Staying On Subject

Bruised, derided, cursed, defiled,
she beheld her tender Child
All with scourges rent:

For the sins of His own nation,
saw Him hang in desolation,
Till His spirit forth He sent.

--Stabat Mater

studyholic,

Sorry it's taken me a little while to respond to your second comment. But maybe it's a good thing that some time has passed and there is more information about the statement we've been discussing. It has also given me a chance to think some more and talk some of this over with a couple of friends.

As far as the "My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel" statement goes, either

a) Cindy Sheehan didn't say it, or
b) she wants to distance herself from any such statement

"[T]hat doesn't even sound like me," she said to Anderson Cooper. It does not sound like her now, anyway, and I affirm what she is doing now. If she did say it, I think I would have advised her to distance herself from the statement a little differently, but she did solidly disown it. I have to agree with you when you say, "People can change and people make mistakes."

A friend of mine reminded me of a Jewish ethical principle that was very important to my father—dan b'kaf z'chut, judging others (and yourself) in the scale of merit.

Our Rabbis taught: A person should always regard himself as though he were half guilty and half meritorious. If one performs one good deed, happy is he for weighing himself down in the scale of merit. If one commits one transgression, woe to him for weighing himself down in the scale of guilt, for it is said, “But one sinner destroys much good” (Ecclesiastes 9.18). On account of a single sin which he commits much good is lost to him.
 
R. Eleazar son of R. Simeon said: “Because the world is judged by its majority, and an individual too is judged by the majority of deeds, good or bad, if he performs one good deed, happy is he for turning the scale both for himself and for the whole world on the side of merit; if one commits one transgression, woe to him for weighing himself and the whole world in the scale of guilt, for it is said, ‘But one sinner.’ – on account of the single sin which this man commits he and the whole world lose much good.' ” (Talmud, Kiddushin 40a)

In the end we are judged by the sum total of our actions, and right now Cindy Sheehan's message is unambiguous and morally compelling.

I think my friend DK is correct that currently the world sees Cindy Sheehan as a living Stabat Mater—making it rather difficult to think clearly about anything negative that might be attributed to her. It is therefore a good thing that we can look at the remark in question by itself, uncolored by any ideas of what Cindy may have meant by it.

So let's go back to the statement: "My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel." Speaking to you as a Jewish person who is opposed to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and who supports the rights of Israelis and Palestinians to political self-determination, I am saying the statement trades in—or, at the very least, invites—antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of US foreign policy.

Perhaps to support this claim, I should elaborate on the history of the antisemitic tract, Protocols of the Elders of Zion and link to current examples of the kind of thing I think the statement comes from and encourages more of. Perhaps you would want to debate whether assertions that the war in Iraq is a war for Israel are antisemitic. However, I do not think I need to debate the rights of others to criticize Israel. Asking me to do that inappropriately changes the subject.

Consider this scenario. It's December 2002. Trent Lott has recently spoken at the birthday and retirement party for Senator Strom Thurmond, saying, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." You bump into an African American friend who asks you if you've heard about the Lott statement and immediately starts cursing him out for being a racist.

In an effort to be fair minded you tell your friend, "Hey, Lott's entitled to criticize the American electorate. After all, it is true that Mississippi has a terrible economy and its schools are a mess. I think Lott just means that Thrumond's a Southerner who understands the problems of the South and is uniquely qualified to address them."

Your friend storms off, really pissed. To her, it doesn't matter what Thurmond may understand about the special needs of Mississippi or anywhere else in the South. To her any praise of Thrumond's agenda is praise of states' rights, segregation, Jim Crow. But if you didn't already know the history, you needed to have asked her why she thinks supporting Thurmond is inherently racist, above all else. If you'd asked that question, instead of launching into a defense of Lott's right, on principle, to be critical of the American electorate, your friend might have rattled off from memory the quote from Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign speeech:

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres into our swimming pools into our homes and into our churches.

I know the analogy isn't perfect. But I hope it makes the point.

(Special thanks to hf and to b.)

~
Painting: Mater Dolorosa by Spanish artist Luis de Morales (Public Domain, via Wikipedia).
Photo: Cindy Sheehan, Crawford, Texas (Lonestar Iconoclast)

Comments

[bitchphd]

I think that the point about the Stabat Mater is exactly spot-on.

[Cdn Looking South]

Cindy Sheehan's stance gets more interesting the deeper you look at her position. Parents who do not support the war and lose their children to it have a complicated grieving process to withstand. That the US government and ideology (personified by the President) exerted more influence on her son's decision to enlist than she is a lonely mourning to endure for a parent. We expect her to have conflicting notions rather than polished messages on point. The right-wing will use her dirty little contradictions to every advantage and sounding the ant-semiticism alarm is a very effective reactionary tactic. Which is why I come here to Hungry Blues for thoughtful reflection in a time when inconsolable mothers of the dead are provoking thought, discussion and action.

[Cdn Looking South]

P.S. Since we're talking about hymns, allow me to post the lyrics of Mourn & Organize, my own lament written within the traditon of music that Hungry Blues honors. Ms. Sheehan has certainly taken Joe Hill's words to heart.

MOURN & ORGANIZE
Are you blind to the people who march for our rights?
Are you deaf to the sound of our cries?
Are you haunted at all by a death in the night?
And we who mourn and organize
We Mourn and Organize

Votes can be taken and bills can be passed
You say it's a fair compromise
But everyday our future looks more like our past
So we mourn and organize
We Mourn and Organize

Did you sign the marching papers with blood as your ink?
Cross all of the T's, dot your I's
There's more to consider than you care to think
So we mourn and organize
We Mourn and Organize

We've watched as you've taken our children away
We've listened to all of your lies
We'll be here tomorrow as we were yesterday
To mourn and organize
We Mourn and Organize

written by Laurie Bell, Toronto, Canada
http://canadianlookingsouth.blogspot.com

[Brandon]

I definitely should consider the sensitivity of the feelings entangled.

[Brandon]

it seems that this is a rightwing tactic.

[Ben G.]

Hey Brandon. You are sometimes terse to a fault. Do you mean changing the subject when folks compain of antisemitism, racism, sexism, etc? I'm actually talking about how people on the left do it, too. Could you claify?

[studyholic here]

Hello Ben G.,

Thank you for your extremely insightful post. I too have been delayed with, well, "studying."

DK is right on--that is, DK is extremely correct--in characterizing Cindy as a media-symbol, as a Stabat Mater. The uncomfortable Christ-associations are apt in terrifically and painfully ironic ways that dovetail with the anti-Semitism of her comment, if she in fact made it (see further comments below).

Beginning your post with the lyric, with the liturgy, underscored this irony in a way that it seems an activist-poet like yourself knows intimately.

The rich discursive nature of your posts are different than other political blogs. I like the HuffingtonPost (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/) because of the length taken to express ideas in all their thorniness. It is quite partisan though, but not without true reason. I also adore http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/, a dual-blog authored by a well-known judge (Posner) and a Nobel prize winning sociologist and economist (Becker), and I like their blog-essays even though I often disagree with the manner in which they shrink many ideas into capitalist economics.

Thus, this is my way of thanking you for the depth and complexity of your response and for your continuing coverage of this issue.

Quick update, because hearing Cindy's actual words within her own context may be important:

Here's Sheehan on the truth about her comments about israel:

“I did not say that my son died for Israel. I have never said it, I don't think it, I don't believe it. It is just another lie, smear tactic from the right. It needs to die right now. It's not the truth. I stand by everything that I have said. But I will not stand by things that I haven't said. I am not anti-Semitic. I am just anti-killing. George Bush is responsible for killing so many people, but nobody scrutinizes anything he says, especially leading up to the war. Since there is nothing to smear me about with the truth, they have to tell lies. A former friend who is anti-Israel and wants to use the spotlight on me to push his anti-Semitism is telling everyone who is listening that I believe that Casey died for Israel and has gone so far as to apparently doctor an email from me. People have to know that he doesn't speak for me. ABC Nightline can't confirm his email is real and therefore any reporting on it is irresponsible. That is not my issue. That is not my message and anyone who knows me knows it doesn't sound like me.”

Also read the posts that context the quote above on her blog:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cindy-sheehan/camp-casey-day-12_b_5830.html

You are correct that the statement that Cindy made, if correct, invites charges of anti-Semitism and your socio-historical-personal context and examples enlighten me further.

On a philosophical level, I guess what pains me the most is the tremendous gap of understanding, spiritually and intellectually, between what the media presents to us--and I mean all factions of television, radio, etc--and the struggle, the error, the pain--the "essai," or trail as the French may say, and "essai" is French derivation of "essay"--that comes when we try to speak in an "unmediated" fashion (an impossibility, I know) with sustained life-long activist-reasoning.

Please forgive me if my rhetoric there was opaque. Graduate schools teach you to write that way. Let me distill this last statement to this question:

How can we speak in ways that demand careful listening and not the quick partisan fix of today's media?

We are, in fact, not cut-out, so-to-speak, on any one day as socio-politically perfect people. We evolve.

I'd like to think, Ben G., that we "come to consciousness" over and over again as we wrestle with issues and problems.

I guess what is so damn compelling about your blog is that it presents a rare record of one man who is coming to consciousness over and over again about civil rights both here and in the world.

How sad, therefore, that there are *few* forums in the political firestorm surrounding Cindy's stand where she can talk at length about her reasoning without her words being spun like Charlotte's web. How sad that there are few outlets within the media today where we can also all talk at length about the uncomfortable cultural criss-crossings that inform America's troubled relationship with the rest of the world, and the Middle East's intra-cultural politics.

We all, I submit, need Anthropological training.

While some encourage divisive and monolithic political positioning, blogs, in some respects, when well-written, help to fill this discursive void in today's partisan-rich media.

[Brandon]

Ah, well I was just observing-- I happened to take in a few right-of-center shows on television a few days back, and more than most did not fail to bring up the topic of Cindy Sheehan and antisemitism. My reasoning is that they have tried to make this a story to deflect from what she is there to do.

[Jack]

I am sorry, I don't buy into what she is selling. This is garbage:

A former friend who is anti-Israel and wants to use the spotlight on me to push his anti-Semitism is telling everyone who is listening that I believe that Casey died for Israel and has gone so far as to apparently doctor an email from me. People have to know that he doesn't speak for me. ABC Nightline can't confirm his email is real and therefore any reporting on it is irresponsible. That is not my issue. That is not my message and anyone who knows me knows it doesn't sound like me.”

Talk about convoluted and ridiculous. But let's say that it is the truth as ridiculous as it may be. Here is another piece of the puzzle that bothers me. Here is a link to the Crawford Peace House. As you can see it lists a number of grievances against Israel. I don't have a problem with criticism provided that it is balanced, but there is not a single thing questioning/condemning Palestinian terror.

Today I read a story and blogged about Hamas's admission to committing the majority of 400 terror attacks in Gaza during the past 5 years. That is only Gaza and doesn't take into account terrorist attacks outside of Gaza. That is hundreds of deaths and the Crawford Peace House that Cindy works with cannot acknowledge any Palestinian blame.

And then she has the lack of moral clarity to compare Rumsfeld to Stalin and Hitler, not to mention she calls Bush the biggest terrorist in the world.

That is just intellectual dishonesty and moral bankruptcy.

It is so easy to go provide legitimate criticism regarding the actions of the administration and she just blows it. I am sorry that she lost a child, but she has serious problems. Her credibility is nonexistent.