Dreadful foreign struggle with frightening implications

No topic could be more urgent and worthy of your close attention than the Israel/Palestinian conflict. It is a dreadful foreign struggle with frightening implications for much of humankind.

It is also a domestic issue of colossal impact that has already shaken this giant oak called America to its very roots, and the worst may be yet to come. It threatens the future wellbeing of all US citizens, especially college students who one day will be called into military service.

I choose my words carefully. I am a Republican, but I am gravely alarmed at the direction George W. Bush has taken us. We have lost our bearings. In our panic, we overlook the relationship of 9/11 to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Congress over-reacts, yielding absolute authority to make war to one man, the president. Still worse, the president announces frightening new doctrines: He asserts his right to order acts of war against any nation he alone deems necessary, and he proclaims America policeman of the world.

The United Nations and other international institutions must follow the US lead or become irrelevant. In a loosely-defined and poorly-designed war on terrorism, the president decides what foreign regimes must go.

His orders brought down two regimes - the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussain in Iraq - amid thunderous bombardment that left thousands of people dead, some of them Americans, along with many thousands of local civilians killed or maimed for life. Lives were plighted, homes destroyed, infrastructure wrecked, and local inhabitants outraged against America.

Unwarranted imprisonment

At home, the overreaction to 9/11 brings misery, embarrassment, fear and even unwarranted imprisonment upon many law abiding citizens. Hundreds, even thousands of people, are rounded up arbitrarily for questioning by the FBI on flimsy charges or no charges at all.

Many are jailed for weeks, months, even longer - all because of their religion, colour of their skin or country of origin. At a convention on the East coast, I met a Canadian who was detained for questioning at the US border. He and his young son were kept in the broiling sun for more than two hours for only one reason. The border guard found on the man's passport that his first name was Mohammed. That was enough to order him out of line for a long wait before eventually being waved through.

Indignities, inconveniences like that are repeated hundreds of times all over America. Think of the indelible impression these experiences make on people, young and old, who once believed that America was unmatched as a land of liberty and personal freedom.

At presidential request, Congress approves unprecedented levels of wiretapping.

Consequently, Big Brother is prying into private lives without court order, impinging on constitutionally guaranteed liberties as never before. An enormous computer data base is being established at the Pentagon in Washington, where intimate information about any and all of us may be entered.

The intrusions continue, and our attorney-general, not satisfied with the extreme powers he has already received from Congress, seeks even greater authority.

The main brunt is felt by people called Muslims, followers of the Islamic faith. Before World War II, they were almost non-existent in America. Today, they number seven million and are the second largest and fastest-growing religious community in America.

I was 51 years old and a Member of Congress for 11 years before I knowingly met a Muslim. I nurtured false images of Islam from early years in Presbyterian Sunday School and did not dismiss them until middle age.

From my personal experience, I am not surprised that false images of Islam flourish everywhere in America. They are strangers in our midst. Most Americans are suspicious of Muslims, linking them falsely with violence, wickedness, abuse of women, and un-American activity.

Many headlines and news broadcasts link the words Islam and Muslim with acts of terrible violence, but few Muslims deserve to be called terrorists. Some professed Muslims. like the perpetrators of 9/11, of course are terrible human beings. They sin grievously against Islamic teachings by killing innocent people and committing suicide. Christianity has its own killers. The Reverend Jim Jones comes to mind.

Muslims actually already make great contributions to the betterment of America. One recently received the Nobel Prize in physics. Muslims are leaders in every worthy profession.

According to a recent poll, 25 per cent of the American people believe Muslims are anti-American - a seven per cent increase over the previous year. Forty-four per cent believe Muslims encourage violence - nearly double the percentage of a year ago.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is inextricably linked to 9/11 and to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The trouble began 35 years ago, when the Washington lobby for the state of Israel began to control all legislation and public policy related to the Middle East.

Shortly after World War II, a small band of US partisans for Israel marshalled self-discipline and commitment so effectively that they succeeded in ending free and open debate on Capitol Hill and throughout most of America whenever Middle East issues are considered.

They had no thought, I am sure, of setting in motion a sequence of events that would be calamitous in the Middle East and later in America. Their goal was to assure the unconditional support of Israel by the US government. The horrible consequences that lay ahead were unintended and unexpected.

In seeking gains for Israel they rigorously stifle dissent and intimidate the entire Congress. They defeat legislators who criticise Israel. I know. I was there for 22 years.

They have forced severe anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias into US Middle East policy for the past 35 years, bias that grows worse year after year. The most harmful part of this process was the disappearance of unfettered discussion of the US relationship to the Palestine-Israeli conflict.

As a result, the anti-Palestinian bias has been getting worse. This bias yields enormous flows of aid in various forms to the state of Israel, and little or none to the hapless Palestinians.It enables Israeli leaders to impose discrimination and severe hardship on Palestinians, most of them Muslims. The outside world, including over a billion Muslims, watches with dismay and anger as the US government supports the subjugation of innocent human beings year after year.

In recent years, this bias has led to the humiliation and devastation of an entire people, radicalising behaviour on both sides of the conflict. but its gross imbalance in power causes the Palestinians to accept by far the greater suffering.

During the past l8 months, while giving lip service to Palestinian statehood, the US government has helped Israel visit new devastation, curfews, and bloodshed on Palestinians. Israeli forces confine them within 20-foot high wire cages, separating them from each other and from sources of income - consigning children to malnourishment and denying them childhood itself.

The US government has been complicit in all of this, a responsibility that is well and painfully known to all the world except the American people.

For all its platitudes about freedom, democracy and human rights, the US government, year after year, has supported the imposition of cruel, unspeakable suffering on a proud and once dignified and self-reliant people.

We help consign Palestinians to bleak days and give them no hope to expect better ones t