Aaron Maté and Moon of Alabama slander Anand Gopal

Anand Gopal

As part of my daily rounds of checking the conspiracist “left”, I make sure to include a visit to Moon of Alabama, a website that grew out of Billmon’s Whiskey Bar from the early 2000s. Most of what appeared there before 2011 was unobjectionable, just as was the case with Seymour Hersh or Robert Fisk’s reporting from the Middle East. When the civil war began in Syria, there was little engagement with its cause. Instead, we were told that this was a new “regime change operation” based on bogus reports about WMD’s. It didn’t matter that Assad was really using sarin gas. Moon of Alabama posted dozens, maybe hundreds, of articles claiming that such reports were “false flags” intended to provoke a full-scale invasion that would replace Assad with rebels linked to al-Qaeda. It didn’t matter that the CIA prevented the FSA from getting its hands on MANPAD’s shipped from Libya. Even after 9 years of asymmetric warfare that left the opposition to Assad huddled and defenseless in Idlib, Moon of Alabama continues to warn darkly about American intervention even if Trump cut off funding to the rebels right after taking power.

Generally, I don’t comment on Moon of Alabama (MofA) since it has little sway outside the Assadist cocoon. However, when I noticed that it had made common cause with Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal’s mini-me next to Ben Norton, over an Anand Gopal article in The New Yorker, I decided to speak up. Once upon a time, the Grayzone crew—Blumenthal, Norton, and Maté—might have had a shot at being published in legitimate magazines like the New Yorker but after becoming indistinguishable from MofA, they are a sideshow. I suppose the rubles compensate for the illegitimacy but one will never know until we get a chance to see their tax returns that are probably more closely guarded than Trump’s.

The MofA blogger, some guy in Germany named Bernhard, and Maté both objected to this paragraph in Gopal’s article:

The U.S.-led coalition waged its assault on Raqqa with exacting legal precision. It vetted every target carefully, with a fleet of lawyers scrutinizing strikes the way an in-house counsel pores over a corporation’s latest contract. During the battle, the coalition commander, Lieutenant General Stephen J. Townsend, declared, “I challenge anyone to find a more precise air campaign in the history of warfare.” Although human-rights activists insist that the coalition could have done more to protect civilians, Townsend is right: unlike Russia, America does not bomb indiscriminately. The U.S. razed an entire city, killing thousands in the process, without committing a single obvious war crime.

Missing from their denunciation of Gopal as making the unforgiveable sin of absolving the USA from “committing a single obvious war crime” is any engagement with the central point of his article, namely that the American rules of war legitimize war crimes.

Behind a paywall (contact me if you need a copy), the article makes clear that the USA has entered a new mode of war-making that is conducted from the air, using guided missiles, drones and bombers beyond the reach of conventional anti-aircraft weapons that make it possible for our military to kill thousands without a single casualty on our side. These paragraphs will make Gopal’s logic clear even though anybody with an IQ over 80 could have figured out his point from the paragraph above:

During the summer of 2016, residents of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria, gathered every night in four houses on the community’s edge, hoping to evade gunfire and bombs. This was the farthest point from a front line, a mile away, where U.S.-backed forces were engaging ISIS fighters. Every night, a drone hovered over Tokhar, filming the villagers’ procession from their scattered homes to these makeshift bunkers. The basements became crowded with farmers, mothers, schoolgirls, and small children. On July 18th, at around 3 a.m., the houses exploded. Thick smoke covered the night sky. Limbs were strewn across the rubble. Children were buried under collapsed walls.

People from surrounding villages spent two weeks digging out bodies. The coalition, meanwhile, announced that it had destroyed “nine ISIL fighting positions, an ISIL command and control node, and 12 ISIL vehicles” in the area that night. Eventually, after reports surfaced that many civilians had died, the coalition admitted to killing twenty-four. When a colleague and I visited, a year after the raid, we documented at least a hundred and twenty dead civilians, and found no evidence that any isis members had been present near the four houses. A mother told me that some small children were obliterated, their bodies never found.

“We take all measures during the targeting process . . . to comply with the principles of the Law of Armed Conflict,” U.S. Marine Major Adrian J. T. Rankine-Galloway said. The essence of this legal code is that militaries cannot intentionally kill civilians. It is true that no one in the chain of command wished to massacre civilians that night—not the pilot or the targeteers or the lawyers. The U.S. points to this fact in calling the Tokhar incident an error, regrettable but not illegal. Yet, though it is reasonable to invoke intention when referring to the mind-set of an individual—this is the idea behind the legal concept mens rea—it seems odd to ascribe a mental state to a collective actor like an army or a state. It is clear, however, that the coalition could have foreseen the outcome of its actions: it had filmed the area for weeks, and intelligence indicating that the village was populated would not have been difficult to gather. During the coalition’s campaign against ISIS, it often based its bombing decisions on faulty assumptions about civilian life; in Mosul, it targeted a pair of family homes after failing to observe civilians outdoors over the course of a few afternoons. Iraqis typically avoid the blazing midday heat. Four people died. The Law of Armed Conflict excuses genuine errors and proscribes intentional killing, but most American warfare operates in a gray zone, which exists, in part, because the law itself is so vague.

Unlike Gopal, Bernhard and Maté only know Syria from afar. Perhaps Maté has visited Damascus as well but if he did, he probably stayed at the same kind of 5-star hotel Blumenthal stays at when he is on one of his junkets. Over lunch a few years ago, Anand told me that he learned Arabic just so he could be able to conduct interviews with people living under the dictatorship. He also didn’t come in on jets landing at the airport in Damascus. Instead, he snuck under barbed wire at the Turkish border and followed painted stones to avoid land mines as he wended his way toward a village that opposed Assad. That is a real reporter as opposed to the corrupt, mendacious, low-rent writers at Grayzone and Moon of Alabama who will have about as much chance getting paid for writing an article in a legitimate magazine as I have winning the NY Marathon in 2021.

Colin Kaepernick and the national anthem

As someone who listens to a lot of sports talk radio, I have been struck by the steady drumbeat of all the white callers who make the same point, as if they were almost reading from a script. It goes something like this:

I understand that football players have free speech but when they are on the job, they have no right to go against their employer. It would be okay with me if Colin Kaepernick had called a press conference to speak about Black Lives Matter or anything else but when he is on company time, he had no right to kneel during the Star Spangled Banner.

The first thing you have to ask yourself is what kind of job requires you to sing the national anthem when the workday starts. People working for Walmart are expected to stock shelves, not stand at attention and sing the Star Spangled Banner so why would someone being paid to throw a football or hit a baseball go through a patriotic ritual before they begin working?

On March 12, 1996, Denver Nuggets point guard Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf (neé Chris Jackson) refused to stand for the national anthem with his teammates. As a convert to Islam, this was counter to his religious beliefs. Additionally, he stated that the flag was a symbol of oppression. He was suspended by the NBA for one game but after a compromise worked out with the league, he agreed to stand but would also be permitted to recite a Muslim prayer instead of singing Francis Scott Key’s harmonically tortuous song that included a verse that condemned slaves fighting for the British in exchange for their freedom.

Unlike the NBA, the NFL has no rules about standing for the national anthem, and the Collective Bargaining Agreement does not mention it as well.

The roots of singing the anthem before sporting events go back to the 1918 World Series when WWI jingoism ruled. This was the same year that Debs made a speech denouncing American participation in World War I, which led to his conviction under the Sedition Act of 1918 and a 10 year prison term. The September 6, 1918 NY Times was clear about the nationalist impulse behind the singing of the anthem, which actually occurred during the 7^th inning stretch rather than before the game started:

Far different from any incident that has ever occurred in the history of baseball was the great moment of the first world’s series game between the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox, which came at Comiskey Park this afternoon during the seventh-inning stretch. As the crowd of 10,274 spectators—the smallest that has witnessed the diamond classic in many years—stood up to take their afternoon yawn, that has been the privilege and custom of baseball fans for many generations, the band broke forth to the strains of ” The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The yawn was checked and heads were .bared as the ball players turned quickly about and faced the music. Jackie Fred Thomas of the U. S. Navy was at attention, as he stood erect, with his eyes set on the flag fluttering at the top of the lofty pole in right field. First the song was taken up by a few, then others joined, and when the final notes came, a great volume of melody rolled across the field. It was at the vary end that the onlookers exploded into thunderous applause and rent the air with a cheer that marked the highest point of the day’s enthusiasm.

The mind of the baseball fan was on the war. The patriotic outburst following the singing of the national anthem was far greater than the upheaval of emotion which greeted Babe Ruth, the Boston southpaw when he conquered Hippo Jim Vaughn and the Cubs in a seething flinging duel by a score of 1 to 0. The cheers for America’s stirring song were greater even than the demonstration offered Vaughn when he twice made the mighty Ruth whiff the air.

Nowadays, baseball owners are not content to have such a display before the game begins. During the seventh-inning stretch, the crowd is expected to sing “God Bless America” on various holidays like Fourth of July. Like 1918, it was an outburst of jingoism following September 11, 2001 that led to it being included as part of the nationalist drumbeat in baseball stadiums. It is only in Yankee Stadium and the Atlanta Braves stadium where “God Bless America” is sung at every game during the seventh-inning stretch.

Also like the “Star Spangled Banner” first being played in 1918, “God Bless America” was composed by Irving Berlin that same year as a way of rousing public opinion in favor of fighting in the trench wars “over there”. The USA suffered 116,708 casualties in WWI, which was 0.13% of the population. That’s a considerable figure considering the fact that the USA only entered the war on April 6, 1917. By comparison, American casualties totaled 58,209 in the Vietnam War, which was 0.0003% of the population.

Most of you are probably familiar with how the song usually starts: “God bless America, land that I love” but the lyrics that precede it will give you a better sense of Berlin’s intentions:

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea,
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free.
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer:

Woody Guthrie hated the song, which was sung ceaselessly on the radio in the 1930s by Kate Smith. He decided to write “This Land is Your Land” as a way of answering Irving Berlin’s pro-war lyrics.

Norman Lear, who just turned down an invitation to be honored at the Kennedy Center because of his disgust with Donald Trump, created “All in the Family” in the early 70s as a way of protesting the Vietnam War and racism. Archie Bunker was the head of the family and about as ignorant and backward as Trump. His son Michael Stivic was a stand-in for people like me, although he never expressed anything remotely sounding like Trotskyism on the show. This argument between Archie and Michael was repeated a million times across America over dinner tables and sounds very much like the reaction to Colin Kaepernick: