Sunday Reading

By John Ballard

?Jeff Sharlet has started a series at his blog detailing some of the backstory of his book, The Family. Readers not familiar with this book or writer need to catch up.

This fall, anti-abortion activists cheered for the Stupak-Pitts Amendment -- or, the Pitts-Stupak Amendment, as Rep. Joe Pitts' office called it. The amendment nearly derailed health reform and threatened to roll back abortion rights. In Salon, on NPR's "Fresh Air," MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow Show," and in other venues I reported on the Family's relationship to the amendment. Representative Bart Stupak has been enjoying subsidized rent at the Family's C Street House since at least 2002. Rep. Pitts' relationship goes back much further, to the late 1970s. Pitts didn't respond, but Stupak has been vocal in denying any connection between the Family, which he characterizes as apolitical, and anti-abortion activism.

The following letter, from Family organizer Fred Heyn to Pitts -- then a state legislator and national anti-abortion activist -- and an associate, Glenn Cunningham, is just one of the many documents contained within the Family's archives that prove Rep. Stupak wrong. It can be found in folder 8, box 386, collection 459 of the Billy Graham Center Archive. It represents the early days of Pitts' anti-abortion activism through the Family. [LINK and letter here. (No pun intended)]

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?Women are not supposed to drive in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia unless a man is in the car. John Burgess, retired State Department employee, tirelessly keeps readers informed about all things Arabian. This story prompted a rash of comments from an otherwise quiet audience.

A teenage girl defied a Saudi ban on women drivers to save her father and brother from the Nov. 25 floods. Malak Al-Mutairy took some rope and drove her father�s GMC to the low-lying Qous Valley where water had nearly submerged the car her family was standing on top of.

She parked her car at an elevated position on the road and waded into the water as far as she could before throwing the rope to her brother, Al-Madinah newspaper reported.

The brother tied the rope on the car and then Malak slowly towed the vehicle out of the water. When her brother fell into the water she returned to help him. Her father Fawaz Al-Mutairy, and brother Faiz were overwhelmed by the floods on their way to buy sacrificial animals for Eid Al-Adha.

There were other submerged cars with people inside them crying for help. Despite her father�s pleas not to return, Malak managed to tow eight more cars with dozens of people inside to safety.

�I had to brave the terrifying floods and rain to rescue my father because no one responded to his call for help,� said Malak.

�My father had taught me how to drive cars when we went on picnics to deserts. I am sorry that I could not help more people because by the time I towed eight cars the water was too high.�

Al-Mutairy was proud that his daughter had saved many people.

�My daughter has a strong personality. Nothing, even floods, deters her when she is determined to do something. No ordinary girl would have accomplished what she did in such weather,� he said.

However, the family was forced to live in a tent after their hilltop house in Hazarat district was damaged. When they did not receive any aid.

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?At Deborah White's Facebook page is a string of comments prompted by her assertion that passage of the health care bill will result in Barack Obama's defeat in 2012. (Yeah, I know. And there's snow in Washington this weekend, too. Some news.)

I was inspired to great thoughts, one of which in my vanity I will copy here.

History is full with oversized, truly ambitious enterprises that in retrospect are seen as mammoth but tragic errors, bought at a high price in lost lives and better alternatives. Most were undertaken for positive, even noble reasons, but as the long shadow of history inches along and light begins to shine in places previously not seen, every country looks sadly backward at a growing number of oh-shit moments.

The American Civil War, Apollo XIII, Vietnam, The Nineteenth Amendment, and the Trail of Tears come to mind without looking up anything more. As a schoolboy I remember a place called Boulder Dam which was the old name for Hoover Dam for political reasons. In the same way we now refer to the Korean "Conflict" or the "Vietnam ERA" because we still cannot bring ourselves to let the word "war" into our vocabulary. The Trail of Tears was genocide in no uncertain terms and it damn near worked. And one of my current assignments (I am a senior caregiver in my post-retirement years) is a hardened old racist who says of the countries about to vanish in the earth's rising oceans "Let 'em go. What they need is a bunch of sharp knives to castrate the men and stop 'en from breeding like a pack of wild dogs."

So in that context what is being done by Congress (and signed by Obama if it gets that far) is historic. It gives to the pharmaceutical, insurance and medical professional cartels mostly what they want in the same way that Prohibition did the bidding of the WCTU and other Teabagger-like populist voices of the day. Only later do such mistakes get corrected. Here in the South we still have "dry" counties thanks to a weird alliance if two groups, Christians and bootleggers, who are the "strange bedfellows" that define politics in moral contradictions. ... See More

Barack Obama came into office with a running head start, a mandate that gave him more political capital than we have seen in decades. But the challenges he faced (and still faces) are historically as threatening as any in our lifetimes. The post 9/11 years are being defined in America by fear and extremism which colors everything that happens. Here is a link to a Robert Parry analysis that spells out the challenge Obama faced in no-win terms.

... if Obama had nationalized one or more of the major banks, the stock market would likely have dived � even more than it did in early 2009. And there would have been lots of commentary about the inexperienced and inept Obama making matters worse.

He would have confronted media denunciations as a �socialist� or worse. The CNBC �free-market� crowd, led by Larry Kudlow, would have used their influential forum to rally the business sector; Fox News would have cited nationalization as proof they were right about the �communist� Obama; Washington Post editorials would have chastised him.

A new Depression might well have been pinned on Obama.

Similarly, if Obama had ordered aggressive investigations into torture and other crimes committed by George W. Bush and his administration, there would have been howls about Obama�s vindictiveness; about how his promises of bipartisanship had been lies; about coddling terrorists.

Given the tiny size and marginal influence of the progressive media, any cheers for Obama�s courage and principles would have been drowned out by the condemnations that would have bellowed forth from CNN, Fox News, the Washington Post and other powerful media voices."

Etcetera...

There was a lot on his plate. So I maintain he made the right choice letting Congress duke it out.

Deborah is a long time blog-buddy at About.com, a NY Times property, as editor of their Liberal Politics page and blog.

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?Charli Carpenter, newcomer at Duck of Minerva, links a fascinating TED video with the modest disclaimer "I'm not sure I understand it well enough to comment, but I figured Duck readers would find it interesting..." It is refreshing to find someone willing to look at something with an open mind and not say WTF.

I. too, have not plowed through all the reading, but I've seen enough to make me curious. The commentary at TED blog makes me think of everything from 4GW to Scientific research.

Our research shows that multiple different types of wars share the same set of underlying mathematical signatures. These signatures are independent of political, religious, geographic or ideological differences. We see the same patterns emerge whether we are studying the cocaine-driven conflict in Colombia or the multi-billion dollar war in Iraq. The statistical signatures of both the timing and the sizes of attacks are a result of the underlying forces that drive the insurgent ecosystem. These same forces may be at play in other non-traditional conflict-type systems such as the gangs of Los Angeles, violent crime in Bogot�and the drug wars in Mexico.

The research shows us that the lines that have traditionally defined the boundaries between organized crime, insurgency and even terrorism, are more blurred than we once thought.

The results of the modeling are also more generally applicable to non-violent competitive ecosystems where there is an asymmetry in force structure. These types of systems include understanding the growth and treatment of cancer, as well as the competition between small startups and established technology companies in Silicon Valley.

It is interesting to note that in the ecosystem of the Somali pirates we can start to see the crossover between startup culture and insurgency. Different pirate groups are funded by a central group that acts to distribute risk and massive returns are possible for successful cells.

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?Does this picture of a new wall at the Egyptian end of Gaza (Rafah) has a Biblical quality or is a flashback from The Ten Commandments messing with my mind?

 
Aside from Moses' separating the sea for the Exodus, there is that story about the Tower of Babel, another official project of mammoth dimensions ended by the Lord's bringing confusion to the enterprise when everyone woke up one morning and couldn't communicate because they were all speaking different languages.

Tunnels connecting Gaza and Egypt have been used for smuggling for years. Without them that tortured piece of real estate would be even worse off than it already is. A comment at the Arabist suggests that this latest Egyptian project has more to do with sucking up to Western and Israeli diplomatic pressure than any real effort to stop smuggling.

I�m really not sure what the fuss is with this. The photo looks like the old wall. And smugglers have long said they simply cut through, or go deeper than, the existing metal plates. The initial Haaretz story made it sound like this was going to be some super-high-tech innovation, but I don�t see it.

Here are a couple of videos produced by  Laila El-Haddad, a freelance Palestinian journalist I have been following for some time. This was state of the art two years ago. From the tenor of the above comment, technology has been keeping up on the Palestinian side of the border as well.

The good tunnel pictures, if you get impatient watching, are toward the end of the second video.

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?As long as we are on the subject, this rather long letter from the son of a British citizen with Palestinian roots illustrates the dimensions of the conflict there. Reading it makes me shy away from words like complex, nuanced or complicated and give my prose over to more emotional terms like stupid, criminal or politically genocidal.

I am a Palestinian refugee, from the village of Fallujah which lies between Gaza, Hebron and Asqalan. I�ve never been allowed to visit Fallujah; my grandparents were exiled from there in 1949 (a year after the founding of Israel) and took refuge in the Gaza Strip. My father and I were both born in the Khan Younis refugee camp-he a few years before Gaza was occupied by Israel, and I in 1988, a month after the outbreak of the first intifada. My dad married a woman from the West Bank-they had met and fallen in love while they were both studying at Birzeit University, and when I was two years old we emigrated to the UK where he received his Phd.

Fourteen years later, in 2004, we all returned to Palestine to live in Ramallah. Now British citizens, my parents were determined that my three siblings and I would forge a stronger connection to our homeland than we ever could living abroad. At first, the transition was made easier by the fact that our foreign passports gave us the freedom of movement that was denied to other Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. For me, this reality was shattered when in late 2005 I attempted to cross the River Jordan from the West Bank to visit my aunt in Amman. The Israeli border agents told me that I could not pass, because I had an Israeli issued Gaza ID. Under Israeli military rules, this meant that I could not �legally� be present in the West Bank because the Israeli occupation had mandated that Palestinians from Gaza could not enter the West Bank, and Palestinians from the West Bank could not enter Gaza. This policy had been in force since the early 1990�s, but was applied with increasing severity after the outbreak of the second intifada.

I lived the next four years under constant fear of arrest by the Israeli military, because that would have resulted in almost certain deportation to Gaza, and isolation from my family. For those four years, I never left the confines of Ramallah, so as to avoid the Israeli checkpoints on every one of the town�s entrances-but even this couldn�t give me a sense of security because I had to commute daily to Birzeit University, on a route frequently patrolled by Israeli forces from the nearby settlement of Bet El.

In July of this year, after many pleas for assistance from the hapless Palestinian Authority, I asked the Israeli NGO Gisha to help me obtain permission from the Israeli occupation to leave the West Bank. I wanted to take part in an internship in the United States, but I would only be granted the permission to exit on the condition that I only return to the Gaza Strip, which had been under siege and total closure for the better of two years then. I accepted this impossible choice-after four years of imprisonment in Ramallah, I wanted to see the outside world and look for a job abroad.

During this entire period, my family had more or less been saved the travel restrictions imposed on me. As a foreign journalist, my dad frequently traveled between the West Bank, Gaza and inside the Green Line, and my mother and siblings would join him on day trips to Jerusalem, Umm al-Fahem, Acca and Haifa. But that all changed this August when he was entering Gaza through the Erez crossing as he had done many times before. On this day however, he was arrested by the Israeli military and had his press credentials revoked. He was told his British passport was worthless, because they had made a frightening discovery: My dad had been born and raised in a refugee camp in Gaza, and had a Gaza ID. They told him he would henceforth be treated not as a foreigner, but as a Gazan-he was sent into Gaza and told he could never cross the Green Line or enter the West Bank again.

My mother and siblings back in Ramallah were also informed that their British passports were worthless and that they would be issued Palestinian IDs by Israel. Despite being raised in the West Bank and still owning a copy of her old West Bank ID, my mother was actually issued with a Gaza ID. We assume this is because she married a Gazan 22 years ago, but nobody has given us a clear answer. This has put her in the same quandary I was in for the last four years. She cannot leave Ramallah for fear of arrest and deportation to Gaza, away from her children, her sister�s and the young children of her recently deceased brother. This situation was compounded by another perplexing development; my brother and sisters, all of whom were born in the UK, and whose parents and older brother had been issued Gaza ID�s, were issued West Bank IDs.

My dad spent the last few months trying to get permission to go back to the West Bank to see his wife and kids-even for a day to pick up his clothes. But whether it was through the British consulate or Israeli NGO�s, the Israeli occupation was adamant that he would not be allowed out of Gaza, unless it was to be deported from Ben Gurion airport. Eventually, in order to save his job, he left Gaza when Egypt opened the Rafah crossing in early December.

Now, my father is in one country and I am in another, while my mother is trapped in the West Bank, unable to travel for fear of never being allowed back. Thankfully, my brother and sisters are able to cross into Jordan, where we may see each other, but our family has been torn apart and separated under the most arbitrary occupation laws imaginable. Despite the continued attempts of Israeli and Palestinian NGO�s, we have found no recourse with the Israeli authorities, and the British consulate has proved useless. We even sent a letter to Tony Blair, the representative of the Quartet, imploring him to intervene on our behalf as British citizens (the letter is included below). Unsurprisingly, we were ignored.

I believe this story needs to be told not because our situation is so unique, but precisely because it isn�t; this is the result of a deliberate Israeli policy, one that has been in place since the early days of the Nakba and has been evolving ever since. It is a policy that has led to the dispossession of millions of Palestinians, and the separation and breakup of tens of thousands of families. The forcibly imposed separation between the West Bank and Gaza is illegal under international law, and through it Israel is succeeding in separating the Palestinian people, one family at a time.

That, and a lot more, including yet another comments thread, is found at Philip Weiss' blog.

He's a progressive Jew, incidentally, not a Palestinian. He is among the many tireless opposition voices in what seems from this distance an impenetrable block of unified Orthodox Jews whose main concern has more to do with military defense than waging peace with their neighbors. American Christian Zionists have a great impact on US public opinion of the Middle East. Stories such as these do not conform to the template and make poor material for reporters. 

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Yeah, that's a lot of reading and videos,  but it's Sunday. What else do you have to do?