NEW YORK'S GOOBERHEAD MAYOR

Time for another Gooberhead Award – presented periodically to those in the news who have their tongues going 100-miles-an-hour... but who forgot to put their brains in gear.

Today's Goober is Michael Bloomberg, the billioniare mayor of the Big Apple. Hizzoner was in the national spotlight during August's Republican National Convention in New York City – and the glare revealed some very ugly wrinkles inside his soul. Bloomberg showed himself to be stunningly callous to our country's most fundamental liberty – the right to assemble in public and speak out about any and all policies with which we disagree. He used the New York police as a bludgeon to crackdown on dissenters who were engaged in totally lawful protests, then, he asserted that "every NYPD officer did a great job."

Alex Pincus definitely disagrees. He wasn't even a protester – just a city resident who went out to a deli for some matzo ball soup and innocently walked into a police dragnet that was indiscriminately scooping up hundreds of people. Pincus asked an officer how to get out of the way, was told "follow me" – then was grabbed by cops, handcuffed behind his back, forced to keel for an hour before being tossed into a filthy make-shift cage topped with razor wire, where he was held for 25 hours without access to a lawyer. Bloomberg's police kept saying to him and all the others, "This is what you get for protesting."

Oblivious to America's hard-won constitutional rights, the mayor later admitted that innocents were abused, but the Gooberhead blamed the victims: "If you go to where people are protesting and don't want to be part of the protest," he haughtily sniffed, "you're always going to run the risk that maybe you'll be tied up with it." Yeah, literally tied up!

Our liberties are not taken from us in one big bang of a coup, but slipped out from under us inch by inch by autocratic Goobers like Bloomberg.

"Arrests at GOP Convention Are Criticized," New York Times, September 20, 2004.

Jim Hightower
Hightower & Associates
1802 W. 6th Street
Austin, TX 78703

Massacre in Iraq

Seymour Hersh spoke at Berkeley last Friday, October 8th. He told a story about recently receiving a call from an American lieutenant in Iraq who'd just witnessed other American soldiers massacring Iraqis.

I typed up what he said from the Real Video file here. The story begins at about 41:45.

UPDATE: I'm told Hersh has said much the same at other events, including this October 1 appearance on the Diane Rehm Show. I haven't listened to it myself, however.

HERSH: I got a call last week from a soldier -- it's different now, a lot of communication, 800 numbers. He's an American officer and he was in a unit halfway between Baghdad and the Syrian border. It's a place where we claim we've done great work at cleaning out the insurgency. He was a platoon commander. First lieutenant, ROTC guy.
It was a call about this. He had been bivouacing outside of town with his platoon. It was near, it was an agricultural area, and there was a granary around. And the guys that owned the granary, the Iraqis that owned the granary... It was an area that the insurgency had some control, but it was very quiet, it was not Fallujah. It was a town that was off the mainstream. Not much violence there. And his guys, the guys that owned the granary, had hired, my guess is from his language, I wasn't explicit -- we're talking not more than three dozen, thirty or so guards. Any kind of work people were dying to do. So Iraqis were guarding the granary. His troops were bivouaced, they were stationed there, they got to know everybody...

They were a couple weeks together, they knew each other. So orders came down from the generals in Baghdad, we want to clear the village, like in Samarra. And as he told the story, another platoon from his company came and executed all the guards, as his people were screaming, stop. And he said they just shot them one by one. He went nuts, and his soldiers went nuts. And he's hysterical. He's totally hysterical. And he went to the captain. He was a lieutenant, he went to the company captain. And the company captain said, "No, you don't understand. That's a kill. We got thirty-six insurgents."

You read those stories where the Americans, we take a city, we had a combat, a hundred and fifteen insurgents are killed. You read those stories. It's shades of Vietnam again, folks, body counts...

You know what I told him? I said, fella, I said: you've complained to the captain. He knows you think they committed murder. Your troops know their fellow soldiers committed murder. Shut up. Just shut up. Get through your tour and just shut up. You're going to get a bullet in the back. You don't need that. And that's where we are with this war.


Posted by Jonathan Schwarz at October 12, 2004 11:12 AM | TrackBack

Christians in Jerusalem Want Jews to Stop Spitting on Them

A few weeks ago, a senior Greek Orthodox clergyman in Israel attended a meeting at a government office in Jerusalem's Givat Shaul quarter. When he returned to his car, an elderly man wearing a skullcap came and knocked on the window. When the clergyman let the window down, the passerby spat in his face.

The clergyman prefered not to lodge a complaint with the police and told an acquaintance that he was used to being spat at by Jews. Many Jerusalem clergy have been subjected to abuse of this kind. For the most part, they ignore it but sometimes they cannot.

On Sunday, a fracas developed when a yeshiva student spat at the cross being carried by the Armenian Archbishop during a procession near the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City. The archbishop's 17th-century cross was broken during the brawl and he slapped the yeshiva student.

Both were questioned by police and the yeshiva student will be brought to trial. The Jerusalem District Court has meanwhile banned the student from approaching the Old City for 75 days.

But the Armenians are far from satisfied by the police action and say this sort of thing has been going on for years. Archbishop Nourhan Manougian says he expects the education minister to say something.

"When there is an attack against Jews anywhere in the world, the Israeli government is incensed, so why when our religion and pride are hurt, don't they take harsher measures?" he asks.

According to Daniel Rossing, former adviser to the Religious Affairs Ministry on Christian affairs and director of a Jerusalem center for Christian-Jewish dialogue, there has been an increase in the number of such incidents recently, "as part of a general atmosphere of lack of tolerance in the country."

Rossing says there are certain common characeristics from the point of view of time and location to the incidents. He points to the fact that there are more incidents in areas where Jews and Christians mingle, such as the Jewish and Armenian quarters of the Old City and the Jaffa Gate.

There are an increased number at certain times of year, such as during the Purim holiday."I know Christians who lock themselves indoors during the entire Purim holiday," he says.

Former adviser to the mayor on Christian affairs, Shmuel Evyatar, describes the situation as "a huge disgrace." He says most of the instigators are yeshiva students studying in the Old City who view the Christian religion with disdain.

"I'm sure the phenomenon would end as soon as rabbis and well-known educators denounce it. In practice, rabbis of yeshivas ignore or even encourage it," he says.

Evyatar says he himself was spat at while walking with a Serbian bishop in the Jewish quarter, near his home. "A group of yeshiva students spat at us and their teacher just stood by and watched."

Jerusalem municipal officials said they are aware of the problem but it has to be dealt with by the police. Shmuel Ben-Ruby, the police spokesman, said they had only two complaints from Christians in the past two years. He said that, in both cases, the culprits were caught and punished.

He said the police deploy an inordinately high number of patrols and special technology in the Old City and its surroundings in an attempt to keep order.

Amiram Barkat
Haaretz israel News