To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
--- George Orwell
Monday, October 19, 2015
50 Years Into Israeli Occupation, Can You Really Blame Young Palestinians For Doing What A Lot Of Americans Would Probably Do?
It’s
a bit rich to hear right wing Israelis and their echo chamber in the lobby here
describe Palestinians mounting violent attacks in Jerusalem as being consumed
by “a blood fetish” or “seized by a communal psychosis.” As Georgetown scholar
Bruce Hoffman points out in his recent book, Anonymous
Soldiers, Zionist terrorism played a significant role in driving the
British from Palestine in the late 1940’s, clearing the way for the as the
Jewish state to come into being. Zionist Terror tactics also encouraged 700,000
Palestinians to flee in fear for their lives during the Israeli War for
Independence in 1948. Those Palestinians have never been allowed back into the
country, a violation of international law that stands uncorrected.
Still,
anyone who has seen or smelled the aftermath of a terrorist bombing can’t cheer
the prospect of lone wolf stabbings, spontaneous rioting and outbursts of
stone-throwing at Israeli authorities escalating
into the organized suicide bombings and gun attacks that marked the Second
Intifada in the early 2000’s. It’s also pretty accurate to argue that the
second Intifada actually made conditions in the West Bank more severe: More
checkpoints and less freedom of movement, with almost four million Palestinians
sealed off behind an imposing, highly fortified Partition Wall in what Columbia University’s Rashid Khalili has
called “The Iron Cage.” The Second Intifada is also widely blamed for traumatizing
the collective Israeli psyche, reducing empathy in the general Israeli pubic
and making it more likely to shrug at government military actions that enact
collective punishment on Palestinians for challenging Jewish domination. In
other words, that harsh treatment is a “fitting Zionist response,” as heel-clicking
Israeli right-wingers like to say.
Of
course it would be much better if Palestinians embraced nonviolent civil
disobedience and took a leaf from Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The growing worldwide
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) shows that Palestinians understand
this, at least on the international front. But BDS won’t show any impact on the everyday lives of
Palestinians in the occupied territories for quite some time, no matter how
much potential BDS holds for forcing Israel to loosen its grip.
After
50 years of Israeli military occupation, a shell of an economy and a peace
process that has gone nowhere however, who can blame Palestinian teenagers for
throwing stones at the IDF, burning rubber tires at makeshift roadblocks or
standing in the middle of the street and taunting Israeli soldiers to shoot
them? While individual teens attacking Jewish bus passengers, IDF conscripts or
police officers seemingly at random fits a definition of terror, why should
that kind of terrorism be seen as something apart from the material conditions
that any detached comprehensive analysis would bring into the discussion? This
isn’t to justify this kind of violence, or attacks allegedly orchestrated by
Hamas such as the drive-by shooting of a young Israeli settler couple as they
drove with their children in the backseat. But it is to explain it, especially
when it the violence is coming from teenagers with no record of terrorist
connections.
In
addition to the heavy handed presence of the Israeli military, the occupation
has also allowed a government-sponsored influx of more than 500,000 armed and
antagonistic Jewish settlers into Palestinian territory, in full violation of
international law. Settler “prince tag” attacks on Palestinians are routine
now, amid wider concern for the rise of Jewish terrorism. In one such “price
tag” attack last summer, Jewish radicals firebombed a Palestinian home on the
West Bank in the middle of the night, burning an infant alive and killing her
parents from their injuries in the days after. According to the New Yorker, Israeli journalists say
that this prospective third intifada should be called the “settler intifada” ---a
violent response to the often violent provocations of that increasingly
powerful faction of hardline Jews.
The
kind of volcanic grassroots violence in Jerusalem these past two weeks, which
is really more like a leaderless revolt engaging in uncoordinated daily attacks
than terrorism as it is more often seen, is almost mathematically inevitable. It
flows out of the toxic combination of desperation, humiliation and rage that
has been pent up on the West Bank since the last uprising a dozen years ago, exploding
with cumulative force. The children who came to consciousness watching their
older siblings, cousins and neighbors being beaten and arrested or shot dead in
a clashes back in 2002 or 2003 are themselves in their teens and early
twenties, with most having no record of terrorist involvement. They’ve grown up
knowing nothing but military occupation, joblessness, the depredations of Jewish
settlers and the political impotence of their own Palestinian leadership, with
little prospect of gaining their own state, or being accorded political rights
within a larger binational Israeli state. In fact, many young Palestinians have
given up on the dream of full Palestinian independence and prefer to become
Israeli citizens with full political rights. Israel, obsessed with preserving the Jewishness of the Jewish
state, doesn’t seem to be too ready to allow that.
Put
in an analogous position, I’m pretty confident that a lot Americans would
probably throw a few rocks and light a few bonfires too. Bad enough to have to live with the grinding
indignities of occupation as well as the intimidating presence of armed
settlers driven by religious messianism and the racial supremacy that accompanies
it. But to have to endure such things for 50
years just seems too much to expect any person or any people to withstand
without lashing back. Would that
it not be the case, but unfortunately that is the case. Cause has its effect; action
prompts reaction---elementary political physics. In other words, context is essential, especially fifty years of it, compounded day after
day.
*****
The oppressive centrality of occupation
in the lives of Palestinians on the West Bank was very simply and eloquently
described by Hussein Ibish, of the American Task Force on Palestine at a panel discussion at Columbia last December. The panel was focused
on the question of whether Israel’s policies toward Palestinians were justified
in light of the security issue it faces.
The panel was sponsored by a number of student groups as well as the
Sheldon Adelson-funded Values Network, whose director, Rabbi Shmuley
Boteach---America’s Rabbi to some---served as moderator. In addition to Ibish
the other panelists were Bret Stephens, the very pro Israel foreign affairs
columnist of the Wall Street Journal, Peter Beinart, a liberal Zionist opposed
to the occupation.
What
Ibish stressed was that the Jewish democratic state of Israel was in fact, not
that at all in that it
“completely disenfranchises” at least 4.5 million people living under its
jurisdiction in the occupied territories. There was nothing like Israel’s
occupation that he could think of anywhere else in the world today, Ibish
declared, citing “intolerable conditions of disenfranchisement and
discrimination.”
Everything you
can do in the occupied territories depends on whether the Israeli government
classifies you as a Jewish settler or an occupied Palestinian. Every single
aspect of daily life is determined by this inevitably ethnic distinction. Where
you may live, what roads you can drive on, whether you can be armed for self
defense or not, how much water and other basic necessities you get per capita,
what type of education your children will have, whether you can travel freely
around your own country or leave it with the normal confidence of being allowed
to return, or whether you need the permission of foreign soldiers, many of them
just out of high school, to go from one village to another, whether you may be
subjected to midnight house raids, what laws you live under, etc.
I could go on
till midnight, I really could.
Does this
arrangement sound like the basis for a reasonable security policy to you? I
mean, really? Because that’s how it’s conceptualized– as forward bases in enemy
territory. “This is Israel’s strategic depth.” We hear that all the time from
people, except Israeli security professionals, who don’t see it that way.
The bottom line is
that in the occupied territories, Palestinians, who are citizens of no state,
live under one set of laws and conditions, and... Israeli settlers even
standing next to each other live under another. Settlers are Israeli citizens,
with all the rights and responsibilities that come with that. The Palestinians
have neither.
Millions of
people have been living like this for almost 50 years, the vast majority of the
history of the modern Israeli state. Now I want to put it to you, There’s not a
single person in this room, not one of you– not one of you– who would accept to
live like that, generation after generation, decade after decade, with no end
in sight. You would resist, in an intelligent manner hopefully. And you would
not put up with it. And if you think you would put up with it, you’re lying to
yourselves.
As direct and intuitive as Ibish’s observations were,
most Zionists here and in Israel reject any suggestion that Palestinian
resistance should be contextualized, preferring to see it as expression of a
history of “hate” triggered by “incitement” on the part of Palestinian leaders
or Muslim clergy. It’s analogous to the way that Zionists denied any connection
between the rising tide of anti Semitism among European Muslims and the Israeli
military actions in Gaza, which killed almost 1500 noncombatant civilians, many
of them women and very small children. It’s far more convenient and exculpating
to see anti Israel actions as being a function of anti Semitism---"The Devil That Never Dies,” as Holocaust scholar Daniel Goldhagen titled his most recent
book--- than in acknowledging that anti Israel hostility springs from actions
that Israel itself has taken: house demolitions, evictions, expulsions, summary
executions, live fire attacks from Israeli snipers, to cite just the beginning
of a long list.
Last week during the Q&A of a Harvard appearance,
Secretary of State John Kerry stepped on this political landmine, specifically
the issue of Israeli settlements. “There’s been a massive increase in
settlements over the course of the last years, and there’s an increase in the
violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing,” Kerry noted. He
added that most people involved in the peace process “have a pretty damn good
sense of what has to be done,”
but implied that there was a lack of “courage” to do what was needed. Comments like this were a way of
“Blaming Israel” for the “Terror Wave” as the Times of Israel phrased the
Zionist reaction. Kerry backpeddled pretty quickly, explaining through his
spokesman that even if settlements were a source of frustration for
Palestinians settlement
activity was not “the cause for the effect we're seeing,” and that he was not
“affixing blame on either side here for the violence.”
Wall Street Journal "Global Affairs" columnist Bret Stephens had no real response to Ibish’s
remarks that night up at Columbia. But he certainly showed his contempt for
those citing “context” in his column this week, indulging tribal
generalizations and highlighting his own lack of human empathy even as he
condemned the Palestinians for the very same thing. Ridiculing those citing
Palestinian despair at the peace process or ragged economy, Stephens declared
that it was “time to
stop furnishing Palestinians with the excuses they barely bother making for
themselves.”
The significant
question is why so many Palestinians have been seized by their present blood
lust—by a communal psychosis in which plunging knives into the necks of Jewish
women, children, soldiers and civilians is seen as a religious and patriotic
duty, a moral fulfillment.
Above all, it’s
time to give hatred its due. We understand its explanatory power when it comes
to American slavery, or the Holocaust. We understand it especially when it is
the hatred of the powerful against the weak. Yet we fail to see it when the
hatred disturbs comforting fictions about all people being basically good, or
wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of empathy.
Today in Israel,
Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death, one at a time.
This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to serve as an
apologist, and an accomplice.
It was significant that Stephens failed to mention the
words “settlements,” “settlers,” “occupation,” and made no reference to the
civilian death toll in Gaza last summer or the rising tide of Jewish terrorism
against Palestinian civilians, among many other factors anyone with a sense of
simple cause and effect would cite. To ignore or to underplay these factors
represents an its own apology for violence and exposes one to the charge of
complicity too, especially after 50 years. Indeed, it may not be psychotic, but it is in its own way pathological, demonstrating that the Iron Cage
that Israel has built for its restive Palestinians has an analogue in the iron
cage Zionism has built around itself to protect the movement’s ideological
certitudes from the political realities now challenging them.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
When Trope Is Truth: How 'Big Jewish Money' Is 'Buying' The White House To Make Israel 'The 51st State'
Trope is truth at this point in the
US-Israel “special relationship,” as New York magazine explains in its
blockbuster story by Jason Zengerle,
“Sheldon Adelson Is Ready to Buy the Presidency.” At least in terms of
the corrupting influence of Big Jewish Money in the 2016 presidential campaign.
You’re not supposed to talk about Big Jewish Money, it being just a straw man
away from the canards contained in such classic 19th century works
of anti Semitism as the Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion. But when you have the self proclaimed “richest Jew
in the world” ready to pony up even more than the $100 million he laid out in
the 2012 election to ensure a Republican candidate pro-Israel enough for him,
it’s kinda hard to dance around the ethnic niceties, although Zengerle does a
commendable job in showing that there is really no love lost between Adleson
and most of his own landsman.
The vast majority of American Jews are not hard-liners
on Israel, he notes.
Obama
won 69 percent of Jewish voters in 2012, even as American conservatives accused
him of purposefully undermining the country’s security and status in the
region. Indeed, according to a 2013 Pew study,
only one in three American Jews feel a strong emotional attachment to the
Jewish state. But over the past 30 years, and especially in the last decade,
the GOP’s attachment to Israel has become remarkably fierce, to an extent that
is basically unprecedented in modern American politics. On issue after issue —
from military aid to settlement policy — the GOP now offers Israel
unconditional and unquestioning support, so much so that some Republicans now
liken the country to America’s “51st state.” The person most responsible for
this development is the multibillionaire casino magnate and Republican
megadonor Sheldon Adelson.
Like Connie Bruck’s New Yorker
article exactly a year ago on the corrupt hold that Israel has on the US
Congress, the New York magazine piece confirms what John Mearsheimer and Stephen
Walt argued almost a decade ago in their ground-and-taboo breaking book, The Israel Lobby. Back then, Jewish journalists got down in a “defensive crouch” about
the book, the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg described it at a panel at the YIVO
institute, where Zionist stalwarts like The New Republic’s Marty Peretz and Holocaust author author Daniel Goldhagen made Walt and Mearsheimer seem like they were “the
second coming of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin,” as per the description of the night that blogger Phil Weiss filed. The mood was so paranoid, Weiss wrote that you would have thought "the Cossacks
were just outside the doors.
Friday, August 14, 2015
ISIS's Satanic Verses
For
over a year now since ISIS first came on the global radar screen, international
news organizations have been reporting on its viciousness, from beheadings of
journalists and aid workers to attacks on non-Muslim minority groups like the
Yazadis and Syrian Christians. Some of the most horrendous reporting has
focused on very young women who’d been captured or kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery,
often to young jihadis as war brides. One of the more harrowing
reports came from the Guardian
almost exactly a year ago, describing the torment and despair felt by Iraqi
Yazidi families who’d learned that their daughters had been sold as slaves to
Islamist militants who’d just rampaged through their area.
For
the past week, Khandhar Kaliph's hands have trembled whenever his phone has
rung.
He
nervously greeted his daughter, who had been kidnapped when the Islamic State (Isis)
overran the Yazidi city of Sinjar. There was a minute of silence, before he
broke down sobbing.
"She
said she is going to be sold as a slave this afternoon, for $10," Kaliph
said, his tears dropping into the brown dust. "What can a father say to
that. How can I help? We all feel so useless."
Kaliph's
daughter, who he did not want to name, had access to a group phone passed
around between other girls imprisoned by the Islamic State in Bardoush prison
in central Mosul.
All
face the imminent prospect of being married off. Or worse, being used by the
jihadis as a sex slave.
The New York Times takes the story into even more horrifying territory today with a story from the western Iraq town of Qadiya, about the religious justifications that ISIS’s clerical leadership have developed “ISIS Enshrines A Theology Of Rape” was the story’s headline.” Historically, religion has been used to justify a great deal of violence and iniquity, whether it be ancient Buddhist monks leading battles against Hindus, medieval Christian crusaders taking on the Saracens, or Jewish fundamentalists conducting “price tag” attacks against Palestinians on the West Bank. But I don’t think I’ve come across a situation where a spiritual tradition has been used to excuse or encourage pathology quite like that described here. The mix of depravity and “devotion”---the suras alternating with sexual degradation-- has an edge that is almost Satanic, an Islamic version of a Black Mass.
In
the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter
took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because
the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave
him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
He
bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated
himself in prayer before getting on top of her.
When
it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious
devotion.
“I
kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small
an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to
Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is
drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a
refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.
The
systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has
become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the
Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as
an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the
Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official
communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s
core tenets.
The report, filed by Rukmini Callimachi, a former West
Africa reporter for the AP who was hired by the Times to report on ISIS and Al
Qaeda, explains that the trade in Yazidi women and girls “has created a
persistent infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are
held, viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated
fleet of buses used to transport them.” Of the more than 5000 Yazidis who were
kidnapped last year, 3000 are still being held. To handle them, Callimachi
reports,
The
Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including
sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And the practice has
become an established recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative
Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.
A
growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has
established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by
the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly,
the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran
and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to elevate
and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.
“Every
time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said F, a 15-year-old girl who
was captured on the shoulder of Mount Sinjar one year ago and was sold to an
Iraqi fighter in his 20s. Like some others interviewed by The New York Times,
she wanted to be identified only by her first initial because of the shame
associated with rape.
Friday, August 7, 2015
Into The Same River: A Whitewater Tragedy in Westchester County
In the immediate
aftermath of Hurricane Irene (August 2011) New York’s normally placid Croton River
was transformed into a raging torrent with Class V rapids --- and no shortage
of hazards. For a few local rafters, it was too hard to resist.
They'd waited all week for it. And then finally, on the
afternoon of Sunday, August 28, as Hurricane Irene began to
ebb in the northeastern states it had ravaged, a group of rafters got their
chance. Torrential rains had transformed the Croton, a mild river that flows
through suburban Westchester County, into the sort of Class V thrill ride they’d
fly across the country to paddle. Earlier that week, Dr. Peter Engel, a
53-year-old psychiatrist and addiction specialist who'd done some of the
world's most challenging rivers, texted a friend, "Now that it’s all going
to be flood, it's time to go boating."
That day the river, which runs over the spillway of the
massive Croton Dam and continues for three and a half miles into the Hudson,
was a hellbroth of logs, tree limbs, stumps, and whole trees that had been
uprooted from the saturated banks. Normally, the river flows at 300 cubic feet
per second; it was now running at 22,500, the heaviest in 55 years. Its
currents had reached nearly 50 miles per hour (faster in more narrow chutes)
and churned with colossal wave trains and Class V and even Class V–plus rapids –
the kind of muscular surge you'd see in the Niagara River below the falls.
Midstream, islands of rocks and trees had been almost completely submerged,
creating classic "strainers," which whitewater riders avoid at all
costs. "That river can be treacherous on any given day," Croton
police detective Paul Camillieri says. "But that day it was a monster. It
was Mother Nature at its most fierce and unpredictable."
The trip had been organized by 37-year-old Ken GiaQuinto, the business manager of a pharmacy his family owns in the city of Rye, New York. GiaQuinto had worked for a time as a river guide in Breckenridge, Colorado. The 12-foot blue raft was his. As Irene made her way up the eastern seaboard, GiaQuinto sent text messages to four friends he thought might want to take advantage of the dramatic rainfall. One was Brian Dooley, a third-grade teacher who coached high school lacrosse with GiaQuinto and was celebrating his 33rd birthday that day. Another was Joe Ceglia, also 33, a boyhood pal of Dooley's who’d been a lacrosse All-American at Syracuse University and even played professionally. He was now the athletic director at Rye Neck High. Neither of them had done a lot of whitewater rafting. A third recruit was 37-year-old Michael Wolfert, an avid skier and climbing-school owner with considerable rafting experience. He lived about 100 yards from the Croton Dam gorge and was familiar with the Croton, at least under normal circumstances. The fourth friend was older and more seasoned than the others. Dr. Peter Engel, who had two adult children, had been running whitewater for more than 30 years. He was the last one to arrive at the river that day, rendezvousing with the other rafters at around 4 pm.
The crew had a hard time finding a safe put-in, so they
drove to a county park beneath the massive Croton Dam, inflated their raft, and
parked it on a bridge spanning the raging water below. GiaQuinto’s and Wolfert’s
wives snapped pictures of their children in the boat, while the crew assessed
the water from the bridge.
There were dozens of people in the park that afternoon,
most gaping at the cataract crashing over the dam’s massive spillway.
"Everyone seemed dumbfounded that anyone would try to do this," said
Mark Stevenson, a photographer who shot footage of the group that day. But, he
said, the group had an "air of authority" and all the right gear. At
one point Stevenson asked GiaQuinto if they had experience with whitewater.
"Oh, yeah," GiaQuinto joked. "We looked it up on Google."
Normally, rafters wouldn’t put a boat in the water until
they'd had a chance to do a safety walk, scanning the river by foot to evaluate
various hazards and plot their course. But the water level made a full survey
impossible. And the doctor, the most experienced of the group, hadn’t had a
chance to read the water features at all.
According to the American Whitewater organization, the
Croton River can present rafters with a number of hazards: keeper holes, rocks
that cause blunt trauma, natural strainers, and low-head dams that create
unpredictable hydraulic perils. That day the five-man crew would encounter them
all.
They launched late in the afternoon, around 5:30, but
with near–50 mph currents, they knew they'd finish the trip well before dark.
The first mile or so was fast but flat. They "smoothed" three
low-head dams with ease, and then a higher, more difficult dam, in near-perfect
form. GiaQuinto was sitting comfortably in the stern, calling out paddling
commands. When they came upon a bridge that had 12 feet of clearance on a
normal day, the rafters leaned backward in the raft to duck beneath it. A
photograph taken from that bridge shows the crew beaming, thrilled at being on
such powerful water.
Less than two miles downriver, the group hit a wave
train that resembled a giant roller coaster, as well as a set of rapids. Then,
not even 10 minutes into the trip, they rounded a bend into Silver Lake, a
wide, flat part of the river used as a town swimming hole under usual
conditions. At this point the rafters could have paused in an eddy by the
riverbank to assess what hazards lay ahead or to consider altering their
original course. The trickiest waters were still to come. If they’d wanted to
pull out and call it a day, this was their last chance.
But they pressed on, and at the Silver Lake spillway,
the boat skewed to the right and plunged into a lurking depression.
Immediately, the raft somersaulted, stern over bow.
"Somehow we just hit the wrong spot at the wrong angle at the wrong
time," Wolfert explained later. Another rafter subsequently told police:
"We never thought an accident would happen. There was no notion of danger.
All of a sudden, the boat just flipped."
Thrown into the smash and boil of the churning 70-degree
water, Ceglia, the rafter with the least experience, knew enough to keep his
feet up and his head out of the water as he barreled through a half-mile of
powerful rapids and rolling waves in a matter of minutes. He managed to grab
onto a tree on the flooded right riverbank and cling to it until a Croton
policeman and volunteer firefighters threw him a rope and pulled him to safety.
"I’m OK," he told rescuers, "but I've got four friends still out
there."
As Ceglia was speeding downstream, GiaQuinto and Wolfert
struggled to swim out of the hydraulic backwash created by the underwater dam.
GiaQuinto later told a friend it was the hardest swim of his life and that he
thought he was going to die as the force of the backwash dragged him and his
life jacket under. Somehow, both he and Wolfert made it safely to shore.
Dr. Engel had a more difficult ride downstream. He was
found by a Croton police rescue boat at 6:24 pm, facedown in the water about a
half-mile from the mouth of the Hudson. He still had on his dark-green helmet,
his life jacket, and his dry top. But all of the garments on the lower half of
his body — including his baggy Nike swim trunks — had been ripped off by the
river or a strainer he might have passed through. According to the medical
examiner, he had a laceration on his forehead and an abrasion on the bridge of
his nose, as well as contusions, bruises, and scrapes all over the rest of his
body. The official causes of death were asphyxia by drowning and hypothermia;
his body temperature was 93 degrees at the time of his death.
Now four of the rafters were accounted for – Brian
Dooley was still missing. As the sun was setting, dozens of responders fanned
out along areas where Dooley – or his body – might be.
As soon as the call went out that a raft had flipped,
local rescuers put their boats in and assumed shoreline watch posts. Croton’s
volunteer fire department and EMTs were joined by counterparts from neighboring
communities, county police, and emergency personnel; police helicopter crews
came from as far away as New York City. More than a hundred personnel turned
out to assist the rescue operation, several of them nearly becoming victims of
the river that day, too.
Three volunteer firemen went swimming after launching an
18-foot skiff just above a railroad trestle bridge. Their engine stalled soon
after they launched, and they could do nothing as an onlooker cried out, “Bridge!
Bridge! Bridge!” The firemen’s boat capsized when it slammed against the
railroad bridge, and the crew members were swept downriver. One of the three,
the department's 44-year-old chaplain, found himself trapped under the boat,
his foot snared in a line. He didn’t break to the surface until he was more
than 200 yards out into the Hudson.
Geoffrey Haynes was at home, listening to his police
scanner, when he heard about the missing rafter. The former AP reporter thought
he might be able to be "another pair of eyes, if nothing else," in
the Dooley search. He and his 23-year-old son grabbed life jackets and
binoculars to scan the area where the raft had flipped. On their second sweep
of the riverbank, the elder Haynes looked through his binoculars and spotted
Dooley’s orange jacket and turquoise dry top about 30 yards from the river’s
far bank at the upper tip of Fireman’s Island. He had wedged himself into a
sweet spot in the nook of two trees, Haynes said, but the water was still
crashing over him, pushing him into one of the trees, forcing him to constantly
change his grip. "To get to this guy would have required a Navy SEAL
operation," Haynes said. Dooley kept trying to pull himself up higher on
the tree, reaching for a small branch above his head. But as the hours passed,
his motions got slower as hypothermia set in.
A Westchester County Technical Rescue Team, trained in
swift-water operations, put in a rescue swimmer, but he was immediately swept
away and pulled from the river by teammates downstream. A helicopter rescue had
been considered, but the tree canopy and the continuing high winds made it
inadvisable to drop in a crew member on a harness. The only thing a helicopter
could do was hold Dooley in its searchlights so rescuers could keep track of
him.
*****
Around 8:45 pm, Geoff Haynes picked up his binoculars to
check on Dooley, but he was gone. A moment later he heard over the police radio
that Dooley was out of the trees. Croton Detective Sergeant John Nikitopoulos
and his two-man dive team had been idling in their Zodiac by the shoreline
downstream. When they heard the radio chatter, they hurried out into the river.
Using powerful handheld searchlights, they got a visual on Dooley, who was
moving downriver at about 1,000 yards in 30 seconds. He flapped his arms weakly
to signal them. When they hauled him into the boat, Dooley curled up in the
hull, "totally spent," Croton police lieutenant Russel Harper later
said. Dooley, who’d spent close to three hours of his birthday struggling in
the water, was shaking and almost unable to speak. He was admitted to the
hospital with extreme exposure and hypothermia. He told police he wasn't sure
whether he had lost consciousness or lost his grip. He had no idea how long
he'd floated or how he made it without hitting any trees.
The day after the incident was bell-blue and sunny, and
a rainbow arced over the Croton River where the rafters had put in, but
elsewhere in town, a stormy backlash was brewing. Some townspeople were furious
that the rafters had put so many rescuers at risk simply to satisfy what one
called "juvenile urgings." The comments sections of local news sites
teemed with ugly remarks. "Score one for Darwin," somebody posted.
Another cracked, "Good riddance. Minus one arrogant, reckless soul in the
world."
Not helping things were certain statements that survivor
Michael Wolfert made to the press. "We were not novices," he told one
reporter. And when asked whether they calculated the risks of rafting the
swollen river, Wolfert replied, "It's a risk we assume." But the
risks of their ride were hardly confined to the men in the raft. Three
volunteer firemen and a rescue swimmer nearly drowned. Helicopters came and
went in dangerous winds, hovering over a heavily treed gorge. Many in the town
thought the rafters should have been billed for the rescue, estimated at more
than $45,000; others urged criminal prosecution.
Engel's paddling buddies were left scratching their
heads. "Peter was not reckless," insists lifelong friend Gary Maltz,
an internist who’d paddled the Gauley with him. "When he went on a river,
he usually knew every nook and cranny. He was very safety-conscious, very
smart, very rational." But the crew had violated some of the cardinal
rules of whitewater paddling. They had not done a full safety walk and had shot
low-head dams that they might have portaged. Most significantly, they left no
margin of error – for being stranded, caught in a strainer, snagged on a tree,
or thrown overboard.
Maybe they failed to give a local, suburban river the
respect they'd give rivers with bigger names, fiercer reputations. Croton
detective Paul Camillieri thinks it was a case of hubris. "They thought
they were going for a Sunday ride. That it'd be over quickly, they’d high-five
each other and then go for beers. I don’t think they really took it seriously
enough." Richard Charney, who'd paddled the Colorado and whose house is
near where Ceglia was rescued, maintained that the big rivers Engel had done
are "known quantities." Their features and hazards are studied and
discussed by paddlers who'd done them. "But that experience would not
apply to the Croton at that level," he says. "At that level, it is a
completely unknown quantity."
Friday, July 31, 2015
What ‘Papa’ Hemingway Might Think About The 'Cecil The Lion' Shooting
Minnesota Dentist Walter Palmer, left. |
The
killing of Cecil the Lion in Zimbabwe, by American dentist and bow hunter
Walter Palmer, provided a peg for Salon
to take its readers “Inside the sick, bizarre world of trophy
hunting,” as its hedline put it. It’s worth the read for an understanding of
the pressures on guides to “deliver the goods” for wealthy clients. It reminded
me of the pressure wealthy would-be summiteers put on their climbing guides in
Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, which
set the stage for tragedy on Mt Everest back in 1996.
The Salon piece on trophy hunting also
brought to mind Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber, published in Cosmopolitan,
of all places, in 1936. The Hemingway/Macomber reference seemed especially
noteworthy as the fact emerged that the dentist only wounded the lion with his
arrows, and had to track him for 40 hours through the bush before finding him
and killing him with a high caliber rifle. Something similar happens in the Hemingway short story, providing
a setting for Papa to dramatize the themes most dear to him: courage, cowardice
and fate, all infused with plenty of testosterone. Below is the key scene, when the Great White Hunting Guide,
Robert Wilson, has to explain to the hapless and cowardly Macomber that they
have to find the lion they just wounded, as a point of honor as hunters and out
of responsibility for the people in the bush who might be hurt if they
accidentally came upon him. The excerpt I’ve posted is a long one. But as I
read through the story almost every paragraph seemed so classic that I couldn’t
bear to put any of them down. Memo to the triumphant-now-hunted Walter Palmer:
In the end, Macomber does have his moment of glory only to lose his wife, as
well as his own life.
Macomber
stepped out of the curved opening at the side of the front seat, onto the step
and down onto the ground. The lion still stood looking majestically and coolly
toward this object that his eyes only showed in silhouette, bulking like some
superrhino. There was no man smell carried toward his and he watched the
object, moving his great head a little from side to side. Then watching the
object, not afraid, but hesitating before going down the bank to drink with
such a thing opposite him, he saw a man figure detach itself from it and he
turned his heavy head and swung away toward the cover for the trees as he heard
a cracking crash and felt the slam of a .30-06 220-grain solid bullet that bit
his flank and ripped in sudden hot scalding nausea through his stomach. He
trotted, heavy, big-footed, swinging wounded lull-bellied, the trees toward the
tall grass and cover, and the crash came again to go past him ripping the air
apart. Then it crashed again and he felt the blow as it hit his lower ribs and
ripped on through, blood sudden hot and frothy in his mouth, and he galloped
toward the high grass where he could crouch and not be seen and make them bring
the crashing thing close enough so he could make a rush and get the man that
held it.
Macomber had
not thought how the lion felt as he got out of the car. He only knew his hands
were shaking and as he walked away from the car it was almost impossible for
him to make his legs move. They were stiff in the thighs, but he could feel the
muscles fluttering. He raised the rifle, sighted on the junction of the lion's
head and shoulders and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened though he pulled
until he thought his finger would break. Then he knew he had the safety on and
as he lowered the rifle to move the safety over he moved another frozen pace
forward, and the lion seeing his silhouette now clear of the silhouette of the
car, turned an started off at a trot, and, as Macomber fired, he heard a whunk
that meant that the bullet was home; but the lion kept on going. Macomber shot
again and every one saw the bullet throw a spout of dirt beyond the trotting
lion. He shot again, remembering to lower his aim, and they all heard the
bullet hit, and the lion went into a gallop and was in the tall grass before he
had the bolt pushed forward.
Macomber stood
there feeling sick at his stomach, his hands that held the springfield still
cocked, shaking, and his wife and Robert Wilson were standing by him. Beside
him too were the two gun-bearers chattering in Wakamba.
"I hit
him," Macomber said. "I hit him twice."
"You
gut-shot him and you hit him somewhere forward," Wilson said without
enthusiasm. The gun-bearers looked very grave. They were silent now.
"You may
have killed him" Wilson went on. "We'll have to wait a while before
we go in to find out."
"What do
you mean?"
"Let him
get sick before we follow him up."
"Oh,"
said Macomber.
"He's a
hell of a fine lion," Wilson said cheerfully. "He's gotten into a bad
place though."
"Why is
it bad?"
"Can't
see him until you 're on him."
"Oh,"
said Macomber.
"Come
on," said Wilson. "The Memsahib can stay here in the car. We'll go to
have a look at the blood spoor."
"Stay
here, Margot," Macomber said to his wife. His mouth was very dry and it
was hard for him to talk.
"Why?"
she asked.
"Wilson
says to."
"We're
going to have a look," Wilson said. "You stay her. You can see even
better from here."
"All
right."
Wilson spoke
in Swahili to the driver. He nodded and said, "Yes, Bwana."
Then they went
down the steep bank and across the stream, climbing over and around the
boulders and up the other bank, pulling up by some projecting roots, and along
it until they found where the lion had been trotting when Macomber first shot.
There was dark blood on the short grass that the gun-bearers pointed out with
grass stems, and that ran away behind the river bank trees.
"What do
we do?" asked Macomber.
"Not much
choice," said Wilson. "We can't br ing the car over. Bank's too
steep. We'll let him stiffen up a bit and then you and I'll go in and have a
look for him."
"Can't we
set the grass on fire?" Macomber asked.
"Too
green."
"Can't we
send beaters?"
Wilson looked
at him appraisingly. "Of course we can," he said. "But it's just
a touch murderous. You see we know the lion's wounded. You can drive an unwounded
lion—he'll move on ahead of a noise—but a wounded lion's going to charge. You
can't see him until you're right on him. He'll make himself perfectly flat in
cover you wouldn't think would hide a hare. You can't very well send boys in
there to that sort of a show. Somebody bound to get mauled."
"What
about the gun-bearers?"
"Oh,
they'll go with us. It's their shauri. You see, they signed on for it. They
don't look too happy though, do they?"
"I don't
want to go in there," said Macomber. It was out before he knew he'd said
it.
"Neither
do I," said Wilson very chee rily. "Really no choice though."
Then, as an afterthought, he glanced at Macomber and saw suddenly how he was
trembling and the pitiful look on his face.
"You
don't have to go in, of course," he said. "that's what I'm hired for,
you know. That's why I'm so expensive."
"You mean
you'd go in by yourself? Why not leave him there?"
Robert Wilson,
whose entire occupation had been with the lion ands the problem he presented,
and who had not been thinking about Macomber except to note that he was rather
windy, suddenly felt as though he had opened the wrong door in a hotel and seen
something shameful.
"What do
you mean?"
"Why not
just leave him?"
"You mean
pretend to ourselves he hasn't been hit?"
"No. Just
drop it.
"It isn't
done."
"Why
not?"
"For one
thing, he's certain to be suffering. For another, some one else might run on to
him."
"I
see."
"But you
don't have to have anything to do with it."
"I'd like
to," Macomber said. "I'm just scared, you know."
"I'll go
ahead when we go in," Wilson said, "with Kongoni tracking. You keep
behind me and a little to one side. Chances are we'll hear him growl. If we see
him we'll both shoot. Don't worry about anything. I'll keep you backed up. As a
matter of fact, you know, perhaps you'd better not go. It might be much better.
Why don't you go over and join the Memsahib while I just get it over
with?"
"No, I
want to go."
"All
right," said Wilson. "But don't go in if you don't want to. This is
my shauri now, you know."
"I want
to go," said Macomber.
They sat under
a tree and smoked.
"What to
go back and speak to the Memsahib while we're waiting?" Wilson asked.
"No."
"I'll
just step back and tell her to be patient."
"Good,"
said Macomber. He sat there, sweating under his arms, his mouth dry, his
stomach hollow feeling, wanting to find courage to tell Wilson to go on and
finish off the lion without him. He could not know that Wilson was furious
because he had not noticed the state he was in earlier and sent him back to his
wife. While he sat there Wilson came up. "I have your big gun," he
said. "Take it. We've given him time, I think. Come on."
Macomber took
the big gun and Wilson said"
"Keep
behind me and about five yards to the right and do exactly as I tell you."
Then he spoke in Swahili to the two gun-bearers who looked the picture of
gloom.
"Let's
go," he said.
"Could I
have a drink of water?" Macomber asked. Wilson spoke to the older
gun-bearer, who wore a canteen on his belt, and the man unbuckled it, unscrewed
the top and handed it to Macomber, who took it noticing how heavy it seemed and
how hairy and shoddy the felt covering was in his hand. He raised it to drink
and looked ahead at the high grass with the flat-topped trees behind it. A
breeze was blowing toward them and the grass rippled gently in the wind. He
looked at the gun-bearer and he could see the gun-bearer was suffering too with
fear.
Thirty-five
yards into the grass the big lion lay flattened out along the ground. His ears
where back and his only movement was a slight twitching up and down of his
long, black-tufted tail. He had turned at bay as soon as he had reached this
cover and he was sick with the wound through his full belly, and weakening with
the wound through his lungs that brought a thin foamy red to his mouth each
time he breathed. His flanks were wet and hot and flies were on the little
openings the solid bullets had made in his tawny hide, and his big yellow eyes,
narrowed with hate, looked straight ahead, only blinking when the pain came as
he breathed, and his claws dug in the soft baked earth. All of him, pain,
sickness, hatred and all of his remaining strength, was tightening into an
absolute concentration for a rush. He could hear the men talking and he waited,
gathering all of himself into this preparation for a charge as soon as the men
would come into the grass. As he heard their voices his tail stiffened to
twitch up and down, and, as they came into the edge of the grass, he made a
coughing grunt and charged.
Kongoni, the
old gun-bearer, in the lead watching the blood spoor, Wilson watching the grass
for any movement, his big gun ready, the second gun-bearer looking ahead and
listening, Macomber close to Wilson, his rifle cocked, they had just moved into
the grass when Macomber hear the blood-choked coughing grunt, and saw the
swishing rush in the grass. The next thing he knew he was running; running
wildly, in panic in the open, running toward the stream.
He heard the
ca-ra-wong! of Wilson's big rifle, and again in a second crashing carawong! and
turning saw the lion, horrible-looking now, with half his head seeming to be
gone, crawling toward Wilson in the edge of the tall grass while the red-faced
man worked the belt on the short ugly rifle and aimed carefully as another
blasting carawong! came from the muzzle, and the crawling, heavy, yellow bulk
of the lion stiffened and the huge, mutilated head slid forward and Macomber,
standing by himself in the clearing where he had run, holding a loaded rifle,
while two black men and a white man looked back at him in contempt, knew the
lion was dead. He came toward Wilson, his tallness all seeming a naked
reproach, and Wilson looked at him and said:
"Want to
take pictures?"
"No,"
he said.
That was all
any one had said until they reached the motor car. Then Wilson had said:
"Hell of
a fine lion. Boys will skin him out. We might as well stay here in the
shade."
Macomber's
wife had not looked at him nor he at her and he had sat by her in the back seat
with Wilson sitting in the front seat. Once he had reached over and taken his
wife's hand without looking at her and she had removed her hand from his.
Looking across the stream to where the gun-bearers were skinning out the lion
he could see that she had been able to see the whole thing. While they sat there
his wife had reached forward and put her hand on Wilson's shoulder. He turned
and she had leaned forward over the low seat and kissed him on the mouth.
"Oh, I
say," said Wilson, going redder than his natural baked color.
"Mr.
Robert Wilson," she said. "The beautiful red-faced Mr. Robert
Wilson."
Then she sat
down beside Macomber again and looked away across the stream to where the lion
lay, with uplifted, white-muscled, tendon-marked naked forearms, and white
bloating belly, as the black men fleshed away the skin. Finally the gun-bearer
brought the skin over, wet and heavy, and climbed in behind with it, rolling it
up before they got in, and the motor car started. No one had said anything more
until they were back in camp.
That was the
story of the lion. Macomber did not know how the lion had felt before he
started his rush, nor during it when the unbelievable smash of the .505 with a
muzzle velocity of two tons had hit him in the mouth, nor what kept him coming
after that, when the second ripping crash had smashed his hind quarters and he
had come crawling on toward the crashing, blasting thing that had destroyed
him. Wilson knew something about it and only expressed it by saying,
"Damned fine lion," but Macomber did not know how Wilson felt abut
things either. He did not know how his wife felt except that she was through
with him.
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