Features of Democracy's Fall

In Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria writes:

Meanwhile, the central problem persists: Israel rules more than 3 million Palestinians who will never become citizens of Israel and yet do not have their own state. As they multiply, Israel’s status as a democracy becomes more and more complex; the country looks more and more like an island of rich Israelis set in a sea of Palestinian serfs.

Zakaria almost nails it . . . . Israel’s status as a democracy doesn’t “become more and more complex.” It becomes more and more a pure fiction.

People should check what Ariel Atias (Minister of Housing and Construction and behind the “fuck you” to Biden and Obama) has said. He advocates radical apartheid, not just separating Palestinians but also orthodox from non-orthodox Jews. Israel has descended into a state where — even if every Palestinian were expelled from the area west of the Jordan River (in the biggest case of ethnic cleansing since the Second World War) — Israeli Jews would soon be at war with one another.

Whatever moral sense lived in Israel has been crushed by successive waves of right-wing, religious fanaticism. Israel now depends on the Palestinians to play the role of collective enemy of the Jews (much, I am sad to say, as Jews played a comparable, though by no means identical, role in Nazi Germany). The United States, too, is headed this way with the right-wing and moderates depending on a vilified, demonized Islam — a monolithic, terrorist enemy — to galvanize public support for, or at least apathy toward, every growing state power.

Fanatics, having won whatever battle gave their petty existences meaning, must turn on each other, like a pack of half-starved wild dogs.

Homeland Security Secretary: We did "some not very nice things"

Tom Ridge, first Secretary of Homeland Security has accepted an International Commission of Jurists report criticizing US torture of prisoners. The report states that measures taken by the US and other states

have resulted in human rights violations, including torture, enforced disappearances, secret and arbitrary detentions, and unfair trials. There has been little accountability for these abuses or justice for their victims.

[...]

Much damage has been done to the international legal framework in these few short years [since 9/11].

The report is striking for, among other things, the near-total absence of American members, a testament perhaps to the unwillingness of Americans to risk being labelled 'anti-American'.

Striking also is the tepid admission of Tom Ridge. It is powerfully reminiscent of 'admissions' of wrongdoing — or worse — by the United States or Israel. The US (or Israel) has "done some not very nice things" (a popular construction).

For the hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, or for the innocent victims tortured to death at Abu Ghraib or Bagram (in Afghanistan) or Guantanamo Bay apologies are too little, too late. And worse, President Obama shows little sign of changing US policy apart from removing the glaring eyesore of Guantanamo Bay.