Censorship and Intimidation

We are a multicultural family. My wife is Chinese and we have two teenage daughters. Since I started to write the 'Visual Statistics Illustrated,' a window of our house was broken and we received a death threat because of my 'Pearl Harbor' article.

The Broken Window The broken window incident commenced around midnight. The stone penetrated the window, bounced of my desk and landed on the cathode-tube display of my computer, which imploded in front of my face. I lost my legs in the military and was not able to pursue the attackers. However, the case was quickly solved by the local police, since the perpetrators left fingerprints on the yellow paintings while adorning our house with the number '666', description 'Devil's House,' and a request 'Chinks Go Home.' This attack was by religious fundamentalists.

The Death Threat was communicated via the phone. The caller thought I denigrated the memory of our soldiers who fought and died in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War. As I tried to explain to him that (being a veteran myself) this was not my intent and that I was writing about the origins of the conflict, not about those who fought it, his emotions overcame him and he said that if I continue to write in this vein, he will kill me. The caller sounded emotionally distressed and I did not pursue this matter further.

However, my experience in this respect pales compared to that of Alison Weir, who published results of her research as a response to allegations such as, e.g., made by Melanie Phillips during her talk to London Society of Jews and Christians on May 3, 2004, claiming that

Media coverage of Israel has become an unstoppable torrent of lies, distortions, libels, abandonment of objectivity for malice and hatred, and obsessional vilification and demonization. It ignores or downplays the fact that Israel conducts military operations only in self-defense.

This claim can be contrasted with Alison Weir's quantitative analysis of the ABC, CBS, and NBC Evening News (www.IfAmericansKnew.org), shown in Figure 1 and with the actual number of children killed, as shown in Fig. 2.

Alison Weir detailed and competent research is one of the best examples how unsubstantiated arguments can be opposed by quantitative analysis and visualization of the obtained results. However, instead of civilized discussion, Alison Weir received on her voicemail the following message:

Close your organization or you're going to die. Me and my buddies, who were trained in the Israeli Army, will come and kill every single one of you son-of -a-bitches for what you are doing to destroy Israel. So watch out. This is not a joke.

Her reply is excerpted here as follows.

No. We're not going to die. I know you're used to killing people who are in your way. Old people, young people, leaders, followers, mothers, fathers, teachers, doctors, factory workers, farmers. It hasn't seemed difficult for you. Human beings are immensely vulnerable. When people have no armor, no defending army, no power, all it takes is a few bullets. Skulls are easily penetrable by tempered steel. Rib cages are shattered with ease. All it requires, really, is sufficient ruthlessness. From the beginning of your nation you've made it clear that you possess this in abundance. You ethnically cleansed the once-multicultural land on which you chose to impose your uni-cultural nation, of hundreds of thousands of human beings who did not fit your national vision of purity. You call this your nation's "War of Independence." Independence from whom? From humanity? From morality? From normality? From everyone else in the world? And you assassinated. How you've assassinated.

Rachel Corrie (1971 - 2003)

Rachel Corrie

You crush 23-year-old Rachel Corrie. You shoot 21-year-old Tom Hurndahl in the back of the head. You shoot 26-year-old Brian Avery in the face. You kill Palestinian grandmothers, nine-year-olds, infants. Your assassins have roved the world with great success. In this country you kill Alex Odeh, Iris Kones, and at least five other Americans. But that's not all.

You've killed careers. You've killed businesses. You've killed hope. You've weeded out sprigs of integrity from our Congress, journalists of principle from our press. You will continue to win your battles, for awhile, but the war has turned. You've called "anti-Semitism" once too often. You've pressured one too many newspapers, one too many universities. You've made one too many anonymous phone calls, e-mailed one too many crude messages. We have awakened to the brutality of your injustice, and our numbers are growing. We are of every ethnicity and nationality, including your own citizenry, and we are joining together to uphold our common humanity. We are working to create a world of equality, of brotherhood and sisterhood, of compassion and respect, of laughter and love.

Jews united against Zionism

Cover of Religion Among the central themes of this book are the arguments against those who use the cover of religion to harm others. In this struggle we are not alone. For instance, among us are Jews united against Zionism who

want to tell the world, especially our Palestinian neighbors, that we wish to live together as friends and neighbors. Let us not forget the peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs that existed throughout the centuries. All those memories vanished with the advent of Zionism. The Zionist oppression of Arabs in Palestine is a tragedy for both the Palestinian and the Jewish peoples. Opposition to Zionism and its crimes does not mean a hatred for Jews. On the contrary Zionism and its deeds are the biggest threat to Judaism and the biggest cause of anti-Semitism. Zionism is not Judaism and Zionists do not represent all Jews.

Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan whose son was killed in Iraq and who says on the address of neoconservative fundamentalist Christians

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for neo-con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full-well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by George Bush. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy...not for the real reason, because the Arab-Muslims who attacked us hate our Middle-Eastern foreign policy. You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you�ll stop the terrorism.

	Norman Solomon Author of numerous books and recipient of the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, is the syndicated columnist and founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy. In the introduction to the Norman Solomon's (1999) book The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spins and Lies in Mainstream News, Jonathan Kozol wrote: "The tradition of Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and I. F. Stone does not get much attention these days in the mainstream press, but that tradition is alive and well in this collection of courageously irreverent columns on the media by Norman Solomon. He fights the good fight without fear of consequence. He courts no favors. He writes responsibly and is meticulous on details, but he does not choke on false civility"
	Noam Chomsky One of America's most prominent social scientists. A renowned professor of linguistics at MIT, he has authored over 30 books on such issues as human rights and the alliance of church, synagogue and state and their role in curtailment of free speech. Here are some of his notable quotes: All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media. The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people. Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. Sports plays a societal role in engendering jingoist and chauvinist attitudes. They're designed to organize a community to be committed to their gladiators. The Bible is one of the most genocidal books in history.
	Israel Shahak was a professor at Jerusalem Hebrew University who won world-wide acclaim for his research on cancer treatment. In 1965 he witnessed a religious Jew not to allow to use his phone on Sabbath to call ambulance for a non-Jew who happened to collapse in his Jerusalem neighborhood. According to the Socialist Worker Online (July 20, 2001) Shahak called a meeting with members of the Rabbinical Court of Jerusalem to ask the state-appointed rabbis if the man�s refusal to help violated Jewish religious law. The rabbis ruled that the man had acted properly. When Shahak heard this, he publicized the story and the Rabbinical Court�s decision in Ha�aretz. The story "caused a media scandal," Shahak recalled. "The results of the scandal were, for me, rather negative. Neither the Israeli, nor the Diaspora, rabbinical authorities reversed their ruling that a Jew should not violate the Sabbath in order to save the life of a Gentile.
	Norman Finkelstein is a professor of political science and author. A graduate of Binghamton University, he earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Princeton University. Professor Finkelstein is known for his writings critical of the American Jewish establishment and for his observation that the Holocaust is being exploited for political ends and for the personal financial gains. Professor Finkelstein's mother grew up in Warsaw, Poland, and was imprisoned by Germans in the Majdanek concentration camp. His father, Zacharias, was during the WWII imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Norman Finkelstein grew up in New York City. He completed his undergraduate studies at Binghamton University in New York in 1974, after which he studied at the ''�cole Pratique des Hautes �tudes'' in Paris, France. He went on to earn his Master's and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in political studies from Princeton University. Professor Finkelstein has taught at Rutgers University, New York University, and at DePaul University in Chicago. Aside of numerous articles in professional journals, Norman Finkelstein is the author of two major books, ''The Holocaust Industry'' and ''Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.'' Among his core theses is the one, excerpted here (''Beyond Chutzpah'', p. 85) as follows: ''Jewish elites in the United States have enjoyed enormous prosperity. From this combination of economic and political power has sprung, unsurprisingly, a mindset of Jewish superiority. Wrapping themselves in the mantle of The Holocaust, these Jewish elites pretend-and in their solipsistic universe, perhaps even imagine themselves-to be victims, dismissing any and all criticism as manifestations of "anti-Semitism." And, from this lethal brew of formidable power, chauvinistic arrogance, feigned (or imagined) victimhood, and Holocaust-immunity to criticism has sprung a terrifying recklessness and ruthlessness on the part of American Jewish elites. Alongside Israel, they are the main fomenters of anti-Semitism in the world today. Coddling them is not the answer. They need to be stopped." References Finkelstein, N. G. (2000) The Holocaust Industry. London, Great Britain: Verso. Finkelstein, N. G. (2005) Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press.
	Marc H. Ellis Professor of American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University, 'one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of his generation' (Richard Rubenstein). In his books Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation (1987) and Unholy Alliance: Religion and Atrocity in Our Time (1997) Ellis examines the record of both Judaism and Christianity, asks why monotheistic religions got themselves entangled in the cycle of recurring violence and seeks a path beyond atrocity and beyond religiosity that sponsors and is silent before violence. After thousands of years of Judaism and Christianity, is it part of our fidelity to abandon these religions, at least as we have known them? If this is true, where do Jews and Christians go from here? Perhaps the task of Jews and Christians may be found in the repositioning of their own discourse to empower those dissatisfied with both Jewish-Christian religion and the religion of modernity. In doing this, we explore the truths found in opposition to ancient and modern religious understanding that lead to atrocity, and the hope that might energize us to build a world without barbarism. Marc H. Ellis is also on the list of Self-Hating and Israel Threatening Jews, together with Norman Solomon, Noam Chomsky, Israel Shahak, Israel Shamir, and over 7,000 others. A similar list existed in Germany during the Weimar Republic featuring names such as Thomas Mann, Bertold Brecht, and Lion Feuchtwanger.

Distilled Evil With respect to the Old Testament, Richard Dawkins, Professor at the Oxford University, in his God Delusion (2006, p. 31) writes

Toward the end of the Roman Empire, the spectacular success of Jews coming to Rome from Judea become obvious. Their growing influence on the Roman society lead to numerous attempts to emulate them, held back mostly by the horror their particularistic religious precepts evoked in Roman citizens brought up in the traditions and ethic of the Hellenistic world. Then a new religion emerged, which to a degree attempted to ameliorate the distilled evil of many of the Old Testament precepts, became codified in the New Testament, and gradually replaced the Roman polytheistic religion. The teachings of the Old Testaments were receding and from as early as 325 C. E. (up to 1869) the Catholic Church banned reading the Bible. The Bible (available in Latin translation) was to be read and interpreted to the lay congregations by clergy (able to read Latin texts and thus, to a degree, familiar with the classic culture of the Roman Empire).

Cauldron of nuclear war The first translation of Bible to a colloquial language was by Martin Luther (1483 - 1546), one of the founding fathers of Reformation and Protestantism, reintroducing the Teaching of the Old Testament into the Christian Religion, today known as Judeo-Christianity, or more specifically, Judeo-Protestantism.

Initially, Luther thought that Jews will embrace his modifications of Christianity. When this did not happened, his admiration for Judaism changed into hatred (cf., Luther, M. (1543) Von den Juden und ihren L�gen). The majority of contemporary Protestant denominations distanced themselves from the Luther's anti-Semitism and embraced uncritical admiration of Israel instead.

Today, about 400 million Protestant Christians trace their heritage to Luther's reforming work and, in the United States, exercise major influence on the policies regarding the use of nuclear weapons. These developments, accentuated during the Bush II administration, generate realistic concerns that these perceptions, not based in reality but deeply rooted in religious delusions, will embroil Israel and other states in the cauldron of nuclear war.

Universality vs. Partiality is the core issue at stake here. While the ethic favors universality, the Judeo-Protestant ethic favors partiality. The ethics of partiality is most prevalent in the United States, where this ethic is the ethic of the ruling class and where, with the ascent of the Bush-headed oligarchy with control of the most potent nuclear arsenal of the contemporary world, acquired ominous dimensions.

The partiality, characteristic of theocracies, is well documented by the empirical work of the Israeli social psychologist Tamarin, (Tamarin, G. (1973) The Israeli Dilemma: Essays on a Warfare State. Rotterdam: Rotterdam University Press) framed within the theoretical context of Piaget, which relates to the development of moral judgment at different stages of maturation. Tamarin administered to more than a 1,000 Israeli schoolchildren the account of the battle of Jericho (Joshua 6:24), containing statements such as:

Tamarin then asked the children whether they approved these actions, with about 70% of Israeli children approving and 30% disapproving Joshua's conduct. The comments within the 'approve' category included comments such as that Joshua was right to exterminate the people

Moreover, some Israeli children 'disapproved' of Joshua's conquering Jericho for reasons such as that

The control group of the Tamarin study consisted of Israeli children who read the same passage, where the 'Joshua' was replaced by 'General Lin' and 'Israel' by 'Chinese Kingdom.' Only 7% of children in the control group approved of General Lin's actions. The majority of Israeli children characterized General Lin's actions as genocide.

Accumulation of wealth Another facet of the ethics of partiality allows for the markedly unequal division of wealth. In the United States, members of the privileged class receive, on the average, more money in one day that the majority earns during the whole year. David C. Johnston in the New York Times wrote:

'Income inequality [in the US] grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans - those with incomes that year of more than $348,000 - receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows. The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.'

In the post-communist Russia, during the Yeltsin's administration (1991-1999), this type of ethic allowed the oligarchs to acquire about 65 percent of Russia's resources.

Jerusalem Countdown The accumulation of wealth is a salient issue of the agenda of the religious right. John Hagee in his book Jerusalem Countdown (2007) where the appalling images of the Armageddon are paving the way for a nuclear war, repeats over and over the mantra of the mainstream Protestant ideology that

interpreted predominantly in terms of material wealth. However, the growing dominance of the ethics of partiality have undermined many of the humanistic traditions that made the America of the previous centuries a beacon to humankind.

Sharon's Wall On the international scene, the ethics of partiality justifies the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and bombing and invasions of numerous countries by the United States and Great Britain as a legitimate act of warfare, while the similar acts of other nations, often of far lesser magnitude, are viewed as a naked aggression. In the same vein, the Berlin Wall was an abomination while the Sharon's Wall is approved and its critics, such as President Carter, marginalized.

Peace Not Apartheid As told by Israel Shamir (Carter and the Swarm, 2007), President Carter in his (2006) book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

'upheld an honorable American tradition: that of Mark Twain who condemned the US atrocities in Philippines, that of Henry Thoreau speaking against the Mexican War. Carter's message is soft and gentle; so soft and compassionate that only the arrogant and power-intoxicated won't be able to live with it.

After Carter spoke, he was immediately counter-attacked by organized Jewry � you couldn't miss it! In my native Siberia, in its short and furious summer, you can watch a swarm of gnats attack a horse, each small bloodsucker eager for his piece of the action. After a while, the blinded and infuriated animal rushes headlong in a mad sprint and soon finds its death in the bottomless moors. The Jews developed the same style of attack. It is never a single voice arguing the case, but always a mass attack from the left and the right, from below and above, until the attacked one is beaten and broken.

Each attacker is as tiny and irrelevant as a single gnat, but as a swarm they are formidable. Observe them separately: Dershowitz, an advocate of torture and of hostage killing. Deborah Lipstadt, a nonentity brought forth by the Washington Post. Their technique is quite simple: They switch the focus of argument onto the personality of their adversary. Thus, instead of discussing apartheid in Israel, we discuss Jimmy Carter, whether he is a bigot and anti-Semite.'

The situation which confronts us was well described by Nobel Lecture of Harold Pinter in his speech when receiving the 2005 Nobel Prize in literature.

'There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.' I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavor. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realizing that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost. Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

Political theater presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonizing has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favored method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as 'low intensity conflict'. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued - or beaten to death - the same thing - and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now. The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution. The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilized. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighboring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. I spoke earlier about 'a tapestry of lies' which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a 'totalitarian dungeon'. This was taken generally by the media as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed.

But this 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened. The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven. Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the two million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer sees any point in being reticent. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favor. It quite simply doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. What has happened to our conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading - as a last resort - all other justifications having failed to justify themselves - as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people. We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has threatened that if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock, he will send in the marines. Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things': I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources. The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honorable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right. The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity - the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons - is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force - yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician. When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimeter and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - human dignity.

Ideologies of Monotheistic Religions Within the framework of religious ideologies, ethics of monotheistic religions is based on the Old Testament, Talmud, and Halakhah, where some are inherently more equal than others, and where no universal law governs both the Chosen and the Unwashed, with separate codes of conduct for each and with another codes regulating their interaction. This ethics provides the ruling elites of theocracies (such as the Arab States and Israel) and incipient theocracies (typified by contemporary United States) with effective means for maintaining their privileged positions, and justifies their imperialist ambitions and colonial crimes against humanity. It is important to keep in mind, that the religious ideology of Islam, the third branch of the triad of the monotheistic religions, is at par with the unsound religious ideologies of its primary and secondary branches. As we argue elsewhere, conflicts wrapped in the religious ideology are not accessible to rational conflict resolution and tend to be resolved by a war. Confounding secular power with religious ideology violates our constitution, placing lives of our children, our future, as well as the future of our children at stake.

	PART I	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING WAR
	Chapter 1	About Ethical Canons and War
	Chapter 2	Decisions Precipitating War
	Chapter 3	Human Sacrifice
	Chapter 4	Amiriyah Shelter
	PART II	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING EQUALITY
	Chapter 5	Slavery
	Chapter 6	Arens' Atrocity Attribution Theory
	Chapter 7	Genocide of Native Americans
	Chapter 8	Intermarriage
	PART III	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING JUSTICE
	Chapter 9	Incarceration
	Chapter 10	Reemergence of Torture
	Chapter 11	Witchcraft Trials
	Chapter 12	Trials of Heretics
	PART IV	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING RELIGION
	Chapter 13	The New and Old Testaments
	Chapter 14	Transplanted Mentality
	Chapter 15	God and His Messengers
	PART V	ETHICAL CANONS CONCERNING EMPATHY
	Chapter 16	Karla Tucker and George W. Bush
	Chapter 17	A Girl with the Almond Eyes
	Chapter 18	Beyond Partiality: Building a World of Laughter and Love