Our presence in Buenos Aires suggests a stirring return to How We Lived on It (7), and its tribute to the Tango.
Number 12 is in a not dissimilar vein.
Photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue
Model & Muse: Renée Perle
Music from the film The Moderns
Video: Irwin 1021
Julia and I will be traveling in Argentina & Uruguay over the next two weeks – we just landed in Buenos Aires yesterday – so posting will be a little erratic. I will try to keep it up, though, and interesting. Since I’m with a pack of voracious photographers, I’m going to flatter them with the prospects of an immediate audience and try to get some of their work up. Tomorrow, another taste of How We Lived on It.
AJA
The late comedian Sam Kinison had a classic, foul-mouthed routine about common sense advice to the regular victims of famine in certain remote areas of the world – something to the effect of YOU KNOW WHY YOU’RE STARVING? YOU LIVE IN A DESERT! THERE’S NO FOOD THERE! NOTHING GROWS THERE! NOTHING IS GOING TO GROW THERE! MOVE WHERE THE FOOD IS!
That was the expurgated version. The bit is funny (to those with that sense of humor) in part because it so completely without sentiment, either for those who are hypothetically starving or for what they or any people often, to others, inexplicably feel about the terrain from which they come, no matter how apparently inhospitable. It is a wonder to Southern Californians that anyone anywhere in the world lives north of, say, the 45th parallel, but, astoundingly, they do, and choose to remain.
The San Carlos Apache Reservation: Photograph by Julia Dean
So it is, in part, with Indian reservations. Many are situated far from the industrial and commercial centers that sprang up over the growth of the nation without consideration of the completely alien Native way of life and attachment to land. This is fundamental to the problem of joblessness on some reservations. It might seem obvious to many non-Natives that American Indians should just pick up and move to the nearest sizable city to seek employment opportunities, and many have done so, willingly and not, over the twentieth century. That presents its own set of problems. However those who remain on the reservation do so for a variety of reasons, among them the feeling of sovereignty it affords (however trifling it may appear to others) and that attachment to a group and to the land.
All too often, without regard to such human considerations, people will pretend that Native Americans are just another melting pot minority and insist that the solution to Native social problems is a more committed effort at assimilation. It is a suggestion both profoundly callous to, and ignorant of, history. In the history of the American republic, there have been noted seven distinct periods or policies of federal government relations with Native America. Through all of these eras, however well-intentioned policymakers may at time have thought them, a general ground of cultural disregard and economic rapaciousness persisted.
1. Trade and Intercourse Era (1789-1825)
2. Removal Era (1825-1850s)
During this era the Tribes of the Southeast were foribly removed to the Oklahoma Territory, in order to advance non-Native settlement and economic interests
3. Reservation Era (1850s-1887)
As Tribes succumbed to conquest they were limited or moved, and confined, to much limited land bases, over which, by treaty, they retained limited sovereignty.
4. Allotment and Assimilation Era (1887-1934)
Once the Indian Wars were considered over, the policy began to break up Tribal land bases, as occurred in Oklahoma, and force acculturation. The tremendous advances the Oklahoma Tribes had made in recovering from the Removal were wiped away
5. Indian Reorganization Era (1934-1940s)
In a complete reversal of policy, Tribes were encouraged through legislation to seek self-government and self-sufficiency.
6. Termination Era (1940s-1962)
In yet another reversal, the government sought the elimination of federal recognition of Tribes and large population transfers to urban areas, again with the aim of assimilation.
7. Self-Determination Era (1962-Present)
One more complete reversal.
It would have been quite remarkable had any substantial recovery from conquest occurred amid these frequently changing policies, culturally destructive in their outright intent or through their inconstancy. Many Tribes have made negligible progress. Others are striding forward, assisted in no small part by Casino profits, as I discussed yesterday.
One constant in the success stories, including in education, is the role of Tribal culture in social and educational advance. The Tribal Colleges demonstrate regularly how educational success for Native Americans is boosted by grounding in Native cultures. Carrie Billy, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, stressed to us, when we spoke with her this past September, the empirical evidence for this relation. Indeed, when it comes to American Indian success, the key findings of The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development are that
Sovereignty Matters. When Native nations make their own decisions about what development approaches to take, they consistently out-perform external decision makers—on matters as diverse as governmental form, natural resource management, economic development, health care, and social service provision.
Institutions Matter. For development to take hold, assertions of sovereignty must be backed by capable institutions of governance. Nations do this as they adopt stable decision rules, establish fair and independent mechanisms for dispute resolution, and separate politics from day-to-day business and program management.
Culture Matters. Successful economies stand on the shoulders of legitimate, culturally grounded institutions of self-government. Indigenous societies are diverse; each nation must equip itself with a governing structure, economic system, policies, and procedures that fit its own contemporary culture.
Leadership Matters. Nation building requires leaders who introduce new knowledge and experiences, challenge assumptions, and propose change. Such leaders, whether elected, community, or spiritual, convince people that things can be different and inspire them to take action.
AJA
Indian Gaming, like reservations, is a complex subject. I address it now because of the coming premiere at the Sundance Film Festival of Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s documentary on Jack Abramoff and his lobbyistg scamming of everyone, including, as always, his own clients – various Indian Tribes that hired him to represent their casino interests. Indian Country Today offers a more Native perspective.
Casino gambling offers ready opportunity for moralizing, and historically, in addition to killing, conquering, lying to, and stealing from Indians, there is nothing non-Native America has better liked to do than lecture and moralize to them. Pointing out that American Indians engaged in warfare too, and that, now, they are willing to make a buck off one of the time-honored vices of non-Native America, just serves, somehow, to justify it all, certainly wash it away. Apparently, money in the pockets of Indians need be purer than
the ethically enriched revenues of the typical non-Native business enterprise. And if the dollars are accumulating too bountifully (which seems to mean noticeably), then the earth will be thrown off its axis. This seemed to be the case when the mysteriously well-regarded Arnold Schwarzenegger first ran for California governor in the recall election against Grey Davis in 2003. (Bang up job he’s done in California, don’t you think, “opening up the books, letting the light shine in,” as he put it at the time? No doubt Davis is choking on the pudding that contains the proof of Schwarzenegger’s political and executive superiority.)
In fact, what was little noted, because so few cared, was that Schwarzenegger ran (please note that I do not use this word often and casually) a pointedly racist campaign against the Indian Tribes of California in 2003. Seeking to stoke further the discontent of Californians with the Davis status quo, the governator decided to run a series of ads aimed at resentment of the accumulated casino wealth of some California tribes.
Their casinos make billions, yet they pay no taxes and virtually nothing to the state. Other states require revenue from Indian gaming, but not us. It’s time for them to pay their fair share. All the other major candidates take their money and pander to them. I don’t play that game. Give me your vote and I guarantee you things will change.
That was the problem with the California economy – the damned Indians (they never cease to be a thorn) were making too much money. They didn’t contribute enough. (The continent, one deduces, was insufficient.) We’re sick and tired of bowing down to them.
The level of historical ignorance was striking, but no more than the electorate would tolerate. The Schwarzenegger advisers bet that there is never any downside to stoking ill will toward Indians, and the results did not prove them wrong.
If a person is inclined to pay attention, there will be news stories about ugly battles, within some tribes, over the divvying up of Casino profits. Some Tribes treat the profits as a kind of annuity, with a yearly dividend to enrolled tribal members. This has led to unseemly
battles over qualifications for official enrolled status in a tribe, with disputes about the degree of blood quantum sufficient for that status. Tribal members emerge from obscurity seeking their share. It is all so very atypical of human behavior generally. Add to it all examples of people spending their money on alcohol and drugs, and generally wastefully, and y0u get a story bearing no relation to what has occurred each year since 1982 with the distribution of the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend from oil profits to state residents. During those cold dark winter months, they’re all going to community college courses to retrain and improve themselves.
If one is not sufficiently knowledgeable, one will not know that it hasn’t worked out quite that well for all Casinos and their Tribes. And if a Tribe was really unlucky, it hired Jack Abramoff to try to make its members some money. But that angle is a story for another day. A better contrasting story is of those tribes that have chosen not to payout an individual dividend, but instead to use Casino profits to fund government operations and development initiatives. This is true, for instance, of many of the Oklahoma Tribes, some of which over the past 10-15 years have made enormous strides in social, educational, and cultural redevelopment. In part, among such Tribes as the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Chickasaw, this has been the benefit of uniquely talented leaders coming along at the right time. But those leaders could have accomplished little without the resource of the Casino profits.
The Choctaw, for instance, under the leadership since 1997 of Chief Gregory Pyle have become an exemplar of the kinds of successes a well-governed and adequately-funded Indian nation can enjoy. Aided by federal programs to boost contracts for small, disadvantaged and HUBzone businesses, profits from the casino business have helped establish the Choctaw Manufacturing and Development Corporation and Choctaw Management Services Enterprises. The latter was “created to provide healthcare staff, information technology support, and administrative management for government and commercial clients,” including U.S. military bases and embassies. In Talihina, Oklahoma the Choctaw constructed the first Indian hospital – with satellites throughout the Choctaw non-reservation geographical area – fully funded by its tribe, without funds from the Indian Health Service.
Photo by Julia Dean
The following is A Policy Primer on American Indian Governments and Their Gaming Operations, from the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. (Large PDF)
The gaming enterprises of American Indian tribes are operations of American Indian tribal governments. With powers akin to one of the states, these governments are recognized by the U.S. Government pursuant to the U.S. Constitution, centuries-old treaties, numerous Supreme Court decisions, Presidential orders, and acts of Congress. Today, in the lower 48 states, .Indian Country. is comprised of 350 Indian areas that are associated with federally-recognized tribes and tracked by the U.S. Census. These consist of 310 reservations and 40 Indian statistical areas, 29 of which are in Oklahoma.1 The reservations range in size from a few acres to hundreds of thousands of acres: the Navajo Nation.s reservation is approximately the size of West Virginia.
Just as states in the United States have certain powers of jurisdiction within their boundaries, so tribes have governmental powers within their boundaries. While tribes (and states) cannot exercise powers such as raising an army or issuing currency, they possess powers to: determine their respective forms of government (e.g., craft constitutions), define citizenship, pass and enforce laws through their own police forces and courts, collect taxes, regulate the domestic affairs of their citizens, and regulate property use (e.g., through zoning, permitting, environmental regulation, and the like). And like states, American Indian governments have the power to determine whether they will engage in gaming operations.
American Indian governments. rights to gaming have their roots in the U.S. Constitution. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution provides that: .The Congress shall have Power. o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.. Accordingly, when the State of California tried to block the government of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians from operating a gaming enterprise in the mid-1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Cabazon.s rights to determine for itself if and how it would operate gaming enterprises. The Court recognized California and Cabazon as separate sovereigns . just as California and, say, Nevada (which, like Cabazon, shares its border with California) are recognized as separate sovereigns when it comes to Nevada.s right to allow gaming.
With tribes rights of gaming thus affirmed, Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 (IGRA). This Act circumscribes the rights recognized by the Supreme Court in Cabazon. Under IGRA, all gambling activities on the reservations are subject to each tribe.s own gaming laws, ordinances, and commissions. Class II gambling (e.g., bingo and related games) and Class III gambling (including, e.g., slot machines and casino games) are both subject to the oversight of the federal National Indian Gaming Commission. And Class III gambling may be subject to state regulation and oversight depending on how these are specified and negotiated in intergovernmental tribal-state compacts.
Paralleling the decisions of many states to operate state lottery businesses in order to help fund state governmental activities, approximately 200 tribal governments are currently engaged in Class II (e.g., bingo) or Class III (e.g., full-scale casinos) gaming. As required by IGRA, revenues from tribal governmental gaming must be directed towards: funding tribal government operations and programs; providing for the general welfare of tribal citizens; promoting economic development; supporting charitable organizations; and funding operations for local, non-tribal government agencies.
Mirroring the decisions of state governments to create and join various associations of state lotteries, 147 tribal governments currently constitute the voting membership of the National Indian Gaming Association (NIGA). Both the Indian and state gaming associations are created pursuant to the respective governments. obligations to serve their citizens. interests, and both types of associations fund research into the impacts of their governmental gaming programs
AJA
Jeff Weintraub, Comments and Controversies – Pass the Damn Bill
He’s been saying it all week long: Democrats, don’t be punks.
Corey Kilgannon, The New York Times – Serpico on Serpico
For film aficionados and New Yorkers of a certain age: Frank Serpico today. How a whole life can turn on one series of events.
Jeffrey Goldberg – The Taboo That Just Won’t Shut Up, Chapter 43
Just how completely absurd is Andrew Sullivan? Goldblog demonstrates for us.
Michael J. Totten, Commentary - A Third Lebanon War?
And when it happens, how much in denial will how many people be that the theo-authoritarian military organization Hezbollah has hijacked Lebanon, funded and armed by Syria and Iran. See also
Howard Schneider, The Washington Post: Hezbollah’s relocation of rocket sites to Lebanon’s interior poses wider threat.
Maybe they mean what they say.
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Judeosphere has only been back to blogging a few weeks, but he is quickly making his mark again with very sharp and important posts. A couple of days ago he posted on Ernest Sternberg’s new article in Orbis, “Purifying the World: What the New Radical Ideology Stands For.” From Judeosphere, Sternberg, with Judeosphere commenting in the midst:
Though it’s a mouthful, world purificationism would do well in expressing what the movement wants. It wants to achieve a grand historical vision: the anticipated defeat of imperial capitalist power in favor of a global network of beneficent culture-communities, which will empower themselves through grassroots participatory democracy, and maintain consistency across movements through the rectifying power of NGOs, thereby bringing into being a new era of global social justice and sustainable development, in which the diverse communities can harmoniously share an earth that has been saved from destruction and remade pristine.
According to this doctrine, the world is divided between the empowered global system, which is the purveyor of toxicity and disempowered communities that suffer its consequences. The world system that perpetuates oppression is known as Empire. It exercises domination through corporate tentacles, media manipulation, state power, and military prowess. It is selfish, greedy, ruthless, racist, and exploitative, and heedlessly pollutes the earth. It imposes its media-saturated culture, dehumanizing technologies, and exploitative production systems on subject peoples.
Sternberg further argues that this perspective explains the doctrine’s inherent hostility toward Israel—a vulnerable nemesis that acts as a unifying cause:
Anti-Zionism pops up in the most unlikely places and in remarkably virulent forms. At the World Social Forum meeting at the mouth of the Amazon, five thousand miles from Jerusalem, packed with over 100,000 purifiers from around the world, demonstrations against Israel count as one of the three foremost accomplishments. In Durban, South Africa, hundreds of governmental groups and NGOs meet allegedly to fight racism, but ignore its genocidal manifestations in Africa, and can agree only to condemn Israel. In America, the Green party has condemnation of Israel as its sole foreign policy. In Britain, unionized academics vote each year to boycott Israel, and never any other place. In Toronto, a demonstration for equal wages displays anti-Israel placards. And in France, so does a demonstration against the loss of appellation for Roquefort cheese.
Why Israel? The clue is in the variety….[of] the new movement: Islamists, Arab Nationalists, post-Christian humanitarians, third-worldists, and anti-globalizers of various stripes. That’s the movement’s ticklish problem: how to keep so much diversity in check. If Empire is too abstract as a nemesis, and America seems too formidable, what’s needed is a scapegoat manageable enough in size that it just might be defeated, and devilish enough in popular imagination that it will elicit the requisite loathing.
Enter Israel, the only Western nation under long enough threat that it has had to fight ongoing wars to survive. Stripped of all context, Israel’s actions can be made to fit the needed image of aggressor. And even if, for some haters of Israel, hatred of mere Jews is not the motive, it’s still all the better that Israel is Jewish, since there is a rich anti-Semitic tradition to draw on….purifiers have rediscovered that old enemy of humanity, the satanic cosmopolitan. He is the globalized Goldberg against whom transnational movements can build solidarity through execration.
Next, yesterday, in Diseased Minds, Judeosphere reported on anit-Western, anti-Semitic vaccination conspiracy theories:
Seven years ago, the Nigerian government halted polio vaccinations after rumors emerged that vaccines were instruments of a Western and Zionist plot to sterilize Muslim women and to hasten the spread of AIDS. (As a result, the disease spread into neighboring Niger, then headed east to Chad and Sudan and also appeared in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Indonesia.)
Now, similar rumors are emerging in Pakistan. According to MEMRI, an article published by an Urdu-language magazine for women in Pakistan has called the international polio eradication campaign a Jewish conspiracy being furthered by various international organizations.
The article declares:
“The Jews, who dream of ruling the world, have invented different types of vaccines, drugs, and injections in an organized way to weaken Muslims in their beliefs on spiritual, practical, and moral levels, and make their bodies contaminated. The oral polio vaccine campaign is being run under a worldwide conspiracy—except in the Zionist countries. Its total focus is now on South Asian countries— India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The U.S. has already marked this area as an extremely strategic region.”
Since their very beginning, anti-vaccination movements have been rife with conspiracy theories. In her book, The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby notes that anti-vaccination rhetoric has traditionally tapped into the Right’s distrust of government and the Left’s distrust of traditional medicine. And, quelle surprise, throughout history, anti-vaccination movements have sometimes been tinged with anti-semitism. The fact that Jonas Salk was Jewish prompted one U.S. group to print pamphlets claiming the polio vaccine represented the “forces of the anti-Christ” in an effort to “violate and contaminate” the bodies of millions of innocent children.
But the emergence of widespread, anti-semitic, vaccine conspiracy theories in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East seems to be a (relatively) recent development. Reading through articles, reports, and online chat groups, it’s a phenomenon that appears to have gathered momentum in just the last ten years.
Judeosphere then quotes the Pakistani article’s recitation of the various world health organizations administering the vaccination programs and its insistence that “[a]ll these organizations are known to work openly of the interest of Zionism.”
It’s a vicious cycle of paranoia: The growing activism of NGOs and multilateral institutions provokes resentment against foreign meddling; these organizations are believed to serve the U.S. agenda—and that agenda is, of course, controlled by you-know-who.
My point in bringing these two posts together? The impulse to purify, as Sternberg terms it, should always frighten. Anti-Semitism has always been framed in terms of purification. Most prominently, see Hitler, A. On the extreme, Utopian left, Mao and Pol Pot sought to purify the masses of their bourgeois tendencies, and society of the counter-revolutionary stain of intellectuals. Stalin’s own purifying purges were a little less ideologically pure, but no less pleasing to his gut. Internationally, the radical left tendencies of which Sternberg writes end up, often, these days, aligning themselves in reactionary sympathy with the Iraqi insurgency, Islamic totalitarians, and rank genocidal racists such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the current Iranian regime. Nothing brings these two noxious extremes together more precisely in twenty-first century international politics than anti-Westernism and anti-Zionism. Find one and you’ll tend to find the other, at either end of the spectrum.
The import for American liberals is this – these are unions of ideas, and identifications, that will not serve to the credit of liberals anymore than have past misconceptions, such as of the various Marxist murderers so often excused in the past. In the meantime, there are low, anti-intellectual, conservative forces at work in U.S. politics, rightist populists championing anti-intellectualism and ignorance and who reject most of the important historical, political, and humanist insights of the twentieth century. When liberals make even casual alliance with, and excuse for, the purifying left extremes that bump hips with hate, they weaken their ability to fight the sordid rejectionists we have seen on the right since the day Obama took office.
AJA
It is generally observed by those who believe that Native Americans receive far too much sympathy for the effect on their cultures of the European arrival in the Western Hemisphere – as if it served as the argumentative coup de grâce – that Indian Tribes throughout the Western Hemisphere warred with each long before and after the first colonial activity. Yes, it is true: human beings all over the globe have always engaged in warfare. It was not different in Native America. However, the involvement of Indian Tribes in the wars between the Europeans, extended to the Americas, was always particularly destructive to Native culture and tribal sustainability. Various tribes were bitterly involved in what are peculiarly designated in the United States the French and Indian Wars, since the wars were primarily between the French and the English. The Algonquian Tribes allied with the French, the Iroquois with the British. Particular alliances were the product of which European population had treated a tribe well and more favorably and Native calculations as to where their fortunes better lay.
During the Civil War, Indians were once again caught in the middle. Many tens of thousands of Indians served in the army on both sides of the conflict. Most whole tribes that took a side did so with the Union, though the Creek and Choctaw, for instance, slave-holding Tribes, fought for the Confederacy. The Cherokee suffered a major split, significantly along the fault lines created within the Tribe in the 1830s, between those who supported acquiescing to the Great Removal to Oklahoma enforced by President Andrew Jackson and those who opposed it. In keeping with the historical treatment of the Tribes by the U.S. and European powers, those that had sided with the Confederacy saw their already involuntary Great Removal treaties dissolved after the war as punishment.
Cumberland Landing, Virginia Federal encampment on Pamunkey River, Va.
In Virginia, the Pamunkey Indians, who had by then been occupying the nation’s oldest reservation for over two hundred years, bitterly resented the mistreatment and supremacist attitudes of the surrounding Virgina population, and allied themselves with the Union, serving, during the 1862 and 1864 campaigns in the Pamunkey River area, as guides and river pilots. According to current Pamunkey Chief Kevin Brown, the Pamunkey suffered at the hands of the Confederate forces for their activity, at one point having their entire male population rounded up and prepared for execution, until General Robert E. Lee intervened and prevented it.
Now, even today, comes this report from The New York Times of another kind of “caught in the middle.” The Tohono O’odham Reservation is right on the Mexican border, in Arizona. It is overrun with Mexican drug smugglers, who both enlist and punish the Native residents, and the Border Patrol agents who suspect and arrest them. Many, though they recognize the necessity of the federal presence, feel occupied once more.
AJA
Well, not really. It’s actually “mind games, the photographs,” but that doesn’t provide the same hook. Mind Games, the movie, by the way, would be the September 30, 2000 France2 video of Muhammad al Durah, a Palestinian boy in the arms of his father, purportedly being shot by Israeli soldiers – an event that was one of the pretexts for the Second Intifada. I wonder how many readers at this moment know, over nine years later, that it is quite generally agreed by the journalistic community and investigators that al Durah was not shot, either purposely or by accident, by Israeli soldiers, but was, at the very least, the victim of Palestinian fire, if not a tool in a staged incident. There was, in fact, much staged activity recorded on video that day by Palestinian cameramen employed by Western news organizations. Richard Landes, who provided expert testimony in a French civil suit on the matter, has developed probably the most extensive documentation of the affair, available at his blog, the Augean Stables. Landes has dubbed the complex of parties and forces producing such media manipulation in the Israel-Palestinian conflict Pallywood. It is my intent in a forthcoming post in the Mind Games series to focus on the work of Landes and various concepts he has developed regarding intellectual tendencies at play in Western political thought.
Today, however, I focus on photographs, or more to the point, call attention to Elder of Ziyon’s focus on photographs, those in a photo essay in Palestine Today that, once again, purports to show IDF soldiers physically assaulting and abusing Palestinian women. In order to grasp the full extent of the manipulation and deceit, one should follow the two links provided, so as to experience the presentation of the photo essay and then Elder’s reorientation for readers of what they are viewing. I will offer here just the essence of what Elder reveals.
In Nabi Saleh village, on the West Bank, IDF soldiers were engaged in what is, unfortunately, too routine a confrontation with Palestinians, including Palestinian teens pelting the IDF forces with rocks. Mixed into a series of photographs showing agitated confrontation and physical contact were the following three photos, in this order, but separated from each other by other photos in a discontinuous presentation. The three photos appear, particularly out of chronological order and in isolation from each other, to show an IDF soldier physically assaulting a Palestinian woman with his machine gun.
One can easily see how, in disordered isolation, the images appear to show a woman being struck by a machine gun or stumbling from the assault. Now, below, are the three photographs, in their proper chronological order and together, and Elder of Ziyon directs us to note that the woman is not being struck by the machine gun, but, in fact, has her hands on its barrel, as she has attempted to wrest it away from the soldier, who is resisting the attempt.
Elder observes,
But if you look closely, things are not as they seem.
The pictures are being shown out of sequence: the Arab woman, knowing that IDF soldiers aren’t going to fire at her, tries to grab the machine gun out of the soldier’s hands (picture 3 [in the Palestine Today presentation], machine gun mostly obscured but you can see the strap), manages to turn the soldier around while holding on to the strap of the machine gun as he tries to pull it away (picture 2) and then the first picture shows him after he managed to wrest it away, while other soldiers come to help him out!
It turns out that these photos were snapped by Reuters, and the caption of photo #3 is “A Palestinian woman tries to grab the weapon of an Israeli soldier in the West Bank village of Nabi Salih, near Ramallah, January 22, 2010. ” For some reason, they didn’t caption photo #2 the same way, and they botch the caption of photo #1 as if the IDF soldier is about to assault her, even as they add “The woman ran away unhurt.”
As in all instances of this kind of mind game, there are two fundamental aspects of the consideration. One is the nature of the misapprehension of the facts, and whatever purposeful activity has produced the misapprehension. The other is the nature of the response from those who have misperceived and misunderstood, whether they accept the revelations of an altered disclosure of reality, and, if they do not – if they reject it against the evidence, or rationalize the distortion – why it is that they do so.
AJA
Judeosphere - Human Rights Watch’s Conflict of Interests
There are none so blind. HRW continues its descent. See, also, here.
Adam Holland – Ron Paul lets his freak flag fly: says CIA coup has occurred.
Paul’s pot reveals another crack – for the those who just haven’t yet been able to see him in the kichen.
Bill Roggio, The Long War Journal – Al Qaeda leader in Turkey captured
Yes, it is a war, it is going on in many places, and there is an online journal dedicated to it.
Ben Cohen, Z Word Blog – AJC Reality Check
New monthly video report countering anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda.
Kyle Minor, Sweet - This Thing Did Seem Solid
Says The Ethical Exhibitionist (H/T), who is always pointing me to interesting reads,
Honestly, this is a really, really good essay. I usually find “scatological essays” boring (the way I find all attempts to “shock” me boring), but this isn’t an attempt at shock at all, and is really quite profound.
Final six minutes. The finales of so many great television series disappoint. This is one of the few that did not.
Song: “Breathe Me” by Sia.
The Atlantic Wire
