Israel's Document Fraud

My colleague Lisa Hajjar just returned from testifying as an expert witness at the deportation hearing on Monday, May 12, 2008 of Mohammad Qatanani, 44, an imam in New Jersey who has lived in the United States since 1995. AP covered the first day's testimony and you can read the International Herald Tribune version here.

Qatanani is being accused of hiding from the U.S. a 1993 conviction by the Israeli military courts, grounds for deportation. Hajjar told the judge that she did not believe Qatanani really was convicted, and that it appeared that Israel had invented this conviction only for purposes of depriving him of a U.S. green card, after Qatanani had established himself as a popular imam in New Jersey.

The main evidence for this speculation is that the United States had no records that indicated Qatanani had been convicted of anything, but had produced only an Israeli statement that Qatanani had been convicted of something (not clear what the charge was) in a NON-military court, where Qatanani had never been charged. According to Hajjar, the only conviction record Israel attached was for another individual altogether, someone whose inclusion in Qatanani's file seemed random.

This event seems consistent with other ICE document fraud, where either ICE attorneys assert that legitimate records aliens present are not legitimate, or, as in the case, present documents that do not establish the ICE attorneys' claims. Fortunately for Qatanani he has a good legal team with the resources to hire experts who could pick up on these problems and explain them to the judge, much to the exasperation of the ICE attorneys, Hajjar told me. But imagine the 95% of cases in which aliens lack attorneys, much less professors, to testify on their behalf.

Qatanani himself testifies on June 2, 2008. (Image of Mohammed Qatanani, second from right, with his family, from http://www.americans4qatanani.org/)

Rep. Steve King's (R-IA) Crime Control: Deport Native-Born Men

I was just listening to Steven King, the minority member on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law suggest that although it was a shame that Peter Guzman's mother had to go through the morgues of Tijuana looking for him, relatives in the United States have to go to the morgues, too:

I would point out there are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters that go to morgues every day in America because of the failure to enforce immigration laws. 27% of inmates in penitentiaries are criminal aliens.

At least as outrageous as trying to downplay the desperation and horror of a mother searching for her U.S.-born, cognitively impaired son in Tijuana morgues, is the insinuation that criminals are more likely to be foreign born than U.S. natives.

Only a small percentage of the total prison population are in federal institutions. Most are held in state and local prisons or jails. According to the Department of Justice, 6.7% of the entire prison population is foreign-born, but about 13% of the U.S. population is foreign-born. This means that King's own demographic of the native born is overrepresented in the prison population.

Indeed an SSRC study using census data also found that within respective ethnic and racial groups, immigrants across the board were less likely than native born citizens to be incarcerated.
Considering that men are 90% of the prison population and that King is a man, perhaps his first step in controlling crime by statistical grandstanding would be to deport himself, maybe to a quiet, remedial math camp somewhere in Europe. (The man on the right in the photo from King's webpage is King.)

ACLU Sues DHS and Others for "Deportation" of Pedro/Peter Guzman

The ACLU complaint on behalf of Peter Guzman filed on February 27, 2008 provides the first clear statement of the activities leading to what the ACLU calls Guzman's "illegal deportation," but might be better viewed as plain and simple criminal kidnapping. What else to call an organized effort to remove someone from the state without their consent? According to the complaint, Guzman was delusional part of the time in custody. Before this occurred and Guzman gave information on his birthplace, the Sheriff's Department correctly recorded this as California.

The complaint provides the first detailed narrative of the U.S. government's failure to obtain Guzman's consent before putting him on a bus on May 11, 2007, without his wallet or California driver's license, and dropping him off in Tijuana, where he knew no one.

Based on the details of this document I am further convinced that the ACLU is being too easy on the government. An "illegal deportation" is an oxymoron, as is the much more common violation of the "illegal arrest." Both of these weight the intentions of state actors in a manner law does not afford private individuals. The actions associated with the "illegal arrest" and even more so for an "illegal deportation" are indistinguishable from kidnapping, which really is the crime (and not just civil claim) that the government should be charging Chertoff et al. with committing. (For an explanation of why Guzman's forcible removal against his will from the USA meets the criteria of kidnapping, read this posting, based on the initial habeas complaint.)

If the state is acting against the law then the putative purpose claimed as the motive for that behavior, i.e., executing the law, is not relevant to defining the state's actions. If a law is not executed lawfully then these actions are not furthering the execution of the law and should be assessed on their own merits.

If I am trying to feed my family and steal food to accomplish that, I am not charged with "illegal caregiving," but theft. If I am unable to accomplish my benign purpose of assisting Mexicans excluded from the U.S. and I drive them into the USA, I am not charged with "illegal job support" but human trafficking.

In other words, state actors should be held accountable for the egregious actions that it commits against people in violation of all of the laws. When a failed execution of a law occurs, then the actions done on its behalf should receive no special protections because they were done by state actors. Indeed, if anything, the scrutiny and punishment of these illegal actions should be much more severe than that directed against private individuals, precisely because of the power these people wield.

Steroids and the Decade of Decline

In a few hundred years, students will learn about The Decade of Decline, the ten years when the United States lost its honor, wars, and money, and any hope of regaining these. It might go something like this:

The long descent began after an ancient Republican clan, Silverfootinmouth, instructed its minions to make sure that the youngest male Silverfootinmouth would ascend to the throne.

The public had voted for a rival clan's more gifted son, but advisers in the kingdom's court were loyal to the Silverfootinmouth family. Also, though they did not speak of this to Silverfootinmouth the Elder, many longtime court officials knew the youngest son to be a fool and were eager to install him as cover for their own nefarious ends. So it came to pass that four men (and one sad woman) loyal to Silverfootinmouth the Elder lied and said Gore, the rival, had not received votes in the province run by the eldest son of Silverfootinmouth, and that therefore the Silverfootinmouth family once more would rule the kingdom.

Gore knew of Silverfootinmouth's trickery, but was worried about civil war and conceded to avoid faction. Gore was a good, if somewhat naive, man and even in defeat tried to help his country. In a short period of time he was able to persuade the citizenry of their folly with fossil fuels, the source of energy that in time killed the civilization. Gore even won an important world prize for this. Alas, by then it was too late. Gore's country was already being consumed by the rising seas. The magic Prius and other advanced vehicles from the East arrived too late to save them. During one of the most tragic weeks, Hurricane Katrina washed out the levies, homes, and people from a once vibrant city called New Orleans, the underwater ruins about 20 miles southeast from the shores of Baton Rouge.

Soon after young Silverfootinmouth became King -- they called it President then, though the county tended to be run by people from a few families-- the country was attacked by men who were from a land where the Silverfootinmouth clan had old friends. It would be unthinkable for young Silverfootinmouth--also known as Shrub, the name given him by a wise woman from his village--to attack those people, but he would look weak if he did nothing.

Shrub's advisers, who had enemies in a different country that was near the country of the attackers, persuaded Shrub to invade that other country instead, even though they knew it had no role in the assault on their people. These advisers were better at pretending to be smart than young Silverfootinmouth, but in fact they also were very silly men. According to one story, which is very comical but still may be true, the main adviser to the King was trying to shoot a duck and instead shot his friend in the face.

The war against the people who never attacked the United States went very badly, costing the country its vast fortune and thousands of its people's lives. And yet the citizens still were afraid because the people who attacked them were not caught. Four years after Shrub first seized power, the people voted by a slim margin for him to continue as their leader.

The country's decline would become permanent. Shrub let the people who worked for him give away the kingdom's gold to their rich friends who ran the banks. The bankers then lent the money to poor people and charged them high rates of interest. It was really fun for while because the bankers were able to make money from lending the government's money and the poor people were able to spend the money, but eventually the bankers ran out of gold and the poor people couldn't repay the loans.

Once there was no more money, Shrub and the politicians for the poor people were very sad and worried, until they realized that money DOES grow on trees and they could just print more of it. The people were all very happy when they learned that the government was going to be sending money to them.

Most narratives of the Ten Year Decline might stop at this point, because the ending might appear self-evident. But just as today, there may be an inquiring student, needing a bit more detail to understand the era's follies. Why didn't the other politicians, called Democrats, do something?

Seated under tents by the dozens because earlier generations decided to privatize education and because the drought in North America had killed all the trees, the students might listen to a wise teacher's chestnut anecdote:

U.S. soldiers were killing themselves in foreign lands, families were being thrown out of their homes, and government agents had kidnapped men in orange suits and were suffocating them with wet towels on an island that disappeared after the 23 Year Rain.

The Senators were in despair. Overwhelmed by the country's actual problems, they agreed amongst themselves to focus on the difficulties faced by their professional athletes.

This was one activity that seemed to make everybody happy. Senator Arlen Spector started this when he learned that a football team called The Patriots had cheated when they played the team from his state called The Eagles. (A worker for the Patriots had videotaped the secret code from The Eagles' coach to the quarterback.) Senator Spector was upset when he learned that the videotapes had been destroyed. He said this was as bad as the government destroying videotapes of shoving wet towels in people's mouths.

Some people complained and said that U.S. agents shoving wet towels in peoples mouths to suffocate them was torture and destroying evidence of this was worse than what the National Football League did, but no one listened to them.

Instead, encouraged by the example of Senator Spector's football investigation, Senate fans of baseball decided they could cheer up their constituents by holding hearings about whether a very famous baseball player had lied about taking drugs that would make his pitches harder for players to hit. The same day of the hearing King Shrub announced that the citizens would be receiving between $300 to $800.

The Tragedy of Kosovar Independence

While Bush hopscotches his way through Africa, trying to avoid the many war zones, it should be clear that the last thing the world needs is another border.

The borders in Africa and everywhere else are superstitious creations meant to ward off an imaginary evil other. Whether created by tribal chiefs, post-WWI mapmakers, or modern kings and bureaucrats, these demonized others are flesh and blood people whose lives have never been constrained by strange lines in the sand.

Indeed, the hybridity and movement of populations explains the presence of Orthodox Greek Serbians in the ruins of the Muslim Ottoman Empire that had conquered them; Albanians in Serbia; and the presence of Serbians in the Kosovo, who were ethnically cleansed by the Albanians following the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA) attacks on Serbian police in 1998.

The recent unhappy history of the former Yugoslavia's disintegration began in 1991, when Germany decided to flex its newly found diplomatic muscles following reunification and chart a foreign policy distinct from the U.S. by recognizing Croatia as an independent state, thus transforming minor skirmishes between small militias into a full-blown regional war with foreign invasions by Britain, the U.S., and NATO.

Seven years later, and three years after the Dayton Accords established recognized governments of independent Croatia, Republic Macedonia, and the Federated Bosnia-Herzegovina, in addition to Slovenia, the nationalist Albanians who were citizens of Serbia decided that the only way they could achieve their dream was through violence.

The KLA decided that the only way to gain the respect and attention of the international community was to kill Serbian police and then expose their fellow Albanian-Serbians to the collective punishment they knew would follow, and lead in turn to the international intervention that would elevate them to nationhood. Just the way it worked for the Croatians.

Here's what a journalist sympathic to the KLA wrote in 1998:

They organized their own parallel Albanian-language schools, their own medical services, and even their own informal tax collectors to pay for it all. They held unauthorized, Kosovo-wide elections that made Ibrahim Rugova, an almost Gandhian advocate of nonviolence, the unofficial "president of Kosovo." And since they weren't killing people, the world ignored their plight. In the last two years, a few frustrated Kosovars formed a "Kosovo Liberation Army" that carried out a few attacks on Serbian police. But the province was still almost entirely peaceful until February when Milosevic sent in his police to massacre several villages where individuals linked to the KLA were thought to live.

(Source: Gwen Dwyer, "Serbia the Ultimate Loser of Carnage in Kosovo," Post and Courrier, Charleston, August 8, 1998:A11.)

In 1998 Albanians living in Kosovo, Serbia, had been suffering the indignities of not being able to use Albanian for official purposes and employment discrimination. These actions by Serbia are unjust but they are no more unjust than the official policy of most other countries.

How different is this from the U.S. requiring English and not Spanish be used in Texan hospitals and schools? Imagine if the United States government were asked to endure Mexican-Americans in the Southwest establishing a separate government and collecting taxes? Would the systematic discrimination against Mexican-Americans today--the official denial of their ability to speak their language and run their own schools--be sufficient to trigger sympathy for large Mexican-American cities in the U.S. becoming independent states? And what if some Mexican-American terrorists, equivalent to the Albanian-Serbian KLA, started to attack the Anglo police who were working in the Southwest, precipitating violent retribution against the population and the occupation of forces from Russia, Canada, and other Latin American countries, which is roughly analogous to the occupation of Serbia's Kosovar region by the U.S., Britain, and other European troops?

The new, self-declared Prime Minister of Kosovo is the man who led the KLA attacks on Serbian police ten yers ago, Hashim Thaci. Although at present only Kosovar Albanians see Thaci as their leader, he is poised to receive receive recognition from the United States, Germany, Britain, and France shortly. Russia and of course Serbia will not recognize Kosovo as a state and have asked the United Nations not to do so either. Several countries in the European Union also do not want to recognize Kosovo, as they have their own secessionist movements with which to contend. According to the New York Times today, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia and Romania oppose Kosovar independence.

Kosovo's ability to split the EU on foreign policy is itself another symptom of how new borders create new divisions. If it is to be a unifying regional political body, the EU needs a single foreign policy. Kosovar autonomy and any other question that provokes debates on sovereignty will undermine this. In the end, the debate shows that despite the best intentions, the nation-state cannot accommodate peace. The answer is not the proliferation of more nation-states but their demise altogether.

Instead of recognizing Kosovo, the world would be better off depriving all states of the ability to control movement and membership by the use of ancestry, language, or any other criterion other than the desire to establish residence.

Kosovo is poised to be independent because of a temper-tantrum that elicited brutal corporal punishment and brought in the child protection service, and this produced another bully that has already been smacking around its own peers. Kosovo's situation is morally no worse than any other country, but it is no better, either.

For a look at how the Kosovar's Orthodox Greek Serbians have documented the bombing of their churches and arson to their homes in recent years by Kosovar's Muslim Serbians, look here, the source of the image above of a man in 2004 peeing at a destroyed 19th century Orthodox church in Prizren.

Race and the California Primary

Race Politics Are Everywhere and Nowhere
The race question in this presidential election seems to be everywhere and nowhere. It's the first time an African American has a credible chance of becoming President, but neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton has made race a point of contention.

The brief ruckus when Clinton suggested Lyndon Johnson was more important than Martin Luther King Jr. in passing the Civil Rights Bill was about different views of how power works, not race, and has been largely forgotten. Both Obama and Clinton credibly avow commitments to people of color, and their social and economic policies will have roughly the same effects.

The White House Must Stay White
Nonetheless the media have played up the possibility that the electorate will remain fixated on race. The angle has been that people of color are worried that the White majority will not countenance a Black president (unless he's in a television show starring Kiefer Sutherland). A journalist for Politico posted an article just before the South Carolina election claiming "Black Voters Fear DC Unready for Black President," and then Obama went on to win all but three counties in that state. But that same night Latino voters in Nevada went for Clinton.

Si Se Puede?
Race has been a factor, but not in the way the pundits predicted. In the topsy turvy racial politics of the U.S., Obama, the "si se puede" candidate, the only one who supports drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants, is losing among Mexican-Americans and winning among White men. Exit polls showed that White men supported Obama by 18 points over Clinton. Meanwhile, Black voters have refuted anecdotal accounts of their anxieties. He's receiving around 85% of the African-American vote.

Why Clinton's Brown Appeal?
In last night's California primary, Latinos voted 2 to 1 for Clinton and Asian Americans voted for her 3 to 1. Why were African Americans and White men in an alliance that did not include Latinos and Asian Americans? There probably is no single explanation but one clear result is that the voters who may keep Obama out of the White House are more likely to be from the barrios than Beverly Hills. (Image is from appearance at National Council of Law Raza.)

"Caramel" Opens Tonight

"Caramel" was written by and stars the director, Nadine Labaki. It is the Lebanese submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film and screened at Cannes.

Labaki hews closely to the advice "write what you know." The film is set in a Beirut beauty parlor in a Christian neighborhood and is based on people Nadine observed. Most of the cast are non-actors, though you'd never know.

"Caramel" has received terrific reviews, including analogies to Pedro Almodovar's work. I've been telling my friends it's like "Sex in the City" set in Beirut. It's a subtle and humorous exploration of the friendship and challenges faced by an intergenerational group of women. There is a great range of characters, from a crazy old lady who collects traffic citations from windshields to the butch lesbian who fixes the generator and washes hair, and develops a simmering relationship with one of the clients.

Labaki is an accomplished actress and music video director whose work is widely admired in the Middle East. Over drinks after the screening a Palestinian filmmaker told Nadine that his mother in Nazareth was a huge fan and that if Nadine came to their city the whole town would come to a stop.

Nadine smiled and then looked sad. Because of her citizenship, Israel and Lebanon both make such a visit impossible.

If you want to support its wider release, and have a great evening, go see "Caramel" this weekend.

Wendy Brown's Talk: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and the Nation-State

Yesterday I had the opportunity to join colleagues at UCLA's Mellon Workshop "Cultures in Transnational Perspective" and hear Wendy Brown discuss two recent essays she wrote: “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy” and “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-democratization”. Wendy's always been one of my favorite lecturers. I especially appreciate her efforts in grappling with the academic and political Zeitgeists of the moment, and to respect her readers and listeners enough to give them nuanced readings and acknowledge her audience's possible objections to her analyses. If it's a parry with her own communities of "Women's Studies" or "the Left" Wendy's comments tend to provoke, sometimes with the point of provocation and that's also for the good.

Brown's Argument
In these particular essays, Brown defines "neoliberalism" and explores its differences and historical overlaps with "neoconservativism." She proposes that the neoliberalism of today -- its exact moment of origin is not stated -- is different from earlier expressions of neoliberalism. The distinctly horrible effects of neoliberalism today is its absorption of the entire government, so that a market rationality pervades all decision-making, and citizens come to understand themselves as consumers and lose sight of democracy's less instrumental possibilities.

Brown identifies herself as a Marxist and with radical critiques of politics, but things today are bad enough that she calls for a return to old fashioned "classical liberalism." Basic values such as rights, equality, and the rule of law that Marxists ridiculed turn out to have some value in themselves and are crucial if democracy is to be re-established.

Discussion
During the discussion Brown was asked a number of questions that seemed to press her to go further in the analytic distinctions she was making. Among these were 1) whether she was nostalgic for an era that perhaps never existed and, 2) whether she was sufficiently attentive to the meanings of "democracy."

As UCLA political theorist Juliet Williams pointed out in her comment (and in her terrific book Liberalism and the Limits of Power), a version of democracy is alive and well in popular culture. Top-rated shows such as "American Idol" and "America's Top Model" suggest Americans love to vote. What are the examples from U.S. American political history or from Brown's thought experiments that might instruct us on more desirable expressions of democracy? Brown replied this was a good question and said she might think further about how she was defining democracy.

Brown responded to questions on whether she was sufficiently attentive to the long history of U.S. politics that has been profoundly antiliberal, antiegalitarian, and unconcerned with the rule of law – slavery, prohiting women from voting, Manifest Destiny, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, Jim Crow, dropping the atom bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, assassinating leaders that threatened corporate interests abroad, etc. etc. etc.-- by agreeing, as she did in her essays, that the history of liberal democracy in the USA has been a troubled one.

I followed up by asking why, recognizing the family resemblance between earlier episodes violating liberal democratic ideals and those today, she chose to emphasize the differences and not the similarities. If generations of people who earlier expressed outrage over the events listed above could not push their government toward liberal democracy, why do we think we can do this?

Brown made the reasonable point that things today are different, and therefore she is calling for us to challenge the particularities of neoliberalism's current constellations to overthrow these now. A fair enough point, but it raises the question of criteria for deciding on what counts as “different enough” to justify this special attention to today's crises.

If it turns out that the violation of the rule of law in invading Iraq, for instance, has a lot in common with the violation of the rule of law in the Spanish-American War, when the United States seized Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam from Spain, then it seems politically urgent to question not only the broader institutional contours of government that make possible repeated violations of liberal democratic norms but to ask whether “liberal democracy” is a possibility for the United States or any country that doesn't live near ice floes.

Bringing Back in the Nation
Instead of a relatively recent tension between competing ideologies of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, which Brown maps out quite convincingly, is it possible that Hegel was right, and that market rationality and norms of a moral authoritarianism can happily coexist as the means of institutionalizing the particularities of the nation-state? If this is right, then the current phenomena Brown describes are merely the most recent examples of a citizenry that is happy to exist as citizens who are consumers and, if not democrats, then joined to the state as nationalists. Their membership is consequential not because they vote or because America stands for particular ideals, but because America is America, their America. This is Mike Rogin's argument in his essays on demonology, that it is U.S. nationalism and anti-Russianism that fuels the anti-communism, and not vice-versa.

Hegel himself believed that the social contract theories of individual rights were a joke and impossible. A country that expects its members to die for it – in other words, any political society based on birth—is not going to guarantee individual rights for the sake of the individual, and the same goes for democratic rights. As long as the nation is the source of people's identities and political commitments, liberal democracy may be not just an illogical theory, as Hegel believed, but also an impossible political goal.

(By the way, the url in the screenshot above is from the United States Postal Service, and is the redirect if you type in www.usps.gov, which is supposed to be the url for any government agency. Try typing in usps.gov and see what happens. The USPS is run by Congress and the .com in its url has always bugged me. I wrote a note on the complaint box a few weeks ago but no one replied. In the event, the desire of a government agency to represent itself as a private firm is one of many examples of the neoliberalism ethos Brown is describing.)

The Crime Is Torture, Not Only Obstruction Of Justice

Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced yesterday that he was authorizing an investigation into the CIA's destruction of videotapes. Here's part of what he said:

“Following a preliminary inquiry into the destruction by CIA personnel of videotapes of detainee interrogations, the Department’s National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter, and I have taken steps to begin that investigation as outlined below."

Note that this announcement makes no reference to the underlying activity being videotaped, i.e., waterboarding, which is torture and illegal under U.S. law, although the Senate, including Democrats Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer on the Judiciary Committee, voted to confirm Mukasey without his acknowledging this, a bad judgment that is now coming back to haunt us.

Mukasey's framing of the investigation is a problem for two reasons. First, it takes the spotlight off the real problem, which is destroying people, not videotapes. This is something the U.S. Congress seems happy to accommodate because the Democrat leadership had been advised of these activities and not objected. Jane Harmon (D-CA) only asked that she receive copies of the tapes, and therefore only can object to not being given these. Ditto for Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House (D-CA), who also was briefed on the U.S. torture of detainees and did not object. However, the U.S. media did not sign onto this free pass for the government to torture and it is disturbing that they are not asking more questions about this.

A second problem is that narrowing the investigation to the circumstances leading to the destruction of the tapes significantly limits the exposure of the CIA to charges of illegality. It appears that various officials in the U.S. Congress and also the 9-11 Commission had requested these tapes. But it is not clear that failing to comply with an interagency request is a criminal and not administrative failing. The obstruction of justice charge for which Scooter Libbey was convicted came out of his lying to the FBI. But members of Congress and a Presidential Commission are not part of the Department of Justice, and therefore it seems likely that failure to comply with a request from these branches of government could be construed as a case of bad office management, even if willfully defiant. The videotapes were never subpoenaed, only requested by individual members, and it is doubtful that any time a federal agency is nonresponsive to a request from a member of Congress that the violation is criminal. Indeed that seems unlikely.

It is of course possible that CIA agents or White House staff might give statements admitting that they believed the videotapes were destroyed out of a concern they would provide evidence that might be used against them for violating the law against torture, and this could be used against them. Here's the statutory language defining "obstruction of justice," from the United States Code, Section 18, 1519:

Whoever knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or any case filed under title 11, or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case, shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

Again, this does appear to be what occurred but this is a far lesser crime than torturing people.

Perhaps if Senators Feinstein and Schumer had backed up the other Democrats on the Judiciary who voted against Mukasey's confirmation because he would not affirm waterboarding torture, then we would have an Attorney General who would be launching an investigation into what actually occurred. The person who did the interrogation is giving interviews admitting that he tortured, so the absence of the videotapes is not a problem. In fact, the CIA is trying to have the Justice Department investigate the agent for disclosing his activities, which means they are acknowledging his account's veracity.

Since the investigation is being vetted through the Justice Department and not a special counsel, it is up to Mukasey to decide on whether to prosecute the CIA for torture, and he's already on record for giving waterboarding a free pass. In fact precisely because of the destruction of the tapes he may even try to fidget out of this by saying that absent the evidence he cannot say with certainty whether torture occurred, which was his line during the hearings, one that seems to have been crafted in cahoots with the White House anticipating exactly this unfolding of events. But again, this is not the fault of the White House, but of the Democrats who could have easily stopped this and did nothing. (The image is from a CNN article about John Kiriakou, the former CIA agent who admitted he tortured Al Qaeda suspects.)

No One Should Be Illegal: Oklahoma Denying Health Care to Citizens without Documentation

It is a sign of the impoverishment of this country's immigration debate that the most traction to be gained against kooks who listen to Lou Dobbs comes from instances of the state misapplying its discriminatory policies, and not the inherent unfairness of the policies even if they were to be administered correctly.

The latest example of this is a report I heard this morning (Christmas) on NPR about Oklahoma denying poor legal residents access to health benefits because of rules designed to prevent undocumented aliens from receiving aid. Here's an excerpt from an article from the Oklahoma newspaper the Muskogee Phoenix:

"A law designed to remove illegal aliens from public assistance has instead denied thousands of U.S. citizens their Oklahoma SoonerCare benefits. SoonerCare is a state program through which Medicaid services are managed. The federal Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 changed how states verify the citizenship of recipients. U.S. citizenship has always been necessary, but the new law requires documentation such as a birth certificate."

Oklahoma Health Care Authority spokesperson Nico Gomez said most of the 5,841 people whose SoonerCare benefits were terminated Dec. 1 are probably U.S. citizens:

"'The reason we can make that assumption is because that has been the pattern in other states,' he said. 'Some of the letters we sent have been returned as undeliverable.'"

More direct evidence of the law limiting benefits due citizens are the demographic features of the applicants denied. The article above states: "58 percent are Caucasian; 18 percent are African-American; 13 percent are American Indian; 10 percent are Hispanic and one percent are Asian." Among the program participants, 62 percent are children.

Equally disturbing is that not only are U.S. citizens and undocumented adult aliens being denied care, but Oklahoma politicians are trying to deny prenatal care to "illegal" fetuses (and whoever else is caught in that ugly net). In a separate development, as reported in the Tulsa World on October 10, 2007, legislators in Oklahoma are trying to reverse an Oklahoma Health Care Authority policy that will allow all pregnant women to receive prenatal care. The policy is presently in effect, but is likely to be overturned by a legislature appealing to the nativist bigots who dominate blue and red states alike. According to Randy Terrill, the policy is a "'dangerous precedent' and 'we cannot allow Oklahoma to subsidize illegal activity,'" i.e., being a fetus without a state license.
The rhetoric is another case of nationalism trumping fundamentalism, a point that was made somewhat differently by a Democrat in the Oklahoma Senate,Tom Adelson: "Anyone who professes to embrace a culture of life would not turn their back on 2,800 innocent children born each year in Oklahoma."

But enough of parsing humanity. There is no rational reason that a fetus should have more claim to health care than someone who is 80, and no good reason that someone born in Mexico City should not be allowed the legal privileges of being born in Tulsa. The argument against illegality is tautology and the argument based on cost hubris. Leaving aside the pragmatic benefits of a prenatal health program touted by the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, no computer is powerful enough to produce definitive figures on the total financial impact of removing impediments to free movement, and those who have made this effort generally find the economic arguments will not support the nativists.
(Image is from U.S. government site on history of Native American health care by federal government.)

On The Shock Doctrine

On Wednesday, November 28, 2007 I heard Naomi Klein speak at NYU to a standing room only audience about her most recent book, Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein actually was sharing the stage with my colleague Lisa Hajjar, an expert on torture and international law. The main argument Klein put forward was that the Chicago School of economic theory initiated by Milton Friedman advanced a program of what became known as neo-liberalism (and is now called neo-conservatism) that was so unpopular in developing countries that it could be advanced only by the use of brute force. Torture was not used to gain information but to terrorize populations so that they would not resist the economic policies imposed by dictators influenced by an ideology that nurtured cronyism and corporatism.

The argument is an intriguing one but it is not ultimately sustainable because it ignores the role nationalism played in establishing these military regimes, the nationalism of the U.S. as well as the developing countries. Hajjar began her talk by trying to elide the difference between Klein's analysis and Hajjar's own focus on the nationalism informing the Israeli use of torture, subtly mentioning national security as an independent ideology also allowing governments to impose practices that otherwise would be opposed but without mentioning the absence of neo-liberalism in many contexts. During the Q and A I asked Klein about this. To paraphrase, I suggested that there are numerous examples of torture that is not being done to advance neo-liberal agendas; and there are numerous examples of neo-liberal reforms that did not require torture. In fact some populations accept torture and other repressive policies used on their fellow citizens out of nationalist fervor, and not because they are afraid. I also mentioned the U.S. Congress's rejection of the immigration bill last summer as an example of the majoritary's nationalism trumping the alleged neo-liberal values of economic elites.

Klein replied that by privatizing homeland security, neo-liberalism has absorbed
nationalist values. Homeland security and nationalism is another avenue to make money--and the private security firms in Iraq would be another example. Her point was that capitalists have figured out how to make money off of nationalism--a lot of money--and therefore the business community no longer sees nationalism as antagonistic to their agenda.

For reasons I'll explain below, I don't buy this dismissal of the role of nationalism in perpetrating state violence, and nationalism's incommensurability with liberalism, but Klein seemed to know a lot and I bought her book. Although her central political point is not supportable, the narrative masterfully weaves together microanalyses of historically independent episodes from the CIAs mind control research in 1950s Canada to the compromised role of the Ford Foundation in supporting Friedman's South American economic shock troops to detailed stories of neoliberal programs from Chile to South Africa to Poland and Russia. The theory is wrong but Klein's facts are one important piece of the story about government repression and she is an outstanding writer.

Here's the problem: Klein is partly right but neoliberalism is not the complete story, and not even the most important one in most contexts. Everyone from Israel to Iraq tortured for reasons that had nothing to do with neoliberalism, and the U.S. "war on terror" has nothing to do with neoliberal agendas, though these accommodate the war. Klein does not want to discuss noneconomic motives for torture and state violence because focusing on the nationalism explicitly invoked by the various political and military leaders who are her protagonists in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Poland, and Russia, is not good for Klein's 1990s "anti-globalization" agenda. Klein comes out of the anti-NAFTA, anti-GATT, anti-WTO movements that were advancing the very parochial, nationalist commitments of the juntas who were torturing people.

This is not to say that so-called indigenous peoples protesting in Seattle favored torture or any other policies of the death sqauds, but it is to say that the belief in a "native" people that should be protected from "outsiders" was also an ideology the Nazis shared and that in less dramatic circumstances appears in political contexts worldwide.

For instance, in today's elections, Putin did not receive 61% of the vote in Russia because people are pleased with his economic reforms, or because he is torturing people, but because he has been bellicose in defying the U.S. on Russian defense (recently withdrawing from a treaty that would have limited Russian army presence near European borders), renationalization (not privatization) of oil, and feeding bigotry against non-Russian residents. And in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is telling voters that voting against the Constitutional change that would make him a dictator is the same as voting for George Bush. In other words, dictators are gaining power from majorities to deprive people of civil rights from the people themselves because of nationalism and not merely compliance under the threat of force.

Klein's story is one of WTO strong arm tactics against suffering developing economies, but the truth always has been that rich countries have had more money to devote to protecting their domestic industries than have poor countries. As long as the WTO could be enforced across the board and rich countries did not evade the rulings it promised to help developing countries, and now this promise is bearing fruit as developing countries are using the WTO mechanism to file complaints against the U.S., a fact Klein ignores. For instance, in July, 2007 Brazil filed a claim against the U.S. for subsidizing agricultural exports.

The Left seems still to have an easy time talking about economic inequality and political economic structures of oppression, but a very hard time grappling with nationalism and embracing cosmopolitanism. Today's Left would not be responsive to servants of aristocrats worried about the fading of old world culture alongside the demise of feudalism, but reveal a misplaced sentimentality for "indigeneity," a code word for nativism or nationalism. (For more on the nationalist and not economic motives for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, see this posting.) Perhaps a way to bring together Klein's persuasive account of the state robberies that required extreme violence with the nationalism that accompanied this is to refuse to use the Chicago
School's language of liberalization altogether. As Klein points out, the main thrust of the plans was privatization. Robbers also like to privatize. This has nothing to do with liberalism.

Instead of a compatbility between liberalism, neo- or otherwise, and nationalism--the ostensible narrative--Klein's is a story of nationalism and force, assisted by a lie that these were outcomes of open markets and choice. If only these reforms really were liberal, and not the expression of U.S. military priorities determined by its Cold War with Russia, as well as the nationalism and greed motivating the repressive forces in other countries as well. Klein herself begins with the CIA's Cold War development of shock therapy but then fails to see how the facts she discovers mark a trail of nationalist and not just economic pathways of violence.

Again, this is a compelling book presenting fascinating material with clarity, intelligence, and passion.

The Pleasures of Reading Garrett Hardin

I'm in the last throes of finishing the ms. and looking over Garrett Hardin's famous "Tragedy of the Commons" Science 162 (1968), pp. 1243-48, which I hadn't read carefully since I was an undergraduate. It's a much more compassionate and thoughtful piece than its invocation by neo-classical economists would suggest. Used as a citation to justify property rights of all sorts, Hardin is himself not persuaded of their utility in many contexts. In fact, the essay would be more aptly titled, "The Tragedy of the Commons for People with Property Rights."

Property rights do not create solutions, but Hardin describes how they contribute to the tragedy of the commons. His paradigmatic example is grazing. But grazing only poses a problem if land is held in common while individuals have private rights to their herd. (If herds also are held in common then neo-classical economists worry about laziness, which would be bad for productivity but would not lead to overgrazing.) Similarly, Hardin's solutions do not require more property rights and market solutions but appeal to an inventive use of regulations.

For instance, noting the degradation of the national parks, he suggests entrance policies based on a lottery, a proposal now in place. And he writes: "[O]ur particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution. The owner of a factory on the bank of a stream--whose property extends to the middle of the stream--often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right to muddy the waters flowing past his door" (1245).

And Hardin in 1968 was one of the first to point out the inability of property rights to handle pollution of what he calls pleasure. As a result of property rights to a store, "The shopping public is assaulted with mindless music, without its consent. Our government is paying out billions of dollars to create supersonic transport which will disturb 50,000 people for every one person who is whisked from coast to coast 3 hours faster. Advertisers muddy the airwaves of radio and television and pollute the view of travelers" (1248).

Hardin also writes with some sadness that each generation is in the habit of forgetting lessons of previous generations. It is indeed a sign of the times that Hardin's lessons on the dangers of overpopulation and the commons, which have not proven the problem he thought they would be, would be the ones for which he is remembered, while his more astute observations about the harms of property rights have been ignored, though not by the folks at anti-advertising, whose bus stop intervention appears above.

Barney Frank Sells out for Job in Clinton Administration: Insider Revelation

On April 24, 2007 Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) did something he's done before, introduce a bill that would "prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender," HR 2015.

The "gender identity" language would help transgendered employees battle discrimination, but it's important for other reasons as well. Including "gender identity" is the only way to make sure sex discrimination laws, including sexual harassment laws, will apply to gays and lesbians. Courts previously have confined application of sexual harassment to different-sex scenarios. Stipulating that "gender identity" should not affect the interpretation of employment protections will protect men from sexual harassment from male bosses, and women from female bosses. Analyses by the LAMDA Legal Defense Fund also suggest that removing "gender identity" would allow employers to fire people on the basis of their being "too effeminate" or "too mannish."

On September 27, 2007, Rep. Frank did something that he appears not to have done before, introduce a competing bill that sells out gays and lesbians by removing the "gender identity" language, HR 3685.

The LGBT community is furious with Frank. According to an October 18, 2007 article in the Bay Area Reporter, "More than 200 LGBT groups around the nation have, in the past 10 days, signed onto a letter to House leaders asking them to 'oppose any substitute legislation that leaves part of our community behind.'"

The question is why did Rep. Frank do this? Frank's explanation: "We do not have the votes to pass the bill with transgender."

But no one who knows anything about Washington politics believes Frank. Indeed Frank himself admits that his proposed bill, even if it passes in both houses, will not become a law until a Democrat wins the presidency. So why is Frank really pushing Congress to pass a law that is being actively opposed by the constituencies in whose name he is acting?

Insiders have an explanation, and it's not a pretty one. According to a source who works with many of these LGBT groups, Frank and others are pressing Nancy Pelosi and Senate colleagues for a vote on a bill without "gender identity" protections at the insistence of presidential candidate and bully Senator Hillary Clinton. In exchange for helping her with this, word is that Frank's been assured a position in her administration.

Why would Hillary want this so badly? Getting the weakened bill on the Senate floor gives Clinton something she can vote for to bolster her substantively weak LGBT credentials and loosen some spare change and good will in the LGBT community. Getting Frank to lose the "gender identity" language in a bill that will not become law allows Clinton to appeal to the mainstream's sense of fairness in the workplace without allowing the Right to scare the general public by suggesting Clinton wants to protect fairies and other people with a gender imagination.

The most hopeful scenario in these cynical dealings is that perhaps after Clinton is elected and the Democrats have an even stronger grip on Congress, and perhaps after Frank receives a cabinet post and other muscle, the administration will push for a real bill that will be really signed, one that includes the "gender identity" language.

Federal Government Persecuting Science-Art Team

Steve Kurtz is the founder of Critical Art Ensemble, a renown art and critical inquiry group whose installations have been in museums, galleries, and classrooms worldwide. A few years ago Steve's wife, Hope, died in her sleep. When the police showed up they found Steve's research materials and after quickly dismissing the possibility that these played any role in Hope's demise, the police brought in the FBI and began an inane bio-terrorism investigation. This eventually led them to an equally silly mail fraud charge against a research scientist, and, in the midst of his struggle against non-Hodgkins lymphoma, the scientist has just agreed to plead guilty to an even lesser charge, still not disclosed. The press release quoted in its entirety below is from the Critical Art Ensemble defense fund, and many links to further information are contained there.

After participating together in an evening of presentations on genetic research and art at a community center in Los Angeles around 2001, where Steve educated the audience on the uses and abuses of genetically modified crops, I spent some time talking with Steve at a friend's home in Silverlake. He is a super-smart, community-minded guy who wants people to think and take control over genetic discourse and genetic material, and all other thought and matter corporate giants want to make their exclusive domain. Rather than the passive, inert matter of Dupont's chemical Zeitgeist, Steve was inspiring people to consciously shape their political and biological worlds.

The thought police do not appreciate such gestures. Use the mail to ship guns? No problem. Use the mail to ship cigarettes? Great! Use the mail to ship something to help educate people beyond the DNA illiteracy? Call the FBI bio-terrorist team and criminalize learning. I'm writing about this on the "states without nations" blog because it's the nationalist paranoia of the Patriot Act that led to Steve's arrest. Here are the details:

October 11, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACTS:
Email: mailto:media@caedefensefund.org
Claire Pentecost: 773-383-9771
Gregory Sholette: 212-865-3076
Edmund Cardoni: 716-854-1694
Igor Vamos: 917-209-3282
Lucia Sommer: 716-359-3061
Dianne Raeke Ferrell: 412-352-2704

SICKNESS, "ABSURD" DOJ PROSECUTION FORCE SCIENTIST TO PLEAD IN
PRECEDENT-SETTING CASE
Scientist's Wife and Daughter Comment on Case

Buffalo, NY - Today in Federal District Court, Dr. Robert Ferrell,
Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate
School of Public Health, under tremendous pressure, pled guilty to
lesser charges rather than facing a prolonged trial for federal
charges of "mail fraud" and "wire fraud" in a surreal post-PATRIOT
Act legal case that has attracted worldwide attention.

"From the beginning, this has been a persecution, not a prosecution.
Although I have not seen the final agreement, the initial versions
contained incorrect and irrelevant information," said Dr. Dianne
Raeke Ferrell, Dr. Ferrell's wife and an Associate Professor of
Special Education and Clinical Services at Indiana University of
Pennsylvania. "Bob is a 27 year survivor of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma
which has reoccurred numerous times. He has also had malignant
melanoma. Since this whole nightmare began, Bob has had two minor
strokes and a major stroke which required months of rehabilitation."

Dr. Ferrell added that her husband was indicted just as he was
preparing to undergo a painful and dangerous autologous stem cell
transplant, the second in 7 years.

The Ferrells' daughter, Gentry Chandler Ferrell, added: "Our family
has struggled with an intense uncertainty about physical, emotional
and financial health for a long time. Agreeing to a plea deal is a
small way for dad to try to eliminate one of those uncertainties and
hold on a little longer to the career he worked so hard to develop...
Sadly, while institutions merely are tarnished from needless
litigation, individuals are torn apart. I remain unable to wrap my
mind around the absurdity of the government's pursuit of this case
and I am saddened that it has been dragged out to the point where my
dad opted to settle from pure exhaustion." (To read Gentry Ferrell's
full statement, please visit:
http://caedefensefund.org/press/ferrellplea.html)

Dr. Ferrell's colleague Dr. Steven Kurtz, founder of the
internationally acclaimed art and theater group Critical Art
Ensemble, was illegally detained and accused of "bioterrorism" by the
U.S. government in 2004 stemming from his acquisition from Dr.
Ferrell of harmless bacteria used in several of Critical Art
Ensemble's educational art projects. After a costly investigation
lasting several months and failing to provide any evidence of
"bioterrorism," the Department of Justice instead brought charges of
"mail fraud" and "wire fraud" against Kurtz and Ferrell. Under the
USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum penalty for these charges has increased
from 5 years to 20. (For more information about the case, please see
"Background to the Case" below or http://caedefensefund.org)

JURIDICAL ART CRITICISM?

The government is vigorously attempting to prosecute two defendants
in a case where no one has been injured, and no one has been
defrauded. The materials found in Dr. Kurtz's house were obtained
legally and used safely by the artist. After three and a half years
of investigation and prosecution, the case still revolves around
$256 worth of common science research materials that were used in
art works by a highly visible and respected group of artists. These
art works were commissioned and hosted by cultural institutions
worldwide where they had been safely displayed in museums and
galleries with absolutely no risk to the public.

The Government has consistently framed this case as an issue of
public safety, but the materials used by Critical Art Ensemble are
widely available, can be purchased by anyone from High School science
supply catalogues, and are regularly mailed.

PROFESSORS OF ART & SCIENCE EXPRESS ALARM

"The government's prosecution is an ill-conceived and misguided
attack on the scientific and artistic communities," said Dr. Richard
Gronostajski, Professor of Biochemistry at SUNY Buffalo, where
Professor Kurtz also teaches. "It could have a chilling effect on
future scientific research collaborations, and harm teaching efforts
and interactions between scientists, educators and artists."

"It's deeply alarming that the government could pressure someone of
Dr. Ferrell's stature into agreeing to something like this. The case
threatens all Americans' Constitutionally guaranteed right to
question the actions of their government," said Igor Vamos, Professor
of Integrated Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

PLEA COMES AMIDST OVERWHELMING PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR DEFENDANTS

The plea bargain agreement comes at a time of overwhelming public
support for the two defendants. A film about the case, Strange
Culture - directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson and featuring Tilda
Swinton (Chronicles of Narnia, Michael Clayton), Thomas Jay Ryan
(Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and Peter Coyote (E.T., Erin
Brockovich) - has drawn widespread critical praise and public
interest, with screenings in dozens of U.S. cities after its
selection to open both the 2007 Human Rights Watch International Film
Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival documentary
section. An October 1 screening of the film at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York City drew a crowd of 400 who stayed for an hour
afterward for a discussion with Professor Kurtz, director Hershman
Leeson, and actress Tilda Swinton. Special benefit screenings of the
film in numerous cities have raised thousands of dollars to offset
the two defendants' escalating legal costs.

BACKGROUND TO THE CASE

The legal nightmare of renowned scientist Dr. Robert Ferrell and
artist and professor Dr. Steven Kurtz began in May 2004. Professor
Kurtz and his late wife Hope were founding members of the
internationally exhibited art and theater collective Critical Art
Ensemble. Over the past decade cultural institutions worldwide have
commissioned and hosted Critical Art Ensemble's participatory theater
projects that help the general public understand biotechnology and
the many issues surrounding it. In May 2004 the Kurtzes were
preparing a project examining genetically modified agriculture for
the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, when Hope Kurtz died of
heart failure. Detectives who responded to Professor Kurtz's 911 call
deemed the couple's art suspicious, and called the FBI. Within hours
the artist was illegally detained as a suspected "bioterrorist" as
dozens of federal agents in Hazmat suits sifted through his work and
impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, his cat, and even his
wife's body.

CASE DEPLETES PUBLIC AND PRIVATE RESOURCES

The government has pursued this case relentlessly for three and a
half years, spending enormous amounts of public resources. Most
significantly, the legal battle has exhausted the financial,
emotional, and physical resources of Ferrell and Kurtz; as well as
their families and supporters. The professional and personal lives of
both defendants have suffered tremendously. A trial date has not yet
been established.

Google Explains Jew Results

Google has replied to the petition to remove JewWatch.com from its search engine. No surprise that they won't remove the site, but their reply is more than a standard form letter and offers some interesting, though not entirely persuasive thoughts, on why anti-Semitic results appear.

f you recently used Google to search for the word "Jew," you may have seen results that were very disturbing. We assure you that the views expressed by the sites in your results are not in any way endorsed by Google. We'd like to explain why you're seeing these results when you conduct this search.

A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query. Sometimes subtleties of language cause anomalies to appear that cannot be predicted. A search for "Jew" brings up one such unexpected result.

If you use Google to search for "Judaism," "Jewish" or "Jewish people," the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for "Jew" different? One reason is that the word "Jew" is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word "Jewish" when talking about members of their faith. The word has become somewhat charged linguistically, as noted on websites devoted to Jewish topics such as these:

* http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mendele/vol01/vol01.174
* http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/jonah081500.asp

Someone searching for information on Jewish people would be more likely to enter terms like "Judaism," "Jewish people," or "Jews" than the single word "Jew." In fact, prior to this incident, the word "Jew" only appeared about once in every 10 million search queries. Now it's likely that the great majority of searches on Google for "Jew" are by people who have heard about this issue and want to see the results for themselves.

The beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google, as well as the opinions of the general public, do not determine or impact our search results. Individual citizens and public interest groups do periodically urge us to remove particular links or otherwise adjust search results. Although Google reserves the right to address such requests individually, Google views the comprehensiveness of our search results as an extremely important priority. Accordingly, we do not remove a page from our search results simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints concerning it. We will, however, remove pages from our results if we believe the page (or its site) violates our Webmaster Guidelines, if we believe we are required to do so by law, or at the request of the webmaster who is responsible for the page.

We apologize for the upsetting nature of the experience you had using Google and appreciate your taking the time to inform us about it.

Sincerely,
The Google Team

I applaud Google's interest in ordinary language philosophy, i.e., the different motives for the use of "Jew" as distinct from "Jewish" or "Judaism." However suggestive their hypotheses, they are not entirely satisfying. First, most of the sites that appear when people use "Jew" are not "disturbing," including what is now the second-ranked site, the Wikipedia entry, which used to be first until this controversy appeared to bump up the JewWatch.com ranking to #1. Also, Google makes an uncharacteristically inaccurate statement about its own search engine: if you type in "Jews" and not "Jew," JewWatch.com also appears as the second site on the list (after the Wikipedia entry) and the third url on the list is for Jews for Jesus. And finally, as I pointed out yesterday, the explanation does not explain why similar results do not show up when people enter "Christian" or "Muslim."

While the details of Google's response are not entirely accurate, the spirit of its engagement is a welcome change from corporate double-speak that ignores the substantive issues. Their engagement, if not expertise in linguistics and counting (the results in their own search engine), are much appreciated.

Website Banning Petition in Progress

A few hours ago my girlfriend received a note forwarded from her mother's friend, asking her to sign a petition to remove "JewWatch.com" from the Google search engine. The note tells people, correctly, that JewWatch.com comes up very high on the google.com search engine if you type "jew." It was the second entry, after the Wikipedia entry. (A website has a high ranking on the google pages if a lot of people visit it through the google keyword searches or if a lot of other sites link to it, which the google engine can figure out by crawling through the web and finding the urls on other pages.)

The message says the site is anti-Semitic and tells recipients that if 500,000 people sign a petition requesting its removal from the search engine, Google will oblige. (The petition itself states Google will do this with a mere 50,000 signatures.)

I find it hard to believe that Google will in fact remove a site from its search regardless of the number of people who request this. If it does, this is a well-kept secret in the normally transparent Google operation, as its not mentioned in any of the means for removing site content. Hard to prove a negative, so I have a query into the Google Press Center about this.

The emailed message does raise an interesting question, and it's not about whether google should remove the site. (Of course not. That's a no-brainer for anyone who doesn't want their viewing habits controlled by the preferences of 50,000 or 500,000 people with too much time on their hands, though not enough time to realize that their messages are going to send people to the JewWatch.com site and further bolster its ranking.)

The intriguing question is why would JewWatch.com be the second site listed when "jew" is entered? Moreover, what does it mean that other entries on the first google page for "jew" are actually much more pernicious than JewWatch, including "The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem," a 1920 anti-Semitic screed by Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford car company. That site also includes links to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and other creepy sites.

I tried typing in "Christian," "Muslim" to see if something similar occurred, but it didn't. One reason is probably that Christians comprise 33% of the world's population and about 20% are Muslim. Jews are fewer than one half of one per cent of the world's population. Assuming that people who are members of a group are more favorably disposed to that group than those who are not, chances are that in absolute numbers, a lot more people are not-Jews than not-Christian or not-Muslim. If ten percent of Jews are not favorably disposed to Muslims and Christians, that's about 138,000 potential anti-Muslim or anti-Muslim website viewers. If 10 percent of Muslims (120 million) and 10 percent of Christians (198 million) hate Jews, that's 318 million people, more than enough for a robust Google ranking.

The sites that appear if you type "jew" are not just anti-Zionist or "anti-Israel Lobby" sites, to use the less charged language of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. These are sites that denounce people as Jews, and not just those who favor Israel.

The obvious reason for the sites' popularity is that a ton of people fear and hate Jews. However this is not a reason but another question. Why? What's going on with the hypothetical ten percent driving these rankings, people markedly singling out Jews and not other minority groups for international approbation? While it's true that hatred is more likely toward a religion other than one's own, the first pages of Google hits for "Confucian" or "Zoroastrians"--religions with fewer adherents than Judaism--display no links to hate-filled websites.

I don't think the answer is the one that B'nai B'rith has in mind but rather, that it lies in Israel's own policies that conflate Jewishness with Israeliness and hence encourage those who oppose Israel to oppose Jews. When I was living in Istanbul and a Turkish sect supporting Al Qaeda blew up nearby synagogues in 2003 and killed 29 Jewish Turks while they were worshiping, Israel arrived to assist with the removal of corpses and the investigation. Much to the country's dismay, the bodies were buried with Israeli and not Turkish flags. Perhaps this was the decision of the families, or of the Turkish government to show their solidarity and appreciation of Israeli aid. But this decision to collapse dying for being Jewish with the celebration of Israel was not made by the folks running JewWatch or other anti-Semitic sites.

Indeed Israel puts itself forward as a Jewish state. It allows anyone who can prove Jewish descent to become a citizen and denies this to anyone not already in its borders, including those who have been removed by force. It is therefore not all that surprising that Jews and not just the Israel lobby would be held responsible for the crimes committed by and in the name of Israel. Indeed to do otherwise, which has been demanded of outsiders since Israel's founding, is to expect a high if not absurd level of sophistication. During World War Two the United States government interned its own citizens if they happened to be Japanese. If Franklin Delano Roosevelt, married to a great civil rights leader, could conflate nationality with ethnicity, then it seems unsurprising that folks with far less cosmopolitan aspirations would do the same.

This does not mean that FDR was correct in assessing the loyalty of his citizens. The confusion reflects that nationality creates ethnicity: Ireland makes possible "the Irish," Korea "the Koreans," and so forth. Before Judaism was Judaism, the Israelites were a nation, one that God told Abraham he would choose for covenant. (Jews were named such much later, by the Romans after the largest tribe in Judea.) Yes, anti-Semitism existed before the modern state of Israel. Long before that. But it did not exist before Israel the patrilineal nation of descent, the one following from the lineage of Abraham before becoming matrilineal after the destruction of the Second Temple. In both cases, belonging to the Jewish or Israeli nation is largely a matter of descent and kinship, just like all other nations, a mark of belonging and therefore of exclusion as well.

If Jews want to stop being targeted in the fight against Israel, then Israel needs to forsake its status as a Jewish nation, and join all other countries in opening their borders. The best way to make sure JewWatch goes away, is to remove the Muslim Watch at the Israeli borders.