The corporate mass media (especially television) did not treat the Chilean mine collapse as a labor story but rather as a feel-good human interest story. It not only avoided asking hard questions about why the near-disaster occurred and why the mine workers could be treated like guinea pigs by their employers, it actively obscured these questions. I saw a psychobabbling guest of Tony Harris on CNN actually talking about how the Chilean government is the father figure for the miners and their supporters and people are turning to it for succor and inspiration. I threw up a little in my mouth.
So here are the questions that a social historian would ask about the sorry episode, and which I never heard anyone on television news ask during all the wall to wall coverage:
1. What were the miners mining? (A.: Gold and copper).
2. Did the high price of gold and the fact that the mining company was close to bankruptcy cause the company executives to cut corners?
Americans who are surprised at Lebanese appreciation of Iran should remember that when the Israel-Hizbullah war broke out in summer 2006, the Bush administration initially actively opposed a ceasefire that could have saved hundreds of Lebanese civilian lives and could have spared billions of dollars in infrastructure. When someone is being intensively bombarded from the air and you attempt to put off a ceasefire, you are not a friend of the country being bombed.
Eldad said, “If the Iranian President were in the Israeli army’s line of fire the day he chooses to throw rocks against Israel then he should not be allowed to return home alive.”
Israel’s vice premier, Silvan Shalom, distanced himself from Eldad’s remarks, saying that Israel does not kill heads of state.
The USG Open Source Center translates or transcribes other reactions from Israel:
Israeli Sources Comment on Lebanon Visit; MK: IDF Should Kill Ahmadinezhad
Israel — OSC Summary
Wednesday, October 13, 2010 …
PM Bureau Source: Ahmadinezhad Visit Completes Lebanon’s Transformation Into Iran Protectorate. Nir Yahav reports in Tel Aviv Walla! in Hebrew, website of leading news service, at 1515 GMT: “‘Ahmadinezhad’s visit to Lebanon completes the process of Lebanon’s transformation into an Iranian protectorate,’ a senior prime minister’s bureau source said today in reaction to the Iranian president’s visit to Lebanon. The source added that ‘Lebanon has thereby joined the axis of radical states that oppose the peace process and support terrorism. The Iranian president is there in the capacity of a supreme commander reviewing his troops, the Hizballah terrorists, who are Iran’s military arm in the region.
“Netanyahu’s bureau sources further said that ‘anyone concerned about peace and freedom should be worried about Iran’s brazen display of power. Lebanon, which has the right to peace and prosperity, has become the Iranian aggressor’s lackey.’” …
Deputy Minister, Mayors Fly Balloons on Border, Protest Ahmadinezhad’s ‘Warmongering’ the Jerusalem Channel 1 Television Online in English reports at 1126 GMT: “Several dozen people demonstrated near the northern border in Metula to protest Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit in Lebanon. Ynet reports that Knesset member Ayoub Kara (Likud) was among the demonstrators. He called on the Lebanese people to prevent an Iranian takeover of their country.”
Walla! further reports at 1138 GMT: “In anticipation of the Iranian president’s arrival in Lebanon, Israeli mayors came to the Fatma Gate (near the Lebanese border) to fly blue and white balloons in the air. Deputy Minister Ayyub Qara, who participated in the event, said: ‘The world should remember that the state was established following 2,000 years the Jews spent in the diasporah.’
She also warned against the imposition of what she called Muslim sharia law on Americans and said they would never put up with it.
Give me a break. No one is working harder to impose a religious law code on Americans than Palin herself. Palin is one of those people who says she would like to forbid abortion even in cases of rape or danger to the mother’s life. Palin’s hostility to pro-choice positions derives from her belief in the supremacy of Christian law, which she wants to impose on all Americans. For more see my classic Salon essay on how many of Palin’s stances track with sharia or actually are more rigid.
Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, and says it does not want one and would not accept one. There is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly certified that no nuclear material is being diverted to military purposes from Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities in Natanz near Isfahan.
In contrast, the United States and Russia each has thousands of nuclear warheads, and smaller nuclear arsenals are possessed by Britain, France, China, and Israel.
It is difficult to see how Iran, a poor weak state with virtually no air force to speak of, and which is defenseless against a nuclear-armed superpower, could possibly cause an ‘Armageddon’ or show-down battle ushering in the Last Days
As for sharia, this allegation that Muslims are conspiring to impose their religious law on the United States is just propaganda from an American right wing that has destroyed the US economy and weakened the constitution, and has no one to blame for it but themselves. So they have nothing to run on but fear. They tried making Americans afraid of Latinos, but there are so many Latino voters that the tactic caused them to crash and burn. They needed a small group to position as threatening to middle America. They really miss the Communists. You could always run against the Communists, and there were hardly any in the US, so there was no down side.
So now they are coming after the some 6 million American Muslims.
Sharia does not have a fixed meaning. It is the living tradition of Muslim religious law. It is analogous to Roman Catholic canon law. What Palin is doing is similar to raising an alarm that the country’s 80 million Catholics have a secret plan to make canon law the law of the land and impose it on clueless Protestant Americans.
Ooops. The one place where attempts are being made to make the US conform to canon law is law around abortion, which is forbidden in Roman Catholic law but allowed in American law.
And guess what. Sarah Palin agrees with the imposition of canon law in that area of forbidding abortions.
US law already overlaps with Muslim sharia in the essentials. Sharia law forbids murder. It forbids theft. Etc.
Most of the elements of sharia to which Americans might object are traditional and are being reformed by Muslims themselves. Thus, sharia traditionally allowed a man to take up to four wives. But in many Muslim countries that practice has been curtailed. Or people think about harsh punishments such as stoning for adultery. But the Qur’an does not mention stoning anyone, and stoning adulterers is actually a feature of Jewish law or halakha that was probably brought into Islam by rabbi converts in the 8th or 9th century. Egypt has made the age of marriage 18, even though Muslim legal tradition allowed marriage at a much earlier age. But then Roman Catholic canon law in the medieval era set the marriage age at 12, as did Jewish religious law. All religious systems of law in the medieval period tended to allow marriage with the onset of puberty. Americans who get all high and mighty about sharia should remember that 18th century British law prescribed hanging for minor theft.
There is no mechanism whereby Muslim religious law could be imposed on Americans (it would have to be legislated by Congress, which is much more likely to make us live by Leviticus). The US Supreme Court has ruled that a law may not be passed if it does not have a secular purpose (that is why we can work on Sundays now; blue laws don’t have a secular purpose.
But since the United States has an Anglo-Saxon, common law legal system that privileges custom as a source of law, it is inevitable that judges will occasionally have to take sharia into account when adjudicating disputes among American Muslims. US judges can take precedents from anywhere, and have occasionally cited rulings of, e.g., the Indian Supreme Court. The only way to avoid this situation would be to adopt the Napoleonic code and give up on custom and precedent as contributors to law. That would be a much bigger break with American legal traditions than merely occasionally citing Muslim legal practice in settling disputes among Muslims.
Some 250 Lebanese notables signed a letter to Ahmadinejad condemning his visit and what they saw as an attempt to position Lebanon as an Iranian military base abutting Israel. The signatories favor the Future movement of PM Saad Hariri or one of his political allies, often called “March 14″ after the date of the large demonstrations they mounted in 2005 in favor of a Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon (a wish they got.) Although Lebanon at the moment has a national unity government, since 2005 the Shiite fundamentalist, pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian Hizbullah Party has often been in the political opposition to Hariri. Rumors are swirling that a tribunal may implicate persons with Hizbullah ties in the 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the father of the current prime minister, and many fear Sunni-Shiite strife were such a conclusion to be publicized.
Ahmadinejad called Saudi King Abdallah, Syrian president Bashar al-Asad and Jordanian king Abdallah II before coming. The Saudis consider Lebanon a part of their sphere of influence and Sunni prime minister Saad Hariri is widely seen as a Saudi surrogate in the country. (The late Rafiq Hariri had made his money in Saudi Arabia and became close to King Fahd before becoming prime minister in the 1990s). Ahmadinejad may have been attempting to calm Saudi nerves about the visit and to assure Riyadh that Iran had no intention of taking over Beirut all together (the Hizbullah and Amal Parties that organize Lebanon’s Shiites are as favorable toward Iran as Hariri is toward Saudi Arabia.)
‘ Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Middle East’s populist answer to the American tea party, has stirred controversy with his trip to Lebanon, which will begin Wednesday. He is planning to visit villages in southern Lebanon on the border with Israel that have been rebuilt with Iranian aid after Israeli incursions and wars, the last in 2006. Ahmadinejad’s theatrical politics often make him a laughingstock, but his trip is intended to make the serious point that Tehran can stand up to Western sanctions and thwart attempts to box the Islamic Republic in.’
Palestinians declined to take the bait of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Monday. Netanyahu offered an extension of the 10-month freeze on new Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank in return for a PA acknowledgment of Israel as a “Jewish State.” Obviously, the phrase has some covert significance for the Israeli Right, and perhaps it is intended to bestow on Israel a right to denaturalize and expel Palestinian-Israelis. The phrase may also be intended to forestall any return to Israel of the Palestinians ethnically cleansed from that territory in 1948.
Israeli foreign minister and far-right social engineer Avigdor Lieberman lost his temper Sunday in a meeting with the Spanish and French foreign ministers. He told them to go solve Europe’s own disputes before coming to the Mideast and instructing Israel how to resolve its. Lieberman is then accused in some quarters of having leaked his comments to the press, embarrassing Spain and France. He is said to have pointed to France’s ban on the niqab or full Muslim face veil, and to Switzerland’s ban on minarets as signs of European difficulty in dealing with Muslims.
(Lieberman does not appear to understand the difference between banning the niqab, which is worn by almost no one in Europe, and keeping over 4 million human beings for decades in a condition of statelessness wherein they have no real human or civil rights.)
Spain and France, undeterred, continued their fact-finding mission in the region. France’s Bernard Kouchner even admitted that it may be necessary to go to the United Nations for a declaration on a Palestinian state.
Abbas raises the possibility that if the negotiations with Netanyahu continue to be frozen, he would go to the UN General Assembly with a plan for a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, to be blessed by the UNO.
The problem is that although the UN could give Palestine a seat as a nation, unless the Israeli army were induced to withdraw from the West Bank and to cease blockading Gaza (which is being economically strangled by an illegal and inhumane Israeli ban on civilian exports), the resulting “state” would remain a fantasy.
If NATO would agree to reassign the troops now beginning to withdraw from Afghanistan to Palestine, and would face down any Israeli intransigence, now that would be a plan.
But nothing so dramatic is likely to ensue. Fanatics like Lieberman have taken over Israel and they have no future in a Muslim Middle East that is now growing faster than Israel economically and which is likely to become more and more militarily and scientifically sophisticated. As Obama’s initiative for a two-state solution is thwarted by the Liebermans and Netanyahus, their actions guarantee that Israel’s future in coming decades is bleak. Unfortunately, the attendant trouble generated by that bleakness is likely to fall on the heads of all our children.
You know that New York Times story that implicated a ‘tag team’ of virus and fungus in the collapse of American bee colonies? And how it implicitly exonerated pesticides, which are among the prime suspects in the bee plague?
CNN reports that it turns out the author of the study on which the NYT depended is funded by Bayer and may have ulterior reasons for downplaying the role of pesticides, some of which were banned in Europe because it was found that they were killing off the bees. The question is why the bees suddenly became vulnerable to fungi and viruses that had long been around. And the pesticides can’t be ruled out.
The NYT reporter on being queried said that the author of the study had not ‘volunteered’ the sources of his funding.
As for bees, they are crucial to pollination and the health of many plant species.
