Antiwar.com Blog

As I rode my bike past Vons today, I saw the picketing workers — all six of them — standing in front of a delivery truck trying to enter the loading bay. Now, I have no problem with people unionizing or striking — if you have a raw deal at work, I think it takes balls to risk your job to make more money. What I have a problem with is how strikes are handled (and how unions are run). If they just marched and voiced their woes to the public, there would be no problems, but when they use violence against non-striking workers (who knows, single mothers and poor people who can’t afford to strike — especially after union dues are jacked from their checks?), I have a problem. They have the right to choose to not work, but not the right to stop others from working, in a situation the “scabs” obviously find beneficial.

So when I saw the strikers basically sabotaging Vons’ business (and the driver’s day), and the confontational jeers they pointed at customers who shopped there despite the strike, I was reminded of this past winter’s antiwar protests. These are the same kind people who protested the war by bringing urban traffic to a halt. Those who ironically, in their outpouring of concern over the lives about to be destoyed in the coming war, have little concern left for the person making their way from their second job to their third job, or the parent trying to get to their child’s school to pick them up, or anyone else trying (in vain) to go about their lives. Yes, wars are terrible — even those that aren’t Bush’s — but there are ways of protesting them peacefully.

Making people’s lives harder than they already are in order to make them pay attention to your cause, just though that cause may be, does not serve the cause. The antiwar movement is hurt by these hoodlum-like actions because instead of embracing our message, those inconvenienced by protests become hostile to it.

And that’s what I was reminded of today. Aren’t you glad I shared? Besides, being a “wage slave” is for losers — it’s about being your own man.

Interesting letter on the very legitimacy of weapons inspections, from Mr. Daniel Larison:

Mr. O’Neill makes an excellent point. Though I must admit that I myself
sometimes became caught up in what Blix said or didn’t say as some kind of
evidence in the argument over the war itself, the regime of weapons inspections in
concert with the regular bombing of Iraq during the 1990s was always morally
indefensible and senseless as a matter of policy. Such a regime presupposed that
one nation alone was punishable for such proliferation, and that this nation could
have no legitimate security claims for the development of unconventional weapons. I
submit that if Israel had been so singled out, the outrage in America at the hostility to
a single country would have been overwhelming. Yet this singling out of a single
country for a “crime” committed by half a dozen, if not many more, states was Iraq
policy since 1991. Supposedly, because Iraq was once an aggressor, its rights were
null and void in perpetuity, but one imagines that such a standard, if taken universally,
might make Israel’s life rather difficult in light of the campaigns 1967 and certainly
that of 1982.
Continue reading “RE “Come Again, Glenn?””

Good roundup of articles on the Mother Jones website. Includes this analysis from Israeli author David Grossman:

Something in the public’s stormy and almost hysterical reaction that gives the impression that the ‘lynch mob’ after the pilots does not derive only from the fact of the refusal to carry out missions: It seems that the more difficult thing, the unbearably difficult thing, that the pilots have done is that, in total surprise, they have torn off most Israelis the protective layer in which they have wrapped themselves for years so as not to know or understand what is really being done in their name.

This, perhaps, is also what is behind the absurd accusation of treason that is being cast at the pilots: If they have betrayed at all, they have betrayed only the huge, consensual denial, the collective blindness. For one moment, the pilots succeeded in creating the frightening, electrifying connection between what Israel has been doing in the territories for 36 years now and the terror attacks, and for this, apparently, it is hard to forgive them. It is possible to choose not to read the reports by Amira Hass and Gideon Levy, but when Hebrew pilots, the flesh of the flesh of the Israeli consensus and the jewel in its crown, force us to look, if only for a fleeting moment, into the heart of the darkness – the first instinct is to get out of there in a panic, patch up the rent that has been torn in the sophisticated flak jacket that protects us from the knowledge and understanding, and immediately — as we were taught in the IDF — to attack and fight back, this time against the pilots.

Parallel-universe news from Gene Callahan and Bob Murphy:

October 10, 2003, New York City – Responding to growing public resentment over aggressive military campaigns, the United Nations today announced the release of a global “do-not-bomb list.” A new UN resolution makes it a crime to drop bombs on the territory of any government or group that has put its name on the do-not-bomb registry.

“The International Do-Not-Bomb Registry is fully up and running,” said Timothy Yuslis, chairman of the United Nations Aerial Warfare Commission. He called the move a “major victory for humans.”

Meanwhile, military groups, soon to face fines of up to $11,000 per kiloton for violating the rules, vowed to heed the wishes of potential bombees while considering legal options that might overturn the system.

Many humans applauded the new list. As Fazool Yansouri, a strong supporter of the measure, put it: “There’s really nothing more annoying than getting home from a hard day at work, sitting down to eat with your family, and then all of a sudden your meal is interrupted by a cluster bomb crashing into the kitchen, sending body parts flying hither and thither.”

Read more.

Instead of paraphrasing U.S. government propaganda, the bloggers at National Review link straight to the press release. Bravo! A lesson in integrity for the rest of the White House shills in the blogosphere.

Ali Ismail Abbas, the Iraqi boy who suffered the loss of both arms and much of his family during the glorious liberation of his country, has been fitted with prostheses by a British charity. This is wonderful news, and Ali seems genuinely grateful for the help he has received.

But for those who think that the U.S. will be held in eternal esteem by the Iraqis, Afghans, etc., consider Ali’s recent comments on the war:

I keep asking myself: “Why are they bombing Iraqi people? What have we done to them?”

I hoped that the pilot who hit our house would be burned as I am burned and my family were burned.

Oh well, I’m sure he’s the only Iraqi who feels this way.