In other small news

An Israeli officer who executed a 13-year old girl has been cleared of "unethical" conduct, as per usual. After all, he only "approached her, shot two bullets into her [head], walked back towards the force, turned back to her, switched his weapon to automatic and emptied his entire magazine into her."

Clearly, respect for human rights, which "constitutes an essential element" of the EU-Israel Associated State Agreement, is being maintained. After all, the company commander was suspended on the grounds of "poor relations with subordinates" (who told him not to kill the child). Perhaps this is even to be taken as evidence that the EU policy of (to quote the EU FAQ) "[k]eeping the lines of communication open and trying to convince our [Israeli] interlocutors" rather than suspending the Agreement is working?

Following the line of reasoning that extending benefits unconditionally instead of applying pressure conditionally is the way forward, the EU should as a matter of urgency sign an Associated State agreement with Sudan, to stop the genocide. Or with Tunisia - no, wait, that's already been done.

Do you want him dead or suffering?

AFP reports on an opinion poll conducted in Israel by the Maagar institute on the occasion of Arafat's illness. According to the results, 47% of Israelis want Arafat to die. Of the 32% who disagreed with wanting Arafat dead, a majority still wanted him to continue to suffer. As for the Israeli government's decision to let Arafat out of his long siege in order to get treatment, 58% agreed and 36% disagreed.

More striking than the answers are the questions. If there was a poll in which people were asked whether they want Sharon to die, or at least to suffer, and whether he should be allowed to have treatment without which he may die, one can imagine the cries of anti-Semitism and the (justified) chorus of protest from all quarters.

More Numbers

A new report to be published in the British medical journal The Lancet has estimated the number of excess deaths in Iraq after the invasion as 100 000, mainly due to violence which is mainly due to the occupying forces.

As regards the methodology, the sample sizes seem quite small to me. Also, it's not clear how to reliably interpret data gathered from interviews (for example, Iraqis not uncommonly blame the US troops for bombings set off by Iraqi or other non-American terrorists, and a similar effect is imaginable in these numbers).

The Iraq Body Count, using a conservative methodology, has counted 14 000 to 17 000 civilian deaths. Given that deaths which are not confirmed by multiple reports don't make it into IBC, and that combatants are not included, the real number is probably a modest multiple of this figure - some tens of thousands.

This number of corpses is difficult to visualise. I think of of 10 Srebrenicas, 30 World Trade Centers, 50 Sabra and Shatilas. What does that mean? Too abstract. I think of the bus ride from here to London, watching out of the window for a hour and a half, corpses lined hand to foot by the road, enough for the whole hundred kilometers.

Once and Future Killing

The Iraq Body Count has come out with a press release about the civilian casualties in the US assault on Fallujah in April in retaliation for the brutal killing of four US mercenaries. Out of about 800 reported deaths, they estimate between 572 and 616 civilians (with about half of these women and children). This makes the assault on Fallujah more severe than the terrorist bombings in Madrid and Karbala - in fact, it's the largest terrorist atrocity since the September 2001 attacks in New York and the Pentagon.

The numbers are quite consistent with early estimates of numbers killed and eyewitness reports on the indiscriminate killing by US troops. (For more reports and analysis, see Andrew Chitty's Fallujah page.)

This reminder of mass murder is particularly topical since more seems to be on the way soon. Fallujah has been bombed for weeks, and preparations for ground assault have been made. A ground assault may be launched after the US elections next week, with British complicity.

The New Anti-Semitism

Let it not be said that the US is alone when it comes to equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. According to AFP, a report on racism in France released on Tuesday recommended criminalising "unfounded" "anti-Israel stances".

The report singles out anti-Semitism and calls for a law "to punish those who might level unfounded racism allegations against groups, institutions or states, and use against them unjustified comparisons with apartheid or Nazism." I find criminalising comparisons to apartheid especially warming. It would be amusing to have speakers who struggled against apartheid in South Africa and now see the same thing in Israel (such as Desmond Tutu) indicted for racism. (In fact, there is no need to compare Israeli policies with apartheid, since they are apartheid.)

The report also finds that the perpetrators of "the new anti-Semitism" are "more heterogeneous" than those of traditional anti-Semitism. Without having read the report, I venture the guess that this means, translated into English, that the people who criticise the Israeli government are not the people who are guilty of anti-Semitic incidents. This reminds me of the first version of the study by the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), which defined pretty much any "pro-Palestinian" act as "anti-Semitic", and then made the surprising discovery that Palestinians are often behind anti-Semitic incidents. (After defining "anti-Semitism" sensibly for the final version, EUMC found that perpetrators of anti-Semitic acts are mostly the usual suspects, white right-wing extremists.)

On Israeli public radio, the Israeli ambassador to France called the report "exceptional ... because it establishes a direct link between anti-Semitism and the anti-Zionist and hostile positions in Israel." I find this quite irresponsible. When representatives of Israel and Jewish organisations chant that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, they also contribute to the sad delusion that anti-Semitism would somehow be anti-Zionism, and thus to the rise of anti-Jewish racism.

The thinking behind such statements is that there is nothing in Zionist ideology or Israeli policy towards Palestinians (and other Arabs) that would provide grounds for criticism, so all criticism must have some hidden reason, given as Jew-hate. But there is indeed a new and sweeping form of anti-Semitism: these statements, which embody the idea that there is nothing to criticise in the dispossession, starvation and killing of Palestinians, who are a Semitic people.

Communist Conspiracy

A slightly embarrassing aspect of going to demonstrations against the war in Britain is the masses of communist banners and placards festooning them. This is especially true of demonstrations like that on Sunday which are merely large as opposed to huge: the number of demonstrators identifying themselves as communists seems to be fairly constant, so they're swamped out in large crowds. (And never present as speakers.)

The local communist parties are bizarrely fascinating. There are so many of them, and I have the impression that their main form of activity is aimless posturing and fierce rivalry with each other. There's a report on the various factions in the Weekly Worker, published by the Communist Party of Great Britain (I was given a copy at the demonstration). The article claims that while the parties achieve little, people from them do have influence in the Stop the War Coalition, CND and other groups which are actually relevant, and even in the Greater London Authority.

What I find striking about the communist publications, Marxist forums and so on is that while there may be speakers or writers from France or Italy, they do not seem to bother with people from countries that would actually have some experience of socialism or communism, whether this would be from communist dictatorships like East Germany or social democracies like Finland. "Socialism" and "communism" -there seems to be little distinction between the two here- are ideological vessels into which fantasies about the coming paradise may be poured, not realities to learn from.

If this dead-end line of thought is seen as an alternative to the corporate servitude offered by New Labour and the Tories, I can see why the British political system is troubled.

Demonstration Issues

It's common for there to be lots of speakers at these demonstrations. Presumably the idea is to offer a platform to many different groups and many voices. I personally find that this tends to make the rallies somewhat boring, as the speeches typically have a lot of overlap, and more ideology and commitment than information and concrete suggestions.

The demonstration on Sunday was no exception in the number of speakers, but this time the speeches seemed to be more diverse than before - at least judging by the number of speakers I disagreed with. I was glad to hear people promoting the motion to impeach Blair, and call for him to be brought on trial for war crimes. The practical emphasis on next year's elections and on building demonstrations was also useful.

I'm happy that families of British soldiers killed in Iraq spoke there, though they were unsurprisingly among the ones I disagreed with, on the issue of "serving honorably": I find little honor in signing off one's morals to the state in blind obedience. But I was more disturbed by the few speakers who wanted to identify (and us to identify) with the Iraqi armed resistance.

Like Palestinians, Iraqis have a right to resist colonial occupation, including by force of arms. And I think that, unlike in Palestine, armed resistance is a major factor in defeating the occupation of Iraq. But the resistance consists of a number of divergent groups of which some legitimately attack the US military (or defend against its attacks), some mostly murder Iraqi and western civilians, and some mix legitimate resistance and terrorism. Standing against the occupiers by unqualifiedly supporting the resistance isn't much of a moral stand.

(These were a few individual speakers. I have found the stand of the Stop the War Coalition itself generally quite agreeable. However, the StWC has also stated that it "reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary, to secure such ends". They have now removed the "by whatever means they find necessary" from the statement on their website.)

But, apart from the appalling morality, what is the point of verbally identifying with the armed resistance? Campaigning to get Blair out of office by impeaching him or getting people to vote helps the situation in Iraq. Building links with and giving practical aid to Iraqi trade unions helps the situation in Iraq. Appealing to British soldiers not to take part in the occupation helps the situation in Iraq. How does verbal support of the armed resistance help anything? Even if you thought it was a good idea to help the armed struggle, the speakers weren't actually proposing to send money or supplies (much less to go and fight), so what's the use of such empty demonstrations of support?

Demonstration Numbers

I was at the national demonstration against the Iraq war in London yesterday. Hearteningly, thousands took part: BBC says that Stop the War Coalition, one of the three organisers, estimates 100 000 people and the police 20 000. The real number is probably somewhere in between. The demonstration concluded the European Social Forum, which had about 20 000 participants, and I don't think the majority of the protestors were from ESF, so 20 000 seems a bit low.

At any rate, the demonstration was large in absolute terms, but small compared to the massive events before the start of the invasion. One simple reason is advertising: the historic demonstration on February 15 2003 with perhaps two million people was very well publicised, for a long time in advance. Probably not many people knew about the one yesterday.

However, I think that more important are the twin facts that many people feel helpless about the war and that it has little impact on daily life. If you don't bother with the news, there is nothing to suggest that you're living in a country engaged in a brutal occupation. It's quite easy to get on with other things and ignore the whole business. Even for those who follow the news, it's now easier to be convinced that things are going better precisely because the situation has gotten so bad that it is not safe for journalists, NGO personnel or independent activists to go around Iraq and report on the catastrophe.

Whereas industrialised war in the early 20th century required massive propaganda to mobilise the population for action, today people need only be convinced not to act, to let sophisticated technology and mercenaries recruited from among the poor do the government's bidding without interference. As long as the immediate cost to the population is perceived to be small, this is quite feasible. (Of course, the war in Iraq costs immense amounts of money, and is quite harmful to society in the long term.) But passive support is fragile: most people see little benefit in the war, and were they to experience a tangible cost of continuing it, passive acquiescence would turn to active opposition. For example, terrorist bombings in Madrid (and the Spanish government's attempt to blame them on ETA) decided the Spanish election.

Pro-Americanism

On the plane back home from Toronto, I read Howard Zinn's "You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train". I realise that part of the reason why his empowering accounts - of struggle against racial segragation, the Vietnam war and so on - are very moving is that I feel his culture to be mine as well. I probably wouldn't feel as connected with the life of, say, a French activist.

Indeed, I watch mostly US movies and TV series, I am familiar with mostly US comics, most of the political books I read are written by US authors: I know mostly US popular culture and US politics. Generally, the United States (along with Britain) is most important cultural reference point in Finland after the national layer. Occasional claims of singling the US unfairly for criticism are properly viewed in this light. If a fish says the water she swims in is polluted, is she unfairly singling out her pond?

At times, one also hears the term "anti-Americanism", which I find particularly illustrative. People who think that Chirac belongs in jail are not labelled "anti-French"; it would be laughable to suggest that those who oppose Berlusconi as a fascist thug are "anti-Italian". Yet, the "anti-Americanism" of people criticising the US government is the subject of serious discussion in the US, and this has spilled to Europe.

Implicit in this language is the idea that the government is interchangeable with the country, so that criticising the government -even by citizens of the country- is equivalent to scorning the people and the culture (which are properly identified with the country). This is a totalitarian idea; in fact, I can't think of an example of a non-totalitarian state other than the US where such a corruption of thought would have taken root.

The endurance of the concept of "anti-Americanism" lies in its handiness in stifling dissent. There is no corresponding positive term in wide use, presumably because it is not as useful. Of course, literally speaking, when I praise Howard Zinn, a deeply American writer, or commend Star Trek, a quintessentially American TV series, I am being "pro-American".