Footnote to the preceding, Did They or Didn't They? Div.

That is, did the Israeli leaders know this or didn't they?

The Pew Research Center said on Thursday that its 2008 Global Attitudes survey

found significant opposition to [Hamas] in several predominantly Muslim countries, not to mention considerable opposition to suicide bombing - a frequent tactic of Hamas in the past - as well as deep reservations about one of Hamas' chief sponsors, Iran. ...

Among the eight countries with sizeable Muslim populations surveyed by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2008, Hamas received a positive rating in only one, Jordan, where 55% voiced a favorable view of the organization while 37% expressed an unfavorable opinion. Still, Jordanian attitudes toward Hamas were less positive than in 2007, when 62% gave the group a favorable rating, and 36% a negative one.

Hamas' image also declined in neighboring Egypt. In 2007, Egyptians were split (49% favorable, 49% unfavorable). By 2008, however, only 42% had a favorable opinion, while 50% held a negative view.

Approval of Hamas remained steady in Lebanon - but at the low figure of 25%. And in Turkey, support dropped from the low 14% to the barely-detectable 6%. (In the other four countries with significant numbers of Muslims surveyed - Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Tanzania - large numbers were not familiar enough with Hamas to render an opinion.)

Even more significantly, Pew reports that while in its 2007 survey, Palestinians held a favorable view of Hamas by 62 to 33 percent,

[a] Nov. 20-23, 2008 poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center found that 37% of Palestinians would vote for Fatah in legislative elections, compared with just 20% for Hamas. In the Fatah-controlled West Bank, Fatah led Hamas by a 35-18% margin. More interestingly, Fatah also led by a 40-22% margin in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. A poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, conducted December 3-5, 2008, also found that Fatah was more popular than Hamas in both the West Bank and Gaza.

However, tragically, Pew's results also showed attitudes in the surveyed countries to be highly negative toward Jews and revealed a good deal of pessimism about the chances for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. So to the extent that Hamas becomes symbolic of Palestinian resistance to Israel, to that same extent it can attract solidified and increased support if it merely survives the Israeli attack - and even the IDF admits that eliminating Hamas is beyond its ability.

Now, the notion that the Israeli assault could potentially increase support for Hamas has been on most commentators' lips, but the changes indicated by these survey numbers was not. While Israeli officials would not have known about the Pew Research figures, which were just released, I simply cannot believe they were unaware of the results of the polling done in November and December about the popularity of Hamas versus Fatah.

Which means that Israel, while claiming it wants to undermine Hamas, undertook military action all but guaranteed to increase support for Hamas - and which in fact appears to have "galvanized" support for Hamas in the West bank - at the very time support for the group was declining.

This begs an obvious question. I think I've already made my answer clear.

War crimes

Updated There simply can be no doubt, no question. What Israel is doing in Gaza constitutes war crimes. Period.

Last Saturday night the Israeli military seized the Gaza City neighborhood of Zeitoun.

On Sunday morning soldiers forced about 100 members of the Samouni clan to gather in a single house, leaving them there without food, water, or heat.

And on Monday morning, Israeli forces shelled the house, killing perhaps 60 or 70 of the people inside.

Let me make sure this is clear: Israeli forces knowingly and deliberately shelled a house containing unarmed civilians and they unquestionably knew about them because they were the ones who put them there. And when ambulances after the first one tried to get to the scene to take away more survivors, they were driven away by Israeli gunfire while Israeli army bulldozers knocked down nearby houses.

That last charge is backed up by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which in an unusually strong statement labeled the Israeli military as having "failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded." It was not until four days later that the ICRC was able to get to the area - and when it got there, Israeli soldiers tried to force them to leave.

(A later account reduced the number killed in that event to 30. However, that did not keep Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, from saying the incident "appears to have all the elements of war crimes.")

That was hardly the only example. On Tuesday, to cite another case, Israeli forces shelled a well-known, clearly-marked, UN school, killing over 40 people and wounding 150 others. Israel defended the attack, saying that "there was hostile fire at one of our units from the UN facility," and that there were secondary explosions indicating the area was booby-trapped.

But by Thursday, the story had changed to there having been fire "from militants on or near the school grounds." (Emphasis added.) Christopher Gunness of UNRWA said he was "authorized to say" that the Israeli army had in private talks with diplomats retracted its claims of militant attacks coming from within school grounds - an admission it has yet to make publicly.

And then there's the issue of Israeli forces firing on UN and Red Cross trucks carrying relief supplies. Not to mention the entire illegal, inhumane, yes evil blockade that has generated

acute malnutrition in Gaza ... on the same scale as in the poorest nations in the southern Sahara, with more than half of all Palestinian families eating only one meal a day.

What's more, evidence is building that Israel never intended to achieve peace. In fact, it wanted the ceasefire to break down and never had any intention of fulfilling its obligations under it.

Haaretz (Israel) reported on Thursday that since March 2007 the Israeli army has been under orders to prepare for an attack on Gaza. In planning meetings, it was set forth that the "optimal situation" as the result of an attack would be the destruction or at least severe weakening of Hamas, including its removal from power, and - and no matter what you think one way or the other about the legitimacy of an attack focusing on Hamas, this is heinous - that

Israel should not be viewed as being responsible for the Palestinian population, but the role should go to a central Palestinian establishment created in Gaza, led by moderate, pragmatic officials.

That is, "We want to destroy your infrastructure, starve you, wreck your government, foist on you new leaders who meet our approval (the hell with if they meet yours) and then walk away from what we call a 'swamp,' washing our hands of the whole disaster we created, the pain and misery we caused, going 'it's not my problem.'" It doesn't get much more callously brutal than that.

You want to know how bad it got?

They also examined scenarios in which Israel's legitimacy for continuing the operation could be compromised: if, for example, a comprehensive cease-fire were attained with the Palestinians....

They were worried that there might be a comprehensive ceasefire! They were worried that a ceasefire would "compromise" the "legitimacy" of their attack! If you have any doubt that's the meaning, consider that

[t]he officials said an agreement with Hamas could improve prospects for a long-term lull in the fighting, but that reaching such an agreement would be inconsistent with both Israeli and international policies against negotiating with the militant group.

Better, you see, to continue the bloodshed, better to see the continuation of the very rocket fire that you claim stopping is your goal, than to gasp! negotiate with Hamas and get "a long-term lull." Better to leave your own people open to risk, better to desire rocket attacks, than risk having your "operation" be "compromised." Okay, maybe it did just get more callously brutal.

This goes a long way toward explaining Israel's patent insincerity about the ceasefire that ended in December, insincerity that was visible from the beginning.

In addition to a halt in all military actions by both sides, the agreement called on Israel to increase the level of goods entering Gaza by 30 percent over the pre-lull period within 72 hours and to open all border crossings and "allow the transfer of all goods that were banned and restricted to go into Gaza" within 13 days after the beginning of the ceasefire.

Nevertheless, Israeli officials freely acknowledged in interviews with ICG [the International Crisis Group] last June that they had no intention of opening the border crossings fully, even though they anticipated that this would be the source of serious conflict with Hamas.

And, in fact, the flow of goods reached only about one-fifth of normal levels.

That insincerity persisted at the end of the six months. In mid-December, Hamas officials told Egyptian officials that Hamas would stop firing rockets toward Israel and return to the ceasefire (which Israel, amusingly, insists on calling "the lull arrangement," apparently because "ceasefire" implies some kind of negotiation) in return for a signal from Israel that it would lift the blockade of Gaza. Informed by Egypt of the offer, Israel either rejected it or just didn't respond at all.

Did Israel know of the offer, or in any event of Hamas's desire? It certainly did:

The interest of Hamas in a ceasefire agreement that would actually open the border crossings was acknowledged at a Dec. 21 Israeli cabinet meeting - five days before the beginning of the Israeli military offensive - by Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel's internal security agency, Shin Bet. "Make no mistake, Hamas is interested in maintaining the truce," Diskin was quoted by Y-net News agency as saying.

Israel's rejection of the Hamas December proposal reflected its preference for maintaining Israel's primary leverage over Hamas and the Palestinian population of Gaza - its ability to choke off food and goods required for the viability of its economy - even at the cost of continued Palestinian rocket attacks.

I've said before that Israel has no interest in any settlement that does not involve continued Israeli domination of the Palestinians - even as, as the above makes clear, it denies any responsibility for their welfare. It is clearly prepared to commit war crimes toward that end.

What is newly clear to me is that it is also, as I said above, willing to have its own people subject to rocket fire in pursuit of that same goal. The phrase "shocks the conscience" hardly seems adequate.

And what is our - that is, our government's - response to this? On the Executive side, the US blocked a UN Security Council resolution on Gaza and then after it was re-written to reflect administration concerns, we abstained. The resolution, which called for

unimpeded provision throughout Gaza of food, fuel and medical treatment, as well as intensified international arrangements to prevent arms and ammunition smuggling,

passed 14-0.

The Legislative branch was even more shameful.

[T]he House of Representatives voted 390-5, with 22 legislators non-voting, for a resolution that explicitly blamed Hamas for both the breakdown in the ceasefire and the subsequent casualties in Gaza and called for all countries to do the same.

The Senate approved a similar resolution by voice vote Thursday.

If you want to know just how bad the House resolution was, you can read the full text at this link - but don't if you have eaten recently; it's an IDF wet dream that doesn't even make the standard perfunctory stab at a phony "balance." (The text of the Senate version, which was adopted by unanimous consent, doesn't seem to be available yet from the GPO. There is this version but as it lacks a number - and the source is AIPAC - I suspect it's a very early version which may be a little different from what was passed.)

I'd like to chalk those votes up to some combination of ignorance and political cowardice but the truth is I don't think even in combination they go far enough. I believe that outright anti-Palestinian bigotry, outright racism, is a significant contributor to that total.

Because the thing is, can anyone seriously, I mean seriously, can even the most strident pro-Israeli US politician seriously argue that everything, every death, is all the fault of Hamas? That when the Israelis bombed mosques, that was Hamas's fault? When Israel forces shelled the house in Zeitoun, when they attacked UN schools, when they shot the drivers of UN relief trucks, all that was Hamas's fault? When Israel engages in illegal collective punishment, that's Hamas's fault? When Israel ignores UN resolutions, that Hamas's fault? When Israel tries to starve a people into submission, that's Hamas's fault? Why? For refusing to be a quiet victim? Are we really supposed to look at the battered, bloody, hungry, cold, people of Gaza and tell them it's not the fault of those who battered and bloodied you, not the fault of those who denied you food and fuel, not the fault of those who have created a gulag, a concentration camp, not the fault of those who have created a wasteland with the intention of calling it peace?

Oh, but you say, oh, but if only Hamas didn't break ceasefires, all would be well. More bilge. In fact, it is not Hamas which usually breaks ceasefires, it is Israel, according to a study of all recent lulls in fighting between Hamas or other Gaza-based militants and Israel, done by Nancy Kanwisher, Johannes Haushofer, and Anat Biletzki and published in the Huffington Post.

They defined a breaking of the ceasefire as the first death. Which has its limitations but it likely the only objective, measurable way to define it - especially when, and this is my judgment, not theirs, that if you're really committed to a ceasefire you may well be able to ignore an incident which does not result in a death.

We analyzed the entire timeline of killings of Palestinians by Israelis, and killings of Israelis by Palestinians, in the Second Intifada[, they said], based on the data from the widely-respected Israeli Human Rights group B'Tselem (including all the data from September 2000 to October 2008).

We defined "conflict pauses" as periods of one or more days when no one is killed on either side, and we asked which side kills first after conflict pauses of different durations. ... [T]his analysis shows that it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern ... becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days. ...

Thus, a systematic pattern does exist: it is overwhelmingly Israel, not Palestine, that kills first following a lull. Indeed, it is virtually always Israel that kills first after a lull lasting more than a week.

Which I suppose is only to be expected. Because, after all, ceasefires "compromise" the "legitimacy" of "operations" and plans for long-term domination. Plans which the civilized world - of which our own government seems to not be part - must reject.

Footnote: Israel indicated on Thursday that it was prepared to accept a ceasefire provided it contained two elements:

These are an arms embargo on Hamas, meaning international monitors on Gaza's Egyptian border to stop smuggling, and a complete end to the firing of rockets at Israel from Gaza.

Note that this does not involve any commitment by Israel to lift the blockade, to allow in adequate humanitarian aid (UNRWA officials say a three-hour truce is simply not long enough to make a difference), to recognize an elected government, to stop its own attacks in Gaza and the West Bank, to stop the oppression of and discrimination against Palestinians, to - well, to commit itself to doing a single freakin' thing.

So translating from PR speak, Israel grandly allowed as how it would accept Hamas's surrender. This is just another example of Israel making an offer it knows will not be accepted. The purpose is neither a ceasefire or a lasting settlement, it's to have an excuse for more war.

Another Footnote: You may want to read this.

Updated with the info about getting the texts of the resolutions.

Button, button

Just wanted to quickly mention that there are two recent additions to the things in the right-hand column.

The first, which has been up there a while now, is from Amnesty International and its "Irrepressible Info" campaign about the censorship and repression of blogs and other internet outlets in countries around the world.

The other, new today, is a link to a petition to Eric Holder, Obama's pick to be Attorney General, calling on him

to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in War Crimes

with a specific focus on the use of torture.

Government shmoverment

In comments on the post "Justice. Compassion. Community." Chuck Butcher and I started to have an exchange about government. I was writing my second response, which I intended to be my last, but it got pretty long so I decided to move the whole exchange up here to a post so that maybe some other folks might throw their own thoughts in. In doing it, I've cleaned up Chuck's comments a little in terms of spelling and punctuation, which I hope he won't mind. They were obviously done as quick thoughts, not carefully thought out and corrected essays, and I wanted them to be clear.

I am also aware that because they were quick thoughts, this particular exchange may not do justice to Chuck's arguments. But hey, it's my blog and the idea is it's a place for my thoughts. So I'm doing it anyway. I will say that except for the cleaning up I mentioned, nothing has been changed or removed.

Chuck said:

One thing, it's not "their money." The money exists because the government provides services. Some services, like welfare, are considered moral services, strictly speaking that's hogwash. Such services are provided in the community interest in order, not out of morality.

Justice and community have a place in government, they aren't moral concepts which are beyond a government's realm, they are pragmatic concepts of order. Compassion is a real problem to ask a government for, especially one which is based on rules that are enforced (note always that 'force' is the root and root meaning).

One of the biggest obstacles to getting things done in America involves the misconception that morality has anything to do with government.

So I said:

it's not "their money."

Money is simply a medium of exchange that enables an economy to reach beyond direct barter. In itself, it has no value; rather, it represents value, value of goods or services that by being represented by the same amount of money as other goods and services are taken to have the same worth. (Which of course breaks down very quickly when social values rather than solely economic ones come into play, but taking that into account right now makes things unnecessarily arcane.)

In that sense, the money you receive in exchange for goods or labor is yours, it is the value of what you have provided, value that can be used to obtain something of equal value from others now or at some point in the future. If you lived in a barter economy and at the end of a workweek you got paid in food rather than money, would you say that food is not really yours?

The same applies even to the cases of charity and welfare. I received a "Jeopardy" desk calendar for Christmas. It was a gift. Is is not mine?

Justice and community have a place in government, they aren't moral concepts.... Compassion is a real problem to ask a government for....

I have a hard time coming up with a concept of justice that does not involve morality, that does not involve a concept of right and wrong. If it's, as you seem to imply, merely a matter of maintaining order, then isn't the most ordered society, the most restricted, regulated, controlled, repressive society the most just?

And I don't ask governments to be compassionate. I ask the people of the society (and the living, breathing people who actually make up the government, who fill its offices and carry out its functions) to be compassionate and to use the government as a means to act on that compassion.

Which brings me to my last response.

the misconception that morality has anything to do with government

I have heard that argued many times; the first time was in support of the Vietnam War on the grounds that the government had decided that was the most efficient way to advance national interests - which themselves were calculated strictly on gain/loss, or, if you will, profit/loss.

I rejected that idea then, I reject it now. You'll note that I said that I see government, at its best, as the vehicle through which a people act on their ideals. I can't conceive of ideals that don't involve morality.

Which had Chuck responding:

People act as though they earn money in a vacuum. They don't.

As soon as you show me a government of any sort that doesn't rule by force I'll buy some idea of morality in government. People may have morals, but the functioning of government doesn't.

The morality of Vietnam was whatever someone's moral set determined it to be, it was flatly stupid. That is something different. War is not moral, [but] it also doesn't have to be stupid. Iraq was stupid, Afghanistan was necessary. There's a difference. I don't pretend Afghanistan was moral.

And that leads to my long reply, posted here, not in comments:

I'm going to leave aside the question of if the Afghanistan war was "necessary" and restrict myself to the original point, which was about government. I'm also going to make this, unless you ask a question or raise an entirely new point, my last on this.

I'm trying to puzzle out exactly what you're arguing here. I gather that you are using "force" in the sense of "obtaining unwilling compliance" and regarding that as if not immoral at least amoral. (Which, I note, is itself a moral judgment, a mirror image of one version of "might makes right.")

At first I thought you were saying that government and morality never overlap because government involves the use of such "force" and therefore government cannot be moral. But that leaves you unable to apply moral standards to any society and so unavoidably leads you to a place marked not only by anarchy (which I mean in the political sense of no government, not the popular sense of destructive chaos) but an utterly atomized society because you have no way to have any general community standards of behavior, since even in an anarchic society there are still various standards enforced - I use the word deliberately - by community action of some sort. Deny any society, any culture, the right to such force and it becomes the cliché law of the jungle, everyone out for themselves. Fail to deny that right and there is no way to define force used by a society against what it views as miscreants as acceptable but that same force used by a government in that same society against those same miscreants as unacceptable. The result is that all societies, every society, the very idea of society, by definition become immoral. I don't think that's what you meant.

The alternative is that you're saying that because government inevitably involves (immoral) force, moral questions about government actions become meaningless and must be left aside and only issues such as effectiveness at pursuing interests and "pragmatic concepts of order" can be addressed. As I said, that is an argument I have heard before.

But the fact is, even in the cases you cite about Iraq and Afghanistan, there are judgments of right and wrong, good and bad, judgments about one type of person - American - being more valuable, more worthy of protection, than another type of person - Afghan. The very act of going to war makes a moral judgment about the relative value of lives and societies.

The only escape from this is simply to define the question out of existence by saying that perceived self-interest, either individually or nationally, has nothing to do with morality. But that's just a verbal dodge, an example of what I call "hand-waving," responding to a question by waving it off rather than answering it. Of course self-interest is related to morality. It is a morality, it is an ethical standard in that it affects what actions can and can't be justified. And no, you can't say "it's not based on ethics, it's based on logic" because under it all is still the foundation of "this is the way it should be, this is what is right, what is proper," a foundation not based on logic but on conviction. (Which, it is true, is no different from any other ethical standard, all of which can be stripped down to some point where "this is right because it just is." Indeed, a lot of what was in the post that started this was a re-write of what I believe "just is" right. But that only serves to confirm my point.)

Consider that some years ago, I had someone suggest - not entirely jokingly - that people on welfare be killed. And I mean, after all, why not? They cost the rest of us money via taxes not only in the form of public support but also in the costs of providing basic public services (police, fire, and the like) for which they don't pay or at least don't pay their share. The subsidies they receive distort the true market value of commodities such as housing. If we tried to resolve that by simply ending public aid entirely, we'd risk creating a large number of people who in their desperation would turn to crime, which certainly would threaten the self-interest of the rest of us and the order of society as a whole. Thus, making it a capital offense to be on welfare would be not only advance both the self-interest of everyone else and society's interest in order, it would be an efficient way to do it.

So why don't we do it? Because it's wrong. Why do we offer whatever (inadequate) level of help we do to those in need even if we see no immediate benefit to ourselves from doing so? Because it's right. Self-interest, standing alone, would drive a different course of action, one that, no matter how you may wish to deny it, makes a judgment, a moral judgment, about the value - the inherent, unrelated-to-calculations-of-self-interest value - of those human lives. There are places self-interest can't reach and times when by producing an obviously immoral result it becomes an immoral practice.

You may accuse me of arguing by extremes and to some extent I am, but as you are arguing by absolutes, I don't feel embarrassed.

The bottom line here is that government, as I said at the very beginning, is a mechanism. It's a tool. In and of itself, it is no more moral or immoral than a hammer and like a hammer, what matters is how it is used. Using a hammer to make a cabinet is good. Using a hammer to commit murder is bad. Using a hammer to painlessly kill a pig for slaughter is either good or bad depending on if you're a vegetarian or not. I don't expect governments to "be" moral any more than I expect them, as I said earlier, to "be" compassionate - or any more than I expect a hammer to "be" moral. What I want is for the people in and out of government to be moral - and compassionate - and to use the government as a means to act on the ideals related to those morals - and that compassion. Referring to a desire for "moral" or "compassionate" government is merely shorthand for that that.

(I'll note here since I assume it would prove necessary at some point that we're talking about the concept of government; this in no way means that I would necessarily approve of or agree with either the moral code involved or the actions taken as a result.)

So do governments involve force? Yes, they do. But unless it is agreed that

- only government involves force, or
- the use of force at any level from the individual up is inherently and invariably immoral and unacceptable, or
- placing different values on the lives of different people based on where they live or how much money they have is not a moral judgment, or
- not only is government free from moral judgment but even the effects of its actions are likewise exempt,

every one of which I would reject as either patently false or failing the challenge of logic or both, there is no basis to say that moral questions can't be addressed to government actions. Governments may not "be" moral but they can by virtue of how they are used act morally or immorally (or, I suppose if you want to be more precise, can be used for moral or immoral ends) and so morality does indeed have something to do with government.

Again, I intend to make this my last on this exchange unless I'm asked a question or an entirely new point (one that's not merely an expansion on a previous one) is raised. Still, I do hope others (including Chuck) will feel free to comment here about the ideas involved.

Several footnotes to the preceding

- The US branch of Amnesty International has sent a letter to US Secretary of State Can'tBe Right saying the group is

particularly dismayed at the lopsided response by the US government to the recent violence and its lackadaisical efforts to ameliorate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. ...

Without diminishing the responsibility of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups for indiscriminate and deliberate attacks on Israeli civilians, the US government must not ignore Israel's disproportionate response and the longstanding policies which have brought the Gaza Strip to the brink of humanitarian disaster.

Then again, maybe they're just being foolish: In response to a French proposal for a 48-hour "humanitarian cease-fire," Livni claimed that

[t]here is no humanitarian crisis, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce.

I guess the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) doesn't know what it's talking about.

- The bias in US media coverage continues as unabated as the violence. The NYT said that

[w]hile thousands of protesters marched in cities across Europe to demand a halt to the Israeli bombing, in Prague, a spokesman for the new Czech presidency of the European Union said Israel’s actions were “defensive, not offensive.”

Other European countries quickly distanced themselves from the Czech position. The French Foreign Ministry condemned both “the Israeli ground offensive against Gaza as it condemns the continuation of rocket firing.”

In London, Foreign Minister David Miliband urged both sides to accept an immediate cease-fire.

So they found one official to defend Israel while other European nations "distanced themselves" from him as tens of thousands marched in protest. This is what the Times described as a "mixed" reaction.

- The US continued its own "evenhanded" policy, blaming Hamas "thugs" for the violence by having "deliberately targeted innocent Israelis” in “an act of terror."

And indeed yes, targeting civilians is terrorism - let's make no bones about that and I'll take this opening to say for anyone out there so constrained in their thinking that they can't see the world in anything other than black and white, my condemnation of Israel does not mean I support Hamas and it does not mean I condone its shelling of civilians. But, still, haven't the Israelis also targeted civilians? Haven't they attacked mosques, homes, schools? On no, that's different. You see, Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak said

[w]e are not war hungry. ... We have no aggressive intentions.... ... We are peace seekers.

What's more, in a press release the IDF said it

wishes to reiterate that the residents of Gaza are not the target of the operation. Those who use civilians, the elderly, women and children as human shields are responsible for any and all injuries to the civilian population. Anyone who hides a terrorist or weapons in his house is considered a terrorist.

So it's simple. If Hamas kills civilians, it's Hamas's fault. If the IDF kills civilians, it's Hamas's fault. It reminds me of an abusive husband screaming at his bloodied wife, "Look at what you made me do!"

- Bush also claimed the US is

"leading diplomatic efforts to achieve a meaningful cease-fire that is fully respected.” Such a truce, he said, will require monitoring mechanisms to help ensure that the smuggling of weapons into Gaza ends.

The key to peace, it seems, is keeping weapons out of the hands of Palestinians while continuing to pour them into Israel. Which is, again, just so even-handed at to make one weep.

- Where is Obama? Keeping his head down, insisting through a spokeswoman. “There is one president at a time." Which is just as well, considering that in August he said

If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.

Now, there's change you can believe in. Isn't it?

- On Saturday, the UN Security Council was considering a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel and expressing concern at the escalation of violence between Israel and Hamas. The US blocked the resolution.

- This comes via A Tiny Revolution. The Israeli military released a video supposedly showing the destruction of a truck full of Grad missiles. However, the Israeli civil rights group B'Tselem investigated the case and supported the claim of the owner of the truck that what the Israelis claimed were missiles were actually gas canisters he was removing from his shop along with other pieces after the shop next door to his got bombed. In an al-Jazeera report, a member of the group noted that there were still canisters lying around the truck and that if they had been missiles ready for launch, the secondary explosion would have destroyed the vehicle - and as the correspondent noted, no one was carrying a weapon, which would seem to be unusual if the people were Hamas militants.

For myself, I admit to not being an expert intelligence analyst, but in watching the video I kept thinking that you could tell that some things heavy and cylindrical were being loaded but how you could tell exactly what they were is beyond me.

This is not the first time Israelis have made such false claims: In 2004, during an earlier attack into Gaza, the IDF accused the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of allowing one of its ambulances to be used to transport a Kassem rocket, backed up by a video of a long, thin object being put in the back of the vehicle. It turned out to be a folded stretcher that was obviously too light and too thin to be a Kassem rocket. The IDF pulled the video from its website, but you can see it here.

- Finally, in scouring links related to this and the previous post, I came across an interesting person, one Avraham Burg. You can read more about him and his ideas about Israel at these various links. He recently became involved with a group called J Street, which calls itself "the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement."

And so it becomes clear

Updated As Israeli tanks and troops crash into Gaza, it becomes clear that what was suspected is true: The goal is not defense, it is destruction. Destruction of Hamas. Destruction not of Hamas as a "terrorist organization," but of Hamas as a government.

It was actually clear - it was admitted - days ago. On Wednesday, The Times (UK) was able to report that

"[t]he goal of the operation is to topple Hamas,” Haim Ramon, the deputy to Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister, said. ...

Brigadier-General Dan Harel, the Israeli deputy chief of staff, said that his forces would erase every trace of Hamas from Gaza’s crowded cities.

“After this operation there will not be a single Hamas building left standing in Gaza, and we plan to change the rules of the game,” the general said.

“We are hitting not only terrorists and launchers, but also the whole Hamas Government and all its wings. We are hitting government buildings, production factories, security wings and more.”

Sunday's New York Times added the information that

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni of Israel said, “There is no doubt that as long as Hamas controls Gaza, it is a problem for Israel, a problem for the Palestinians and a problem for the entire region.”

Vice Premier Haim Ramon went even further Friday night in an interview on Israeli television, saying Israel must not end this operation with Hamas in charge of Gaza.

“What I think we need to do is to reach a situation in which we do not allow Hamas to govern,” Mr. Ramon said on Channel One. “That is the most important thing.” ...

Israel has not spared the trappings of Hamas sovereignty or limited itself to military targets. It says that the mosques it has destroyed were weapons storehouses and that the Islamic University, which it has hit repeatedly, housed explosives factories. But it has also reduced many government buildings to rubble without any claim that they were military in nature.

“The government buildings are a place where financial, logistical and human resources serve to support terror,” said Capt. Benjamin Rutland, a spokesman for the Israeli military. “Much of the government is involved in the active support and planning of terror.”

(That last, I'll note in passing, is an argument championed by the US in the 1991 Gulf War, when civilian targets like public roads and telephone switching stations were declared military targets because they "could help Iraq's military," a definition by which, I remarked at the time, "it becomes hard to think of anything that is not a 'military target.'")

But of course even in that face of that, the US media couldn't bring itself to acknowledging the fact. So the very same day, the NYT also said that

it remained an open question whether Israel would try to oust the Hamas government*

and ABC News was citing a conveniently anonymous Israeli "government official" who quoted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as telling his inner Cabinet on Saturday that

Israel's objective was to bring quiet to southern Israel but "we don't want to topple Hamas."

The latter report, if true, brands Haim Ramon a liar but actually sounds a great deal more like an exercise in CYA, because, as the NYT noted,

while it may sound decisive to speak of taking Hamas out of power, almost no one familiar with Gaza and Palestinian politics considers it realistic.

So talk tough for international and domestic consumption, lay out the real goal, but knowing you may well fail, have the fallback that "the Prime Minister never said that."

But here's my real point in raising this: Deputy Prime Minister Ramon also said that

“We will stop firing immediately if someone takes the responsibility of this government, anyone but Hamas. ... We are favourable to any other government to take the place of Hamas.”

Mr. Ramon, you are a liar. A damned bold-faced liar.

First, "anyone?" Who else is there? Fatah? They're not only seen as corrupt but as collaborators because of the utter failure of their moderation to secure any genuine concessions from Israel; taking over Gaza in the wake of an Israeli attack would only confirm that judgment. A Fatah government wouldn't last a month and that's probably optimistic. Egypt? It's already said no to the possibility and it has no intention of taking up the burden of guaranteeing humanitarian conditions in Gaza, the same burden Israel has shamefully and illegally shunned. NATO, as some have suggested? The answer there is also no.

The fact is, there isn't anyone else. And I find it impossible to believe that Mr. Ramon doesn't know this. Again, as so many times before, Israel has set down conditions for progress toward a wider agreement which it knows can't be met.

And second, suppose, just suppose, there was someone else. Are we supposed to imagine for a single second that when Ramon said "any other government" he actually meant any other government rather than "a government acceptable to Israel," a government, let's be blunt, of either pro-Israel foreign occupiers or Quislings?

(I'm flashing on Phil Ochs' song "Cops of the World," specifically the lines "We'll spit through the streets of the cities we wreck/And we'll find you a leader that you can elect.")

Even that begs the question: What sort of government would be acceptable to Israel? We've been down this road before. Not that long ago the cry was "Anybody but Arafat." But the truth is, no Palestinian leader is acceptable to Israel. Even when they got the one they said they preferred - Mahmoud Abbas - they set about to downplay and undermine chances for a settlement, changing the rules, upping the ante, moving the goalposts, even before he was inaugurated.

Israel does not want a peace which does not include Israeli domination of the Palestinians. That is, except among those members of the Israeli rejectionist front who don't want to dominate the Palestinians, they want them tossed out of Gaza and the West Bank entirely so it can all become part of "greater Israel."

(That expulsionist impulse is not limited to the more extreme elements of Israeli society, either. In November 2007, Foreign Minister Livni said that a future Palestinian state

will not be a solution just for the Palestinians who live in the West Bank. It is designed to provide a comprehensive national solution - for those living in the West Bank, and the refugees camps, and even for the [Arab] citizens of Israel.

That is, she envisioned that the Palestinians now living in Israel proper would either leave or be kicked out.

By the way, the link is from a group of Orthodox Jews called True Torah Jews Against Zionism which claims that the existence of Israel as a Jewish political entity is actually contrary to the Torah. I would not even dare to pretend to be enough of a Biblical scholar to argue that point one way or the other.)

Always it's the same. A ceasefire starts with much fanfare and grandiose expressions of hope and progress. But no progress is made, no Israeli concessions appear, more settlements are built, more demands are made on Palestinian authorities to do for Israel what it has been unable to do for itself, repression continues, the taking of land continues, Palestinian anger builds, the ceasefire ends or breaks down, and that very ending becomes the excuse for continued, even increased, repression - until the next ceasefire.

It's time to stop. Period. End it. Now. And the best thing we as Americans can do to that end is to demand an end to US military aid and sales to Israel until and unless Israel reaches specific agreements - not promises, not more "if they stop, we can talk" bull because, again, we've gone that way too many times before to have any faith in it, but specific agreements - to lift the blockade of Gaza, to accept the results of democratic elections among Palestinians (which means accepting a government lead by Hamas), to tear down any part of its "separation fence" that extends beyond the so-called "Green Line" (the borders of Israel proper), to remove settlers from the West Bank (except for any prepared to live under Palestinian rule), to restore lands illegally taken from Palestinians, to allow a limited "right of return," and to establish a truly independent, truly self-governing, Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Until then, there should be no aid except humanitarian assistance to both Israelis and Palestinians. We may not be able to stay the hangman's hand but we can at least stop paying for the rope.

*Interesting: A few hours later, with no indication the change was made, that phrase has disappeared from the online version of the story. In its place is a statement of the official Israeli position that "it is not their aim now to fully reoccupy Gaza," which of course is a completely separate issue from overthrowing the Hamas government.

Updated with the inclusion of the graphic, which reads "I, too, am against the war in Gaza." It apparently originated at a website in Israel, but unhappily for me, that site is in Hebrew, of which I can't read word one. I found it at The Magnes Zionist.

Justice. Compassion. Community.

Yesterday over at Hullabaloo, Dday had a piece about how in the wake of the election Congressional GOPpers are becoming convinced their problem is that they're not being reactionary enough and how they intend to scream and screech even more than they have. As part of that, he brought up how everything - including the financial bailout - became a basis for calling for tax cuts.

That lead to his making an observation which I thought required response, which I'm cross-posting here:

I don't think anyone has invalidated that "let the people have their own money" approach.

That's because they keep accepting the underlying premise of "private (unrestricted free-market capitalism) good, public (government) bad" instead of trying to construct an alternative narrative - or, if you prefer, frame. They persist in fighting on the right's turf, in the right's terms.

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that this very failure may be quite revealing of how the Dems as a group really think, I dug up and mixed together some stuff of mine from years ago to suggest some possible elements of an alternative narrative based around the underlying concepts of "justice" and "community."

We see government as the vehicle through which a people can act on their ideals. Our heritage as Americans includes a great many idealistic values - but conservatives are appealing to the worst in our heritage: to selfishness, to suspicion, to "what's-in-it-for-me."

In their bankruptcy of spirit they have sought to arouse a meanness of manner and selfishness of soul among the American people. They've tried to divide us against ourselves, empty us of compassion, and make what the British call "I'm all right Jack" our national motto. They want you to think of just yourselves in isolation: You're working, you're not hungry, your mortgage hasn't been foreclosed, so the hell with everybody else.

They've favored the rich, pampered Big Business, and sought to conceal the pain they've caused under a stream of claims, anecdotes, and figure-mongering that ranges from the merely clever to outright lies.

They are not political leaders, they're cult leaders, true believers in the classic sense of the term: They believe themselves to be in possession of certain ultimate truths that are not subject to rational argument and they isolate themselves from the contamination of non-believers. And, like all cults, it has its glorious vision eternally threatened by its ultimate demons.

That's why they speak of the personal but never of the public; of self but never others; of us and them but never we; of family but never of community. In fact, they're afraid to talk of community, because that means to talk of social obligations, of moral commitments to others, commitments which their selfish, circumscribed view can't comprehend, indeed rejects as, almost literally, heresy.

We think we as a people are better than they give us credit for, and it's time we had government that called us to the highest of our ideals instead of the lowest of our fears.

Because compassion is not a cliche; it's a requirement of our humanity. Decency isn't for case-by-case convenience but must be a basic social tenet. And justice is not a prerogative of the powerful but a basic human right and it must be protected as such.

What we ultimately reject is the right of so few to have so much when so many have so little. What we ultimately resist is the power of so few to control so much when so many control so little. What we ultimately affirm is the right of every human being to a decent life free of hunger, fear, and oppression. What we ultimately demand from our society is the effort to guarantee that right. We've no desire to place a ceiling over anyone's aspirations, but we do want to put a floor under everyone's needs.

That's the dream, a dream that reaches to the depths of the human dream. We don't dream of perfection, of idealized utopias, but of simple human justice. Justice in its truest sense: economic, social, and political. A justice that rejects the ascendancy of bombs over bread, of private greed over public good, or profits over people. A justice that centers on the preciousness of life and will fight to maintain and even expand that preciousness.

That dream is there for us, and if we can but have the courage to hold to that dream, to take risks for it, to look to the future, together we can do it. It won't be easy. It won't be cheap. And it won't be convenient. But it is possible - and, after all is said and done, it simply is the only right thing to do.

Just have to keep hammering it: Justice. Compassion. Community. Justice. Compassion. Community. Justice....

Yes, I realize that the body of that sounds more like a manifesto than a counter-narrative, which is why I included the coda. Those words should be part of, underlie, everything we say, every program we advocate. The real genius of the right, contrary to what some may say, does not truly lie in their ability to create a simple message but in their sheer stubbornness in advocating it, their determination to express their underlying notions at every opportunity until they become so ingrained, so suffused through our social and political discourse, that they no longer come to consciousness and so no longer get argued.

Which is why "invalidating" the "'let the people have their own money' approach" is completely the wrong way to fight. It can't be invalidated because in a basic philosophical sense, it is "their own money." The unspoken part, the part that underlies it and gives it its potency, the part that has penetrated the culture, is "keep your own money because no one cares about you so you don't have to care about anyone else." Without that unspoken call to isolation-driven selfishness, argument loses almost all its emotional power. Without that unspoken call to isolation-driven selfishness, people realize just who it is that is keeping what.

The counterweight, then, is not a challenge to the surface part, is not some version of "it's not really your money" (which I have seen argued) or, worse, acquiescing in the wingers' claim that we're saying "the government knows how to spend it better than you do." The counterweight is more along the lines of "as a member of a community, you have a responsibility to the other members of that community, as they do to you - and the more you have (and we're looking at you, rich people), the greater the responsibility." (The religiously-inclined can refer to Luke 12:48: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.") The idea is to change the issue of taxes from the wingers version of "your own money" to one of community responsibility, to the justice of everyone paying their fair share.

The point is not the exact words or even the particular issue. The point is to keep referring to those basic principles insistently, repeatedly, stubbornly, unflinchingly, unashamedly, unhesitatingly, even in-your-facedly.

Oh my, how many times have I said this in some form or another: Stop trying to fight the wingers on their terms! The idea is not to see what we can wrangle within their rules, it's to change the rules! There is a counter-narrative to the wingers' paeans to selfishness. But - and this is where we so often fail - we have to be prepared to be every bit as stubborn as they are.

It remains to be seen if we're up to it.

Justice. Compassion. Community. Justice. Compassion. Community. Justice. Compassion....

We made it

It kinda feels like we barely made it, but we did. Got through 2008. It wasn't the best of years, what with various hassles including having to move again and various financial disasters, so I can't say I'm sorry to see it go, but go it did.

We greeted the New Year with cold, a car making funny noises, a cut in income, and no heat. (The latter of which turned out to be a minor problem easily fixed, happily.) So I can only assume it's gonna get better. Hooray!

The picture, by the way, has nothing to do with the rest of this post, it should have gone up a week ago, and doesn't even really relate to the New Year, but I wanted to post it anyway. It's the first-ever picture of Earthrise, as seen by Apollo 8 astronauts on December 24, 1968, 40 years ago this past Christmas Eve. If you want to make the stretch, you could say posting it symbolizes my intent to keep having geek posts in 2009.

Start the year with a little trivia, which actually does have to do with the New Year: Why are the months we just passed through, September through December, named as they are?

Answer: The old Roman calendar started the year on March 25; the idea was the year started with the arrival of spring. Supposedly it was Julius Caesar who changed it to January 1, but a lot of countries later on used the original calendar; some changed as they adopted the Gregorian calendar in the late 1500s but others didn't follow suit until the 1700s.

Why is that relevant? Because those calendars also used the Roman names for several of the months, as we do now. And if the year starts in March, making March the first month of the year, then December is the tenth month - reflected in its prefix "dec," referring to ten, as in "decade."

And so for November (from "novern," nine), October ("octo," eight), and September ("septem," seven). That is, they are so named because they were the seventh through the tenth months of the year.

On a side note, for the second year Jon Swift invited bloggers on his blogroll (plus some selected others) to submit a link to what they thought was their best post of the year. He has put up his compilation of them here. It makes for some really interesting reading.

Yes, I did make a submission. I admit to having had a hard time picking among about a half-dozen of my own finalists, but I finally settled one this one from November. Which I think I chose partly because I didn't want to admit that my best post for the entire year came in January.

I noticed in the course of making my selection that I was preferring those written with passion rather than those that were more analytical. Which is likely why, had it not been written too late to be a submission, the post immediately preceding this one would have been in the running.

An open letter to Israel

This is coming out later than I intended because it took rather longer than I expected to gather all the links. Most of them are to previous posts of mine, which I did because a number of those posts themselves had more than one relevant link and time just didn't permit taking that extra step of looking at all of those to see which ones were relevant and still live.

The news from Gaza continues bad, the fighting - or, since it's said that calling thing by their right names is the beginning of wisdom, the aerial assault against a mostly defenseless populace - goes on into a fifth day as Israel continues to attack the people of Gaza in its "war to the bitter end" against Hamas, one it is refusing to allow the international press in to witness for itself.

My own response to this is the following, what you, if you wish, can consider to be an open letter to the state of Israel:

Israel, I write to you as someone who has never, not once, questioned your right to exist. Someone who for nearly 40 years now has advocated the "two-state" solution of mutual recognition between Israel and an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Someone who, that is, would like to address you as a friend - but cannot. Cannot because you have made it impossible for me to be anything other than a dedicated foe of the course you have set, a course of war, of bigotry, of colonialism, of oppression. You have demonstrated for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that you do not want peace except the cold, deadly "peace" of domination and control.

The fact is, you have for years done everything you could to avoid a settlement that would involve surrendering your military and economic control of Palestinian lands.

You have sought to undermine any possibility of moderation among more radical Palestinians by undertaking provocative actions when any signs of such moderation emerge and then have used the very success of that strategy to delay or freeze talks.

You have sought to undermine every sign of moderation or accommodation even among elected Palestinian officials, labeling whatever they have done as not enough to satisfy your demands. That's been clear for over 15 years: In September 1993, Yassir Arafat, writing as head of the PLO, sent a letter to then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin saying, specifically and in so many words, that the PLO "recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security." Such recognition, you had insisted for years on end, was the one thing you required to advance to a settlement. But when it came, you said it wasn't enough. Later, you actively set out to undermine the authority of the Palestinian Authority. You demanded elections among the Palestinians but when Hamas did well in them and got a role in the government, you labeled it a "terrorist" government, said it made negotiations impossible, and openly set out to overthrow it.

You have repeatedly set conditions on negotiations that you knew were all but impossible to meet, including demanding a complete end to all attacks and the "dismantling" of radical groups - a goal that for all your efforts and all your might you yourself have not come close to accomplishing despite more than 40 years of trying. Indeed, those conditions were ones you believed could not be met, demanded not to secure negotiations but to avoid them. And when Palestinian security forces did try to contain attacks on Israel, you denied them the tools to do it while still demanding they succeed as a precondition to any advance toward a settlement.

When negotiations did occur, you made supposedly "generous" but thoroughly deceitful offers that you knew in advance would not, could not, be accepted and then used that refusal as a basis to falsely claim there was no "partner for peace." You promised as part of negotiations you would halt settlements on the West Bank. You lied.

Your "unilateral withdrawal" from Gaza was not a withdrawal at all in any meaningful sense of the word, it was the creation of a gulag, one surrounded by Israeli military forces, one whose every exit and entrance and whose airspace and ports are controlled by the IDF. Presented as some grand gesture for peace, it was no such thing: Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called it "a mortal blow" that would "bring to an end" Palestinian dreams of nationhood. Its purpose was to "freeze Palestinian statehood indefinitely," to, in one of those grand lies at which Israel has become adept, deny your obligations under international law and "dispel the claims regarding Israel's responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip," while simultaneously tightening your grip on the West Bank.

You have engaged in illegal and immoral assassination. You have killed peaceful protesters with apparent impunity. You have used Palestinians as human shields, illegal under international law.

You have persistently dehumanized Palestinians including engaging in routine degradation and humiliation at border crossings. You have illegally destroyed Palestinian homes and illegally expropriated Palestinian lands. You have immorally institutionalized discrimination against Palestinians in the West Bank to the point where even the roads have become an expression of apartheid.

You have engaged in illegal and immoral collective punishment including actively trying to blockade and starve the people of Gaza into submission, leaving them drastically short of food and supplies, with stocks of vital items now "either very low or nonexistent," according to the UN. Even fuel and spare parts to maintain basic public services are mostly unavailable, leaving 60% of the population with running water only once every five to seven days. And this week, you illegally rammed a boat in international waters that was attempting to deliver food and medicine despite your illegal and inhumane blockade.

You have thumbed your nose at the International Court of Justice when it condemned your illegal "separation fence." You claimed that what happened on the West Bank was an "internal Israeli matter," a perhaps unintentional but still clear declaration of your intentions for the region.

You have labeled any press criticism as "anti-Semitic" even though that coverage has been so one-sided that media accounts describe it as a period of "calm" when no Israelis are dying - even though Palestinians continue to be killed.

Oh, and yes, the deaths, let's talk about the deaths. During the period from the beginning of October 2000 through the end of November 2008, you killed more than four times as many Palestinians as Palestinians killed Israelis, and all the while you insisted that every Israeli death, even of a soldier, even as the result of an attack on what would clearly be a military target, was the result of an act of "terrorism" while every Palestinian death, even if it was clearly an unarmed civilian, was the result of "necessary self-defense." In the most recent fighting, nearly 100 times as many Palestinians have been killed as Israelis: pushing 400 versus 4. Nearly 2000 more have been wounded. Some individual Palestinian families have had more killed than all of Israeli society. You killed nearly 20 times as many Palestinians in the first three days of the attack as Israelis had been killed by Hamas rockets in the preceding eight years.

And through all of it, across the years, you have demanded that the Palestinians promise to permanently, completely, stop all attacks on Israel and Israelis and formally recognize Israel as a precondition to even seriously discussing a settlement - even though you know, you must know, how could you not know, that doing so would strip Palestinians of the one thing they have to offer in negotiations, that is, a guarantee of security. Even when you got your recognition, it made no difference to you. Your demand, that is, is that Palestinians cease being an opposition, cease being a party to negotiations, and instead approach you as supplicants, begging for scraps from your table. Your desire, that is, your desire in all of this across all these years, is, in the words of former Israeli Defense Force chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, "to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people." To dominate. To control. To be free to oppress.

After all that, after all of that, you have the effrontery, the arrogance, the hubris, the chutzpah, the utter appalling gall, to present yourself as if you were the victim? That is both unbelievable and quite literally unforgivable.

I have said it before, I have said it for 40 years, I firmly believe, that two states, Israel and Palestine, living in mutual recognition, is the best available course, the one that offers the best hope of doing justice and promising security to both peoples. It is beyond tragic that that is precisely the course you are determined to avoid.

You perhaps have noticed how many times I have used the words "illegal" and "immoral." That was out of necessity as so much of what you have done these past few decades - and continue to do now - fits both descriptions. I can only hope that at some point you decide, or discover the need, to return to the ranks of civilized nations. In the meantime, I can only regret your having become enraptured by blood and power and urge my own nation to refuse to continue to support it.

Your once and I hope future friend,
LarryE

It's getting colder out there, Part Two

On Friday, the Washington Post described how

[s]tates from Rhode Island to California are being forced to curtail Medicaid, the government health insurance program for the poor, as they struggle to cope with the deteriorating economy. ...

Already, 19 states ... and the District of Columbia have lowered payments to hospitals and nursing homes, eliminated coverage for some treatments, and forced some recipients out of the insurance program completely.

Many are halting payments for health-care services not required by the federal government, such as physical therapy, eyeglasses, hearing aids and hospice care. A few states are requiring poor patients to chip in more toward their care. ...

[U]ncertainty over how much [federal] help may come, and when it might arrive, is prompting many states to make the biggest reductions to their Medicaid programs in years - and in some cases, ever.

Medicaid has real limitations: For one thing, contrary to common notion, being poor does not qualify you for assistance unless you fit a "designated eligibility group." The result is that even with the program, an estimated 35% of poor Americans (and 29% of the "near poor," those with incomes up to double poverty level) still have no health insurance of any sort. (See Figure 5 at this link to a report of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured) Nonetheless, it is the nations largest source of government health insurance, covering about 59 million Americans in 2007.

And now there are these cutbacks, with even more states expecting to make even deeper cuts in 2009, which are happening at a time of increasing unemployment (and attendant loss of job-related health insurance), which means even more people are going to need the help - and it may not be there.

I wonder if this is something else Mr. Flickinger thinks will be good news in the long run. After all, it will rationalize out all - well, at least some of - the redundant people. Because, you know, "If they'd rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population."

It's getting cold out there, Part One

A few weeks ago, I noted an article that reported that by the end of November, there had already been a record number of commercial bankruptcies in the US, and the year wasn't even over. I also quoted from that article an economist who said he

expects a wave of retail bankruptcies in the first quarter of 2009, as struggling businesses run out of gas after hanging on for the holiday shopping season.

The intervening time has only made things look even worse. Bloomberg News reported today that

U.S. retailers face a wave of store closings, bankruptcies and takeovers starting next month as holiday sales are shaping up to be the worst in 40 years. ...

More than a dozen retailers, including Circuit City Stores Inc., Linens ‘n Things Inc., Sharper Image Corp. and Steve & Barry’s LLC, have sought bankruptcy protection this year as the credit squeeze and recession drained sales. Investors will start seeing a wide variety of chains seeking bankruptcy protection in February when they file financial reports, said Burt Flickinger.

“You’ll see department stores, specialty stores, discount stores, grocery stores, drugstores, major chains either multi-regionally or nationally go out,” Flickinger, managing director of Strategic Resource Group, a retail-industry consulting firm in New York, said today in a Bloomberg Radio interview. “There are a number that are real causes for concern.” ...

Retailers’ fourth-quarter earnings may fall 19 percent on average, the seventh consecutive quarterly decline, according to Ken Perkins, president of Retail Metrics, a Swampscott, Massachusetts-based consulting firm.

The Commerce Department says the US economy shrank at an annual rate of 0.5% in the third quarter of 2008, it's worst performance since 2001 - and economists expect it will continue to shrink for an additional three quarters. Personally, barring some massive public investment in the economy and one far bigger than what has been proposed, I think they're being optimistic.

Footnote: Flickinger said that in the long run, this is will help the retail industry.

“We’ll be going from a Dickens-esque worst of times this December to the best of times in future Decembers because we’ll rationalize out all the redundant retailers and retail space in shopping centers,” Flickinger said.

Yup. Shuttered stores, disrupted communities, bankruptcies, people losing their jobs, their incomes, their health insurance, even their homes - it's all good news if you'll only look at the long-run big picture for business. Yup, indeed.

We already knew this

Updated But still, it's good to have it confirmed that the blithering, mouth-breathing, drool-mottled idiots of the right have no clue what the hell they are talking about. Again.

Under the tutelage of the anti-sex wingnut fanatics, the federal government established programs that now spend $200 million a year promoting abstinence, including having people sign so-called virginity pledges.

According to a new study published in the professional journal Pediatrics, those pledges don't do a damn thing. (A .pdf version of the entire article is available at this link.)

In this study, researchers compared the sexual behavior of 289 teenagers who reported taking a virginity pledge in a 1996 national survey to 645 non-pledgers who were matched on more than 100 factors, such as religious beliefs and attitudes toward sex and birth control.

The results showed that five years after taking the virginity pledge:

- 82% of pledgers denied ever having taken the pledge.
- Pledgers and matched non-pledgers did not differ in rates of premarital sex, sexually transmitted disease, and oral and anal sex behaviors.
- Pledgers had 0.1 fewer sexual partners in the past year but did not differ from non-pledgers in the number of lifetime sexual partners and the age of first sex.

That is, there was no real difference one way or the other. So was this just a matter or people going "Oh, yeah, sure, I'll sign, what the heck" but without any commitment? Perhaps. But there was one statistically-significant difference between the signers and the non-signers:

The study showed that fewer pledgers used birth control or condoms in the past year or any form of birth control the last time they had sex.

That is, they were every bit as likely to have sex, as soon, with as many people - but less likely to use birth control , in fact 10 percentage points less likely, leading to a greater risk of that bane of every right-thinking conservative moralistic blowhard, teenage pregnancy.

Why are we expected to listen to these people?

Footnote: KTK at Lean Left takes a look at a much wider field and reaches much the same conclusion, although expressed as a statement and let's just say somewhat less politely.

Updated to include the 10 percentage points info and its link.

There will be more

I will have something to say about the Israeli attack on Gaza tomorrow. For the moment, I am just going to quote a small part of something I said nearly five years ago, in January 2004:

I have been consistently critical of Israel in regard to its face-off with the Palestinians. I do that for several reasons. One is that the underlying principle is that I genuinely believe - and have believed for over 30 years - that the Palestinians have every bit as much right to a land of their own as the Israelis do and that mutual recognition between Israel and an independent Palestinian state is, barring a miraculous reconciliation, the best available, the most just, solution for long-term peace and stability.

I also believe that Israel has become less interested in a solution that does not involve maintaining its dominance over the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights.

And I believe now that Israel's actions in the years since, including this bloody attack, have only served to confirm that judgment. Israel is not engaged in defense, it is engaged in a form of colonialism.

I'll also note here for the sake of my ego that more than three and a-half years after I wrote that, Henry Siegman, the former director of the US/Middle East Project at the Council on Foreign Relations (1994-2006) and former head of the American Jewish Congress (1978-1994), which would seem safely establishment credentials, said this in the London Review of Books:

[A]ll previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank.

I expect I will make further reference to that same article.

Not another global warming post!

Um, yeah, 'fraid so. But it's a short one. The BBC said today that

[t]he past year has been one of the most devastating ever in terms of natural disasters, one of the world's biggest re-insurance companies has said. ...

Although there were fewer "loss-producing events" in 2008 than in the previous year, the impact of natural disasters was higher, said Munich Re in its annual assessment.

More than 220,000 people died in events like cyclones, earthquakes and flooding, the most since 2004, the year of the Asian tsunami.

Meanwhile, overall global losses totalled about $200bn (£137bn), with uninsured losses totalling $45bn, about 50% more than in 2007.

Which made 2008 the third most expensive year on record, trailing only 1995 (the year of the Kobe earthquake in Japan) and 2005 (the year of Hurricane Katrina.)

Company officials said the results showed the effects of global warming and said

world leaders must put in place "effective and binding rules on CO2 emissions" to curb climate change and ensure that "future generations do not have to live with weather scenarios that are difficult to control".

I'm not offering Munich Re as experts on climatology, even though it does have a Geo Risks Research division. Rather, I'm using the data to point out that those who try to deny global warming by claiming that severe weather events are not increasing over time are simply wrong. That every year does not set a new record is irrelevant, just as is the lack of a new all-time temperature record every year. The prediction of global warming models is not that the trend over time is necessarily to more storms but rather to more severe storms.

With the inclusion of 2008, it means two of the three most destructive years on record have happened in the last four years. Which should at minimum give the denialists who make the argument in question pause - but of course it won't. Denialism recognizes no heresies.

A different subject

I'm yet again dipping into the pile of comments I've recently made on other blogs to post here. It does kinda feel like cheating; why, I'm not sure since cross-posting is certainly a common practice - so why not cross-comment-to-posting?

Anyway, one of the good folks at Lean Left posted some email exchanges from last year between himself and a friend who died of cancer this past October. He - the poster - asked people to honor the friend's request in that exchange and have a discussion about the right to die. I made a few comments; the only changes here are the addition of the links to info about the Zygmaniak case and correction of typos.

As Ted [the friend] noted, the legal and ethical issue often isn’t the right to suicide, it’s the right to assisted suicide. I say the answer to that doesn’t relate to “if” but to “under what conditions.” This is my take on the ethical (not the legal) side:

Does a mentally-competent person have to right to take their own life? Yes.

Given that, if unable to carry it out themselves in a way to minimize suffering, does that person have the right to ask another for help? Yes.

Given both of those and assuming their own conscience allows it, does that second party have the right to help? Yes.

Given all of those, does that second party have the right to refuse to help? Yes.

The sticker, of course, is the “mentally-competent” part. For example, I was brought up Catholic and I remember being taught at one point that the Church no longer regarded suicide as a sin on the grounds that life was such a previous gift of God that no sane person would willingly surrender it. But that becomes a catch-22 because it means that attempting suicide is proof that you aren’t mentally competent to make the decision to attempt suicide.

Which is why I included that last point above: If that second party believes the suicidal person is not thinking clearly or is acting out of a bout of clinical depression or similar cause, I’d say not only can they refuse, but they are morally and ethically obligated to do so.

This has been a conviction of mine of long-standing. I was tangentially involved in the case of Lester Zygmaniak, who in 1973 performed a mercy killing of his brother George. It could reasonably be called an assisted suicide because George had repeatedly asked Lester to kill him.

George had been in a motorcycle accident that left him in a great deal of pain and, doctors said, permanently and irreversibly paralyzed from the neck down. He repeatedly asked his doctors why they wouldn’t just let him die and begged Lester to put him out of his misery.

Ultimately, Lester smuggled a shotgun into the hospital, asked George one more time if he was sure this is what he wanted, and on getting an affirmative response, shot George in the head, killing him instantly. (Sidebar: Note that “minimizing suffering” does not necessarily mean the use of medications.) He then waited in the room until the police came. He was charged with first degree murder.

At his trial, his lawyer pleaded temporary insanity, a defense that rarely works. But the jury took just two and a-half hours to both acquit Lester and to find his sanity had returned, thus freeing him. I said at the time - and I still think - that I didn’t for a minute believe the jury actually believed the temporary insanity claim; rather that, given the circumstances, they took the attitude “no damn way we’re sending that boy to jail for who knows how many years.”

Precisely because the issue of assisted suicide is fraught with matters of conscience and judgment, it’s an area where people surely can disagree and agree to disagree - but for that very reason I think it’s an issue where we need to be extremely cautious in setting legal limits that would criminalize actions undertaken willingly and in good conscience by all directly involved.

My "tangential involvement" is that I was slightly acquainted with the defense attorney in the case and in an unrelated discussion (about Vietnam and draft resistance) shortly before the shooting I had said that I thought people were becoming more sympathetic to the idea that "life must be worth living to be life" or words to that effect.

In response to my comment, the poster said he "mostly liked" my framework, but would like some additional person involved who was not directly involved/related to the person wishing to die. "I can see how that could become cumbersome in some cases," he said, but added that he was concerned about possible abuse.

I understand your desire for the involvement of a disinterested party, I do[, I replied]. It’s the reluctance to make assisted suicide seem too easy to get and do, an outcome I doubt anyone would favor. (And I’ll note that by “second party” I didn’t mean it necessarily was one individual; perhaps “outside party or parties” in place of “second party” would have been better.)

But again in terms of the ethics involved and not the legalities, I wonder, who would that third person be? How would you locate them? Consider the case of George Zygmaniak. What uninvolved third party could he have approached and how would they have been involved? And should a disinterested party have a say in the ethical aspects of what may well be the most intensely personal decision any of us could ever make?

In terms of the legalities, on the other hand, I could see a provision in a law about assisted suicide that would require an examination by some appropriate professional to determine that the person who wishes to end their life is mentally competent to understand the nature and consequences of their decision. But again, that is about competence, not ethics.

At the same time, I think the potential for abuse is rather small since even with an assisted suicide law, never mind without one, the possibility of being tried for murder if questions arise is quite real. Again referring to the Zygmaniak case, if the jury hadn’t been convinced that what Lester did was actually an act of mercy that was desired by George, Lester would very likely have been convicted of first degree murder.

After giving it a good deal of thought about whether I wanted to or not, I added one more comment to give an emotional as well as a philosophical context to my beliefs:

A footnote to this: I think folks here know that I’m not much of one for going into personal experiences. I’ll offer a heckuva lotta personal opinions but not a lot of “this is what happened in my life.” But I’ll do it in this case because I have a somewhat personal connection to this issue, not direct, but the connection is there.

Part of that is the fact that I’m subject to what I call dark spells, some of which have been long enough and dark enough that I understand the temptation to suicide as well as the need to try to wait it out to see if some light returns. You know the saying “so low I have to reach up to touch bottom?” Know that there are worse places, places where it seems there is no bottom and the sinking will never end.

The other has to do with the death of my mother, which was in 1986. She was at that point a brittle diabetic with end-stage renal disease. She had been in and out of the hospital several times over the preceding months and each time there was the possibility it would be her last. On this occasion, on top of everything else, she had a trach tube (so she couldn’t speak). We’d gotten her a little pad so she could write things out - but she suffered a string of TIAs (transient ischemic attacks, sometimes called mini-strokes) that left her hands unable to write the words her brain was screaming at them.

One day, I was standing at her bedside. One of her doctors and my father were across the room, talking. My mother looked at me and mouthed what I believe - but do not know - were the words “pull the plug.” I shook my head no. Wide-eyed with distress, she very clearly mouthed “Why?” I said “I can’t.” Not with my father and the doctor - both of who would try to physically prevent me - in the same room. Upset and unhappy, she turned her head away from me.

I intended to return later that day, when we would be alone, and ask her if she did say what I thought she said and if she meant what she appeared to mean. If the answer was yes, I would have done it. There is no question about that.

She slipped into a coma later that afternoon, before I could get back. She died two days later.

It was and remains one of the biggest regrets of my life that my mother may have died believing that I, who alone of all the people in her life would have been willing to fulfill that final request (as she surely knew), failed her.

So yeah, I have considered the ethics and emotions of both suicide and assisted suicide - from both sides of the situation.

I always thought that the people who work suicide prevention hot lines should be people who've been there, i.e., people who at some point might have been on the other side of that line. It's a cliché but it's true that generally, it is a terrible idea to tell someone considering suicide "You've got your whole life ahead of you!" since that's exactly the problem. But what you can say, and what thinking to myself I believe got me through on one occasion, is "Just hang on until tomorrow and see how you feel then." True, they may not feel any different.

Then again, maybe they will.