Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Two of the most arresting, visionary Israeli-Palestinian peace campaigners, Sari Nusseibeh and Ami Ayalon, will bring their peace proposals to a University of Washington audience on Thursday, October 23rd at 7:30 PM in Kane Hall. Anyone who has any interest in Mideast peace or the future of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples should hear their wise words of counsel.

Those of us interested in an equitable solution to this conflict that honors the national aspirations of both sides do not have many who carry the banner as well as these do. Both are accomplished former servants of their respective governments and communities and have held positions of considerable power within their respective political systems. It is all the more amazing that they have found common ground on such a contentious and divisive issue as this.

Nusseibeh is the president of Al Kuds University in Abu Dis (East Jerusalem) and Ami Ayalon is the former head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence agency. Their peace plan, striking in its simplicity and far-sightedness, calls for a two-state solution to the conflict within pre-1967 borders (allowing for modest alterations as determined by negotiations between both parties), recognition of Jerusalem as an open city and capital of two states, and for a financial solution to the issue of the Right of Return. Read their Declaration of Principles. The two have an Israeli website, The Peoples’ Voice Mifkad L’Umi and a Palestinian website, People’s Campaign for Peace And Democracy.

Today’s announcement of the death of Elia Kazan Elia Kazan, Influential Director, Is Dead at 94, makes the recent PBS American Masters documentary Miller, Kazan, and the Blacklast: None Without Sin ‘must see’ viewing. Michael Epstein’s electrifying study illuminates the rewarding 1940s and 1950s creative partnership and ultimate bitter breakup between Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller after the former ‘named names’ in his HUAC testimony.

The show describes the extraorindarily fecund Miller-Kazan collaboration on plays such as All My Sons and Death of a Salesman which led to their final work together (before the HUAC testimony) on a screenplay (which Miller wrote and Kazan was to direct) about the Brooklyn waterfront, The Hook. After completing their work together to prepare it for the screen, they submitted it to the studio for final approval. Unaccountably, the studio head sent the script to the FBI to ask whether they thought it was worthy of production. Needless to say, the FBI found the script wanting and suggested that the mob bosses who run the waterfront should be turned into Communists(!).

After Kazan named the names of his fellow Group Theater Communist Party cell members (all the names were already known by the Committee), Miller broke off all contact with the man he viewed as a betrayer of their former mutually held values. Each man then proceeded to create an artistic masterpiece which attempted to justify their actions in the face of HUAC. Interestingly, Kazan’s On the Waterfront is lifted almost entirely from their previous work, The Hook. Though Miller wrote the screenplay and had every reason to complain about Kazan’s usurpation, he did not. One wonders why.

Miller, in turn, created The Crucible as a meditation on social evil and how the good man should respond to it. While most critics correctly note that the play is an allegorical response to the McCarthy era; more importantly, and more specifically, it is Miller’s rejoinder to Kazan and Waterfront. In response to Kazan’s morally pure, black and white view of evil in Waterfront (note that Marlon Brando’s character emerges bloodied but triumphant in the film’s climactic scene), Miller posits a society and its individuals who have a much more tenuous hold on moral certainty in the face of evil.

What is truly extraordinary about None Without Sin is that while one comes away with a sense of Kazan as the more morally flawed of the two figures, one understands as Miller did Kazan was only partially the captain of his own fate during the HUAC period. Miller understood (though vehemently disagreed with) Kazan’s motivation in testifying (to save a brilliant artristic career which had been up to that time, and would always be devoted to promoting the social good and tackling traumatic social, moral and political issues).

You may also hear online interviews with the documentary’s creator, Michael Epstein .

I stupidly posted my e mail address one time to a New York Times forum (& it was removed within 24 hrs.). The address was harvested by spammers. Within a day, I was getting 200 daily delivery failure e mail notices from various domains saying that e mails sent from my address were aborted before delivery to other parties because they contained viruses, etc. Not to mention the 10 or so counterfeit Microsoft security e mail notices I receive each day.

Which brings me to my possibly very naive question: shouldn’t there be an easy way to verify the authenticity of an e mail address that is used to send an e mail? Perhaps you could link the e mail address to the IP (yes, I know many have dynamic IP addresses). So, even if IP linking isn’t the answer, isn’t there some way to link an address to something of mine (PC, IP, whatever) that can’t be traced or appropriated by the spammer?

Can anyone tell me whether this issue is being addressed by anyone in the industry? Shouldn’t ISPs themselves care about this issue since their customers’ addresses (which they distribute) are being ’stolen?’

In response to the above question, a Dell Forum member provided this interesting link to a Center for Democracy & Technology study of e mail spam, its origins and ways to stop it.

tags e-mail, spam

GoogleNews just featured a Voice of America story, White House on the Defensive Over Alleged Press Leak Exposing CIA Agent about the Bush White House which allegedly leaked to Rovert Novak, in a fit of pique against former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson (who was telling the media that he had not found any evidence of Sadaam Hussein attempting to purchase African uranium), the identity of his wife, an undercover CIA operative. Adding to the spiciness of the story is the 10 year potential prison sentence and $50,000 fine facing the person who uncovered the identity of a U.S. spy.

The Bush Administration response:

it has no evidence any of its officials were behind an alleged press leak that exposed the identity of a CIA operative.

If you think about this statement it appears to be a complete denial of the charge until you examine the language carefully. “It has no evidence…” Of course, it has no evidence…because it doesn’t want to know. It doesn’t want to know and it doesn’t want to do anything to find out as evidenced by the following quotation:

He [Scott McClellan] rejected calls from reporters that President Bush should be pro-active in questioning White House staff members.

In other words, the bastards want to be able to say they didn’t do it; but they also won’t do anything to find out whether they did. So of what good or value is the supposed denial above–none, of course.

So let’s really get down to it here. Did someone from the White House leak the story to right wing journalist hack Novak? Of course they did! Will anyone be held accountable for this crime? Doubtful. Can you imagine John Ashcroft’s Justice Department investigating and prosecuting such a potentially damaging incident? I can’t either. Many of us didn’t lose any sleep (or have any love lost) when Congress ended the independent prosecutor statute after Ken Starr destroyed the political viability of the statute for good. It’s starting to look like a pretty good law just around now, isn’t it?

I find delicious the allegation that Karl Rove might have been the leaker. I’d like nothing more than to have that bastard hoisted by his own petard. To have a master of dirty tricks (did you read Seymour Hirsch’s New Yorker article several months ago which detailed Rove’s Machiavellian machinations against his Young Republican political rivals during college days?) caught at his own game and mortally wounded (politically) would be too sweet!!

The glow is off the rose. Look, no serious represenative of the left in this debate is gloating at the failure of Bush Administration policy in Iraq. No one wants to see our boys killed and maimed; nor does anyone want to see all the Iraqi casualities of the postwar period. But we have to face facts and admit that we are failing and figure out what we’re going to do about it. That was the theme of Charlie Rose’s September 4, 2003 show, Postwar Iraq: How is it Going?, one of his more dramatic and incisive recent programs. It featured Fouad Ajami of the Johns Hopkins University and Jessica Tuchman Matthews, president of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace.
I’ve heard Ajami many times on this program and always admired his forthrightness and good common sense in discussing throny and difficult issues relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But I had no idea that, barring a few minor cavils over Administration policy, he supported the Bush Iraq policy hook, line and sinker. It was a sad discourse on his side. Basically, the thread of his argument was that things aren’t going well now, but we have to stay the course. If we don’t, then we will look like fools to the rest of the world and especially to the Arab world. In that case, we will never be able to have serious influence in Arab capitals again if we ‘cut and run.’ When Rose asked him why we shouldn’t leave Iraq now, Ajami’s reply was: “We simply won’t do it. It’s a preposterous idea.” So much for serious intellectual debate!

Matthews’ position was much more nuanced and well-reasoned in my opinion. She believes that we have lost the possibility of succeeding at the Iraqi postwar reconstruction and trasition to democracy which we’d hoped to accomplish. The bombings of the UN compound tell us that possibly even the UN is no longer viewed as an honest broker. Therefore, the Bush Administration attempt to broker a Security Council resolution that might draw our former adversaries on this issue (France, Germany, etc.) into participation in the Occupation is no longer viable. It is time to consider our exit strategy.

Think of all the prewar rationales we no longer hear about (except from the unrepentant Bill O’Reilly types):

1. Sadaam developed weapons of mass destruction
2. An opportunity to destroy a state that is a direct physical threat to the U.S.
3. Create democracies throughout the Arab world
4. Transform Iraq from failed state into economically thriving, democratic state
5. Direct Hussein-Al Qaeda links to 9/11

Each of these neocon rationales has been discredited or simply unproven. This in turn discredits the entire purpose of the war and undermines any reason for going on.

Matthews argues that in making war on Iraq our goal was to dismantle a ‘terrorist state’ and instead we have created one where none existed before. In this postwar period, every Islamic militant and terrorist in the world seeks to converge on Iraq to kill the infidel Americans. Before the war, these extremists had no such ‘focus’ to their worldwide propaganda and recruitment efforts. We’ve handed them the best recruitment tool they could hope for.

The Bush argument that sticks deepest in my craw is the contention that it is actually a good thing that U.S. armed forces are now facing Arab terrorism in Iraq because otherwise we’d be facing them here on our shores. This is a preposterous and borderline idiotic argument. Our boys are being killed in Iraq because we’ve sent them on a fool’s errand. Sadaam Hussein may have hated the U.S. before the war, but he never participated in 9/11 and I haven’t even seen evidence that he’s participated in any anti-U.S. terrorist conspiracy since the attempt on George Bush senior’s life in Kuwait in the 1990s. Now, we’ve taken a state that was bad, horribly managed, totalitarian but not an overt fomentor of terrorism against us; and transformed it into the greatest breeding ground in the world for such hatred. It’s quite an accomplishment and one for which George Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Don Rumsfeld deserve all the credit.

All of George Bush’s professed good intentions conveyed in speeches before the war, reminds me of those great Graham Greene novels of the 1950s like the Quiet American, which deal with westerners in the third world who come with the best of intentions and leave having wrought unmitigated havoc.

Wolfowitz, Kristol and the neocons based their plans for Iraq on their theories (some would say ‘fantasies’) rather than the actual reality of the country itself. We based our pre- and postwar policies on our own assumptions of what we wanted to happen. These folk didn’t take into account that the Iraqi people (and certainly the militants themselves) had differing views. How could we possibly think we knew what was best for Iraq when almost no government operatives knew anything about Iraq, its culture, its religions, history and language. This is sure a danagerous way to make a policy.

To hear the show, go to Charlie Rose Show archives, search for the Sept. 4th program, and click ‘listen.’

I've looked at many blogs whose owners display hyperlinks to fellow bloggers who blog on the same topic as they do. There are also webrings which work on a similar concept. I would like to create a directory of blogs devoted to Israeli-Palestinian peace based on the concept of a two state solution and mutual recognition. If your blog fits into this category, please contact me and let's start cross-linking our blogs and/or create a webring based on the same principle.

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