Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead, or In Memory of Justice

Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!

I suppose if I had lost half my family to Saddam Hussein, Friday night would have been cause for celebration. So maybe I would have joined the revellers in the streets of Dearborn and Baghdad who were in the mortifying throes of retribution rock.

Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!

Or is she?

The Wicked Witch of the West lives on. Indeed, Saddam took his last few breaths at one of her military bases. So much for his execution being the act--or convincing demonstration--of a free and independent Iraq. No, Saddam was silenced not executed. His dirtiest secrets died with him. Whew! Pew!

Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead! And her red shoes are red with blood.

To be truthful, the news left me as empty and sad as the news of Timothy McVeigh's death.

Saddam used his last moment to invoke Palestine. What else could he invoke? I wonder what the huddled, curfewed massess of Gaza thought as the news came over the radio and TV. Or was there another one of those interminable blackouts imposed by the Israelis as an expression of ironic, inpotent solidarity between the downtrodden of Palestine and Iraq.

One thing that the saga of Palestine has taught me that is relevant here is this: the wronged can do wrong in the name of right. The children of Warsaw can choose to transmute their victimhood into victimization--rather than transcend it.

For me, "Resist not evil" is still the rule. "Who amongst you is without sin?" is still the main question to the jury. These were the exhortations of a Jew to his own people. Or did the Father of that Son die when the Temple of Jerusalem was bulldozed by the Romans in 50 AD?

MEMORIES OF EICHMANN
During the mock trial of Saddam Hussein I kept remembering Hannah Arendt's dispatches to the New Yorker from the Jerusalem-based trial of Alolph Eichmann, Hitler's henchman in Hungary. She condemned the death sentence as a failure of justice, then she wrote "The Banality of Evil" to remind us that killing would have only been the right choice for the right reasons. And there was nothing in the verdict that suggested Eichmann was being executed for the right reasons.

What would have been the right reasons? Eichmann, like Hussein, should have stood in the docket of an international tribunal representing the totality of humanity and not just groups or persons wronged by the defendent. Further, every one with complicity in the horrors of his regime should have known they could also be named and called to testify. Crimes against humanity must be proven in a court room that truly represents this collective of spirit and society. Saddam was tried and killed by his victims acting on behalf of his long-time biggest sponsor: America. Such conflicts of interest should have been prevented, or, at least, acknowledged.

I know such purity of circumstance is a lot to ask for. But I ask it anyway. If my deliberations on the life of a person were allowed to be guided by rage and need for revenge, then, in the ultimate interests of humanity, I should recuse myself from sitting in judgment. This conflict of interest would poison any chance for the jury to serve the cause of justice.

Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead! But not by my hand or vote or consent if given in rage or anger. The witch is dead only by fiat of reason not retribution; by solemn council not giddy unanimity.

Saddam, as I noted before, was executed at a US military base by men who cannot be, by dint of this fact, other than paid assassains of my country. Saddam was silenced not executed. Secrets and handshakes died with him whose revelation in a public courtroom to which the entire world has accesss was the only reason for his trial.

JUSTICE AS A PROOF OF GOD
Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!--and what she knew died with her, making us no safer or wiser than before. Don't you think that somewhere in the world those wronged by Saddam didn't note the hypocritical irony that Donald Rumsfeld, who is as responsible for perpetuation of bloodshed in Iraq as the tyrant hung on friday night, gots a pink slip and comfortable retirement? Such trials kill God or make him seem more external to us.

If God is to live, He must live within us. If God is to be compassionate, merciful and just, it must be we who are His highest abode in creation so that we serve by mere fact of consciousness and conscience as the conduits of His sacred attributes. These attributes, Sufis like me believe, are His only form. If God is to be a deus in machina, not ex machina, his virtues must be carried by blood and breath into any and every contemplation of action. The Christ within is God-guided consciousness and behavior. And God can only "exist"--meaningfully--in the exercise of his attributes. The best proofs of God are existential.

Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead! But the bell that brought the news is now cracked and unable to ring until it is repaired. The repair is the exercise and triumph of virtue, even, or especially, in the face of eveil--be it that of a dangling tyrant or a jostling Friday night crowd fresh from a hanging.

The Day After Christmas Is When The Celebration Begins In Full and Earnest

If Christmas is just an exchange of gifts, then Christmas has come and gone. But driving my son(g) to the airport this morning, it was a kind of relief to feel the aching love and heavy heart that is always what time has come to as of late. In this way, as several songs of this season say, it is Christmas every day. The dying that I know of in greater numbers than ever before remind me that Time must have a stop, but it won't as long as we habitually dwell in these bodies where the most lingering and capable thoughts of who we are are as fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.

The family is, of course, larger. The Giver/Giving makes it to every home in every thought of giving. It is, as Christmas reminds, the All of us, so to speak, whose safety and well-being we crave. And it is into this encompassing sense of enclosure as family with Father and Mother to pray to for its welfare that I return this morning, ready to spend what I will earn as daily bread on comfort and renewal. The weight of the name-words Jesse and Amy is autonomic sum of the weight of worlds that I have had a hand in shaping and handing to my children.

Christmas, my faith tells me, is supposed to be the best world this can be, white not with snow but clarity, radiance, and the deservedness of our membership in it. A world worth thanking for. Gratitude reifies God.

My friend Jonathan Granoff stopped me short the other day when he said that Justice is a quality of God just as important as love and compassion but which is now barred from invocation of The Master Presence in our lives. We must yearn for the dispensation of Justice as much as the Rahmat-virtues of Mercy and Compassion. We must yearn to be its conduits, for Justice is the Virtue that flies farthest and most concretely from us in its sharing.

So I declared this grey, misty Tuesday morning a New Year of sorts, and searched for a Robert Creeley poem to mark the resumption of time and the resolutions it may bring. Since Creeley is never less than watchful, it didn't take long to find a poem of 'his' that spoke for me. It's from a calm, contented Spring day 40 years ago at least. Call it the Feast of the Assumption--the assumption of continuance, and the responsibility it brings.

If by my end of days, I can do no better than the sense of two, the duality of me and all those whom I love, the world as subject and object, this poem would say I lived well and practised the core mindfulness asked of every disciple. (For to celebrate any holy day is the be reminded of discipleship.) On such a day as then or this, "Who am I?" is, as it is here, a refrain and everything seen participates as particulars of that singing. Note how sweetly elemental things are in this world: water contained as lake, air verging into aether as hgh-rising smoke, then fire of sun sent as morning light on leaves and, finally, combusted into bird song and canticle of praise in the reverberant space. This is a poem about the first and final stillness in which we are contained--no matter which, or all, of the three worlds that we occupy: the before, during or after. Creeley is saying, It is all one time and place; it is all a holy day. Allhamdullilah!< /DIV>

With my best wishes,

David

INTERVALS

Who
am I--
identity
singing.

Place
a lake
on ground, water
finds a form.

Smoke
on the air
goes higher
to fade.

Sun bright,
trees dark green,
a little movement
in the leaves.

Birds singing
measure distance,
intervals between
echo silence.

--Robert Creeley, Words, Scribners, New York, 1967, p. 129

"The Song Of One Who Weeps Forever" by Bawa Muhaiyaddeen

Here is the song I have been asked to recite this Christmas Eve morning at the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship:

The Song of One Who Weeps Forever
In the Name of Sheikh
Sultan Muhaiyaddeen of Baghdad

Have you abandoned me at this moment,
Permitting my body's destruction?
Have you made all my struggles and suffering useless,
So that I sigh with frustration
Like a man longing for fruit beyond his reach?
Ya Muhaiyaddeen, may Allab be pleased with you.

I do not know the destiny written for me.
Have my words not reached your holy ears?
O grace, you have come as the gracious one,
Have mercy on me.
Come, take me to the palace of the King,
Ya Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

Come to this world and make me your own,
So that I see your state in this cage
Before death comes.
I am just a wicked man singing songs,
Come, take away my suffering, console me,
O great Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

There is no one else to help me,
Why do you not have pity
On Me? I arrived at this sad state
Because of my parents' faults.
Come to me before I am put into an earthen grave,
Ya Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

If you do not have pity on me after saying all this
Whom can I tell of my kinship with you,
O great King Muhammad, Rasul, Messenger
From whom the fragrance of kasturi emanates,
Please remove the suffering of a sinner,
Great Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

At your feet I weep and beg
That all the faults of this tormented sinner be forgiven.
To whom can I confess my sins?
Please come immediately, take away my sorrows,
Ya Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

At this moment take pity on me.
I have unwittingly had what is in the crown of your head.
Forgive my faults before my body is destroyed,
Keep me at your feet,
Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

Endless treachery and falsehood have lived
In my heart as intoxicants. I am such a sinner,
But I know you are the only refuge for this poor wretch.
Please remove the treachery from my heart,
Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

If you who know everything
Should abandon me at this moment,
Where can I turn?
There is no one to help me.
Please come, dwell in my heart,
Save me from the torment of my sorrows,
So I will yearn for your divine feet,
Ya Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

If you leave me heart, I will become so evil,
I will become a sinner wasting my time,
I will melt and burn like wax in a fire.
Appear before me at this very moment,
Our Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

I was cheated when I worshipped the earth,
I was possessed by a demon when I worshipped women.
As my mother and father would, take pity on me, your slave.
Is there anyone else who can help me?
Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah, be pleased with you.

Please forgive all the faults I have committted,
Draw me to your feet, protect me.
I swear in the name of God who permeates heaven and earth
I have told the truth as I see it.
Please hear me,
Ya Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

Radiance of the pure one
Who shone like light from a cradle of beautiful gems
In the throne of God, even in the time of darkness before creation began,
Is there any other truth to praise or sing about?
Protect me, have compassion, jeweled light of my eyes,
Ya Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

Even though I keep your holy name within,
And try to establish the inner light of perfect purity,
Why do I still waver and make mistakes?
I am a sinner whose bodily cage may be destroyed before I ever see the King.
I have no one to help me except you,
Yah Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

I am telling the absolute truth,
And the time is right.
Appear before me,
Appear in my heart, at this moment take pity on me,
Make me victorious
In the field of devotion, in the countryside
Where the golden rain of grace falls,
Ya Meera Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you.

Meera Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you,
You imprisoned that jinn in a small phial
And rescured a golden princess.
Will I ever find myself
And dedicate my life to God
Before death comes to seize me?
Meera Muhaiyaddeen, may Allah be pleased with you

--His Holiness M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, "Maya Veeram: or The Fortess of Illusion," pages 153-5

Looking for God's Love in All the Wrong Places

Below please find Robert Fisk on Jimmy Carter's brave bold book about Palestine and the world of good done for sales by the strident attacks of the Jewish lobby. Incredibly, that lobby now has the chutzpah to pretend it doesn't exist or have any influence on the Media. Fisk reminds his readers that Israel was cosy with South Africa when It was an apartheid state--yet its defenders insist it is an insult to compare policies in Nearly digested Palestine with Afrikaner polices in south Africa. I guess it would also be an insult to remind Zionists of arms deals with South Africa.

I've been thinking the last few days that I should have kept my Ramadan fast going, if only to keep constant link and vigil with the victims of American foreign policy in iraq and Israeli domestic policy in occupied Palestine. I know that it's a meager symmetry to suppose or hope voluntary missed meals in Narberth, PA have any equivalence with imposed starvation in Gaza. But symbolic deprivation is, at the very least, an act of prayer and solidarity.

In a few hours I have been asked to read a song by my teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen about the seeming failure of God to hear the prayers of the trampled. Only a believer could make such a credible case for the understandable but misguided agony of atheism (with which I sympathize). I am ashamed to admit how many times I have sung this bleak song in recent days. But Faith is supposed to do more than falter.

Sometimes, I confess, I think my birth-people believe it is their right and duty to make the world cry out in abandonment as they cried out between 1941 and 1945. If you listen on the streets of Gaza or in the West Bank, you will hear the sounds of Kristalnachts most days and nights. In those places, it won't be a white or blue or green Christmas. It will be a red one.

God forgive every People of the Book from using those books to sow and reap bloodshed. God further forgive the peoples of the book for shielding themselves from culpability for the mayhem they make. Scripture, history has taught me, is a pretty mean street on which to seek and find the word of God. I am tired of religious gang wars. As alternative, I suggest we listen to the voice within (a/k/a "original Mind," "Buddha Nature," "Nur Muhammed," "inner light," etc.) that still takes dictation from the soul. The first time Muhammed heard that voice, he hid under a blanket and almost drowned in a cold sweat. Subsequent transmissions were more welcome.

In any case, that voice is one in condemning violence and vowing peace. That voice is the living scripture. This was the voice that Jesus Christ and Buddha heard speaking only and always in the mother tongue of love and compassion. "Resist not evil," that voice commands.

"When will I finally meet my teacher?" my teacher was asked. "When you stand naked and alone with God," he answered. I think he meant "in God," dissolving like a sugar cube in coffee or, to use one of his favorite analogies, splitting like a seed to become a tree. That's when the trinity of father, son and holy spirit are no more or no more than one and all.

Nevertheless, to be honest, there will be days and nights when I accuse God of deserting humanity. It is that song sung by a man who never doubted God in all the time I knew him that I shall be honored to read this morning. It is the same song Christ quoted on the cross when he sobbed, "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Like my teacher, he sang it for us and not himself.

Islam has a saint like Christ. His name was El Hilaj, condemned to death, as Christ was, for repeatedly proclaiming, "I am the way." Sentenced to be blinded, deafened, silenced, then drawn and quartered, the community took turns in throwing clods of dirt at him to signify personal assent to this terrible punishment. Like Peter denying Chirst, El Hilaj's own teacher took part in this ritual of repudiation. When he threw his clump of dirt at El Hilaj, his student groaned so deeply they say the earth shook. "Why did you groan like that?" the conscience-sticken teacher asked. El Hilaj answered, "They know not what they do, but you do."

It is not foolish or farfetched to see blazing similarities in the lives of Jesus and El Hilaj. But once we do, we who claim to follow these teachers and their teaching must make comparison with the teachers and disciples whose ignorance ensures Calvary. I'll remember Peter as much as Christ when I recite my teacher's words today. I'll remember guru and disciple and vow once again to watch with him in the garden as asked each time I fall asleep--and he awakens me.

Banality and Barefaced Lies

Here in America, I stare at the land in which I live and see a landscape I do not recognise

By Robert Fisk12/23/06 "The Independent" --

-- I call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work for The Independent - the Middle East - and see a landscape which I do no recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter?

I picked up Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood. Carter lists the outrageous treatment meted out to the Palestinians, the Israeli occupation, the dispossession of Palestinian land by Israel, the brutality visited upon this denuded, subject population, and what he calls "a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights".

Carter quotes an Israeli as saying he is "afraid that we are moving towards a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arabs subjects with few rights of citizenship...". A proposed but unacceptable modification of this choice, Carter adds, "is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them".

Needless to say, the American press and television largely ignored the appearance of this eminently sensible book - until the usual Israeli lobbyists began to scream abuse at poor old Jimmy Carter, albeit that he was the architect of the longest lasting peace treaty between Israel and an Arab neighbour - Egypt - secured with the famous 1978 Camp David accords. The New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print", ho! ho!) then felt free to tell its readers that Carter had stirred "furore among Jews" with his use of the word "apartheid". The ex-president replied by mildly (and rightly) pointing out that Israeli lobbyists had produced among US editorial boards a "reluctance to criticise the Israeli government".

Typical of the dirt thrown at Carter was the comment by Michael Kinsley in The New York Times (of course) that Carter "is comparing Israel to the former white racist government of South Africa". This was followed by a vicious statement from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who said that the reason Carter gave for writing this book "is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media. What makes this serious is that he's not just another pundit, and he's not just another analyst. He is a former president of the United States".

But well, yes, that's the point, isn't it? This is no tract by a Harvard professor on the power of the lobby. It's an honourable, honest account by a friend of Israel as well as the Arabs who just happens to be a fine American ex-statesman. Which is why Carter's book is now a best-seller - and applause here, by the way, for the great American public that bought the book instead of believing Mr Foxman.

But in this context, why, I wonder, didn't The New York Times and the other gutless mainstream newspapers in the United States mention Israel's cosy relationship with that very racist apartheid regime in South Africa which Carter is not supposed to mention in his b ook? Didn't Israel have a wealthy diamond trade with sanctioned, racist South Africa? Didn't Israel have a fruitful and deep military relationship with that racist regime? Am I dreaming, looking-glass-like, when I recall that in April of 1976, Prime Minister John Vorster of South Africa - one of the architects of this vile Nazi-like system of apartheid - paid a state visit to Israel and was honoured with an official reception from Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, war hero Moshe Dayan and future Nobel prize-winner Yitzhak Rabin? This of course, certainly did not become part of the great American debate on Carter's book.

At Detroit airport, I picked up an even slimmer volume, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group Report - which doesn't really study Iraq at all but offers a few bleak ways in which George Bush can run away from this disaster without too much blood on his shirt. After chatting to the Iraqis in the green zone of Baghdad - dream zone would be a more accurate ti tle - there are a few worthy suggestions (already predictably rejected by the Israelis): a resumption of serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, an Israeli withdrawal from Golan, etc. But it's written in the same tired semantics of right-wing think tanks - the language, in fact, of the discredited Brookings Institution and of my old mate, the messianic New York Times columnist Tom Friedman - full of "porous" borders and admonitions that "time is running out".

The clue to all this nonsense, I discovered, comes at the back of the report where it lists the "experts" consulted by Messrs Baker, Hamilton and the rest. Many of them are pillars of the Brookings Institution and there is Thomas Freidman of The New York Times.

But for sheer folly, it was impossible to beat the post-Baker debate among the great and the good who dragged the United States into this catastrophe. General Peter Pace, the extremely odd chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that "we are not winning, but we are not losing". Bush's new defence secretary, Robert Gates, announced that he "agreed with General Pace that we are not winning, but we are not losing". Baker himself jumped into the same nonsense pool by asserting: "I don't think you can say we're losing. By the same token (sic), I'm not sure we're winning." At which point, Bush proclaimed this week that - yes - "we're not winning, we're not losing". Pity about the Iraqis.

I pondered this madness during a bout of severe turbulence at 37,000 feet over Colorado. And that's when it hit me, the whole final score in this unique round of the Iraq war between the United States of America and the forces of evil. It's a draw!

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited

Slow Death By Semantics

"'Remembering' the Holocaust is primarily about excluding other victims."--Gabriel Ash

In the world of appraising, people seek comparables in value between identical or like items. In this way, too, history is appraisal. Yet there is now a successful campaign to ban the use of words like "genocide" or "apartheid" by observers seeking legitimate comparables between the actions of Israel and any other nation as they attempt appraisal of events. Critics of Jimmy Carter's brave, accurate book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," have denied it any relevance or legitimacy based on its title alone. Of course, Jews aren't the only people who seek to barricade themselves in a semantic prison. But they have used the tactic of political correctness to stifle criticism of and outrage at Israel. That's why this use of semantics to stop analysis and criticism is so dangerous and deplorable.

As I see it, defenders of Israel have invented a new cloaking shield from criticsm based purely on SCALE. "NOT GUILTY BY REASON OF MAGNTIUDE" is the new Israeli defense against accusations of war crimes in Palestine and Lebanon. Indeed, this attack on the mechanism of analogy has been used to silence dissent by both Israelis and non-Israelis. Israel has expended so much effort on taking and keeping custody of the post-Holocaust syntax of suffering that it has prevented any attempt at inclusion of their own actions in the collective of history and current events.

Although never intended to be such, this policy of delegitimizing critics on the grounds of word choice is, to me, sociopathic semantics. Why? Because it denies both victims and perpetrators an historic framework of description and comparison. Frustrated by the inability to use or forge benchmarks and analogies for their suffering, or to cite legitmate precedents from 20th and 21st century European history, there can no longer be a means of saying, J'accuse, because no incident that is cited is allowed comparability.

Of course, semantic deprivation sooner or later turns on those who use it. The Israelis have turned the 6 million of their people killed in the most epic genocide of modern history into a brutal bulk, an as-yet unmatched and unmatchable enormity of horror (as if suffering is simply quantitative). Like the wall they are building around Palestine, this tactic ceases to make the history it enshrines a preventive to all catastrophes of a similar nature.

Look, hundreds of crucifixions took place monthly in Roman-occupied Judea, but don't you dare compare any of these other victims to God's cherished scapegoat on the hill (although many were killed for preachings similar to Jesus's). What I am saying is that the Holocaust has become an exclusive Jewish franchise, impotent--by dint of Jewish trauma sublimated into enshrinement--to prevent its recurrence. Unfortunately, that makes the Holocaust a means of isolating Jews--walling (and wallowing) them in their own history. And they have built the wall themselves based on fear that they themselves endow with great power.

Everytime I see a Western dignitary called on the carpet for semantic crimes against the Jews, I am saddened by what has hardened into Holocaust orthodoxy. Jewish history must be allowed to freely assemble and mingle with all history of like and kind. Invite an Armenian to supper tonight, please.

Let me be clear here. The Holocaust is not just Auschwitz and Dachau. It is in its early years, systematic village by village extermination--800 men in Komo, Lithuania, 500 in Riga, Latvia, 337 wiomen in a town in Estonia whose name I can't pronounce, then 350 men and women in a neighboring town for "spreading vciious propaganda" (i.e, complaining about conditions). It is in these incidents that I find justifiable comparables with the Palestinian plight of entrapment, isolation and suffering. The Germans might have kept the slaughter on this scale and still rang up a death toll in the million. When we look at the Holocaust min its first ferocious phases as pogroms, all events of similar scale, scope then have admissability into this tragedy. Some Jews I have talked with who escaped from Europe remember Nazi slaughters in their villages. So is is not unfair to link German treatment of Jews from 1938 to 1942 to Israeli treatment of Palestinians from as early as 1967 until today.

Which brings me to my greatest worry: the growing escalation of Israeli inhumanity as occupiers. Israel's reaction to kidnapping three soldiers in Lebanon mocks the scale of reprisal imposed by Nazis on Jewish villages during 1940 and 41. It was as if Olmert was using Lebanon to prove his willingness to resort to barbarism against Arabs. His message: "I'm as big and cruel an SOB as Sharon. So don't mess with me." I think Lebanon was the final straw for many, although I have to say that starving Palestine as punishment for electing a Hamas-dominated Parliament last January is a close second.

It is this latter crime that forced Jimmy Carter to write his book, which has been criticised, as expected, for inclusion of the word "apartheid" in its title. Carter rightfully, provably fears that Israel is under the control of people whose ambition is annexation of the West Bank and complete neutralization of Gaza. Yes, maybe the Israeli people are as much against occ upation of Palestine as Americans are against occupation of Iraqi. But that means little to the victims both in Palestine and Iraq. America just sent a harsh reprimand to President Bush, but he is not listening. I don't see Israelis ready yet to rebuke and remove Olmert.

As a poet, I must protest with every atom of my being the refusal to allow justified comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany. Looked at in the blinding light of racism, the two are certainly kindred. History is a mirror in which we see ourselves. As long as Jews use their history only as a window to look and point at others and not also a mirror in which to see comparables between their behavior with that of past oppressors, the fate of Palestine in the Middle east is set to be a replay of Jewish history in Europe--a fate that is as ironic as it is unbearable. It is time to connect the dots between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto. It is time to fit the West Bank into a template of South Africa's former system of black gulags. It is time to save Palestine from Israel. It is time to save Israel from itself.

Hollocaust Hullabaloo
by Gabriel Ash
www.dissidentvoice.org December 14, 2006

It's been a good week for the Holocaust. It was in the news all the time. Unfortunately, the media excels in not making connections, which leaves me with the joyful job of bringing together all the recent Holocaust news. In Iran, the clowns at the Foreign Ministry hosted a conference of Holocaust buffoonery graced with the presence of such luminaries as the white supremacist David Duke. In France, Presidential hopeful Segolene Royal stumbled over the question whether she heard the comparison that a Hizbullah deputy made (or didn't make, in Arabic or not, that was or wasn't translated to Royal) between Hizbullah and the French resistance to the Nazis. Royal assured us that any such comparison, which implies some measure of likeness between Nazi Germany and Israel, would be, had it been made, completely "inadmissible, odious, an abomination" (Loubnan Ya Loubnan, December 2006). Finally, before leaving for a visit to Germany, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert gave a speech at the National Holocaust Museum in which he compared Iran to the Nazis and urged Germany to cut its economic ties to Iran. Let us begin with the third event. This is how Olmert put his case to the Germans: "May I suggest to the German people. . . . You may have an economic interest, you may have a business interest, but you have a deeper and more fundamental moral obligation to yourself, to your history and to your future." (Israel National News, December 11, 2006) In other words, because of the Holocaust, Germany must support Israel's assault on Iran.

Five centuries ago, a German monk rose against the Catholic pope, accusing him of mixing matters of conscience with lucre by selling divine pardons to wealthy sinners. Martin Luther was adamant that sin and redemption were matters of the direct relation between the individual and God. Anyone who pretended to mediate this relation, to obtain redemption on someone else's behalf (and to be paid for it) was a charlatan (Luther actually said "antichrist," but that is the name of the supreme charlatan). The least one can say about post WWII Germany is that it betrayed Luther. Repentant of their recent Nazi past, Germans agreed to pay billions of dollars to Israel. Israel is a state that didn't exist during the Nazi holocaust. The Nazis murdered Jews, homosexuals, Roma, socialists. That had nothing to do with the state of Israel, some of whose founders expressed admiration for Nazi ideology and even wanted to fight on Hitler's side in the War (Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis). Israel was not a victim of Nazism. It was, if anything, an indirect beneficiary. Yet Israel offered Germans redemption: pay us, and we will lift the burden of sin from your shoulders. Pay us, and you will be rehabilitated. And Germans were happy to pay. Having a conscience of one's own, living with one's true past and seeking redemption in the desolation of the wrecked self was just too much for many Germans (to be fair, that is easy to understand. The burden of Nazism wasn't light.) They were happy to pay and they watched silently, uncritically, as Israel took their blood money and used it to build exactly the kind of militarized garrison state that had led them to perdition.

It is ironic that the Germans, having accused themselves of being too obedient, too eager to let the Nazi state define morality, would try to cure themselves by giving yet another state, Israel, the right to define morality on their behalf. Yet they did. Thus German politicians and intellectuals outsourced their conscience to Israel and the U.S. Fifty years later they are still unable to criticize the actions of either. Instead of a real conscience, they adopted a sanctimonious servility to all things Israeli. Into this context stepped Ehud Olmert, the new Holocaust Pope, demanding from Germans obedience in exchange for a renewal of the epochal pardon, reminding them, like the sleek indulgence hawker that he is, of their "obligation to themselves."

Olmert, however, the man received "warmly" by Chancellor Merkel, is a war criminal. Only recently he ordered the slaughter of hundreds of people. According to his own words the slaughter was not a by-product of military action (which would be bad enough) but a deliberate attempt to exert pressure on Lebanese politicians (Gabriel Ash, Dissident Voice, July 2006). Olmert is thus a criminal even by the lax standards of ius in bellum.

To be clear, there is absolutely no comparison between what Olmert did in Lebanon and Gaza and what the Nazis did in Auschwitz. There is, however, a pertinent similarity between what Olmert did in Lebanon and Gaza and what the Nazis did in places such as Lidice. If contemporary Germans had any obligation to themselves and to their history, that obligation would be to arrest him and put him on trial the moment he landed in Germany. They certainly did not have an obligation to listen to a blood stained butcher pontificate about morality. Nobody does.

Let us turn now to the Affaire Sego. According to masterful digging of the French Lebanese blogger of Loubnan Ya Loubnan, Segolene Royal was trapped by a little comedy put together either by the members of the Lebanese "Cedar revolution" parties or by insiders of Jacque Chirac's government or by both. The two groups have a stake in preserving the current French Lebanon policy and its alignment with Washington and Tel-Aviv.

The interesting thing to ponder, however, is the lasting usefulness of the Holocaust as a leash against stray European politicians. Royal, smarting up from the bruises, canceled her meeting with Hamas representatives, essentially giving up on her erstwhile commitment to listen to all parties in the Middle East. She issued the expected declaration that any comparison between the Nazis and Israel would have prompted her to leave the room. That effectively means she cannot be in the same room with 90% of people who actually live in the Middle East. The Holocaust, one concludes, is the most effective weapon in the hands of those bent on manufacturing a "clash of civilizations."

If the memorization of Nazism in the West can prevent a French politician from meeting with the democratically elected representative of Palestinians, the Holocaust has become a tool in the arsenal of segregation in the service of global apartheid. I am not sure which is more offensive, a Saudi doctor insisting that he wouldn't be in the same room with women (Arab News, November 22, 2006), or a French politician insisting she won't stay in a room with a Lebanese who sees himself fighting in the tradition of the French resistance against the Nazis. The comparison is salient because the Holocaust has taken in Europe (and differently, in Israel) the semblance of religious dogma. "Denying the Holocaust" is the only speech-act that is legally proscribed as blasphemy and can land one in jail. And European politicians apparently cannot be in the same room with "infidels," i.e. people who challenge the belief that there is only one great Holocaust, with Israel its prophet.

And just like the breathtaking hypocrisy of Saudi fundamentalists, who raise hell over a stupid Danish cartoon but co-operate with the U.S. and Israel behind the scenes against Palestinian resistance, the "Holocaust fundamentalists" of Europe talk through both sides of their mouth. No sooner had Segolene Royal asserted she would not listen to the slightest implication of a similarity between Israel and Nazism, Israel's PM used the podium of the Holocaust Museum to compare Iran to Nazi Germany. Will Royal say she would have left the room if she had heard Olmert make that historical comparison? Israelis and Americans run a cottage industry of comparisons between Nazism and the evil man de jour. Begin compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler. Clinton compared Milosevic to Hitler. Sundry columnists compared Islamic fundamentalism to Nazism. Bush compared Saddam to Hitler. And now Iran is Israel's latest Nazi incarnation. When was the last time a European Holocaust fundamentalist left the room in reaction to these truly asinine comparisons?

Let me spell out the hypocrisy of the Holocaust hawkers. The West has elevated the crimes of the Nazis into a benchmark of evil. Paradoxically, every subsequent crime, especially when the perpetrator is Israel, can now be excused on the ground that it falls short of the death camps. Conversely, the genocidal tendencies inherent in the systematic obliteration of the basis of civilian life can be ignored by invoking the ritual condemnation of the "false analogy" with Nazism, even as such systematic destruction has been incorporated in the military practice of the West and is operative wherever modern armies must contend with popular resistance. Therefore one could never compare the death of over a million Iraqis as the result of deliberate American policy since 1992 to the holocaust, nor can one compare the decade long collective punishment of the people of Gaza or the destruction of South Lebanon to the pacification methods of the Nazis. Nobody would call Bush a "holocaust denier" for flatly denying the value of a scientific study that estimates the number of his victims to be in the hundreds of thousands.

However, the opposite happens when the interests of the West are so disposed. The "lesson" of the holocaust is good enough to justify the NATO bombing of civilian targets in Yugoslavia, the genocidal U.S. occupation of Iraq, Israel's massive bombing of Beirut, a future nuclear war against Iran, etc. The pettiest tyrant who "kills his own people" (and who doesn't?) is suddenly as ter rible as Hitler. The slaughter of European Jews has thus been transformed into a Hollowcaust, a benchmark of evil that is utterly indeterminate, empty at its core, at once trivially applicable to everything and sublimely applicable to nothing. The Hollowcaust acts like a quirky and capricious divinity, rejecting a comparison here, accepting an equally valid or invalid one there. It is a partisan divinity, a god that always blesses 'us' and curses 'them,' even as it simultaneously demands to be worshipped by all humanity and in the name of all humanity.

The Hollowcaust thus entices victims to a futile competition in which they must worship it with a steady sacrificial offering of facts, reports, statistics, that would justify their demand to be heard by measuring what happened to them in relation to the fate of the Jews of Europe. But the success of this appeal, like the success of Cain's original 'holocaust,' depends on no thing except the freedom of the divine will -- in this case the mood in Western capitals. History and facts are more or less irrelevant. Like Skinner's pigeons, the supplicants are driven to insanity by the complete disconnect between causes and consequences. Like Cain, they are sometimes driven to fratricide. It is quite understandable that under such circumstances the temptation to deny or belittle the crimes of the Nazis is almost irresistible. The denial of the holocaust is rooted in the desire to pin down the Hollowcaust.

This brings us back to the pathetic holocaust conference that took place in Iran. The most charitable thing that can be said about the organizers of this conference is that they are fools. Allegedly in solidarity with the victims of state terrorism, they come out in defense of state terrorism. Challenging the veracity of the holocaust, Iran's President's pet cause, is not a repudiation of Zionism, bu t as Joseph Massad convincingly argued (Al-Ahram, 2004), a useful justification for Zionism.

Moreover, to whitewash Nazism is to defend state terrorism, and that includes Israel. There are anti-imperialists who reject state terror categorically. It is perhaps not surprising however that the government of Iran, itself not averse to torture and murder, would find such high principles too burdensome. The pettiness of Iran's President are, as expected, manna from heaven to Zion's willing apologists.

The Western media took the occasion to fill many pages with condemnations, exhortations, and scare mongering of epic proportions. To take one illuminating example, Anne Appelbaum warns her readers that all the work done to institutionalize the memory of the holocaust is not enough. "The near-destruction of the European Jews in a very brief span of time by a sophisticated European nation using the best technology available was, it s eems, an event that requires constant re-explanation . . ." The message of Hollowcaust hawkers such as Appelbaum is only amplified by such idiocies as the Iranian conference. O Jews! They are singing in unison, give some more money to the likes of the Simon Wiesenthal center, so they can blabber a little more about the Hollowcaust while they present Rupert Murdoch with a human rights award! (The Forward, February 3, 2003)

But pay close attention to what exactly Appelbaum seeks to "explain." For in her words one can see clearly the trace of the Hollowcaust's Faustian bargain, the bargain that gave Jews official recognition for their suffering in return for accepting to become the standard bearers of Western Whiteness. It isn't the horror suffered by the victims as such, it isn't murder, it isn't terror, it isn't even genocide that Applebaum singles out as the uniqueness of the holocaust. What needs to be explained, according to her, what needs to be constantly re-imagined, is the horror of "a sophisticated European nation using the best technology available" to commit genocide.

But it should takes no effort it figure out that this is the last thing that requires an explanation. A sophisticated European nation using advanced technology to kill those it considers not fully human!? Where is the question? Isn't that a valid synopsis of a full dozen chapters of modern history? Did anyone expect white supremacy to be enforced with sticks and stones? Of course states use the best technology they have when they perpetrated murder against whole populations. Does Appelbaum not know how many billions of dollars are spent every year perfecting the tools of mass murder and inventing new ones? What makes gas chambers so sophisticatedly shocking or shockingly sophisticated among nuclear bombs, mustard gas, napalm, cluster bombs, Agent Orange, machine guns, Caterpillar D-9s, long range bombers and any of the thousand small and large inventions designed by perfectly legitimate enterprises to hasten the passage of the offending population to its unmarked grave?

Sophistication and technology are not what sets the Nazi genocide apart. It is the one thing it has most in common with dozens of other campaigns by Western states against non-white population groups. It is remarkable that Appelbaum wants to erect as primal difference the very element that is least unique to the holocaust, the one element that is most likely to be seized upon by victims of Western imperialism and colonialism as the common ground of their victimization. The stakes cannot be clearer.

"Remembering" the holocaust is primarily about excluding other victims. It is about rendering murder incomprehensible when committed on a massive scale by "a sophisticated nation with advanced technologies." The act of explaining is not concerned with adding insight. In the manner of negative theology, one "explains" the holocaust by preserving its incomprehensibility, so that it constantly remains in need of re-explanation. Erecting the Hollowcaust as a unique case of "a sophisticated nation with advanced technology" committing genocide is not about affirming the past. It is about denying the present. It is about denying the millions of deaths that are perpetrated year in year out by "sophisticated nations with advanced technologies." It is also about erecting a totemic barrier between "sophisticated nations with advanced technologies" and the rest of humanity.

On the one side are those nations whose acts of mass murder are made to be incomprehensible, and therefore effectively denied -- it does not happen anymore because it would be unthinkable to think that it happens. A genocide committed by a sophisticated nation happened only once. A nd to suggest that it happened more than once is to betray the memory of the victims. It is blasphemy. The very commemoration and deification of that unique, one-off, historical aberration confirms that it was an unexplainable departure from the "civilized" norms that are defined by it. In Freudian terms, the Hollowcaust is the foundation of modern Western supremacy in the same way that incest is the foundation of the family.

On the other side (of the wall, if you wish) are the "unsophisticated," technologically backwards nations. By implication, mass murder in those nations is low-tech, but also unremarkable, easily comprehensible, explained quite "naturally" by their very lack of sophistication. They are the barbarians and they just tend to kill each others. It follows that to kill them is to commit no great crime, since violent death is their very modus vivendi. 'They' do not respect life as 'we' do; they raise their kids to be suicide bombers, and so forth. In a perfectly circular manner, their irreverent rejection of the Hollowcaust faith (which is built to exclude them) confirms their exclusion from the community of the civilized and abandons them to be killed without repercussions.

The Hollowcaust is thus the ideology par excellence of Global Apartheid (of which the Israeli wall is but a small section). Abdullah Derkaoui's brilliant cartoon above captures the way the Hollowcaust functions according to the classic definition of ideology, mediating between the viewer and the reality of Apartheid and thus constructing the subject of segregation. And now these pious Hollowcaust hawkers are surprised and shocked that so many barbarians piss on their memorials? Note: they are only getting back the message of their own racism with a "return to sender" scrawled over the envelope.

<>Gabriel Ash is an activist and writer who writes because the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword and sometimes not. He welcomes comments at: g.a.evildoer@gmail.com.

'A' is for Apartheid in the Modern Alphabet of Misery

The controversy over Jimmy Carter's book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,"
was to be expected. And the much-publicized resignation of Kenneth Stein from the Carter Center is no surprise. Carter has been roundly criticised for daring to compare Israel's policies of pacification in Palestine to South Africa's policies of containment against blacks.

Frankly, I am sick of subjugation by semantics. Israel and its apologists have no right to assert authority to appoint who can and who cannot use the most resonant and relevant words and analogies, drawn from recent history, to frame their occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. Words and phrases like "genocide," "ethnic cleansing" and "apartheid" are part of a vocabulary that has evolved to describe events taking place in this country--now reduced in size and status considerably below that of a satellite state to a quiltwork of bantustans (blacklands) and Indian reservations.

The Palestinian crisis is denied comparison or access to any antecdent or likeness that would suggest systematic verifiable extermination of a people, race or culture. In short, Israel and its apologists are practicing dehumanization and deprivation by censoring and castigating critics who seek to draw legitimate parallels to atrocities and horrors committed daily against Palestinians. As a poet, I cannot permit the final ostracism of this country and its people from my time's recognized syntax of suffering. This is one form of isolation I can prevent.

I would never deny Jews the right and need to frame their history in the magnitude of suffering invoked by the word "Holocaust." Jewish history takes a measure of inhumanity that sets a new scale for barbarism. As a Jew who has studied and written about the Holocaust, that catastrophe is part of my identity. I still remember the small nervous breakdown it caused when I read letters from Nazi soldiers stationed in the Ukraine to parents and friends about throwing Jewish babies against trees or up in the air for bayonetting as part of drunken sport.

But those particulars now keep company with fresh descriptions of Palestinians shot by Israeli snipers or driven from homes that are to be razed by American-made bulldozers. I keep a fact file of assassinations using planes and missiles my tax dollars have sent gratis to Israel. And I feel the sore, impacted guilt that Germans of conscience must have felt allowing the Holocaust to unfold.

In my lifetime, I have watched as my people have become so obsessed with their past and prevention of its recurrence that they have turned it into an exclusive franchise for protection. The Holocaust has become a kind of demonic luxury brand for hideous, large-scale suffering. So when foreign dignitaries visit Poland or Germany, they are expected, as a gesture of cultural courtesy, to visit Holocaust shrines like Dachau or Aschwitz. Such visits can no longer be spontaneously or privately compelled. They are scripted as part of ritualized expectations which must be met. Obeisance to Jewish history is now part of diplomatic protocol in Eastern Europe.

As much as I hate to say this, such behavior is part of an insidious branding of Jewish history. Yes, build Holocaust museums, but allow chronicling and curatorship of genocide to include the Armenian holocaust of 1914 and Rwanda's in our time as more than precursors and addendums. Let there be, if you will, a brotherhood of suffering that becomes an ash heap from which a true phoenix of non-violence arises and under whose full-sky wing span of light (rather than dark) we can stand--unafraid and embracing.

As things are now, historians, commentators and observers must apply for authorization to compare events in Palestine to their conspicuous Jewish antecedents and parallels. Of course, this permission is never granted. So while Darfur is allowed coddling in words such as "genocide," even "holocaust," Palestine, which is strangled by political quarantine that begs reference to the Warsaw Gehtto and the Berlin Wall, is, of course, denied affiliation with its brother-events and conditions. At the risk of sounding like a crass marketer, Palestine is a sort of un-cola of oppression, while Darfur is allowed to be its Diet Coke.

For Israel's own good, we must not allow it to control discourse and analysis in order to de-link the tragedy of Palestine with history, or to deprive this calamity of a recognizable resonance in the annals of contemporary mass cruelty. Israel is guilty of documentable "genocide," "ethnic cleansing" and "apartheid." These words are permissible markers for the Palestinian plight.

Israel may take away every Palestinian right, but it cannot take take away the right to place their history in the justified contexts of racism and persecution it invokes. And I, for one, will freely and legitimately use the universal syntax of suffering that has evolved since the Hitler, Stalin and Mao regimes to describe and condemn Israel's policies and actions toward Palestine. History requires me to do so. To make Palestine a Brand X for suffering is to condone the genocide that is taking place there.

Here's an article, published in Electronic Intifada, that discusses apartheid in South Africa and Israel.

Former President Jimmy Carter's new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," is igniting controversy for its allegation that Israel practices a form of apartheid. As a South African and former anti-apartheid advocate who visits the Palestinian territories regularly to assess the human rights situation for the U.N. Human Rights Council, the comparison to South African apartheid is of special interest to me.

On the face of it, the two regimes are very different. Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial discrimination that the white minority in South Africa employed to maintain power over the black majority. It was characterized by the denial of political rights to blacks, the fragmentation of the country into white areas and black areas (called Bantustans) and by the imposition on blacks of restrictive measures designed to achieve white superiority, racial separation and white security. The "pass system," which sought to prevent the free move ment of blacks and to restrict their entry to the cities, was rigorously enforced. Blacks were forcibly "relocated," and they were denied access to most public amenities and to many forms of employment. The system was enforced by a brutal security apparatus in which torture played a significant role. The Palestinian territories - East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967.

Although military occupation is tolerated and regulated by international law, it is considered an undesirable regime that should be ended as soon as possible. The United Nations for nearly 40 years has condemned Israel's military occupation, together with colonialism and apartheid, as contrary to the international public order.

In principle, the purpose of military occupation is different from that of apartheid. It is not designed as a long-term oppressive regime but as an interim measure that maintains law and order in a territory following an armed conflict and pending a peace settlement.

But this is not the nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Since 1967 Israel has imposed its control over the Palestinian territories in the manner of a colonizing power, under the guise of occupation. It has permanently seized the territories' most desirable parts - the holy sites in East Jerusalem, Hebron and Bethlehem and the fertile agricultural lands along the western border and in the Jordan Valley - and settled its own Jewish "colonists" throughout the land. Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories has many features of colonization.

At the same time it has many of the worst characteristics of apartheid. The West Bank has been fragmented into three areas - north (Jenin and Nablus), center (Ramallah) and south (Hebron) - which increasingly resemble the Bantustans of South Africa. Restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by a rigid permit system enforced by some 520 checkpoints and roadblocks re semble, but in severity go well beyond, apartheid's "pass system." And the security apparatus is reminiscent of that of apartheid, with more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons and frequent allegations of torture and cruel treatment.

Many aspects of Israel's occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel's large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites.

Following the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, one might expect a similarly concerted international effort united in opposition to Israel's abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians. Instead one finds an international community divided between the West and the rest of the world. The Security Council is prevented from taking action because of the U.S. veto and European Union abstinence. And the U nited States and the European Union, acting in collusion with the United Nations and the Russian Federation, have in effect imposed economic sanctions on the Palestinian people for having, by democratic means, elected a government deemed unacceptable to Israel and the West.

Forgotten is the commitment to putting an end to occupation, colonization and apartheid. In these circumstances, the United States should not be surprised if the rest of the world begins to lose faith in its commitment to human rights. Some Americans - rightly - complain that other countries are unconcerned about Sudan's violence-torn Darfur region and similar situations in the world. But while the United States itself maintains a double standard with respect to Palestine it cannot expect cooperation from others in the struggle for human rights.

John Dugard is a South African law professor teaching in the Netherlands. He is currently Special Rapporteur (reporter) on Palestine to the United Nations Human Rights Council. This article comes courtesy of the Institute for Middle East Understanding and was published first in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.