The Lock Step Conformity Of America
By Mustafa Khan
10 July, 2009
Countercurrents.org
It is pitiful to note that the United States mocks its own Yankee pragmatism when it comes to the Palestinians and women. This is even more pronounced in the days of the administration of President Barack Obama.
From the day his aides removed Muslim women in hijab from a photo session to his highly exceptionable silence over the detention of former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire and others by Israel he smacks of a Democratic pretender. The boat the Spirit of Humanity was seized on June 30 and 21 people abducted and kept in prison and released on July 5. The Americans who spent their July 4th Independence Day in Israeli jail were Cynthia, Adam Shapiro, a film maker, and Kathy Sheetz, a nurse and film maker. The UN rapporteur Richard Falk called the seizure unlawful and the Israeli blockade of Gaza a continuing crime against humanity.
During his election campaign he facilely accepted the resignation of Samantha Power. She was ‘forced’ to leave the campaign not because she had said that America opposes genocide one day and yet it defends it the very next day in the UN but for calling Hillary Clinton a bitch in an informal situation. The former is very often repeated when it comes to the genocidal policies and practices of Israel. Such is the lock step conformity of all the US administrations vis-à-vis Israel that one wonders whether it is Israel which is running America. This is true despite the fact that Obama rules the United States of America and not the United States of Israel.
The Democratic party is known for its concern for the minorities and intellectuals. It is also true that the Americans are still not ripe enough to have a woman president. Why had the hijab of a couple of women in a crowd posed any danger that the head scarf-ed women were removed from the scene, and they his admirers! In this the Americans are not what in another context Martin Kingsley calls fully evolved society.
Many events that have taken place over the years poignantly bear this out. An American white Christian woman protesting Israeli demolition of Palestinian houses was crushed to death by a bulldozer. It did not cause any ripple in the water of frigidity of the American conscience. The then president of the US did not bother to make any statement. On the other hand when Somali pirates kidnapped a private US citizen Obama sent American bombers to rescue him.
More appalling than anything is the most savage system of imprisonment in Israel. How failed is Israel as a state is exemplified by the awful prison of Ramle, one of the gulags of our time. There are people there who have not committed any crimes and do not know whether they would be ever released. Many of them are from Arab countries and have no legal help and embassy contact as they are denied both. Their being “trapped in despair” is the reason why they so raptly hear the lectures of Captain Denis Healey who tried to take humanitarian aid to Gaza in his ship, DIGNITY. They also want to learn navigation and sail on the blue waters of the deep seas around the world rather than waste their life in the Israeli prison. Will their dream ever come true! There are the proud Ethiopians who ended up there in their search for a better life!
One can only hope against hope that things would turn for the good of all. The imprisonment of Cynthia McKinney and Mairead Maguire shows that the silence of Obama and his administration is an eloquent confession of how the closest and most reliable ally, Israel, practices the grossest violation of human rights and dignity. The US record was tarnished by its invasion of Iraq and the notorious Abu Gharib prison and the Guantanamo detention centre and the ill famed extraordinary rendition. Further, its record is made murkier by its close association with Israel and its complicity in what Israel is doing. Or else why are Obama and the mainstream media silent over the Cynthia McKinney affair.
She along with 21 others had taken token humanitarian help to Gaza which included food, medicine, crayon and cement, etc. Speaking symbolically and connotatively she remarked: “The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza.” “Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else's children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza's children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.”
Let alone debating and contesting the import of such soul searing indictment, the government of America and the media have maintained deliberate studied indifference to the whole affair. They are so much under the thralldom of the Jewish lobby! However the moment they hear the Zionist twitter on ‘holocaust’ and ‘never again’, they begin to chirp and look over their shoulders to see that others have noted their chirp.
The Israelis had looted all of the belongings of those who sailed in the boat along with the humanitarian aid. The hijacked were forced to borrow an old phone from somewhere in the prison from another prisoner to send their message. Cynthia’s Independence Day message makes the celebration ceremony a parody of the truth.
The enforced silence on certain matters is so jealously maintained that there is a total black out on them. Only now has the US army accepted that Israel has nuclear weapons though it was known to almost every country in the Middle East as well as the world thanks to Mordechai Vanunu. Behind the towering walls in occupied land Israel is drilling for oil. This is a plausible truth of our time. Will the world also wait for half a dozen decades for the US government to officially find it out and acknowledge it as true?
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