0 OPINION Thursday, January 12, 1989 Page 4 The Michigan Doily .diiau.&dl Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan 420 Maynard St. Vol. IC, No. 73 Ann Arbor MI 48109 Unsigned editorials represent a majority of the Daily's Editorial Board. All other cartoons, signed articles, and letters do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Daily. Laboratories of death U. S undercuts talks U. S. MEDIA COVERAGE of the Paris conference on chemical weapons indicates the State Department has suc- ceeded in fixing attention on its unsub- stantiated allegation that Libya is build- ing a chemical weapons plant. Over 100 nations have sent delegates to the conference. And yet both the New York Times and the Associated Press this week have focused almost exclusively on the accusations and de- nials of the U.S. and Libyan represen- tatives. Even the announcement of a unilateral destruction of much of the Soviet chemical arsenal has been eclipsed by obsessive reportage of U.S.-Libyan dueling. By Tuesday, both the AP and the Times reported that the conference was fraught with bickering. In fact, as is revealed near the ends of these stories, it is specifically the imputations put forth by the United States that are cre- ating divisiveness. If the past is any indication, repeat allegations serve for the United States significant and nefarious purposes. Even if later discredited, allegations can undermine the applications of in- ternational law and raise doubts about verifiability and the value of arms con- trol agreements. As the world's largest chemical weapons producer, the United States has a great stake in achieving these ends. .In 1981, the Reagan administration ptbmulgated a series of similar allega- tipns against the Soviet Union. As re- pdrted repeatedly in U.S. newspapers, tt Soviets were allegedly manufac- triing biological weapons, deploying chemical weapons in Afghanistan, and had provided toxin weapons (yellow rain) to the Vietnamese - all in viola- tidn of the Geneva Protocol. ;This entire series of accusations was a : later discredited or remained inconclu- sive. But simply disseminating the al- leg ations made the Protocol - along with disarmament treaties in general - appear impotent and ineffective. Soon after, citing Soviet "non-com- pliance," U.S. conservatives began en- couraging withdrawal from the Bio- logical Weapons Convention. And in this atmosphere of manufactured dis- trust, the U.S. Chemical Warfare and Biological Defense Programs experi- enced a resurgence of support. Be- tween 1980 and 1985, funds for re- search and development of biological and chemical weapons increased 300 percent. Political attitudes shifted from disarmament to re-armament. Now the United States is again sowing the seeds of suspicion and doubt. Reflecting on the breakdown of the Paris negotiations, the New York Times offhandedly referred to the Geneva Protocol as an "almost antique document" (1/10/89). This trivialization of international law does indeed make remote the possibility of a meaningful consensus. And this is unforgivable. The out- come of the Paris conference will have much to say about the fate of a binding treaty, currently in draft form, that would ban chemical weapons outright. Two years of negotiations in Geneva have seen good progress, but this frag- ile process could be easily derailed by false allegations and belligerent pos- turing. The world's graveyards are filled with the victims of chemical warfare. Negotiations to ban chemical arsenals must be entered into soberly and in good faith. The United States has failed to do this, and the media has failed to hold the United States responsible for its damaging actions. by Arlin Wasserman This is the third of a four-part series. Richard Jannaccio was once a science writer for the University of Wisconsin in Madison (UW). The day before he was fired, Jannaccio wrote a story about a newly hired consultant at the University. That consultant is Philip Sobocinski. Sobocinski was hired to help professors at UW tailor their research to attract Pen- tagon grants - that is to serve the inter- ests of our nation's military. Sobocinski moved to Madison when he retired as an army colonel serving at the Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Disease in Fort Detrick, Mary- land. There he oversaw the distribution of over $300 million in research grants. UW's hiring of Sobocinski capped their year-long search to hire a recently retired Department of Defense (DoD) officer to head their University Industry Research Program. Sobocinski fits the bill perfectly. He retired only a few weeks before coming to UW. There he helped Professor Fun Sun Chu land a half million dollar grant to study trichothecene T2 poisons which kill by causing profuse bleeding. Not only did Chu receive the money to develop antibodies to fight T2 toxins but also to mutate the virus itself and create new antibodies to cure the newly created varia- tions of the disease. This research parallels the general U.S. policy on chemical and biological weapons (CBWs): create aggressive weapons for which only we have the cure so that these weapons can be used to dec- imate the enemy without adverse affects on the soldiers using the weapons. Arlin Wasserman investigates military research at the University for the Michigan Student Assembly, Chu is currently developing new forms of saxatoxins, an algae derived from poi- son which the CIA has used in Central America since 1975. Soon after Chu's first grant, Professor Bibhuti DasGupta re- ceived a quarter million dollars to develop nerve toxins in the Food Research Insti- tute of UW, the same unit in which Chu works. We can all look at the UW situation and marvel at what takes place at another Big Ten university. But we should not be sur- prised. Similar types of research go on at this university, which currently receives nearly $12 million from the Pentagon - over a million dollars more than UW re- ceived this year. This figure has more than doubled in the past five years. The root causes of this problem exist at many levels. One can point the finger at administrators may see their jobs as value- free: the researchers create the weapons and the government uses them. In the words of Philip Sobocinski "The United States leadership from the President on down, the management of the DoD laboratories and the scientists themselves are all ethical and moral people" (Progressive 11/87). But as we have al- ready seen in part one of this article, our President is not hesitant to use CBWs to achieve political gains. And lastly, we can place the blame for the militarization of scientific research on the Reagan administration. Universities need research funding, and if funds are cut for the Department of Health and Human Services or the Environmental Protection Agency and given to the DoD, then it is t '...Are they free of blame if they do not even wonder about the motivations of the Pentagon to fund their particular re- search project?' 0 researchers who feel that science is value free, that the poisons they create can be used for good or bad. In this, they are cor- rect. But are they free of blame if they do not even wonder about the motivations of the Pentagon to fund their particular re- search project? In the case of Chu who now works with algae, if our country is worried about civilian poisoning from al- gae, why is the money not coming from the National Institute of Health? At the same time, university administrations are motivated to go after money for research. The University of Michigan would probably be embarrassed to note that its total research dollars for 1990 dropped by eight or nine percent, and this is the likely scenario if it discontinued receiving money from the Pentagon. Large research universities are likely to go after as much money as possible. And these not surprising to see universities restruc- turing their research priorities to match those the Reagan administration has established. It is unlikely that the Bush administra- tion will stop developing new CBWs, but it may be possible to prevent much of the research from occurring (or at least not on this campus) by creating an atmosphere of awareness - one in which professors ac- tively question if they want to do certain types of research for the DoD. Moreover, as citizens and as students we may want to ask whether or not we want this type of research conducted at any public university and whether CBW re- search actually serves the public interest. (This will be the subject of the final part of this series.) Zionism reviewed Associated Press Geneva A young victim of Iraqi chemical fast year for medical treatment. By Libby S. Adler The majority of letters and editorials on this page prove their authors to be less than knowledgeable when it comes to Zionist theory. It is understandable in the face of current Israeli oppressive measures that people might attribute these inexcus- able policies to the ideology that the state presumes to espouse. This kind of willful ignorance plays well into the hands of those who oppose an ideology. An anti-communist can cite problems in the Soviet Union and an anti- capitalist can cite oppression in the United States, though John Locke's theory of property, upon which our system is sup- posedly based, does indeed account for the greed and distressing inequalities that we see in this country. Many of our campus' anti-Zionists have utilized the same advantage, masking an anti-Israeli gov- ernment stand behind a poorly supported anti-Zionist one. There is no lack of evidence that Israel has been enacting the ideals of the most dangerous of the Zionist theorists, but it is imperative to realize that Zionism is not a monolithic ideological entity. Sadly for those who have never been exposed to Zionist thought, many of the letters and editorials in the Daily have mentioned only the most right-wing of a vast spec- trum of Zionist thinkers. Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zion- ism, the ideology of the Likud party in Israel, was a right-winger. Likud has done a swell job of enacting his principles, which, modeled on the Italian nationalism of his day, are not exactly humanitarian in their methods. Meir Kahane, a virtual outcast in mainstream Israeli society, has been cited repeatedly on this page. He is, unquestionably, a bigot, as even some of Israel's more accepted political leaders have proven themselves to be. Before you dismiss Zionism as a whole, however, I would ask you to examine the thoughts of a few other influential Zionist thinkers and the platforms and voting records of other parties in the Israeli par- Libby S. Adler is an LSA senior liament, the "Knesset." I am not talking about fringe elements in pre-statehood theory or Israeli society, but visible and known thinkers and politicians. A.D. Gordon, for example, has been classified as both a socialist and a mystic. He wrote about the connection that the Jewish people had to the land in Palestine. He believed that only by directly working on the land can the Jews get back in touch with their national creative consciousness. This theory is completely void of any no- tion of exclusivity. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook is yet an- other great Jewish mystic (not to be con- fused with his embarrassing offspring, a Rabbi someone else Kook, founder of the Gush Emunim philosophy). He wrote of the Jewish nation's need to regain its geo- graphical and cultural cohesion such that it may fulfill the commandments of the Torah, regain cultural creativity, re-estab- 'I am a Zionist. I believe in the r termination: both my nation and war with mine. tion, and have been vocal and active against the violation of human rights and U.N. agreements. Both parties are Zion- ist; that is, they favor the existence of a home for the Jewish People in Israel. They, as I, believe that Jewish liberation and Palestinian liberation can indeed both exist in Palestine. The place is small, but not so small. I am a Zionist. I believe in the right of all nations to self-determination: both my nation and the nation that is bitterly at war with mine. It saddens me that Yitzhak Shamir and George Habash demand exclu- sive rights to this land of two peoples. To equate Zionism with racism is to take into account only those Zionists that deny individual or national rights to Palestinians. Zionism is a national liberation movement. If you believe that all nationalist movements are racist, ther. you must concede that Palestinian, Arme ight of all nations to self-de- 1the nation that is bitterly at bombardment arrives in .s Praise for the PLO NOUGH IS ENOUGH.We want peace." With these words Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat set the stage for a new eTa in the Palestine/Israel conflict. In a concession to Secretary of State George Shultz's diplomatic newspeak, Arafat accepted UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, acknowl- edged "the right of all parties," includ- ing Israel, "to exist in peace and secu- rity" and "totally and absolutely" re- nounced terrorism.This ended a 13-year I.S. ban on negotiating with the PLO. The Palestinian people and their sole lgitimate representative, the Palestine Liberation Organization, should be commended for their political pragma- .For forty years the people of Pales- tine have withstood Israel's Iron Fist fence, however, is less than encourag- ing. The very same day the United States sat down with PLO officials for the first stage of dialogue, Israeli troops in the West Bank town of Nablus murdered five Palestinian mourners at a funeral and wounded scores of others across the Gaza Strip and West Bank. In a rare display of public unity, Shimon Peres of the Labor Party and Yitzhak Shamir of the Likud Block have ruled out the possibility of Israeli participation in an international peace conference with the PLO - almost universally recognized as the only possibility for peace. For the sake of all people in the re- gion, Israel must end the suffering of the Palestinian people and move to- ward recognition of the Palestinian lish a relationship with God, and con- tribute to the world as a whole. Rabbi Kook's ultimate goal was universalism, but he felt that the Jews would better con- tribute to the "Tao", if you will, once they had re-established their cultural and reli- gious roots. Ahad Ha'am, Hebrew for "One People", was a proponent of reviving the Hebrew language (which in its current form is less than a century old). He also wished to see Jewish centers for study established. Again, the idea is Jewish revival, not the oppression of Palestinians. Current political parties such as the Citizens Rights Movement (CRM) and Mapam (based on Ber Borochov's Socialist Zionism), have respectable platforms, voting records and morals. CRM has in- troduced legislation to better the lives of Palestinians, women and gay men. Ma- pam is aligned with CRM, but tends to focus more on economic issues. Both par- ties oppose the occupation, favor talks with the Palestinian Liberation Organiza- nian and Kurdish nationalism are racist movements as well. To equate current Ise raeli policy with racism, state terrorism or,, military oppression is much more realis- tic, and this column should in no way be taken as a justification for such action, My point is that Zionism, the ideology, and Zionists, the proponents, are a lot more diverse than many of the authors on this campus would have you believe. Check out The Zionist Idea by Arthur Hertzberg, for a survey of Zionist theory, and watch for the statements and activities not just of the campus group Tagar, but also of the Progressive Zionist Caucus. The Soviet Union had its Stalin as well as its Gorbachev; Palestine had its Abu Jihad and its Mubarak Awad. Only by recognizing the diversity of thinkers and actors on the scene of any movement or institution, can we come to a just and in- formed judgement. It is time for those who care about the Middle East to start examining the peacemakers and the moderates instead of simply exploiting the eytrpmisc_ i J ... ,. .... .. ...., r..... .,.... ...