Purge Those Holy Books

It's another chapter in the war on terror. Los Angeles school officials are pulling an edition of the Koran from the district's libraries because of charges that the footnotes are anti-Semitic. This particular edition of Islam's Good Book dates from 1934. An example of one such offending footnote: "The Jews in their arrogance claimed that all wisdom and all knowledge of Allah was enclosed in their hearts. But there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in their philosophy. Their claim was not only arrogance but blasphemy." This doesn't seem so bad, but I suppose you can never be too careful.

A story in the Los Angeles Times reports that copies of The Meaning of the Holy Quran were donated in December to the Los Angeles Unified School District by a local Muslim foundation. A school district official told the Times that the books, a goodwill gesture in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, were distributed to the schools last week "without the usual content review."

It surely won't be long before the Bible is pulled from school library shelves as well, since the Old Testament is rough on the Palestinians and the New Testament rough on the Jews. Try the Book of Numbers, chapter 25, which has sentiments on racial harmony I assume to be different from those of the Los Angeles School District. God is furious about sexual intermingling between the children of Israel and the hosts of Midian. Phineas, son of Eleazar, having risen up with a javelin, "went after the man of Israel into the tent and thrust them both through, the man of Israel and the woman through her belly." God is well pleased and signifies his approval by visiting a pestilence on the Midianites: "So the plague was stayed from the children of Israel. And those that died in the plague were twenty and four thousand."

Also joining the anti-Bible coalition will presumably be the National Organization of Women, unless its officials are swayed by the fact, apparent in the passage just quoted, that Phineas was pro-choice, albeit in a somewhat drastic manner. Here's St. Paul on the status of women: "The head of every man is Christ and the head of the woman is man; and the head of Christ is God." Though my basic view is that any childish mind not inoculated by compulsory religion is open to any infection, by all means let us sweep the Jewish Bible, the Christian Bible and the Koran off every shelf whither might stray the hand of impressionable youth. Such a cleansing act would return us to the very roots of the European enlightenment.

An interesting review by Jonathan Ree in the London Review of Books discusses the origins of the European enlightenment, specifically a pamphlet originating in the Netherlands and circulating in manuscript form around Europe in the 1680s. It was called the Traite des Trois Imposteurs (Treatise on Three Impostors), arguing that all the above-mentioned Holy Scriptures were, as Ree puts it, "fabricated by conspiracies of priests who somehow managed to pass them off as the word of God." The first impostor was Moses, educated by Egyptians, who pulled the wool over the eyes of ignorant and credulous Jews; the second was Jesus, who learned Moses' political astuteness, picked up some mangled ideas from Plato and other Greek philosophers and "surrounded himself with a troupe of voluble imbeciles who were prepared to believe everything he said, even when he claimed his mother was a virgin and his father a holy ghost." The third impostor was Mohammed, who learned everything he needed to know from the other two charlatans.

The authors of the pamphlet have never been identified, but according to Margaret Jacob in her very influential 1981 study, The Radical Enlightenment, if they had a philosophical tutor it would have been Spinoza, a Dutch Jew. The way things are headed, even that identification will probably be construed as anti-Semitic.

DynCorp Cometh

The following contract was announced by the U.S. Dept. of Defense on Jan. 15: "DynCorp, Int., Fort Worth, Texas, is being awarded a $119,751,602 contract to provide for all personnel, equipment, tools, materials, supervision, and items and services as necessary to perform forward operating locations, base operating support services in support of the U.S. Southern Command's aerial counterdrug surveillance mission in Aruba, Curacao, and Ecuador. At this time, $25,709,541 of the funds has been obligated. The period of this contract is January 15, 2002 through December 31, 2002. Solicitation was posted via the electronic posting system in May 2001, and there were three proposals received. Negotiations were completed December 2001. The contractor will perform this effort at various locations worldwide. The Air Combat Command Contracting Squadron, Langley Air Force Base, Va., is the contracting activity (F44650-02-C-0002)."

For more than 50 years DynCorp, based in Reston, VA, has been a worldwide force providing maintenance support to the U.S. military through contract field teams. As one of the federal government's top 25 contractors, DynCorp has received nearly $1 billion since 1995 for these services.

Aruba is off the northern coast of Colombia, where the oil fields and most of Occidental's holdings are concentrated, nowhere near the southern department of Putumayo where the coca eradication operation is taking place. Curaçao, a colony of the Netherlands, is 35 miles off the coast of Venezuela, also far from the coca eradication operation. Venezuela has not yet been announced as a target of the antiterrorist war, but its lack of accommodation to foreign oil corporations and its friendly relations with Cuba and Iraq, plus much recent internal tumult over the leadership of the populist Torres, has persuaded many that it is a ripe target for destabilization.

DynCorp, please note, is the former employer of Ben Johnston, a Texan who blew the whistle a bit more than a year ago on the behavior of some of his erstwhile colleagues. According to a detailed story by Kelly Patricia O'Meara in Insight magazine, a Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization act (RICO) lawsuit has been filed in Texas on behalf of the former DynCorp aircraft-maintenance technician for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters being serviced by DynCorp in Bosnia, where the company has deployed 181 personnel during the last six years.

"In the latter part of 1999," O'Meara cites the suit as alleging, "Johnston learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts." Johnston, the suit alleges, "witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased."

According to O'Meara, "Rather than acknowledge and reward Johnston's effort to get this behavior stopped, DynCorp fired him, forcing him into protective custody by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) until the investigators could get him safely out of Kosovo and returned to the United States." Johnston's "main problem," he explained to O'Meara, "was [sexual misbehavior] with the kids, but I wasn't too happy with them ripping off the government, either. DynCorp is just as immoral and elite as possible, and any rule they can break they do. There was this one guy who would hide parts so we would have to wait for parts and, when the military would question why it was taking so long, he'd pull out the part and say 'Hey, you need to install this.' They'd have us replace windows in helicopters that weren't bad just to get paid. They had one kid, James Harlin, over there who was right out of high school and he didn't even know the names and purposes of the basic tools. Soldiers that are paid $18,000 a year know more than this kid, but this is the way they [DynCorp] grease their pockets. What they say in Bosnia is that DynCorp just needs a warm body?that's the DynCorp slogan. Even if you don't do an eight-hour day, they'll sign you in for it because that's how they bill the government. It's a total fraud."

Johnson was appalled enough by the drunkenness and sloppy work, but the exploitation of local children and women was what put him over the edge. "None of the girls," says Johnston, "were from Bosnia. They were from Russia, Romania and other places, and they were imported in by DynCorp and the Serbian mafia. These guys would say 'I gotta go to Serbia this weekend to pick up three girls.' They talk about it and brag about how much they pay for them?usually between $600 and $800."

O'Meara reports that "According to CID, which sought guidance from the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate in Bosnia, 'under the Dayton Peace Accord, the contractors were protected from Bosnian law which did not apply to them. They knew of no [U.S.] federal laws that would apply to these individuals at this time.' However, CID took another look and, according to the investigation report, under Paragraph 5 of the NATO Agreement Between the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia regarding the status of NATO and its personnel, contractors 'were not immune from local prosecution if the acts were committed outside the scope of their official duties.'"

The CID case was closed in June 2000 and turned over to the Bosnian authorities. DynCorp says it conducted its own investigation, and Hirtz and Werner were fired by DynCorp and returned to the United States but were not prosecuted. The company has denied all of Johnston's allegations.

Chomsky for Turkey

Now comes the news that in Turkey the chief of terrorism prosecutions is targeting the publishers of writings by MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky. Chomsky is planning to fly to Turkey for publisher Fatih Tas' first court appearance on Feb. 13. He has already written to the offices of the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, pointing out that amendments to Turkish law were supposed to have provided greater freedom of expression, not less of it.

I assume that Christopher Hitchens, who has charged Chomsky with being a terror-symp, will also be heading for Turkey to testify for the prosecution. And talking of Hitchens, here are some lines from Coleridge's Biographia Literaria that seem relevant. Coleridge, wearing his conservative hat, is belaboring the pro-terror, pro-Jacobin faction: "The sincere reverers of the throne felt the cause of loyalty ennobled by its alliance with that of freedom; while the honest zealots of the people could not but admit, that freedom itself assumed a more winning form, humanized by loyalty and consecrated by religious principle. The youthful enthusiasts who, flattered by the morning rainbow of the French revolution, had made a boast of expatriating their hopes and fears, now disciplined by the succeeding storms and sobered by increase of years, had been taught to prize and honor the spirit of nationality as the best safeguard of national independence, and this again as the absolute pre-requisite and necessary basis of popular rights."