Israel is a society where racism is the law.

The main internal refugees in Israel are those who speak Arabic.

Jews that are Arab or Black also face extreme racism. In the 1980s much was made of Israel saving Black Jews in Ethiopia. The story that got less coverage was that racist Israel treated these people so badly that many went home.

As for the supposed lack of racism in capitalist Japan, I must say that you are once again not informed. Here is an article I wrote soon after Sept. 11 that covered racism in Japan:

Japanese Longshore Workers Resist The War,
Racist Government Cracks Down On Korean Japanese

By STEVE ARGUE
200 Japanese dockworkers at Sasebo Port have been
refusing to load war armaments for the U.S. led war
against Afghanistan. Their action also includes a
daily one-hour shut down of the port demanding an end
to Japanese involvement in the war on Afghanistan and
opposing the enactment of Japan's new "anti-terror
laws" that curtail civil liberties.

The Japanese government's role in the so-called war
on terror has included the sending of aircraft, naval
vessels, and 1,600 personnel to the Indian Ocean as
back up for the terror bombing of Afghanistan. While
not directly participating in combat the Japanese role
is to lend support to the war.

Japan's constitution presently forbids the sending
of troops into foreign combat. That constitution was
enacted under the dictates of the United States after
the Japanese government's defeat in World War 2.
Today the Japanese government is moving towards
overturning that part of the constitution. The
resistance in the Japanese working class to Japan
moving into the world military arena is strong after
enduring Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and after having seen
brutal Japanese imperialist war policies including the
1937 rape of Nanjing and the enslavement of "comfort
women" for sex.

While Japan has not played a direct military role
in the world since 1945, Japan is a very powerful
imperialist country in an economic sense. Today the
Japanese ruling class wants to couple its ability to
bully and exploit third world countries economically,
with the ability to bully militarily just as the
United States does. The visit by Japanese Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi to a memorial for Japanese
militarism called the Yasukuni Shrine, coupled with
new official textbooks that blatantly cover up the
crimes of Japanese imperialism while enslaving Asia,
and moves to overturn Japan's pacifist constitution
are important warnings to the Japanese working class
and the people of Asia about the direction the
Japanese ruling class is moving.

A factor in the anti-war sentiment at Sasebo is
their location. Sasebo is very close to both
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and is located in between. The
U.S. atomic bombing of those two cities during World
War 2 killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
After the first bomb was dropped President Truman
addressed the nation saying, "The world will note that
the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a
military base". Neither city was a military target,
but the American people were lied to then just as we
are lied to today.

Despite the lies in the American corporate media
and lies of the U.S. government we now know through
European and other foreign mainstream media that over
3,500 civilians have died in the U.S. bombing of
Afghanistan. These Afghani civilians had nothing to
do with September 11th. This civilian death count
was meticulously tabulated by Prof. Marc Harold of the
University of New Hampshire who compiled the
information from the foreign press up until Dec. 10th.
More civilians have died in the bombing since.

The dockworkers of Sasebo know that the targeting
of civilians is never justified. The horrors
experienced by the people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima
were partially meant to attain an immediate
unconditional surrender from the Japanese government
in order to avoid an invasion and for the U.S. to
avoid the Soviet Union gaining a role in post war
Japan. Whether one agrees with these goals or not the
atomic incineration of hundreds of thousands of
civilians coupled with burns, radiation illness, and
birth defects has no justification.

Today the U.S. government wants us to think that
the murder of civilians on September 11th justifies
the death and destruction the U.S. has carried out
against Afghanistan. Yet long before September 11th
the U.S. government has been carrying out terror
bombing killing 5 million in Korea, 3 million in
Vietnam, well over a million in Iraq through bombing
and sanctions, thousands in Panama, and millions
through proxy wars including propping up the racist
and genocidal government of Israel and putting the
Taliban in power in Afghanistan.

The dockworkers of Sasebo know that the killing of
civilians is not justified, and they are taking one of
the most profound actions in the world to stop the
killing. They are showing, by their small example,
how the workers of the world have the potential
ability to stop imperialist war. That potential
ability can be found in the fact that we can stop the
shipment and production of war armaments.

The example of the Sasebo workers continues to be
very relevant. The so-called war on terror, the Bush
Administration tells us, is not over. While the U.S.
government has not yet finished their objectives in
Afghanistan they are looking towards carrying out wars
in Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, Libya, and
Yemen. In addition the U.S. is heavily involved in
giving billions of dollars of military support to the
Colombian death squad government against a powerful
peasant insurgency, and giving even more support to
the deadly racist government of Israel against the
Palestinian people.

So-called War On Terrorism Targets Korean Japanese

On November 28th Bush named North Korea as one of
the potential targets of the so-called war on
terrorism. The next day the Japanese government began
a campaign of repression against the Korean Japanese
communities. In the Tokyo area Japanese police
arrested 15 leaders of the General Association of
Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon). Their offices
were ransacked and the treasurer of the organization
was taken from the hospital to jail.

Forty-seven different Korean Japanese businesses
were raided as well. These businesses included banks
and savings and loan operations which are very
important to the Korean Japanese because Japanese
Koreans cannot get a loan from a Japanese bank.

The Japanese government, like the U.S. government,
is using September 11th as an excuse to crack down on
dissent. Today in the U.S. it is Arabs and Central
Asians who are being scape-goated for Sept. 11th as the
rights of all workers are being eroded. In Japan it
is 700, 000 Korean Japanese who are the most direct
victims.

The Korean community in Japan has long been a
victim of racism. They are relegated to the worst and
lowest paying jobs just as America's victims of racism
are. As a result of this and their history most
Korean Japanese are anti-capitalist and sympathetic to
North Korea. North Korea is looked to for
successfully resisting both Japanese and American
imperialism.

The U.S. attempt to impose a puppet government on
all of Korea was done following Japan's defeat in the
Second World War. The resistance of the Korean people
to Japanese imperialism was soon directed against the
U.S. occupation of their land, especially with the
United States using the same individual puppet
government officials to oppress the Korean people as
Japan had.

Facing stiff resistance from the Korean people to a
U.S. occupation of their land the United States went
to war. The 1950-1953 U.S. war against the Korean
people was a slaughter of horrendous proportions.
Five million Koreans were killed in a war that
included an early bombing campaign that did not leave
a building standing.

A sort of stalemate was reached at the end of the
war dividing the country between North and South. The
U.S. continues to occupy the south with 40,000 U.S.
troops aimed not just at the North Korean deformed
workers state, but also at the Korean working class as
a whole. South Korea is far from democratic.
Hundreds of union leaders have been imprisoned in
South Korea this year alone including KCTU President
Dan Byung-Ho. Thirty-six socialists are imprisoned in
South Korea as well for organizing strikes and
publishing books.

The Asian financial crisis a few years ago hit both
Japan and South Korea hard and the economic crisis is
not over. For the bosses it is their intention to make
the workers pay ever more through lay-offs, union
busting, and political repression while the
capitalists enjoy the wealth they've made off of
labor. The militant labor movement of South Korea
that continues to stand up despite repression, and the
Japanese Sasebo workers standing up against war and
political repression are two powerful examples of what
the labor movement as a whole can do in the fight for
a better world.

A potential U.S. war once again on the Korean
peninsula is a potential war that must be fought
against. It is the right of the Korean people to
decide their own government without U.S. intervention
as it should be the right of the people of Afghanistan
to decide their own future.

Afghanistan

Due to U.S. bombing and military assistance to the
"Northern Alliance" Mujahideen the reactionary Taliban
regime appears to be gone. The U.S. put the Taliban
in power to begin with.

The U.S. has brought together the forces to make up
a new transitional government in negotiations held in
Bonn. Excluded from the Bonn talks were the left
progressive former PDPA, now renamed the PVAP. Also
excluded was the "Alliance for democracy in
Afghanistan" in which the Social Democratic Party of
Afghanistan plays the pivotal role and who were
leaders in the uprising against the Taliban in Herat.
In addition the Revolutionary Association of the Women
of Afghanistan (RAWA) was excluded.

Instead the U.S. brought together the King and the
various Mujahideen forces of the "Northern Alliance"
who are known for their abuses of women including mass
rapes and throwing acid into the faces of women
liberated from the veil. By supporting the most
reactionary elements in Afghanistan and excluding all
of those who to some degree advocate women's rights
and democracy, the U.S. government is continuing to
impose misery on the Afghan people. That misery flows
directly from the U.S. intervention that began in
1979.

In 1978 the PDPA came to power in Afghanistan.
Their program of women's rights and literacy campaigns
infuriated fundamentalist mullahs. By 1979 the CIA
was in Afghanistan financing these religious fanatics
who organized the Mujahideen in a holy war against
literacy and women's rights. The Soviet Union,
fearing a fanatical Islamic state on their border
moved in to put down the U.S. backed Mujahideen
rebellion.

The Mujahideen waged their misogynist holy war
against women and literacy with billions of dollars in
U.S. aid and with the profits made off of the heroin
trade. Their tactics included murdering women for
teaching little girls how to read and write, throwing
acid into the faces of women who had become liberated
from the veil, and skinning Soviet soldiers alive who
were defending the PDPA government from the CIA's
Mujahideen.

It is the factions of these mercenary killers the
U.S. government installed back into power on Nov. 13th
as a result of murderous U.S. bombing and other direct
aid to the northern Mujahideen.

The rule of the Taliban also flowed directly out of
earlier U.S. support to the Mujahideen, and Pakistani
dictatorship. Many of the fanatics of the Taliban
were recruited out of the Mujahideen. The Taliban
were organized and financed with direct assistance
from the U.S. supported Pakistani dictatorship and
secret police in an attempt towards imposing a
friendly stable government. Osama bin Laden was one
of the recipients of this U.S. aid, first for the
defeat of the PDPA government, and later in the
attempt to impose a friendly and stable Taliban
government that would benefit Pakistani and U.S.
economic interests. The U.S. got neither, but they
were still trying up until this year. In fact the
clerical fascist regime of the Taliban received 120
million dollars in U.S. aid in the year 2001 alone.

U.S. interests go beyond getting rid of the Taliban
and alleged terrorists. The real desire is a stable
government that can defend oil and gas interests. The
Taliban was not capable or completely willing to give
U.S. oil and gas interests exactly what they wanted.
These points were made clear by John J. Maresca, vice
president of Unocal, when he explained Unocal's desire
to get at billions of barrels of Central Asian oil
with a pipeline through Afghanistan. He explained
this in testimony before a House committee on Feb. 12,
1998 saying, "From the outset, we have made it clear
that construction of our proposed pipeline cannot
begin until a recognized government is in place that
has the confidence of governments, lenders and our
company."

The U.S. government now sees King Zahir Shah as the
puppet to give Unocal what they want. Yet this will
not be easy to impose. Two of the countries that also
want a hand in Central Asian oil are Russia and Iran.
Both countries are giving backing to forces made up of
nationalities that were murdered by King Zahir Shah
when he was in power.

The now capitalist Russian government backs the
Tajik Islamic fanatics under the leadership of Ismail
Khan, while Iran backs various Hazara groupings.
Meanwhile the U.S. is trying to re-impose on top of
these forces King Zahir Shah, who during his reign in
power carried out ethnic cleansing against the Tajik
and Hazara nationalities.

So-called "peace keeping" troops are being sent in
an attempt to maintain stability. Yet it is not in
the interests of the Afghani people or the working
class of the United States, Japan, or any other
country to re-impose King Zahir Shah on the people of
Afghanistan. We are not the ones who will profit when
UNOCAL gets its billions of barrels of Central Asian
oil, but it will be our class, working people in
uniform from various countries, who are likely to die
imposing a King for the profits of UNOCAL. All
imperialist forces out Afghanistan and the Red Sea
now! No to war against North Korea! Workers of the
world strive to follow the example of the Sasebo
dockworkers to stop the madness of our rulers!