This week the student government of the University of Oregon unanimously approved a resolution condemning the potentiality of a nuclear-armed Iran. According to the student publication 'The Daily Emerald' the resolution was penned by a working group composed of members of QuackPAC, the campus arm of AIPAC, which is the most powerful arm of the Israel Lobby at the national level.
What the decision lacked in eloquence or acumen was more than made up for in bluster and braggadocio. Apparently enjoying fluent command of Farsi, the lingua franca of Iran, Senator Ben Bowman assured 'The Daily Emerald' that “Iran is a country that has explicitly stated that Israel is a country that shouldn’t exist.” Assuming an air of seriousness appropriate for discussing matters of such import, a member of the drafting committee added that “They also don’t like America very much." By these and similarly incisive geopolitical explanations the student government fell hook, line, and sinker for the bait, swallowing it whole.
If the reader is at this point grasping frantically for relevance, do not fear. The hardline Israel lobbyists who drafted the resolution explained that “We’re trying to bring it to our community and hoping that other
campuses will pick this up as well...Ideally the UO would have this passed and we could take this to the
State Senate and have it passed there too.” To lay it out in plain terms, the Israel Lobby is launching an astroturf campaign set on hijacking student institutions to press their own narrow and thoroughly repugnant agenda, eventually at the national level.
This decision is a curious one, making plain the fact that AIPAC and its quislings will do anything to push its morally indefensible line, even and especially at the cost of democracy in America and Israel. That the student senators of the University of Oregon fell for the bait is unnerving to say the least. Either our elected student officials are painfully ignorant of the political implications of this decision -- something that politicians are presumably aware of, crooked beyond description, or -- and this very well may be the case -- truly scared of the Lobby's power.
'Why worry about some insignificant resolution,' you may be asking. In actuality, the resolution is not just 'some' resolution but momentous in both its content and implications.
The first implication is fairly evident: the Lobby is asserting a personal agenda that is at odds with the views of most Oregon students, plus one that is entirely inappropriate to push in the forum of campus government. Passing it, in other words, was contradictory to the spirit of democratic process. What is all the more disturbing is the manner in which this suspension of transparency and debate, two prerequisites of the democratic process, were carried out without a moment's hesitance or serious impediment. Instead, the student senate, either too credulous to perceive the perverse magnitude of their decision or too scared to question it, lent their signatures to the it unanimously.
Secondly, this miscarriage of policy shows that our student government is operating on a plane divorced from the daily realities of the average student. If the Lobby did not intimate the senators into adopting its own program then it is safe to say that our 'representatives' are not representing the concerns of Oregon students. While students are drowning up to their eyeballs in loans, the quality of education daily deteriorates and the palpable specter of privatization continues to loom like a foreboding storm-cloud, the senators -- our 'representatives' -- are concerning themselves with, wait for it...Iranian energy politics and U.S. foreign policy.
For anyone who cares about the Middle-East, or people for that matter, the significance of this resolution goes well beyond the bounds of student government and campus life. At heart, it signals an unqualified willingness to underwrite a rapacious foreign policy that has wreaked devastation across the globe.
Ever since the United States assisted Great Britain in toppling the democratically-elected Mossedegh government of Iran in the early 1950s, the U.S. has lost any simulacrum of impartiality or moral authority with which to 'arbitrate' matters concerning Iran. The use of American largesse to shore up the Shah's reign during the 1960s and 70s, a reign notorious for some of the worst human rights violations in recorded history, further soils these claims. And if one needs an event with which to crown this blood-soaked history (principally Iranian blood, of course), the decision to supply Saddam Hussein with chemical weapons with which to slaughter Iranians during the Saddam-initiated Iran-Iraq War surely qualifies for the prize.
If there is a single unifying theme that may be used to stitch together this history of maimed limbs, lost innocence, and deferred dreams, it is the American government's eagerness to underwrite this senseless pageant of human carnage and ruin. While the QuackPAC lobbyist's blustery assertion that “They also don’t like America very much," is certainly not true for most Iranians, it is completely understandable if the intentions of the U.S. government are eyed with suspicion by not a few.It is indeed remarkable how deep the affinity of the average Iranian to American culture and society remains, even in the wake of this great epic of human tragedy. After 9/11 there was probably not one country in the Middle East that mourned as deeply or had as emotive public vigils in solidarity with the victims as the Iranians. For if anyone knows about grief it is surely the Iranians.
Even so, the U.S. continues to kowtow to the Moloch that is the Israel Lobby, a lobbyist group that perennially seeks to buttress the most extreme right-wing currents in Israeli politics, in the process stifling the voices of a good many Israelis and trampling the prospects for a truly democratic Israel. This is an easy decision for American legislators since it prevents them from catching flak from the Lobby, thus protecting their chances for reelection and ingratiating them with those who oversee the Lobby's coffers.
Yet, the ease with which American policymakers defer to the Israel Lobby stems from more than the Lobby's own chutzpah, but reflects an important truth about the nature of superpower status. In all its foreign policy decisions, the Obama administration has shown itself to be cast in the same mold as Bush et al. With just as much self-conviction, searing ignorance and an easy willingness to use force, Obama has expanded and, in fact, created new wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Uganda and elsewhere.
When it comes to Iran he continues to unilaterally impose a draconian sanctions regimen that is in explicit contravention of international law. This indiscriminate form of collective punishment, if imposed by another country on the U.S., would be considered a suitable case for war -- as has been articulated by the U.S. Senate. Obama's bellicose assertion that 'all options are on the table' is just as incompatible with explicit norms of international law, illegally insinuating that the U.S. may launch a preventive war in order to preclude the potentiality of a nuclear-armed Iran.
The almost perfunctory way in which 'all options' are openly discussed discloses much about the United States' privileged position as global bully. Unlike every other country in the world where war is only an 'option' if attacked, the U.S. reserves the exclusive prerogative to launch a war whenever it feels its 'interests' are 'threatened,' two criteria liable to such broad interpretation that they literally allow the U.S. to get away with murder. Imagine the U.S., like a patrician lounging in his armchair thousands of miles away from the site of bloodshed and incomprehensible suffering, gets to coolly contemplate whichever 'option' is most convenient for the day. Like a schoolboy choosing from a menu of sumptuous ice-cream flavors, the one that sparks his fancy at the moment is calmly selected. The effects of the patrician's actions are unseen and unheard of -- that is, unless he feels that it is convenient for him glance over the day's newspaper.
Just as revealingly, the student government's decision to bestialize Iran betrays the hypocrisy of their political idealism and activism. While America tore Iraq asunder it remained silent. As U.S. soldiers are thrust into the senseless chaos of Afghanistan it remains silent. As the U.S. underwrites the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes and the wholesale repression of peaceable Palestinian grassroots movements, the student government remains silent. Only when the matter does not so evidently implicate our own society does the student government raise its pseudo-liberal conscience. All the more disturbing is that the University of Oregon, this supposed bastion of learning and progressive thought, is being goaded under the auspices of QuackPAK, and consequently AIPAC, to take the helm of a thoroughly immoral attack on Iranian culture and humanity.
For if a war with Iran is triggered because of this and like bullying it will be the Iranian people who suffer, and who have indeed been suffering at the hand of American caprice for over a half century.
Above all, these issues must be recognized for what they are: a moral
question. Neither Israel's gulag system for Palestinians, its
politicians' references to Sudanese refugees (fleeing genocide) as a
"cancer", or its use of terrorism in Iran (killing Iranian nuclear
scientists) are justifiable according to any terms compatible with basic
human decency. The U.S. is no better: it funds these despicable acts
when it is not itself partaking in or orchestrating them.
If the student government of the University of Oregon has any desire to salvage its respectability it must rescind this immoral, truly bizarre, and entirely inappropriate resolution. The resolution is simply not justifiable on any grounds. Just as importantly, our senators must realize their job is to work for the good of the students, not special interest groups whose program is wholly lacking in relevance, student support and, most of all, a moral compass.
I have long been ashamed to be an American. Now I am ashamed to be a Duck.
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