Sunday, July 20, 2014


All U.S. Troops and Mercenaries Out Of Iraq Now!

Workers Vanguard No. 1049
11 July 2014
 
Iraq in Flames: Legacy of U.S. Occupation
All U.S. Forces Out Now!
 


JULY 6—As the fundamentalist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) extends its hold over vast stretches of western and northwestern Iraq, Barack Obama has ordered hundreds of U.S. forces back into that country. Since the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of the ISIS offensive in early June, the U.S. president has in three separate deployments mobilized a total of 775 troops, backed up by Apache attack helicopters and unmanned aircraft. Additional warships, including the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, were also dispatched to the Persian Gulf. Faced with strong public opposition to sending troops back into Iraq, Obama engaged in word games, calling the troops “advisers” who “will not be returning to combat” while at the same time evoking possible air strikes.
Washington is putting itself in a position to intervene militarily on the side of the Iraqi government in a communal civil war pitting the Shi’ite-dominated regime in Baghdad against a Sunni-based insurgency that encompasses ISIS, tribal leaders and former B’ath Party officials. The infernal cycle of bloodletting is resulting in the effective breakup of the country, with the Shi’ites in control of the capital and southern Iraq. After Baghdad’s army abandoned Kirkuk amid the ISIS advance last month, Kurdish pesh merga military forces seized that hotly contested, oil-rich city. And Kurdish leaders have taken steps to further consolidate the autonomous Kurdish region in the north.
Workers and the oppressed have no interest in a victory by one combatant or the other in the reactionary Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. However, the international working class definitely has a side in opposing imperialist intervention in Iraq and demanding the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops and mercenaries. It is U.S. imperialism that constitutes the greatest danger to the world’s working people and downtrodden.
In a repeat of scenes from the U.S. occupation, since the beginning of this year more than one million Iraqis have been driven from their homes, victims of atrocities committed by both sides in this communal slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of Sunnis in the western Anbar province have fled the shelling and bombing of residential neighborhoods by the regime of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. In Baghdad, where tens of thousands died during the 2006-2007 explosion of Shi’ite-Sunni slaughter set off by the U.S. occupation, Shi’ite militias are again targeting the city’s remaining Sunni neighborhoods. Meanwhile, ISIS fighters overrunning Shi’ite villages in northern Iraq have carried out mass killings of the population, including women and children. The Christian population in northern Iraq, the remnant of a once substantial community, is fleeing by the thousands as ISIS bombards their villages.
The wave of communal bloodletting in Iraq was nourished by the devastating civil war in Syria, where sundry imperialist and regional powers have backed an insurgency dominated by reactionary forces, centrally from the majority Sunni Muslim population, directed against the murderous Ba’ath Party regime of Bashar al-Assad. Sunni fundamentalists, bolstered by support from U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states as well as Turkey, have increasingly dominated the revolt against Assad. In January, ISIS expanded its operations from Syria into Iraq in support of a rebellion launched by Sunni tribal leaders against Maliki in Falluja and Ramadi, Anbar province’s two largest cities. Harking back to the formation of Islamic states starting in the seventh century, ISIS celebrated its recent gains by proclaiming a “caliphate” extending from its bastion in northern Syria across the extensive tracts that it controls in Iraq.
The U.S. campaign to topple Assad has been driven in no small part by Washington’s longstanding hostility toward Iran, a key ally of Syria. Yet by installing a Shi’ite-dominated government in Baghdad, the U.S. occupiers ended up handing Iran great influence in Iraq. With the backing of Tehran, Maliki has turned a deaf ear to pleas from Washington that he cede power to a more “inclusive” government coalition. Nonetheless, across Syria’s increasingly meaningless border with Iraq, the U.S. finds itself supporting the same side as Damascus and Tehran. As ISIS forces approached Baghdad, Iran rushed daily arms shipments to the Maliki regime and deployed Revolutionary Guard forces to join the fight, while Syrian jets have bombed Sunni positions inside Iraq.
The civil wars in Syria and Iraq are hot spots in a years-long regional conflagration that threatens to keep widening, with ISIS vowing to extend its military operations into Lebanon and Jordan. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged support to Jordan if ISIS crossed into that country. Iran has massed troops on the Iran-Iraq border. Even Saudi Arabia deployed 30,000 troops to its border with Iraq, concerned that the caliphate declared by the Frankenstein’s monster that it helped create might find support among the tribes in its northern region, which have links to the areas of Syria and Iraq now controlled by ISIS.
The large-scale, ongoing bloodshed in the Near East, and the promise of more, has the bourgeois media in the U.S. pointing the finger at Islam’s centuries-old sectarian rifts. In reality, the main culprit is the history of imperialist divide and rule of Iraq and the rest of the region by the European powers and more recently the U.S. As we wrote at the time, the U.S. occupation threatened “the trisection of Iraq into Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish sectors, with battles to come over the possession of its oil wealth” (WV No. 882, 8 December 2006). With U.S. forces today still in Afghanistan, which is now considered the longest war in U.S. history, Washington is threatening to renew imperialist depredations in Iraq.
In opposition to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, we have repeatedly stressed the need for class struggle against the U.S. capitalist rulers at home in defense of those neocolonial countries. Our revolutionary perspective stands in stark contrast to that of the reformist left. These self-styled socialists aspired to build liberal antiwar coalitions designed to appeal to Democratic Party politicians who saw the Iraq quagmire as a losing proposition for U.S. imperialism. As such, the various coalitions refused to take a side in defense of Iraq and Afghanistan against imperialist attack and beat the drums for “Anybody but Bush!”
Democrats and Republicans may differ over which tactics are most effective in pursuing the interests of U.S. imperialism, but they are both bourgeois parties that defend the interests of the capitalist ruling class. The nightmare inflicted on the Iraqi peoples was a hallmark of successive administrations under both parties: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama. As Hillary Clinton gears up for a possible 2016 presidential run, she has embraced neoconservatives like Robert Kagan who were instrumental in selling the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
By sowing the illusion that Democrats in office can be pressured to carry out a humanitarian foreign policy, the reformists act to retard the political consciousness of workers and radical-minded youth. The truth is that military depredations are part of the “normal” workings of imperialism, the profit-driven capitalist system in its epoch of decay in which the advanced industrial powers compete globally for control of markets, raw materials and access to cheap labor. As the leading capitalist power, the U.S. will persist in its efforts to dominate the Near East and act as the world’s “top cop.”
The ravages of U.S. imperialism abroad are reflected domestically in grinding poverty, racial oppression and intensified exploitation of labor by capital. The U.S. working class must be won to the understanding that it has the social power and interest to eradicate capitalist imperialism and the wars this system breeds. What is necessary is the forging of a revolutionary workers party that fights to overthrow the capitalist system through socialist revolution.
Bitter Fruit of Imperialist Divide and Rule
Once one of the more advanced countries in the Near East and a regional cultural center, Iraq was laid waste by over a decade of U.S.-dictated starvation sanctions, two devastating wars and the eight-year military occupation of that country. The arrogant American ruling class viewed its military superiority as a guarantee that it could defeat any conceivable enemy at any time. All that was needed to put Iraq directly under its thumb was enough firepower deployed with sufficient savagery. The U.S. and allied powers unleashed mass murder, indiscriminate terror and torture on a scale far exceeding that employed by Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi strongman they replaced. To buttress their rule, the U.S. imperialists systematically played off sectors of the Iraqi population against each other, playing divide and rule.
Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. occupiers moved quickly to purge former members of Hussein’s Ba’ath Party from government jobs. That act largely removed Sunnis from the state administration and helped trigger a communal-based Sunni rebellion. The U.S. mobilized Shi’ite militias and the Kurdish pesh merga to help crush Sunni Arab insurgents in Falluja in 2004 as that city was leveled. Following elections in 2005, a communal-based system of power sharing was set up along the lines of the confessional arrangement in Lebanon. Under this unwritten agreement, the Iraqi prime minister is a Shi’ite, the largely ceremonial president is a Kurd, and the speaker of parliament is a Sunni. This served as a template for setting up puppet governments dominated by Shi’ite—and to a lesser extent Kurdish—parties at the expense of the minority Sunni Arabs.
In 2006, the U.S. occupation authorities installed Maliki as their quisling prime minister (and in 2010 would again support his bid for the office). He oversaw a wave of anti-Sunni terror carried out by the overwhelmingly Shi’ite army and police backed up by Shi’ite death squads. Following the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops in December 2011, the ongoing communal conflict that had been fostered under the occupation again escalated. Moves by Maliki against prominent Sunni political figures touched off widespread Sunni protests. In April 2013, government troops attacked a protest encampment in the northern city of Hawija, killing at least 44 people. Thousands of Sunni and Shi’ite civilians perished in the slaughter that followed. In January, Maliki’s troops launched an artillery onslaught against Falluja and Ramadi. The Sunni tribal chiefs, who during George W. Bush’s famous 2007 troop “surge” had sided with the U.S. against Al Qaeda, welcomed back those same fundamentalist forces, now based in Syria.
No longer an Al Qaeda affiliate, ISIS (which recently renamed itself the Islamic State) has posted a video on its website titled End of Sykes-Picot. This is a reference to the secret agreement by which Britain and France toward the end of World War I agreed to divide up the spoils of their impending victory over the Ottoman Empire. For the reactionaries of ISIS, the destruction of that Turkish empire marked the end of the last caliphate, a world to which they aspire to return. In fact, the colonial division of the Ottoman Empire, out of which Iraq issued, retains significance today precisely because it set the stage for the reactionary communal conflagration that is erupting across the Near East. In turn, the deepening sectarian bloodshed in Iraq underlines the fact that it is not a nation but rather a patchwork of different peoples and ethnicities—primarily Shi’ite Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
From the mid-19th century start of their direct intervention in the Levant region, the European powers set various nationalities, ethnic groups and sects against each other. France sought to profit from its amitié traditionnelle with the Christian Maronites, who originated in Syria in a seventh-century split from the Eastern church of Byzantium. The British posed as the benefactors of the Druze, a tenth-century offshoot of Shi’ism, and tsarist Russia extended protection to the Orthodox Christians. In 1860, a massive civil war between Maronites and Druze was sparked by a Maronite peasant rebellion in which the feudal estates were seized, the land distributed and a peasant commonwealth proclaimed. On the eve of French military intervention into that war, Karl Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune (11 August 1860):
“The conspirators of Petersburg and Paris had, however, in case their temptations of Prussia should fail, kept in reserve the thrilling incident of the Syrian massacres, to be followed by a French intervention which...would open the back door of a general European war. In respect to England I will only add, that, in 1841 Lord Palmerston furnished the Druses with the arms they kept ever since, and that, in 1846, by a convention with the Czar Nicholas, he abolished, in point of fact, the Turkish sway that curbed the wild tribes of the Lebanon, and stipulated for them a quasi-independence which, in the run of time, and under the proper management of foreign plotters, could only beget a harvest of blood.”
Later, the “conspirators of Petersburg and Paris” combined with the British to carve up the Levant, as well as the rest of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, in the 1916 Skyes-Picot treaty. France took Syria (including modern Lebanon) for itself while Britain acquired Jordan and Palestine—all against the wishes of their inhabitants. The publication of the treaty by the newly established Soviet workers state in late 1917 exposed the imperialist intrigues and had an electrifying effect, helping to spark a series of national revolts and popular uprisings across the region.
In the French share of the dismembered Ottoman Empire, Paris created a “Greater Lebanon” by incorporating large Muslim areas together with traditional Maronite strongholds in the Mount Lebanon range. As a result, the Maronites and other, less numerous, Christian sects slightly outnumbered and dominated Muslims. In Syria, the imperialists promoted the Alawites to lord it over the predominantly Sunni Muslim population (see “Syrian Civil War: Legacy of Imperialist Divide-and-Rule,” WV No. 1009, 28 September 2012).
The Kurds were also promised their own state, albeit a truncated one, in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. But they never got even that deformed expression of national self-determination. By 1920, it was becoming clear that the former Ottoman vilayet (province) of Mosul, which had been assigned to France under the Sykes-Picot treaty, had much more oil than was originally thought. So Britain decided to keep southern Kurdistan by incorporating it into a newly created country called Iraq, which itself basically corresponded to the concessions of the British-controlled Turkish Petroleum Company. The state functionaries and military officers of the majority Shi’ite country set up by the British colonialists were exclusively Sunni.
In 1919, the Kurds in northern Iraq rose in revolt against the British overseers. The British brutally crushed the rebellion. The following year, the Shi’ites of southern Iraq rebelled, killing or wounding some 2,500 troops deployed by the British before the revolt was drowned in blood. Anticipating by almost 70 years Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds, Winston Churchill, at the time British war secretary, clamored for dropping mustard gas bombs on the Iraqi rebels. It was decided instead to bombard them with poison-gas artillery shells.
Lessons of 1958 Iraqi Revolution
It is a sign of despair that the most prominent voices in the Near East calling to undo Sykes-Picot today are religious bigots who aim to crush those who do not worship their preferred deity in their prescribed way. That has not always been the case, and it will not remain so indefinitely.
We base ourselves programmatically on the experience of V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party that led the 1917 Russian Revolution, which had an enormous impact on the Near East. But well before mass Communist parties (CPs) were able to take root in the area, a conservative bureaucratic caste under Stalin had usurped political power in the Soviet workers state. This ruling bureaucracy repudiated the Bolshevik program of international socialist revolution in favor of “building socialism in one country” and its corollary, “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. In the Near East as elsewhere in the colonial world, this outlook was expressed in the espousal of “two-stage revolution,” which meant support to a supposedly progressive wing of the bourgeoisie while indefinitely postponing the proletarian revolution.
Nonetheless, the large Stalinist Communist parties that emerged in the mid 1930s and ’40s in many Arab countries attracted the most class-conscious workers and radical intellectuals. Typically, these CPs were either founded by or based heavily on minorities. The various Egyptian communist groups were all formed by Egyptian Jews. The Iraqi CP had Kurds and Jews in its leadership (see “Near East, 1950s: Permanent Revolution vs. Bourgeois Nationalism,” WV Nos. 740 and 741, 25 August and 8 September 2000).
There is a rich tradition of working-class struggle in the Near East, whose highest point was the Iraqi revolution of 1958. That revolution was touched off by the overthrow of the monarchy by left-nationalist officers on Bastille Day 1958. The whole country rose up. As workers staged massive demonstrations in the cities, some numbering a million people, peasants staged insurrections throughout the countryside, killing landlords and seizing the land. The Iraqi CP had the overwhelming support of the multinational working class. It also had broad support among other layers of the population, including within the army and even some sections of the officer corps. It is clear that the Iraqi CP could have taken power. The U.S. sent the Marines into Lebanon to be ready for a possible invasion of Iraq. Socialist revolution was on the agenda.
Isaac Deutscher, the historian and biographer of Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, wrote: “Most western observers on the spot agreed that Kassem [the nationalist in power who had the Iraqi CP’s support] could hardly hold his ground against an all-out communist offensive.” But in the interests of “peaceful coexistence” with the U.S., the Soviet bureaucracy sold out the revolution, ordering the Iraqi CP to stand down. And under the sway of the program of “two-stage revolution,” the Iraqi CP went along, putting the brakes on the movement.
While riding the crest of the revolutionary wave, the CP continued to subordinate itself to the left-nationalist officer Kassem in a supposedly “anti-imperialist” revolution. Of course, the promised second stage of socialist revolution never came. Instead, Kassem turned on the CP. In 1963, the reactionary, nationalist Ba’ath party, which included Saddam Hussein (who was not yet a national leader), came to power and carried out a bloodbath of thousands of leftist workers using lists supplied by the CIA.
For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!
The Iraqi revolution held out enormous historic possibilities for workers of the Near East and for oppressed peoples like the Kurds. Today, spread across four countries—Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran—the people of Kurdistan still constitute the largest nation by area without a state. When Iraqi Kurdish leaders recently announced plans for a referendum on independence from Baghdad, the Obama administration let them know, in no uncertain terms, that Kurdish independence is not on Washington’s agenda.
The history of the Kurdish people’s national struggle is a litany of betrayals by their nationalist leaders, who systematically sought to gain advantage by currying favor with sundry capitalist powers. A case in point was provided by the Kurdish leaders in Iraq who actively collaborated with the 2003 U.S. invasion, offering their pesh merga as an auxiliary to U.S. military forces. The Kurdish masses must look to an alliance with the Arab, Persian and Turkish proletariat—which in turn must be won to championing Kurdish self-determination—in a revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalist rule in the four countries that oppress them and establish a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan. (See “The Kurdish People and the U.S. Occupation of Iraq,” WV Nos. 804 and 805, 23 May and 6 June 2003.)
Iraq today is a shattered society. The future of the Iraqi masses as a whole is dependent on working-class struggle in nearby countries with strategic concentrations of proletarian power. We have no illusions that it will be an easy task to win workers of the Near East, ground down by their capitalist rulers and imperialist overlords, to the Marxist program of proletarian revolution. But there will be no end to ethnic and national oppression, no emancipation of women, no end to the exploitation of working people short of shattering the capitalist order. That requires the forging of revolutionary working-class parties in opposition to all forms of bourgeois ideology, religious reaction and imperialism, as part of a genuine Trotskyist Fourth International, which would link the fight for a socialist federation of the Near East to the struggle for proletarian revolution in the imperialist centers.
Another Philip Marlowe Passes-James Garner At 86 

James Garner, Witty, Handsome Leading Man, Dies at 86


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An Actor of Disarming Wit

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James Garner, the wry and handsome leading man who slid seamlessly between television and the movies but was best known as the amiable gambler Bret Maverick in the 1950s western “Maverick” and the cranky sleuth Jim Rockford in the 1970s series “The Rockford Files,” was found dead of natural causes at his Los Angeles home on Saturday night, the police said. He was 86.
Mr. Garner, who smoked for most of his life, even after open-heart surgery in 1988, had suffered a stroke in 2008.
He was a genuine star but as an actor something of a paradox: a lantern-jawed, brawny athlete whose physical appeal was both enhanced and undercut by a disarming wit. He appeared in more than 50 films, many of them dramas — but as he established in one of his notable early performances, as a battle-shy naval officer in “The Americanization of Emily” (1964) and had shown before that in “Maverick” — he was most at home as an iconoclast, a flawed or unlikely hero.
An understated comic actor, he was especially adept at conveying life’s tiny bedevilments. One of his most memorable roles was as a perpetually flummoxed pitchman for Polaroid cameras in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in droll commercials in which he played a vexed husband and Mariette Hartley played his needling wife. They were so persuasive that Ms. Hartley had a shirt printed with the declaration “I am not Mrs. James Garner.”
His one Academy Award nomination was for the 1985 romantic comedy “Murphy’s Romance,” in which he played a small-town druggist who woos the new-in-town divorced mom (Sally Field) with a mixture of self-reliance, grouchy charm and lack of sympathy for fools.
Even Rockford, a semi-tough ex-con (he had served five years on a bum rap for armed robbery) who lived in a beat-up trailer in a Malibu beach parking lot, drove a Pontiac Firebird and could handle himself in a fight (though he probably took more punches than he gave), was exasperated most of the time by one thing or another: his money problems, the penchant of his father (Noah Beery Jr.) for getting into trouble or getting in the way, the hustles of his con-artist pal Angel (Stuart Margolin), his dicey relationship with the local police.
“Maverick” had been in part a sendup of the conventional western drama, and “The Rockford Files” similarly made fun of the standard television detective, the man’s man who upholds law and order and has everything under control. A sucker for a pretty girl and with a distinctly ’70s fashion sense — he favored loud houndstooth jackets — Rockford was perpetually wandering into threatening situations in which he ended up pursued by criminal goons or corrupt cops. He tried, mostly successfully, to steer clear of using guns; instead, a bit of a con artist himself, he relied on impersonations and other ruses — and high-speed driving skills.
Every episode of the show, which ran from 1974 to 1980 and more often than not involved at least one car chase and Rockford’s getting beaten up a time or two, began with a distinctive theme song featuring a synthesizer and a blues harmonica and a message coming in on a newfangled gadget — Rockford’s telephone answering machine — that underscored his unheroic existence: “Jim, this is Norma at the market. It bounced. Do you want us to tear it up, send it back or put it with the others?”
In his 2011 autobiography, “The Garner Files,” written with Jon Winokur, Mr. Garner confessed to having a live-and-let-live attitude with the caveat that when he was pushed, he shoved back. What distinguished his performance as Rockford was how well that more-put-upon-than-macho persona came across. Rockford’s reactions — startled, nonplused and annoyed being his specialties — appeared native to him.
His naturalness led John J. O’Connor, writing in The New York Times, to liken Mr. Garner to Gary Cooper and James Stewart. And like those two actors, Mr. Garner usually got the girl.
Mr. Garner came to acting late, and by accident. On his own after the age of 14 and a bit of a drifter, he had been working an endless series of jobs: telephone installer, oil field roughneck, chauffeur, dishwasher, janitor, lifeguard, grocery clerk, salesman and, fatefully, gas station attendant. While pumping gas in Los Angeles, he met a young man named Paul Gregory, who was working nearby as a soda jerk but wanted to be an agent.
Years later, after Mr. Garner had served in the Army during the Korean War — he was wounded in action twice, earning two Purple Hearts — he was working as a carpet layer in Los Angeles for a business run by his father. One afternoon he was driving on La Cienega Boulevard and saw a sign: Paul Gregory & Associates. Just then a car pulled out of a space in front of the building, and Mr. Garner, on a whim, pulled in. He was 25.
Mr. Gregory, by then an agent and a theatrical producer, hired him for a nonspeaking part in his production of Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” which starred Henry Fonda, John Hodiak and Lloyd Nolan. It opened in Santa Barbara and toured the country before going to Broadway, where it opened in January 1954 and ran for 415 performances. Mr. Garner said he learned to act from running lines with the stars and watching them perform, especially Fonda, another good-looking actor with a sly streak.
“I swiped practically all my acting style from him,” he once said.
Mr. Garner claimed to have stage fright and no desire to act in the theater. He later played Lieutenant Maryk (the Hodiak role) in a touring company of the play that starred Charles Laughton, but afterward would almost never appear onstage again. Still, it was the serendipitous stop on La Cienega that changed his life.
“The only reason I’m an actor is that a lady pulled out of a parking space in front of a producer’s office,” he wrote in “The Garner Files.”
James Scott Bumgarner was born in Norman, Okla., on April 7, 1928. His paternal grandfather had participated in the Oklahoma land rush of 1889 and was later shot to death by the son of a widow with whom he’d been having an affair. His maternal grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee. (Mr. Garner would later name his production company Cherokee Productions.)
His first home was the back of a small store that his father, Weldon, known as Bill, ran in the nearby hamlet of Denver. His mother, Mildred, died when he was 4. When he was 7, the store burned down and his father left James and his two older brothers to be raised by relatives; when his father remarried, the family reunited, but James’s stepmother was abusive, he said in his memoir, and after a violent episode at home, he left.
He worked in Oklahoma, Texas and Los Angeles, where his father finally resettled. He went briefly to Hollywood High School but returned to Norman, where he played football and basketball, to finish. In 1950, when the Korean War broke out, he was drafted.
Mr. Garner’s first Hollywood break came when he met Richard L. Bare, a director of the television western “Cheyenne,” who cast him in a small part. That and other bit roles led to a contract with Warner Bros., which featured him in several movies — including “Sayonara” (1957), starring Marlon Brando and based on James Michener’s novel set in Japan about interracial romance — and sliced the first syllable from his last name.
His first lead role was in “Darby’s Rangers” (1958) as the World War II hero William Darby, a part he was given after Charlton Heston walked off the set in a dispute with the studio over money. At about the same time he was cast as the womanizing gambler Bret Maverick, the role that made him a star.
Alone among westerns of the 1950s, “Maverick,” which made its debut in 1957, was about an antihero. He didn’t much care for horses or guns, and he was motivated by something much less grand than law and order: money. But you rooted for him because he was on the right side of moral issues, he had a natural affinity for the little guy being pushed by the bully, and he was more fun than anyone else.
“If you look at Maverick and Rockford, they’re pretty much the same guy,” Mr. Garner wrote. “One is a gambler and the other a detective, but their attitudes are identical.”
In a Maverick-like (or Rockford-like) move, Mr. Garner left the series in 1960 after winning a breach-of-contract suit against Warner Bros. over its refusal to pay him during a writers’ strike. He did not return to series television for a decade.
He found steady work in movies, however. In “The Children’s Hour” (1961), an adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play, he played a doctor engaged to a schoolteacher (Audrey Hepburn) accused of being a lesbian. He appeared uncomfortable in that earnest role, but he was winning and warm in “The Great Escape” (1963), the World War II adventure about captured Allied fliers plotting to break out of a German prison camp, as Bob Hendley, the resourceful prisoner known as the Scrounger.
In 1964 he starred with Julie Andrews in “The Americanization of Emily,” which he called his favorite of all his films. He played the personal attendant of a Navy admiral, a fish out of water and the voice of the movie’s pacifist point of view.
Written by Paddy Chayefsky, it included perhaps the longest and most impassioned speech of his career: “I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham,” he said, in part. “It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.”
In 1966, he starred as an avenging frontier scout in the violent western “Duel at Diablo” and as a high-speed driver in “Grand Prix,” a film that sparked his interest in auto racing. He drove in the Baja 1000 off-road race several times, and he drove the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 in 1975, 1978 and 1985.
He also appeared in romantic comedies, including three in 1963: “The Thrill of It All” and “Move Over, Darling,” both with Doris Day, and “The Wheeler Dealers,” opposite Lee Remick. There was also a comic western, “Support Your Local Sheriff” (1969), and a follow-up, “Support Your Local Gunfighter” (1971). Other notable films included “Victor/Victoria” (1982), in which he was reunited with Ms. Andrews and played a man who falls in love with a woman even though she has been masquerading as a man.
Mr. Garner was often injured on the job; during the Rockford years, he had several knee operations and back trouble. More seriously, in 1988, he had a quintuple bypass operation, which cost him his job as spokesman for the beef industry.
After surgery, he made a vigorous return to work. He appeared in the television films “My Name Is Bill W” (1989), starring James Woods as a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and “Barbarians at the Gate” (1993), based on the best-selling book about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco; in “My Fellow Americans” (1996), a comic adventure in which he and Jack Lemmon played feuding former presidents who find themselves framed by the sitting president and end up together on the lam; and in the romantic film “The Notebook” (2004).
He also reprised his Rockford character in several television movies and appeared in the movie version of “Maverick” (1994) as Marshal Zane Cooper, a foil to the title character, played by Mel Gibson.
Of Mr. Garner’s other forays into series television, “Nichols” was said to have been his own favorite. A dark comic western set in Arizona in the early 20th century that was produced by Cherokee in 1971, it starred Mr. Garner as a retired soldier who becomes sheriff of his hometown. When NBC canceled it after one season, Mr. Garner was so incensed that he had his character killed in the final episode.
He later had recurring roles on a number of shows, including “Chicago Hope,” “First Monday” and “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter”; in the short-lived animated series “God, the Devil and Bob,” he was the voice of God.
Mr. Garner disdained the pretentiousness of the acting profession. “I’m a Methodist but not as an actor,” he wrote in “The Garner Files.” “I’m from the Spencer Tracy school: Be on time, know your words, hit your marks, and tell the truth. I don’t have any theories abut acting, and I don’t think about how to do it, except that an actor shouldn’t take himself too seriously, and shouldn’t try to make acting something it isn’t. Acting is just common sense. It isn’t hard if you put yourself aside and just do what the writer wrote.”
Nor did he sit still for the dog-eat-dog business side of Hollywood. In the early 1980s he again sued his employer, this time Universal, which he accused of cheating him out of his share of profits on “The Rockford Files.” Universal settled the case in 1989, reportedly paying him more than $14 million.
Mr. Garner, a lifelong Democrat who was active in behalf of civil rights and environmental causes, always said he met his wife, the former Lois Clarke, in 1956 at a presidential campaign rally for Adlai Stevenson, though in “The Garner Files” Mrs. Garner said they had actually met at a party earlier. She survives him, as do their daughter, Greta, known as Gigi; and Mrs. Garner’s daughter from a previous marriage, Kimberly.
Persuasively ambivalent as a hero of westerns, war movies and detective stories, Mr. Garner’s performances may have reflected his feelings about his profession.
“I was never enamored of the business, never even wanted to be an actor, really,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “It’s always been a means to an end, which is to make a living.”
Correction: July 20, 2014
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the co-author of James Garner’s 2011 autobiography, “The Garner Files.” He is Jon Winokur, not Vinokur. It also erroneously included a survivor. Mr. Garner’s brother Jack died in 2011.
Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel


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for July 4th-singing John Lennon-against blind patriotism
03 Jul 2014
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The American Way
Hi peaceful people,
For all of you who can't get into the blind
patriotism of July 4th and the wars it causes,
my cover of the many covered song "Imagine":
http://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=12845039

Some relevant quotes:
Ben Franklin-"there has never been a good war or
a bad peace".
Thomas Jefferson-"when the people fear the government,
there is tyranny-when the government fears the people,
there is liberty".
British philosopher Samuel Johnson, 1775-"patriotism is the last refuge
of a scoundrel".
let's all celebrate freedom from war
and social injustice- the real freedom,
Michael Borkson
Boston, Mass.(the birthplace of the revolution)

Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel 

"Defend the Palestinians" - Protests Across Europe Oppose the Israeli War Machine
10 Jul 2014
Protests sweep across Europe against Israeli aggression . Thursday, 10 July 2014 13:24
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Concerned people in a number of European cities have staged peaceful protests against Israel's aggression in the Gaza Strip, which so far has resulted in the killing of several dozen Palestinians, Felesteen newspaper reported.

In Spain, the Palestine Solidarity Forum organised a protest in Madrid, during which the participants appealed to Israel to immediately stop its aggression against the Gaza Strip. The protesters read out a statement reminding the international community that 9 July marked the tenth anniversary of the International Court of Justice's decision on the Apartheid Wall erected by Israel inside the occupied Palestinian territories, declaring it illegal.

The protestors demanded "to freeze the partnership agreement between Israel and the European Union; to abolish all forms of military and security cooperation; and to stop all Spanish companies' activities in Israel to avoid becoming a war criminal".

In Barcelona, a pro-Palestine group organised a similar protest attended by several representatives of political parties and nearly a thousand people, who all condemned the Israeli raids on Gaza. The protestors demanded a stop to all forms of cooperation between the city's autonomous authority and Israel over the latter's "aggressiveness".

The Spanish Foreign Ministry has warned its citizens planning to travel to Israel or Palestine to take full caution.

Meanwhile, nearly a hundred people organised a protest in front of the European Parliament's headquarters in Brussels to condemn the continued Israeli attacks. The protesters declared that, "the Israeli actions, including random shelling without any distinction between civilians or military personnel and the killing of children and women, are war crimes which Israeli officials should be tried for."

The protesters chanted slogans against Israel, including "Israel is a terrorist" and "Boycott Israel", and appealed to the governments of the European Union and Belgium to take rapid political action to stop Israeli's aggression against Gaza.

In Istanbul, the Palestine Solidarity Association organised a similar protests in Oglu Beck Street, waving Turkish and Palestinian flags. The organisers said that the Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are being killed in cold blood.

Similar protests have also been held in London, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Glasgow, Derry, Galway, Paris, Strasbourg, Berlin, The Hague, Athens, Valencia, Rome, Turin, Florence and Geneva, with many more protests planned in the coming days. A selection of photographs of the protests across both Europe and North America are being published on the website of Samidoun, the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.

The Israeli Air Force launched on Tuesday multiple raids on different parts of the Gaza Strip, so far resulting in the killing of at least 77 Palestinians, including women and children, and nearly 500 being injured, according to Palestinian medical sources.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/europe/12689-protests-sweep-acros
On Israel-Palestine and BDS - Choose Effective Tactics - Noam Chomsky
14 Jul 2014
Those dedicated to the Palestinian cause should think carefully about the tactics they choose.
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The misery caused by Israel’s actions in the occupied territories has elicited serious concern among at least some Israelis. One of the most outspoken, for many years, has been Gideon Levy, a columnist for Haaretz, who writes that “Israel should be condemned and punished for creating insufferable life under occupation, [and] for the fact that a country that claims to be among the enlightened nations continues abusing an entire people, day and night.”

He is surely correct, and we should add something more: the United States should also be condemned and punished for providing the decisive military, economic, diplomatic and even ideological support for these crimes. So long as it continues to do so, there is little reason to expect Israel to relent in its brutal policies.

The distinguished Israeli scholar Zeev Sternhell, reviewing the reactionary nationalist tide in his country, writes that “the occupation will continue, land will be confiscated from its owners to expand the settlements, the Jordan Valley will be cleansed of Arabs, Arab Jerusalem will be strangled by Jewish neighborhoods, and any act of robbery and foolishness that serves Jewish expansion in the city will be welcomed by the High Court of Justice. The road to South Africa has been paved and will not be blocked until the Western world presents Israel with an unequivocal choice: Stop the annexation and dismantle most of the colonies and the settler state, or be an outcast.”

One crucial question is whether the United States will stop undermining the international consensus, which favors a two-state settlement along the internationally recognized border (the Green Line established in the 1949 ceasefire agreements), with guarantees for “the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of all states in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” That was the wording of a resolution brought to the UN Security Council in January 1976 by Egypt, Syria and Jordan, supported by the Arab states—and vetoed by the United States.

This was not the first time Washington had barred a peaceful diplomatic settlement. The prize for that goes to Henry Kissinger, who supported Israel’s 1971 decision to reject a settlement offered by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, choosing expansion over security—a course that Israel has followed with US support ever since. Sometimes Washington’s position becomes almost comical, as in February 2011, when the Obama administration vetoed a UN resolution that supported official US policy: opposition to Israel’s settlement expansion, which continues (also with US support) despite some whispers of disapproval.

It is not expansion of the huge settlement and infrastructure program (including the separation wall) that is the issue, but rather its very existence—all of it illegal, as determined by the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice, and recognized as such by virtually the entire world apart from Israel and the United States since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who downgraded “illegal” to “an obstacle to peace.”

One way to punish Israel for its egregious crimes was initiated by the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom in 1997: a boycott of settlement products. Such initiatives have been considerably expanded since then. In June, the Presbyterian Church resolved to divest from three US-based multinationals involved in the occupation. The most far-reaching success is the policy directive of the European Union that forbids funding, cooperation, research awards or any similar relationship with any Israeli entity that has “direct or indirect links” to the occupied territories, where all settlements are illegal, as the EU declaration reiterates. Britain had already directed retailers to “distinguish between goods originating from Palestinian producers and goods originating from illegal Israeli settlements.”

Four years ago, Human Rights Watch called on Israel to abide by “its international legal obligation” to remove the settlements and to end its “blatantly discriminatory practices” in the occupied territories. HRW also called on the United States to suspend financing to Israel “in an amount equivalent to the costs of Israel’s spending in support of settlements,” and to verify that tax exemptions for organizations contributing to Israel “are consistent with U.S. obligations to ensure respect for international law, including prohibitions against discrimination.”

There have been a great many other boycott and divestment initiatives in the past decade, occasionally—but not sufficiently—reaching to the crucial matter of US support for Israeli crimes. Meanwhile, a BDS movement (calling for “boycott, divestment and sanctions”) has been formed, often citing South African models; more accurately, the abbreviation should be “BD,” since sanctions, or state actions, are not on the horizon—one of the many significant differences from South Africa.

http://www.thenation.com/article/180492/israel-palestine-and-bds#
Defend Palestinians Against Zionist Onslaught on Gaza!
15 Jul 2014
Israel Out of the Occupied Territories!
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Workers Vanguard No. 1049 - 11 July 2014

Israel’s latest terror bombing of its Gaza concentration camp.

To those at the helm of Zionist Israel, their repeated attacks on Gaza are just “mowing the grass,” a “sort of maintenance,” as a former military commander put it. Indeed, the current assault, a projected long-term offensive dubbed “Operation Protective Edge,” is standard procedure for the rulers of capitalist Israel, a Zionist garrison state founded on the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.

The pretext for the current wave of Zionist terror was the June 12 abduction of three teenage yeshiva students hitchhiking in the occupied West Bank and the discovery of their bodies 18 days later. Although no evidence has been revealed about who committed the killings, Israel’s rulers effectively delivered a verdict of collective guilt on the Palestinian population. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out more than 2,400 raids on homes, medical offices and schools and arrested some 600 Palestinians, killing at least seven, while also bombing dozens of sites in Gaza prior to the current attack. Now, the mobilization of 1,500 infantry and police reservists and plans to call up an additional 40,000 IDF reservists threaten a major bloodbath of Palestinians. Meanwhile, most of impoverished Gaza’s ambulances will not be running due to lack of fuel and its hospitals have declared a state of emergency. The working class internationally must stand in defense of the besieged Palestinians against the Zionist terror machine!

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly declared the Islamic fundamentalists of Hamas guilty of the killings of the three Israelis, even though Hamas, which runs Gaza, never claimed responsibility. As calculated, his pronouncement touched off a round of terror by fascistic West Bank settlers and other reactionary Jewish mobs directed against Israeli Arabs as well as Palestinians. The chauvinist frenzy culminated in the abduction and hideous murder of 16-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir of East Jerusalem. Seized by ultra-Zionists on July 2, the youth was later found burned to death, touching off angry protests by Palestinians in the West Bank and in some Israeli cities that continue to rage. Anger was further stoked by a brutal police attack on Muhammad’s American cousin, 15-year-old Tariq Abu Khdeir, at a protest in East Jerusalem.

The ever-expanding Zionist settlements in the West Bank have increasingly ghettoized the native Palestinian population, from the walls surrounding the territory to the “bypass roads” and military zones that are off-limits to them. The very existence of these settlements is a constant reminder to the Palestinians of their dispossession. All Israeli troops and settlers out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem!

Gaza is all but defenseless against the Zionist military juggernaut, sealed off by the sea and by its borders with Israel as well as Egypt, whose military regime is hostile to Hamas. While Hamas forces can at most launch crude rocket attacks, the Zionists are armed to the teeth, including with the Near East’s only nuclear arsenal. As Israeli forces bombed the Gaza ghetto from the air and sea, today’s Haaretz printed a statement by President Obama lauding the $3 billion annual U.S. military aid to the Zionist regime for “making Israel safer” and serving to “save lives.” With breathtaking cynicism, he went on to declare his support for the Palestinians’ “right to self-determination” while intoning that any Palestinian government must be pledged to “nonviolence” and recognition of Israel! In opposing its “own” capitalist rulers and their military alliances, the U.S. working class must oppose all U.S. aid to Israel. As supporters of just causes, we Marxists do not equate the violence of the oppressed with the violence of the oppressors.

We take a side militarily with Hamas against the Zionist terror campaign, while giving not the least political support to these Islamic reactionaries or to Palestinian bourgeois nationalism. We fight to bring the class axis to the fore. National emancipation for the Palestinians requires the proletarian overthrow of the Israeli capitalist rulers and also those of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, which are home to millions of Palestinians. The Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab populations are interpenetrated peoples, laying rival claims to the same territory. Under capitalism, the exercise of the national rights of one necessarily comes at the expense of the right of self-determination of the other. Only in a socialist federation of the Near East can conflicting claims over land and resources be equitably resolved, and all discrimination on the basis of language, religion and nationality be done away with.

Israel is a class-divided society, with workers exploited by the capitalist ruling class. The hard but necessary task of breaking through the chauvinism that poisons the consciousness of Jewish working people is not made any easier by the criminal, indiscriminate bombings carried out by Hamas and other Palestinian forces against Israeli civilians, which drive the Jewish population further into the arms of their rulers. What must be done is to forge revolutionary Marxist parties in Israel/Palestine and throughout the Near East, in opposition to all forms of nationalism and religious fundamentalism and committed to the struggle for socialist revolution on a world scale.


http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/index.html
See also:
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/index.html

Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel 

19 Jul - 200 Protest at Park Street - ``Stop the Israeli War Machine - Defend the Palestinians!``
19 Jul 2014
As the Israeli army targets the Gaza Ghetto - Boston protests.
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19 Jul - 200 Protest at Park Street -
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19 Jul - 200 Protest at Park Street -
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19 Jul - 200 Protest at Park Street -
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19 Jul - 200 Protest at Park Street -
Boston - Over two hundred people turned out to another of the almost daily demonstrations against the Israeli war on the Gaza Ghetto. Leftists, Muslims, Palestinian Americans, and others came together to voice support for the Palestinian people in the face of one of the most heavily armed military machines in the world. The defense of a defenseless people.

Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel 

Bostonians March for End to Violence in Israel/Palestine
10 Jul 2014
Boston, MA - Hundreds of students, faith leaders, and activists from 15 local organizations marched today to protest Israel’s escalation of violence against Palestinians, citing 52 killed and 450 injured in Gaza in just the last two days. They picketed the downtown Boston locations of three companies they say are complicit in the violence: TIAA-CREF, Veolia, and Macy’s.
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Photo by Marilyn Humphries
At Park Street, Claire Gilbert from Grassroots International opened up the event by declaring that “The wrenching events unfolding in Israel and Palestine are not random; they are part of the system of occupation itself.”

The protest’s tone remained solemn in honor of the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost since mid-June. Karlene Griffiths, a pastor in formation in the United Church of Christ who recently returned from a delegation to Palestine, led a moment of silence and a reading of names. “We weep, we mourn, we move forward and we fight,” Griffiths said.

The crowd then marched to Macy’s, where they called for a boycott of Sodastream products produced in an illegal settlement, then to the Boston offices of Veolia Energy, whose parent company operates a light rail serving illegal settlements in East Jerusalem.

“Veolia is not above the law,” said Andre Francois of the Boston School Bus Drivers Union, who is working locally to oppose Veolia’s union-busting. “No more abuses in Palestine or Boston.”

The final stop was at the offices of pension fund TIAA-CREF, where the demonstrators called for disinvestment from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and prison contractor G4S.

“As we all witnessed Israeli jets bombing Palestinian civilian areas this week, Israeli troops storming Palestinian refugee camps and cities, and the killing of Palestinian civilians, I am reminded how complicit the US government, US corporations, and American taxpayers are in the human rights abuses committed by Israel,” declared Thomas Abowd, a professor at Tufts University and a shareholder of TIAA-CREF.

National Week of Action calls for Divestment from Occupation

This demonstration was one of 15 taking place across the country as part of the “We Divest National Week of Actions,” marking the progress of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement to hold Israel accountable for violations of Palestinian human rights.

Protesters held signs emblazoned with corporate logos of companies targeted by BDS, detailing their role in Israel’s occupation and victories of campaigns against them. One sign read, “Veolia dumps settlement waste on Palestinian land. In 2013, TIAA-CREF dumps Veolia from its social choice fund.”

Other speakers included Dina Jacir, a Palestinian-American co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine at Hampshire College; Holly Bicerano, a student at Boston University; Maria Peniche, an immigration activist who related her experience crossing the US/Mexico border to that of Palestinians; and Jason Lydon of the prison abolitionist organization Black and Pink, who condemned mass incarceration in the United States and in Israel.

Sponsoring organizations: American Friends Service Committee; Grassroots International; Jewish Voice for Peace Boston; United for Justice with Peace; National Lawyers Guild, Suffolk Law; Cambridge Bethlehem People to People Project, American Jews For A Just Peace; Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights; Boston Feminists For Liberation; Boston College Students for Justice in Palestine; Boston Alliance for Water Justice; First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain; Black and Pink; Ads Against Apartheid; Boston BDS

Jewish Voice for Peace-Boston is a local chapter of the largest US-based grassroots organization dedicated to promoting full equality, democracy, and self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians. JVP supports nonviolent efforts here and in Israel-Palestine to end Israel’s Occupation, expand human and civil rights, and implement a US policy based on international law and democracy. We Divest is a national, coalition-led initiative by Adalah-NY, the American Friends Service Committee, Grassroots International, Jewish Voice for Peace, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, and the US Palestinian Community Network
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Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel 

Copley Sqare: Hundreds Demonstrate to "Defend the Palestinians!"
19 Jul 2014
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Hundreds of members of the “#Boston4Gaza” movement turned out in front of the library on Copley Square calling for an end to the Israeli assault. Signs and buttons expressed solidarity with the Palestinian people.

"Stop the Israeli War Machine!"

From a bullhorn one speaker addressed the crowd. “This is what’s come to the Jewish culture in Israel — we’ve lost our ground. We’ve lost our morals. We’ve lost our values and our humanity,” said Malkah Feldman of Cambridge. “I will do everything in my power to restore that humanity to the Jewish community.”

A ten miles away in Newton, Israeli supporters from across Greater Boston poured into the Congregation Mishkan Tefila in Chestnut Hill to show their support. Some carried “Stand with Israel” signs and Israeli flags. The ceremony opened with the sound of a siren and Jewish Community Relations Council director Jeremy Burton reminding the audience that when that sound goes off in Israel, residents have seconds to take cover.

“Ladies and gentlemen, each of the 13,000 rockets and missiles fired at Israeli civilians by Hamas over the last nine years has been intended to kill innocent Israelis or injure innocent Israelis or terrorize innocent Israelis,” said Jeff Robbins of the Anti Defamation League New England. Others told of family members in Israel under siege and asked congregants for prayer.

“But sometimes praying isn’t enough,” said Suffolk Construction CEO John Fish. “These brutal attacks on innocent people are blatant acts of terror, and like any nation that inhabits this earth, Israel has every right to defend herself and her people from terrorism.”

..........

For its many supporters in the west, Israel is being unfairly singled out for criticism. As the country’s former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami angrily said to me in an interview for al-Jazeera English in 2013: “You are trying to turn Israel into a special case.”

According to the likes of Ben-Ami, there are much more vile regimes, and more violent groups, elsewhere in the world. Why pick on plucky Israel? What about the Chinas, Russias, Syrias, Saudi Arabias, Irans, Sudans and Burmas? Where are the protests against Isis, Boko Haram or the Pakistani Taliban?

There are various possible responses to such attempts at deflection. First, does Israel really want to be held to the standards of the world’s worst countries? Doesn’t Israel claim to be a liberal democracy, the “only” one in the Middle East?

Second, isn’t this “whataboutery” of the worst sort? David Cameron told those of us who opposed the Nato intervention in Libya in 2011: “The fact that you cannot do the right thing everywhere does not mean that you should not do the right thing somewhere.” Well, quite. And the same surely applies to criticism of Israel – that we cannot, or do not, denounce every other human-rights-abusing regime on earth doesn’t automatically mean we are therefore prohibited from speaking out against Israel’s abuses in Gaza and the West Bank. (Nor, for that matter, does the presence of a small minority among the Jewish state’s critics who are undoubtedly card-carrying anti-Semites.)

Trying to hide Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians behind, say, Syria’s barrel bombs, China’s forced labour camps or Russia’s persecution of gays won’t wash. After all, on what grounds did we “single out” apartheid South Africa in the 1980s for condemnation and boycott? Weren’t there other, more dictatorial regimes in Africa at the time, those run by black Africans such as Mengistu in Ethiopia or Mobutu in Zaire? Did we dare excuse the crimes of white Afrikaners on this basis?

Taking a moral stand inevitably requires us to be selective, specific and, yes, even inconsistent. “Some forms of injustice bother [people] more than others,” wrote Peter Beinart, the author of The Crisis of Zionism, in December 2013. “The roots of this inconsistency may be irrational, even disturbing, but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t act against the abuses they care about most.”

Third, Israel is “singled out” today, but by its friends and not just by its enemies. It has been singled out for unparalleled support – financial, military, diplomatic – by the western powers. It is indeed, to quote Ben-Ami, a “special case”.

Which other country is in receipt of $3bn a year in US aid, despite maintaining a 47-year military occupation in violation of international law? Which other country has been allowed to develop and stockpile nuclear weapons in secret?

Which other country’s prime minister could “humiliate” – to quote the newspaper Ma’ariv – a sitting US vice-president on his visit to Israel in March 2010, yet still receive 29 standing ovations from Congress on his own visit to the US a year later? And which other country is the beneficiary of comically one-sided resolutions on Capitol Hill, in which members of Congress fall over each other to declare their undying love and support for Israel – by 410 to eight, or 352 to 21, or 390 to five?

Indeed, which other country has been protected from UN Security Council censure by the US deployment of an astonishing 42 vetoes? For the record, the number of US vetoes exercised at the UN on behalf of Israel is greater than the number of vetoes exercised by all other UN member states on all other issues put together. Singling out, anyone?

Fourth, the inconvenient truth is that we in the west can happily decry the likes of, say, Assad or Ayatollah Khamenei yet we can do little to influence their actual behaviour. Have sanctions stopped Assad’s killing machine? Or Iran’s nuclear programme? In contrast, we have plenty of leverage over Israel – from trade deals to arms sales to votes at the UN. Israel is our special friend, our close ally.

Yet when Israel started bombing Gaza this month, claiming it was acting in response to incoming rocket fire and was trying to kill Hamas operatives, Cameron merely “reiterated the UK’s staunch support for Israel” and “underlined Israel’s right to defend itself”. And the hundreds of Palestinian dead? Didn’t they have a right to self- defence? There was not a word from our PM. This, ultimately, is the fundamental difference when it comes to comparing Israel’s abuses with those of other “rogue” nations. We single out Israel because, shamefully, we are complicit in its crimes.

Boston Herald video on Youtube: - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RMntJfdmxI

See Also:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/07/we-single-israel-out-becaus

Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel 

Video/Photos-Boston Protests Israel War On Gaza
19 Jul 2014
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Boston, Mass.-July 19, 2014:
About 300 protesters turned out at Park St.
in Boston today July 19 to speak out against
Israel's brutal attack on Gaza's Palestinians.
A very emotional and spirited protest with speakers
on the plight of Palestinians,loud and energetic
chants of "Free Free Palestine" and ending with a
mock "die-in" with the names of some of the hundreds
of Palestinians killed read aloud.There was a small handful
of pro US/pro Israel hecklers there which the Boston police
seperated from our demonstration.
The protest today was sponsored by a wide coalition
of Boston activists-Jewish Voices For Peace, UJP,
ANSWER, Boston IAC, Committee For Peace And Human Rights,
UNAC, as well as many others. Here are the video and photo links
that I took today:
Short 6 min. video:
http://youtu.be/T9z0EQITxEE

Photos:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/protestphotos1/sets/72157645783121074/

End all ethnic and religious wars-
live together in peace.
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Defend The Palestinian People! No U.S. Aid To Israel 

Saturday, July 19, 2014


Tens of thousands in London say no to Israeli barbarism

Some of my photos from this magnificent demo - up to 100,000 rallied A Cry for Gaza fills the streets of London