By: Ghassan Rubeiz, Ph.D

        EAST MEREDITH, NY – During a historical visit to Jerusalem in 1979, late President Anwar Sadat of Egypt proclaimed that the Arab-Israeli conflict is largely psychological.

        Inherited notions about history and deeply felt convictions about the injustices are so strong that when an Arab-American meets a Jewish-American socially they tend to avoid politics at all cost. Discussing differences might spoil a relationship between an Arab and Jew who may share a neighborhood, a business, a classroom or a workplace.

        However, though the majority swims with the current, there is a significant minority on each side of the Mideast divide, which challenges extremist views and works hard to promote understanding and a justice-based peace. There are people who endeavor to break through the barriers between the communities and engage in an open-minded exchange.

        Examples are easy to find. I have a personal story to tell about our family’s meeting with a creative and peace-loving Jewish family. I am an Arab-American of Lebanese descent, and my wife, Mary, is an American who has lived a few years in Lebanon.

        It started in late May, when Bruce Roter, a Jewish reader expressed appreciation for an article in which I appealed to the Arabs and Jews of America to work together for peace in the Middle East. Responding to my appeal, Bruce Roter said “I hear you”. He added, “I am the composer of a symphonic work… ‘A Camp David Overture (Prayer for Peace)’” and he shared with me the YouTube link.

        Bruce is a professor of music at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. The late Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Mrs. Jihan Sadat (Sadat’s wife) praised his 1996 composition. This work has been performed for the promotion of peace in several US cities over the last 14 years, in the hope, as Bruce puts it “that this music can foster cultural ties among all the people of the region”. When it was played in Washington three years ago, official representatives from Israel, Egypt, France and Canada attended the concert.

        After hearing an excerpt of this inspiring work, I arranged a meeting with Bruce and his family, including his wife Monique, and three children.

        The Roter family has had ample exposure to life in the Middle East. Monique’s parents emigrated from Egypt in the 1950s. Growing up in a Sephardi family, Monique has an inbuilt taste for Middle East food and the Levantine culture.

        On a sunny day, in late July, Bruce and his family shared a meal with ours: “lubie blahmeh” over rice, a green bean stew with beef. We talked about all sorts of Mideast dishes with nostalgia: “Bamie”, “Mulukhia”, “Wara inab”. Over lunch, Monique told us that her parents were expelled from Egypt during the Nasser regime. I saw no anger on Monique’s face. I did not offer my perspective for the departure of so many talented communities from Egypt during the revolutionary period of Nasser; commentary on history to interpret a sensitive personal story may sound callous.

        The meal provided an easygoing setting to share sensitive ideas. The Roters are strong advocates for Israel, but they see this state’s future security strengthened through the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

        Afterwards, we invited a small group of friends to listen to Bruce introduce and play the CD of his “peace overture”. We asked many questions and Bruce was glad to explain his approach to teaching music and creating it. He also talked about his latest work, a children’s peace opera, “The Classroom.” The setting of the opera is a classroom composed of two ethnic groups. The debut will take place this fall in an Albany elementary school, where the Roter children are enrolled. In the premier performance, the two groups will be Palestinian and Israeli children.

        The Rubeiz and Roter families have established a new friendship born out of a common appreciation for coexistence of a secure Israeli state and a future Palestinian state. The two families feel strongly that conflict could either divide or bring people together. People unite when there is a common will to avoid war in solving problems. We hope that this friendship will deepen with time, regardless of how the political situation develops.

        The Mideast has millions of stories – some sad, some happy, some of mixed affect. Yet it is the human element, I find, to be a key to understanding, explaining and solving the conflict in the Middle East.

        * Dr. Ghassan Rubeiz (grubeiz@comcast.net) is an Arab-American commentator on issues of development, peace and justice. He is the former Middle East Secretary of the Geneva-based World Council of Churches. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).

BY Frank Scott

Under the guise of fighting terrorism a paranoid and secretive U.S. government has several hundred thousand employees working with Top Secret clearance. How can anyone but an idiot expect to keep secrets when hundreds of thousands of people have access to them?  And with so many top secretly watching one another watch one another, how did billions of dollars suddenly vanish from an Iraqi slush fund?

        When facts about the Afghanistan war that should have been common knowledge had we a truly free media were finally revealed to the public, the heroic revealer was arrested while the cowardly concealers charged that he was endangering our military. These traitorous jackals clamor for more troops in Afghanistan while denying jobs here at home where the only stimulus program sends workers to invade foreign countries for alleged defense of our “homeland”. This costs thousands of lives, billions of dollars, makes more enemies for us and increases the threat of terrorist attacks.

        Our industrial infrastructure is in dangerous disrepair, our financial infrastructure is propped up by taxpayers who get nothing but personal debt for their public investment, millions are unemployed and descending into poverty, the upper middle class is being lowered to middle while the middle sinks into permanent debt. And government spending is criticized for everything but foreign wars that cost trillions, profit a small minority and cause deadly loss for the great majority.

        The venal idiots and sanctimonious dolts in charge of this disaster have enough weapons to destroy the world as they claim to preserve democracy here – where it hasn’t existed since the original western settlers arrived   – while creating it in other nations – where it hasn’t a chance to exist until western military settlers depart. If we were citizens instead of merely consumers we might see that we make an insane asylum look like a center for the pursuit of reason and morality.

        After the Supreme Court made it even easier to market politicians, corporate money is flooding the financial cesspool mind management calls our democracy. The wealthiest not only indirectly purchase their political servants but in the further privatization of government decide to take direct political power themselves. The billionaire who bought the mayor’s office in New York has set a trend and now another billionaire is attempting to purchase the governor’s office in California. How long before another billionaire puts a down payment on the presidency?

        Media dutifully reports who has the most campaign money and is therefore a sure winner when the people – in their usual minorities – go to the polls and select either a billionaire or the tool of billionaires. Calling this a democracy would only make sense to patients at the world’s busiest mental health crisis center.

        In the midst of what we’re told is an economic recovery that hasn’t yet reached tens of millions who don’t own banks, the armed menace not only continues but has more billions shoveled into the Pentagon psycho ward, with more ominous threats made to Iran on behalf of Israel, and saber rattling directed at North Korea, Venezuela and Somalia, among others. It is imperative for the public to take action that will turn this monstrous if enfeebled state vehicle around before it goes over a cliff. But not if we continue to be divided by political ploys that set minorities against minorities and prevent identification of the problems affecting the majority. Those cannot be solved by ghettoized groups of Americans, but only by a united democratic nation.

        The color coded insurrections we create in foreign countries that are falsely called democratic revolutions may be ironically balanced by color coded red and blue states rising against the government here. Manipulated by focus groups and polling , voters are reduced to market research clusters and subjected to advertising campaigns that sell politicians as so many consumer goods. But there may be a backlash and recent actions in Arizona and Missouri are signs of hope even as they are criticized as misguided over reactions. Both states attempt to confront real problems which bring great private profit to owners of the federal structure but social loss to them. While their analysis of capitalism may be naive, so is their opponent’s unquestioning acceptance of immigration and health care policies that benefit minority capital at the expense of a majority of the people.

        Reducing these problems to the typical good vs. evil political thought paralysis is exactly what rulers want. It keeps people battling over issues that should bring them together. Meanwhile, we move closer to economic and environmental breakdown through more wars, more mindless fossil fuel consumption, and more actual and dangerous bigotry towards American Muslims than toward any immigrants, legal or illegal, from anywhere in the world.

        Calling for unity among America’s disunited can only seem hopeless to those with no real desire for survival. None of us will be safer and most of us will be in great danger if the fanatic Israeli lobby gets a lunatic American government to go along with an attack on Iran. The suffering we would inflict on innocent Iranian people might be greater than what we would experience, initially, but at some point all of us will feel the deadly results of such an insanely immoral act. And we will feel it whether we are straight, gay, single, married, white, black, native or immigrant. Hopefully  we will not need such a tragedy to bring us to our national senses, but we could strive towards democracy by thinking in terms of avoiding such a further calamity by beginning to act like the most important identity group with the most common interest; American members of a tragically, pointlessly, economically divided human race.

BY Ihsan Alkhatib, Ph.D Esq.

Islam is “Perpetual war” or “no compulsion in religion”

        Mr. Robert Spencer is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) a book that is praised by a who’s who of self-appointed for- profit crusaders against Islam. Spencer claims to know what “Islam” “is” and self appoints himself an authority on Islam. Spencer is on an unholy crusade looking for material he can use, in context and out of context, to advance his agenda of demonizing Muslims. He presents the religion as an evil ideology intent on dominating the world and subjecting it to Shariah law. The wording and titles of his chapters show his ideological bias.  One chapter’s title reads “Islamic law: lie, steal and kill.” He is an activist whose is involved with efforts to block and disturb efforts to builds Islamic centers in the US. 

The Quran tolerant verses: “Canceled”

        Spencer  invokes the doctrine of abrogation (naskh) to claim that almost 200 verses in the Quran advocating peaceful co-existence, among other noble values, have been canceled by the “Sword verse” a verse that was referred to by an assistant US attorney in the trial of the Yemeni Imam Al Moayyed as the “terrorist verse.” Spencer presents as an undisputed fact/consensus matter that “the violent verses of the ninth sura, including the “Verse of the Sword” (9:5), abrogate the peaceful verses, because they are revealed later in Muhammad’s prophetic career. He adds “[D]ifferent understanding of abrogation met with little interest and support among Muslims worldwide- not least because they fly in the face of interpretations that have been mainstream for centuries.” 

“Moderate Islam” does not exist?

        Spencer picks and chooses from the grand Islamic tradition to advance his agenda.  It is true that some Muslims, a tiny percentage of worldwide Muslims, adopt the argument that he develops and misrepresents as mainstream Islam. As to the general Muslim public, he writes “…[those] who want nothing to do with today’s global Jihad, while their theological foundation is weak.”

Aggression vs. Non- belief

        The theological foundation of those who argue against the wide ranging abrogation claim is not weak. It is voiced by, among others, the famous Muslim scholar of Aljazeera satellite TV station fame Al Qaradawi, a leading Muslim scholar who is watched on Al Jazeera by hundreds of millions of Muslims.  On Al Qaradawi’s website there is an Arabic- language entry based on a TV interview he gave headed “Aya al Sayf/The sword verse is a subject of disagreement and some say it was abrogated.” [http://www.qaradawi.net/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=7197&version=1&template_id=197&parent_id=196]

        Dr. Al Qaradawi’s raises the argument that the “sword verse” itself is arguably abrogated. Qaradawi emphasized in the interview that “aggression on Muslims and not disbelief is the basis for Muslim warfare…There is disagreement on the so-called Sayf aya (the verse of the sword). Some claimed that it abrogated 200 verses of the Quran among which are the forgiveness and tolerance. But there are those who say that the Sword verse itself is abrogated.” He stressed the importance of understanding and explaining these verses in the light of the context they were revealed and the reasons for the revelation.

Debating “Abrogation”

        Spencer presents the abrogation argument as a settled matter. Qaradawi presents a different picture. Qaradawi states:  “There are those who claim that Islam has to conquer the world by force. They rely on debatable vague grounds. They claim that the verse of the sword abrogated all the verses calling for peaceful coexistence. On principle, abrogation should be narrowly applied.  There are scholars who argue that there is no abrogation in the Quran and call for reinterpreting the verses that have been thought be abrogated. The issue of abrogation is not a settled matter. There is not even one verse in the Quran that is claimed to be abrogated where you don’t find scholars claiming that it was not. There is not even one verse that there is consensus among the scholars that it is abrogated.”

The four “sword verses” in Sura Repentance

        Qaradawi added, ‘there are four verses, almost all in the Sura al Tawba/Repentance, that are understood as the sword verses. For example, verse 9:5 “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war. But if they repent and establish regular prayers and pay Zakat then open the way for them.” When you examine this verse you find that it deals with the idolaters of Qureysh and the idolaters of Arabia. They violated treaties and exceeded limits and hurt the Muslims and fought them for years.  Tawba/Repentance Sura addressed them “a declaration of immunity from Allah and his Messenger to those of the Pagans with whom you have contracted mutual alliances.” This verse addresses those who fight Islam. The proof for this understanding is the subsequent verse 9:4 “but the treaties are not dissolved with those Pagans with whom you have entered into alliance and who have not subsequently failed you in aught, nor aided any one against you. So fulfill your engagements with them to the end of their term: for Allah loveth the righteous.” Verse 9: 6 if one amongst the Pagans ask thee for asylum, grant to him, so that he may hear the Word of Allah; and then escort him to where he can be secure…”

Ibn Taymieh’s Treatise on Warfare

        Al Qaradawi adds ‘the bizarre thing is that the radicals say that these verses were abrogated by Qur’an 47:4 “Therefore, when you meet the unbelievers in fight, smite at their necks; at lengths when you have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond formed on them: thereafter is the time for either generosity or ransom, until the war lags down its burdens.” ..Another verse that is considered the Sword verse is ” Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of truth, (even if they are) of the people of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” Quran 9:29. This revelation came in the context of the post Tabook battle when the Muslims fought the Byzantines after they had killed the Muslim messengers sent to them. The Byzantines were getting ready to invade Medina and the Muslims had to confront them.  Among others, Shaykh al Islam Ibn Taymieh- his book Treatise on Warfare against the Unbelievers, in it he says that the prophet did not fight except those that did fight him and those who offered truces or peace treaties were accepted. ‘

Turning the world against us if no one refutes

        Al Qaradawi identifies the problem succinctly when he states that those who make the argument that the “sword verse” abrogated the two-hundred verses calling for peace and tolerance pose a danger to the Islamic umma- a “danger of turning the world against Islam.” Qaradawi adds,   “If these ideas spread and no one refuted them then the world would see us as warmongering intending to control the world by force. We want to win people over by amity and not by the sword.” Al Anfal 8:61 reads “But if the enemy incline towards peace, do thou also incline towards peace and trust in Allah” and 60:7 “It may be that Allah will establish friendship between you and those whom you now hold as enemies.” Al Qaradawi concluded “there is no permanent enmity, no permanent amity, hearts change and Islam always wants to open doors for amity with people because it is mercy to all mankind.”

        The New York Times reported  that “a high-profile battle rages over a mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, heated confrontations have also broken out in communities across the country where mosques are proposed for far less hallowed locations.”  At the heart of these campaigns and the attacks by former politicians such as Newt Gingrich is an understanding of Islam as a violent political ideology, an argument relentlessly promoted by Spencer and many others. Islam is what Qaradawi is, not what Spencer and his fellow travelers believe. Even if one does not agree with all of Qaradawi’s fatwas/opinions.

By: John-Paul Leonard

        Muslims in the West need to defend themselves, say experts. Imagine you are a public defender trying to acquit an innocent person who’s been framed by the police. How would you feel if your client cops a plea bargain, and confesses to the crime? Pretty frustrated, right? That’s how the 9/11 Truth movement in the US and 7/7 truthers in the UK often feel about their Muslim communities.

        As one who has published several books on 9/11 and 7/7, I wondered why so few Muslims in the US and UK support our effort. In the Middle East, I’m told almost everyone has been convinced the Mossad was behind 9/11. So conformity with the social mainstream must be part of the problem. Muslims may rightly feel that they will simply be scorned as self-serving conspiracy theorists, who see the CIA pulling the strings behind everything.

        But it is a plain fact and not a theory at all, that three World Trade Center Towers were demolished by explosives on 9/11. (No.1 and 2 in the morning and No. 7 in the afternoon, which the media completely hushed up). All three buildings came down at free-fall speed.

        Free fall means there is nothing standing between an object and the ground as it falls. That is as plain a fact of everyday physics as you can find. It is how buildings are demolished. The supporting columns are blown out, and it all falls down.

Only when we ask “who did it” do we have to theorize who the conspirators were. They certainly did not include a handful of alleged Saudi hijackers. On that, we have another set of plain facts.

- There was not a single Arab name on any of the flight manifests.

- A Boeing 757 is about 5,000 times lighter than one of the Twin Towers, making a negligible impact.

- Fuel mixed with air won’t burn hot enough to weaken steel. You couldn’t run a car or a kitchen stove otherwise.

        Case dismissed, right? Not quite. We have to convince the jury. And there we have had to reluctantly accept the evidence of another strange thing: 

        People do not reason from facts to conclusions. It’s the other way around. They start from a world view. They will only accept a conclusion which does not upset that view. They then select facts to fit the conclusion. If there aren’t any, they just refuse to think about it.

        So what world views could get Muslims to buy into the wild-eyed conspiracy theory the Neo-cons sold us about 9/11?

        There are many different types of people among the Muslims, and no one explanation will fit everyone.

        Most Muslims came to the West because they believed in the American Dream. To face the truth would mean giving up the dream.

        Immigrants feel a need to assimilate. Psychologists have found that victims may identify with their oppressors. Some immigrants come from countries where it is not customary to question authority. A few Muslims might the feel the US deserved such an attack, so the government’s theory seems to fit. Many more have been taught that Islam has no political dimension, so they just “won’t go there.” Just like European Americans, many Muslim Americans are afraid to be branded conspiracy theorists. How did this term come to be such a taboo?

        There are strategic goals that a world power can achieve most easily by trickery and covert means. For example, staging a fake attack on your own ships in order to get into a war on a weaker nation; as in the sinking of the USS Maine or the Gulf of Tonkin incident. But a secret can always come out, and tricks only work as long as people don’t see through them. The solution: ridicule the inquisitive as “conspiracy theorists.”

        We can’t be so easily cowed. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me,” we kids used to say on the playground.

        Some Muslims may be complacent that Allah will take care of them as believers. But Allah requires us to do our part. When Islam was nearly destroyed by the Mongols, it was finally saved not by prayer but by a determined military defense. Lack of unity, using the enemy to settle scores with Muslim rivals, and intimidation had paved the way for the invaders, with some Muslim and Arab states giving in to avoid bloodshed, while others took the lash, all too similar to the picture today.

        So what is the right way for Muslims now? I have researched the Quran and the Hadith on this subject. (See http://www.progressivepress.com/blog , March 24th entry.) The teachings are clear. Muslims should be forthright and stand their ground. They should seek and speak the truth. And they should have no illusions that appeasing or mimicking of those who oppress them is going to bring them around.

        The events of the last nine years, with more and more Muslim and Arab nations coming under the gun, is the best proof that Muslims cannot let their enemies get away with 9/11.

        The following experts contributed to this study. They also participated in a colloquium on it on Pacifica Radio on July 7th, 2010. http://www.progressivepress.com/news/london-tube-bombings .

        Nick Kollerstrom, author of Terror on the Tube, the book that shows the accused Muslims were innocent of the 7/7 bombings because of the physical impossibility of the government story.

        Kevin Barrett, author of Truth Jihad, hosted of colloquium on the air.

        Dave Aossey, author of Instruments of the State, a 9/11 truth novel.

        David Livingstone, author of Terrorism and the Illuminati. His thesis is that Islam today was already deeply subverted and neutralized by the British Empire, which gave the Wahhabi and Salafi schools their start. Muslims are given only two futile choices, extremist jihadism and apolitical pietism.

        Author John-Paul Leonard first began writing about politics with Al-Aqsa Intifada. After a year or so of Internet activism for the Palestinian cause, he turned to the issue of 9/11 as the best way to break through the apathy of Middle America. What could be better for Palestine, he says, than for America to find out that 9/11 was done by the Mossad? These five political observers exchanged views on this topic on Pacifica Radio on July 7th, 2010, archived here. http://www.progressivepress.com/news/london-tube-bombings .

By: Tammy Obeidallah

Over the years, I have lambasted the U.S. government, particularly in the area of foreign policy. Wars, copious amounts of taxpayer dollars in aid to an apartheid state, inherent racism and hypocrisy have provided endless fodder for constant criticism.
Has that criticism been aimed at the right place? The motivations behind the aforementioned institutionalized evils are elementary: money, power and greed; however the real problem is much deeper. A government that—at least in principle—is supposed to be “for the people, by the people” must relinquish some of the responsibility for erroneous policy to the people. Whether we feel the need to acquiesce out of fear or out of apathy, we are equally culpable.
The first great enemy to humanity is fear. It is fear that ultimately leads to racism, bigotry, hatred and any number of social ills. Those in power are well aware of this, and will use any means to instill fear in their citizenry in order to manipulate them. Recently, Israeli schoolchildren underwent numerous air raid drills, supposedly in the event of an attack by Hezbollah, or maybe Iran, or just in case the resistance groups in Gaza finally develop a rocket that can hit the broadside of a barn.
Of course, a country which touts itself as a premier tourist destination cannot be under the threat of imminent attacks from Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and Gaza, yet these brainwashed youngsters will—like us—be taught not to question, only to fear and to support their government’s attacks on Palestinian civilians and humanitarian activists under the guise of self-defense.
The tragic absurdity was compounded when Israeli commandos stormed a Gaza-bound humanitarian cargo ship, murdering unarmed activists, only to make outlandish claims that they were ambushed and attacked with knives, pipes and clubs. According to the increasingly preposterous hasbara machine, the Free Gaza movement is tied to Al-Qaeda and hate-filled passengers had prepared themselves for a violent confrontation. Logic dictates that if a group of activists plans a violent confrontation against one of the most advanced and trigger-happy armies in the world, they will carry at least a couple of AK-47s rather than knives and pipes.
However, fear leaves us with the inability to reason, thus it is the most important weapon in the propagandists’ arsenal. Common sense becomes an early casualty. Traveling on internal flights within Ecuador during a recent trip served as a blissful reminder that in other places in the world, travelers do not have to dump their water and liquids in larger-than-three-ounce containers at the door, nor remove their shoes. Yet fear-mongering has convinced us that there is a bomb in every bottle of baby oil and we are poised to submit to even more indignities after the infamous alleged “underwear bomber.” It is truly amazing what people will tolerate.
The Obama administration is poised to give Israel an additional $205 million for a missile defense shield, while the state of California has announced budget cuts eliminating programs such as welfare-to-work and home health care. The vicious cycle continues: give money to Israel, cut program funding for poor and destitute Americans to keep them busy with basic survival so there is no concern for what is going on overseas.
Such apathy, like fear, is equally debilitating. Whether it is the amount of gratuitous violence in news and entertainment, or simply that we are too busy trying to find employment, pay mortgages, maintain health coverage, gas the car and put food on the table, we are losing our uniquely human ability to empathize. Our government’s endless quest for global hegemony has created these conditions—instead of focusing on our own job creation, inner cities, education and health care, foreign wars and entanglements have drained our resources, leaving our citizens to die at hospital doors and our desperate youth to gun down each other in the streets.
I ran into a former coworker at a wedding recently. Sitting together at the reception, three year-old grandson on her lap in his crisp white tuxedo, I showed her pictures of my children while listing the major life changes that had taken place in the eleven years since I had seen her. She spoke of retirement with an air of sadness not usually associated with a comfortable pension after a lifetime of hard work and then informed me quietly that her youngest son—the father of the little boy seated so solemnly in her lap—had been shot and killed in 2007.
After heartfelt yet inadequate and clichéd expressions of sympathy, I realized that I had most likely seen reports of his murder on the news, but had given it little attention: it wasn’t in my part of town and I would not have recognized the name. In other words, it didn’t affect me.
Only then did I come to the disturbing realization that I am not immune to the sickness that has infected us all to one degree or another: the apathetic tolerance that we afford such untimely loss of human life. The people in neighborhoods and situations who have to worry about getting gunned down in front of their own homes cannot be bothered with the gross oppression going on in Palestine. More ignorance and apathy allows the government to continue unabated the flow of economic and military aid to the apartheid state of Israel.
To combat these dual forces of fear and apathy, we must remember the words of the 17th Century English poet John Donne: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind…” We must afford each priceless human life the reverence it commands and refuse to succumb to the irrational scare tactics used by our government to justify mass murder.

By: Frank Scott

Our heads are filled with stories about the danger of trillions of dollars in debt and deficits with little if any mention of the real problem they represent. It is not the debt but what we are indebted for that threatens the future of our nation. If we owed hundreds of trillions of dollars – which may soon be the case – and every American was employed, housed, educated, cared for without question in time of ill health or economic need and safe from warfare and violence from inside the nation or out, such debt would not be any problem at all.
Borrowing today and paying back tomorrow shouldn’t mean we lavishly spend most of the borrowed money on weapons, waste, cosmetics and pets, causing us to scrimp on health, education and social life while complaining that we have too much debt. We have to control our spending on things only a minority of us actually want or really need, and begin changing priorities to satisfy the shared needs and wants of the great majority. This can’t happen under the domain of forces that mislead us into social divisions that exaggerate differences and minimize similarities to protect a perverse commodity culture and a degenerate political order that defines minority rule as democracy.
The present renewal of the drive to dismantle Social Security and turn it over to private profiteers is one among many of the lies and distortions offered as solutions for our problems which will only make them much worse. Increasing budgets for inhuman war and decreasing budgets for human service only make sense to anti-social forces which profit from divide and conquer policies. These reduce Americans, especially the working majority, to special interest and identity groups whose common cause is sacrificed to private competition while ruling minorities practice a lucrative socialism at their expense.
Our imposed common condition of privately shaped ignorance needs to become a liberated common cause of social democracy in order to transform our economy before it transforms us into a totally failed society.
All people need housing, safe communities, health care, education, transportation and the free time necessary to pursue interests other than simply working to maintain those needs. But we are socialized to accept a lack of any and all of those things for far too many of our number, believing that those who don’t have them are simply undeserving. This divisive condition is part of the political economy that replaces citizenship with consumerism and substitutes anti-social competition for social cooperation.
When people seek community in religious gatherings where they worship deities that call for solidarity and love among humanity, and leave those places to practice competitive individualism and economic warfare amongst themselves, the society in which they practice this split personality is suffering more than a collective mental disorder. That disorder is part of the economic foundation that is taught to us as a natural order of what is called god’s universe, except when god is being communed with at church, ashram, temple or other place of worship of the beautiful immaterial ideal in order to escape the ugly material reality. This fractured dualism makes it possible for a society to be in great debt in order to make war, create poverty and destroy the natural environment, while lacking the material and spiritual sustenance of life for a majority of the human community.
If we are all god’s children, as many believe, we need to stop treating some of our kin folk like excrement. The human family is dysfunctional under profit and loss rules in which values that sound good in words about love, compassion and brotherhood turn out to be deeds of hate, waste and mass murder. We cannot be ethical people practicing high minded morals in the midst of a collectively immoral economy that trashes ethical behavior with murderous attack on humans and all other parts of the natural environment.
The earth is treated as a profit making commodity and we see it erupting in gushers of oil that threaten far more than the profit margin of one petroleum company. Humans are treated as nothing more than commodities by the same system, and it cannot and should not be blamed on individual corporate CEOs or political and media gas bags who simply follow the systemic dictates of creating profit for some at the expense of all. That is the religion of the market under private control, creating benefit for a minority at enormous cost for the great majority. That cost is being reflected in greater numbers of personal lives as this economy suffers what is called a recession, but even more telling signs are revealed in the rapid breakdowns in life support systems that can no longer withstand the ravages of being treated like marketable commodities rather than what they are; the substance of our lives.
Nature is our nature and not some product which we can simply market and sell for profit at the mall. When we incur colossal debts in order to create massive destruction of nature, we are destroying the very substance of ourselves. That cannot go on and will only be changed by a motivated and informed public that demands service to humanity – itself – before service to a private commodity market. The growing numbers who profess that another world is possible are voicing the necessity, not just the possibility. We will have that other world or we will not have any world at all. And creating that future organism is worth going into far more debt than any we have incurred for generating this present grotesque antihuman and rapidly failing mechanism.

BY SAMI BISHARA MASHNEY
Editor-in-Chief, Anaheim, CA
 
  When I immigrated to the United States at age 23, I arrived in Jacksonville, Florida, in the height of the Iranian hostage crises when Americans were being held in Tehran in the aftermath of the Iranian overthrow of the Shah and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
 I have to admit that I was quickly unnerved by the anti-Iranian-and-Muslim frenzy, maliciously whipped by the so-called “mainstream” media whose one of its major objectives is to create animosity and hostility between the American People, and the various peoples of the Middle East—Israel, of course, the “Chosen” State, is exempted as usual.
 Although I’m neither Iranian nor Muslim, as a Palestinian Arab recent immigrant, I looked Middle Eastern enough to be concerned with the high-pitched xenophobia, whose flames were fanned every 15 minutes with an unstoppable barrage of more and more “Breaking News,” etc.
 Being naive and fresh of the boat, I thought then that if I pretended to be Greek, I would face less hostility from an average uninformed Jacksonville redneck, who, after consuming several Budweisers, engages me in an unsolicited and heated political debate at the local discotheque.
 So my name became Sam Mashnikopolous who just emigrated from Greece. Of course, I was secretly loathing the likelihood that some random Greekophile would checkmate me by engaging me in a spontaneous Greek conversation, because, Greek, for lack of a better term, was still Greek to me.
 A few months went by and I regained my self-assurance, dropped the Greek act, and started and continue to audaciously refer to myself as an Arab American.
 To me, being an Arab is congruous with being an American. Both characteristics are compatible without any contradiction or dual loyalty problems, in the same manner as being Italian, Irish, Russian, are compatible with also being an American. As a matter of fact, our law allows naturalized Americans to have dual nationality.
Throughout my life in the USA, I infrequently encountered fellow Arab Americans who vehemently deny their Arab heritage. Some do so on myopic religious grounds, some on mindless regional ones, and some out of shear and unadulterated misguidance.
 When I founded the Network of Arab American Professionals of Orange County (NAAP-OC), I had to do a lot of convincing to persuade a fellow Arab American professional of Arabic Christian extraction that he can be a Christian, an Egyptian, a Lebanese, an Iraqi, an Arab, and an American, all at the same time since none of these designations are mutually exclusive to each other.
 I always use myself as a textbook example of someone who is a Palestinian, an Arab, a lapsed Catholic Christian, an American, and a human citizen of Earth.
While I’m very proud of choosing to be an American,   I am also equally proud of being Palestinian and Arab. When I look around me and see successful immigrant Americans, I can’t help but notice that no community reached its maximum potential by denying its very own existence!
 I once dealt with a government agent investigating my Lebanese Christian client for alleged membership of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Muslim Party of God. When I attempted to explain to the agent that my Christian client cannot be a member of an Islamic party, he laughed at me and said, “Christian, Muslim, Shiite, Sunni, all Arabs are the same!” The funny thing is that my client had no affiliation or affinity whatsoever to Hezbollah and was someone who would have considered Hezbollah a rival!
 So, irrespective of how we feel about our religious and regional differences, when we live in America, we are all perceived as “Arabs,” whether we like or not. So, we might as well positively assert our Arabness as a rallying point instead of apologizing for it and hiding it in the dark ethnic closet.
 This brings me to Allan Mansoor, Mayor of Costa Mesa, CA and candidate for the 68th Assembly District of California. Mansoor descends from an Arab father and a Swedish mother.
Mansoor wrote on his blog: “My father, though born in Egypt and with an Arabic name, was greatly influenced by European culture.” “I am taking exception to being classified as ‘one of three Arab-American candidates in city elections.’”
 I lived in Egypt five years when I went to Pharmacy School at Cairo University. There, I met all sorts of Egyptian People whom I liked and quickly became accustomed to. As an inexperienced 16 year old coming from sleepy Ramallah, I was quickly befriended by many Egyptian friends who quickly made it clear to me that they are Coptic Christians. I later learned that my Christian middle (father’s) name “Bishara” announced my Christianity to them and that’s why they befriended me!
 I got to know these friends very well and they were all proud to be Egyptians, Arabs and Coptic Christians. They did not consider being Christian inimical to being an Arab.
Well, Allan Mansoor, excuse me but I too take exception to your taking a weenie exception to being called an ‘Arab’ American. I am giving my vote to Phu Nguyen, a candidate who is not afraid to refer to himself as a “Vietnamese” American.
 As we say in Arabic, he who forgets his origin has no origin. That is the case of Allan Mansoor, who, in pursuit of success and influence, made the conscious decision to deny his origin, just like Peter and Judas denied Christ. Peter repented and went to heaven. Will Mansoor repent and stop denying his Arabic heritage?!

By: Ghassan Michel Rubeiz

Columnist

 Congress needs to stop letting Israel get off easy for violating international law.

On Nov. 3, the House of Representatives voted to discredit a United Nations report that accuses both Israel and Hamas of war crimes in the three-week war last January. Read the full story