There was mixed reaction at home and abroad on the lack of a concrete agreement from the meetings in Iceland. On Capitol Hill, reaction broke down along party lines, with Democrats criticizing the President for missing a golden opportunity; Republicans praised him for not caving in to the Soviets. America's NATO allies were disappointed that promising arms reduction initiatives never materialized. They especially regretted the lack of an agreement to eliminate medium-range US and Soviet missiles from Europe. But Kenneth Adelman, Director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, says too much criticism is unfounded. He says the meetings did yield two proposals which have moved the arms control process far beyond where it was before the meetings in Iceland. "I think the prospects are better now because the Soviets have agreed to particular numbers on their 50% proposal for reductions of strategic weapons, and agreed to only, to have only a hundred warheads worldwide in the INF, or intermediate-range nuclear force. Soviet negotiators cannot now say the Soviets need five hundred and thirteen warheads in Asia as they did last week if their leader says, no, they only need a hundred in Asia." Adelman says arms negotiators in Geneva can now pick up where the talks left off in Reykjavik.
Flood waters began to recede today in Alaska after three days of rain caused heavy damage, damage expected to reach into the millions of dollars. "It's getting better," said one emergency worker. "Things are actually starting to look up." Alaska Governor Bill Sheffield planned to fly over the flood-stricken areas north and south of Anchorage. So far, there are no reports of injuries. Many people have been evacuated from their homes.
All the high schools and middle schools in South Africa in the black township of Soweto were shut down today as students staged a massive walkout. Thousands of students reported to classes, but walked out in mid-morning as part of a protest.
Hundreds of people are homeless and thousands more stranded, after severe rain and windstorm lasting three days slammed portions of South Central Alaska. Flooding that washed away bridges and roads and destroyed at least fifteen homes continues in many areas, and persistent bad weather is hampering rescue and damage assessment efforts. Tim Wolston, of member station KSKA in Anchorage.
The worst deluge of rain in at least a decade began pelting South Central Alaska last Thursday night. Sixty and seventy-mile-an-hour winds helped the rain wash away two bridges and the railroad line north of Anchorage, and completely cut off the town of Seward, southeast of here, from the outside. Seward Mayor Harry Giesler says very conservative estimate of fifteen million dollars in damage has been done so far.
"We're looking at extensive road repair and rebuilding on all the arterial roads and even the main road coming into town. And the railroad, pardon the expression, caught h, e, double toothpicks.
Heavy fog and continuing rain are hampering efforts to assess the damage and get supplies to those who need them. But Giesler says those that needed to be evacuated have been, while others are trying to ride out the storm.
"You know Alaskans are a very hearty bunch, and especially people that have things like dog teams and animals. They are very, very reluctant to leave their home as long as it's even there. So we're going, trying to get back and check on people, make sure they're all right and that they have food and water and things like that."
The water is still rising in spots, and Seward is expecting at least another twenty-four hours of rain. North of Anchorage, the damage is just as severe. Lieutenant Mike Holler of the state Division of the Emergency Services says several hundred homes in the valley north of Anchorage have been damaged.
"It remains to be seen, as people literally walk out of the woods or find dry ground and are evacuated, as to just what extent the damage will get total."
Lieutenant Holler says two major bridges north of Anchorage were totally washed away by the raging waters, and tracks belonging to the Alaska Railroad, which provides a major form of transportation between Anchorage and Fairbanks, were destroyed.
"Now, as far as the goods, shipment of goods and materials to sustain life in the interior of Alaska, that particular transportation avenue has been totally shut off, along with the highway as far as using overland trucking and so forth."
Emergency shelters have been set up for those left homeless by the flooding. Alaska Governor Bill Sheffield has issued disaster declarations in order to free up state relief funds, and the state is hoping for federal aid. Officials say because of the remoteness of many of the communities involved, it may be several days before the damage is fully assessed, and that's if threatening clouds don't release more rain. For National Public Radio, this is Tim Wolston in Anchorage, Alaska.
The conflict between Arab and Jew in Israel and the occupied territories is fought with bombs and jet fighter attacks and with high level political posturing. But there's also a psychological struggle between the two. New York Times Correspondent David Shipler has written a book called Arab and Jew, which explores the stereotypes and myths that Israelis learn about Arabs, and that Arabs learn about Israelis.
"These myths," said Shipler, "stem from and help perpetuate the political and military conflicts. "Shipler says the two cultures teach their children to hate in the schools.
"Increasingly, Israeli Jews are beginning to realize that the battlefield is not only on the frontiers of their country ,but also in the minds of their children, that what happens in classrooms, how the Arab is portrayed in text-books, how the teachers talk about Arabs, how Arab children see Jews as they grow up—all of these elements are important in shaping the future, because the prejudices are very deep and are reinforced so thoroughly everyday that it's hard to see a way out of them .There is textbook called The Arabs and Islam that's used ... it's published by the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture and used in religious Jewish schools for seventh and eighth graders. And that textbook portrays the Arab as essentially primitive and violent. These two concepts go together in the sense that the Arab affection for violence and battle and warfare and robbery is highlighted. And you don't get any sense at all of the Arab as a modern, urban professional. The Arab is a desert warrior essentially, whose children grow up playing games. ... For example, there's a passage that says the Bedouin man is proud to engage in robbery and so educates his children. Bedouin children like the game 'Hassu' —robbery raids. They compete in running and wrestling and learn to use weapons at a very young age. In another section, there's a phrase that says, 'the women who lose their sons or husbands in the battle receive the hard news without weeping or cries.' In other words, the Arab doesn't value human life somehow. Now that stereotype is fairly common to many cultures."
"We heard that during the Vietnam War about the Vietnamese :they don't value human life like we Westerners."
"Exactly. During the Korean War about the Koreans, during World War II about the Japanese. It's a fairly common one. Of course, what it does is dehumanize the Arab in the eyes of Jewish children who are raised with these textbooks."
"Now what happens when you go to schools of Arabs inside Israeli occupied territory? How did they portray the Jews, the Israelis?"
"The textbooks that are used surreptitiously in Arab schools on the West Bank, for example, are published by Jordan."
"You say, surreptitiously."
"Yes, because the Israeli procedure is to take those Jordanian textbooks, expurgate the offensive passages and republish them. But in fact they have only three inspectors for a thousand schools to check to make sure that Arab teachers are not using the Jordanian versions. So they really can't check up very thoroughly. And the Jordanian versions do creep into the classrooms. What happens in those textbooks is that Jews are portrayed as violent and are hardly seen at all except in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. One of the interesting companion stereotypes to the Jew as violent that you see in Arab textbooks is the Jew as a coward. This idea is quite pervasive. The Jew is strong because he has advanced weapons, but in his soul, in his heart he's a coward, and so he hides behind these weapons."
"Is there any way to gauge whether these stereotypes, whether the school's socialization process is really working? In other words, can you somehow measure if the ... how these teachings of the schools are affecting the way Arab and Israeli children interact with each other, that it makes them hostile toward each other?"
"In the first place Arab and Israeli children hardly ever have contact and rarely have an opportunity to interact, because they live separately, they go to separate schools, and what not. But I think there's no question that the school setting on both sides encourages bigotry. There was one example that brought it home to me of an Israeli girl who was ten years old, who came home from school one day after an attack on Arab mayors on the West Bank, and she said, 'Mommy, are we glad or not glad that it happened?'"
"She didn't know."
"Her mother said, 'We're absolutely not glad. Violence is never the way.' And the next day she came home from school, and she said, 'Mommy, you're wrong. We are glad it happened.' I don't know where she picked it up, whether from other children or from a teacher. But there are some schools, and in especially religious schools in Israel devoted to teaching children of right-wing ultranationalists, where the instruction is quite ideological in terms of rejecting the Arab as an alien who really doesn't belong in this land except as a subordinate to the Jew. Young people have told me that they're taught that the Arab is Amalek, the ancient enemy of the Jews in the Bible who is to be exterminated."
"You have been talking a lot about school textbooks, for instance, what's taught in the schools as a way of perpetuating these stereotypes. In our own country, of course, there's been a big effort in the past ten-twenty years to purge textbooks in the classrooms of the sort of stereotypes we have had of blacks, for instance, or Indians. Is there anybody in Israel who is trying to do a similar thing with the Israeli textbooks?"
"Yes, there is an entire effort being conducted by the Vanier Foundation with the Ministry of Education's cooperation to take these stereotypes out of text books, to write new ones, to revise the curriculum from top to bottom, beginning in the youngest grades in an effort to sensitize Israeli Jewish children to the richness and diversity of Arab culture and to portray Arabs as more than just enemies, but also as fellow citizens and neighbors."
"And this is something the government condones?"
"Well, half-heartedly. There is a support for it officially in the Education Ministry, but the religious schools are reluctant to do it. And there's been some resistance on the part of some educators at the level of school principal or teacher. So it's a mixed picture. It's gone to the point where quite a few eleventh grade classes now are following an elective curriculum in which they begin the first day by writing down all the words that come to mind when they think of Arabs. The teacher then puts them up on the blackboard, and the kids have to sit there and stare at their own prejudices. And that's the beginning of a process of dealing with the stereotypes they've grown up with."
David Shipler. His new book is called Arab and Jews : Wounded Spirits in A Promised Land .
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