from the San Francisco Chronicle
Jon Carroll
Friday, April 8, 2005
The following is the first communique from a group calling itself
Unitarian Jihad. It was sent to me at The Chronicle via an
anonymous spam remailer. I have no idea whether other news
organizations have received this communique, and, if so, why they
have not chosen to print it. Perhaps they fear starting a panic. I
feel strongly that the truth, no matter how alarming, trivial or
disgusting, must always be told. I am pleased to report that the
words below are at least not disgusting:
Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are
Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one
God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God,
with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the
possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was
noted with love by the secretary.
Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States! Too long
has your attention been waylaid by the bright baubles of extremist
thought. Too long have fundamentalist yahoos of all religions
(except Buddhism -- 14-5 vote, no abstentions, fundamentalism
subcommittee) made your head hurt. Too long have you been buffeted
by angry people who think that God talks to them. You have a right
to your moderation! You have the power to be calm! We will use the
IED of truth to explode the SUV of dogmatic expression!
People of the United States, why is everyone yelling at you???
Whatever happened to ... you know, everything? Why is the news
dominated by nutballs saying that the Ten Commandments have to be
tattooed inside the eyelids of every American, or that Allah has
told them to kill Americans in order to rid the world of Satan, or
that Yahweh has instructed them to go live wherever they feel like,
or that Shiva thinks bombing mosques is a great idea? Sister
Immaculate Dagger of Peace notes for the record that we mean no
disrespect to Jews, Muslims, Christians or Hindus. Referred back to
the committee of the whole for further discussion.
We are Unitarian Jihad. We are everywhere. We have not been born
again, nor have we sworn a blood oath. We do not think that God
cares what we read, what we eat or whom we sleep with. Brother
Neutron Bomb of Serenity notes for the record that he does not have
a moral code but is nevertheless a good person, and Unexalted
Leader Garrote of Forgiveness stipulates that Brother Neutron Bomb
of Serenity is a good person, and this is to be reflected in the
minutes.
Beware! Unless you people shut up and begin acting like grown-ups
with brains enough to understand the difference between political
belief and personal faith, the Unitarian Jihad will begin a series
of terrorist-like actions. We will take over television studios,
kidnap so-called commentators and broadcast calm, well-reasoned
discussions of the issues of the day. We will not try for "balance"
by hiring fruitcakes; we will try for balance by hiring
non-ideologues who have carefully thought through the issues.
We are Unitarian Jihad. We will appear in public places and require
people to shake hands with each other. (Sister Hand Grenade of Love
suggested that we institute a terror regime of mandatory hugging,
but her motion was not formally introduced because of lack of a
quorum.) We will require all lobbyists, spokesmen and campaign
managers to dress like trout in public. Televangelists will be
forced to take jobs as Xerox repair specialists. Demagogues of all
stripes will be required to read Proust out loud in prisons.
We are Unitarian Jihad, and our motto is: "Sincerity is not
enough." We have heard from enough sincere people to last a
lifetime already. Just because you believe it's true doesn't make
it true. Just because your motives are pure doesn't mean you are
not doing harm. Get a dog, or comfort someone in a nursing home, or
just feed the birds in the park. Play basketball. Lighten up. The
world is not out to get you, except in the sense that the world is
out to get everyone.
Brother Gatling Gun of Patience notes that he's pretty sure the
world is out to get him because everyone laughs when he says he is
a Unitarian. There were murmurs of assent around the room, and
someone suggested that we buy some Congress members and really
stick it to the Baptists. But this was deemed against Revolutionary
Principles, and Brother Gatling Gun of Patience was remanded to the
Sunday Flowers and Banners committee.
People of the United States! We are Unitarian Jihad! We can strike
without warning. Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear
as if from nowhere! Nice people will run the government again!
There will be coffee and cookies in the Gandhi Room after the
revolution.
This startling new underground group spreads lack of panic! Citizens
declare themselves "relatively unafraid" of threats of undeclared
rationality. People can still go to France, terrorist leader says.
Michael row the boat ashore, and then get some of the local kids to
pull the boat onto the dock, and come visit with
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
***
From: "Henry Norr" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, April 09, 2005 1:25 PM
Subject: RE: [alliance] the most important political news in North America
only on KPFA ,Apr 8, 2005
I'm not often moved to defend the NY Times, but my copy of Friday's edition
has a front-page story on the desafuero. It's staff-written, not AP. It
leads not with Fox's defense, but with "In a vote that casts doubt on the
legitimacy of Mexico's fledgling democracy,...." And it puts the crowd at
"hundreds of thousands," not 100,000.
On Thursday the Times also ran an editorial saying "The campaign for
president of Mexico has taken on the air of the bad old days..." and calling
the charges against Lopez Obrador "transparently political." It's generally
disparaging of AMLO, labeling him a "demogogue" among other things, but
it concludes "He may not be the right man for the presidency, but that issue
should be for Mexico's electorate to decide."
In fact, I'm sorry to say, the Times picked up on this issue well before
Pacifica, as far as I can tell - they've run several news stories and a
strong op-ed about it over the last couple of months.
The Times is not alone on this in the corporate media. The other day week
the Washington Post also ran a editorial opposing the desafuero, declaring
that "Mr. Lopez Obrador's disqualification would be a disaster for Mexico's
political system, and perhaps for its long-term stability."
This kind of coverage obviously reflects considerable unease within the U.S.
ruling class, or at least important elements of it, about the risks created
by the exclusion of a political figure as popular as AMLO. Morgan Stanley's
senior analyst on Latin America put out a report saying "I have rarely been
as concerned as I am today regarding the course of political events
unfolding in Mexico." And as usual, the Wall Street Journal gets right to
the point: they had a story the other day headlined "Political Turmoil In
Mexico Poses Economic Threat," with the following lead: "An escalating
political battle over whether the country's most popular politician will be
allowed to run in next year's presidential contest could jeopardize Mexico's
social peace and prove hazardous to investors in the country's financial
markets."
Henry
***
Robin Cook : Why American neocons are out for Kofi Annan's blood
The US is determined to derail the secretary general's progressive reforms
The Guardian Friday April 1, 2005
The debate on Darfur in the UN security council last night is a salutary
reminder that the only hope for peoples abandoned by their own
governments is an effective international community.
It was a Labour government that hosted the conference in postwar London
that gave birth to the UN. Now this Labour government has the opportunity
to modernise it by taking up the challenge of Kofi Annan's blueprint for a
UN
for this century.
The UN was founded in an era when most of its present members were not
independent states, and even fewer were industrialised nations. Nearly all
permanent members got there because they were the victors of the second
world war. To this day Germany and Japan have never overcome their initial
exclusion as the losers, and the new industrialised giants such as Brazil or
India remain in the waiting room.
Not one permanent member represents the Muslim world, although
developing a positive, tolerant relationship between the west and Islam is
one of the most pressing security issues of our time. The obvious solution
is
for Egypt or Indonesia to take one of the four new permanent seats that the
Annan package proposes for Africa and Asia.
New permanent members will not qualify for a veto, which begs the question:
what happens to the veto of the existing five? In truth the British veto is
already vestigial. When I first went to the UN I caused consternation by
asking when we had last deployed the British veto. After much phoning of
retired diplomats, it was established that we had last cast our veto a dozen
years before, bizarrely on a matter relating to the Panama Canal, although I
never found anyone who could remember what exactly had been so
important in Panama that it merited a British veto.
The problem is that to Americans their veto in the UN occupies the same
talismanic role as our veto in the European Union. The best hope is a
self-denying commitment by the permanent five that they will each cast their
veto only on matters of immediate national interest. Britain could start the
log rolling by making such a unilateral statement on its own, which should
not be difficult as we now do not use our veto at all.
The economic and social council of the UN has never achieved the same
status as its security council. The Annan report cogently points out the
perversity of this imbalance, as so much of the agenda of the security
council is taken up with violent conflicts that have their roots in the
failure to
promote peaceful development.
This lack of authority on the part of the economic and social council
produces a failure to coordinate the UN agencies competing against each
other in the same field. It is striking testimony to the difficulty of the
UN in exercising leadership on development that in the controversy over the
appointment of Paul Wolfowitz it is rarely mentioned that the World Bank is
technically a UN body. No one is asking for Kofi Annan to be given a veto
over whether Wolfowitz gets the job, but it does not seem unreasonable to
demand stronger coordination at the centre to stop the World Bank pursuing
neo-liberal policies that are in flat conflict with the development agendas
of other UN agencies.
This brings us to the solid concrete roadblock in the path of the Annan
reforms. The world is confronted with a choice between two competing
models of global governance. The direction signposted by Kofi Annan is to
a regenerated UN with new authority for its collective decisions. However,
collective decision-making is only possible if there is broad equivalence
among those taking part. And there is the rub. The neocons who run the US
administration want supremacy, not equality, for America and hanker after
an alternative model of global governance in which the world is put to right
not by the tedious process of building international consensus, but by the
straightforward exercise of US puissance.
There are ways in which this power can be displayed more subtly than by
dispatching an aircraft carrier. Over the past six months their influence
has been deployed in heavy press briefing against Kofi Annan, to their
shame faithfully taken up by rightwing organs in the British press.
There is a breathtaking hypocrisy to the indictment of Kofi Annan over the
oil for food programme for Iraq. It was the US and the UK who devised the
programme, piloted the UN resolutions that gave it authority, sat on the
committee to administer it and ran the blockade to enforce it. I know
because I spent a high proportion of my time at the Foreign Office trying to
make a success of it. If there were problems with it then Washington and
London should be in the dock alongside the luckless Kofi Annan, who
happened to be general secretary at the time.
But there is a deeper level of perversity to the denigration of Annan by the
American right wing. They have long clamoured for reform of the UN. Kofi
Annan has just proposed the most comprehensive overhaul of the UN in its
history and is the general secretary most likely to deliver support for it.
If they persist in undermining him they are likely to derail his reform
package. The suspicion must be that they would rather have a creaking,
ineffective UN to treat as a coconut shy than a modern, representative
forum that would oblige them to respect collective decisions.
The eccentric selection of John Bolton as Bush's ambassador to the UN is
consistent with such a strategy of sabotage rather than reform. His
hostility to any constraint on US unilateralism is so deep, (and his life so
sad), that he described his "happiest moment" signing the letter to Kofi
Annan telling him that the US would have nothing to do with the
international criminal court. His relish in the gesture is all the more
revealing as the issue was not within the remit of his job, and he pleaded
to be allowed to sign as a special favour.
Ironically the first confrontation the US has faced since his appointment
was the vote last night on the proposal to refer the war crimes in Darfur to
the international criminal court. The problem for Washington unilateralists
in trying to stop it was that the brutality and genocide in Darfur is a
classic case for enforcement of international law through multilateral
process.
To its credit the British government had long made it clear that regardless
of what the US did, they would support the French resolution invoking the
international criminal court. Such a stand is welcome not only as the right
policy for Darfur, but as a demonstration that Britain backs the Annan model
of a modern, multilateral system of global governance and this time at least
has declined to accept US supremacy.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1449863,00.html
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