Q.3 Who is the most independent?
A. He who practiseth contentment.

Q.4 Who is the most needy?
A. He who practiseth it not.

But, who gets the ‘wise’ tag in our clusters? : One, who is able to please everyone by being circumspect, discreet, diplomatic and tactful. Few lies, white or black are fine as long as they don’t hurt. Sinning?

What about intelligent? If you have the ability to settle well in life, have been proactive in extracting the best of the opportunities and are always anxious for more, God you have the brains.

The concept of ‘independent’ is mostly financial. Not by what you don’t have, but how much you have hoarded and can flaunt with pride. The more you ‘need’ it, more ‘independent’ you will be.

Amusing as it may sound, Farid and the modern man, both have answers to the same questions. While the former is looking for accomplishment of the spirit, the latter is all for body.

What you ache for, is also absolutely your choice.

Making that choice,
Manjit

⁽⁰⁾

"But you took it out on me!" the man insisted.

Siegel, a loving and sensitive person, saw the truth in this and changed his behavior. Years later, he read a line of poetry by Rumi: Your criticism polishes my mirror. "When I heard that," Siegel exclaimed, "it was like 'Oh, thank you! Now I know why they're all trying to make me better. It isn't that I'm a terrible person. They're trying to help me!"

And so it is for each of us, as the people in our lives hold up reflective mirrors enabling us to see who we really are. The problem is, as Bernie Siegel pointed out, most of us don't take kindly to criticism. The self-defensive ego, a hero in its own mind, typically rejects criticism and stirs up negative emotions that close our minds to truths which could be larger than our own. At other times the ego, in disarray, absorbs undue or untrue criticism that becomes a less-than-useful way of relating to life.

What, then, is a body to do?

Science and spirit tell us that the body is to sit still and relax when the mind is confused. The mind quiets itself and consciousness listens for the still, small voice of the soul. We draw from this deeper well of knowing to get clear on the truth of a person or situation, because the only cure for ego’s well-meaning grip on our perceptions is disarmament through meditation, positive thinking and wholeness affirmations. These create in us the calm, peaceful mind of transcendence, in which we are attached to nothing of the ego and only to the mind of the soul. It is this higher mind which sees clearly by staying open and receptive to wise, loving guidance of every sort.

I've been listening to a wonderful discussion of how emotion influences consciousness, on a CD set, "Destructive Emotions," by author Daniel Goleman. It's a detailed report on a Mind and Life Institute gathering in which the Dalai Lama of Tibet met with some of the world's foremost researchers on the effects of and antidotes to our destructive emotions (a staggering 84,000 of which have been catalogued by Buddhist philosophy). Scientists are confirming that negative emotions like anger, fear and depression alter physical structures in our brains so that we are quite literally unable to know the difference between fact and fiction: e.g., we get so mad and filled with aversion that we "see red" or "can't see straight."

Conversely, love really is blind to the truth about our objects of attraction and affection. Somewhere between the eyes and ears, the brain dumps this undesirable information, I suspect because the appreciative, energized heart, according to The HeartMath Institute (heartmath.org), emits a vibration that is 60 times stronger (within the body) than the power of our brain waves!
What a wonderful challenge and how critical it becomes for us to master even our most subtle emotions and moods, in order for our thinking mind and five senses to accurately perceive and interpret information. Otherwise, we live in emotional delusion and reality distortion. So we have a choice between truth or fiction. If we choose to see truth we must accept that this is not easy to do, yet work toward it by mastering our thoughts and feelings in the hope of a consensus reality that will lead us and our world to peace.

I am reminded of the Snow White fairytale, in which the wicked queen demands, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall/Who's the fairest of us all?"and a sepulchral voice intones, "Snow White." This response so infuriates the queen's obsessive vanity that she dresses as a ragged beggar to give a poison apple to Snow White.

What if, instead, the queen had searched in her mirror for the perfect, radiant beauty of her soul? If, within the mind of her soul, she'd heard the voice of an inner critic, she could have allowed her higher self to remind her that we are all souls on a journey, none better and none less than another.

I see us living happily ever after in this adventure called life. Each step of our soul journey rids us of negative emotions like self-blame, guilt and shame, the worst distorters of all, so that eventually we love, honor and respect ourselves; attune to the still, small voice of the soul; and shift to the perspective of love. Through these eyes we see every person and event as a teacher and readily discern what is true and what is not. We are no longer pushed by pain, but pulled by vision.

When our mirrors grow cloudy, it is easy to polish them. We bring into our minds our joyful memories of love, and love carries us into Spirit's realm of transcendence. Ego and its hazy illusions vanish because we now see in a new and better way. Through these eyes, on a clear day, we can see into forever.

About Judith: Judith Pennington is a writer and teacher of consciousness development and the step-by-step path to enlightened mastery. She is the author of a critically acclaimed book, "The Voice of the Soul," and presents workshops across the country. Visit her website, www.eaglelife.com, to check for an event near you, sign up for her free e-newsletter and read articles on how to attain peace, joy and prosperity.

Copyright © 2005 Judith Pennington

⁽⁰⁾

The story seems mundane enough at first. Girl loves longstanding male bestfriend, but subsumes her love when it becomes clear that her female best friend is also interested in the same boy. Kathy’s narrative is clean and matter of fact, full of the detail of day to day school day memories.

The story of love lost and regained which drives the narrative forward is one which has been played out in love songs (like the fictional “Never Let Me Go” song which Kathy takes to) for as long as love songs have been written. But this is no ordinary coming of age story. Nor is it really about a love story, although the whole concept of love, and artistic power is one which sets off the sinister underlying elements of the story. It takes about 70 pages or so of hints before the reader is made aware that neither Kathy, nor her love interest Tommy or best friend Ruth are ‘like us’ -- usual characters in the sense that the realistic matter-of-fact guise of this novel might indicate. What the reader finally becomes aware of, more or less concurrent with the narrator, is that the characters are clones, ‘created’ rather than born, solely for the sake of providing replacement parts for ‘humans,’ a ‘species’ to which these people clearly do not belong.

And yet, of course they are exactly like us. They hunger, desire, are moved by beauty and feel pain in exactly the same way. And of course however they may have come into being, they have all the same neuro-linguistic perceptions as anyone might. Somehow, and somewhere, one imagines a kind of parental set – the persons, scientists or whatever who have created them, and who has the responsibility for their existence. These missing characters form part of the novel’s setting – the backstory and backdrop which is never revealed.

The gods which created Kathy, Tommy and Ruth are missing from the novel, along with any kind of reference for morality. Not quite missing however are those people after whom the clones are created—the “possibles” -- and there is a kind of touching nostalgia of the sort that an adopted person might feel for his real but utterly inaccessible parents among the characters for their possible. In his usual delicate and understated way, Ishiguro creates an extraordinary tension between the many dichotomies in the setting of this story that begins to take priority over the love story as the novel moves forward. The first point of climax occurs when Kathy sees the head carer of Hailsham, “Madame,” crying in her doorway after witnessing her dancing with her pillow to an old tune, the “Never Let Me Go” of the title:

I froze in shock. Then within a second or two, I began to feel a new kind of alarm, because I could see there was something strange about the situation. The door was almost half open – it was a sort of rule we couldn’t close dorm doors except for when we were sleeping – by Madame hadn’t nearly come up to the threshold. She was out in the corridor, standing very still, her head angled to one side to give her a view of what I was doing inside. And the odd thing was she was crying. It might even have been one of her sobs that had come through the song to jerk me out of my dream. (71)

For the reader, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy are simply characters, and it is Ishiguro’s skill as a writer that the dichotomy between their obvious humanness and the non-human nature of their roles begins to sit uncomfortably at the back of the reader’s head. The three characters’ growing self-awareness and sense of being different coupled with the learned inevitably of that difference becomes poignant when Ruth goes in search of her ‘possible.’

It is the closest any of them can get to their origins and so it is a powerful moment of loss and longing when the group of students suddenly sense the impossibility of ever striving to live the kind of lives they are longing for:

All the time, we could hear Ruth’s possible and the silver-haired lady talking on and on. They weren’t especially loud, but in that place, their voices seemed to fill the entire space. They were discussing some man they both knew, how he didn’t have a clue with his children. And as we kept listening to them, stealing the odd glance in their direction, bit by bit, something started to change. It did for me, and I could tell it was happening for the others.(160)

The philosophical questions around the ethics of this world, or the terrible use of what are clearly people in this way is hardly raised, with the very brief exception of a last ditch visit made by Kathy and Tommy, in an attempt to get ‘out of’ the donor program – based on a rumour circulated among the donors that anyone who demonstrated ‘true love’ might get let off. The lovers made their pilgrimage, and instead found some semblance of the horrible truth about their existence:

Suddenly there were all these new possibilities laid before us, all these ways to cure so many previously incurable conditions. This was what the world noticed the most, wanted the most. And for a long time, people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum.(257)

But however present the moral question is in this story, it is never directly raised, and Ishiguro resists the urge to make it obvious. If these people are artistic and capable of love, is their tragedy any greater? If they don’t mind their role, is it any less horrible? It’s impossible for the reader to take anything other than the position of horrified spectator in this strange world, and the more you think about it, the broader the implications of the questions raised.

Because in many ways, this isn’t really a distopia about the horrors of organ donation, although there is a certain degree of discomfort at the notion of raising a species, or even animals, for such a utilitarian purposes. But of course the whole issue of technological progress and morality is one which is upon us now, when even faces can be transplanted, and when machines capable of thinking are just around the corner. The morality in this novel is pretty clear, but there are also hints that the book may be showing us more the similarities rather than the differences in the lives of these characters and those of the readers. After all, we are all going to die after a relatively short life of utilitarian work on behalf of someone else, and while we may have the consolations of family which the characters in Never Let Me Go don’t, the novel makes our own exertions on the hamster wheel seem almost as futile as Kathy’s. It’s a chilling notion that makes you want to go berserk just like Tommy:

‘I was thinking,’ I said, ‘about back then, at Hailsham, when you used to go bonkers like that, and we couldn’t understand it. We couldn’t understand how you could ever get like that. And I was just having this idea, just a thought really. I was thinking maybe the reason you used to get like that was because at some level you always knew” (270)

This is a powerful, expertly written novel which reads easily even as it leaves the reader deeply disturbed. The unanswered questions it raises about what it means to be a human, about the nature of life, and about morality that will resonate with the reader beyond the pages of the book.

Never Let Me Go
By Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber & Faber
263pp, May 2006, $22.95

Originally published in http://www.compulsivereader.com/html. Reproduced here with permission.

⁽⁰⁾

Thwarted, I sat still
And . . . I felt it and knew,
Like all numinous things, it is invisible.
I am centered.

Mirror
Clean,
Clear,
Hazy,
Watery,
Like me, like you.

So true,
So false,
Deep, distorted,
Beautiful, Ugly,
Fragile,
Like life, DITTO.

Manjit Handa, PhD teaches Creative Writing in the Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University, Canada.

⁽⁰⁾

When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
Gibran, The Prophet

Sing and hear only of Him; engrave Him in your heart.
So banish sorrow and suffering, and make bliss your abode.
The guru’s word is the sound of sounds, and the Vedas too.
The lord abides in his words.
Guru Granth Sahib

Relationship is a mirror in which the self and all its activities can be seen; and it is only when the ways of self are understood in the reactions of relationships that is there is creative release from the self.
J. Krishnamurti

⁽⁰⁾

2. Blowzy
a) A solid support
b) A blindfold
c) Disheveled in appearance
d) None of the above

3. Chino
a) A tough twilled cotton cloth
b) An animal
c) Related to China
d) None of the above

4. Delimit
a) To set free
b) To demarcate
c) Conveying away
d) None of the above

5. Electric Eye
a) Photocell
b) A kind of sensor
c) A kind of shiny metal
d) A laser mirror

6. Hemophobia
a) Fear of fellow human beings
b) A sort of paranoia
c) Abnormal fear of blood
d) None of the above

7. Magniloquent
a) To shout
b) Spoken in a grand style
c) Silent
d) Bear howl

8. Numismatic
a) Related to coins
b) Related to stamps
c) Related to ancient sites
d) None of the above

9. Parody
a) A humorous imitation of a serious work
b) Related to trees
c) Human intervention
d) None of the above

10. Yin (Chinese)
a) Feminine
b) Masculine
c) Two-faced
d) Both a & c

Answers
1. (c) 2. (c) 3. (a) 4. (b) 5 (a) 6 (c) 7 (b) 8 (a) 9. (a) 10 (a)

Your Score
8-10 Excellent
5-7 Good
1-4 Need improvement

⁽⁰⁾

Recently, my foundation conducted a focus group about global warming to see where people are at in their understanding of this complex and challenging problem. The results? Let's just say they were disconcerting, to say the least.

Simply put, most people don't have a clue. The majority felt that global warming was a very important problem and they were quite concerned about it. But when pressed as to why it was a problem or what caused the problem, all heck broke loose.

Apparently, according to the average Joe, global warming is happening because we've created a hole in the ozone layer, allowing the sun's rays to enter the atmosphere and heat up the earth - or something like that. The cause of the problem is cars, or airplanes, or aerosol cans. No one really knows for sure.

This is really quite remarkable. I would have thought that such confused understandings of the issue would have been commonplace five or six years ago, but with global warming being in newspapers on practically a daily basis this spring, on the front cover of magazines, in theatres (An Inconvenient Truth), and a hot political issue as well, surely people would get it by now.
Apparently I was wrong. People don't get it. This is a big problem, because if people don't get it, then they don't really care, so politicians and CEOs don't really care, and status quo rules the day. And blindly we march into the sunset.

But while science magazines are all talking about carbon sequestration and climate-forcing mechanisms, the average person is still trying to decipher the nature of the problem itself. True, few citizens need to understand the complicated nuances of atmospheric science or the various mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol, but people cannot care about things they do not understand. If our leaders are to take the issue seriously, the public must have at least a basic understanding of it.

So, to clarify - the ozone layer is a part of the atmosphere way up high that helps shield the earth from the sun's most harmful rays. A couple of decades ago, scientists realized that some of the chemicals we were using in our industries and homes were finding their way into the upper atmosphere, reacting with the ozone and destroying it. Scientists were concerned that if this continued, it would thin the vital protective layer, leading to increased skin cancers and crop damage. They sounded the alarm bell, the international community responded with the Montreal Protocol to phase out ozone-depleting substances, and today the ozone layer is gradually healing itself.

Global warming is a quite different phenomenon. Again, it's a human-made problem, but this time it's due to the heat-trapping gases we are putting into the atmosphere from our industries, cars and homes. These gases act like a blanket, keeping more heat near the earth's surface. More heat also means more energy in the atmosphere, which means more frequent or severe extreme weather events like droughts, storms and floods.

With each new piece of research, the expected effects of global warming become clearer, more urgent and more disturbing. Scientists say this will be one of the biggest challenges humanity will face this century. Right now we are not tackling the issue fast enough or direct enough to escape the most severe consequence.

So if you understand what global warming is, and what it isn't, please tell your friends. Please speak up and help ensure that we don't continue to grope blindly into the future, searching in the darkness for a light switch. Because at this rate, by the time we finally reach it, it may no longer work.

Originally published on August 18, 2006

Dr. David Takayoshi Suzuki is distinguished Canadian geneticist who has attained prominence as a science broadcaster and an environmental activist. He is also a co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

⁽⁰⁾

If you think this aphorism exaggerates the importance of food, consider that today almost 4 billion people worldwide depend on the agricultural sector for their livelihood. Food is destiny, all right; every decision we make about food has personal and global repercussions. By now it is generally conceded that the food we eat could actually be making us sick, but we still haven't acknowledged the full consequences--environmental, political, cultural, social and ethical--of our national diet.

These consequences include soil depletion, water and air pollution, the loss of family farms and rural communities, and even global warming. (Inconveniently, Al Gore's otherwise invaluable documentary An Inconvenient Truth has disappointingly little to say about how industrial food contributes to climate change.) When we pledge our dietary allegiance to a fast-food nation, there are also grave consequences to the health of our civil society and our national character. When we eat fast-food meals alone in our cars, we swallow the values and assumptions of the corporations that manufacture them.

According to these values, eating is no more important than fueling up, and should be done quickly and anonymously. Since food will always be cheap, and resources abundant, it's OK to waste. Feedlot beef, french fries and Coke are actually good for you. It doesn't matter where food comes from, or how fresh it is, because standardized consistency is more important than diversified quality. Finally, hard work--work that requires concentration, application and honesty, such as cooking for your family--is seen as drudgery, of no commercial value and to be avoided at all costs. There are more important things to do.

It's no wonder our national attention span is so short: We get hammered with the message that everything in our lives should be fast, cheap and easy--especially food. So conditioned are we to believe that food should be almost free that even the rich, who pay a tinier fraction of their incomes for food than has ever been paid before in human history, grumble at the price of an organic peach--a peach grown for flavor and picked, perfectly ripe, by a local farmer who is taking care of the land and paying his workers a fair wage! And yet, as the writer and farmer David Mas Masumoto recently pointed out, pound for pound, peaches that good still cost less than Twinkies.

When we claim that eating well is an elitist preoccupation, we create a smokescreen that obscures the fundamental role our food decisions have in shaping the world. The reason that eating well in this country costs more than eating poorly is that we have a set of agricultural policies that subsidize fast food and make fresh, wholesome foods, which receive no government support, seem expensive. Organic foods seem elitist only because industrial food is artificially cheap, with its real costs being charged to the public purse, the public health and the environment.

The contributors to this forum have been asked to name just one thing that could be done to fix the food system. What they propose are solutions that arise out of what I think of as "slow food values," which run counter to the assumptions of fast-food marketing. To me, these are the values of the family meal, which teaches us, among other things, that the pleasures of the table are a social as well as a private good. At the table we learn moderation, conversation, tolerance, generosity and conviviality; these are civic virtues.

The pleasures of the table also beget responsibilities--to one another, to the animals we eat, to the land and to the people who work it. It follows that food that is healthy in every way will cost us more, in time and money, than we pay now. But when we have learned what the real costs of food are, and relearned the real rewards of eating, we will have laid a foundation for not just a healthier food system but a healthier twenty-first-century democracy.

Reprinted with permission from the September 11, 2006 issue of The Nation magazine. For subscription information, call 1-800-333-8536.
Portions of each week’s Nation magazine can be accessed at http://
www.thenation.com.

⁽⁰⁾

His latest is Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. In May, he traveled to Beirut, where he met, among others, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. He joins us on the phone from Masachusetts. We welcome you to Democracy Now!

NOAM CHOMSKY: Hi, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Well, can you talk about what is happening now, both in Lebanon and Gaza?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, of course, I have no inside information, other than what's available to you and listeners. What's happening in Gaza, to start with that -- well, basically the current stage of what's going on -- there's a lot more -- begins with the Hamas election, back the end of January. Israel and the United States at once announced that they were going to punish the people of Palestine for voting the wrong way in a free election. And the punishment has been severe.

At the same time, it's partly in Gaza, and sort of hidden in a way, but even more extreme in the West Bank, where Olmert announced his annexation program, what’s euphemistically called “convergence” and described here often as a “withdrawal,” but in fact it’s a formalization of the program of annexing the valuable lands, most of the resources, including water, of the West Bank and cantonizing the rest and imprisoning it, since he also announced that Israel would take over the Jordan Valley. Well, that proceeds without extreme violence or nothing much said about it.

Gaza, itself, the latest phase, began on June 24. It was when Israel abducted two Gaza civilians, a doctor and his brother. We don't know their names. You don’t know the names of victims. They were taken to Israel, presumably, and nobody knows their fate. The next day, something happened, which we do know about, a lot. Militants in Gaza, probably Islamic Jihad, abducted an Israeli soldier across the border. That’s Corporal Gilad Shalit. And that's well known; first abduction is not. Then followed the escalation of Israeli attacks on Gaza, which I don’t have to repeat. It’s reported on adequately.

The next stage was Hezbollah's abduction of two Israeli soldiers, they say on the border. Their official reason for this is that they are aiming for prisoner release. There are a few, nobody knows how many. Officially, there are three Lebanese prisoners in Israel. There's allegedly a couple hundred people missing. Who knows where they are?

But the real reason, I think it's generally agreed by analysts, is that -- I’ll read from the Financial Times, which happens to be right in front of me. “The timing and scale of its attack suggest it was partly intended to reduce the pressure on Palestinians by forcing Israel to fight on two fronts simultaneously.” David Hearst, who knows this area well, describes it, I think this morning, as a display of solidarity with suffering people, the clinching impulse.

It's a very -- mind you -- very irresponsible act. It subjects Lebanese to possible -- certainly to plenty of terror and possible extreme disaster. Whether it can achieve any result, either in the secondary question of freeing prisoners or the primary question of some form of solidarity with the people of Gaza, I hope so, but I wouldn't rank the probabilities very high.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Noam Chomsky, in the commercial press here the last day, a lot of the focus has been pointing toward Iran and Syria as basically the ones engineering much of what's going on now in terms of the upsurge of fighting in Lebanon. Your thoughts on these analyses that seem to sort of downplay the actual resistance movement going on there and trying to reduce this once again to pointing toward Iran?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the fact is that we have no information about that, and I doubt very much that the people who are writing it have any information. And frankly, I doubt that U.S. intelligence has any information. It's certainly plausible. I mean, there's no doubt that there are connections, probably strong connections, between Hezbollah and Syria and Iran, but whether those connections were instrumental in motivating these latest actions, I don't think we have the slightest idea. You can guess anything you’d like. It's a possibility. In fact, even a probability. But on the other hand, there's every reason to believe that Hezbollah has its own motivations, maybe the ones that Hearst and the Financial Times and others are pointing to. That seems plausible, too. Much more plausible, in fact.

AMY GOODMAN: There was even some reports yesterday that said that Hezbollah might try to send the Israeli soldiers that it had captured to Iran.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Israel actually claims that it has concrete evidence that that's what was going to happen. That's why it's attempting to blockade both the sea and bomb the airport.

NOAM CHOMSKY: They are claiming that. That's true. But I repeat, we don't have any evidence. Claims by a state that's carrying out the military attacks don't really amount to very much, in terms of credibility. If they have evidence, it would be interesting to see it. And in fact, it might happen. Even if it does happen, it won't prove much. If Hezbollah, wherever they have the prisoners, the soldiers, if they decide that they can't keep them in Lebanon because of the scale of Israeli attacks, they might send them somewhere else. I’m skeptical that Syria or Iran would accept them at this point, or even if they can get them there, but they might want to.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky , we have to break. When we come back, we'll ask you about the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations comments about Lebanon. We'll also be joined by Mouin Rabbani, speaking to us from Jerusalem, Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group. Then Ron Suskind joins us, author of The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11. Stay with us.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest on the phone is Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His latest book is Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. I wanted to ask you about the comment of the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. He defended Israel's actions as a justified response. This is Dan Gillerman.

DAN GILLERMAN: As we sit here during these very difficult days, I urge you and I urge my colleagues to ask yourselves this question: What would do you if your countries found themselves under such attacks, if your neighbors infiltrated your borders to kidnap your people, and if hundreds of rockets were launched at your towns and villages? Would you just sit back and take it, or would you do exactly what Israel is doing at this very minute?

AMY GOODMAN: That was Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations. Noam Chomsky, your response?

NOAM CHOMSKY: He was referring to Lebanon, rather than Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: He was.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah. Well, he's correct that hundreds of rockets have been fired, and naturally that has to be stopped. But he didn't mention, or maybe at least in this comment, that the rockets were fired after the heavy Israeli attacks against Lebanon, which killed -- well, latest reports, maybe 60 or so people and destroyed a lot of infrastructure. As always, things have precedence, and you have to decide which was the inciting event. In my view, the inciting event in the present case, events, are those that I mentioned -- the constant intense repression; plenty of abductions; plenty of atrocities in Gaza; the steady takeover of the West Bank, which, in effect, if it continues, is just the murder of a nation, the end of Palestine; the abduction on June 24 of the two Gaza civilians; and then the reaction to the abduction of Corporal Shalit. And there's a difference, incidentally, between abduction of civilians and abduction of soldiers. Even international humanitarian law makes that distinction.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what that distinction is?

NOAM CHOMSKY: If there's a conflict going on, aside physical war, not in a military conflict going on, abduction -- if soldiers are captured, they are to be treated humanely. But it is not a crime at the level of capture of civilians and bringing them across the border into your own country. That's a serious crime. And that's the one that's not reported. And, in fact, remember that -- I mean, I don’t have to tell you that there are constant attacks going on in Gaza, which is basically a prison, huge prison, under constant attack all the time: economic strangulation, military attack, assassinations, and so on. In comparison with that, abduction of a soldier, whatever one thinks about it, doesn't rank high in the scale of atrocities.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We're also joined on the line by Mouin Rabbani, a senior Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group and a contributing editor of Middle East Report. He joins us on the line from Jerusalem. Welcome to Democracy Now!

MOUIN RABBANI: Hi.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Could you tell us your perspective on this latest escalation of the conflict there and the possibility that Israel is going to be mired once again in war in Lebanon?

MOUIN RABBANI: Well, it's difficult to say. I couldn't hear Professor Chomsky's comments. I could just make out every sixth word. But I think that Israel is now basically, if you will, trying to rewrite the rules of the game and set new terms for its adversaries, basically saying, you know, that no attacks of any sort on Israeli forces or otherwise will be permitted, and any such attack will invite a severe response that basically puts the entire civilian infrastructure of the entire country or territory from which that attack emanates at risk. Judging by what we've seen so far, it more or less enjoys tacit to explicit international sanction. And I think the possibilities that this conflict could further expand into a regional one, perhaps involving Syria, is at this point quite real.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the UN resolution, a vote in the draft resolution, 10-to-1, on Gaza with the U.S. voting no and for countries abstaining -- Britain, Denmark, Peru and Slovakia?

MOUIN RABBANI: Well, I think it would have been news if that resolution had actually passed. I think, you know, for the last decade, if not for much longer, it’s basically become a reality in the United Nations that it's an organization incapable of discharging any of its duties or responsibilities towards maintaining or restoring peace and security in the Middle East, primarily because of the U.S. power of veto on the Security Council. And I think we've now reached the point where even a rhetorical condemnation of Israeli action, such as we’ve seen in Gaza over the past several weeks, even a rhetorical condemnation without practical consequence has become largely unthinkable, again, primarily because of the U.S. veto within the Security Council.

AMY GOODMAN: Mouin, what do you think is going to happen right now, both in Gaza and in Lebanon?

MOUIN RABBANI: Well, I think it's probably going to get significantly worse. I mean, in Lebanon, it seems to be a case where Hezbollah has a more restricted agenda of compelling Israel to conduct prisoner exchange, whereas Israel has a broader agenda of seeking to compel the disarmament of Hezbollah or at least to push it back several dozen kilometers from the Israeli-Lebanese border. You know, the Israeli and Hezbollah perspectives on this are entirely incompatible, and that means that this conflict is probably going to continue escalating, until some kind of mediation begins.

In Gaza, it’s somewhat different. I think there Hamas has a broader agenda, of which effecting a prisoner exchange with Israel is only one, and I would argue, even a secondary part. I think there Hamas's main objective is to compel Israel to accept a mutual cessation of hostilities, Israeli-Palestinian, and I think, even more important, of ensuring their right to govern. And I think, at least as far as the Israeli-Palestinian part of this is concerned, Hamas's main objective has been to send a very clear message, not only to Israel, but to all its adversaries, whether Israeli, Palestinian or foreign, to remind the world that political integration and democratic politics for them are an experiment, that they have alternatives, and if they're not allowed to exercise their democratic mandate, that they will not hesitate, if necessary, to exercise those alternatives.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Noam Chomsky, right now industrial world leaders gathered in St. Petersburg for the G8 meeting. What role does the U.S. have in this?

NOAM CHOMSKY: In the G8 meeting?

AMY GOODMAN: No. What role -- they're just gathered together -- in this, certainly the issue of Lebanon, Gaza, the Middle East is going to dominate that discussion. But how significant is the U.S. in this?

NOAM CHOMSKY: I think it will probably be very much like the UN resolution that you mentioned, which is -- I’m sorry, I couldn't hear what Mouin Rabbani was saying. But the UN resolution was -- the veto of the UN resolution is standard. That goes back decades. The U.S. has virtually alone been blocking the possibility of diplomatic settlement, censure of Israeli crimes and atrocities. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the UN vetoed several resolutions right away, calling for an end to the fighting and so on, and that was a hideous invasion. And this continues through every administration. So I presume it will continue at the G8 meetings.

The United States regards Israel as virtually a militarized offshoot, and it protects it from criticism or actions and supports passively and, in fact, overtly supports its expansion, its attacks on Palestinians, its progressive takeover of what remains of Palestinian territory, and its acts to, well, actually realize a comment that Moshe Dayan made back in the early ’70s when he was responsible for the Occupied Territories. He said to his cabinet colleagues that we should tell the Palestinians that we have no solution for you, that you will live like dogs, and whoever will leave will leave, and we'll see where that leads. That's basically the policy. And I presume the U.S. will continue to advance that policy in one or another fashion.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky , I want to thank you for being with us. His latest book is Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. And Mouin Rabbani, senior Middle East analyst with the International Crisis Group, joining us from Jerusalem. Thank you both.

Reprinted with permission from Democracy Now and Chomski.info, as broadcast on July 13, 2006 in a documentary entitled "Recycling Fear: The New American Enemy."

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