Anti Religion = Pro War? Gaza Chomsky

War and Enlightenment

The 18th-century ideals are being appropriated to defend the war in Iraq, resulting in a standoff between reason and religion.

Dan Hind -- July 2, 2007 2:02 PM

What does the campaign to bring Enlightenment values to the Middle East have in common with calls to launch a crusade against the anti-Christ in Babylon? The answer is that both projects helped to reconcile the public to the invasion of Iraq.

While rightwing Republicans intoxicated themselves with hints of Iraqi involvement in 9/11 and overheated rhetoric about the war against the beast, liberals took comfort in the notion that the White House was at last taking seriously the need to confront religious tyranny. One prominent liberal supporter of the war allowed himself to be convinced that a "slum clearance" of "the region's rotten nexus of client states" was "beginning to form in the political mind". Yes, in March 2003 the talk was all of weapons of mass destruction and UN resolutions, but if you listened carefully enough you could pick up hints that the US administration "could be made to care as much about democracy and emancipation". The planners in the Pentagon became, through the alchemy of their admirers' prose, the spiritual heirs of Voltaire and Paine.

Celebrity atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will angrily deny that religious fundamentalism can have anything in common with the 18th century's campaign for secularism and religious tolerance. They insist noisily that the values of the Enlightenment are under threat as never before from the forces of unreason. And all this panic about mumbo-jumbo is good box office; atheists never seem to tire of reading about the pernicious absurdity of religious beliefs.

But at the level of perception management, the Enlightenment served exactly the same purpose as the religion that is supposed to be its mortal, defining enemy. "Believe what you like, only do not resist", was the watchword of the White House and of Downing Street. You could take your pick from crusades, democratisation or weapons of mass destruction. If you liked your drama really straightforward, you could even believe it was all about a son's righteous thirst for vengeance. Would-be enlightened intellectuals might want to look more closely at an institutional system that was able to use the Enlightenment itself as just one more theme in its campaign to sell an illegal war. It is the virtuosity of the people who brought us the invasion of Iraq, not the vaudevillian villainy of the evangelical right, surely, that should engross the attention of our paladins for truth and justice.

Faith, it is said, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Can the enlightened advocates of war in Iraq now deny that they were lost in the fervour of their hopes, that they were deluded as to the nature and purposes of earthly power? This need not lead us to despair of enlightenment, to imagine, as some do, that the hope of material improvement must always decay into murderous utopianism. That is a cheap kind of worldliness, the philosophical equivalent of Damien Hirst's cows in formaldehyde; at once luminously transgressive and entirely safe.

As a series of revolutions in human understanding, the Enlightenment has much to teach us about how we might yet, perhaps just in time, transform the world through the power of knowledge. But it is not enlightened to enlist the Enlightenment to the service of Anglo-American power. Nor is it enlightened to exaggerate and misconstrue the problems of political irrationalism. At best, such an "Enlightenment" distracts us from far more pressing concerns. At worst it is itself a menace, a clear and present threat to reason.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dan_hind/2007/07/war_and_enlightenment.html

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Guillotining Gaza

BY NOAM CHOMSKY -- 18 July 2007

THE death of a nation is a rare and sombre event. But the vision of a unified, independent Palestine threatens to be another casualty of a Hamas-Fatah civil war, stoked by Israel and its enabling ally the United States.

Last month’s chaos may mark the beginning of the end of the Palestinian Authority. That might not be an altogether unfortunate development for Palestinians, given US-Israeli programmes of rendering it nothing more than a quisling regime to oversee these allies’ utter rejection of an independent state.

The events in Gaza took place in a developing context. In January 2006, Palestinians voted in a carefully monitored election, pronounced to be free and fair by international observers, despite US-Israeli efforts to swing the election towards their favourite, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party. But Hamas won a surprising victory.

The punishment of Palestinians for the crime of voting the wrong way was severe. With US backing, Israel stepped up its violence in Gaza, withheld funds it was legally obligated to transmit to the Palestinian Authority, tightened its siege and even cut off the flow of water to the arid Gaza Strip.

The United States and Israel made sure that Hamas would not have a chance to govern. They rejected Hamas’s call for a long-term cease-fire to allow for negotiations on a two-state settlement, along the lines of an international consensus that Israel and United States have opposed, in virtual isolation, for more than 30 years, with rare and temporary departures.

Meanwhile, Israel stepped up its programmes of annexation, dismemberment and imprisonment of the shrinking Palestinian cantons in the West Bank, always with US backing despite occasional minor complaints, accompanied by the wink of an eye and munificent funding.

Powers-that-be have a standard operating procedure for overthrowing an unwanted government: Arm the military to prepare for a coup. Israel and its US ally helped arm and train Fatah to win by force what it lost at the ballot box. The United States also encouraged Abbas to amass power in his own hands, appropriate behaviour in the eyes of Bush administration advocates of presidential dictatorship.

The strategy backfired. Despite the military aid, Fatah forces in Gaza were defeated last month in a vicious conflict, which many close observers describe as a pre-emptive strike targeting primarily the security forces of the brutal Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan. Israel and the United States quickly moved to turn the outcome to their benefit. They now have a pretext for tightening the stranglehold on the people of Gaza.

‘To persist with such an approach under present circumstances is indeed genocidal, and risks destroying an entire Palestinian community that is an integral part of an ethnic whole,’ writes international law scholar Richard Falk.

This worst-case scenario may unfold unless Hamas meets the three conditions imposed by the ‘international community’ — a technical term referring to the US government and whoever goes along with it. For Palestinians to be permitted to peek out of the walls of their Gaza dungeon, Hamas must recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept past agreements, in particular, the Road Map of the Quartet (the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations).

The hypocrisy is stunning. Obviously, the United States and Israel do not recognise Palestine or renounce violence. Nor do they accept past agreements. While Israel formally accepted the Road Map, it attached 14 reservations that eviscerate it. To take just the first, Israel demanded that for the process to commence and continue, the Palestinians must ensure full quiet, education for peace, cessation of incitement, dismantling of Hamas and other organisations, and other conditions; and even if they were to satisfy this virtually impossible demand, the Israeli cabinet proclaimed that ‘the Roadmap will not state that Israel must cease violence and incitement against the Palestinians.’

Israel’s rejection of the Road Map, with US support, is unacceptable to the Western self-image, so it has been suppressed. The facts finally broke into the mainstream with Jimmy Carter’s book, ‘Palestine: Peace not Apartheid,’ which elicited a torrent of abuse and desperate efforts to discredit it.

While now in a position to crush Gaza, Israel can also proceed, with US backing, to implement its plans in the West Bank, expecting to have the tacit cooperation of Fatah leaders who will be rewarded for their capitulation. Among other steps, Israel began to release the funds — estimated at $600 million — that it had illegally frozen in reaction to the January 2006 election.

Ex-prime minister Tony Blair is now to ride to the rescue. To Lebanese political analyst Rami Khouri, ‘appointing Tony Blair as special envoy for Arab-Israeli peace is something like appointing the Emperor Nero to be the chief fireman of Rome.’ Blair is the Quartet’s envoy only in name. The Bush administration made it clear at once that he is Washington’s envoy, with a very limited mandate. Secretary of State Rice (and President Bush) retain unilateral control over the important issues, while Blair would be permitted to deal only with problems of institution-building.

As for the short-term future, the best case would be a two-state settlement, per the international consensus. That is still by no means impossible. It is supported by virtually the entire world, including the majority of the US population. It has come rather close, once, during the last month of Bill Clinton’s presidency — the sole meaningful US departure from extreme rejectionism during the past 30 years. In January 2001, the United States lent its support to the negotiations in Taba, Egypt, that nearly achieved such a settlement before they were called off by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

In their final Press conference, the Taba negotiators expressed hope that if they had been permitted to continue their joint work, a settlement could have been reached. The years since have seen many horrors, but the possibility remains. As for the likeliest scenario, it looks unpleasantly close to the worst case, but human affairs are not predictable: Too much depends on will and choice.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2007/July/opinion_July63.xml§ion=opinion