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On May 2 the Senate, in a vote of 94 to 2, and the House, 352 to 21,
expressed unqualified support for Israel in its recent military actions
against the Palestinians. The resolutions were so strong that the Bush
Administration--hardly a slouch when it comes to supporting
Israel--attempted to soften its language so as to have more room in
getting peace talks going. But its pleas were rejected, and members of
Congress from Joe Lieberman to Tom DeLay competed to heap praise on
Ariel Sharon and disdain on Yasir Arafat. Reporting on the vote, the
New York Times noted that one of the few dissenters, Senator
Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, "suggested that many senators were
after campaign contributions."

Aside from that brief reference, however, the Times made no
mention of the role that money, or lobbying in general, may have played
in the lopsided vote. More specifically, the Times made no
mention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It's a
remarkable oversight. AIPAC is widely regarded as the most powerful
foreign-policy lobby in Washington. Its 60,000 members shower millions
of dollars on hundreds of members of Congress on both sides of the
aisle. It also maintains a network of wealthy and influential citizens
around the country, whom it can regularly mobilize to support its main
goal, which is making sure there is "no daylight" between the policies
of Israel and of the United States.

So, when Congress votes so decisively in support of Israel, it's no
accident. Yet, surveying US newspaper coverage of the Middle East in
recent months, I found next to nothing about AIPAC and its influence.
The one account of any substance appeared in the Washington Post,
in late April. Reporting on AIPAC's annual conference, correspondent
Mike Allen noted that the attendees included half the Senate, ninety
members of the House and thirteen senior Administration officials,
including White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who drew a standing
ovation when he declared in Hebrew, "The people of Israel live." Showing
its "clout," Allen wrote, AIPAC held "a lively roll call of the hundreds
of dignitaries, with individual cheers for each." Even this article,
however, failed to probe beneath the surface and examine the lobbying
and fundraising techniques AIPAC uses to lock up support in Congress.

AIPAC is not the only pro-Israel organization to escape scrutiny. The
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, though
little known to the general public, has tremendous influence in
Washington, especially with the executive branch. Based in New York, the
conference is supposed to give voice to the fifty-two Jewish
organizations that sit on its board, but in reality it tends to reflect
the views of its executive vice chairman, Malcolm Hoenlein. Hoenlein has
long had close ties to Israel's Likud Party. In the 1990s he helped
raise money for settlers' groups on the West Bank, and today he
regularly refers to that region as "Judea and Samaria," a biblically
inspired catch phrase used by conservatives to justify the presence of
Jewish settlers there. A skilled and articulate operative, Hoenlein uses
his access to the State Department, Pentagon and National Security
Council to push for a strong Israel. He's so effective at it that the
Jewish newspaper the Forward, in its annual list of the fifty
most important American Jews, has ranked Hoenlein first.

Hoenlein showed his organizing skills in April, when he helped convene
the large pro-Israel rally on Capitol Hill. While the event itself was
widely covered, Hoenlein, and the conference, remained invisible. An
informal survey of recent coverage turned up not a single in-depth piece
about Hoenlein and how he has used the Presidents Conference to keep the
Bush Administration from putting too much pressure on the Sharon

AIPAC's power makes potential sources reluctant to discuss the
organization on the record, and employees who leave it usually sign
pledges of silence. AIPAC officials themselves rarely give interviews,
and the organization even resists divulging its board of directors.
Journalists, meanwhile, are often loath to write about the influence of
organized Jewry. Throughout the Arab world, the "Jewish lobby" is seen
as the root of all evil in the Middle East, and many reporters and
editors--especially Jewish ones--worry about feeding such stereotypes.

Jewish organizations are quick to detect bias in the coverage of the
late. As the Forward observed in late April, "rooting out
Jews the most direct and emotional outlet for connecting with the
conflict 6,000 miles away." Recently, an estimated 1,000 subscribers to
the Los Angeles Times suspended home delivery for a day to
protest what they considered the paper's pro-Palestinian coverage. The
Chicago Tribune, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
and the Miami Herald have all been hit
by similar protests, and NPR has received thousands of e-mails
complaining about its reports from the Middle East.

Do such protests have an effect? Consider the recent experience of the
New York Times. On May 6 the paper ran two photographs of a
pro-Israel parade in Manhattan. Both showed the parade in the background
and anti-Israel protesters prominently in the foreground. The paper,
which for weeks has been threatened with a boycott by Jewish readers,
was deluged with protests. On May 7 the Times ran an abject
apology. That caused much consternation in the newsroom, with some
reporters and editors feeling that the paper had buckled before an
influential constituency. "It's very intimidating," said a correspondent
at another large daily who is familiar with the incident. Newspapers, he
added, are "afraid" of organizations like AIPAC and the Presidents
Conference. "The pressure from these groups is relentless. Editors would
just as soon not touch them."

Needless to say, US support for Israel is the product of many
factors--Israel's status as the sole democracy in the Middle East, its
value as a US strategic ally and widespread horror over Palestinian
suicide bombers. But the power of the pro-Israel lobby is an important
element as well. Indeed, it's impossible to understand the Bush
Administration's tender treatment of the Sharon government without
taking into account the influence of groups like AIPAC. Isn't it time
they were exposed to the daylight?

Perhaps there's a limit to female masochism after all. To the great
one, Creating a Life, Sylvia Ann Hewlett's book deploring the
failure of female professionals to have as many children as she thinks
they need to be happy, is a big commercial flop ("The Talk of the Book
World Still Can't Sell," May 20). Out of a 30,000-copy first printing,
perhaps 8,000 have sold, despite a publicity campaign from heaven:
Time cover story, 60 Minutes, Oprah, Today,
wall-to-wall radio. The UK edition, Baby Hunger (Hewlett's
original choice of title--gag me with a spoon!), is also piling up in

The Times quotes numerous bewildered publishing people--could it
be the cover? women's "deep level of anxiety"?--but it's no big mystery
why the book isn't selling. Except when right-wing foundations buy up
truckloads of copies, antifeminist tracts usually do poorly despite
heavy attention. The media love them--this week's newsstand features
New York with "Baby Panic" and Us with "Will They Ever
Have Babies?" in which Jennifer Aniston and other nulliparous stars
bemoan their lot--but book buyers don't bite. Hewlett follows in the
Morning After
, which argued that date rape was just "bad sex."
that nobody but women buy books about women--and women who buy hardcover
books are mostly feminists. They know date rape isn't bad sex, and they
don't need Hewlett to tell them their biological clocks are ticking.
DeCherney told the Times a woman's chances of getting pregnant at
smile, settle and rattle those pots and pans? That's what your relatives
are for.

"a creeping nonchoice," was surprised to find herself on Hewlett's list
of tearful women whose careers got in the way of childbearing. "I've had
a great life," she told me, "with no regrets, and I spent a long time
telling Hewlett just that."

* * *

What if a woman ran for President who had great progressive politics
except for one thing--she believed that any man accused of rape or
sexual harassment should be castrated without a trial? How many
progressive men would say to themselves, Oh well, she's got great
three? two?

Of course, no progressive woman would ever put this crazy notion
forward. Our hypothetical candidate would understand all too well that
she couldn't propose to kick men in the collective teeth and expect them
some progressives apparently expect women to do for Dennis Kucinich,
Besides numerous e-mails thanking me for "outing" him and two or three
upholding the "human rights" of the "itty bitty zygote," I heard from a
few readers like Michael Sherrard, who urged "liberals" to "get over
their single-issue abortion orthodoxy." Instead of asking women to give
"broad based multi-issue progressive movement" Sherrard wants, Kucinich
his socially conservative Cleveland constituents, as his supporters
claim, but America isn't the 10th Congressional District of Ohio writ

What Kucinich's fans may not understand is that for pro-choice women,
for whom no plan or hope or possibility or circumstance, however
desperate, matters more than being a nest for that "itty bitty zygote."
As I've written before, despite the claims of "pro-life feminists" and
"seamless-garment" Catholics, progressive social policies and abortion
rights tend to go together: Abortion bans flourish where there are
backwardness, poverty, undemocratic government and politically powerful
patriarchal religion, where levels of education, healthcare and social
progressives should demand that "their" politicians add abortion rights
to their agenda. No progressive would vote for someone who opposed
unions or wanted to bring back Jim Crow. Why should women's rights
matter less? It's disgusting that the AFL-CIO supports anti-choice
politicians--as if their members aren't getting (or causing) abortions
in vast numbers--and it backfires, too. In Pennsylvania's Democratic
gubernatorial primary, pro-choice centrist Democrat Ed Rendell trounced

* * *

A French committee is promoting Ahmed Shah Massoud, the assassinated
Northern Alliance commander, for the Nobel Peace Prize (among the
signatories: actress Jane Birkin, Gen. Philippe Morillon and that
inevitable trio of trendy philosophes, Bernard-Henri Levy, Alain
Finkielkraut and Andr&amp;eacute; Glucksmann). I know what you're thinking:
If Henry Kissinger could be awarded this honor, why not the
government in 1992, destroyed Kabul by fighting with his erstwhile ally
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and helped create so much havoc, including
documented massacres of civilians, that Afghans welcomed the Taliban?
Still, there's something repellent about proposing to award Massoud,
should call it the Nobel War Prize.

piece in the May 18 Washington Post demonstrating that the
now-famous August 6 presidential daily briefing, contrary to
Administration officials' claims about its contents, actually carried
eye-opening May 27 Newsweek cover story that shreds the
the Isikoff who four years ago defined national security in terms of

wherever this potentially incendiary story leads, from fog of
unprovables to hot smoking gun, one change has already taken place
expend more effort poking holes in the vaunted Bush Administration spin
skepticism stirring around such heretofore Teflonized officials as
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice? Before her May 16
damage-control press conference, Rice was probably the Administration's
statement left bleeding on the floor after a pile of evidence came
forward showing plenty of people were predicting precisely that), her
certain wooorrrrdds are creeping into the media vocabulary--words
like "serious credibility gap," in the Newsweek piece.

September that it prevented US journalists from asking the toughest of
except myself from this criticism." The genuflection sometimes reached
at the feet of officials from the most unilateral and secretive
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld).

and the Washington Post both ran editorials on May 17 that were
right-wing papers, the predictable yelping about how it's really
Clinton's fault.

became President. Reporters might also look into the way the
Administration declined to continue a process of tightening overseas and
offshore banking regulations begun by the Clinton Administration in an
effort to track down narcotics traffickers and terrorists. The Bush

whether intelligence officials should have been able to put together the
connecting some dots of their own.

So what's it called if during war you criticize the President for any reason?
And how long does this war go on (and this is where this theory's really pretty clever)?

haven't done much mental spring cleaning because so much of the last
month has been taken up with brooding and spewing about the crisis in
the Middle East; no doubt the coming months will be much the same. After
putting your mind to this issue for a long time--witness Shimon Peres,
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and so many others--cobwebs
gather and it becomes hard to see through the accumulated dust. So it
was pleasant to turn to Legal Affairs, the new publication of the
Yale Law School, edited by Lincoln Caplan, which casts an intelligent
eye over a broad and spacious intellectual terrain.

Of course the first item I turned to--obsessively--was an article on
Israel, more specifically on the legendary Supreme Court President
Aharon Barak (no relation), by Emily Bazelon--thankfully the only Middle
East piece in the inaugural issue, or who knows how I might have been
sidetracked. In 1992, from his seat on the Israeli Supreme Court, he
championed the Basic Laws that now serve the country as a kind of de
facto constitution and give Israel one of the most progressive sets of
human rights laws and precepts to govern any nation. But that was just a
first step for this exceptional person.

In May 1998, in a historic pronouncement, he declared (I'm simplifying
here) that torture of Palestinian detainees by the Shin Bet was not
legalized under Israeli codes. This meant that one day there would be no
more shabach--the technique of tying prisoners to kindergarten
chairs, putting their heads in sacks and subjecting them to humiliation
and psychological torture. It meant no more shaking, a favored method
that disorients and injures without leaving visible signs. No more sleep
deprivation. Barak later codified this ruling, when he "unequivocally
declared for a unanimous court that the Shin Bet's methods of
interrogating Palestinians detained without charges violated the rights
to human dignity and freedom." But those were better days in Israel, and
Bazelon points out that current conditions may have allowed the Shin Bet
to violate the ban. The Public Committee Against Torture has filed two
petitions to the court since September 2000, both arguing that the ban
on torture has not been "fully enforced," as Bazelon understates it. One
petition was withdrawn and the other rejected. Like so many of his
generation who hoped to normalize life in Israel, Barak too has been
undermined by the Degeneration of the Situation.

Anyway, Legal Affairs is not all bleakness and Jerusalem drizzle.
Its other lead piece is Brendan Koerner's dazzling narrative of
cyber-intrigue and blackmail that extends from Russia to FBI
headquarters in DC. The magazine also looks at hip-hop music with the
amusing premise that it is all about law enforcement, in a piece that
would be great but for its silly, super-serious tone. Tim Dodd
contributes an excellent article from Jakarta on Syafiuddin
Kartasasmita, the conservative Indonesian judge who was assassinated a
year after leading a three-man panel that found the youngest son of the
dictator Suharto, Tommy, guilty of corruption. A very amusing piece by
Dashka Slater tells you what it's like to spend a working week watching
only court TV (answer: terrific and soporific). A bunch of small
excerpts from Christopher Buckley's latest Washington entertainment
(No Way to Treat a First Lady) are fun, if not terribly
enlightening. And "Silence! Four ways the law keeps poor people from
getting heard in court" should be on the reading list of every legal
reporter and defense attorney in America. There is also a no doubt
valuable piece by Benjamin Wittes on the faulty legal underpinnings of
Kenneth Starr's behavior (but lines like "the attorney general had the
authority to decline to request an independent counsel where a clear
Justice Department policy would preclude an indictment" really harsh my buzz).
Legal Affairs reminds you that the law matters--unlike
American Lawyer, which makes you think the law is a buddy system
for grotesque elites in major urban centers who speak a language the
rest of us cannot understand (except when it's about gigantic salaries
and hourly fees). The new magazine reminds you that the law is the
element in which most of the major stories of our lives take place
(marriages, births, deaths, crimes, real estate closings, divorce), and
that it provides the narrative framework for the unfolding of most
important events.

News From Nowhere

Globalvision News Network has set up an extremely useful website
called The News Not in the News (you can find it at
www.gvnews.net, by subscription). This is where you can see what the
Arab press is really reporting; where you'll find the latest from places
like Kyrgyzstan, where the government has just resigned following unrest
since the May 10 sentencing of Felix Kulov, the foremost leader of the
Kyrgyz (new national adjective!) opposition, to ten years in prison. The
stories are put up without annotation, so that, say, the Kyrgyz
reporting can become convoluted to the uninitiated reader. But you
wouldn't want to miss this story: In his first interview in two
years--conducted along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in writing and by
messenger, not in person--Mullah Omar (you remember him) tells Asharq
, an Arab news agency, that flames will engulf the White
House and that Osama bin Laden is still alive. Of course, for all one
knows, the interviewee could have been an Afghan schoolboy having his
fun, since there is no proof that the reporter's questions were actually
relayed to Omar himself. But that is what is both useful and charming
about this site: It is raw news as it is written and printed in other
lands, as fresh as it can be, and with its edgy myth-making untouched by
American objectivity. "What is important for the US now is to find out
why they did that [the attack on September 11]," says "Omar." "America
should remove the cause that made them do it." If only "Omar" had a
mirror version of The News Not in the News, he could see what a
tempest that very same issue set off in America's own pages not so long
ago. But we wouldn't want to harsh his buzz.

President Dubya loves to crusade against the "axis of evil" in his war on terrorism--but he formed an unholy alliance with the countries that make up the "axis" to declare war on the condom as a

The essential mystery of the 2000 election has always been this: How in
the world did George W. Bush ever get close enough to invite the
Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to give him his

Of course, he couldn't have done it all by himself. Al Gore ran away
from one of the most successful economic records of any Administration
this century and could not seem to articulate a single compelling reason
that he should be President. Bush was also mightily aided by Ralph
Nader, whose spoiler candidacy commanded just enough support to swing
battleground states for the Republicans while failing to come even
remotely close to the 5 percent, matching-funds goal that was his
professed inspiration. But the biggest piece of the puzzle is still
Bush. He may have "grown" in office, but the fact is he had some of the
skimpiest qualifications for the job of almost any successful candidate
in our history, while Gore's were among the best. Moreover, his
political views were well to the right of most voters on almost
everything, while Gore's were well within the national consensus. By any
conventional calculation, Bush should have lost in a landslide.

The obvious answer to the paradox is that Bush sold his personality, not
his politics. But how? Are people just stupid? Don't they realize that
bills of rights, Social Security, the right to choose, etc.? Well,
that's one answer. But a more compelling one is that the so-called
liberal media, contrary to its nonsensical reputation for favoring
Democrats, failed to inform the public of the two candidates' political
and ideological differences, and the implications those differences held
for the nation's future.

The release of two different kinds of campaign documents--Ambling
Into History
, a book by New York Times reporter Frank Bruni,
and Journeys With George, a film by former NBC News producer
Alexandra Pelosi--shed considerable light on just how the media managed
to spend millions upon millions covering the candidates while reporting
next to nothing of value to voters. Ambling is a memoir of a
love-struck reporter. The journalist charged with covering the campaign
for the newspaper that sets the agenda for most of the elite media
focuses with laserlike intensity on every nod, wink, smile and
profession of alleged "love" that comes his way from the candidate. But
we hear barely a word about the candidate's pollution- and
fat-cat-friendly policies as governor of Texas or his lies and
dissimulations when it came to environmental protection, affirmative
action, issues of corporate responsibility, healthcare policy and the
like. If you want to know the exact number of seconds that George and
Laura Bush danced at every one of their nine Inaugural Balls, then the
intrepid Mr. Bruni is your man. If you have any interest in what Bush
might have been doing at his desk the following morning, well, where did
you get the silly idea that a New York Times reporter should
concern himself with boring stuff like that?

The willingness of the Times bigfoot to treat the election as the
equivalent of a junior high popularity contest signaled to the rest of
the media that contentless coverage would be the order of the day. The
net result, as Pelosi shows us in her fascinating but nauseating
documentary--to be broadcast on HBO in November--is a press corps that
follows its campaign masters like a litter of newborn puppies. They wait
open-mouthed for Karl Rove or Karen Hughes to drop a tender morsel of
warmed-over baloney into their mouths, wagging their tails in
appreciation after every feeding.

The clowning frat boy who plays the Republican presidential candidate in
the Pelosi movie does turn out to be a genuinely congenial fellow. If
you've been wondering why it is that everybody seems to like this
guy--and how he has managed to forge so many lifelong bonds with people
irrespective of his apparent doofus-like qualities--then this movie will
provide a painless seventy-six-minute education. The filmmaker--the
daughter of House Democratic whip Nancy Pelosi--hates Bush's politics
but likes him personally, and so can we. She tells audiences that
Journeys is a documentary about process and that the candidate
himself is unimportant. But that's nonsense. Bush is a star. If Pelosi
had had the misfortune to be assigned to Al Gore's press plane, this
movie would have sucked.

But like Ambling, Journeys is more valuable for what it
shows than what it tells. Over and over we hear the reporters criticize
themselves for the emptiness of their coverage as they express a kind of
wearied contempt for the snowmobile rides and other pseudoevents that
substitute for substance. But over and over again, they submit without
apparent protest. They regurgitate the campaign's baloney sandwiches and
watered-down Kool-Aid--without even bothering to convince themselves
that it's really steak and champagne. In between feedings, they ask the
Man for his autograph, laugh at his jokes and seek, without much
success, to justify the effects of their collective lobotomy to Pelosi's
pitiless focus.

Unlike Bruni, Pelosi demonstrates considerable professional
self-awareness (which is why she felt compelled to quit her job and
leave the field entirely after the campaign). Early on, she gives us
the Financial Times's Richard Wolffe speaking excitedly about
covering "the greatest story in the world...big issues, big stakes; it's
a big game, but it's important." A little later he admits, "Most of our
time is spent doing really stupid things, in stupid places with stupid
people." If you want your mystery summed up in a single sentence, it
would be hard to outdo Wolffe: "The Gore press corps is about how they
didn't like Gore, didn't trust him.... Over here, we were writing only
about the trivial stuff because he charmed the pants off us."

But Bush himself puts it best, just before kissing Pelosi in pursuit of
her (meaningless) vote in the California primary: "If I lose," he
playfully smirks, "you're out of work, baby. You're off the plane."

On Friday, September 15, four days after the terrorist attacks, an
18-year-old Moroccan boy received an unusual request from his school
guidance counselor: Come see me as soon as you can and bring your
passport. On Monday, well before his 8 am class, the boy climbed the
steps to James Monroe High School in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and
handed over papers showing that his visa had expired. A half-hour later
he was waiting anxiously in the school security office. He didn't know
the police were going to handcuff him and take him down to the station.
"I was upset I had already missed the first period, Virginia
Government," said the young man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity
in a phone call with his lawyer listening in.

Officer Jim Shelhorse, public information officer for the Fredericksburg
police, said the police never suspected the boy of terrorist activity.
And the boy's lawyer says that he had a pending application to extend
his visa, which meant that he was free to be here. But such distinctions
were lost on the police and school. And by the time his visa did expire
on December 4, the boy was already imprisoned in an Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) detention center in Arlington, Virginia. "I
am treated like a criminal," he said in a phone interview from the
detention center this winter. "I am with drug dealers and gun dealers.
They are not mistreating me but I am not comfortable."

The way the school guidance counselor turned in this student is just one
example of how, post-9/11, ordinary citizens have become watchdogs
policing the gateways to this country. Whereas the INS used to be solely
responsible for enforcement, others now eagerly participate in that
task. In fact, this activity has been encouraged: Weeks after the
terrorist attacks, the Bush Administration asked people to report
suspicious activity at the same time that it announced plans to use
immigration laws to fight terrorism, giving the impression that
immigration is everyone's business. Then, in December, a month after the
Justice Department asked police around the country to track down and
interview some 5,000 Middle Eastern men, the INS announced it was
placing 314,000 immigrants wanted for deportation on an FBI database
used by nearly all police agencies to check criminal charges. Now even a
local police officer writing a traffic ticket can determine that a
violator is subject to a deportation order and presumably make an
arrest. And on January 31 President Bush announced the creation of a
national volunteer agency called Citizen Corps to engage "ordinary
Americans" in reporting suspicious activity to the authorities. The
government will also expand the "Neighborhood Watch" program, in which
people report their neighbors' suspected terrorist connections.

As critics point out, when ordinary citizens or the police and FBI do
the INS's work, they don't know what they are doing. The result is both
inefficiency and discrimination. "It discourages immigrants from
providing information when they are the victims," said Lucas Guttentag,
director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project. "And it creates this
population that is exploited, denied protections of the law to the
detriment of society as a whole." The problem isn't new. In 1997 the
police in Chandler, Arizona, conducted a sweep of illegal immigrants as
part of an effort to "beautify" the rumpled agricultural town. Working
with the Border Patrol, police approached people on the street based on
the "lack of personal hygiene" and "strong body odor common to illegal
aliens," according to police reports leaked to the press. Police then
asked to see ID and immigration papers. Among the 432 people caught in
the "Operation Restoration" dragnet were scores of US-born Hispanics who
sued the city for discrimination.

Federal immigration officers undergo a seventeen-week residential
program that includes instruction on how to legally arrest someone on
grounds like fraudulent document production. Lacking such training,
police in Chandler often wrongly concluded documents were fakes and
arrested people anyway. "There has to be a reasonable, particularized
suspicion of wrongdoing," said Stephen Montoya, a civil rights lawyer
who represented the Chandler plaintiffs. "It can't just be because you
speak Spanish." In the case of the high school boy, the school guidance
counselor had little reason to ask for papers besides his national
identity. The boy's lawyers have argued that the school had no
jurisdiction to ask for immigration documents, and that a high school
student can't be denied basic education because he is an undocumented
immigrant. But the immigration judge rejected those arguments. (School
officials declined to comment.)

Legally, the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act makes it easier for law enforcement to collaborate
with the INS and request information from the government. And though the
law doesn't require schools to report immigration violations, "drawing
the line is very difficult for individual citizens," says Peter Schuck,
a Yale Law School professor. In the past, however, courts have struck
down laws encouraging citizens to become INS snitches. California's
Proposition 187, which attempted to recruit social workers and
government bureaucrats to report immigration violators so they would be
denied access to public services, was declared unconstitutional by
federal courts.

Ironically, some of the post-9/11 policies actually obstruct
antiterrorism efforts by discouraging people from cooperating with
authorities. When the Justice Department asked 5,000 Arab-American men
to come forward, it was unclear whether the men were putting themselves
at risk of being turned in to the INS. "That's not a good law
enforcement strategy," said Ben Johnson, associate director of advocacy
at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Perhaps even more disturbing, alerting the government because someone
appears swarthy or wears a turban is now considered acceptable behavior.
"What is wrong with calling the FBI?" said Father James Mueller, a
priest in Queens, New York, when I asked if he had any regrets about
making a report on Rafiq Butt, a 55-year-old Pakistani, after neighbors
saw six Middle Easterners go to an apartment he shared with three other
Pakistani men. Butt died in detention of a heart attack. In another
case, on November 13, FBI agents wearing biohazard gear swooped into the
home of two Pakistani men; their neighbors reportedly suspected them of
manufacturing anthrax after they saw them dumping a cloudy liquid (soapy
water from a clogged sink) and handing over a silver canister (a food
dish for a friend) outside their home. The men said they understood.

The Virginia high school student was similarly charitable. He came to
this country by himself last year trying to escape what he would only
describe as discrimination based on his sexual orientation. A Queens
mosque helped him with a place to stay and he eventually met a friend
who offered him his country house in Fredericksburg while he completed high school. He had only attended the school for three days when
he was arrested. "This happened because of one person," he said. "The
majority of people treated me very good. The students were nice. They
showed me the whole school. They were helpful. The math teacher liked
me. It was Algebra II. I had it when I was in eighth grade. I did the
exercises very fast." At press time he was out on bond, living with a
foster family in Washington, working on getting his GED and waiting for
a July asylum hearing. His future plans are to attend college and major
in finance, perhaps in Canada.

As a Russian studies major at Yale in the 1970s, I observed Soviet
"elections" that were conducted more fairly than the 2002 Yale
Corporation's board of trustees election. Why is the Yale Corporation so
threatened by the candidacy of a prominent New Haven pastor who cares
about Yale and its workers?

The last time a prospective trustee was nominated by petition was almost
forty years ago, when William Horowitz became Yale's first elected
Jewish trustee. Back then 250 signatures were required for ballot
qualification; that has since been raised to 3 percent of eligible
alumni--some 3,200 signatures today. The Rev. Dr. W. David Lee, an
African-American pastor of one of New Haven's largest churches and a
graduate of the Yale Divinity School, gathered 4,870 signatures. If
elected, he would be the only New Haven resident other than Yale's
president to sit on the corporation's board.

But he is also supported by Yale's employee unions, and the
university--one of America's great institutions of higher learning--does
not like that. Normally, the Standing Committee for the Nomination of
Alumni Fellows of the Association of Yale Alumni nominates two or three
alumni to stand for election. This year, apparently threatened by Lee's
grassroots efforts, the committee nominated only one, Maya Lin, creator
of the Vietnam War memorial, around whom the Yale Corporation and its
allies could rally.

As an alumnus, I received no fewer than six mailings--from the alumni
organization, from wealthy Yale alumni, from former corporation board
members--all criticizing Lee for failing to identify who paid for his
mailing, for his "aggressive campaign" and for his "ties to special
interests, labor unions."

In a campaign flier (containing no disclosure of who paid for it), the
Association of Yale Alumni quoted comments from Lee critical of the
university. It is not surprising that a minister of a large church at
which many Yale employees worship might at times express substantial
differences with a university that pays many of those workers less than
a living wage.

As if the Yale Corporation had not already made its interests known,
even the ballot package--paid for by the university and sent to all
voters--was slanted in favor of the corporation's candidate. The
official publication intimates support for its favored candidate from
"over 700 alumni," including the Association of Yale Alumni, the
officers of Yale college classes and Yale clubs and other alumni
associations. The other candidate, the Yale Corporation stated in the
ballot package, was "nominated by petition"--(as though Lee's 4,870
signatures did not indicate the support of those alumni).

Reminiscent of elections conducted in one-party states, the corporation
refused to allow an observer to be present when the ballots are counted.
It is not in the Yale bylaws, he was told.

It is unfortunate that Yale, which has produced so many national
leaders, has earned a widespread reputation for its antiunion activities
[see Kim Phillips-Fein, "Yale Bites Unions," July 2, 2001]. To all but
declare war on Yale's workers and its union, and on an outstanding young
New Haven leader, can only exacerbate city-university tensions and roil
Yale's already troubled labor-management waters.

How could one pro-worker candidate who aspires to a lone seat on a board
of nineteen of America's most influential people unleash the fury of an
entire university hierarchy? Why do powerful people--the kind who sit on
Yale's board--feel so threatened by a local minister? Why can't one of
the world's most prestigious universities--with a multibillion-dollar
endowment--pay its workers a living wage?

For God. For Country. For Yale.

Right in the wake of House majority leader Dick Armey's explicit call
for several million Palestinians to be booted out of the West Bank, and
articles accusing a vague entity called "the left" of anti-Semitism.

an associate professor of legal studies and psychology at the University
of Illinois. Leaving nothing to chance, Salon titled Fox's
contribution "The shame of the pro-Palestinian left: Ignorance and
anti-Semitism are undercutting the moral legitimacy of Israel's

Over the past twenty years I've learned there's a quick way of figuring
just how badly Israel is behaving. There's a brisk uptick in the number
of articles accusing "the left" of anti-Semitism. These articles adopt
varying strategies. Particularly intricate, though I think
well-intentioned, was a recent column by Naomi Klein, who wrote that "it
is precisely because anti-Semitism is used by the likes of Mr. Sharon
that the fight against it must be reclaimed." Is Klein saying the global
justice movement has forgotten how to be anti-anti-Semitic? I don't
prefaced by strident assertions of pro-Semitism?

supposed silence of the left about anti-Semitism demonstrate their own
good faith by denouncing Israel's behavior toward Palestinians? Klein
did, but most don't. In a recent column in the New York Times
Frank Rich managed to write an entire column purportedly about Jewish
overreaction here to news reporting from Israel without even fleeting
reference to the fact that there might be some factual basis to reports
time for abuse of the "inexcusable" Arafat. Isn't Sharon "inexcusable"
in Rich's book?

So the left gets the rotten eggs, and those tossing the eggs mostly
don't feel it necessary to concede that Israel is a racist state whose
obvious and provable intent is to continue to steal Palestinian land,
oppress Palestinians, herd them into smaller and smaller enclaves, and
in all likelihood ultimately drive them into the sea or Lebanon or
Jordan or Dearborn or the space in Dallas-Fort Worth airport between the
third and fourth runways (the bold Armey plan).

Here's how Fox begins his article for Salon: "'Let's move back,'
my wife insisted when she saw the nearby banner: 'Israel Is a Terrorist
State!' We were at the April 20 Boston march opposing Israel's incursion
sign." Inference by Fox: The banner is grotesque, presumptively
Palestinian point of view Israel is indeed a terrorist state, and
anyway, even if it wasn't, the description would not per se be evidence
of anti-Semitism. Only if the banner had read "All Jews Are Terrorists"
would Fox have a point.

Of course, the rhetorical trick is to conflate "Israel" or "the State of
Israel" with "Jews" and argue that they are synonymous. Ergo, to
of Israel's most articulate critics are Jews, honorably committed to the
cause of justice for all in the Middle East. Many Jews just don't like
hearing bad things said about Israel, same way they don't like reading
Fox will rush into print denouncing those who "toy with the old
anti-Semitic canard that the Jews control the press." These days you
can't even say that the New York Times is owned by a Jewish
family without risking charges that you stand in Goebbels's shoes. I
How the Jews Invented Hollywood
, by Neal Gabler.

charges of anti-Semitism) that even after Congress recently voted
and twenty-one reps voting against (I don't count the chickenshit
twenty-nine who voted "present"), you could scarcely find a mainstream
paper prepared to analyze this astounding demonstration of the power of
AIPAC and other Jewish organizations, plus the Christian right and the
military industry, which profits enormously from military aid to Israel,
since Congress has stipulated that 75 percent of such supplies must be
bought from US firms like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

The encouraging fact is that despite the efforts of the Southern Poverty
march down Main Street, there's remarkably little anti-Semitism in the
United States, and almost none that I've ever been able to detect on the
Jews. It's comical to find the left's assailants trudging all the way
back to LeRoi Jones and the 1960s to dig up the necessary anti-Semitic
gibes. The less encouraging fact is that there's not nearly enough
criticism of Israel's ghastly conduct toward Palestinians, which in its
cleansing of Palestinians, just as Armey called for.

So why don't people like Fox write about Armey's appalling remarks
(which the White House declared he hadn't made) instead of trying to
change the subject with nonsense about anti-Semitism? It's not
anti-Semitic to denounce ethnic cleansing, a strategy that, according to
recent polls, almost half of Israelis now heartily endorse. In this
accuse it of anti-Semitism certainly do. They're apologists for policies
put into practice by racists, ethnic cleansers and, in Sharon's case, an



December 24, 2014


December 23, 2014


December 23, 2014


December 22, 2014

From the classrooms to the streets, the movement keeps growing.

December 22, 2014


December 22, 2014


December 19, 2014


December 19, 2014

Here's to a new year!

December 19, 2014


December 19, 2014