Thursday, May 30, 2002

California Special Sun, May. 26, 2002 Simon's talk show exhibits his political views By Dion Nissenbaum San Jose Mercury News California's Republican candidate for governor doesn't have much of a political record for voters to dissect. But Bill Simon does have a talk show. In much the same way that Ronald Reagan started with ``General Electric Theatre'' and Jesse Helms made his name on a small, 250-watt North Carolina radio station, Simon began his political career with a foray into the entertainment industry. For much of last year, Simon hosted ``Sunday with Simon,'' an early-morning, half-hour talk show that offered a unique window into the candidate's ideological foundations. While Simon has sought to move toward the political mainstream since winning the GOP nomination in March, his choice of guests in all 15 episodes that aired on the family-friendly cable network PAX-TV -- recently reviewed by the Mercury News -- reflect the candidate's solidly Christian conservative worldview. Among Simon's guests were a sex education activist who preaches abstinence, the anti-abortion founder of Domino's Pizza, and a man known as a ``Walt Disney for Christians.'' Simon mostly played the role of genial host, but at times he used his guests as a sounding board for his own views on Hollywood, abortion and the need for religion to play a larger role in public life. He chastised film critics for promoting ``perverse'' films, suggested that young women should dress more modestly and agreed that America has pushed religion to the sidelines. ``The role of religion in life -- isn't that the central question that we need to address at this point?'' Simon asks ``The Book of Virtues'' author and former drug czar Bill Bennett in one of the shows. It's an issue Simon has championed for years. In a 1999 speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation entitled ``Why America can't do without religion,'' Simon lamented a system that ``systematically sabotages religion'' in America. ``Clearly, we have reached the point where the civil rights of those who preach and practice the most radical lifestyles or who insist that all public places be a `naked public square' trump the religious liberties of anyone who disagrees,'' according to a transcript of the speech. The last Republican nominee for governor, Dan Lungren, mirrored that viewpoint. And Democrat Gray Davis convinced voters that Lungren was too conservative for California by using the GOP candidate's efforts to infuse political life with religious values. Now Davis who, like Simon is Catholic, is seeking to do the same with his latest GOP challenger. ``Gov. Davis has always felt that your personal faith is just that -- personal,'' said Davis campaign spokesman Roger Salazar. ``As governor, you have a responsibility to represent people of every background and every faith. You just can't govern with an eye on one religious group or another.'' In a recent interview with the Mercury News, Simon said he chose the guests for his show because he respected what they had done with their lives. ``It was meant to showcase people that I admire or I thought had led very interesting lives,'' said Simon, who serves as vice chairman of the entertainment company that aired his show. One topic that Simon returned to again and again was religion. He interviewed the head of a Christian relief organization, the founder of a Christian home for troubled teens, the leader of a Christian-based coffee company, and the CEO of a Bible-based entertainment company. In one show, Simon chatted with Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza, who bemoaned an abortion friendly ``culture of death'' in America and suggested that the media were dominated by ``almost demonic'' forces. In many of the shows, the guests served as mirrors for Simon's views on abortion, the role of religion in society and the corrupting influence of the entertainment industry. He criticized film critics for championing ``perverse films,'' suggested Hollywood was trying to ``kidnap our kids'' and wondered if young women should tone down their ``provocative'' dress. In his conversation with Lakita Garth, an activist who pushes abstinence over safe sex, Simon asked: ``Lakita, do you think young women should dress more modestly?'' Garth responded by criticizing women who wear their ``skirt so short it's a belt and the `V' cut down to the navel.'' Simon laughed and wondered: ``How can you blame a young man for being intrigued when young women are running around like that?'' In another show, Simon spoke with conservative film critic Michael Medved, who accused Hollywood of promoting ``radical secularism and intolerance of religion.'' In the Medved interview, the film critic talked of Hollywood's fascination with ``degradation, depression, despair, dysfunction -- any other `D-word' you can think of.'' Simon asked: ``Do you think that that's reinforced by the number of critics that seem to me to be absolutely in love with perverse films?'' ``Oh,'' Medved said, ``absolutely.'' Reprinted under the Fair Use doctrine of international copyright law ( http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html ). All copyrights belong to original publisher. 7:12:06 AM    comment

QUOTE OF THE DAY "Through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may muder a hater, but you can't murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that." - - Martin Luther King, Jr. [In this piece from the London Review of Books, Israeli poet and writer Yitzhak Laor explores the myths that enable the Israeli popular consciousness to support the brutally destructive and self-destructive oppression of the Palestinian people.] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n09/laor2409.htm From Volume 24 Number 09 | cover date 23 May 2002 After Jenin Yitzhak Laor What has the war between us and the Palestinians been about? About the Israeli attempt to slice what's left of Palestine into four cantons, by building 'separation roads', new settlements and checkpoints. The rest is killing, terror, curfew, house demolitions and propaganda. Palestinian children live in fear and despair, their parents humiliated in front of them. Palestinian society is being dismantled, and public opinion in the West blames it on the victims - always the easiest way to face the horror. I know: my father was a German Jew. Disastrously, the Israel Defence Force is the country's imago. In the eyes of most Israelis, it is pure, stainless; worse, it is seen as being above any political interest. Yet, like every army, it wants war, at least every once in a while. But whereas in other countries military power is balanced by civil society's institutions or by parts of the state itself (industry, banks, political parties etc), we in Israel have no such balance. The IDF has no real rival within the state, not even when the Army's policy costs us our own lives (the lives of Palestinians, not to mention their welfare or dignity, are excluded from political discourse). There's no doubt that Israel's 'assassination policy' - its killing of senior politicians (Dr Thabet Thabet from Tulkarem, Abu Ali Mustafa from Ramallah) or of 'terrorists' (sometimes labelled as such only after being eliminated) - has poured petrol on the fire. People talk about it, yet no politician from the Right, the Centre, or even from the declining Zionist Left has dared speak out against it. And despite critical articles in the press, the Army has kept on doing what it wanted to do. Now they have had what they were really aiming for: an all-out attack on the West Bank. Since 11 September the words 'war against terror' have been popular, which is why everything Israel does is a war against terror, including the looting of the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah. I'm against terror, too. I don't want to die walking my son to the mall. In fact I don't take him there anymore. I don't ride buses, and I'm scared that my family's turn will come, but I know that they - that is, our generals - accept terrorist attacks as a 'reasonable price to pay' to reach a solution. What is their solution? Peace - what else? Peace between the victorious Israelis and the defeated Palestinians. The IDF's ruthlessness should be read against the background of its defeat in Lebanon, when it was driven out after long years of waging a dirty war. Southern Lebanon was burned and destroyed by artillery and an Air Force that no terrorist organisation could fight against. Yet 300 partisans - should I call them 'terrorists'? - drove us (that is, our Army) out twice. First in 1985, back into what our Army and press used to call our 'Security Zone' (the foreign media called it 'Israel's self-proclaimed security zone'); and then, two years ago, out of that same Security Zone. The generals who were beaten then are running the current war. They have lived that defeat every day. And now they can teach them - that is, the Arabs - their lesson. Our heroes, armed with planes, helicopters and tanks, can arrest hundreds of people, concentrate them in camps behind barbed wire, without blankets or shelter, exploit the confusion to demolish more houses, fell more trees, take away more livelihoods. The bulldozer, once a symbol of the building of a new country, has become a monster following the tanks, so that everybody can watch as another family's home, another future disappears. Israelis look to punish anyone who undermines our image of ourselves as victims. Nobody is allowed to take this image from us, especially not in the context of the war with the Palestinians, who are waging a war on 'our home' - that is, their 'non-home'. When a Cabinet minister from a former socialist republic compared Yasir Arafat to Hitler, he was applauded. Why? Because this is the way the world should see us, rising from the ashes. This is why we love Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (and even more his disgusting film about the IDF) and Schindler's List. Tell us more about ourselves as victims, and how we must be forgiven for every atrocity we commit. As my friend Tanya Reinhart has written, 'it seems that what we have internalised' of the memory of the Holocaust 'is that any evil whose extent is smaller is acceptable'. But this 'evil of the past' has a peculiar way of entering our present life. On 25 January, three months before the IDF got its licence to invade the West Bank, Amir Oren, a senior military commentator for Ha'aretz, quoted a senior officer: In order to prepare properly for the next campaign, one of the Israeli officers in the territories said not long ago that it is justified and in fact essential to learn from every possible source. If the mission is to seize a densely populated refugee camp, or take over the kasbah in Nablus, and if the commander's obligation is to try to execute the mission without casualties on either side, then he must first analyse and internalise the lessons of earlier battles - even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German Army fought in the Warsaw Ghetto. The officer indeed succeeded in shocking others, not least because he is not alone in taking this approach. Many of his comrades agree that in order to save Israelis now, it is right to make use of knowledge that originated in that terrible war, whose victims were their kin. Israel may not have a colonial past but we do have our memory of evil. Does this explain why Israeli soldiers stamped ID numbers on Palestinian arms? Or why the most recent Holocaust Day drew a ridiculous comparison between those of us in the besieged Warsaw Ghetto and those of us surrounding the besieged Jenin refugee camp? The satisfaction over the 'victory' in Jenin was part of this constant lie. Some twenty Israeli soldiers (most of them reservists) died in what was supposed to be a zero-casualty campaign, but the defenders of the camp were equipped only with rifles and explosives. On the Israeli side, as usual, there were special units, moving from one alleyway to another, assisted by a drone which supplied sophisticated information to the commanders at the rear. When that didn't work, there was the shelling of the camp, then the deployment of US-supplied Apaches to destroy houses along with dozens (or hundreds) of inhabitants. Was it a massacre? Like everything else in our corrupted life, it comes down to the number of dead: ten dead Israelis are a massacre; 50 Palestinians not enough to count. The destruction of the camp, whether spontaneous or premeditated by Sharon & Co, reflects the determination of senior officers to finish their military service with a real achievement: the elimination of the Palestinian national movement, under the guise of the war against terror. But terror won't be beaten that way; on the contrary. Enslaving a nation, bringing it to its knees, simply doesn't work. It never did. The long siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is proof that the words 'Israeli generals' no longer refer to men capable of strategic thought, or anything like it. Israeli generals may have fought some complicated battles in 1967, 1973 or even 1982, but in Bethlehem they have surrounded 200 young Palestinians for more than three weeks and let the whole world see their stubbornness and senseless cruelty. How, you may ask, can a disobedient nation like Israel follow so foolish a high command? Here's the beginning of an answer. As the corpses lay rotting in Jenin, and small children were running around looking for food or their missing parents, and the wounded were still bleeding to death, with the IDF preventing any relief or UN officials from entering the camp (what did they have to hide?), the Ministry of Education issued an instruction to all schools that children should bring in parcels for the soldiers. 'The most important thing,' the teacher of my seven-year-old son said, 'is a letter for the soldiers.' Hundreds of thousands of children wrote such letters when the war against a civilian population was at its most extreme, under the critical observation of the world media. Imagine the ideological commitment of those children in the future. This is just one aspect of our oppositionless society. The Israeli imaginaire is constituted, before anything else, of the belief in Israeli supremacy. When there is a cruel suicide bombing in a hotel in Netanya, we will respond on a greater scale, with a terrorist attack on them, no matter if it inflicts death or hunger on two million people who have no connection with that act, no matter if it will create a thousand more martyrs who will blow themselves up along with their victims. The military logic behind this behaviour says: 'We have the power and we have to exercise it, otherwise our existence is in danger.' But the only danger is the danger facing the Palestinians. Gas chambers are not the only way to destroy a nation. It is enough to destroy its social tissue, to starve dozens of villages, to develop high rates of infant mortality. The West Bank is going through a Gaza-isation. Please don't shrug your shoulders. The one thing that might help to destroy the consensus in Israel is pressure from Western Europe, on which the Israeli elite is dependent in so many ways. Yitzhak Laor is an Israeli poet and writer. Jewish Peace News (JPN) is a service provided by A Jewish Voice for Peace. JPN's editors are Adam Gutride, Amichai Kronfeld, Sarah Anne Minkin, Judith Norman, Mitchell Plitnick, Lincoln Shlensky, and Alistair Welchman. The opinions expressed by the editors and presented in the articles sent to this list are solely those of their authors, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of A Jewish Voice for Peace. A Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is a San Francisco Bay Area grassroots organization dedicated to the human, civil and economic rights of Jews, Palestinians, and all peoples in the Middle East. To SUBSCRIBE to Jewish Peace News, our daily news and information service, please send an email message to: jewishpeacenews-subscribe@yahoogroups.com To JOIN the Jewish Voice for Peace community mailing list (no more than one message per week), which features Middle East peace information and local Jewish community activist updates, please send an email message to: jewishvoiceforpeace-subscribe@yahoogroups.com 7:09:14 AM    comment

© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.