Trump’s Gang Tries to Hide Its Crimes: Attacking the Freedom of Information Act

Evan Osnos has produced a must-read article for The New Yorker titled Trump vs. The “Deep State”.  His focus is suggested by this lede.

“How the Administration’s loyalists are quietly reshaping American governance.”

Osnos surveys the role the Trump administration has played in providing critical hires for government positions, and in the management of government departments.  On first read, one is struck by the incompetence demonstrated in the process.  On second thought, one notices the number of ethically-challenged individuals that are in positions of power.  A little deeper thought leads to the realization that our government has been invaded by a small group of individuals who—whether driven by greed or lust for power—are wiling to break any rule or law that gets in their way as they pursue their personal goals.  Trump has set the example for others to follow.

Consider the vetting process used to insert unqualified and/or ineligible people into positions of power.

“To vet candidates, the Obama campaign had used a questionnaire with sixty-three queries about employment, finances, writings, and social-media posts. The Trump team cut the number of questions to twenty-five, by dropping the requests for professional references and tax returns and removing items concerning loans, personal income, and real-estate holdings.”

“According to one lawyer, the transition sought ‘work-arounds’—ways that incoming officials could retain investments without breaking the laws against conflicts of interest. ‘If you look at them as technical rules that lawyers should be able to “get around,” that gives you a whole different approach,’ the lawyer told me. ‘It’s like tweeting after a couple of beers. It’s not going to end well’.” 

Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of malfeasance by a cabinet member.  One can only wonder at what might be taking place at lower levels of government.  What would be considered crimes in previous administrations are acquiesced to as the costs of maintaining dominance by a compliant Republican Party.

The most troubling practice is the destruction of reality.  Facts are denied or hidden from view in order to promote agendas.  Trump provides the prime example.  He tells obvious lies loudly and repeatedly.  The media repeats his lies, thus giving them more credence with the gullible.

Osnos detected the altering are hiding of facts as a growing practice within government agencies.

“In one agency after another, I encountered a pattern: on controversial issues, the Administration is often not writing down potentially damaging information.”

Consider the example of Ben Carson’s HUD spending.

“After members of Congress requested details on Carson’s decorating expenses, Marcus Smallwood, the departmental-records officer at HUD, wrote an open letter to Carson, saying, ‘I do not have confidence that HUD can truthfully provide the evidence being requested by the House Oversight Committee because there has been a concerted effort to stop email traffic regarding these matters’.”

And then there is the Department of the Interior.

“At the Department of the Interior, the Inspector General’s office investigated Zinke’s travel expenses but was stymied by ‘absent or incomplete documentation’ that would ‘distinguish between personal, political, and official travel’.” 

“According to Ruch, of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, when environmentalists filed suit to discover if industry lobbyists had influenced a report on Superfund sites, they were told, ‘There are no minutes, no work product, no materials.’ Ruch added, ‘The task-force report was a product of immaculate conception.’ He believes that the Administration is ‘deliberately avoiding creating records’.”

The Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has also been participating in the altering of reality.

“The mayor of Oakland, Libby Schaaf, had infuriated the White House by warning undocumented residents of a forthcoming sweep. Jeff Sessions accused her of sabotage, saying, ‘ICE failed to make eight hundred arrests that they would have made if the mayor had not acted as she did.’ That figure became an instant talking point on cable news. And, in comments the next day, Trump elevated the eight hundred to ‘close to a thousand people’.”

James Schwab was the spokesperson for the ICE office in San Francisco.  He knew from experience that such an ICE sweep was unlikely to round up more than about 200 people.  The actual number of arrestees was 232.  Schwab deemed the pronouncements by Trump and Sessions as intentionally misleading and politically motivated.

 “ ‘I contacted the headquarters and said, “How are we going to respond to this when we know this is inaccurate?” ’ he recalled. Schwab was told not to elaborate or correct the error; instead, he should refer reporters to existing statements. ‘That just shook me,’ he told me.”

“Rather than aiding in the deception, Schwab resigned. ‘A lot of people in the federal government are holding on tight, trying to keep everything going properly,’ he told me. ‘And people are fearful to say anything. I was fortunate enough to be able to quit my job and say something, but most people aren’t able to do that.’ The White House has politicized work that was once insulated from interference, Schwab said. ‘We see that in the F.B.I. very publicly, and then I saw that at ICE from the highest levels of the White House. Who knows where else it’s happening in the rest of the government’.”

With the pollical sensitivity of all matters related to immigration, one would think that a detailed accounting of ICE’s activities would be crucial to evaluating what is taking place.  Dune Lawrence addressed ICE in an article in Bloomberg Businessweek: Trump Refuses to Release Data on Immigration Crackdown.  He introduces his piece with this lede.

“ICE’s disappearing records make it difficult to examine whether reality meets the president’s rhetoric.”

Lawrence provides this background related to immigration-related actions initiated by Trump.

“The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency promised to put out weekly updates that would include information on localities that release immigration violators and the criminal records of those released.”

“The first reports were filled with inaccuracies and in several instances called out counties for not cooperating with detainer, or detention, requests that were actually sent to other places with similar names. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency had to issue a list of corrections, and soon it simply stopped putting out the reports. For the past 18 months, ICE has also refused to release other key data about its enforcement activity that had been routinely available.”

“This disappearing data is at the heart of two lawsuits brought against ICE by the

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a small research group at Syracuse University. As of January 2017, ICE stopped handing over records it had provided under the Freedom of Information Act for years, including any details about how effective Trump’s crackdown has been.”

Hiding data that might be inconvenient is becoming standard practice for the Trump administration, but the legal argument being made by ICE for not complying with TRAC’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests would, if approved by a court, effectively negate FOIA and allow government agencies to conduct their business without any public access to government records.

“ICE argues that many of the records TRAC has asked for don’t exist in the form requested and says producing responses would require searching its database, a process the agency claims amounts to creating new records, which isn’t required under FOIA.”

“ ‘If they’re going to court to try to keep information hidden about the detainer policy, they’re probably hiding something,’ says Peter Boogaard, a former DHS press secretary in the Obama administration. More broadly, transparency has become a function of political convenience, Boogaard says. ‘They’re happy to say that immigration is causing huge problems, but at the same point, they are not sharing information’.”

Trump and his minions are suspiciously desperate to obscure reality and to keep data from public view.  This is how people who are involved in illegal and unethical activities operate.

Osnos included in his article this warning—one we should heed.

“A White House that is intent on politicizing and falsifying information can achieve its objectives before other branches of government know enough to stop it.”

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

Trump’s War on the Federal Workforce

Trump and His Associations with Russians and Criminals

Trump and Populism: Be Very Afraid

The Decline in Support for Democratic Institutions: Use Them or Lose Them

Is the United States Willing to Accept an Autocrat as Leader?

Israel: The Last of the Righteous Ones

It seems inevitable that a stateless people like the Jews, who lived for almost 2,000 years at the whim of those who possessed the land in which the Jews resided, would promote universal principles of social justice and human rights.  In fact, many notable Jews were participants in establishing these principles, to the extent they exist in interactions between nations, both in written documents and in actual implementation.  But the Jews are no longer a stateless people.  Since the formation of Israel, Jews have a nation and minorities within it who live at the whim of Jewish masters.  Do the principles so dear to earlier generations of Jews carry over into the running of a state, or are Jews no better than people of any other state when they are in power?  David Shulman addresses this question in an article in the New York Review of Books: The Last of the Tzaddiks.  A Tzaddik translates as “a righteous one”

Shulman is a rather remarkable academic scholar who was born in the United States in 1949 and moved to Israel in 1967 to begin his college education.  He has lived in Israel from the Six-Day War until the present and served a tour in the Israeli military during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982.  He is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was awarded the Israel Prize for Religious Studies in 2016.  Although his academic credentials are quite impressive, he is probably best known now as a peace activist who has been trying to protect Palestinians from official and unofficial predations by the Israelis.  From his Wikipedia page we have this quote attributed to him.

“This conflict is not a war of the sons of light with the sons of darkness; both sides are dark, both are given to organized violence and terror, and both resort constantly to self-righteous justification and a litany of victimization, the bread-and-butter of ethnic conflict. My concern is with the darkness on my side.”

Shulman’s article begins with this description of his early background.

“In the somewhat exotic Jewish home in Iowa where I grew up, it was axiomatic that there was an intimate link between Judaism and universal human rights. Like nearly all Eastern European Jewish families in America, my parents and grandparents were Roosevelt Democrats, to the point of fanaticism. They thought that the Jews had invented the very idea, and also the practice, of social justice; that having started our history as slaves in Egypt, we were always on the side of the underdog and the oppressed; that the core of Judaism as a religious culture was precisely this commitment to human rights, and that all the rest—the 613 commandments, the rituals, the theological assertions—was no more than a superstructure built upon a strong ethical foundation. For me, this comfortable illusion was shattered only when I moved to Israel at the age of eighteen.”

The ideals of an earlier time were carried over in producing a Declaration of Independence for Israel.

“….the ethical goals set forth in Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which promised that the new state would be based on ‘freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel’ and that it would ‘ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex’.”

The issue to be confronted is that none of those promises have been kept.

“[We have] a Jewish nation-state in Palestine that now, seventy years later, discriminates against its own Arab minority within the Green Line (the pre-1967 border) and savagely persecutes millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

After the war in 1967, Israel had occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  According to the terms that ended that war those regions were intended to form the basis of a Palestinian state adjacent to the Israeli state.  But Israel has continued to occupy those regions and it has become clear that their plan is to make them uninhabitable by the Palestinians so that they must leave—eventually.  There are so many Israeli settlements, checkpoints, and barriers now that it would be impossible to ever return it to a condition where it could form a Palestinian state.

Religion has been critical to the lives and experiences of Jews through the ages.  Unfortunately, sacred texts for a religion that describes Jews as God’s chosen people are likely to be uncertain sources in which to search for guidance on social justice and universal rights.  Shulman acknowledges that.

“Take, for example, the famous Talmudic ruling that a Jew is allowed to desecrate the Sabbath in order to save a human life. I and many others have often found comfort in this rule. However, as Adi Ophir and Ishay Rosen-Zvi have shown, in the premodern sources it applies only to saving a Jewish life; it can be stretched to include the life of a non-Jew only if there is a danger that by not saving that life the Jews may face reprisals from their non-Jewish neighbors (mi-shum eivah).  So much for universal ethics. Opinions still vary as to whether Leviticus 19:18, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ is similarly limited to one’s Jewish neighbor, as the earlier part of the verse suggests (‘thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people’). I have had occasion to witness bitter debates on this text between Israeli peace activists and religious Israeli settlers on the West Bank. You can guess which interpretation the latter prefer.”

The most orthodox of the religious have been the most adamant about securing all Palestinian land for greater Israel.  It is difficult to negotiate with a person who claims “God gave this land to me.”  In fact, religious texts have been used in the past to justify mass murders of Palestinians.

The state is firmly in the hands of right-wing extremists, and religion is no place to turn for help, that leaves only the courts to turn to for an activist who seeks justice for the Palestinians in the occupied territories.  The nonmilitary courts do take into consideration the principles imbedded in their Declaration of Independence, but they are also subject to political pressures as well.  Many dedicated individuals have waged long legal battles fighting for rights of those oppressed.  But it was the courts themselves that acquiesced to the illegal taking of Palestinian lands for settlements.  Shulman details one of the legal victories won.

“At a conservative estimate, many thousands of Palestinian arrestees were tortured, often severely, over the two or three decades before 1999.”

“The High Court postponed serious consideration of this issue for years, until it was forced by public pressure and activist litigation to confront it. Under the enlightened leadership of Aharon Barak, the court ruled, on moral grounds articulated in international law, that torture was illegal under most circumstances. That ‘most’ was part of a significant loophole that allowed the security services to have an internal consultation when there was a perceived need for physical pressure on suspects. Torture has significantly diminished in Israel in recent years, but it has not disappeared, as a recent report published by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) makes clear.”

The most effective methods of activists involve going out in the fields and shielding Palestinians from harm.  There are a number of organizations set up to do just that.

“These groups accompany Palestinian farmers and shepherds to their fields and grazing grounds and protect them from the predations of Israeli settlers and soldiers; they provide a restraining presence at the innumerable checkpoints and roadblocks manned by soldiers; they publicize routine criminal acts by military units operating in the territories; they offer emergency medical care to Palestinians unable to reach clinics and hospitals in the West Bank or in Israel; and, with particular emphasis, they are part of the unending legal battle for Palestinian lands, residency rights, and personal security, as well as a host of other pressing human rights issues.”

While the general populace goes about their lives in acquiescence to the methods being used by their political leaders, somewhere there resides within them that age-old outrage at injustice.

“Sometimes, however, protest erupts in unexpected ways. The Israeli government has recently begun deporting asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea. Close to 40,000 were scheduled for deportation or, if they refused to go, for open-ended incarceration in miserable conditions. The Israeli government was ready to pay the governments of Rwanda and Uganda to take these people, as later became clear. Very real, possibly life-threatening dangers awaited the deportees in these countries, including possible confiscation of their identity papers, the theft of their possessions, physical abuse, imprisonment, extortion, and the threat of being forcibly repatriated to their countries of origin (both South Sudan and Eritrea are engulfed in nightmarish violence). Most of these refugees have been in Israel for close to ten years; Hebrew is now their primary language; their children go to Israeli schools; for all intents and purposes apart from citizenship, these people are Israelis.”

“An unprecedented wave of popular protest brought many thousands of Israelis to the streets. El Al pilots and flight crews refused to fly the deportees to their deaths. Doctors, academics, lawyers, and many ordinary citizens, including Holocaust survivors and their relatives, spoke out. Some synagogues joined the struggle. Many stressed the unthinkable cognitive dissonance that arises from watching a Jewish state, founded by refugees from lethal oppression, sending tens of thousands of desperate African refugees to an unknown and precarious fate.”

Shulman takes encouragement from the fact that the government plan collapsed under pressure from courts and public opinion.  However, the political leaders continue to plot means by which individual rights can be taken away.

“Meanwhile, the government, driven by its extremist coalition partner the Jewish Home, is furthering a bill aimed at bypassing the High Court altogether by allowing a simple majority of sixty-one members of the Knesset to override the court’s rulings, particularly in cases involving basic human rights. This move is the most far-reaching attack ever made on the fundamental structure of Israeli democracy. If the bill passes, it will enshrine a tyranny of the majority and undermine the very concept of inalienable rights.”

Shulman is unwilling to give up on the notion that social justice and universal rights are deeply imbedded in Jewish culture.  He seems to believe that the righteous ones may still win the fight for justice in Israel.  However, he points out that most Israelis do not fall in the activist category.

“Most ordinary, decent Israelis acquiesce passively to the horrors of the occupation (a sizable minority actively supports the settlement enterprise).”

That is reminiscent of comments made about German citizens during the 1930s.  What Israeli leaders are pursuing are essentially a Generalplan Ost to provide desired Lebensraum and a final solution to dispose of a defenseless minority.

That ought to generate some “cognitive dissonance” among the Israelis.

The interested reader might find the following article informative:

Israel, Palestinians, and the United States: Peace Will Never Happen

Why Won’t Working Class Whites Move to Where the Jobs Are?

Alec MacGillis (ProPublica) provided a timely article in Bloomberg Businessweek: Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future?  He recounts the efforts of the workers at two coal-fired power plants to respond to the news that the facilities had been scheduled to be shut down.  His story unfolds in the area of Adams County, Ohio, with emphasis on the impact on the town of Mansfield.  Since the two plants provided most of the quality employment (union wages and benefits) in the area, most of the workers would be unable to find anything near equivalent as work.  One might expect most then to look elsewhere, but history tells us that many cling desperately to any hope that they can remain in the region where they have spread deep roots.  MacGillis provides this background.

“America was built on the idea of picking yourself up and striking out for more promising territory. Ohio itself was settled partly by early New Englanders who quit their rocky farms for more tillable land to the west. Some of these population shifts helped reshape the country: the 1930s migration from the Dust Bowl to California; the Great Migration of blacks to the North and West, which occurred in phases between 1910 and 1960; the Hillbilly Highway migration of Appalachian whites to the industrial Midwest in the 1940s and ’50s.”

“In recent years, though, Americans have grown less likely to migrate for opportunity. As recently as the early 1990s, 3 percent of Americans moved across state lines each year, but today the rate is half that. Fewer Americans moved in 2017 than in any year in at least a half-century.”

MacGillis focuses on one particular individual who grew up in the region and describes why he would prefer not to leave friends, family, and church.  He also points out that those who had been transplants from other places who came for the decent jobs the plants provided were the more likely to move on again.  A convincing case is made that leaving is difficult, but no conclusion was provided as to why moving might be more difficult now than it was a few generations ago.

MacGillis did tell the tale of one couple who found good work in Washington state.  After about six months they returned to Adams County after the husband found a job there.

“The position was nonunion and paid only $22 per hour, half of what he was making in Washington state and also much less than the $35 per hour he made at Killen Station [power plant]. He took it anyway.”

Their decision was attributed to wanting to live what they referred to as “the American dream,” which they defined thusly.

“The American dream is kind of to stay close to your family, do well, and let your kids grow up around your parents….” 

That particular description of the American dream was rather startling.  It suggested that there is something fundamentally different about people who believe that, and perhaps it was important to delve into this issue further.

The ease with which the white working class turned to Trump in the last election has generated a number of attempts to categorize this class of people.  Perhaps the most perceptive is Arlie Russell Hochschild’s study of the residents of Louisiana: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right.  Her focus was not on why people didn’t wish to leave per se, but rather why their attachment to their home region was so strong that they were willing to welcome industries that would provide the jobs that would allow them to stay even though the industry would befoul the land and render it barely habitable.  Within that context she brought up the concept of a “least resistant personality.”   

Back in 1984, California wanted to build a waste facility that would provide a difficult environment for any living nearby.  It would be noisy, smelly, generate a large amount of traffic, lower property values, provide few jobs and would likely produce unhealthy levels of pollution.  The thought was to learn how to convince any who might dwell in the neighborhood that they would be enduring something that was worth the discomfort.  A study was commissioned to Cerrell Associates, a consulting firm, that provided a completely different perspective.  The report was written by J. Stephen Powell.

“The plant manager’s best course of action, Powell concluded, would not be to try to change the minds of residents predisposed to resist.  It would be to find a citizenry unlikely to resist.”

“Based on interviews and questionnaires, Powell drew up a list of characteristics of the ‘least resistant personality profile’:”

·         Longtime residents of the South or Midwest

·         High school educated only

·         Catholic

·         Uninvolved in social issues, and without a culture of activism

·         Involved in mining, farming ranching (what Cerrell called “nature exploitive occupations”)

·         Conservative

·         Republican

·         Advocates of the free market

These attributes applied to a great extent to the Louisianans of Hochschild.  They apply as well to the people of Adams County as presented by MacGillis.  The concept of a “least resistant personality” is interesting in that it supports the fact that there truly are different cultures in our country, encouraging the insensitive notion that there is a left coast, a right coast, and a flyover area.  It helps define the strength of the attachment to home that develops within a class of people, but it does not provide much insight into why that feeling is so strong.

Joan C. Williams scolds upper-class liberals about their ignorance of working class whites in her recent book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.  Her lecturing becomes a bit irritating, and she goes a bit overboard in promoting the virtues of the working class (and the cluelessness of the elites).  Nevertheless, she provides some interesting insights.

“Middle class kids are groomed to fly away, and they do.  The working class likes to keep its young close to home.  Tearing a working-class person from the network that defines their life is a far heavier lift than insisting that a Harvard grad move to Silicon Valley.”

“Non-privileged people, whether poor or working class, tend to be more rooted than American elites.  Their lack of market power means that they rely on close networks of family and friends for many things more affluent folks purchase on the open market, from child and elder care to home improvement projects.  Moving would eliminate this safety net….”

Then Williams makes a point whose significance she might not have fully appreciated.

“At a deeper level, non-privileged people invest much more of their identities in their close-knit families and communities than do more privileged ones.  Poor and working-class people derive social honor from their reputations in communities of people who’ve known them ‘forever’.”

This concept of “social honor” was identified by Hochschild as one of the strongest motivators in the Louisianans she encountered.  It also provides a segue to a possible explanation why leaving a community can be so difficult for this class of people.

Keith Payne provides an important perspective in his book The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die.  The inequality Payne refers to need not be associated with the standard markers of income or professional attainment.  It is perhaps better understood as a status (social honor) deficit.  Poor people who are comfortable with their status within a community of peers can be quite satisfied.  A millionaire who has to deal with billionaires every day might be very cognizant of his/her lack of status and actually consider themselves to be “poor” because of it.

“….inequality is not the same thing as poverty, although it can feel an awful lot like it….Inequality makes people feel poor and act poor, even when they’re not.  Inequality so mimics poverty in our minds that the United States of America, the richest and most unequal of countries, has a lot of features that better resemble a developing nation than a superpower.”

The health and longevity problems that are associated with poverty have been well documented.  What Payne is saying is that the same problems arise for people who are not objectively poor, but who merely feel poor because they suffer a status deficit.  Payne invites his readers to view status as rungs on a ladder and assign themselves a rung appropriate to their perceived status.

“We have to take subjective perceptions of status seriously, because they reveal so much about people’s fates.  If you place yourself on a lower rung, then you are more likely in the coming years to suffer from depression, anxiety, and chronic pain.  The lower the rung you select, the more probable it is that you will make bad decisions and underperform at work.  The lower the rung you select, the more likely you are to believe in the supernatural and in conspiracy theories.  The lower the rung you select, the more prone you are to weight issues, diabetes, and heart problems.  The lower the rung you select, the fewer years you have left to live.”

The people of Adams County followed by MacGillis are enmeshed in a community and have established a status level for themselves.  Were they to move to a new place where a job might be easier to find, they would lose that status and fall to a much lower state.  They might find themselves having to compete with those whom they had always considered to be inferior to themselves for one reason or another.  They might find themselves competing with a black or a Hispanic for a job.  Can they deal with that?  This sense of impending loss of status could be why it is so difficult for people to uproot themselves.

Is this focus on status being overly emphasized?  Perhaps not.  A number of studies have recently emerged claiming that Trump picked up a lot of white votes, not because of any economic promises he made, but because he told them he understood how precarious white advantage (status/social honor) over others had become, and how he hinted he was going to do something about it.

What then is different now from a few generations ago when people were willing to pack up and move long distances in search of work?  A worker today in Adams County moves to another location essentially as an individual with perhaps a spouse and children.  In the eras MacGillis referred to earlier, the migrations were not those of individuals.  They were rivers of people who left and sent back word of what they found, encouraging others to follow.  Preferred destinations were identified where people more like those they had just left congregated and a sense of community could be reestablished.  And with community, a sense of status could be quickly regained.  It was a different era.

So, there is one possible answer to MacGillis’s initial question—and that should be enough amateur sociology for one day.

The interested reader might find the following articles informative:

Louisiana Turns Itself into an Industrial Sacrifice Zone

Inequality,Poverty, and Social Dysfunction

Understanding Trump’s Base

Abortion and Christian Terrorism

When the word terrorism is used, the association is immediately drawn with militant Muslim individuals who kill people in the furtherance of some combined religious and political goal.  A common definition of terrorism would be the following.

“The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.”

If one wished to focus on religious motivations, a comparable definition of “religious terrorism” would be this.

“The use of violence and intimidation, especially against nonbelievers, in the pursuit of religious aims.”

Murdering a person is clearly an act of violence; putting another person’s life at risk is also a form of violence and intimidation.

Islam is thought of as a violent religion because it tends to apply its exacting laws and extreme punishments to believers and non-believers alike wherever it has political power.  All religions that have gained political power behave the same way, although the implementation of law and punishment can be more subtle.  Most European nations had state religions at one point, and some still do.  However, in nearly all cases the resultant religious rule was so unpopular that any political power the religions had has essentially been eliminated. 

When the United States was founded it was decided that a state religion was unacceptable because the multiple versions of Christianity in place hated each other so much it was best to not invite violence by showing any preference.  Not having experienced living under a religion-dominated society, many in the United States think it would be a good idea.  These people are consumed by the desire to force others, nonbelievers, to live according to their rules.  This is exactly what Islam does.  Could it be that our Christian-dominated society is also capable of religious terrorism against its citizens?  The answer is yes.

Incitement to violence and intimidation against homosexual and transgender people is produced by some versions of Christianity in this country, and they are busy exporting their views around the world.  Here the focus will be on abortion and the consequences of “pro-life” activism.

Marcia Angell provides a concise summary of the chronology of the pro- and antiabortion chronology in a New York Review of Books article The Abortion Battlefield.

“Women have always been subject to male domination, sometimes almost completely. Even in as enlightened a country as the United States, men created the laws under which women lived well into the twentieth century, and they ensured that women had an inferior status.”

All writers who are pro-choice with respect to abortion believe that the pro-life movement is mainly aimed at controlling women and their sexuality.

“Not surprisingly, controlling sexuality and reproduction was central to keeping women in their place. For most of the country’s history, motherhood was considered women’s highest calling. They were expected to submit to their husbands sexually, and marital rape did not become a crime in all states until 1993. Abortion was illegal in most of the country for most of its history. Desperate women would take various folk remedies to end a pregnancy, try to end it themselves with some contrived implement, or find an illegal abortionist—all risky. There are no reliable figures for how many women died from illegal abortions but almost certainly there were many.”

Relief for some women came with the availability of birth control pills in the 1960s.  However, the number of unwanted pregnancies remained high and the number of women who were killed or injured in the attempt to terminate their pregnancy was still large.  The carnage was so great that even some religious leaders believed that access to safe medical abortions was necessary.

“In 1973 the Supreme Court, in the case of Roe v. Wade, took the next step. It found by a 7–2 majority that women had a constitutional right to end a pregnancy. The right was close to absolute in the first trimester, could be regulated by the states in the second trimester only to protect the woman’s health, and in the third trimester could be further regulated or even banned to protect ‘potential life,’ unless the woman’s health or life were at stake. Legal abortions rapidly became common. According to the Guttmacher Institute (a research institution that gathers data on reproductive health in the US), about 3 percent of women in the United States had legal abortions in 1980 (one of the peak years), and it was later estimated that roughly a third of American women would obtain an abortion at some time in their lives.”

The initial “pro-life” activism came mainly from Catholics who referred to all life as deserving of reverence and protection.  This included being against war and capital punishment.  Later on, as other denominations entered the fray, the “life” of interest was only the unborn embryo or fetus residing in a pregnant woman. 

“By the 1980s, the antiabortion movement had undergone another major shift. It became dominated not by Catholics but, over time, by evangelical Protestants, and its methods increasingly included direct confrontations at abortion clinics to block access. The movement also became increasingly associated with the right wing of the Republican Party, which as far back as the Eisenhower administration had set out to win over religious and social conservatives. The 1980 Republican platform called for a constitutional amendment to protect the life of the unborn, and the new president, Ronald Reagan, who, like Trump, had once favored abortion, now, like Trump, opposed it.”

“In 1986 an evangelical Protestant minister, Randall Terry, started an organization called Operation Rescue, which advocated stopping abortions by nearly any means possible, including firebombing clinics and harassing and threatening clinic doctors and staff and their families. There were more than 60,000 arrests at Operation Rescue actions, according to [Karissa] Haugeberg [an author], and the organization went bankrupt within a few years because of the mounting number of lawsuits. But the turn toward violence continued.”

The violence would include murders and bombings, clearly acts of religiously-motivated terrorism aimed at preventing a legal activity.

“The total count between 1978 and 2015, writes Haugeberg, was eleven murders (nine of them physicians), twenty-six attempted murders, 185 arsons, forty-two bombings, and 1,534 vandalizations of clinics.”

The greatest current focus of antiabortion activists is the creation of legal obstacles to the operation of clinics where abortions are available, and/or impeding access to such clinics by pregnant women. 

“….particularly since Republicans have gained control of most state governments, states have rushed to pass new laws that treat pregnant women like errant children. According to Haugeberg, ‘Between the 2010 midterm elections and 2015, states adopted 231 new restrictions on abortion’.”

Clearly, murder and bombings are acts of terrorism.  But what about the effort to forbid a woman the ability to terminate an unwanted pregnancy?  Forcing a person to experience injury or death as a result of imposed religious beliefs should be considered terrorism as well.

It turns out that pregnancy is a serious medical condition.  Consider this fact.

“According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, c. [about] 4 million women who give birth in the US annually, over 50,000 a year, experience ‘dangerous and even life-threatening complications’.”

NPR and ProPublica recently evaluated the maternal deaths in the United States and reported some startling results in U.S. Has The Worst Rate Of Maternal Deaths In The Developed World.  This chart of the maternal death rate per 100,000 live births over time for various developed nations was provided.

For some reason, the maternal mortality rate is much higher than in any of the other wealthy nations listed, and it is increasing over time rather than decreasing as it is in other countries.  In 2015 the death rate was 26.4 per 100,000 live births.

This source tells us that there are approximately 650,000 abortions reported annually to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in recent years.  Using these numbers, if the antiabortion movement actually succeeded in forcing 650,000 women to carry to term an unwanted child, 172 women would die and 8125 would be subjected to “dangerous and even life-threatening complications.”

The act of forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to full term rather than have a safe abortion means that a significant number of them will die or suffer bodily harm in the process.  This is the result of a few classes of Christians insisting that all people must live according to their beliefs.  This is Christians performing acts of terrorism.

Return to the above chart on mortality data and note that the increase in the United States seems to track the increase in measures to limit access to abortions.  Could there be a correlation?  Note also that Ireland, a nation that prohibits abortions almost completely, has a falling mortality rate.  It turns out that Irish women have ready access to an abortion; they must merely take an inexpensive trip to the UK where they are readily available.  Such trips are perfectly legal and accepted in Ireland.  The well-covered referendum that was recently voted on will likely increase the probability that Irish women may be able to get an abortion within Ireland, but it will not have much of an effect on the number of women obtaining them.  That leaves the United States as about the only country successfully trying to eliminate access to a medical abortion and leaves open the question of a mortality correlation with antiabortion efforts.

When NPR and ProPublica performed their evaluation of maternal mortality, they focused on what happens to women while giving birth in a hospital.  Their conclusions seem to fit the simple explanation that no one on the various medical teams seems to worry much about the mother or plan in a systematic way for any complications that might occur around the time of birth or soon after.  There is much more concern for preparations for any difficulty the infant might encounter at birth.

Katha Pollitt provides some perspective on why pregnancies can be dangerous in her book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.

“The risks of producing a baby include ectopic pregnancy, gestational diabetes, bacterial vaginosis, preeclampsia, anemia, urinary tract infections, placental abruption, hyperemesis gravidarum (the constant and severe nausea that killed Charlotte Brontë), depression, postpartum psychosis, and PTSD—to say nothing of morning sickness, heartburn, backache, stretch marks, episiotomy or caesarian scarring, decreased marital happiness, and lowered lifetime income.”

Women who have ready access to quality medical care before, during and after birth are more likely to have a successful pregnancy.  That is the experience in the nations where mortality continues to fall.  In the rush to limit access to abortion have pro-lifers also limited access to more general medical care for women and thus increased the probability of maternal mortality?

Lawrence Wright suggests there is a relevant bit of data that emerged from the abortion wars in Texas.  He explored the idiosyncrasies of Texas politics in an article in The New Yorker: America’s Future Is Texas.

“That year [2011], the Republican state legislature turned its attention instead to defunding women’s-health programs. ‘This is a war on birth control and abortions,’ Representative Wayne Christian, a Tea Party stalwart from East Texas, admitted. ‘That’s what family planning is supposed to be about’.”

“The long-term goal of cultural conservatives is to cut off access to abortion in Texas, to end state subsidies for birth control, and to gut state funding for Planned Parenthood—which, in 2011, served sixty per cent of the health needs of low-income women in the state. The legislators slashed the family-planning budget from $111.5 million to $37.9 million. Eighty-two family-planning clinics subsequently shut down.”

  

“Texas has the highest rate of uninsured people in the nation, and, according to the Center for Public Policy Priorities, about seventeen per cent of Texan women and girls live in poverty. After the family-planning budget was cut, there was a disproportionate rise in births covered by Medicaid, because so many women no longer had access to birth control. By defunding Planned Parenthood, the legislature also blocked many women from getting scans for breast cancer and ovarian cancer.”

In 2011, the governor signed into law a bill requiring women seeking an abortion would have to undergo a highly intrusive sonogram 24 hours before the procedure could be performed.

“When the Senate approved the bill, Dan Patrick, then a state senator, declared, ‘This is a great day for Texas. This is a great day for women’s health’.”

“Between 2010 and 2014, the proportion of women who died in childbirth in Texas doubled, from 18.6 per hundred thousand live births to 35.8—the worst in the nation and higher than the rate in many developing countries. These figures represent six hundred dead women.”

“….a report in the September, 2016, issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology noted, ‘In the absence of war, natural disaster, or severe economic upheaval, the doubling of a mortality rate within a two year period in a state with almost 400,000 annual births seems unlikely’.”

Correlation does not prove causation, but the data is suggestive, and some analysis of the possible causes seems necessary.

“The mystery might be cleared up if Governor Abbott released records about how these women died. In 2011, when he was attorney general, he issued an opinion stating that information about the deceased would be withheld, supposedly to prevent fraud.”

Katha Pollitt also provides relevant correlations in her book.

“Among American states, there’s a correlation between white religiosity, Republican Party power, restrictions on abortion, and the status of women.  The ten states where women’s status is highest (measured by economic security, leadership, and health) are strongly Democratic, with strong secular cultures (in order: Maryland, Hawaii, Vermont, California, Delaware, Connecticut, Colorado, New York, New Jersey, and Washington).  The ten states where women’s status is lowest are solidly Republican, with churches wielding a lot of political and cultural power (Georgia, Indiana, South Dakota, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, Utah, and Louisiana).”

If antiabortionists wish to treat their women like crap, and their women are willing to put up with that, so be it.  But they should not be allowed to harm the other women of the world!

Israel, Palestinians, and the United States: Peace Will Never Happen

Henry Siegman is a Jew who was born in Frankfort Germany in 1930.  As a young boy he was one of the few German Jews to make it into the United States in 1942.  He was subsequently ordained as an Orthodox Rabbi and served as a chaplain in the Korean War where he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and the Purple Heart.  As a Jew and a scholar, most of his adult life has been spent tracking and evaluating the events surrounding Israel’s foundation and evolution as an entity within the greater Middle East.  Given the recent events associated with the US government’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the London Review of Books gave him space to record his current feelings.  He is described as: “president emeritus of the US/Middle East Project and a former senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.”

Siegman produced an article that was titled Two Terrorisms in the paper version and The Two-State Solution: An Autopsy in the online version.  Both titles are relevant because understanding the fate of the two-state solution requires a familiarity with the terrorist history of both the Palestinians and the Israelis.

First some background is required.  In the early part of the twentieth century, Zionism was a mostly secular movement encouraging Jews to work towards some sort of recognized legal presence in Palestine, a region controlled by the British.  If such a thing was to come to pass, then the Palestinians would bear the brunt of the sacrifice.  When the British wished to depart, the UN sponsored a partition plan in 1947 that would divide the region into a Jewish-controlled area and a Palestinian-controlled area.  This source describes the impact.

“To address problems arising from the presence of national minorities in each area, it suggested a land and population transfer involving the transfer of some 225,000 Arabs living in the envisaged Jewish state and 1,250 Jews living in a future Arab state….”

Both sides had claims to the land that they considered nonnegotiable.  If the stakes are existential and there is no acceptable political solution, then violence soon follows in the form of terrorism.  That was the case in 1948 and that is the case today.  Siegman provides this perspective.

“The violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their struggle for statehood is not any different from the measures to which Zionists resorted before and during the 1948 war. According to Morris [Benny Morris, historian], ‘the upsurge of Arab terrorism in October 1937 triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict.’ While in the past, Arabs ‘had sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers’, now, ‘for the first time, massive bombs were placed [by Irgun] in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed.’ Morris notes that ‘this “innovation” soon found Arab imitators’.”

“During Israel’s War of Independence, Jewish defence forces acted in similar ways to Irgun and Palestinian terrorist groups. As Morris explained in an interview in Haaretz, documentation declassified by the IDF shows that ‘in the months of April and May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages.’ The Haganah, which became the IDF, was responsible for at least 24 deliberate massacres of unarmed civilians; the number of victims in each operation ranged from single figures to several hundred. ‘What the new material shows,’ according to Morris, ‘is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought, [including] an unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion’.”

The Jews were vastly outnumbered.  If they were to produce a democratic nation to their liking, the number of resident Palestinians had to be greatly reduced.  This could be accomplished by killing them, moving them into the equivalent of concentration camps, or simply driving them away.  Their Bible told them that all three options were acceptable.

It is difficult to view this situation as a case of the “good” guys versus the “bad” guys.  But that is the narrative the Israelis sold, and the US bought it.

“The point of recognising this history is not to justify terrorism by either Israelis or Palestinians, but to acknowledge the outrageous double standard that has been applied to the two parties and has undermined the possibility of a peace accord. Without knowing that history, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand the extent to which Israeli propaganda has succeeded in shaping a narrative about the creation of Israel that presents the Palestinians who were brutally expelled from their homes as the aggressors and the Jews as their victims. Without that history, it is impossible to understand the outrage Palestinians feel over having been portrayed as the bad guys for so long.”

After the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel had demonstrated military dominance in the Middle East.  They could do what they wished, and what they wished was for the Palestinians to go away.  The set up “temporary” occupations of the still contested Gaza Strip and the West Bank.  They have no permanent presence in Gaza, but they control all access by land, sea, or air.

“Nothing more profoundly expresses the dishonesty of the dominant Israeli narrative and its perverseness than the statement directed at the Palestinians by Israel’s former prime minister Golda Meir: ‘We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we cannot forgive you for making us kill yours.’ Even if Israelis don’t know about what happened during the 1948 War of Independence, they can be in no doubt about the malicious blockade imposed on Gaza, which, according to the UN, will make it uninhabitable for its two million residents within two years. Almost half of that number are children.”

If there was ever to be a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians it would have to involve ceding all or most of the West Bank to a Palestinian state.  While US negotiators tried valiantly—and naively—to broker such a peace, Israel was blatantly working to make such a state impossible.  Israel has long been allowing Israeli settlers to move into the West Bank and create communities.  Many of these settlers are determined to never give up their land peacefully.  Their current role, and that of the Israeli government is to make life miserable for the Palestinians who refuse to leave.  Their access to jobs, water, and farmable land can be taken away from them at an Israeli’s whim.   Violence between the better armed and organized settlers and the resident Palestinians is common.

The existence of the settlements means that a viable West Bank state cannot be constructed.  That is the reason for the settlements.  Even if a liberal Israeli government were to be formed with a two-state solution in mind, it would take a bloody civil war to make it happen.  And it is not clear that the Israeli military would even be on the government’s side.

Whenever Israel’s actions raised an international outcry, the US was always there to provide it cover.

“The members of the US diplomatic corps who served in the Middle East during the more than half a century that I worked professionally on this subject were outstanding. They understood that, given the vast disparity of power between Israel and the Palestinians, without determined American intervention the outcome of the conflict would be entirely on Israel’s terms. But US politicians consistently undercut its diplomats by assuring Israel’s governments that even though the US objected to policies that violated previous agreements, international law and democratic norms, they would always have Israel’s back.”

“And the US has had Israel’s back, and not only when Israel’s security was threatened; it has also scuttled Security Council resolutions that might have changed Israeli calculations about the costs of its permanent subjugation of the Palestinian people. America’s assurances convinced successive governments that they could safely turn their country into an apartheid state, a transformation that far-right governments headed by Netanyahu have now made a reality.”

“To this day, the official position of Likud, Israel’s ruling party for much of the past half-century, is that it will never allow the establishment of a Palestinian state anywhere in Palestine. The largest caucus in the Knesset is the one devoted to assuring the establishment of a Greater Israel in all of Palestine, and, until that goal is reached, preventing Palestinian statehood on even a square foot of Eretz Yisrael. Likud’s official dismissal of Palestinian statehood never led the US to challenge Israel’s qualification as a peace partner….”

The free pass Israel received from the US was due to immense influence of Jewish advocacy groups and the large amounts of money that could be made available for campaign contributions. 

Interestingly, most US Jews that practice their religion are in either Conservative or Reform movements.  Israel only recognizes the Orthodox version as the true religion.  This leaves the US Jews in an increasingly awkward position with respect to Israel.  You can be Jewish if you are born to a Jewish mother, but the increasingly powerful Orthodox Rabbis would like to be able to proclaim that only Orthodox conversions to Judaism are valid.

“I believe I am more aware than most of the profound Jewish religious attachment to the Land of Israel. I was raised in a deeply Zionist and religiously observant home. Moreover, I am old enough to have experienced personally what it meant to live under the Nazis. …Zionism was rejected by the overwhelming majority of Orthodox Jewry as a heresy, just as completely as the Zionist movement rejected Orthodoxy as an anachronism that held back the political and cultural modernisation of Jewish life. No one could have imagined at the start of the 20th century how completely Zionism would be taken over by Orthodox Jewry in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The possibility that the government of this new Zionist state might someday fund an organisation that seeks to restore restore the ancient priesthood and the sacrificial cult it presided over, as this and previous Israeli governments have actually done, would have sent the founders fleeing to the exits.”

The Orthodox religious are the most strident in demanding that Israel must return to its “God-given borders.”  They increasingly have influence over what are considered “Jewish values.”

“Anyone who has followed the recent flood of new legislation by Netanyahu’s government aimed at protecting the Jewish identity of the state from encroachment by democratic norms, will agree that these early Zionist advocates grossly underestimated the threat to Israel’s democracy posed by the current defenders of ‘fundamental Jewish values’. Legislation that allows Israeli Jews to bar Israeli Arab citizens from Jewish neighbourhoods – which in Israel means virtually everywhere other than Palestinian neighbourhoods – is one result of this new dedication to fundamental Jewish values. Another example is the appalling treatment by the government of migrants from African countries who have sought asylum in Israel. Not entirely unrelated is a recent statement by Israel’s Sephardi chief rabbi, a government official, on the kinship of black people to monkeys.”

Netanyahu has had a troubled relationship with US Jews because they tend to wish for a peaceful solution to the Palestinian solution.  Netanyahu seems to be turning his back on them in favor of a bigger and more powerful US and world constituency—evangelical Christians.  Many evangelicals believe that the Bible contains the roadmap to the future.  And that roadmap indicates that the reestablishment of the Jewish nation must occur before the second coming of the lord can take place—a highly anticipated event.  The evangelicals thus provide a large number of people who will support the territorial goals of the Israeli leadership.

An article in the New York Times, Israel and Evangelicals: New U.S. Embassy Signals a Growing Alliance, provides background.

“Mr. Netanyahu has had rocky relations with liberal American Jews, partly over what they see as his lack of interest in resuming peace talks with the Palestinians, but even more over his acquiescence to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox rabbis on contentious debates with Reform and Conservative leaders involving conversions to Judaism and prayer at the Western Wall. The alliance with evangelicals may free him of the need to appease liberal Jews.”

“’He believes they’re going to assimilate and won’t be interested in their Jewish identity,’ Anshel Pfeffer, author of a biography of Mr. Netanyahu, said in an interview. ‘He sees the Orthodox minority of American Jews, much more in line with his right-wing thinking, becoming the majority of American Jews in a generation or two. And he sees the Republicans and the Christian evangelicals as being the real base of support for Israel in the U.S., rather than American Jews’.”

“Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to Washington and a regular participant in events there to rally evangelical support, said that ‘devout Christians’ were now the ‘backbone’ of the United States support for Israel. ‘It’s got to be a solid quarter of the population, and that is maybe 10, 15, 20 times the Jewish population,’ he said in an interview.

“Worldwide, the proportion is even more staggering, with the number of evangelicals estimated at 600 million, led by the boom in traditionally Catholic Latin American countries.”

Donald Trump’s support for Netanyahu’s agenda and the ties with the evangelical community has led to a somewhat unusual source of support for Israel.  Siegman explains.

“More recently, alt-right and neo-Nazi elements that form the most loyal members of Trump’s base have joined this circle of supporters: they now see Israel’s embrace of a religiously defined national Jewish identity (replacing its previous status as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’) as a validation of their own Christian, racist, fascist and white supremacist ideology. White supremacists can now join with Netanyahu in castigating Jewish critics of Israel’s xenophobic and far-right nationalistic policies as self-hating Jews.”

The United States was once the only power that could influence Israel’s actions.  Now any notion that we would try to apply constraints to Israel seems hopelessly naïve.  Israel is still the most potent military power in the Middle East.  The only nation that might conceivably challenge it is Iran, a country with whom Israel seems on a collision course.

Stay tuned!