If an Israeli group wants to march in New York, do you allow Neo-Nazis into their parade? If African Americans are marching in Harlem, do they have to let the Ku Klux Klan into their parade? … People have rights. If we let the [Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization] in, is it the Irish Prostitute Association next?

—John Dunleavy, chairman of New York’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, telling The Irish Times why lesbian and gay marchers should be kept off the streets, in the closet, on the other side of the rainbow, etc.

There are rules to follow when making analogies. One is that they be logically consistent. To my knowledge, there are no Israeli Neo-Nazis, or African American KKK members. But there are Irish gays and lesbians — including New York’s newly elected council leader, Christine Quinn, who condemned Dunleavy’s remarks.

Just how petty can the parade’s organizers be? They banned not just the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization but also the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, an advocacy group supporting undocumented Irish immigrants (an estimated 40,000 in the U.S.). Perhaps the organizers forget that many of their ancestors were terribly persecuted immigrants themselves, who escaped famine in their own land to face racism and poverty in America — back at a time when America’s borders were open and there was no such thing as an “illegal alien.”

That said, I have to admit I can’t get too worked up over this parade issue because I find all parades to be boring. I’m sure there’s something I’m missing here. But really, what’s so exciting about standing outside in frigid weather watching grown men in funny costumes walk down the street and wave? It’s so 19th century.

Which basically sums up the mentality of the parade’s organizers.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

The body of Tom Fox, one of the four peace activists kidnapped in Iraq last November, was discovered Thursday. The 54-year-old father of two, a member of the Chicago-based Christian Peacemaker Teams, had been tortured with electric cables before being shot in the head.

Fox, a Quaker, was a dedicated activist who spent the last two years of his life in Iraq, working with Iraqi human rights groups to foster peace and seeking a richer understanding of Islamic culture. As a peacemaker he found his inspiration in Jesus and Gandhi, who taught him to stand firmly, nonviolently, against evil. Writing to his fellow activists in October, Fox asked them to remember the Mahatma’s words: “A person who has known God will be incapable of harboring anger or fear within him, no matter how overpowering the cause for that anger or fear may be.”

The day before his abduction, Fox shared another short reflection titled “Why are we here?” Here is an excerpt:

I have read that the word in the Greek Bible that is translated as “love” is the word “agape.” Again, I have read that this word is best expressed as a profound respect for all human beings simply for the fact that they are all God’s children. I would state that idea in a somewhat different way, as “never thinking or doing anything that would dehumanize one of my fellow human beings.”

As I survey the landscape here in Iraq, dehumanization seems to be the operative means of relating to each other. U.S. forces in their quest to hunt down and kill “terrorists” are, as a result of this dehumanizing word, not only killing “terrorists,” but also killing innocent Iraqis: men, women and children in the various towns and villages.

It seems as if the first step down the road to violence is taken when I dehumanize a person. That violence might stay within my thoughts or find its way into the outer world and become expressed verbally, psychologically, structurally or physically. As soon as I rob a fellow human being of his or her humanity by sticking a dehumanizing label on them, I begin the process that can have, as an end result, torture, injury and death.

“Why are we here?” We are here to root out all aspects of dehumanization that exist within us. We are here to stand with those being dehumanized by oppressors and stand firm against that dehumanization. We are here to stop people, including ourselves, from dehumanizing any of God’s children, no matter how much they dehumanize their own souls.

His hopeful words then sting us now with a painful irony. This is all the more true of the “statement of conviction” that Fox and his fellow sojourners signed last March, in which they acknowledged the dangers of their work in Iraq — and yet insisted its importance outweighed the risks. “We hope that in loving both friends and enemies and by intervening non-violently to aid those who are systematically oppressed, we can contribute in some small way to transforming this volatile situation,” the statement read.

Even if the love they showed to their enemies was not enough, there could be no hatred in their hearts, the statement went on to say. In the event of hostage-taking, “We will try to understand the motives for these actions, and to articulate them, while maintaining a firm stance that such actions are wrong…. [We] reject violence to punish anyone who harms us…. We forgive those who consider us their enemies.”

We will never know for certain what thoughts went through Tom Fox’s head in the moments before his death. But if the words and deeds he offered over the course of his life are any indication, he faced his murderers without fear, or anger.

Acknowledging the humanity that they had forsaken.

Forgiving them, for they knew not what they did.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Personal information on detainees was withheld solely to protect detainee privacy and for their own security…. [Disclosure] could result in retribution or harm to the detainees or their families.

—Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler, U.S. military spokesman in Guantánamo Bay, on why the Pentagon refused for four years to release the names of the prisoners held at the offshore prison, until a federal judge ordered it to do so this week.

Ever since it started shipping prisoners arrested in Afghanistan and Pakistan to prison facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the Bush administration has fought ferociously to keep them away from the rule of law and the skeptical eye of the international community. First, the suspects were planted upon a plot of occupied land that the U.S. government contends it leased but the Cuban government claims was taken by force. (When’s the last time you “leased” a car from your Honda dealer at gunpoint?) Then, it refused to allow the prisoners to see lawyers or family, classified them as “enemy combatants” to advance a flimsy legal argument for holding them indefinitely without charges, and prevented any outside group (except, after a while, the International Committee of the Red Cross) from gaining access to the prisoners. Even after incidents of torture came to light, the administration continued to refuse to release the identities of the prison’s occupants — until The Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and a federal judge ruled against the government, demanding that the relevant documents be handed over on Friday.

Following their usual practice of letting no bad deed go un-spun, the Bush administration is suddenly making itself out to be a kinder, gentler jailer. The identities of Guantánamo’s prisoners, says a Pentagon spokesman, were withheld “solely to protect detainee privacy and for their own security.”

Privacy? Security? Sir, have you no sense of irony?

It is truly awe-inspiring to watch a government spokesperson say these things with a straight face. It reminds me of how the Pentagon, when faced with a rash of attempted suicides at the Guantánamo prison, started reclassifying them as “manipulative self-injurious behaviors” — because anyone who wants to kill himself is just being “manipulative.”

Of course, it is possible that the Guantánamo prisoners, wasting away for years in their cells with no connection to the world outside, are really pining for privacy. They don’t want anyone else to know or care about what happens to them. Their detainment is, after all, a private matter to be discussed between the prisoner and his jailer. Perhaps they’re afraid of identity theft or telemarketers.

It is possible that the prisoners fear for their safety, too. Inside the Guantánamo prison, they’ve been pampered — with repeated beatings and sexual abuse, having feeding tubes shoved up their noses without sedatives, being chained in a fetal position for hours until they defecate upon themselves. Outside, who knows what may happen to them?

There are surely some very bad men holed up in Guantánamo. But after five years of this human rights (and public relations) disaster, there is still no compelling reason why the prisoners being held there can’t be charged with crimes, given fair trails, and then, if found guilty, sentenced and punished. Does the Bush administration persist in its Orwellian policies because of mere stubbornness or because it lacks any evidence that many of these men were actually al-Qaeda fighters (as a review of the Pentagon’s own data concluded)?

Or maybe the government has just grown attached to its little gulag in sunny Guantánamo. What would the 500-some prisoners do without the Bush administration to look after their privacy, security, and tendencies toward “manipulative self-injurious behavior”?

Maybe this is what George Bush meant when he talked about compassionate conservatism. At Guantánamo, Big Brother knows best.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world knows nothing.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

There’s a great piece by Thomas Walkom in the Toronto Star about how the climate of fear that the Bush administration has exploited since the September 11 terrorist attacks is itself to blame for the hysteria over the sale of six ports to an Arab, state-owned company based in Dubai — a hysteria that Bush is struggling mightily now to control, in defiance of many members of his own party.

Irony is a constant in politics. Since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush has deliberately defined the world in the black-and-white, us-versus-them language of his war on terror. Now, the rhetorical demons he so assiduously promoted are coming back to bite.

The fears surrounding the port deal are misinformed, even “racist,” Walkom says. There is no compelling security reason for blocking this firm from purchasing the ports:

The American president points out, correctly, that the arch-conservative and profoundly undemocratic U.A.E. government is a staunch U.S. ally.

His defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld notes — also correctly — that terrorists can come from anywhere, including the U.S. and Britain. Why condemn an entire nation because a few of its citizens made the wrong choice?

The editors of The Wall Street Journal, who find the entire episode distasteful, note that security at these ports will continue to be handled by the U.S. government.

The only effective difference is that profits made by running the ports will flow to princelings in Dubai rather than capitalists in the City of London.

But among Americans, none of this seems to matter. A citizenry whose fears have been so successfully exploited by this administration remains unconvinced.

Over the past five years, Bush has defined his presidency by his willingness — better yet, eagerness — to overturn or ignore laws that he feels stand in the way of “getting the terrorists.” Now his fans must wonder why Bush has suddenly grown soft. How can he defend the rights of foreigners to do business while endangering the lives of Americans?

The criticism of the port deal may not be justified, but for the many millions of Americans whipped into an eschatological frenzy thanks to the constant terror alerts and Iraqi roadside bombings and bin Laden terror tapes, it makes perfect sense. In the America that Bush built, racism is indeed rational.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Once upon a time, a secretive vice president convened a secret government task force that developed secret energy policies and secretly included energy industry executives.

Then, there were secret military tribunals, with secret charges for secret prisoners. There were secret renditions that transferred some of these secret prisoners to secret prisons in secret European countries.

There was the disclosure of the identity of a secret CIA officer. Who told what to whom remains a secret, and the vice president’s chief of staff was indicted for allegedly keeping secrets from federal prosecutors.

There was a secret conversation between a president and prime minister about secretly bombing an Arabic television network. There was another secret discussion about tricking Iraqis into shooting down a U.S. spy plane secretly painted with United Nations colors.

The administration secretly intercepted the communications of UN delegates in New York, and secretly bugged the office of the UN’s nuclear watchdog agency.

Members of Congress wanted to see records of secret communications between federal government officials responding to Hurricane Katrina, but these, after all, were secret.

The secret budget for the country’s secretive spy agency turned out to be not-so-secret.

There were meetings between a corrupt lobbyist and the president, but the details continue to be kept secret. A photograph of one such meeting was available online and then pulled, because someone wanted it to remain a secret.

The administration engaged in secret wiretapping of American citizens, bypassing a secret court set up explicitly to monitor such surveillance and keeping their activities a secret from all but a few members of Congress, who were themselves bound to secrecy. But defenders of the administration vowed that those responsible for revealing this secret would be punished.

There were secret photos of secret acts of abuse, torture, and murder at an Iraqi prison. (Ironically, abuse, torture, and murder occurred at this prison under an earlier regime, too, but that was an open secret.)

The vice president was involved in a secret shooting and drank a secret quantity of beer.

This week, we learned that there were secret government documents that were classified as not secret until secret federal agencies decided they should be secret again, which was kept secret from the public — and even apparently from the people in charge of keeping tabs on those secrets.

Many years ago, when this country was fighting another global war, the government engaged in secret wars and gathered secret information about the enemy. That secret intelligence turned out to be misinformed, foolish, even dangerous in its blindness.

Today’s secretive governments may have their secret reasons for keeping secrets, but is all this secrecy worth the trouble?

“Secrecy,” a wise man once said, “is for losers.”

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Don’t pick a fight with a ’toon — especially a ’toon who is syndicated.

In an outbreak of cartoon (cartoonish?) anger a tad less frightening than the worldwide protests over the prophet Mohammad cartoons, the Rev. Al Sharpton recently attacked cartoonist Aaron McGruder for an episode of his animated series, Cartoon Network’s The Boondocks, in which MLK wakes up from a decades-long coma, protests the Bush administration, and utters the N-word. Over the past week, McGruder has struck back with a series of newspaper cartoons devoted to trashing Sharpton for trashing The Boondocks (see here, here, here, and here).

For another take on the flap, check out this column by USA Today’s DeWayne Wickham.

Interestingly, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius mentioned one of these recent Boondocks cartoons in a column yesterday. Ignatius compared the recent Muslim backlash to the Mohammad cartoons to African Americans’ reactions to the N-word. He held up McGruder’s cartoon as an example of how African Americans today can “deal with their anger in less self-destructive ways.” (Did Ignatius realize that the whole point of McGruder’s cartoon was to slam Sharpton for slamming him?) In turn, Workbench criticized Ignatius for his “jaw-dropping racial generalizations.”

Who ever thought that cartoons would become the most serious news of the day, worthy of endless protests, riots, arsons, and testy editorials?

Speaking of news and the funny pages, Doonesbury seems to be at the top of its game again. Since the Iraq invasion Garry Trudeau has been chronicling the tragic absurdities of the war — both abroad and on the home front — mostly through the eyes of Doonesbury character B.D., a veteran of Vietnam and both Gulf Wars, who lost his leg in Iraq and is now (sort of) seeking counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder. B.D.’s helmet has finally come off; Bush’s Mad Martian-wear is still on, though looking a little worse for wear in these post-“Mission Accomplished” days.…

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

First there was the story of the special bond between two cowboys, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who began a forbidden and secretive love affair after one fateful night on a Wyoming mountain. Now comes a film about the special friendship between two other men, separated by vast expanses of time and space, and yet drawn together by love: Marty McFly and Dr. Emmett Brown.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

It’s an open secret that American tourists regularly head to Cuba to frolic on the white beaches of our closest communist neighbor, but if you happen to go there to protest American foreign policy, prepare to be indicted …

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

I just watched a PBS Frontline documentary, “Sex Slaves,” which provides a much-needed look at a global trade that snares hundreds of thousands of women around the world. The documentary is incredibly engrossing, centered around the story of a husband searching for his pregnant wife, Katia, a Moldovan woman who was sold into slavery by an acquaintance while traveling in Turkey. Katia and many other women from impoverished countries are duped with offers of legitimate work, kidnapped, and held against their will. They are typically forced to have sex with eight to 15 men a day and beaten regularly. (This kind of sex trade does not just happen in far-off lands: About 20-25,000 of these women have ended up in the United States, says one expert interviewed in the documentary.) Another former sex slave, Tania, from Ukraine, went to Turkey in the hope of getting a nanny job; she was sold to a violent pimp and worked as a prostitute for 10 weeks under the threat of violence until a customer bought her freedom. “Before this, I hadn’t encountered much evil in my life,” Tania says. “But when I got there I couldn’t believe places like that actually exist in this world. I thought I’d find at least one kind person, or that one of those pimps would set me free.” In Turkey, the police officers collude with sex traffickers; some are even customers.

The scariest thing is that Tania chooses to go back to her life as a prostitute. Her family lives in utter poverty in Chernobyl, Ukraine; they cannot afford surgery for Tania’s severely ill younger brother. Shortly after winning her freedom, Tania decides to return to Turkey and sell herself — this time willingly — to raise the money. It may seem like a story taken from a dreary historical novel like Memoirs of a Geisha or Les Misérables, but this is the reality for hundreds of thousands of women, trapped in a modern-day nightmare where poverty and lawlessness meet human lust and cruelty.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has a thoughtful post on the violent reaction to cartoons published of the prophet Mohammad. An excerpt:

An open society, a secular society can’t exist if mob violence is the cost of giving offense. And that does seem like what’s on offer here. That’s the crux of this issue — that the response is threatened violence and more practical demands that such outrages must end. It’s back to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses …

The price of blasphemy is death. And among many in the Muslim world it is not sufficient that those rules apply in their countries. They should apply everywhere. Perhaps something so drastic isn’t called for — at least in the calmer moments or settled counsels. But at least European governments are supposed to clamp down on their presses to heal the breach.

In a sense how can such claims respect borders? The media, travel and electronic interconnections of the world make borders close to meaningless.

So liberal mores versus theocratic mores. Where’s the possible compromise? There isn’t any. On the face of it this gets portrayed as an issue of press freedom. But this is much more fundamental. ‘Press freedom’ is just one cog in the machinery of a society that doesn’t believe in or accept the idea of ‘blasphemy.’

I agree that there doesn’t seem to be any possibility of a long-term compromise in this case. In a diverse and increasingly interconnected world, the only hope for peace comes from accepting the right of individuals anywhere to criticize, even mock, anyone else’s beliefs. In the absence of such debate, we will eventually move back to a world of tribal, state-sponsored religions, with scientific inquiry halted or limited (which on some days seems to be the world that the Bush administration prefers).

That said, I’m not sure that all the clucking and finger-waving coming from opponents of Islam is going to get us to any solution either. Traditionalist, reactionary thinking always gains strength when there is meddling by foreigners identified with another faith. There is a tendency to close ranks when one’s people, culture, and fundamental beliefs are threatened.

Such was the case as far back as the early history of Christian Europe. If Muslim armies still had control of Spain in the 16th century, would there have been a Protestant Reformation in Germany and elsewhere? Dissent could take root in part because Europe’s Christians no longer felt as vulnerable to invasion from a foreign, infidel power; now they could simply turn on each other.

Muslims in the Middle East already have to deal with the presence of foreign troops on their soil, and foreign governments in their politics. The latest round of attacks on Islam from Europe and America has given extremist religious leaders all the more credibility among their followers.

With time and without meddling, the Islam that the West fears so much — the Islam that set the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus on fire — can surely evolve, in much the same way that other faiths have evolved to blunt, and even expunge, traditions incompatible with liberal, capitalistic democracy. (We may forget, for instance, how far today’s mainstream Christian denominations have come from their traditional, once vehement, opposition to practices like usury and divorce.) After all, contrary to the views of some critics of Islam, not all Muslims think alike. In each of the countries now experiencing riots and upheaval over the Mohammad cartoons, there are growing numbers of highly educated professionals who want to see their societies move toward the protection of Western-style civil liberties. The problem is that these liberties are still seen as too “Western-style.”

If foreigners continue to intrude on domestic affairs in these countries, homegrown reformers will continue to have to counter charges that they are merely flunkies of the foreigners. And their voices of reason and moderation will continue to be drowned out in the strident, unnecessary conflict between East and West.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen

Minutes after George Bush’s State of the Union address tonight, ABC News dissected the speech and announced — with truly startling mathematical precision — that 60 percent of the paragraphs in the president’s speech could have come from one of Bill Clinton’s State of the Union addresses. (It was so startling that I forget if it was 60 percent or some other number.)

In light of this fascinating statistic, I have put together a quiz to test your knowledge of tonight’s State of the Union. After reading the statements below, please indicate whether the words came from (a) George W. Bush’s 2006 State of the Union, (b) Bill Clinton’s 1999 State of the Union, or (c) Osama bin Laden’s recent audiotape.

On justice:

1. “We are people who do not stand for injustice.”

2. “We are pressing … to bring those responsible to justice.”

3. “We do not forget the other half … because the demands of justice and the peace of this world require their freedom as well.”

On the nation:

1. “We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat.”

2. “No nation in history has had the opportunity and the responsibility we now have.”

3. “Our nation has only one option.”

On the nation’s resolve:

1. “We are in this fight to win, and we are winning.”

2. “They win a few battles but lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are much better.”

3. “No one anywhere in the world can doubt the enduring resolve and boundless capacity of [our] people.”

On Osama:

1. “We will defend our security wherever we are threatened, as we did … when we struck at Osama bin Laden’s network of terror.”

2. “Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously.”

3. “A swimmer in the ocean does not fear the rain.”

On Social Security:

1. “So let me say to you tonight, I reach out my hand to all of you in both houses and both parties and ask that we join together in saying to the American people: We will save Social Security now.”

2. “Tonight, I ask you to join me in creating a commission to examine the full impact of baby boom retirements on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. This commission should include members of Congress of both parties, and offer bipartisan answers.”

3. “The best death to us is under the shadows of swords.”

Click here for the answers.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen