Opinion Editorials, March 2010

 
The Daily Show, Sarah Palin, Microsoft, and back to Mordechai Vanunu

By Eileen Fleming
 
Al-Jazeerah & ccun.org, March 8, 2010

 
Because I watch The Daily Show, I learned Sarah Palin was on a Jay Leno show. She got a few laughs, but nobody was talking about Palin's connections to the top leaders of "the New Apostolic Reformation/NAR; a religious movement that makes geographic maps of where demons reside. The NAR is a religious network of elites drawn from the ranks of business and government throughout the world [and] encompasses the humble and the elite alike, supporting a network of 'prayer warriors' in all 50 states, within the ranks of the U.S. military, and at the far reaches of the globe -- all guided by an entire genre of books, texts, videos and other media. The New Apostolic Reformation, is the largest religious movement you've never heard of."[1] 
 
What we the people for peace, justice, equal human rights and for an end to war and military occupations are really up against is the empire of Big Brother; or the dominant or Royal Consciousness as Walter Brueggemann explains it in, The Prophetic Imagination.
 
Brueggemann describes the ancient Hebrew prophets as itinerant poets, who addressed the social and political injustices perpetuated by the power structures, and were routinely ignored or reviled for telling the brutal truth.  Brueggemann also connects the dots between prophecy and politics,  “We will not understand the meaning of prophetic imagination unless we see the connection between the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation.” [2]
 
“Royal consciousness is what drives the structures of political power---institutions that, devoted only to their perpetuation, exploit and oppress the people they are charged with protecting and serving.
 
“Royal Consciousness is concerned only with maintaining the systems that will increase power and wealth for the few.” [Ibid] 
 
Perpetuating the status quo is the foremost goal in the maintenance of Royal Consciousness, which runs through state, church and corporate media.
 
Hierarchy always interprets any expression of doubt or inquiry as a threat.
 
Those that question a policy or decision are perceived as undermining authority, but dissent and investigative journalism are the means to assure a healthy democracy.
 
In 1958, Edward R. Murrow warned that as television became more about entertainment and not about shows of enlightenment, the republic would be dumbed down.
 
The royal consciousness thrives when people are in a state of comfortable numbness; a society dominated by the royal consciousness becomes easily anesthetized by politicians who can also do a little stand up comedy.
 
Totalitarian regimes control the people with fear of 'the other' and lives kept busy with keeping roof above head and any escape from routine is often filled with mindless entertainment.
 
But then, the curtain on the obvious comes down and what is oblivious to most is that things are very wrong indeed. People are needlessly suffering because of the apathy and especially the inaction by those with political power- but without the political will to do the right thing-and they won’t do the right thing, unless their consciences can be accessed and pricked.
But the situation appears hopeless, the world is out of balance, tipped on its side by military power and royal conciseness thrives when ever there are those who believe there is nothing that be done to fix anything, so why even bother to think about it?
 
Royal Consciousness thrives whenever 'we' do not consider ‘the other’ as also us-just in different skins and places in time.
 
And that is the task of prophetic imagination: to simply and directly challenge the royal consciousness by being a voice of Conscience, and it begins with "spying on Americans has become big business" and the unearthing by
 
Cryptome's John Young on Alex Jones TV 1/3: The Internet is a Police State Surveillance Grid

Cryptome provided the lead to a 22-page Microsoft document, outlining how Microsoft stores all of your private data in their online servers and helps government agencies obtain your private information without the need for court orders.
 
Read that Microsoft Document here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/27394899/Microsoft-Spy
 
However, on February 13, 2008, we already knew:
 
"The Senate yesterday approved a sweeping measure that would expand the government's clandestine surveillance powers, delivering a key victory to the White House by approving the telecom immunity provision…the Senate approved the reauthorization of a law that would give the government greater powers to eavesdrop in terrorism and intelligence cases without obtaining warrants from a secret court…The most important change approved by the Senate yesterday would make permanent a law approved last August that expanded the government's authority to intercept -- without a court order -- the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States communicating with others overseas." [3]

Vanunu

In my second book, I wrote:
 
On February 22, 2006, in a Jerusalem court it was revealed that Israel had asked Microsoft to hand over all the details of Vanunu's Hotmail account before a court order had been obtained, while eluding that Vanunu was being investigated for espionage.  
 
Vanunu wrote, "Microsoft obeyed the orders and gave them all the details…three months before I was arrested and my computers were confiscated. It is strange to ask Microsoft to give this information before obtaining the court order to listen to my private conversations. It means they wanted to go through my emails in secret, or maybe, with the help of the secret services, the Shaback, Mossad.”
 
Vanunu's attorney also proved that the police had misled the judges who gave the orders to arrest him, to search his room, to go through his email, confiscate his computers and that the police also misled Microsoft to believe they were helping in a case of espionage.
 
Vanunu explained, “The State came to the court with two special secret Government orders; Hisaion [documents or information that are deemed confidential by the government and kept from the court, the defendant, and lawyers.] This allows the prosecution to keep documents related to my court hearing secret. One was from the Minister for Interior Security and one from the Minister of Defense." 
 
When I questioned Vanunu, regarding his Attorney, Michael Sfard’s requests to Police Representative Mr. Peterburg, to specifically state what type of espionage activity the police alluded Vanunu was being accused of, Vanunu replied in an email:
 
"The policeman did not have any answers and said that he brought all the evidence to the court. When Sfard asked him again about any material related to the 'espionage' [charge] Peterburg had no answers. Sfard proved that the police had misled the judges who gave the orders to arrest me: to search my room, to go through my email, to confiscate my computers and [that they] misled Microsoft to believe they are helping in a case of espionage."
 
Shortly after being released from 18 years in a tomb sized cell, Vanunu said, "I am the same man as I used to be in the prison, defending my right to freedom of speech. That was my fight for 18 years, all the time demanding the right to speak. That’s what I did and continue to do now that I’m free. The Israel government continue to pursue me, don’t want to let me go free after 18 years. I don’t have any more secrets, so the Israeli government should realize this case is over, dead --they should let me go.”
 
Vanunu is still waiting in Jerusalem for the right to leave the state and fade away into history instead of continuing to make it. And I have begun writing my third book-which is a lot about stumbling into being the only reporter in the world who bothered to document Mordechai Vanunu's FREEDOM OF SPEECH Trial since it began, 25 January 2006.
 
I also reported on Naomi Klein's, 2007, book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, and connected these dots in 2008:
 
After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel's economy was devastated, but then came 9/11, and "suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners…Many of the country's most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel's status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom--a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war.
 
"Israel now sends $1.2 billion in "defense" products to the United States—up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world.
 
"Much of this growth has been in the so-called "homeland security" sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion--an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror.
 
"Israel's policy of erecting walls and checkpoints to seal off the occupied territories are also laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested Palestinians--whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling 'Hamasistan'--are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs." [4]

Poster-boy for Israel's Industrial Security/Surveillance Complex is Mordechai Vanunu. Every email Vanunu has ever written, snail mail received, phone call conversation and walk he has ever taken through east Jerusalem, has potentially been monitored 24/7, since his release from an Israeli prison in 2004.  

During my first trip to east Jerusalem in June 2005, Vanunu told me that during the first two years of his 18 years in jail [most all in solitary confinement] a light shone above his head 24/7 in a tomb sized cell. When ever he closed his eyes a guard would come in and shine a brighter light into his face and say, "Just checking if you had committed suicide yet."

In 2008, and thirty odd years from my first time, I reread Orwell's 1984, that was published in 1949. I was struck at how much Vanunu reminded me of Winston Smith, Orwell's man with an independent thought that Big Brother; The Party incarnate found so threatening they tortured him beyond his endurance in order to break him, brainwash him and strip him of his humanity.

In 1987, in Ashkelon Prison, Vanunu wrote, I had "no choice. I'm a little man, a citizen, one of the people, but I'll do what I have to. I've heard the voice of my conscience and there's nowhere to hide…yes, it's there all right. I'm all right. I do see the monster. I'm part of the system. I signed this form. Only now I am reading the rest of it. This bolt is part of a bomb. This bolt is me. Who else knows? Who has seen? Who has heard?" [5]

"A working prophet, is able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away…the irresistible human addiction to power were already long in place…the means of surveillance in Winston Smith's era…[are] primitive next to the wonders of computer technology…most notably the Internet." [6]

"Universal peace and justice are the goals of man, and the prophets have faith that in spite of all errors and sins…[and] although under the illusion of fighting for peace and democracy…all the fighting nations lost moral considerations…the unlimited destruction of civilian populations…atomic bombs…can human nature be changed so that man will forget his longing for freedom, dignity, integrity, love-can man forget that he is human?" [7]

In Orwell's epic, Winston Smith played the role of the archetype of all threats to Big Brother; an individual with an open and free mind, independent thought, memory of history, a voice of dissent and willing to take bold action. Orwell's Big Brother tortured all threats in order to get inside their head and then to brainwash them into accepting doublethink as truth.

The atomic bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a baby step compared to the 21st century slaughter that can be achieved by thermonuclear weapons with capacities to wipe out 100% of a country within minutes. The Industrial Military Complex cranks out new weapons about every five years and soon the minds driven mad with doublethink-"war is peace"- will create 100 or 1,000 megaton bombs.

"Orwell demonstrates the illusion of the assumption that democracy can continue to exist in a world preparing for nuclear war, leaders have only one aim, and that is power, and power means to inflict unlimited pain and suffering to another human being.
 
"How can a minority of one be right? We spend a considerable part of our income and energy in building thermonuclear weapons, and close our minds to the fact that they might go off and destroy one third or one half of our population and that of the enemy, another example of doublethink-and from a Christian standpoint" there is the evil of killing any other. [Ibid]

From emails Vanunu wrote between March 24-27, 2008:

"Court hearing postponed to May 13, 2008-the appeal against 6 month prison sentence for speaking to foreign media...I think the hearing was postponed because, from the beginning of the trial until now, they really don't know what they want. All was a game to try to put me under new pressure to see if they can gain something by holding me here.

"All this means is that Israel just continues what they have done since my release in 2004, delaying and holding me here instead of sending me for real freedom. They want me very poor and angry, but I am surviving. One thing is very clear: my case is over. They should let me go free.

 "My lawyer is very busy with the trial of the previous president, Kasav. He was accused of rape and sexual harassment by many women in his office, while as a minister office many years ago, and again in his palace as president. But the turmoil here is that the prosecutor made a deal with him; no trial no prison sentence, just a symbolic punishment. So today he will go to court with my lawyer to get his deal and be totally free.

 "There is a lot of suffering here. Israel wants to hide so much because it is not good for its image as a democracy and a friend of America…1984, yes I read it many times and many years ago. 1984 is here." [8] 
 
And because I watch The Daily Show, I learned Sarah Palin was on a Jay Leno show. She got a few laughs...

Notes:
 
1. http://www.truthout.org/prayer-warriors-and-palin-organizing-spiritual-warfare-take-over-america57276
2. Braverman, Mark, FATAL EMBRACE, page 154
3. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021300959.html?hpid=topnews
4. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070702/klein
5. http://www.vanunu.com/
6.Thomas Pynchon, Foreword, Centennial Edition 1984
7. Erich Fromm, Afterword, Centennial Edition 1984
8. http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=860&Itemid=198

Only in Solidarity do "we have it in our power to begin the world again."-Tom Paine

Eileen Fleming,
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com
Author of "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"  
Producer "30 Minutes with Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu"
http://www.youtube.com/user/eileenfleming