We Need MORE Criticism of Hamas, not Less

 Since Oct. 7th I have read a lot about the war between Israel and Hamas, I have done a small amount of protesting on the street, I have gotten a letter published in the Boulder Weekly (a widely-read alternative newspaper), I have sent a few messages (in support of the Palestinians) to federal politicians, and I have also taken part in a fair amount of email discussion among a lot of the Boulder County people supporting the Palestinians. In those discussions I encountered two ideas that I think overlap and which I would like to address in this essay. First is the idea that it’s okay for the Palestinians to kill civilians because it’s an “asymmetrical” conflict where the Palestinians don’t have the resources, power, and environment to fight in that the Israelis have. The second idea is that the Israelis have the power to wage peace and the Palestinians don’t and therefore it is the former who need to take the first few steps or so towards peace and the latter can wait until those steps have been taken to reciprocate.

This essay will address these two ideas and to a lesser degree some other aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Since Oct. 7th I have read something like 2,000 words a day about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict- 50% from the BBC, 10% from Juan Cole’s site Informed Comment, 10% from CNN and the rest is miscellaneous. Looking at the 30 years before that I probably read an average of 100-200 words a day about it and it broke down like this- 20% from Juan Cole and about 20% is from the BBC. The rest, about 60% is from various sources, some  mainstream, some progressive, including The Nation, the Washington Post, the Times of Israel, etc.

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Although I only have a BA, it’s in Ethnic Studies and mine includes three courses taught by Ward Churchill (I don’t think this affected how much I learned from him, but he was my faculty advisor (I got an A in all three of the courses he taught)). I have also spent a huge amount of time studying the recent conflict in Northern Ireland (in the last 26 years about 1,000 words a day on average), and that included some things that made me more familiar with the violence than most outside observers (A: I heard a lecture in 2002 by someone who had just months earlier been Chief of Staff of the IRA and B: in 2002 I was in the middle of two riots with the security forces).

In general, I support the Palestinians- in some ways more than many people who support them (in 2002 I got a CU-Boulder group called “Students for Justice in N. Ireland” to endorse the campus Coalition for Justice in Palestine), but in some ways less so (I wasn’t among the brave young people who went there in solidarity with them around 2002). I did a post where I do a pretty good of taking down Zionism and explaining why a one state solution would be better than a two state solution. Here and there in the last six months I say that although I condemn what happened Oct. 7th, I would support something that resembled what the IRA did during The Troubles (a detailed explanation of how I reached the conclusion that the IRA were (OBJECTIVELY) not terrorists is here and a description of the Republican Movement’s (1970-1997) strategy is here).

On the other hand I hate Hamas and always have. Recently I decided that I no longer consider the Palestinian Authority/Palestinian Liberation Organization to be worthy of my support.

I did a post about how incredibly appropriate it is to use the word Apartheid in relation to Israel. That is largely about Israel, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In one way or another, to one degree or another, in the last 17 years residents of the Gaza Strip have had it worse than Palestinians in the West Bank (until recently Gaza was dominated by Israel even though it had no soldiers there (now it’s still dominated (if that’s the right word), in part because there ARE soldiers there)). Those Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza are state-less and thus very close to powerlessness.

So, it’s true that Israel is MUCH more powerful than the Palestinians, and is allied with the most powerful country in the world. The resistance is underground in East Jerusalem, Israel, and the West Bank. Israel has an advanced and conventional military that includes, for example, tanks. Does that asymmetry mean that Hamas shouldn’t be seriously criticized for focusing overwhelmingly on intentionally killing civilians Oct. 7th?

No, it doesn’t mean that. Crucially, the IRA almost never intentionally killed civilians and almost never unintentionally killed civilians and almost never TRIED to kill civilians (I explain how I came to those conclusions here). The IRA was of course an underground army and the British had, for example, many helicopters that were used extensively (especially in South Armagh, where, without helicopters, the British Army would have been defeated by the IRA). In the struggle against Apartheid, operations by the military wing of the ANC (in English known as “Spear of the Nation”) were even less likely to result in civilian death, and they were definitely fighting under difficult conditions.

I should say at some point here that I believe there is a spectrum between completely legitimate targets on one hand and completely innocent civilians on the other hand. This is reflected in my opinion of Hamas’ military wing and my opinion of the IRA, among others. It doesn’t mean that I think less-than-totally-innocent civilians are legitimate targets, but I don’t attach much value to such killings when deciding if I consider the group responsible to be a terrorist organization or something better.

Although I do not totally agree with international law on this, international law is so unfavorable towards the killing of civilians that I believe killing civilians is not excused by the conditions that an underground army fight under against a technologically and institutionally superior foe.

Although this may not be the fairest thing to say about them, it almost seems to me that progressive supporters of Hamas believe that there is something akin to a Law of Physics about the inevitability of underground armies intentionally killing civilians- their argument seems to be, “you don’t condemn an apple for falling to the Earth.” But there are at least two such armies that never or almost never intentionally killed civilians. One of them was totally successful (although it should be mentioned that their economic agenda was not realized, the ANC’s primary goal was the end of Apartheid) and the other was sort of successful (the Good Friday Agreement isn’t that bad and in recent years Sinn Fein and the EU have forced the British to create a border of sorts between N. Ireland and Britain).

The second and overlapping idea is that the Palestinians don’t have the power to wage peace and can only wage war until Israel takes the first few steps towards peace on their own. In my opinion Israel is a lot more responsible for the conflict than the Palestinians are. The average Israeli Jew is a lot more comfortable than the average Palestinian is and could survive the re-distribution of resources (i.e. water) that peace would require. I’m sure a lot of Palestinians would say that they have little or nothing to lose and that for decades now Israel has been brutalizing them and undermining the possibility of a two state solution and many of them will fight until Israel makes the first moves.

Although I am not a pacifist, A) I overwhelmingly support non-violent political efforts and B) what I’m about to say needs to be seriously considered by supporters of this theory that Hamas cannot wage peace at this point. The Black population in America was seriously dis-empowered in the decades before and during the Civil Rights Movement (there was SOME militancy and looking back at that history, I support some of that militancy). But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was almost 100% against the use of violence and saying that he “waged peace” is putting it mildly- it was a scorched Earth version of “waging peace.” I have a theory that intentionally killing civilians in war is further from “waging peace” than exclusively targeting combatants. I am not saying that liberation movements out there in the world need to completely abandon the use force in order to respect the legacy of Dr. King. But I believe progressives should be careful with who we support when it comes to armed liberation movements. And although I am not going to go into a lot of detail beyond looking at the Civil Rights/Black Power era and N. Ireland, I also think we should ask ourselves, “what would Gandhi think?”

The Republican Movement (Sinn Fein and the IRA), as I mentioned above, conducted a very honorable struggle and DID do a lot of non-violent stuff. In all fairness to Hamas, they did successfully contest an election in 2006 and didn’t have much more in terms of opportunities for non-violent political efforts. But I am still going to point out that starting in the mid-80s SF members who got elected to local councils took their seats and engaged their unionist opponents non-violently and democratically- a move towards waging peace in the acutely imperialistic Thatcher years. When the conditions seemed right, in 1994 the IRA went on cease-fire for about a year. After a brief return to war, they went on cease-fire again in 1997 and to a VERY large degree have become less and less relevant and I wouldn’t be surprised if they pretty much ceased to exist in the last 15 or so years.

Although I’m not gonna go into much detail here (I talk about this in a 2009 post) the RM and the Nationalist community in general bent over backwards to make the peace process work. It would have been VERY reasonable if they had refused to sign up to anything that failed to guarantee a United Ireland after some transitional period. The republican argument is something I go into some detail about here. Around 1997-2005 the IRA took several steps leading up to the full decommissioning of their arsenal, steps that kept the Peace Process going forward, despite frequent provocations by their opponents (i.e. for about 3 months in late 2001 loyalists terrified little Catholic girls (aged about 11) on their way to school just inside a Protestant area (there’s a fairly good article about it here)). 

When the conditions seemed right, the IRA was quick to wage peace. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza have less power than the 1998 Catholic population of N. Ireland, but it’s also relevant that on a per-capita basis, Catholic civilians might have been slaughtered in The Troubles to a greater degree than was the case with Palestinian civilians since 1967 (that is, until Oct. 8th 2023 when that situation changed dramatically) (below, starting with the sentence “As I write elsewhere 856+” I try to illustrate how the Catholics were slaughtered). Even though the Catholics probably had more power in 1998, when it came to support from the global community, the Palestinians definitely have more (i.e. the Catholic population of N. Ireland didn’t have a representative at the UN) (and the British, although I don’t believe they used this to win diplomatic battles with Dublin, are permanent members of the UN Security Council and have a veto and they might have benefited from that in terms of discouraging support for the IRA). I talk about the Irish half of that comparison with South Africa in the middle third of a post here (starting with a paragraph that begins by mentioning South Africa). Crucially, the US government was, to one degree or another, on the side of the British as I describe in note #17 of a post here. As I said, the IRA waged peace not when they had the global community behind them, not just when British politics made peace more likely, but when it appeared there was an opportunity to stop the violence and the inequality, the hate and the injustice. In 1994 that meant after very few moves by the British and the Unionists. In 1996-1997 there were a few more moves by the British, but also some provocation by London and the unionists- which was ignored.

As I was typing this I increasingly came to understand that in terms of power, the Catholic population had more than their brothers and sisters in Palestine. But what I wrote about the latter having more support globally is true. Also, in terms of forgiving your oppressors and waging peace, you have to consider what I write below about the Catholic civilian population, on a per capita basis, being slaughtered to such a great extent that it was possibly worse on a per capita basis than what the Palestinians have been through between 1967 and Oct. 7th (it’s not a perfectly symmetrical comparison and for multiple reasons I am not going to hunt down solid figures for deaths of the Palestinians, but you might agree with me when you read that section after the next paragraph).

I don’t think anything excuses much less justifies what Hamas did Oct. 7th. I’m not saying that they are anywhere near as responsible for the conflict in general as Israel is but Oct. 7th was a massive and (sort of) unprovoked escalation (I say sort of unprovoked because it was disproportionate to what Israel was doing- nowhere near as disproportionate as Israel’s response to Oct. 7th, but still disproportionate (you have to consider that targeting civilians is more provocative than attacking soldiers)). If they were fighting offensively as the IRA did, I’d be pretty supportive. Coming back to reality, what do I think Hamas and the PLO and the Palestinian people in general should do? I think their allies worldwide need to continue to take a stand and communicate to Israel that it had better stop bombing Gaza and allow humanitarian aid into Gaza like never before, and stop going towards what I think would be something fairly genocidal. And they need to get the US to stop supporting Israel. (I believe that when it comes to genocide  there is a spectrum between 100% dead and, at the other end of the spectrum, what Ireland experienced during the Famine). I have no idea how making Gaza livable for 2.2 million people will be accomplished in the immediate future. But worse than that is the possibility that Israel will try to push Gazans out of Gaza and into Egypt, which would be pretty genocidal. I have almost no idea what should be done beyond an end to the violence and a return of aid to Gaza and and an end to American support for Israel. Normally I would say that a one-state solution must be pursued as I argue here, but after what has happened to both the Jewish population and the Palestinian population, I am thinking of going back to supporting the two-state solution. I imagine the reality is there will be no peace process worthy of the name for a very long time.

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As I write elsewhere 856+ Catholic civilians were killed in the years 1969 to 2005 by either loyalist paramilitaries or the security forces. A comparable scenario in America would have meant around 67,000 unarmed people of color killed by cops or Nazi skinheads (etc.) in the same time period. A: based on what I’ll describe below, I would guess that the actual number for that was probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000; B: I'm not saying the racist system in this country wasn't, ideologically or programmatically, capable of killing 67,000 people of color in those years if the "rebellion" among people of color here had been as militaristic as the one among Catholics in N. Ireland; but the reality is that as bad as it was for people of color here in those years, it was, in terms of deaths, MUCH worse for Catholics in N. Ireland.

What makes me confident about my statement “probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000”?



1. Between 1996 and 2005 according to the FBI there were 38 racist murders. I have read that the Department of Justice officially estimates that for every hate crime reported to the FBI there might be 20-30 that aren’t reported because not all local law enforcement agencies report such crimes to the FBI. So I came up with 1,140 for those years.


2. I heard that in a 12 month period during a 2014 (apparent) surge in police murders of black people including those of Eric Garner in NY, Tamir Rice in OH, and Michael Brown in MO among other highly publicized such cases, that around 200 black people armed or unarmed, had been killed by cops in America. Although I’m very open-minded about accusations that cops plant guns, this country also has a ridiculous number of guns.


3. Bear in mind that decades ago the number of people of color and the number of cops in this country were both smaller or much smaller than they are today.


4. If it’s worth much, about 10 years ago I read a huge amount of what the Southern Poverty Law Center put on their web-site in the previous 10-15 years. I also got an Ethnic Studies degree if that’s worth much.


5. There was little or no talk about “Brown Lives Matter” so I get the impression that very few Latinos/Latinas/Chicanos/Chicanas have been killed by cops in recent years (as far as I know, even Arpaio’s sheriff’s department in AZ didn’t kill a single such person) and that might reflect the situation in earlier decades. I have practically never heard of Asian-Americans being killed by cops. And if Native Americans were being killed at a high rate in the 80s and 90s I would have heard (a massive chunk of my major was Native American Studies).
 

UPDATE 6/9/21 I just found a Democracy Now! story relevant to this. It's about the last 20 years, but there's a small overlap between that and the period I was looking at Catholics and people of color (1969-2005), and it's possible that what I said about this comparison is off a little. Bear in mind that the figure I refer to in item #2 above came from organizers of a Black Lives Matter protest.

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In that first part (ending just above this line) I addressed the issues of asymmetry in war and waging peace. Here I need to address some other aspects of Hamas that contribute to me being hostile.

I believe in being consistently against religious fundamentalism and social conservatism. Towards the bottom I will explain how I don’t have a racist double standard in the favor of the Irish.

Hamas is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” and they’re very friendly with Iran, so I think I am on pretty good ground saying they are fundamentalists. I’m not an atheist and I’m certainly not a NEW atheist (see this). I believe in the separation of religious institutions and the state, I believe in secular politics (although I have nothing against religious socialists I am not one myself) and I believe in “Intelligent Design” not creationism.

I won’t apologize for consistently being against social conservatism, including sexism and homophobia. I’m sure some readers are groaning at that sentence in this essay, but please read what I write below.

I get the impression there is something close to a consensus among American progressives that criticizing the allegedly misogynist attitudes of MANY Muslim men is inappropriate. Are Muslim women oppressed to one degree or another in many (perhaps most) muslim societies? I think the answer is pretty close to “YES, although I have gotten the impression that some progress has been made on the issue in recent decades. I need to make clear that I don’t support laws (in France, for example) where muslim women are banned from dressing in a way that might be considered religious and/or traditional and/or conservative. I believe that Muslim women are adults and don’t need the government, or male relatives, or random males in the street telling them what to wear, when men are not treated that way as well.

What about homophobia? In general I get the strong impression that the VAST Majority of Muslims are homophobes. I wish I had a lot of evidence specifically about HAMAS being homophobic, but I am comfortable just assuming that they are. I DO know that in recent years Hamas and Iran get along very well and Iran is DEFINITELY homophobic. I also read a brief accusation of homophobia that Meredith Tax leveled against muslim fundamentalists in her book “Double Bind.”

Do I have a racist double standard in favor of the Irish and/or Catholics? No. Republicanism is mostly secular. There were a few Protestants in the IRA (is Sinn Fein as anti-protestant as Hamas is anti-Semitic? See this), and there are a LOT of atheists in Sinn Fein. Going back to the IRA, I was told that at one point, perhaps in the mid-1990s, a significant minority of IRA POWs were housed together in the same part of the prison because they were all devout. But I am certain it was a minority and probably a small minority of the POWs.

The first (or at least close to the first) Vice President of Provisional Sinn Fein (the SF that Gerry Adams was President of for a long time), in the early 1970s, was a woman. In the era of the Civil Rights Movement (late 60s/early 70s), if there was only one leader of the CRM it was Bernadette Devlin (McAliskey). She was also perhaps the main leader of those, around 1980, who were supporters of republican POWs demanding political status. In the mid-1980s for one year SF was pro-choice and between then and now (or at least most of that time) their position was only MODERATELY pro-life, and they might be pro-choice today. In recent years the two most senior leaders of SF are both women. When Gerry Adams stepped down as President of SF he came out as pro-choice.

A handful of facts about SF and homophobia are here.

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(I believe that Hamas is anti-Semitic. This is primarily based on 2-3 facts. They’re religious fundamentalists and they went after Jews, and some of them raped Jews (if you can prove that they raped a lot of non-Jewish people, I’ll reconsider that statement). I have decided that the PLO are anti-Semitic (based on a BBC article here) and if THEY’RE anti-Semitic I feel comfortable assuming that the socially conservative religious fundamentalists are, too. When I have made this accusation in the past 1-2 American supporters of Hamas have said that the anti-Semitism of some Palestinians can be traced back to Europe- that doesn’t make it okay!)

There are two last things I need to say. This post is partly a response to a blog post  by a woman named Helena Cobban here. The main theme of her post is that “it’s past time to end the demonization of Hamas.” Combined with everything else I have written above, I need to explain that Hamas weakens, it doesn’t strengthen, the cause of Palestine. Large numbers of people in the world believe it’s wrong for civilians to be targeted in war. Large numbers of people believe that anti-Semitism is wrong. Hamas’ targeting of civilians and their anti-Semitism turn people away from supporting the Palestinians. I mean Oct. 7th did nothing to increase support for their people. ISRAEL’S REACTION has, and that might have been Hamas’ plan, but I think that was a pretty bad plan and doesn’t change the fact that Oct. 7th was anti-Semitic. I guarantee you there would be more support for the Palestinians if they were not associated with Hamas.

I imagine that when anti-Semitism in the Palestinian population is not challenged by American supporters of the Palestinians, it might be noted by the younger and more impressionable progressive activists who might adopt that bigotry as their own. That means that ignoring anti-Semitism among the Palestinians can have an effect on how Jews are treated HERE.

We need to criticize Hamas MORE not LESS.

Britts Out! (Katie Britt, immigration, and sex-trafficking)

(That’s what I say about Ireland and the US Senate!)

As you probably know, a month ago GOP Sen. Katie Britt was under a storm of criticism in response to her rebuttal speech after the State of the Union address by President Biden. She told the story of a Mexican woman sex-trafficked when she was a young teen in Mexico- well, for the most part Britt didn’t want you to know it was in Mexico. Britt’s been less than consistent about this, but the idea was to make you think it was in this country and on Biden’s watch (when in fact it was during the George W. Bush administration).

In addition to everything else that has been said about Britt’s rebuttal, I have some more to add. Crucially, read the two paragraphs towards the bottom that are in italics, they’re very important.
 
She was talking about the surge in migration from Mexico to the US, but she also talks about sex-trafficking and Mexican drug cartel activity and she is conflating all three of them (it should be noted that the Mexican woman who was trafficked was not a victim of the cartels contrary to what Britt implied). Has sex-trafficking surged? I’ll be honest- I don’t know, but I think Britt wants you to think it has and that it's coming here with Mexican migrants.

At one point in a March 10th The Guardian article, she is quoted as saying:
 
“We have to tell those stories, and the liberal media needs to pay attention to it because there are victims all the way coming to the border, there are victims at the border, and then there are victims all throughout the country.”
 
I believe that although this is in conflict with what she was saying the rest of the time, she was trying to say in that quote that this kind of sex-trafficking is common in Mexico and Mexicans want to come here and rape your wife or daughter, etc. and only Donald Trump can stop them. She was saying that the sex-trafficking inside Mexico, deaths of migrants at the border and deaths of Americans at the hands of immigrants inside America are one unbroken chain that can only be addressed comprehensively by Trump’s approach to immigration. This is nonsense.

Tough immigration policies will not affect the Mexican drug cartels (it certainly wouldn’t have stopped what happened in Britt’s anecdote because the cartels and the the border had nothing to do with it). Separating children from parents at the border will do absolutely nothing to the cartels. I’m not sure what WILL stop the cartels because I’m not as familiar with recent Mexican history as I should be, but tough immigration policies are not going to help.

As far as “there are victims at the border,” I am not sure what she’s talking about, but there are reports that migrants waiting to cross the border often find themselves in bad situations, which probably does include all kinds of sex crimes. I am not sure how much time is spent at the border by migrants who are not asylum seekers, but as far as the asylum seekers, you must remember that Britt’s party and her hero, Trump, strongly support the “Remain in Mexico” policy where asylum seekers must wait in Mexico until a decision is made about granting them asylum. So, the GOP believes that Mexico is just one big nightmare for teenage girls trying to get to America, but they want such survivors to either wait in Mexico for months or years, or to just stay in Mexico permanently.

As far as victims in this country, yes, it occasionally happens as it might have recently with Laken Riley (I said it- satisfied, MTG?) (I said “might have” because of the presumption of innocence). Those are tragedies but you need to consider a few things:
1) From what I have read non-immigrants here are more likely than immigrants here to commit crimes (yes, that statement probably is based on ignoring the “crime” committed when they enter this country without documents- but that’s a victimless crime).
2) That percentage of the immigrant population that commits violent crime must be incredibly small- why punish everyone in that population because of a very few bad apples?
3) I cannot remember a lot about how often this happens but what about the immigrants who die at the hands of racist and violent white people who listen to the anti-immigrant rantings of people like Britt? Fueling that racism as Trump does will only increase the number of immigrants who get viciously beaten to death by angry teenage males.

In her statement that I quoted above Britt implies that liberals ignore what she's talking about. There are probably better counter-examples than this, but I’m going to go with something that I think is important and probably doesn’t get mentioned very much. The TV show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit FREQUENTLY makes it clear that NYC is a "sanctuary city" where cops don't collaborate with Immigration authorities and not only do they oppose all kinds of sex crimes in general, there was one season 19 two-part episode about a "coyote" (someone who helps undocumented immigrants get across the southern border and to their destination in the US) who repeatedly raped women he was transporting. Another episode, “911” in season seven, is about a young girl who was brought over the Mexican border by someone who then sold her to child pornographers. In season 16 there is an episode “Girls Disappeared,” about sex-trafficked teenage girls crossing that border. There might be other episodes like that.

Liberals and progressives believe that migrant women and girls being sexually exploited and/or assaulted is a serious problem, but they don't support Trump's extreme approach to immigration.

Law and Order Reviews H

 I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Kids” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

Although it’s a minor aspect of the story, the main characters are concerned that police friends of the defendant’s father (an ex-cop) may have conspired to get a key witness killed, without whose testimony the defendant would probably be acquitted.

“Old Friends” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is about a whistle-blower being killed by someone trying to protect a small (or at most medium) sized business from lethal exposure about moldy baby food that could easily sicken or even kill babies. On the other hand, I am not absolutely sure I should be doing this review because it’s a mobbed-up business and the mob is responsible for the murder, so it’s less damning of capitalism than it would be if there was no mob involvement.


“Blue Bamboo” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

There is one small part of this episode I want to highlight. It sounds like one of the detectives is saying there should be more funding for education. I realize that’s hardly something the Left has a monopoly on, but it is also an important part of our agenda.

In general there’s something that’s a bigger part of the episode but which I am unsure I should comment on. It basically says that there is some massive problem with anti-Japanese bigotry in America. It says nothing about bigotry towards Japanese-AMERICANS. I think it might be exaggerating how much anti-Japanese bigotry there was in the mid-1990s in America. I do have one little anecdote about this. When I was about 6-7 years old in the early 1980s I saw that in a men’s room stall someone had written “Remember Pearl Harbor, stone a Toyota” (or something very similar to that). To be honest, at the time I thought it was clever and/or neat. I had no idea that shortly before or after that day a Chinese-American (Vincent Chin), mistaken for a Japanese-American by two white Michigan auto-workers, was killed in a hate crime in 1982.

“White Rabbit” Season 5. See this for a plot summary.

To some degree this episode could be considered in conflict with the New Left of the 1960s, but the DA and the senior ADA, to one degree or another express some degree of sympathy with those who passionately opposed the Vietnam War. Although I’m not that familiar with him, William Kunstler was for decades an important civil rights and civil liberties lawyer, and in this episode he played himself.

Overall, politically it’s one of the best episodes.

More on the Hamas Offensive

Below is an LTE I might not actually submit to a newspaper, but it says some things that I need to say. The first post I did on this theme is here.

I have been a supporter of the Palestinians since somewhere around 12th grade. I have protested in support of them here in America, and also in Belfast, N. Ireland. In 2002 I convinced the other members of a CU-Boulder group (Students for Justice in Northern Ireland) that we should endorse the campus Coalition for Justice in Palestine. In the last 15 years one of the main topics on my blog is supporting the Palestinians. But an even bigger part of my blog is about opposing anti-Semitism, and I’m proud to say that those two parts of my blog overlap heavily.

I know that there are many progressives who are not anti-Semitic but who have failed to condemn Hamas’ early October offensive. Although that failure is not necessarily bigoted, what Hamas has done IS bigoted. They are religious fundamentalists and overwhelmingly went after civilian life, and it was Jews they were targeting. As someone who looks back and supports almost everything the IRA did in The Troubles, I would not condemn a Palestinian effort that resembled the IRA’s campaign- targeting the military and (using methods that almost always prevent civilian death) destroying government and commercial property.

I say that because the Palestinians have very serious and legitimate grievances. Those who are Israeli citizens experience a fair amount of inequality (the State is officially Jewish, it cannot be simultaneously democratic). Those in the West Bank have it even worse (they are state-less (they have no citizenship, and thus no civil rights)). And those in  the Gaza Strip live in the world’s largest open-air prison.

They have every reason to be furious at the Israeli state and Israel’s Jewish population. But intentionally killing civilians in war is, to one degree or another, wrong, and in this case bigoted.

Tom Shelley

Fuck Hamas

This is my position on what happened in Israel and Palestine in early Oct.

First, as far as the history of that conflict, about 20% of my knowledge comes from Juan Cole’s site Informed Comment and about 20% is from the BBC. The rest, about 60% is from various sources, some  mainstream, some progressive, including The Nation, the Washington Post, the Times of Israel, etc. In the last week it’s something like 50% the BBC, 10% Juan Cole, 10% CNN and the rest is miscellaneous.

I have been a supporter of the Palestinians pretty much since I started becoming more than a tiny bit political. I sort of explain my general thoughts about the conflict in a post here. I have only briefly been VERY familiar with Israeli and Palestinian politics, and that was the first 2-3 months of 2020 when I was reading about 15 articles a day on the web-based newspaper The Times of Israel. I used to be a member of what used to be the American section of the Socialist International (the Democratic Socialists of America) and in 2001 learned that Fatah, the leading part of the PLO (Arafat was a leader of Fatah), was a less-than-full member of the SI. Until recently I basically supported them.

That was increasingly (in recent years as more and more criticisms were made of the PLO) because of who the main alternative was. My position has always been- “Fuck Hamas.” To one degree or another Hamas is a lot more socially conservative than Fatah is, and I think that the activities of the military wing of Hamas were more likely to intentionally kill innocent civilians than the PLO was when they were fighting Israel.

But for decades now I have heard about the PLO being corrupt and abusing their power. They also have done a horrible job of advancing the interests of their people. Although that’s been clear to one degree or another for decades now, there was a BBC article that really explained that just recently. And then there was a BBC article accusing the President of the Palestinian Authority (sort of an extension of the PLO, in the West Bank) of giving a VERY anti-Semitic speech. As you’ll understand if you read that article, Abbas said that European Jews were targeted because they had money. This is not true and even if all Jews were rich, how in the world would that justify killing them- especially when rich people outside the Jewish population were not targeted as well.

I won’t discuss this in this essay, but I am not sure who I can support among the political movements in the Palestinian population.

The Palestinians have very serious and legitimate grievances. Those who are Israeli citizens experience a fair amount of inequality. Those living in the West Bank have it worse (they are state-less), and in different ways the residents of the Gaza Strip have it even worse than that. The first two of the three aspects of the Israeli state I just referred to are often referred to as being governed by “Israeli Apartheid.” I explain how that’s a legitimate term for how the Palestinians are treated here. The two state solution has been dying a slow death for decades as Israel plants settlers in the West Bank, changing the “facts on the ground” that will make an independent Palestine non-viable.  The Israeli Right, who are in power right now, wants to annex all of the West Bank, at the expense of the Palestinians living there.

So, yes, the Palestinians have every reason to be FURIOUS with the Israeli state and the Israeli people. But what Hamas has done in the last few days is horrible. IF it had been aimed at the military and (using methods that avoid civilian death) government and commercial buildings, I would at least sort of approve. But that’s not what happened. What happened was a massacre of civilians and, especially with a right-wing extreme Zionist government in Jerusalem, it will provoke an even greater (UPDATE 310/10/23 bigger, and/or more extensive) response than what we have seen in the last few days. It will probably bury any chance at peace for a generation.

Is that guaranteed? Fortunately it is not. We need to continue our efforts to change American policy on Israel. That effort will be boosted if we do more to incorporate opposition to anti-Semitism into our solidarity work in support of the Palestinians. That is one of the main themes in my post on Zionism and a one state solution. At the risk of scheming internationally, this is one more reason to support the Irish political party Sinn Fein. After SF got within striking distance of leading a left-wing and republican government in Dublin in 2020, Juan Cole wrote a post about what that might mean for the Palestinians. In recent years there has been a trend of bigger and bigger percentages of the Jewish-American population supporting the Palestinians, and this will help.

In general I am a supporter of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, although I worry that a CULTURAL boycott could fuel anti-semitism. But an economic and political BDS network would be awesome.

So, we need to do a better job than we have done. And I think that a good place to start is to react to recent events by condemning Hamas, talking up a one state solution, and doing more of what we have already done.

 

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UPDATE 10/12/23 There is another item on the same theme here.

Law and Order Reviews G

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Manhood” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

This episode is about homophobia in the police. Four cops conspire to fail at backing up a fifth one (a gay man) who is in need of assistance, because they’re homophobes and either want him dead or at least wounded.  It seems like the head of their precinct (a geographical division of the NYPD that probably includes something like 100-300 cops) was at least opposed to the Assistant DA’s effort to prosecute the four cops and may have encouraged the homophobia of his men.

At one point one of the four cops talks about gay people and political influence the same way that anti-Semites talk about Jews and political influence.

The prosecution loses when the jury acquits 3 defendants (one testified against them as part of a deal). In some ways it’s a sad ending, but probably more realistic than convictions would have been and sort of more likely to inspire anti-homophobic action (in general, not necessarily in relation to homophobia in the police).

“Volunteers” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

This is about a homeless man being  beaten (almost to death) by a middle-class resident of the NYC neighborhood he (the homeless man) lives in. To a large degree the residents and business-people of that area are jerks, but this specific homeless character is possibly worse (until you factor in the attempt at murdering him by the residents of the neighborhood, that is). That kind of undermines the liberal-progressive message the show is trying to give about being sensitive to the problem of homelessness but the writers probably needed the homeless character to provoke the people he lived near. The jury’s vote to convict on one count related to the attempted homicide is practically over-turned when the judge sentences the defendant to time served (a couple days) and a short period of probation. I think that highlights that a lot of this country’s elite is hostile to the homeless.

“Profile” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

Although not especially noteworthy or inspirational, this is a pretty good anti-racist episode. At one point there’s a brief statement about racial scapegoating. I think that racial scapegoating is a major problem. There’s a lot of white capitalists out there who, to one degree or another like the idea of convincing white workers that their economic misery is the fault of people of color and/or white anti-racists, and/or policies like Affirmative Action.

“Black Tie” Season 4. See this for a plot summary.

In general I was thinking that maybe I should make a brief note when the defendant is a rich person. Especially with episodes like this when they use their influence to obstruct the investigation and/or get away with it because of their wealth.

People of Color and Racism

(This is what you might call a special post- I am for reasons that are both personal and political addressing something that some people who looked at my blog between 2009 and 2017 may have criticized me for)

In early 2018 a political friend (who is a widely respected Black veteran of the fight against racism) explained something to me about racism which had not been explained to me very well before that. I had done a post on my blog about the theory/fact that people of color in America can’t be racist. It was originally written and published in 2009 and in 2017 I re-wrote it so it would be more convincing. This essay is largely about how it shouldn’t be held against me, but my position in that 2017 post was that people of color can be racist.

(Not sure exactly where to place this, but in early 2018 I deleted that post)

To a large degree, back then I thought of racism as a set of beliefs and I only sort of thought of it as a system in America. I remember I DID, in the decades before 2018, use the word “structural” a lot but I did not use the word “system” and I think that using the former is less critical than using the latter (I think the latter is a more holistic way of describing it (or comprehensive or something like that)). My friend explained that since there is only one racist system in this society and it’s for the benefit of white people, people of color can’t be racist (I knew of course that there is only one racist system here and it’s for white people, but I didn’t connect the dots the way most white allies do). My very limited 2009 research into this theory/fact had led me to believe that the argument in favor of it was that people of color didn’t have the power to be racist towards whites. In 2018 the explanation that referred to a “system” made a lot more sense to me.

The 2017 version of that post focused largely on two arguments. First, that people of color DID have SOME power with which to be racist towards whites (i.e. the use of physical violence). Second, that I referred to both anti-Catholic and  anti-Protestant bigotry in N. Ireland with the word “sectarianism,” and if I did that I was going to communicate in a similar way about racism in this country.

There are three general points I need to stress. First, what I was calling “anti-white racism” is what many people (including the friend I refer to above) call “anti-white bigotry.” Second, I wrote a very long paragraph in that post explaining why I believe that what I now call anti-white bigotry is a very small problem. That paragraph, with a couple of small changes, is available in a post here. It is about half-way down from the top and starts with “Even without that…” Third, since 2018 there have been 1-2 posts that were “labelled” (“tagged”) “anti-white bigotry,” meaning that they are partly or mostly or completely about that topic (in early 2018 I deleted the post where I said people of color could be racist). At this point there are 109 posts labelled “anti-racist” and there are about 41-189 more that could more or less be labelled that way, so I was and am OVERWHELMINGLY more concerned about white supremacy than I am concerned about anti-white bigotry.

In the context of admitting this mistake I made I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but as you may know I got an Ethnic Studies degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Somehow I missed being told in those classes that people of color can’t be racist. First, I hope this isn’t held against any of my professors. Second, I really was a fairly or almost very good Ethnic Studies student and further down I publish the grades I got in those classes.

And there’s some even better evidence that I was a good anti-racist in general. Although some of my anti-racist activism wasn’t about power and privilege and control and exploitation (some of it was just about challenging the prejudice of most white people) I DID do a lot of anti-racist activism that WAS about what I then called “structural racism.” In the mid-90s I did a lot of activity around defending Affirmative Action and defending immigrants. In 1996 and 2000 I attended a total of about 5 actions that were part of two labor union campaigns by the “Justice for Janitors” project of the Service Employees International Union. In 2001 I helped organize three events about racism in America that were largely about racial injustice and inequality. In the late 1990s I went to 3-4 actions in Denver about police brutality and in the last 10 years I went to two Black Lives Matter protests in Boulder. Some of the material on my blog is about “structural racism” (that is not everything I did as a white ally, but probably about 2/3 of it).

Although it was about challenging the prejudice of racist Irish-Americans and not about concrete improvements in the lives of people of color, a large chunk of my Northern Ireland activism was done in a way that was in conflict with white supremacy in this country. That and some other relevant thoughts are in a long post here.

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There are four things I need to explain that help justify my belief that this political mistake shouldn’t be held against me.

First, a lot of the books I read about N. Ireland that were written by anti-Unionist (“unionist” meaning pro-British) leftists referred to both anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant bigotry as sectarian. I offer examples of that further below.

Second, the post I deleted in 2018 was called “Guilty of Being White.” I got that title from a song of the same name by a 1980s punk rock band called Minor Threat. The man who wrote that song is Ian MacKaye and it was apparently inspired by he and his friends in High School getting beaten up by Black kids (I may have gotten that from wikipedia but I just found a better source for it here). The thing is, Ian MacKaye I believe is very anti-racist. That’s mostly based on the following: I found a YouTube fan video about anti-racist skinheads that had 4 Minor Threat songs as the soundtrack; and after leaving Minor Threat, he became the vocalist for a band called Fugazi and according to another Black veteran of the fight against racism (Daraka Larimore) Fugazi was in 2001 the most progressive hard-core punk band.

Third, in a song on Body Count’s first album, Ice-T (the vocalist of the heavy metal band) refers to a Black woman who hates white people as a racist. That was on the same album as “Cop Killer” and was thus long before any alleged “selling out” by Ice-T when he joined the cast of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. Also, since he got that job Body Count has often played "Cop Killer" at concerts and on a 2017 BC album (Bloodlust) Ice-T did a song called “No Lives Matter” where the lyrics are a creatively written hybrid of support for Black Lives Matter and opposition to poverty. Another reason I would say that he didn’t “sell-out” by joining the cast of SVU is that in 1993 when BC played “Cop Killer” at a concert I went to, Ice-T first said something about how in theory being a cop is something cops should be proud of, but that the reality is very different. He wasn’t 100% anti-cop even then and if you consider the fact that almost once a season SVU’s writers give his character good lines criticizing the police, I don’t think that he has compromised his values to be on that show.

Fourth, I know that at least in 2009 at least some people at the Southern Poverty Law Center believed that people of color could be racist. Although they are wrong about that I imagine it was a semantics thing the way it was with me (in the sense that they were probably referring to anti-white bigotry but were inappropriately using the word “racist”). (Part of why I am reluctant to penalize them much about this is that, at least in recent years and maybe for decades now, in addition to their work on stuff like tracking Klan activity, they also do a lot of work that’s about economic justice)

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Below are the grades I got for classes that were part of my major.

Intro to Asian-American History. B-

Intro to Ethnic Studies B

Indian/Govt Conflicts FBI on Pine Ridge A (Note: about 1/4 of it was about the Black Panthers)

Race, Class, and Pollution F (Note: although I probably wouldn’t bother mentioning this if I were to apply for grad school, a huge part of why I failed this is that I made some bad decisions about what to spend time on, I had some personal problems, and I hadn’t, at that point, taken the Research Methods in Ethnic Studies class and until I took it I did not like doing research)

American Indians in Film A

Emergence of Modern Mexico D (Note: although I probably wouldn’t bother mentioning this if I were to apply for grad school, a huge part of why I got a D is that I learned that Summer that Summer School isn’t a good way for me take college classes)

Asian-Pacific American Communities C

Chicanos/US Social System C

Research Methods in Ethnic Studies B

Topical Issues in Native North America A

Selected Topics in Ethnic Studies: Prisons, Crime and Culture B- (Note: About 10% was about the Black Panthers)

Research Practicum in Ethnic Studies B+

Japanese-America: Critical Thinking A-

North American Indians: Traditional Culture B

Senior Seminar in Ethnic Studies A-

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This last part is about the N. Ireland dimension of this that I referred to above. It’s a work-in-progress because I have only just started reading those books (4 out of 5 I have read before and I remember some stuff that backs me up on this, but I need to read them again and take some notes and then I’ll add that material here). (I get the impression that in the last 10-20 years it may have become unpopular among anti-Unionists to refer to anti-Protestant bigotry as sectarianism, but most of my reading of the books I’m referring to was around 2000 (I might change how I talk about it, but I am unlikely to become active on the NI issue in the future and may not have the opportunities to discuss this with other anti-Unionists))

Law and Order Reviews F

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“The Corporate Veil” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

This is a good one where a corporation is the criminal. There’s also a brief positive reference to Ralph Nader.

“Wedded Bliss” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

This is about sweatshop labor. It’s pretty damning.

“Mother Love” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

One of the detectives says that crack cocaine should be legalized, and his partner doesn’t seem to strongly disagree. I support ending the war on drugs, at least in relation to some and maybe all drugs. I think marijuana legalization is great. To one degree or another, I believe other drugs should be either legalized or decriminalized- that is decriminalization of possession of a small amount (this approach would probably not change the law as far as people who sell drugs). Decriminalization would involve treating addiction as a medical problem instead of a criminal one. I think that this would be an appropriate way to deal with crack.

“Jurisdiction” Season 3. See this for a plot summary.

Although he’s alone and pretty junior, a corrupt cop is stopped.

“Conduct Unbecoming” Season 3. For a plot summary see this.

In general, it’s almost critical of the US military. The plot includes the Navy trying to bury the scandal by sacrificing a low-ranking officer in a court-martial but on the other hand the Navy apparently had come down slightly hard on the senior officer who had engaged in “conduct unbecoming.”
Then there's the time that one detective mentions that the tax-payers paid for the massive party the Navy crew had at an NYC hotel. The other detective says: “nice to know my tax dollars aren’t being wasted on school books.”

Law and Order Reviews E

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Cradle to Grave” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

At the beginning there’s one very progressive statement. The cops are looking for the parent(s) of a dead baby and are asking at child care places. A woman working at one says that they used to watch babies, but because of a cut in the federal funding they got, they had to stop. She says something about how the federal government was able to buy a couple more military aircraft because of those nation-wide cuts to child care subsidies, and implies that it was a bad set of priorities.

After about 10 minutes it became clear to me that it was about a lazy, greedy slum-lord property owner. In order to transform her decaying, low-rent buildings into something more profitable, she encourages tenants to move out- a corrupt building superintendent and a thug posing as a tenant make life very difficult for the tenants. The owner and her two helpers are charged in connection with the baby dying because the heat was turned off and there was a broken window in the apartment the baby died in.

“The Fertile Fields” Season 2.  See this for a plot summary.

Initially there’s some chance that the murder was an anti-semitic hate crime carried out by Black teens. The senior police officer is reluctant to rush to that assumption, worried that it will greatly aggravate relations between NYC Jews and NYC Blacks. The way that the murder turns out to have been committed by a white, non-Jewish criminal I think says a lot about a tendency to blame black teens when they’re innocent.

“Intolerance” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There’s a little bit of anti-racism. The white suspects (their conviction was overturned when a mistrial was declared) brought a bit of racism to the academic competition between their loved one and his Chinese-American peer, who they probably killed.

“Silence” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

This is basically about homophobia. It’s a little flawed but overall it’s anti-homophobic. It’s about a black-mail scam by straight prison inmates against closeted gay men outside prison (I think it might happen in reality because I first read about it in a John Grisham novel two decades ago, and now this (this episode was done about 10 years before that book, so people were thinking about it at two different times in our recent history)). If it IS real, that’s just one more reason to fight homophobia.

“The Working Stiff Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

Although it could be more pro-union and I wouldn’t call it socialist, it is in a fairly good way about conflict between the working-class and the upper-class. The union activist with an attitude toward the bosses gets along well with the cops and the Assistant DAs, so I think the viewer is sort of supposed to like him.

Law and Order Reviews D

I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here.  In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.

Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.

“Heaven” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There are two things worth mentioning. First, the senior police officer says that in the absence of a tragedy like the lethal fire they’re investigating, most New Yorkers don’t care about brown-skinned immigrants.

Also, the junior ADA says (approvingly) that constitutional protections like the 4th and 5th Amendments are for everyone including undocumented immigrants.

“Severance” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

The killer was hired for the job by a crooked defense contractor.

“Blood is Thicker” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There’s one brief mention of how GOP politician Dan Quayle (VP of the US 1989-1993) avoided Vietnam by joining the National Guard, at a time when getting in the Guard meant you wouldn’t be sent to Vietnam. Although the Washington Post article I just read wasn’t explicit about Quayle’s position on the war at the time he avoided it, in general he was a hawk during his political career. There were millions of people who supported the war and tried to avoid fighting in it because they didn’t want to be killed.

“Vengeance” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.

There’s a tiny bit of dialogue between minor characters that might be considered pro-union.

“Sisters of Mercy” Season 2.  See this for a plot summary.

To one degree or another this is about a man, probably around 30 years old, coercing girls in their mid-teens into having sex with him.