Katherine Gun, Clare Short, Jane Turner,* Sherron Watkins,** hundreds of female service members now in the Gulf…
What do all these people have in common?
They are all female and they have all been whistleblowers on major abuses of the public trust that have been undertaken by supposedly responsible people in their own workplaces.
Is this a trend? How might we account for it?
I raised this question over our morning coffee today with Bill, the spouse.
“Maybe women are more honest?” he speculated. (What a sweetheart!)
“Or maybe,” I said, “many of these abuses are things that are done in some kind of a good-ol’-boys culture in the workplace, and the women have never been invited to become part of that? In fact, I’m sure a lot of women in all these organizations have had major battles of their own trying to deal with the good ol’ boys… So really, you wouldn’t expect them to have any investment in good-ol’-boy culture, would you?”
Anyway, it’s an interesting question. What do you JWN readers think?
—
* FBI agent, reported on a theft by another FBI agent from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. FBI responded by trying to dismiss her. (Today’s WaPo, p.A11. Hate their new registration system so not putting in link.)
** Revealed some of Ken Lay’s misdoings at Enron
Suicide bombings, contd.
In a post
here yesterday (Tuesday), I posed five questions about the phenomenon of
Palestinian suicide bombings and assigned myself the pretty onerous task
of addressing them “over the coming days.” (You can go straight to
the list of questions, from
here
.) In that earlier post, I tried to tackle Question 1, Is there
something about these types of attack that makes them uniquely different
from any other form of assault against a society, and if so, what is it?
— and I made some reference to a couple of the later questions.
Today, I want to start at Question 2, Do the “special” attributes of this
form of attack justify “special” forms of response against those judged
responsible for such attacks? And maybe from there I’ll segué
right on into Question 3: How broadly or narrowly should such “responsibility”
be ascribed?
Palestinian suicide bombings: another explanation
So here I am, trying to work through the whole complex subject of Palestinian suicide bombings (and the nature of Israel’s reactions to them)… But Ze’ev Boim, Israel’s deputy Defense Minister, thinks he might have the answer.
Tuesday, he made a statement in public in which he asked: “What is it about Islam as a whole and the Palestinians in particular? Is it some form of cultural deprivation? Is it some genetic defect? There is something that defies explanation in this continued murderousness.”
According to this story by Yair Ettinger in today’s Ha’Aretz, Boim’s statement created “a firestorm of outrage” in Israel. Ettinger reported on a number of outraged comments made by Members of Knesset from the Labor-and-to-the-left and Arab parties. (Go read them.)
But here’s my question: Where’s the outrage from political or cultural figures in the United States?
Imagine how great, and how rapidly organized, the outrage would be if a deputy minister in an Arab country (or anywhere else) had gone on the record with exactly parallel comments about the Jews! But here is a clear example of hate-speech… And where, oh where, is the outrage– or even, any expression of mild criticism– from pols and other public personalities in the US?
In addition to the various criticisms of Boim’s speech that various political figures inside Israel voiced publicly, Ettinger also reported the following significant reactions from Israeli personalities:
Continue reading “Palestinian suicide bombings: another explanation”
Cole on Sistani and Mudarrisi
Okay, I know I just criticized Juan Cole for his reading (or, non-reading) of the Brahimi report. But his blog is, in general, just the most amazing resource for everyone around the world who is interested in, and cares deeply about, Iraq. I was so happy that he won the 2003 Koufax Award for “Best expert blog”. (I hope that the rest of you all voted for him there, as I did.)
Today, in addition to his post about the Brahimi report, he had two interesting posts that were up to his usual standard of careful, well-informed analysis. In this one he cites a statement that Grand Ayatollah Sistani issued on Monday, in which Sistani spelled out yet again his view that, “the UN should play a central role in the transfer of power to the Iraqis.”
In this post, he wrote about a statement from another Iraqi Grand Ayatollah, Muhammad Taqi al-Mudarrisi, the leader of the Organization of Islamic Action, which Cole describes as “a mostly Karbala-based party”. Notable in Mudarrisi’s statement was a strongly worded warning that any undue delay in holding direct elections in Iraq would be,
- “a time bomb that could explode at any minute… Without elections, our national institutions will remain shaken, unrecognized and distrusted by the people.”
The contrast between (the reported versions of) these two statements–both issued on the day the Brahimi report was being unveiled in New York–seems significant to me.
Brahimi report: a realistic way forward
Y’all know that I admire Juan Cole a lot. However, I wish he had read the Brahimi Report on Iraq some before he made the sweeping judgment that, “This way of proceeding seems to me unlikely to be fruitful.”
The reasoning Juan provides for this judgment is to note that Annan reportedly plans to send Lakhdar Brahimi back to Iraq to consult with “leading political figures” there over how to proceed– and then, to completely and quite unjustifiably conflate that latter category with the Iraqi Governing Council!
No other reading of the Brahimi report that I have seen–including my own–supports that conflation. (Tsk, tsk, Juan!) Instead, what the report talks about is the urgent need for consultation “among the Iraqi stakeholders”, in order to reach agreement on all the many modalities of the transition process including the elections that will be a central part of it. Elsewhere, it mentions that such stakeholders include a broad spectrum of community leaders in Iraq, of which the IGC is only one among many.
The report itself is definitely worth reading. It presents what seems to me to be a realistic appraisal of the current situation in Iraq, as well as of the prospects for holding the nationwide elections there that at this point–thankfully!– just about everyone agrees need to be part of any workable and credible transition back to viable Iraqi national sovereignty.
Significantly, the seven-person team that global media star Brahimi headed was one that included both people with solid experience of analyzing current Iraqi affairs and people with solid experience of organizing elections during troubled political transitions. A serious and well-chosen team.
Its expertise shines out throughout the whole report. Paragraph 50, “Recommendations”, is obviously central.
Pentagon’s Iraqi SOFA collapses
Can you hear it? Clunk, clunk, clunk. That’s the sound of the Bushies’ latest hastily-cobbled-together “plan” for post-Saddam Iraq falling apart, one major portion at a time.
The latest part of the Pentagon’s (shockingly misnamed) “plan” to collapse is the part known as a “Status of Forces Agreement”, or SOFA.
In this report in today’s NYT, Dexter Filkins tells us that:
- Iraq’s interim leaders said Sunday that they could not negotiate a formal agreement with the American military on maintaining troops in Iraq, and that the task must await the next sovereign Iraqi government.
Interesting, huh? I wonder what it feels like for all those ignorant, manipulative, and cynical neo-cons (is there any other kind?) when they see all their treasured plans falling apart one by one by one.
I wrote about the importance of the SOFA issue twice back in January, here and here. In the second of those posts, I recalled an earlier SOFA-type agreement in the Middle East that had been concluded with a “successor regime” that notably was not regarded as politically legitimate by its own people, and that as a result collapsed catastrophically. That was the security agreement that Sharon’s government concluded with Amin Gemayyel’s government, in Lebanon.
In that earlier case, the very fact that Gemayyel had been willing to conclude such an agreement with Israel contributed to the general sense of the illegitimacy of his government. Evidently the IGC in Iraq, many of whose members have a highly realistic appraisal of their own lack of domestic legitimacy, was eager to avoid a similar fate.
For example, in Filkin’s piece, he writes:
Hard thinking about suicide bombings
Yesterday, in West Jerusalem, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated his
bomb on a crowded early-morning bus. Eight people–actually nine,
including
the bomber himself– were killed, and scores injured.
What a tragedy.
Here
are some details about seven of these people.
I was in West Jerusalem exactly two weeks ago. When I visited Israel in
2002, I was glad to have the opportunity to take a few bus-rides, as I
hoped
it would show some sort of solidarity with my many friends in Israel who,
I know, live with a constant level of dread that something like this may
happen.
On my most recent visit to Jerusalem, just two weeks ago, I
didn’t ride a bus.
But I made a point of spending an evening walking
over to Ben Yehuda Street and eating in a nice, popular restaurant there.
The same sort of (perhaps ill-focused) “solidarity” at work.
The Israeli government and, it seems, many people in Israel are vocal in
making the case that the fear they suffer from the suicide bombers
justifies
many of the policies their government has adopted taken and continues to
adopt
toward (or against) the Palestinians.
That includes the policy of not
negotiating with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority–on the grounds
that
the extremely hard-pressed PA is “not tough enough” on the militant
organizations
that organize the missions of the suicide bombers.
It also, more currently,
includes the government’s pursuit of its present wall-building project in
the West Bank.
I think I understand a little about how terrible it must feel to live in
a country that is subject to periodic suicide-bomb assaults, many of them
detonated in places filled with civilians.
I have only spent a little
time in Israel.
But back when I was in Lebanon in the late 1970s, car-bomb
attacks against “soft”, civilian-packed targets were certainly one of the
many tactics used by the (Israeli-backed) Maronite extremist organizations
against the people of mainly-Muslim West Beirut.
Like most of the other
western journalists working in Lebanon at that time, I lived in West
Beirut.
I also had my children there.
Yes, we were living within the bounds
of an always unpredictable civil war (which was why I left the city, with
my children, in 1981).
Many horrendous things happened while I was
there– and of course, many even worse things, in 1982, after I was gone.
But one of the things that happened periodically in West Beirut was
certainly car-bombs.
Sharon’s wall system in pictures
One week ago today, I spent the morning driving round parts of the western portion of Ramallah governorate with Anita Abdallah and a couple of other people. You can read a little about what we saw there toward the end of this post.
Here is one picture of the inside of Deir Ghassaneh, a lovely hilltop village that is home to many members of the Barghouthi family, and the site of the grave of the late Bashir Barghouthi, a great Palestinian thinker and social activist.
This is a picture of the big yellow gate the Israelis have installed at the base of the only road that leads to Deir Ghassaneh and four other villages. Note the scenic watchtower in the background! There is a military base and a growing-as-we-speak Israeli settlement right nearby.
On the day we were there, the gate was, thankfully, open. But whenever the Israelis choose to close it, they do; and sometimes it has been closed for many days in a row. Then, the people of the five villages have great difficulties getting to jobs, markets, schools, or doctor’s appontments in the nearby towns of Ramallah and Bir Zeit.
Here is a picture of Sharon’s 24-foot-high “Bigger than Berlin” concrete wall as it slices straight through the (Palestinian) eastern suburbs of Jerusalem. We’re looking at the wall here from the Aizariyeh side. My Palestinian friends told me that in some places, the local residents use cranes to lift kids over the Wall so they can get to school, etc. I’m not sure you could do that for Granny if she needs to go to a doctor’s appointment….
Finally, here is a really poignant picture of one section of the Wall that’s on the point of being completed. This is to the north of Aizariyeh, at the point where Sharon’s plan is leaving room for the the massive Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Adumim to be “included” in his crazy-quilt Jerusalem perimeter.
Those elusive permits for Gaza
Since early January, the Israeli authorities have been handing a new piece of paper to foreigners entering their country (and also, to foreigners entering the occupied West Bank across the Allenby/King Hussein Bridge. This is what it looks like.
How lovely that they promise that they will make “the utmost effort” to authorize requests to enter Gaza “within 5 working days”. Too bad that these “utmost efforts” brought no results in my recent case, eh? (See this recent post on my efforts to get into Gaza last week.)
Arafat, and other encounters in Palestine/Israel
I got back home to Charlottesville, Virginia, Monday evening, and have been working my rear end off since then writing a long article to a tight deadline. Got up at 4 .a.m. this morning to work on it, no less. That wasn’t as bad as it seems, since the time-difference between here and Israel/Palestine allowed me to think of myself as basking lazily in bed till noon.
But now, having met the deadline I was working to, and having taken the faithful pooch Honey for a good long walk, I’m ready to blog here again. Where was I?
I confess I haven’t posted anything meaningful here yet about some of the most politically “significant” encounters I had while I was in Palestine/Israel. Like my lunch-party with Yasser Arafat last Friday. Or the content of the good discussions I had on Thursday with former Palestinian Minister of Culture Ziad Abu Amr and PLO Executive Committee Qays Samarrai (Abu Leila). I really didn’t see the need to advertise encounters like these to the whole world at a time when I still (on Sunday morning) had to face the prospect of a lengthy interrogation and inspection of all my baggage and notes at the time I would be leaving Ben-Gurion airport.
Are you like the many other people I have talked to since my lunch with Arafat whose first question has been, as always, “How did you find him?”
Continue reading “Arafat, and other encounters in Palestine/Israel”