Racism and Bird Flu

Common Sense
John Maxwell

The US Press is in the throes of two of its annual rituals: first, the celebration of the latest crop of Pulitzer prizes for journalistic excellence; second: the selection of a suitable candidate for the year's high profile public lynching.

In past years they have sacrificed O J Simpson, Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant, to name only the most prominent.

Candidates for lynching are not always obvious; since September last and Hurricane Katrina, Kanye West, Harry Belafonte and New Orleans Mayor Roy Nagin were all considered and discarded. Belafonte was too smart, Kanye West was too popular and Roy Nagin was right about the Bush administration and its failures in the disaster. The Mexican illegal immigrants are too diffuse for a really impressive auto da fé. A simpler, more easily stereotyped candidate is needed.

This month, two relatively new candidates presented themselves: Barry Bonds, the home run hitter accused of lying about steroid use, and Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who punched a Congressional security guard she accused of an inappropriate attempt to restrain her as she rushed into the Congress without passing through the metal detectors.

At the same time, two of three suspects in the violent rape of a young black woman by members of an almost all white university sports team are getting the benefit of a 'full court press' to provide character evidence for them before they have even entered the courtroom. Their alleged victim is meanwhile traduced as drunk and delusional.

Clearly, high-class young white men could not possibly have raped a black woman, a university student herself - from a black university - who is not only a single mother but was working her way through college by moonlighting as a stripper.
While the rich, young white athletes are having their sterling praises sung by the media, Cynthia McKinney is being investigated by a Washington, D.C. Grand Jury.

Hamas and Palestine

HEBRON, West Bank - A Palestinian driver places items to be searched in front of an Israeli army explosives robot at a checkpoint in the West Bank town of Hebron last Friday. (Photo: AP)

Hamas and Palestine are getting the Haiti Democracy treatment. Having had the temerity to vote for the people they thought might best represent them, the Palestinians are to be blackmailed into good behaviour.

In response to US and Israeli pressure "Several EU nations, including Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands have already frozen their aid to the new government and more may follow. Aid from the EU and its 25 member nations averages $615 million per year, about half of which has been suspended. The EU decision to freeze payments affects an immediate instalment of $36.5 million, compounding an already dire financial situation for the Palestinian government. Canada, Norway and other non-EU member nations have also cancelled funding."

The US secretary of state explained why: "Because the new Hamas-led Palestinian government has failed to accept the Quartet principles of non-violence, recognition of Israel and respect for previous agreements between the parties, the US is suspending assistance to the Palestinian government's Cabinet and ministries."

No similar pressure has been put on the Israelis, whose attitude to the Palestinians is reflected faithfully in the Hamas attitude to Israel. And while Israel is commended for not blasting the Palestinians in revenge for the latest suicide bombing, no one has remarked that the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv was preceded by the Israelis killing 15 Palestinians and wounding dozens more the previous weekend.

In a commentary printed in Cairo's Al Ahram, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Ismail Haniyeh, outlines what he says is the basis for comprehensive peace. It is worth quoting at some length:

"From time immemorial, Palestine was the peaceful homeland of native Muslims, Christians and Jews who lived together in peace and harmony, sharing a common history and heritage. In fact, it was only after Palestine was placed under the British mandate following World War I, and when the British colonialist authorities subsequently decided to illegally give Palestine, our ancestral homeland, to Zionism, that inter-communal and inter-religious harmony was disturbed.

"As result of that wanton injustice, we find ourselves today as prisoners in our own homeland, enslaved and tormented by an illegal and immoral occupier who is treating our people as children of a lesser God, or even as if we were animals.

"In fact, the criminal nature of this occupation transcends reality. The ugly scenes of murder, home demolitions, and humiliation to which our people are subjected on a daily basis and which people outside Palestine watch on their TV screens, are but a small part of what is really happening on the ground.

"Needless to say, the Israeli occupiers wouldn't be perpetrating their crimes against a helpless people whose only "crime" is its enduring yearning for freedom and justice were it not for the disgraceful apathy of the international community towards my people's plight. "Hence, I call on the international community to pressure the Israeli state to stop its systematic oppression and institutionalised persecution of my people."

Haniyeh says his people want peace and they believe peace is possible, but "for a just peace to materialise in Palestine, the world community must adopt an honest approach to this conflict. We say so because we are tired of the international community's hypocrisy and double standards in dealing with both parties to the conflict.

"Indeed, we would like to know why the UN has allowed Israel to repeatedly fly in the face of more than 100 UN resolutions aimed at ending the illegal occupation of my country? Are there two sets of international law, one for the weak and another for the strong?

"Is Israel above international law? Is Israel entitled to a special treatment by the international community whereby it can kill our children with impunity, steal our land with impunity, and expel us to the four corners of the world with impunity?"

Prime Minister Haniyeh concludes with a simple appeal for justice:

"It is time that all men and women of conscience and rectitude speak up in support of justice for the Palestinians. We have suffered too much, and it is time that we are allowed to reclaim our usurped freedom and dignity. We are not demanding the impossible. We only challenge the world community to be faithful to the UN Charter and international conventions that prohibit the acquisition of land by force."

In a world whose agenda is set by an increasingly corrupt and self-serving media, public opinion on the side of justice will never be able to have any effect if it continues to be systematically denied the truth. If the world does not know of the injustices of Palestine or Haiti, we can never be moved to do anything to redress the prevailing wickedness. We cannot oppose evil if we do not know that it exists.

Bird Flu

Egypt is in the throes of a bird flu epidemic. Apparently, the Egyptian poultry industry has been destroyed but backyard rearing of chickens is making the pandemic impossible to control. Galal Nassar, writing in Al Ahram, says an unpublished study suggests that "the avian flu virus is now endemic in Egypt and will remain so for years because of the bungling of health authorities at every step of the way".

It is suspected that the virus entered Egypt by the illegal importation of infected birds, which implies, according to Nassar "on top of gross negligence, gross corruption motivated by a greed so voracious that it had no compunction at letting the interest of immediate gain override the dangers to which it was exposing society".

Nassar points out that the Egyptian pandemic has occurred despite sensible precautions taken early on; a state of emergency had been declared, there was wholesale slaughter of industrial poultry, but little attention was paid to backyard poultry rearing or to the possibility that unscrupulous people might import infected poultry into the country. So, despite enormous early sacrifice, Egypt is again threatened by a pandemic to which the government's response is to blame the backyard chicken rearers.

It appears that Egypt is increasingly likely to be gripped by panic and confusion unless the government begins to take serious, organised action to find and destroy the sources of infection, because the longer the virus is allowed to survive and spread is the more likely that the disease will mutate, make the jump and begin to spread from human to human, instead of from birds to humans. At that point, there will not be much that anyone can do.

In Jamaica, we need to realise that if bird flu becomes endemic here, as it has in Egypt, despite the fact that only a few people have died, it will mean the end of the tourism industry and wholesale unemployment. At that point we will have not only a public health emergency but a public security emergency. Before we are very much older we need to begin, and urgently, to devise a food security programme, diverting some of the millions we are spending on highways to nowhere to importing and planting food.

We really need to begin turning some of our sugar land over to peas and beans, to begin programmes to promote backyard gardening and to develop new strategies to guarantee reliable supplies of protein foods for the population. I believe it would make sense for us to begin to convert some of the enormous craters left by bauxite mining into fish ponds. It may make sense right now to forbid bauxite companies to mine out all the bauxite and instead to leave a lining of bauxite clay in the ground so that we can seal the ponds without too much expense.

It may also make sense to begin developing cottage industries around these ponds for the salting/pickling of freshwater fish, because if the pandemic really gets a grip even our electricity supplies will be in danger. We may not be able to import the oil to drive the generators to provide power for refrigerators and freezers. We need to begin a completely new look at our survival techniques and a completely new understanding of what it means to be civilised.

We can be certain of only one thing: we have no idea how desperate our situation may become. But even if it does not become desperate we need to begin to understand the meaning of sustainable development and to prepare for future threats.

The lives we save may be our own.