LA and DC march details follow these wonderful essays. -Ed
The Nation, September 19th, 2005 Theocracy Lite, by Katha Pollitt So now we know what "noble cause" Cindy Sheehan's son died for in Iraq: Sharia. It's a good thing W stands for women, or I'd be worried. The new Constitution, drafted under heavy pressure from the Administration, sets aside the secular personal law under which Iraqis have lived for nearly half a century in favor of theocracy lite. "Islam is the official religion of the state and is a basic source of legislation," Article 2 begins--the spin is that this language is a victory because Islam is not the source. "(a) No law can be passed that contradicts the undisputed rules of Islam." On the other hand, "(b) No law can be passed that contradicts the principles of democracy" and "(c) No law can be passed that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms outlined in this constitution"--as in, for example, Article 14: "Iraqis are equal before the law without discrimination because of sex," religion, ethnicity and so on. There's enough right here to keep a conclave of political theorists busy for years. Equal before which law? How can women be equal before Islamic law, according to which they are unequal? How can a non-Muslim be equal in a Muslim state? Who decides which Islamic rules are undisputed and which are, well, disputable? As with our own multiple versions of Christianity, doesn't that depend on which imam is holding the Koran? And what happens when (a) (Islam) conflicts with (b) (democracy) or either (a) or (b)--or both--conflict with (c) (human rights)? Don't laugh, it could happen. Fortunately, the Constitution has come up with just the thing to settle those knotty questions--a Supreme Federal Court "made up of a number of judges and experts in Sharia (Islamic Law) and law." As prowar pundits are quick to remind us, it's a lot like our own Constitution--except for the official religion part, and that's not for lack of effort by Justice Scalia. Bush has professed himself delighted with the document. "This Constitution is one that honors women's rights and freedom of religion," he announced in Arizona, where he was taking a vacation from his vacation. The freedom-of-religion bit alludes to a slightly bewildering provision that seems to hold out the possibility of separate courts for each religion. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, the head of Iran's ultra-Shiite Guardian Council, isn't too worried by this ecumenical gesture: "Fortunately, after years of effort and expectations in Iraq, an Islamic state has come to power and the Constitution has been established on the basis of Islamic precepts." We don't yet know what any of this means concretely, but if Iraq turns out to resemble Iran--and boosting Iran's regional influence was another thing Casey Sheehan died for--women have a lot to look forward to: being married off at the age of 9, being a co-wife, having unequal rights to divorce and child custody, inheriting half as much as their brothers, having their testimony in court counted as half that of men, winning a rape conviction only if the crime was witnessed by four male Muslims, being imprisoned and flogged for premarital sex, being executed for adultery, needing mandatory permission from husband or father to work, study or travel. Bush supporters who find any of this disturbing--hello? Independent Women's Forum?--can console themselves with the thought that, as former CIA official Reuel Marc Gerecht said on Meet the Press, "women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy." Another plus: Ayatollah al-Sistani is antichoice. According to his website, sistani.org, even a rape victim can have an abortion only if her relatives would murder her for getting pregnant. So Iraqi fetuses are all set. Is this what all those purple fingers were about? They looked like a nation demanding democracy from reluctant occupiers but really they were making an ethnic and religious power grab? In 2004 Iraqi women's groups, quietly backed by then-US occupation chief Paul Bremer, forced the Governing Council to rescind Resolution 137, which would have replaced secular family law with Sharia. That was reassuring to those who wanted to believe that the US government was on some sort of Wilsonian human-rights mission. This time around we're supposed to take comfort in the promise of secular courts for those who prefer them, in the banning of honor killings and in the Constitution's transitional 25 percent set-aside for women in Parliament, even as Sunni and Shiite theocratic gangs assault and murder unveiled educated and professional women who venture out alone. "We have lost all the gains we made over the last thirty years," said Safia Taleb al-Souhail, last seen sitting in the balcony with Laura at the State of the Union address, smiling and waving her purple finger. "It's a big disappointment." Even blunter words come from Dr. Raja Kuzai, an obstetrician and secular Shiite who served in the assembly's Constitution-writing committee and, as the President tells it, greeted him as "My Liberator" when she visited the Oval Office in 2003: "I think it is over now," she writes in the San Antonio Express-News. "I want the American people to know that our dreams are gone, our work was in vain. There will be no future for our children and our grandchildren in the new Iraq. The future is for the clerics. They will lead the country.... This is not the democracy we dreamed of. This is the dictatorship of the majority!" Dr. Kuzai has announced that she is leaving Iraq. It always seemed a little strange to me that Bush was carrying the standard of secularism and pluralism and women's rights in the Muslim world when he is so keen against all three here at home. In the liberal hawks' fantasy war, Bush was the love child of Mary Wollstonecraft and Voltaire, striding forth to battle the combined forces of Osama bin Laden and Jacques Derrida. Sometimes I thought that to Bush, as an evangelical Christian, even the Enlightenment was better than Islam, the rival faith. But given the way things are turning out, it's clear that Bush's world is big enough for two kinds of religious mania: America gets creationism, Iraqis get Sharia. Fundamentalists get both countries, and women get the shaft. *** CounterPunch - Sep 15, 2005 http://www.counterpunch.org/landau09152005.html "Call Me Bush-tail..." Bush, God and Katrina By SAUL LANDAU In literature, God has sent warnings. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville's sea saga, Captain Ahab refused to recognize God's limits. The white whale (God's creature?) warns Ahab in a first encounter by chewing off the captain's leg. Instead of respecting this admonition, the commander of the commercial whaling vessel sought revenge domination over nature, in the form of a large animal. Ahab moved decisively to assert domination over the natural order. In Life, George Bush froze unscripted-when world-shaking issues fell onto his morally weak shoulders. Suffering and death confound him. Perhaps Barbara traumatized the seven year old W when little sister died of leukemia? The day after the funeral, the Bushes played a round of golf the proper set dealing with death. Barbara, according to Dr. Justin Frank, had trouble connecting emotionally with her son. W's father also played a role in W's "character pathology: "emotional and physical absence during his son's youth triggered feelings of both adoration and revenge." The President suffers from "grandiosity" and megalomania." He sees himself, America and God as interchangeable. Bush on the Couch 2004 Indeed, as US troops invaded Iraq, commerce secretary Don Evans said that "Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation at this time." (Judy Keen, USA Today, April 2, 2003) W's spiritual adviser Rev. James Robison W said that Bush told him: 'I feel like God wants me to run for President. I can't explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me. Something is going to happen... I know it won't be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.' The Observer, November 2, 2003, On 9/11 something did happen. But W didn't disentangle himself from the plot of My Pet Goat, which he continued to read to Florida second graders for seven minutes after aides told him a jet had flow into the Twin Towers. A day later he emerged from his daze. He didn't appear at the scene of the tragedy until September 14. Likewise, when Katrina struck, God apparently didn't tell Bush to go to the tragedy site. The Pres remained on vacation, jogged and did fundraisers and other religious work. After five days, Bush finally visited the disaster site. Was anyone less qualified to "love thy neighbor as thyself?" Unable to overcome his emotional learning disability, inability to grasp emotionally or intellectually the scope of the human tragedy, he posed for photo ops by hugging women and then joked about his drinking days in "N'Oleans." "Very funny," said the diseased and half dead. Then Bush talked with sincerity about how Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) a multi millionaire-- had also lost a house. But he would replace it with "a fantastic house - and I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch." How better to humiliate the world's most powerful nation then to saddle it with a Bush in the midst of a tragedy? How best to show limits to arrogant Americans then by placing in charge a bungler incapable of responding to other people's pain? After even the toady media recognized his incompetence, White House handlers scripted return visits to the disaster sites. But deep inside, W wanted to return to his Eden, Crawford, a place to enjoy riding bikes and jogging. His mother Barbara had, after all, reassured him and the nation that since "so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this-this [she emits a chuckle referring to government programs] is working very well for them." She saw the evacuation of people to Houston as an example of her boy's successful administration. "What I'm hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. Almost everyone I've talked to says we're going to move to Houston" (Barbara Bush, after touring the devastated areas, NPR "Marketplace" September 5). Bush had described himself as a leader and "leaders lead." But God did not imbued W with take charge qualities. Bush doesn't grasp difficult situations and therefore can't see how to deal with them. He looked down from Air Force One at the broken 17th Street levee through which water flooded New Orleans. Then W landed and spoke about the urgent need to control lawlessness, not suffering and death. He probably forgot Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's wisdom on looting. Rummy had ordered US troops not to crack down "on looting in Iraq because it might alienate the Iraqi people they are trying to win over." Rumsfeld understood looting as part of a process. "U.S. forces should not be blamed for the lawlessness and looting in Baghdad as it is a natural consequence of the transition from a dictatorship to a free country" (UPI 4/11/03). After his initial display of unconcern, Bush returned to Louisiana and toured with Senator Landrieu, who initially believed he was making "a real and significant effort to get a handle on a major cause of this catastrophe." But when she flew over the same "critical spot again this morning, less than 24 hours later" she realized it had been nothing more than "a hastily prepared stage set for a Presidential photo opportunity; and the desperately needed resources we saw were this morning reduced to a single, lonely piece of equipment. The people of southeast Louisiana and the Gulf Coast deserve far better from their national government..." (Landrieu, September 3 press release) As a religious man Bush knew that God created man and then woman. Intelligent design? But Bush did not understand God's subsequent ambivalence toward his creations. After they committed their initial sin, from which of course they received knowledge and guile and got tossed out of Eden for their disobedience, they lacked a collective brain. So, Adam and Eve and their progeny began a long process of destroying His perfect environment. Think of the millennia in which He watched people systematically erode His sculpture. With the industrial revolution, the attack on His intelligent design became downright ferocious. Assaults on thousands of His species, the ozone layers and the air, water and soil might well have offended even the most patient of gods. Massive green house gas emission altered the very framework of His opus. Did God vindictively choose Bush to administer at times of great catastrophes? He knew that the Bush family chose its servants on the basis of loyalty. So He must have smiled smugly when Bush chose Michael Brown to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA. Brown lost his previous position as head of the Arabian Horse Association by apparently not properly organizing horse shows. But for the Bushes, subservience was the perfect trait for servants. Bush picked him first as deputy director and then head of FEMA when the director resigned. Brown shared Bush's ignorance of suffering. After Katrina struck, Kate Hale, former Miami-Dade emergency management chief, said Brown had "done a hell of a job, because I'm not aware of any Arabian horses being killed in this storm." Brown apparently didn't understand that FEMA, his agency, was created to handle disasters. "The U.S. Forest Service had water-tanker aircraft available to help douse the fires raging on our riverfront," said Senator Landrieu, "but FEMA has yet to accept the aid. When Amtrak offered trains to evacuate significant numbers of victims-far more efficiently than buses-FEMA again dragged its feet. Offers of medicine, communications equipment and other desperately needed items continue to flow in, only to be ignored by the agency." (September 3, 2005, Landrieu press release) Brown admitted to Paula Zahn that "The federal government did not even know about the convention center people until today." (CNN, September 1, 2005). "I think the other thing that really caught me by surprise," he said, "was the fact that there were so many people, and I'm not laying blame, but either chose not to evacuate or could not evacuate. And as we began to do the evacuations from the Superdome, all of a sudden, literally thousands of other people started showing up in other places, and we were not prepared for that. We were, we were surprised by that." While corpses floated in the waters that filled New Orleans, Brown patted himself on the back. "Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans - virtually a city that has been destroyed - things are going relatively well." (CNN) Critics of Bush's handling of Katrina assume that citizens deserve efficiency and compassion from the federal government. But Bush's response to catastrophe, judging from his behavior during the Katrina aftermath, appeared to be as punisher of the poor, not the rich -- not provider. In 1785, Thomas Jefferson, reflected on slavery. "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. His justice cannot sleep forever." Was Jefferson's God defining justice as sardonic revenge not only by inflicting us with Katrina, but placing George W. Bush as chief administrator of its aftermath? [Saul Landau is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.] --- Join Mass March and Rally in L.A. >From Iraq to New Orleans Fund People's Needs, Not the War Machine STOP THE WAR IN IRAQ, MARCH & RALLY! SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 24th MARCH: 12 NOON at Olympic & Broadway, Downtown LA RALLY: 1:30 PM at the Federal Building, Los Angeles & Temple Call ANSWER for more information: 323-464-1636 Co-Sponsors: L.A. County Federation of Labor, Alliance for Just and Lasting Peace in the Philippines, Coalition for World Peace, Committee for Justice to Defend the LA 8, Free Palestine Alliance, Frente Unido de los Pueblos Americanos, Gabriella Network, Global Resistance Network, Global Women's Strike, Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, International Socialist Organization, Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, KMB - Pro-People Youth, Korean Americans for Peace, Latino Movement USA, Muslim Students Association-West, National Council of Arab Americans, National Committee to Free the Cuban Five, National Lawyers Guild, Office of the Americas, Palestinian American Women's Association, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Peace and Freedom Party, South Asian Network, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), U.S. Labor Against War, Youth & Student A.N.S.W.E.R. --- Demonstration in Washington, DC - Sept 24, 2005 INFO: Bus Drop Off, Parking, Maps, Tabling, Contingents, Housing & More! Click on link below to obtain essential information for the September 24th rally and demonstration in Washington, DC. Courtesy of the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition. http://answer.pephost.org/site/News2?abbr=ANS_&page=NewsArticle&id=6793 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> 1.2 million kids a year are victims of human trafficking. 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