Category Archives: Issues

Major U.K. supermarket chain boycotts exports from Israeli West Bank settlements

The Guardian reports: The Co-operative Group has become the first major European supermarket group to end trade with companies that export produce from illegal Israeli settlements.

The UK’s fifth biggest food retailer and its largest mutual business, the Co-op took the step as an extension of its existing policy which had been not to source produce from illegal settlements that have been built on Palestinian territories in the West bank.

Now the retail and insurance giant has taken it one step further by “no longer engaging with any supplier of produce known to be sourcing from the Israeli settlements”.

The decision will hit four companies and contracts worth some £350,000. But the Co-op stresses this is not an Israeli boycott and that its contracts will go to other companies inside Israel that can guarantee they don’t export from illegal settlements.

Welcoming the move, Palestinian human rights campaigners said it was the first time a supermarket anywhere in the west had taken such a position.

The Co-op’s decision will immediately affect four suppliers, Agrexco, Arava Export Growers, Adafresh and Mehadrin, Israel’s largest agricultural export company. Other companies may be affected by the policy.

Hilary Smith, Co-op member and Boycott Israel Network (BIN) agricultural trade campaign co-ordinator, said the Co-op “has taken the lead internationally in this historic decision to hold corporations to account for complicity in Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights. We strongly urge other retailers to take similar action.”

With strong public support for Palestinians in the UK, this decision by the Co-op is not only good on principal but it may well also prove to be good for business. If in the coming months there is reasonable evidence that this was a smart commercial move, the larger supermarket chains may well follow suit.

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You are all suspects now. What are you going to do about it?

John Pilger writes: You are all potential terrorists. It matters not that you live in Britain, the United States, Australia or the Middle East. Citizenship is effectively abolished. Turn on your computer and the US Department of Homeland Security’s National Operations Center may monitor whether you are typing not merely “al-Qaeda,” but “exercise,” “drill,” “wave,” “initiative” and “organization”: all proscribed words. The British government’s announcement that it intends to spy on every email and phone call is old hat. The satellite vacuum cleaner known as Echelon has been doing this for years. What has changed is that a state of permanent war has been launched by the United States and a police state is consuming Western democracy.

What are you going to do about it?

In Britain, on instructions from the CIA, secret courts are to deal with “terror suspects.” Habeas Corpus is dying. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that five men, including three British citizens, can be extradited to the US even though none except one has been charged with a crime. All have been imprisoned for years under the 2003 US/UK Extradition Treaty which was signed one month after the criminal invasion of Iraq. The European Court had condemned the treaty as likely to lead to “cruel and unusual punishment.” One of the men, Babar Ahmad, was awarded 63,000 pounds compensation for 73 recorded injuries he sustained in the custody of the Metropolitan Police. Sexual abuse, the signature of fascism, was high on the list. Another man is a schizophrenic, who has suffered a complete mental collapse and is in Broadmoor secure hospital; another is a suicide risk. To the Land of the Free they go – along with young Richard O’Dwyer, who faces ten years in shackles and an orange jump suit because he allegedly infringed US copyright on the Internet.

As the law is politicized and Americanized, these travesties are not untypical. In upholding the conviction of a London university student, Mohammed Gul, for disseminating “terrorism” on the Internet, appeal court judges in London ruled that “acts … against the armed forces of a state anywhere in the world which sought to influence a government and were made for political purposes” were now crimes. Call to the dock Thomas Paine, Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela.

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Talks fail as U.S. refuses to apologize for killing 24 Pakistani soldiers

The New York Times reports: The first concentrated high-level talks aimed at breaking a five-month diplomatic deadlock between the United States and Pakistan ended in failure on Friday over Pakistani demands for an unconditional apology from the Obama administration for an airstrike. The White House, angered by the recent spectacular Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, refuses to apologize.

The Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Marc Grossman, left the Pakistani capital Friday night with no agreement after two days of discussions aimed at patching up the damage caused by the American airstrikes last November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghanistan border.

Both sides insist that they are now ready to make up and restore an uneasy alliance that at its best offers support for American efforts in Afghanistan as well as the battle against some extremist groups operating from Pakistan. The administration had been seriously debating whether to say “I’m sorry” to the Pakistanis’ satisfaction — until April 15, when multiple, simultaneous attacks struck Kabul and other Afghan cities.

“What changed was the 15th of April,” said a senior administration official.

American military and intelligence officials concluded the attacks came at the direction of a group working from a base in North Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal belt: the Haqqani network, an association of border criminals and smugglers that has mounted lethal attacks on foreign forces in Afghanistan. That confirmed longstanding American mistrust about Pakistani intentions — a poison that infects nearly every other aspect of the strained relationship. That swung the raging debate on whether Mr. Obama or another senior American should go beyond the expression of regret that the administration had already given, and apologize.

The negotiations are complicated by a complex web of interlocking demands from both sides. Without the apology, Pakistani officials say they cannot reopen NATO supply routes into Afghanistan that have been closed since November.

The Americans, in turn, are withholding between $1.18 billion and $3 billion of promised military aid — the exact figure depending on which side is speaking.

The continuing deadlock does not bode well for Pakistan’s attendance at a NATO meeting in Chicago in three weeks, assuming it is even invited. The administration has been eager to cast the event as a regional security summit meeting, and Pakistan’s absence would be embarrassing.

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After the Arab spring, the sexual revolution?

The Guardian reports: An explosive call for a sexual revolution across the Arab world in which the author argues that Arab men “hate” Arab women has provoked a fierce debate about the subjugation of women in countries such as Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

Women are deeply divided over the article, entitled “Why do they hate us?”, by the prominent American-Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy, which fulminates against “the pulsating heart of misogyny in the Middle East” and builds to an early crescendo by stating: “We have no freedoms because they hate us … Yes: They hate us. It must be said.”

Eltahawy is not alone in stressing that a revolution has come and gone, but done little for Arab women. There are only eight women in Egypt’s new 500-seat parliament – and not one female presidential candidate. Domestic violence, forced marriage and female genital mutilation are still part of the status quo across a region covering more than 20 countries and 350 million people.

“Even after these ‘revolutions,’ all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian’s blessing – or divorce either,” Eltahawy argues in Foreign Policy. “An entire political and economic system – one that treats half of humanity like animals – must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun.”

Eltahawy draws on anecdotal and empirical evidence for her tirade: 90% of women who have ever been married in Egypt “have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty”; not one Arab country is in the top 100 nations as ranked by gender equality; Saudi women have been prosecuted for daring to drive a car. Eltahawy nails the paradox that it is women who must cover up – because of the sexual impulses of Arab men.

But plenty of women across the Arab world have taken objection to Eltahawy’s blanket condemnation of men.

“I agree with most of what she said but I think that the one thing that she might be reluctant to admit is that it’s not about men hating women, it’s about monotheistic religions hating women,” says Joumana Haddad, a Lebanese author and journalist. “They continually reinforce patriarchal standards and patterns that have existed long before. There is no harmony possible between monotheism and women’s rights. The teachings deny women their dignity and rights.”

Dalia Abd El-Hameed, a researcher on health issues at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, added: “It is oversimplistic to say Arab men hate Arab women; it presents us as needing to be saved. I don’t want to be saved, because I am not a victim. We can’t put all Egyptian women in one category, let alone Arab women. My problems are not the same as a rural woman from Upper Egypt.”

Sarah Naguib, a political activist in Egypt, said: “I honestly think it’s almost offensive to be asked if Arab men hate Arab women. That’s like saying all Muslims are terrorists and all Jews are evil and the American dream still lives on.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. signals major shift on Iran nuclear program

The Los Angeles Times reports: In what would be a significant concession, Obama administration officials say they could support allowing Iran to maintain a crucial element of its disputed nuclear program if Tehran took other major steps to curb its ability to develop a nuclear bomb.

U.S. officials said they might agree to let Iran continue enriching uranium up to 5% purity, which is the upper end of the range for most civilian uses, if its government agrees to the unrestricted inspections, strict oversight and numerous safeguards that the United Nations has long demanded.

Such a deal would face formidable obstacles. Iran has shown little willingness to meet international demands. And a shift in the U.S. position that Iran must halt all enrichment activities is likely to prompt strong objections from Israeli leaders; the probable Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney; and many members of Congress.

But a consensus has gradually emerged among U.S. and other officials that Iran is unlikely to agree to a complete halt in enrichment. Maintaining an unconditional demand that it do so could make it impossible to reach a negotiated deal to stop the country’s nuclear program, thereby avoiding a military attack.

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Facebook and Google turned into government spies? The dangerous new law before Congress (CISPA)

Alternet reports: (Update: The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) passed the House Thursday.) 

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to pass a reprehensible cyber-security bill that seeks to protect online companies—giant social media firms to data-sharing networks controlling utilities—from cyber attack. It is reprehensible because, as Democratic San Jose Rep. Zoe Lofgren said this week, it gives the federal government too much access to the private lives of every Internet user. Or as Libertarian Rep. Ron Paul also bluntly put it, it turns Facebook and Google into “government spies.”

But that’s not the biggest problem with the Congress’s urge to address a real problem—protecting the Internet from cyber attacks. While House passage launches a process that continues in the Senate, the bigger problem with the best known of the cyber bills before the House, CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, is not what is in it — which is troubling enough — but what is not on Congress’s desk: a comprehensive approach to stop basic constitutional rights from eroding in the Internet Age.

“I don’t think the current cyber-security debate is adequately protecting civil liberties,” said Anjali Dalal, a resident fellow with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (and a blogger). “CISPA seems to place constitutionally suspect behavior outside of judicial review. The bill immunizes all participating entities ‘acting in good faith.’ So what happens when an ISP hands over mountains of data under the encouragement and appreciation of the federal government? We can’t sue the government, because they didn’t do anything. And we can’t sue the ISP because the bill forbids it.”

What happens is anybody’s guess. But what does not happen is clear. The government, as with the recently adopted National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, does not have to go through the courts when fighting state "enemies" on U.S. soil. Instead, CISPA, like NDAA, expands extra-judicial procedures as if America’s biggest threats must always be addressed on a kind of wartime footing. Constitutional protections, starting with privacy rights, are mostly an afterthought. [Continue reading…]

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39 ways to limit free speech

David Cole writes: Google “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” and you’ll get over 590,000 hits. You’ll find full-text English language translations of this Arabic document on the Internet Archive, an Internet library; on 4Shared Desktop, a file-sharing site; and on numerous Islamic sites. You will find it cited and discussed in a US Senate Committee staff report and Congressional testimony. Feel free to read it. Just don’t try to make your own translation from the original, which was written in Arabic in Saudi Arabia in 2003. Because if you look a little further on Google you will find multiple news accounts reporting that on April 12, a 29-year old citizen from Sudbury, Massachusetts named Tarek Mehanna was sentenced to seventeen and a half years in prison for translating “39 Ways” and helping to distribute it online.

As Anthony Lewis was wont to ask in his New York Times columns, “Is this America?” Seventeen and a half years for translating a document? Granted, it’s an extremist text. Among the “39 ways” it advocates include “Truthfully Ask Allah for Martyrdom,” “Go for Jihad Yourself,” “Giving Shelter to the Mujahedin,” and “Have Enmity Towards the Disbelievers.” (Other “ways to serve,” however, include, “Learn to Swim and Ride Horses,” “Get Physically Fit,” “Stand in Opposition to the Disbelievers,” and “Expose the Hypocrites and Traitors.”) But surely we have not come to the point where we lock people up for nearly two decades for translating a widely available document? After all, news organizations and scholars routinely translate and publicize jihadist texts; think, for example, of the many reports about messages from Osama bin Laden.

In 2009, Tarek Mehanna, who has no prior criminal record, was arrested and placed in maximum security confinement on “terrorism” charges. The case against him rested on allegations that as a 21-year old he had traveled with friends to Yemen in 2004 in an unsuccessful search for a jihadist training camp in order to fight in Iraq, and that he had translated several jihadist tracts and videos into English for distribution on the Internet, allegedly to spur readers on to jihad. After a two-month trial, he was convicted of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization. The jury did not specify whether it found him guilty for his aborted trip to Yemen—which resulted in no known contacts with jihadists—or for his translations, so under established law, the conviction cannot stand unless it’s permissible to penalize him for his speech. Mehanna is appealing.

Under traditional (read “pre-9/11”) First Amendment doctrine, Mehanna could not have been convicted even if he had written “39 Ways” himself, unless the government could shoulder the heavy burden of demonstrating that the document was “intended and likely to incite imminent lawless action,” a standard virtually impossible to meet for written texts. In 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court established that standard in ruling that the First Amendment protected a Ku Klux Klansman who made a speech to a Klan gathering advocating “revengeance” against “niggers” and “Jews.” It did so only after years of experience with federal and state governments using laws prohibiting advocacy of crime as a tool to target political dissidents (anarchists, anti-war protesters, and Communists, to name a few).

But in Mehanna’s case, the government never tried to satisfy that standard. It didn’t show that any violent act was caused by the document or its translation, much less that Mehanna intended to incite imminent criminal conduct and was likely, through the translation, to do so. In fact, it accused Mehanna of no violent act of any kind. Instead, the prosecutor successfully argued that Mehanna’s translation was intended to aid al-Qaeda, by inspiring readers to pursue jihad themselves, and therefore constituted “material support” to a “terrorist organization.” [Continue reading…]

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Barak adds to Israel’s mixed messages on Iran

The New York Times reports: One day after Israeli newspapers reported that the nation’s top general had said economic and diplomatic pressures against Iran were beginning to succeed, his superior, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, said Thursday that the chances “appear low” that the Iranian government would bow to international pressure and halt its nuclear program.

The remarks by Israel’s top defense officials added to uncertainty over the unity of the nation’s leadership in its approach to Iran’s nuclear program, which Israel fears is aimed at producing weapons. While Israeli officials insisted Thursday that there was no disagreement, the comments by Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz to Israeli journalists did not appear to line up completely either with the tone of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, or the assessment of Mr. Barak.

“The truth must be told: The chance that this level of pressures will make Iran respond to the international demand to halt the program in an irreversible manner — the chance of that appears low,” Mr. Barak said during an Independence Day celebration in Herzliya. “I will be happy to be proved wrong. But that is my best assessment, and it is based on years of tracking Iranian maneuvering and on historical precedents of North Korea and Pakistan.”

Mr. Barak’s remarks came even as top officials tried to erase the perception of disagreement over Iran. The day began with General Gantz’s telling reporters “there is really no distance” between his view and that of the prime minister, according to an aide who was with him. But it was unclear whether the general was being pressed to walk back from his comments, if he felt his message was misconstrued or if it was all part of a broader strategy of trying to offer dual messages for different audiences.

In any case, the discrepancies, however slight, were self-evident.

In an interview published Wednesday in the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, General Gantz described the Iranian government as “very rational.” Mr. Netanyahu had told CNN on Tuesday that he would not count “on Iran’s rational behavior.”

General Gantz said Thursday morning that he thought Iran would ultimately decide against building a weapon because of sanctions and the threat of a military strike from multiple nations; hours later, Mr. Barak said he thought it unlikely that the sanctions would succeed and that he did not see Iran as “rational in the Western sense of the word, meaning people seeking a status quo and the outlines of a solution to problems in a peaceful manner.”

Mr. Barak’s extensive foreign policy comments were quite unusual, given that they were offered during what was billed as a holiday toast, but hewed closely to the positions he has long stated regarding Iran and its nuclear program. He also warned of “a nuclear arms race” with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and “even the new Egypt,” calling Iran “a challenge for all the world.”

General Gantz, meanwhile, hinted Thursday that Israel had international backing for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, saying: “The military force is ready. Not only our forces, but other forces as well.”

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The other America, 2012: confronting the poverty epidemic

Sasha Abramsky writes: Clarksdale, Mississippi, might seem an unlikely starting point for a meditation on twenty-first-century American inequality. After all, the music the town’s fame rests on is born of the sorrow and racial exploitations of another century. Clarksdale proudly markets itself as the home of the blues: the world’s best blues musicians still come to jam in the little Delta town where W.C. Handy once lived, where Bessie Smith died and where Robert Johnson supposedly made his infamous pact with the devil at a crossroads on the edge of town.

But Clarksdale is also the site of a very different crossroads, one in many ways emblematic of what America is becoming: a place of stunning divides and dramatically disparate life expectations between rich and poor. The side streets of central Clarksdale are lined with tiny, dilapidated wooden homes. Most residents here make do without basic services and amenities, including anything beyond a bare-bones education, and many lack access to the broader cash economy. In contrast, the stately old townhouses in the historic district—places where several Mississippi governors grew up, where the young Tennessee Williams ran around while staying with his grandparents—look like the scenic backdrop to a romantic film set in the antebellum South. And the newer, more palatial mansions in the suburbs ringing the town could serve as staging grounds for a reality TV show on the nouveau riche.

In the poorer section of Clarksdale, in a subsidized housing unit about the size of a small boat’s cabin, lives 88-year-old Amos Harper, a jack-of-all-trades who grew up in a sharecropping family. Harper spent decades doing everything from farmwork to interstate tractor-trailer transport. These days, he gets up early to supplement his $765 monthly Social Security check, collecting cans from the gutters and trading them in for 49 cents per pound. When he isn’t doing that, he’s mowing lawns and running errands for several of the town’s richer residents, including Bill Luckett.

Luckett and his wife live in a huge house designed by architect E. Fay Jones, a Frank Lloyd Wright mentee. Every detail, from the high ceilings to the sunken rooms, has been carefully planned. The larger-than-life home complements the larger-than-life persona of Luckett, a burly 64-year-old attorney and real estate developer with a shock of gray hair who is “president of everything from a country club to a hunting club,” as he puts it. Luckett serves on a state legal aid board and various educational advisory boards, and he counts among his acquaintances some of the country’s top politicians and entertainers.

He also considers Harper a friend, although, as Luckett would be the first to acknowledge, the friendship is deeply unequal. Until age slowed him down, Harper would routinely show up at the Ground Zero blues club, a raucous place Luckett owns with actor Morgan Freeman, showing off dance moves that Luckett says are some of the best in town.

For Luckett, Clarksdale’s imbalances are indicative of broader fissures and inequities in Mississippi—and, he believes, across America. Angry at the way the political system is ignoring poverty, Luckett ran for governor last year on an anti-poverty and invest-in-education platform. He came in a strong second in the Democratic primary, though in a state as heavily Republican as Mississippi, that didn’t necessarily count for much. “I’d never intended to get into politics,” he explains over a glass of red wine in one of his living rooms. But, he says, lack of investment in public education, an increasingly regressive tax system and other challenges pushed him into the fray. “America has never had as greedy a top 1 percent as we have now. The inequality has reached dangerous proportions.”

Unfortunately, Luckett is a rare exception in Mississippi politics. The state’s leadership is exemplified by ex-governor Haley Barbour and current governor Phil Bryant, who both won election by forging alliances between country club denizens and the culturally conservative white working class, which both preach the virtues of shrinking government, rolling back regulations and cutting social services. “When you get a white guy walking out of his rusty trailer into his pickup truck and he’s got a Vote Republican placard in his yard, then you’ve reached the height of stupidity,” Luckett says.

Sadly, this too is reflective of the nation. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli military chief: Iran will not build nuclear bomb

The Washington Post reports: Israel’s military chief said in an interview published Wednesday that he believes Iran will choose not to build a nuclear bomb, an assessment that contrasted with the gloomier statements of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pointed to differences over the Iran issue at the top levels of Israeli leadership.

The comments by Lt. Gen Benny Gantz, who said international sanctions have begun to show results, could relieve pressure on the Obama administration and undercut efforts by Israeli political leaders to urge the United States to get as tough as possible on Iran.

Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have repeatedly stressed that they do not think sanctions and diplomacy will persuade Iran to halt a nuclear program they describe as a military one, and they warn that the time to stop it is quickly shrinking.

But the Israeli security establishment is believed to be far less convinced about the urgency of military action. Gantz made his own reservations clear in a handful of rare interviews with Israeli newspapers, offering comments that analysts said seemed intended to inject nuance into a debate that has reached frenzied heights this spring. Speaking to the newspaper Haaretz, he said that the Israeli military would be ready to act if ordered, but that he did not think that this year would be “necessarily go, no-go.”

Gantz described Iranian leaders as “very rational people” who are still mulling whether to “go the extra mile” and produce nuclear weapons.

“I believe he would be making an enormous mistake, and I don’t think he will want to go the extra mile,” Gantz said of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. While Gantz cautioned that Khamenei could still change his mind, the supreme leader has said repeatedly that Iran does not intend to build a nuclear weapon, and that its uranium enrichment program is for peaceful purposes.

Although striking in its bluntness, Gantz’s assessment of Iran’s nuclear intentions did not differ dramatically from comments made publicly and privately by other current and former Israeli officials in recent months. Others have also concluded, for example, that Iran intends to achieve nuclear weapons capability but would stop short of assembling and testing a bomb, steps that would almost certainly incur a military response from Israel and perhaps the United States.

But Gantz’s comments differed starkly in tone from those made recently by Netanyahu about the diplomatic efforts of the United States and other world powers.

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Never forget… World War II

Shmuel Rosner writes: The seven days between Holocaust Memorial Day (last Thursday) and Independence Day (this Thursday) are packed with national symbolism. Seven days to remind the Jews of Israel of their trajectory from near annihilation to sovereign revival. Seven days for much sorrow and much pride.

And seven perfect days for political messaging.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened the season last week by dismissing those who “prefer that we not speak of a nuclear Iran as an existential threat” and “do not like it when I speak such uncomfortable truths.” These “truths” are in fact a matter of much debate, and yet Netanyahu can’t really go wrong asserting them as fact. However remote the possibility that a nuclearized Iran would actually spell calamity for Israel, that outcome is too serious not to strike fear.

It wasn’t the first time Netanyahu used the specter of the Holocaust to characterize the danger posed by Iran. I remember hearing him make the case at the annual gathering of the Jewish Federations of North America in Los Angeles in 2006. “It is 1938,” he said back then. “Iran is Germany, and it is about to arm itself with nuclear weapons.”

Six years later, for Netanyahu at least, it’s still 1938 — maybe 1939 — and Iran is still comparable to Nazi Germany. During his speech last week, Netanyahu told his many critics that those who do not understand in the same terms as he does the gravity of the threat “have learned nothing from the Holocaust.”

Apparently one of those know-nothings is the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. “Iran is a danger, but to claim that it is creating a second Auschwitz? I compare nothing to the Holocaust,” Wiesel told the Globes last week. He believes that to invoke the Holocaust like this is to trivialize it.

Yes, to invoke the Holocaust in response to every Israeli fear is to trivialize it — but it also isolates the Holocaust from the horror of a war in which as many as 70 million people died. Those who beat the drums of war need to remember how hard war is to contain and how unpredictable its outcome. Netanyahu doesn’t just trivialize the Holocaust; he trivializes war itself.

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Veterans and brain disease

Nicholas Kristof writes: He was a 27-year-old former Marine, struggling to adjust to civilian life after two tours in Iraq. Once an A student, he now found himself unable to remember conversations, dates and routine bits of daily life. He became irritable, snapped at his children and withdrew from his family. He and his wife began divorce proceedings.

This young man took to alcohol, and a drunken car crash cost him his driver’s license. The Department of Veterans Affairs diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D. When his parents hadn’t heard from him in two days, they asked the police to check on him. The officers found his body; he had hanged himself with a belt.

That story is devastatingly common, but the autopsy of this young man’s brain may have been historic. It revealed something startling that may shed light on the epidemic of suicides and other troubles experienced by veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His brain had been physically changed by a disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E. That’s a degenerative condition best-known for affecting boxers, football players and other athletes who endure repeated blows to the head.

In people with C.T.E., an abnormal form of a protein accumulates and eventually destroys cells throughout the brain, including the frontal and temporal lobes. Those are areas that regulate impulse control, judgment, multitasking, memory and emotions.

That Marine was the first Iraq veteran found to have C.T.E., but experts have since autopsied a dozen or more other veterans’ brains and have repeatedly found C.T.E. The findings raise a critical question: Could blasts from bombs or grenades have a catastrophic impact similar to those of repeated concussions in sports, and could the rash of suicides among young veterans be a result? [Continue reading…]

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Thank you to 60 Minutes

Jewish Voice for Peace says: “On April 22, Bob Simon and the US news show 60 Minutes shared the painful truth with 13 million viewers — the primary cause for the exodus of Palestinian Christians from the Holy Land is the nearly 45 year-old illegal Israeli occupation. Now 60 Minutes is being attacked for telling the truth. A range of Israel-first partisan groups have gone on the attack against CBS, and they have received over 29,000 emails of complaint. If 60 Minutes backs down, then other media outlets will do the same.”

Click here to sign JVP’s petition which has already gathered over 5,000 signatures in a couple of hours. (JVP is a national grassroots organization dedicated to promoting equality, democracy and self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians.)

Churches for Middle East Peace also have a petition for the same purpose. (CMEP is a coalition of 24 national Church denominations and organizations in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions.)

And if you missed Bob Simon’s report, here it is:

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Paul Krugman’s silence on Israel: the power of the lobby or the weakness of its critics?

Yesterday, Paul Krugman wrote a brief post on his New York Times blog, The Conscience of a Liberal:

Something I’ve been meaning to do — and still don’t have the time to do properly — is say something about Peter Beinart’s brave book The Crisis of Zionism.

The truth is that like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going. It seems obvious from here that the narrow-minded policies of the current government are basically a gradual, long-run form of national suicide — and that’s bad for Jews everywhere, not to mention the world. But I have other battles to fight, and to say anything to that effect is to bring yourself under intense attack from organized groups that try to make any criticism of Israeli policies tantamount to anti-Semitism.

But it’s only right to say something on behalf of Beinart, who has predictably run into that buzzsaw. As I said, a brave man, and he deserves better.

So if Krugman felt the need to say something about Beinart’s book, I guess this was it — he’s said something.

To borrow one of President Obama’s favorite words when it comes to Israel, Beinart has made a stalwart defense of the two-state solution. He did so at a time that there is a widening consensus that the expansion of Israeli settlements across the West Bank has made the creation of a Palestinian state virtually impossible.

While Beinart has been widely praised for his courage, it’s less obvious to me whether he is being bold or simply astute. He’s young enough to not want to find himself on the wrong side of a generational divide and to that extent he seems to be following rather than leading opinion among younger American Jews. Indeed, he still has plenty of catching up to do.

As for Krugman, his own focus is domestic and economic, so I understand that he has other battles to fight. But when he says, “I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going,” he might as well have said he chooses to keep his head in the sand. He will only refer to the Israel lobby by the euphemism “organized groups” and knowing that he risks attack, raises his head above the parapet simply to declare that he is unarmed.

No doubt the lobby and its attack dogs like Alan Dershowitz can be viscous and unrelenting, but there are at least two ways of responding to intimidation: to be intimidated or to be defiant.

When the lobby attacks, too many people respond by bemoaning its might and its ruthlessness; too few offer the right wing Zionists the scorn they deserve.

Maybe if Israel’s most rabid defenders were more frequently mocked, their power would turn out not to be as great as it is feared.

From his secure positions as a tenured professor at Princeton and New York Times columnist even if Krugman wasn’t to make it a regular habit, he could stand up and take an occasional shot at the lobby without putting his life in danger.

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