>From: "Ian Murray" <seamus2001 at attbi.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>To: "Lbo-Talk at Lists. Panix. Com" <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Subject: New York falling silent?
>Date: Wed, 15 May 2002 20:07:19 -0700
>
>New York is starting to feel like Brezhnev's Moscow
>
>Public debate in America has now become a question of loyalty
>
>Jonathan Steele
>Thursday May 16, 2002
>The Guardian
>
>What a sad place New York City has become. A vibrant, disputatious town
>with a worldwide reputation for loud voices and strongly expressed
>opinions is tip-toeing around in whispers. Grief over the casualties of
>the twin towers massacre is not the reason (those wounds are slowly
>healing), but a stifling conformity which muzzles public discourse on US
>foreign policy, the war on terrorism and Israel.
>
>"If people knew I held these views, I wouldn't be able to stay in this
>job," an old college friend confided as I passed through the city for a
>few days last week. He was appointed by the Bush administration to a top
>Federal position (not connected to foreign policy) some months ago. His
>subversive views on the Middle East, if uttered in Europe, would raise no
>eyebrows: Ariel Sharon has no vision or strategy; his tactics on the West
>Bank are counter-productive; the American media are failing to report
>adequately on the suffering of innocent Palestinians in cities ransacked
>by Israeli troops.
>
>Another friend, a liberal rabbi, was about to set off on a regular visit
>to Israel. She contrasted the usual furious public arguments which she
>expected to find there to the behind-the-hand mutterings of New Yorkers.
>"Over here Sharon and Netanyahu have managed to turn the issue of
>terrorism, which was provoked by Israeli behaviour on the West Bank, into
>an existential question of the survival of the Israeli state. Debate
>becomes disloyalty," she complained.
>
>The Israeli prime minister's humiliating refusal to heed the White
>House's call last month for an immediate halt to Israel's West Bank
>incursions should have prompted a debate on whether Bush or Sharon makes
>US foreign policy, she argued. Instead, the leaders of most American
>Jewish organisations sided with Sharon and were pleased when Bush backed
>down.
>
>Listening to these anguished but private complaints suddenly reminded me
>of the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev era when lower-level officials,
>journalists and other fringe members of the regime sat around their
>kitchen tables, expressing their true views only to family and close
>friends. A far-fetched analogy, of course, until you look at the
>narrowness of public discussion, not just on Israeli-Palestinian issues,
>but also on the threatened American attack on Iraq and the
>administration's war on terrorism in general.
>
>When Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, suggested this spring that
>the war had failed because Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar were still
>free, he was fiercely attacked and never dared to repeat the point. The
>campaign for an all-out attack on Iraq continues in full swing with none
>of the congressional opposition which marked the Gulf war a decade ago.
>John Bolton, the state department's most hawkish official, is taken
>seriously when he "names" countries with biological weapons programmes
>which the US claims the right to target with military strikes. No one
>contrasts his purported expertise with the fact that, after seven months,
>the FBI has failed to discover the whereabouts of the people or the
>laboratories in the US which produced and mailed anthrax-coated letters
>last autumn. If the administration is so ignorant about events on its own
>doorstep, why should anyone believe it knows what is going on in labs in
>Iraq, Iran or Cuba?
>
>To enforce this abandonment of reasoned argument in the name of a
>witch-hunt against terrorists, a strange alliance of evangelical
>Christians in Congress has come together with the leaders of American
>Jewish organisations who normally support the Democratic party. "We live
>in a culture where there is a diminishing tolerance of dissent,"
>commented Abe Brumberg, long-time editor of Problems of Communism, the
>Soviet-era journal which was funded by the US government.
>
>He drew my attention to a column by Frank Rich in the New York Times. The
>piece reported that America's foremost Jewish newspaper, Forward, was
>fielding subscription cancellations for accepting an ad from Jews Against
>the Occupation. Mainstream papers are also being targeted. "Our press is
>not being muzzled," Rich was careful to write, "but the dictates of what
>constitutes politically correct conversation about the Middle East are
>being tightened to the point that American leaders of all stripes
>increasingly seem to be in a contest to see who can pander the most to
>American Jews."
>
>On CNN's domestic news one morning their vacuous presenter Paula Zahn
>urged viewers to stay with her until after the break. "A new book which
>criticises American foreign policy and says the US has been guilty of
>terrorism has sold 160,000 copies. We'll have more," she announced.
>
>Noam Chomsky's book, I wondered. Are they really going to let him appear?
>No such luck. The offending book was indeed by Chomsky but America's
>leading dissident was not invited on to the show. Like Soviet television
>in the 1970s, which regularly put up regime hacks to pillory the two
>giants of non-conformity, Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
>without giving them a say, Ms Zahn's guest was William Bennett, a
>Republican former cabinet minister. He proceeded to "explain" Chomsky's
>high sales with a flippant "kooks in our midst" argument. Many Americans
>were still in deep confusion after the shock of September 11, and some
>people were prepared to believe anything, he claimed.
>
>Chomsky was unsurprised when I rang him later. "It's typical," he said.
>"CNN International interviews me a lot, but the US channel doesn't dare."
>Far from being depressed, Chomsky was in bullish mood. Like an
>intellectual rock star he is perpetually on the move, travelling to
>packed auditoria on campuses around the US and abroad. "I spend about an
>hour every night turning down email requests to speak," he said. He was
>off to Bogota in Colombia later that day.
>
>Other professorial friends were not so gung ho about the extent of campus
>radicalism, in spite of recent peace marches in Washington and New York.
>But they agreed that universities are the only place for political
>discussion these days. "I hear there was a fantastic debate at Yale Law
>School recently," my highly placed Bush appointee reported. "Two
>Palestinian law students wiped the floor with Tom Friedman, the New York
>Times columnist."
>
>The fascination, and frustration, of America has always been the way one
>society can produce so much optimistic vigour and risk-taking
>intellectual energy alongside a ruling culture of such boorish ignorance
>and cruelty. To judge from the east coast today, the middle-aged liberal
>intelligentsia is letting itself be intimidated into taking the wrong
>side. j.steele at guardian.co.uk
>
>
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