I can guarantee what you won't see this holiday weekend are images of the
over one million Iraqi dead. Say we assign, in an arbitrary way for purely
illustrative purposes, an average height of 5 feet for every person killed in Iraq and then lined those people up from head to toe. That gruesome line would stretch from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon -- 950 driving miles up Interstate 5. If we count the Iraqis who have been forced to flee, we would have to go back and forth between L.A. and Portland another four times.There are obscene amounts of people who have been slaughtered for the US
Profit Driven Military Empire who do not count here in America on any day. People in Vietnam are still dying from the toxins dumped on their country by the US, not to mention the millions who died during that war. Let the carnage escalate in Afghanistan while we protect our personal images by turning a blind eye to Obama's war crimes. Are you going to feel a lump of pride in your bosom when the coffins start to be photographed at Dover for this imperial crime of aggression? Will you look at those flag-draped boxes of the lifeless body of some mother's child and think: "Now, I am free." Is it better to be dead when Obama is president?A tough, but real, aspect of this all to consider is, how many of the
soldiers buried in coffins in military cemeteries killed or tortured innocent
people as paid goons for Empire? To me, it is deeply and profoundly sad on so many levels. If I have any consolation through all of this, I learned that my son bravely refused to go on the mission that killed him, but he was literally dragged onto the vehicle and was dead minutes later before he was forced to do something that was against his nature and nurture.Casey will always be my hero but he was a victim of US Imperialism and his
death should bring shame, not pride, as it did not bring freedom to anyone. I
will, of course, mourn his senseless death on Memorial Day as I do everyday.However, we do not need another day here in America to glorify war which enables the Military Industrial Complex to commit its crimes under the black cloak of "Patriotism."
From Palestine to Africa to South America, our quest for global economic
domination kills, sickens, maims or oppresses people on a daily basis and about
25,000 children per day die of starvation. I am not okay with these facts and I am not proud of my country.I will spend my reflective time on MD to mourn not only the deaths of so
many people all over the world due to war, but mourn the fact that they are the unseen and uncared for victims of US Empire.
SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) -- “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” (Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Cindy Sheehan -- Day of the Dead -- Memorial Day 2009
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Palestine Solidarity Vigil -- Today (Sat.) Westlake Park Noon
When: Saturday May 23, Noon - 2:00pm
Where: Westlake Center on 4th & Pine
VoicesofPalestine.org
Trey's Memorial Day Column
As this is the Memorial Day weekend, people will be remembering all the fallen soldiers of our various military incursions. For me, the best way to honor their memory is to work to make war obsolete. Ed McCurdy -- back in 1950 -- put it better than I can.
Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream
Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war
I dreamed I saw a mighty room
Filled with women and men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd never fight again
And when the paper was all signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands and bowed their heads
And grateful pray'rs were prayed
And the people in the streets below
Were dancing 'round and 'round
While swords and guns and uniforms
Were scattered on the ground
Last night I had the strangest dream
I'd never dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Cheney Breaks the Taboo -- Support for Israel Feeds Terrorism by Ray McGovern
Portion below; whole article here: http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern05222009.html
Are you ready for a scoop that is not a scoop, but that almost no one knows about?
It has to do with an unclassified study published, not by some “liberal” think-tank, but by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board just two months after the 9/11 Commission Report. That report directly contradicted what Cheney and President Bush had been saying about “why they hate us,” letting the elephant out of the bag and into the room, so to speak:
“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.”
You didn’t know about that report? Well, maybe this is because of the timing. The Defense Science Board final report was given to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Sept. 23, 2004, just weeks before the presidential election.
That is a time when presidential candidates and the U.S. Establishment in general are hyper-allergic to discussing how U.S. support for Israeli policies toward the Palestinians encourages the recruitment of anti-American terrorists.
Suppressed, Then Gutted
Bending over backwards to oblige, the FCM suppressed the Defense Science Board findings until after the election. On Nov. 24, 2004, the New York Times, erstwhile “newspaper of record,” did publish a story on the board’s report — but performed some highly interesting surgery.
Thom Shanker of the Times quoted the paragraph beginning with "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom'" (see above), but he or his editors deliberately cut out the following sentence about what Muslims do object to; i.e., U.S. "one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights" and support for tyrannical regimes. The Times did include the sentence that immediately followed the omitted one. In other words, it was not simply a matter of shortening the paragraph. Rather, the offending middle sentence was surgically removed.
Similarly creative editing showed through the Times' reporting in late October 2004 on a videotaped speech by Osama bin Laden. Almost six paragraphs of the story made it onto page one, but the Times saw to it that the key point bin Laden made at the beginning of his presentation was relegated to paragraphs 23 to 25 at the very bottom of page nine.
Buried there was bin Laden's assertion that the idea for 9/11 first germinated after "we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American-Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon."
Wading through the drivel in the FCM’s Times and Washington Post on Friday morning, I am hardly surprised that they missed Cheney’s slip about U.S. policy toward Israel being one of the terrorists’ “true sources of resentment.”
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
"UK Medics Go on Hunger Strike after Being Refused Entry into Gaza" -- Haroon Siddique
Three British medics began a hunger strike in Egypt today to protest against being refused entry into Gaza for a humanitarian mission.
Their aim is to establish a cardiac surgery unit at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, which currently has no such facility, and to help train medical students and junior doctors there. But the British medics have been denied access to the Palestinian territory at the Rafah crossing since the beginning of May.
Omar Mangoush, a cardiac surgeon at Hammersmith hospital, in London, told guardian.co.uk he had been to the crossing with his colleagues every day since arriving in Egypt on 4 May, only to be told they did not have permission to enter.
"We are on hunger strike until they let us through," he said. "We'll stay [at the crossing] until they let us in. We want to put pressure on the British embassy. We believe if the British embassy wanted us to do this they could exert pressure [on the Egyptian authorities]."
Mangoush said he had been told by the British embassy that it had received a letter from the Egyptian foreign ministry saying the medics' request for access to Gaza had been "postponed".
But he claimed American aid workers had gained entry to Gaza at their first attempt with the support of the US embassy.
Mangoush named the other British medics on hunger strike as Christopher Burns-Cox, a retired consultant, and Kirsty Wong, a nurse at Hammersmith hospital. Another six people are on hunger strike, including three Belgians, he said.
The cardiac surgeon took a month's holiday from work to take part in the mission for the Manchester-based charity Palestine International Medical Aid (PIMA)
"This is very important for us," he said. "There are loads of people with heart disease [in Gaza]. They can't get here [to Egypt], they can't get to Israel. If it's this hard for us to get to, how difficult is it for the Palestinians to get out?"
PIMA's director, Dr Ahmed Almari, said: "It's unbelievable. They're a group of doctors, they went for education and teaching, to set up a cardiac unit. It's unfair and sad that it is only as a result of a hunger strike that anybody pays attention. There's no reason to stop them from crossing."
Egypt has kept the Rafah crossing largely closed since Hamas won the Gaza elections three years ago. One of the main demands of Hamas has been that all crossings into Gaza should be allowed to reopen permanently. A number of aid groups have said the closure of the crossings is contributing to a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Palestinian medical sources reported today that a one-year-old infant died yesterday at a local hospital in Rafah owing to several complications, including pneumonia, as his transfer to a hospital outside of the Gaza Strip was not possible due to the ongoing Israeli siege.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Nahr al-Bared Camp: Protest Against Barracks -- via Angry Arab Newservice
On 15 May 2009, several hundred [Palestinian] residents of the destroyed Nahr al-Bared Refugee Camp in North Lebanon gathered at the al-Quds mosque to march along the army posts to a construction side in the south of the camp. There, yet another piece of land was flattened and the building of the fifth unit of temporary shelters for displaced families is being prepared.
In their chants, the protesters demanded the return to the old camp and the end of the siege on Nahr al-Bared and the abolishment of the permit system respectively. Abu Tayyeb of the Residents' Committee demanded the immediate stop of the building of the new barracks as long as the reconstruction in the old camp wouldn't start. He further criticized corruption and nepotism in the reconstruction process and asked why the rebuilding of the old camp is constantly being delayed. He hinted at intentions to actually not rebuild the camp and told the crowd: „The laying of the foundation stone on 9 March was nothing but a lie!
Monday, May 18, 2009
Oscar Grant's Killer Could Get Manslaughter Only????? Outrageous!
Link to original: http://cbs5.com/localwire/22.0.html?type=bcn&item=MEHSERLE-HEARING-baglm
The preliminary hearing for former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle on charges that he murdered an unarmed passenger on New Year's Day began today with tight security and a protest by about 100 people.
The hearing before Alameda County Superior Court Judge C. Don Clay, which is expected to take up to two weeks, will determine whether there is enough evidence to have Mesherle, 27, ordered to stand trial on murder charges for the death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant III, who was shot in the back at the Fruitvale station in Oakland.
The shooting occurred after Mehserle and other BART officers responded to reports that two groups of men were fighting on a train.
Todd Chretien of the Community Council, a group that helped coordinate a protest outside the courthouse where Mehserle's hearing is taking place, said, "Five and a half months ago we all watched Oscar Grant murdered in cold blood on the BART platform, but there's a gap between that event and making sure that justice is done."
Chretien said, "We're here to guarantee that Johannes Mehserle is convicted of first-degree murder."
Legal commentator Michael Cardoza said the presence of the large group of protesters, coupled with massive protests in January that sometimes erupted into violence, could make it easy for Mehserle's lawyers to argue that his trial should be moved away from Alameda County because it will be impossible to get a fair trial here.
"It will be up to the sheriff to make sure that jurors are not intimidated. You can't have jurors who are intimidated by people in the streets," Cardoza said.
Cardoza said he thinks Mehserle's case will be "a fight between second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter," not about whether he's the one who killed Grant.
He said of the case, "This is a what-is-it, not a whodunit."
A judge has issued a gag order in the case, so the attorneys aren't able to comment on the order of witnesses in the preliminary hearing.
Judge Clay is expected to begin the hearing by ruling on a defense motion that asks that the Alameda County District Attorney's office be removed from Mehserle's case, alleging that prosecutors violated state and federal laws, State Bar ethics rules and the U.S. Constitution by trying to get Mehserle to talk to investigators without the knowledge and outside the presence of his attorney.
Cardoza said he thinks one of the key issues in the hearing will be apparently contradictory comments made by Mehserle shortly after the shooting.
Citing legal briefs filed by the district attorney's office, Cardoza said that at one point Mehserle claimed to have fired his gun because he thought that Grant was reaching for a gun but at another point Mehserle said he actually was trying to fire his Taser and fired his gun by mistake.
"Those are two different stories," Cardoza said..
He added, "I don't know if he really said those things and that is something that should come out in this hearing."
A Picture is Worth...
[Hebron, May 18. Image via Getty]
An Israeli soldier keeps guard near a Palestinian woman standing by a Star of David graffiti sprayed by Israeli settlers near an army checkpoint in the centre of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron on May 18, 2009 during a visit by a delegation of ultra-nationalist Israeli MPs protesting against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's promotion of the easing of restrictions on Palestinians. Netanyahu will have first face to face meeting with President Barack Obama amid divisions over Middle East peacemaking and Iran's nuclear ambitions. The hawkish premier, who wants a 'fresh' approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, will unveil in the White House meeting on May 18 his long-awaited policy for regional peace focused on countering Iran, aides said. AFP PHOTO / MENAHEM KAHANA (Photo credit should read MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP/Getty Images)
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Remembering the Nakba in Seattle -- 1948-2009 -- Over 400 Destroyed Villages, Millions of Destroyed Lives
May 16, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
On TV: Israeli Siege Kills Baby Aged 2
http://www.aljazeera.net/mritems/images/2009/5/13/1_913687_1_34.gif
Gaza Strip, May 14, (Pal Telegraph) - Another Palestinian child died in a very dramatic scene documented on T.V. A baby aged 2 died today from a heart defect made worse by lack of medical care due to the Israeli imposed siege.
Aljazeera's reporter, Tamer Al meshal, reveals one of the miseries resulting from the Israeli siege on Gaza . Feras As'ad Al Mazlom, an infant aged 2, was the only child of newly married couple As'ad and Amal.
Infant Feras who was born with a heart defect, he had to spend more time in a hospital bed rather than his loving parents' arms. He never played nor enjoyed his innocent life like others.
Like many Palestinians, Feras paid for the siege with his precious life. The hospital and equipment were not able to rescue him nor could his parents move him to Egypt for treatment. However, the hospital managed to coordinate a transfer to an Israeli hospital.
With hope, the father tried obtaining permits for both his wife and son to cross the border, and he finally succedded. The father moved like crazy to complete the travel documents necessary for Feras to be transferred for treatment.
Unfortunately, as they were on the way to pick their child and head to Erez crossing into Israel, they received an excruciating phone call saying their only was no longer alive and there's no need to take him anywhere.
It was minutes or rather seconds between life and death for Feras. This baby, didn't fight Israelis, never shot at them, nor fired a rocket rather, his only fault was being, "a child born in Gaza"
Thousands of Palestinian like Feras are still on the waiting list of death. Israel is hindering access to their basic right of treatment. Those patients' rights are highly recognized and guaranteed by the 4th Geneva convention and humanitarian law. However, Israel does not respect UN authority or declarations regarding human rights.
See the death of Feras here: http://www.aljazeera.net/
Channel/KServices/ SupportPages/ShowMedia/ showMedia.aspx?fileURL=/ mritems/streams/2009/5/13/1_ 913686_1_12.wmv Special report:
Nancy Al Buhisi and Sameh A. Habeeb
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Jewish Pogrom -- David Shulman
Portion below; whole article here: http://jewishpeacenews.blogspot.com/2009/05/jewish-pogrom.html
May 3, 2009
Pogrom at Khirbet Safa
By David ShulmanPogroms: it's something the Jews know about. I grew up on those stories—Cossack raids on the shtetl, the torture and killings and wanton destruction. My grandmother had a brother. They lived in Mikhalayev, in the Ukraine. One day the Cossacks came, and everyone panicked, and the seventeen-year-old brother tried to hide in a pond, and he drowned. She mourned that young death all her life; the dead don't age, and some wounds never heal.
And now it turns out—who would believe it?—that there are Jews who also know how to carry out pogroms. For the last ten days or so, settlers from Bat 'Ayin in the so-called Etzion Bloc have been paying violent daily visits to their Palestinian neighbors in Khirbet Safa, perched high on the edge of the western ridge that overlooks the coastal plain all the way to the sea. A terrorist from Khirbet Safa entered Bat 'Ayin two weeks ago, murdered a settler boy with an axe, and wounded another. The police caught him soon thereafter. But that hasn't stopped the Bat 'Ayin settlers from repeated rampages to wreak revenge on Khirbet Safa. They've already killed four innocents, and another eleven or twelve have been wounded by gunfire. As if that weren't bad enough, the soldiers have apparently been making common cause with these settlers, opening fire readily at the villagers. Life in this most beautiful of the mountain villages has become a nightmare; not that it was easy before.
We get the emergency call around 5:00 after a long day that started off in Susya, in South Hebron. At first it looked as though we'd never get through the barriers and the roadblocks; like last week, we had police and army on our tail from the moment we left Jerusalem. Two full buses and several private cars headed south by the long route twisting over the dry hills. A grey, sultry day, summer approaching: in the endless battle in the wadis and terraces between green and brown, green seems to be losing ground. Every once in a while the soldiers would stop one of the cars and threaten to stop the buses. But, happily, by midday we had rendezvoused at Susya with a van of Palestinian activists from all over the West Bank. All in all, some 150 Combatants for Peace—former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian members of the armed resistance organizations who have given up all forms of violence—had come to meet each other and to see the reality of South Hebron.
This is what it will look like one day, I was thinking. Like in Berlin when the Wall fell. Maybe I won't live to see it, but I know it will be like this. People, ordinary people from both sides, pour out of the vehicles more or less into one another's arms. The soldiers in their jeeps with their guns and other deadly toys are helpless to hold back this flood of dangerous fraternization. Some of them look to me like they'd like to join us. It all happens fast and very naturally, without thinking. Walking over the rocks and thistles toward the tents of Susya, I hear snippets of conversation like many I've heard before. Awkward, tentative, eager. Strangers introduce themselves: "I'm 'Abed. I live in the refugee camp at Dahariyya." "We're from Bethlehem." "I'm from Tel Aviv, I'm a student. I served in the fucking army for three and a half years." (This with a somewhat sheepish smile). A young Palestinian man to a dark-haired Israeli woman: "Would you come visit me in my home
someday?" "I don't know. Maybe. I'm afraid." A short silence. "Yes, I'll be happy to come." I, too, embrace my friends: Hafez, Isa, Nasir, 'Id, the gentle, irrationally hopeful, anxious 'Id.We stand among the black tents facing the Israeli settlement of Susya with its red-tile roofs and the new "illegal outpost" that settlers have put up on the next hill, just a couple of hundred meters off. In the distance, at Shuneran, you can see the lonely white whirl of the new turbine our people have recently set up for our Palestinian friends. Wind-driven, it's already generating enough power to run a refrigerator and a newfangled butter-and-cheese churn: the milk goes into the drum of an old washing machine that shakes it wildly up and down, and in practically no time there is the unlikely miracle of butter. Just two weeks ago I watched Bedouin women doing it the old way, in a goat-skin hung over a fire and rocked back and forth for long hours. This turbine at Shuneran is like a gift from the gods.
Ofra, wiry, battle-worn, lucid, is speaking to the crowd as Yusri translates into Arabic: "The occupation has an interest in preventing us from meeting one another, and an even greater interest in preventing us from struggling together. But we will never allow them to separate us. This is our responsibility and our answer to apartheid. We had to get past the barriers and roadblocks to come here today, and we also had to break through the metaphorical walls that have divided us." I wonder how Yusri is going to manage this last sentence. He lives in a world of very real walls and barriers. But no, he's got it, no problem: "hawajiz majaziyeh--that is," he explains, "the walls that have been erected in our minds."
Still, it looks like today is going to be rather bland. There are the dialogue sessions that take time—many of the Israeli Combatants have never been in South Hebron or anywhere else in the territories, and some are meeting living people from the other side for the first time. The seasoned few of us from Ta'ayush wait, a little bored. The truth is we're having trouble holding ourselves back from what our instincts tell us is the thing to do—that is, from marching the whole crowd up the hill toward the new outpost. It's not every day you get 150 activists here in Susya. But there's been a decision: no confrontations today. You can't expose the first-timers to the whole terror and rigor of the occupation. And yet that hill is so enticing. There's a new settler caravan in place, too. All we have to do is to start walking…..
And then, surprisingly, a new decision crystallizes. We will "take" that hill after all. We'll follow Nasir up to the ancient well that belongs to the Hadari-Hareini families but that is now off limits to them; the settlers won't let them near it. South Hebron is a hot, dry land, and a well means the difference between life and death. We head out over the rocky terraces. Movement, at last, and action: the relief is sweet and viscous as a heady liquor. My lungs take in the sharp smell of wild sage, thyme, and the aromatic herb the Palestinians call Amaslimaniya, said to heal infections and stomach pains. I wonder if it heals heart-ache, too. The very fragrance seems to be healing mine.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
The Paradox of Israel's Pursuit of Might -- Max Hastings
Portion below; whole article (via Angry Arab Newservice) here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/israel-middle-east-max-hastings
Israel suffers the same frustration on a regional scale as that which afflicts the US globally: the difficulty – some of us would argue impossibility – of leveraging overwhelming military power to make its will prevail upon the Palestinians. The Palestinians are incapable of imposing their own will on the Israelis. But poverty, misery and impotence represent weapons of their own. These things cause Israel to be regarded by a large part of the world as an oppressor.
I often think that Israelis focus too much upon their past, not enough upon their future. In the days when I visited Israel regularly, dinner-table arguments about the nation's strategy became familiar. There would often come a moment when somebody would blurt out – justifying this or that aspect of Israeli policy: "But you've got to understand why we must do this – because of the Holocaust." For more than 60 years, the Holocaust card has been played again and again. Today in Europe, there is not the slightest danger that the unspeakable fate of the Jews in the 1940s will be forgotten. But many people, especially the young, no longer perceive the crimes of Hitler, however monstrous, as providing remotely adequate justification for – for instance – Israeli military excesses in Gaza and the appropriation of scarce water resources at Palestinian expense.
The Holocaust argument is sometimes displaced by a more facile jibe: that those who criticise Israel are guilty of anti-semitism. I have been accused of this myself. Yet I take comfort from the number of Jews who express repugnance about Israel's excesses. Avi Shlaim has dissected the failures and deceits of modern Israeli policy far more convincingly than I could. Rabbi David Goldberg has described Israel's failure to create a plausible successor vision to that of the old Zionists. "Zionism's most important achievement," he says, "was to provide a haven for the escapees and survivors of Hitler's Holocaust." Today, by contrast, few western Jews want to live there. The Zionist claim, that the country is the natural home of Jews, is rejected by a majority of the world's 14 million Jews. Goldberg argues that "Zionists claim that only in their own land can Jews lead a full, 'normal' life without fear of anti-semitism. But the irony of Israel's geopolitical situation is that the average Jew walking the streets of Los Angeles, Golders Green or even Moscow is physically safer than the average Israeli walking in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv."
Many Jews no longer believe that the Zionist concept of entitlement, based first upon Biblical history, and latterly upon the Holocaust, suffices to justify perpetuating historic injustice upon the Arabs of Palestine. Benny Morris's excellent recent history of the events of 1948 shows that even a respected Israeli historian is today ready to acknowledge the scale of Israeli ethnic cleansing at the time, and of the deceits employed since to conceal what took place. The Israeli myth, that the Palestinians displaced in 1948 voluntarily abandoned their homes and property, is unsustainable in the face of such evidence.
An Israeli listening to all this might interrupt angrily: "But why do you say so little about Hamas and Hizbollah, rocketing and suicide-bombing innocent Israeli civilians?" Yes, indeed – such acts must always be condemned. But what of proportionality? In recent years, for every Israeli killed by terrorism, the Israeli security forces have killed 30, 40, 50 Palestinians – most of them civilians. Israel exacts a blood price from the innocent of a severity which only tyrannies have historically thought appropriate.
The entire thrust of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians in recent times has been to convey a crude message of overwhelming power, of Israel's ability to command, kill or destroy at will, without fear of sanctions. The Israeli army, which once exemplified much that was best about Israel, has today been corrupted by the long experience of suppressing insurgency. Morally, if not militarily, it is a shadow of the force which fought in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973.
Israel has tested to destruction the utility of force in achieving its security. It is not enough to assert proudly that the Jewish state remains a democracy and haven of free speech in a region in which neither of these precious things is much in evidence, if that same democracy behaves in a fashion which denies mercy to the weak. For someone like me, who enjoyed a love affair with Israel 40 years ago, it is heart-breaking to see the story come to such a pass. It is because so many of us so much want to see Israel prosper in security and peace that we share a sense of tragedy that 61 years after the state was born amid such lofty ideals, it should be led by such a man as Bibi Netanyahu, committed to policies which can yield nothing honourable or lasting. Amoz Oz's 1979 prophesy to me has alas been fulfilled. It will be as great a misfortune for Israel as for the Palestinians, if its governments persist in their past delusions through the years ahead.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Marcy Newman on "why hip-hop is necessary" -- gaza, sri lanka, etc.
http://bodyontheline.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/on-why-hip-hop-is-necessary/
one of the reasons i so love rap music and hip hop culture is because so much of it–or at least the stuff i listen to–has such smart lyrics, amazing politics, and usually amazing sounds. but also i love it because i see it as a form of resistance. dam does this for palestine. k’naan does this for somalia. the narcicyst does this for iraq. m.i.a. (a.k.a. maya arulpragasam) does this for tamils in sri lanka. i found an interview she did with tavis smiley (who is as clueless as riz khan when it comes to interviewing people) and she does an amazing job of discussing the political crisis in sri lanka and the genocide against the tamil people: [embedded video of MIA -- go to link at top to see these -- linda]
socially and politically conscious rap artists have such a crucial role to play in stopping the demonization of people that lead people in the west to call those marginalized people who face ethnic cleansing and genocide “terrorists” when the reality is they are all subjected to state terrorism supported by the united states. all of the groups above that i mentioned, and all of whom i’ve blogged about previously, sing and speak eloquently and brilliantly about the situation where they live, or if like m.i.a., as refugees. as i’ve blogged previously i’m so struck by the parallels between palestinians and tamils in sri lanka in the current genocide underway in sri lanka. there are more that emerge every day. david batty wrote for the guardian the other day about a doctor reporting on the attacks on civilians by the sri lankan government against the tamil population and the story sounds so much like gaza:A doctor working in the warzone described the assault as the bloodiest he had seen in the government’s offensive against the Tamil Tigers.
Dr V Shanmugarajah said he feared many more may have been killed since some bodies were being buried on the spot without being brought to the makeshift hospital he runs.
Shanmugarajah described seeing shells fly through the air, with some falling close to the hospital, forcing many to flee to bunkers for shelter.
The rebel-linked TamilNet website said about 2,000 people were feared dead. It accused Sri Lankan forces of launching the attack, a charge the military denied.
Military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said it was only using small arms in its effort to wipe out the Tamil Tiger rebel group and there “is no shelling taking place”.
The government had sent medical supplies into the warzone in recent days but a shortage of doctors, nurses and helpers has made treatment difficult, Shanmugarajah said.
“We are doing the first aid and some surgeries as quickly as we can. We are doing what is possible. The situation is overwhelming; nothing is within our control,” he said. Shanmugarajah said he had sought the help of volunteers to dig graves.
The government vowed two weeks ago to cease firing heavy weapons into the tiny coastal strip that remained under rebel control in an effort to avoid civilian casualties. But medical officials in the area have reported that air strikes and artillery attacks have continued unabated, despite the presence of an estimated 50,000 civilians in the tiny conflict zone.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
America I Hate You -- Layla Anwar
May 10, 2009
I hate everything you represent, everything you stand for, everything about you...EVERYTHING. I fucking hate you.
You completely destroyed my country, my home, my family, my relatives, my friends, you have completely ruined our lives with your greed, your apathy, your criminality, your hypocrisy, your evilness ..........I fucking hate you.
I FUCKING HATE YOU. HATE YOU with every fiber in my body, with every beat of my heart, with every breath I take....
Iraq's riches are being privatized...so your companies and those of the smelly once a month bathing Brits can enjoy their leisurely lives.
I still am not sure who is worse - the Jews of Israel or the Kurds of Iraq. Which Zionism is more lethal ?
Over 100'000 barrels of crude Iraqi oil are being given away by the Kurds to American, Norwegian and British companies. That amounts to a revenue of 5 Million dollars a day.
The Federal government of Baghdad, because this is what Al-Jazeera called it today, the Baghdad government as oppposed to the Kurdish government has agreed but the only thing it disagrees with - the names of the companies. It wanted a say in those hand picked companies, to please its Iranian masters.
Stealing our riches, stealing our lives, stealing our blood and living off it like some worm, like some parasite...I HATE YOU AMERICA.
The Kurdish Peshmergas, the ones you cried about being so oppressed, including your fucked up liberals and progressives of my ass...are waging a brutal war in Kirkuk and in Mosul, displacing hundreds of families....
The South is under total Iranian control, and deals are being made with your monsters of companies via the central Shiite government.
The Iraqi population is living in misery, fear, loss, destruction, neglect, poverty...while you are sucking on our blood, through the kurds and the shiites shits you have put into power...
I HATE YOU AMERICA. I HATE YOU.
Our families are torn apart, our lovers are torn apart, our neighborhoods are torn apart, we have become beggars, living off merciful handouts...
Merciful handouts that your so called "good will" people come to the rescue and try to help...assuaging the bit of conscience you have left. But you have no fucking conscience. You are just ego, you have embellished your acts with such denial, you are evil itself.
You ripped us of our dignity, us the proud Iraqis who would not bow to any human...for we carry history our shoulders, like a cross, like a burden, like a message...
I HATE YOU AMERICA.
Rows and rows of burned flesh, from your smart technology, your technology of death, fill hospitals...Fallujah, Mosul, Baghdad, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestine...
Rows of flesh, for your cannibalistic eyes and teeth...so you can dig your ugly teeth in more flesh...and orgasm at the sight...
I FUCKING HATE YOU.
Humanity ? What fucking Humanity ? You have no humanity, you have no soul, you have no fucking conscience...You are DEAD. A DEAD PEOPLE.
There is worse than physical death. There is a soul, moral death and you are fucking dead. You are nothing but armed skeletons on this earth...skeletons with tons of grease, flab, pulling your weight and your bellies that are never full, your barrels of bellies that look like endless holes that nothing can fill up...
You think you are so fucking sophisticated don't you ? You are fucking idiots with guns...even your so called intellectuals, I don't buy them for one cent...
Including your left, your anti-war shits, your liberals and the wanking Arabs that suck up to you like house niggers, I buy none of you for one cent...
Go ahead, kill as much as you want, burn, maim, tear down, build walls, displace as much as you want...
You are a worthless people and a worthless nation.
Afghan Girl's Burns Show Horror of Chemical Strike -- NATO & U.S. Probable Perps
"As the former head of Israel's 20-lawyer International Law Division in the Military Advocate General's office, Daniel Reisner, recently stated: "If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it."
Portion below; whole article (via Angry Arab Newservice) here: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20090508/twl-uk-afghanistan-phosphorus-exclusive-bd5ae06.html
Life as 8-year-old Razia knew it ended one March morning when a shell her father says was fired by Western troops exploded into their house, enveloping her head and neck in a blazing chemical. Skip related content
Now she spends her days in a U.S. hospital bed at the Bagram airbase, her small fingernails still covered with flaking red polish but her face an almost unrecognisable mess of burnt tissue and half her scalp a bald scar.
"The kids called out to me that I was burning but the explosion was so strong that for a moment I was deaf and couldn't hear anything," her father, Aziz Rahman, told Reuters.
"And then my wife screamed 'the kids are burning' and she was also burning," he added, his face clouding over at the memory.
The flames that consumed his family were fed by a chemical called white phosphorous, which U.S. medical staff at Bagram said they found on Razia's face and neck.
It bursts into fierce fire on contact with the air and can stick to and even penetrate flesh as it burns.
White phosphorus can be used legally in war to provide light, create smokescreens or burn buildings, so it is not banned under international treaties that forbid using chemicals as weapons.
Colonel Gregory Julian, a spokesman for the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, confirmed that Western forces in the country use the chemical.
"In the case of white phosphorus it is used on the battlefield in certain applications ... It is used as an incendiary to destroy bunkers and enemy equipment; it's used for illumination."
But U.S. military training manuals say firing it at people is illegal. Its use in populated areas has been a persistent source of controversy.
Razia and her family are the first known civilian casualties of its use in Afghanistan.
WHO FIRED?
Rahman said the shell that burnt his daughter landed after a firefight near their house in the eastern province of Kapisa. The NATO-led international force there is made up mainly of French troops, with U.S. support.
"(Western) troops were on the road, the Taliban were on the mountain and we were at the house, sandwiched between them. When the Taliban began retreating, they fired artillery at them, 12 rounds. One hit my house," Rahman said.
A spokeswoman for the NATO-led force rejected Rahman's account, saying an internal investigation into the incident concluded that it was "very unlikely" the weapon that hit Razia's house was theirs, because of the timing and location.
U.S. Major Jennifer Willis suggested instead that the Taliban had fired the shot: "An enemy mortar team, known to have been operating in that area, may have been responsible."
The Afghan government, military specialists and experts on the Taliban told Reuters, however, that insurgents have never been observed using white phosphorus. The only forces on the battlefield known to use it are the United States and NATO.
Friday, May 08, 2009
Freeing Leonard Peltier -- Jeff Armstrong
Barack Obama plainly aspires to join the select ranks of United States presidents who led the nation through national crises with relative wisdom and resolve. Obama and his supporters often invoke Lincoln, Kennedy, and FDR as historical exemplars. But in one important respect, Obama need reach no higher than to emulate the precedent set by Republican president Warren Harding.Rightly reviled as one of the worst presidents in American history for the corruption and mendacity of his cabinet (known, for good reason, as the Ohio Gang), Harding should nevertheless be acknowledged for freeing 24 political prisoners (excluding, of course, most IWW activists) in his first year of taking office in 1921. Among the beneficiaries of Harding's conciliatory gesture was Eugene V. Debs, the socialist party candidate for president who polled nearly one million votes in the 1920 election from behind federal prison walls. Perhaps due to his unique status, Debs was granted special dispensation to leave prison unsupervised to meet with attorney general Harry Daugherty.
Debs, to his credit, spurned the attorney general's request that he renounce his revolutionary views in return for a full pardon Yet Harding commuted Debs' sentence and released him and other political prisoners less than one year into his term and two and one-half years into Debs' 10-year sentence, which he landed for speaking out against then-President Woodrow Wilson and the military draft at a socialist party convention shortly before the conclusion of what was then known as the Great War.
At first glance, Harding's call for a return to “normalcy” and Obama's ringing but amorphous promise of change would seem to have little in common. Yet both campaign slogans signified a sharp break from the immediate past, in the case of the former from the imperious and imperial presidency of Wilson and in the latter from the reckless and lawless regime of George Bush II. Like Harding before him, Obama has sought to reach out to his ideological opponents in the spirit of reconciliation and to bring the office of the presidency back down to earth. Harding went so far as to meet personally with Debs after liberating him from captivity to the cheers of his guards and fellow inmates alike.
Instead of extending his hand to the unresponsive GOP, however, Obama should be reaching out to Leonard Peltier and apologizing for two centuries of violence, oppression, and empty promises to the indigenous peoples of the United States. If ever there was a sphere in which change, and one might even say a return to normality (in terms of normalized relations with Americans), is needed, it is in Indian Country. Reservation Natives live in something of a parallel legal universe in which they are the only racial group victimized in a majority of criminal assaults by members of other races, yet tribal police are granted no criminal jurisdiction over non-Natives.
When it comes to civil rights, tribal governments, which again with limited exceptions have jurisdiction only over Indians, are virtually beyond the reach of not only the United States constitution but even their own tribal constitutions. With rare exceptions, tribal courts are subordinate arms of tribal councils, unable or unwilling to uphold any semblance of civil rights and liberties. As if by cruel joke, that great guardian of civil liberties, the FBI, is responsible for upholding the civil rights of tribal members.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Ban Ki-moon's [e.g. THE WEST'S] Moral Failure -- Hasan Abu Nimah
Late last week, according to the BBC Arabic news website, a report was submitted to the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon about the scale of destruction Israel inflicted on UN installations in Gaza. This was also mentioned on a BBC news bulletin on 1 May, but I could find little trace of this story anywhere else.
The brief news item stated that the UN report contained secret information supplied by Israel about an incident in which more than 40 Palestinian civilians were massacred when Israeli shells fell "outside" a UN school where many Palestinians were taking shelter. The secretary-general is reportedly considering how much of the information he can release without revealing the information supplied by Israel, the news item said, adding that the UN report concluded that Hamas fighters were not inside UN buildings but close to them.
Commenting on the report, the BBC said that it was informed by a diplomatic source, that the United States has informed Ban's office that the report should not be published in full due to the damage that that could cause to the Middle East peace talks; in other words (mine, in fact) to Israel.
The point here is neither to pass any premature judgment on an unpublished report -- despite obvious inconsistencies regarding shelling "outside" a UN installation that was somehow severely damaged -- nor to predict how much of the report the secretary-general will finally decide to publish.* * * * * [material omitted] * * * *Well, the secretary-general decided on 20 January to defy the norm and go to Gaza. But his courage only went so far. His highly-protected convoy took him straight to the still smoldering compound of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) whose warehouses of food and fuel were destroyed by Israeli attacks along with their contents. He must have noted that the massive destruction could not have resulted from "shelling outside" the installation. "I am just appalled," he said, "Everyone is smelling this bombing still. It is still burning. It is an outrageous and totally unacceptable attack against the United Nations." This flash of anger was limited however only to UN facilities. He spoke as if the rest of Gaza -- where more than 7,000 people lay dead or injured, and thousands of homes, schools, mosques, universities, police stations and government buildings were destroyed -- did not exist, or were not of UN concern.
Whisked around in his convoy, he did not bother to stop and talk to any of Israel's victims -- the families who had just dug the remains of their loved ones from the rubble or those with horrific injuries in Gaza's overstretched hospitals. These are the very people, the Palestinian refugees, that the UN is in Gaza to help, but there was it seems no time for them.* * * * * [Material omitted] * * * * *This is but one of the many sad stories of how the UN top leadership has betrayed and failed its mission. The UN does not exist only to protect its personnel and installations. The UN flag alone ought to provide that kind of real protection -- immunity which no state dares to violate without fear of the consequences. But Israel has repeatedly attacked UN facilities, schools, peacekeeping forces and personnel in Palestine and Lebanon knowing full well that it, not the UN, enjoys immunity for its actions. The next time Israel attacks a UN facility, part of the responsibility will lie with those who failed to act correctly this time around.
"Who Will Stop the AIPAC Jews Before it is Too Late?" -- Medea Benjamin
May 06, 2009 "CommonDreams" - - While I was being tackled by security guards at Washington's Convention Center during the AIPAC conference for unfurling a banner that asked "What about Gaza?," my heart was aching. I wasn't bothered so much by the burly guards who were yanking my arms behind by back and dragging me-along with 5 other CODEPINK members-out of the hall. They were doing their job.
What made my heart ache was the hatred I felt from the AIPAC staff who tore up the banner and slammed their hands across my mouth as I tried to yell out: "What about Gaza? What about the children?"
"Shut the f--- up. Shut the f--- up." one staffer yelled, red-faced and sweating as he ran beside me. "This is not the place to be saying that shit. Get the f--- out of here."
What makes my heart ache is thinking about the traumatized children I met on my recent trip to Gaza, and how their suffering is denied by the 6,000 AIPAC conventioneers who are living in a bubble-a bubble where Israel is the victim and all critics are anti-Semitic, terrorist lovers or, as in my case, self-hating Jews.
I found it fascinating that AIPAC's executive director Howard Kohr opened the conference admitting that there was now a huge, international campaign against the policies of Israel. He painted a picture of 30,000 people marching in Spain, Italian trade unionists calling for a boycott of Israeli products, the UN Human Rights Council passing 26 resolutions condemning Israel, an Israeli Apartheid Week that is building a global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign.
This global movement, he warned, emanates from the Middle East, echoes in the halls of the United Nations and the capitals of Europe, is voiced in meetings of international peace organizations, and is spreading throughout the United States-from the media to town hall meetings, from campuses to city squares. "No longer is this campaign confined to the ravings of the political far left or far right," he lamented, "but increasingly it is entering the American mainstream."
But Kohr failed to explain why there has been such an explosion in this movement, even among the American Jewish community. He didn't tell the attendees that the world was shocked and outraged by Israel's devastating 22-day attack on Gaza that left over 1,300 people dead-mostly women and children. He didn't mention the killing of civilians fleeing their homes, the use of white phosphorous, the bombing of homes, schools, mosques, hospitals, UN buildings, factories. He didn't talk about the continuing, cruel blockade of the Gaza Strip that is keeping desperately needed humanitarian aid from reaching 1.5 million people and making rebuilding impossible.
There were no seminars at the conference by human rights groups like Amnesty International that are calling for an immediate and comprehensive suspension of arms to Israel. Instead, one after another, U.S. elected officials eager to curry favor with AIPAC pledged continued U.S. financial support for Israel. Senator Kerry, despite that fact that he was one of only a handful of legislators who visited Gaza, didn't say one word about the massive destruction he witnessed and pledged that as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he would do everything to ensure that the $30 billion in military aid to Israel is "delivered in full." "America will continue our military aid, and Israel will keep its military strength," he insisted. Instead of calling for talks with the democratically elected government of Hamas, Kerry said: "Hamas has already won one election-we cannot allow them to win another." He ended his speech shouting several times in Hebrew, "Am Yisrael Chai-Israel lives!"
Even Vice President Biden, who at least told AIPAC that Israel should freeze new settlement activity, didn't say a word about the ongoing humanitarian crisis caused by Israel's invasion and continued blockade of Gaza. No U.S. officials, and there were hundreds at the conference, dared echo the call of the United Nations or the world community to lift the siege of Gaza.
Republican Congressman Eric Cantor was one of the most emotional speakers, portraying Israel as the victim of an evil global movement determined to wipe out Israel and all Jews. Evoking the "shivering, naked victims who were herded into the gas chambers," he wondered when it would become too late to protect Israel. "When is it too late?", he repeated over and over.
I wonder the same thing. When is it too late, I wonder, to stop Israel from destroying itself? When is it too late to tell AIPAC attendees that more violence and hatred is not the answer? When is it too late to open the hardened hearts of my people, once victims of a terrible holocaust, to realize that by occupying Palestine we have become they evil we deplore? When is it too late to restore meaning to the Hebrew term "tikkun olam" by truly working to heal the world? When is it too late for the Jews of the world to weep for the children of Gaza, recognizing that they, too, are the children of God?
I couldn't ask my questions at AIPAC. My mouth was muzzled by the sweaty hands of hate-filled staffers demanding that I "shut the f--- up." But despite AIPAC's massive funds and influence, I feel certain that more and more members of the Jewish community will step forward and refuse to be silent. I just pray it is not too late.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
"UC-Santa Barbara Faculty Member Goes Public About ADL Pressure"
From the blog of THE COMMITTEE TO DEFEND ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT UCSB http://sb4af.wordpress.com/
History professor attended meeting where Abraham Foxman pushed UCSB to act against sociology professor
Corrected version. Please distribute widely.
Date: May 2, 2009
Contact: Daniel Olmos, (818) 468-8894, olmos@umail.ucsb.edu.
Alba Peña-Leon, (626) 665-9212, alba@umail.ucsb.edu.
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Harold Marcuse, associate professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said he attended a March 9 meeting on campus where Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman pressured university officials to investigate charges of “anti-Semitism” against sociology professor William I. Robinson.
Marcuse said Foxman discussed the charges against Robinson for nearly an hour with about a dozen faculty members and university officials, including Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Michael Young and the executive dean of the College of Letters and Science, David B. Marshall.
“When the meeting started, Foxman quickly launched into what I would call a rant about what he said was an anti-Semitic email that professor Robinson sent to his class,” Marcuse said. “We then had an open discussion about Foxman’s comments and the charges against Robinson. In my recollection, that was the only thing we talked about at the meeting. Nothing else was discussed.”
"Our Responsibilities" (vis a vis Palestine) -- By Bashir Abu-Manneh
Portion below; whole thing (via Palestinian Pundit) here: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21367
My fifth and final point is about solidarity in the West. What should the demands of progressives and radicals be? After Gaza, imposing restrictive measures and sanctions against Israel should be the main political demand, until Israel complies with international laws and resolutions and ends its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This is the recommendation of Palestinian human rights organizations like Al-Haq.
As the International Court of Justice ruling against the illegal Wall stated on 9 July 2004, international action is required to ensure Palestinians' right of self-determination: "Further action is required to bring to an end the illegal situation resulting from the construction of the wall and the associated regime" (clauses 159 & 160).[10]
Sanctions against the occupying Israeli state are thus an urgent and primary task in the West. This also means that the solidarity movement should not get bogged down or distracted with discussions about the one-state or two-state solutions (ultimately a matter for Palestinian democracy).
Nor should our movement be required to lend ideological legitimation to Hamas or to other Palestinian nationalists. One supports the Palestinians, not because of the nature of their leadership, but because one supports the principle of self-determination for an oppressed people. It's a basic democratic right and a pre-requisite for a life of dignity, freedom, and justice. It's also a moral imperative.
Marilyn French, Feminist and Novelist, Dies at 79
I'm very grateful to Marilyn French and I'm sure I have a lot of company. Reading "The Women's Room" changed my life (and it needed changing!)
Link to original: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2009177198_apusobitfrench.html
The writer and feminist Marilyn French, whose novel "The Women's Room" sold 20 million copies and was translated into 20 languages, has died in New York City.
Carol Jenkins of New York's Women's Media Center says the 79-year-old died of heart failure on Saturday.
Jenkins says French's landmark 1977 novel "connected with millions of women who had no way before of claiming their anger and discontent."
French was teaching college when she wrote the novel about the journey to independence of a 1950s housewife who gets divorced and goes to graduate school. The book mirrored aspects of her own life experiences, including the rape of her daughter.
Her last novel is to be published this fall.
"Aids Convoy in the Mediterranean to Gaza" -- By Sameh A. Habeeb
More: www.savegaza.eu
Italy, May 5, 2009-The climax to the Seventh Palestinians in Europe conference was the launch of the long anticipated ‘Hope for Gaza convoy’ The convoy moved to Gaza and recently is in the Mediterranean carried by a shipping boat.
The convoy is destined for the Gaza Strip and carries provisions for the education and medical sectors, specifically for Palestinians with special needs – those who were handicapped by the major Israeli attacks of December and January.
Through a chorus of cheers and tears the convoy of a dozen well-equipped ambulances and some 30 trucks loaded with medical and humanitarian supplies set sail on a cargo ship from Genoa along with human rights volunteers, European parliamentarians, and journalists.
Non-governmental organizations, institutions and human solidarity movements across the continent are part of the global movement campaigning for the besieged people in Gaza. They are forming a strong coalition of activists, professionals from various backgrounds, politicians, human rights organizations who are dedicated in bringing to light Israeli crimes and violations of international law as well as the routine imprisonment of the Palestinian people in their homes.
Beginning in Milan on Sunday evening the convoy travelled to the Italian port city of Genoa where it set sail for Alexandria, Egypt. From there it will travel by land Sinai with the intention of passing into the Gaza Strip through the Rafah border crossing.
Representatives of Palestinian rights groups chanted slogans of solidarity saying that “Gaza is a symbol of pride.” With thousands of people killed or injured, in addition to the destruction of home and business, the convoy is urgently needed to deliver some respite and gestures of kindness to a people who are in danger in losing hope in basic human kindness. Past convoys have found it difficult to deliver the desperately needed aid, at present we can only be cautiously optimistic that this convoy will be allowed to pass.
Palestinian flags waved high above the cheers and tears as the convoy set out. Dr. Arafat Madi, President of the European Campaign to Lift the Siege on Gaza, said, “What we are doing is the least we can do. It is a drop in the ocean compared to the sacrifices made by our people in Palestine..””Dr. Madi added, “We promised our people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip We will invest all our efforts to send these aids and medical kits for those who deserve it in Gaza. Many people have been left maimed and disabled. All of us agree that they need urgent aid, especially medical aids to help in their grueling rehabilitation from the latest.”
The convoy is headed by 12 high-profile politicians from across Europe including, Britain, Italy, Scotland, Switzerland and Greece. Also joining the convoy will be many people from the Arab and Muslim communities from various European countries.
The Trial of the San Francisco 8 -- Ben Terrall
Part of article below; whole here: http://www.sfbg.com/blogs/politics/2009/05/the_trial_of_the_san_francisco.html
On Monday, June 8, the seven former Black Panthers known as the San Francisco 8 will face a preliminary hearing in Superior Court. The defendants are charged in the 1971 death of a local police officer; the charges were initially brought back in 1975, and dismissed when a judge ruled that the central evidence in the case was obtained through torture.
In fact, the FBI COINTELPRO-era case has a chilling resemblance to stories of torture at Guantanamo Bay: the statements were obtained after several of the suspects were subject to sleep deprivation, wet blankets used for asphyxiation, and beatings.
Now, although the San Francisco district attorney refused to file charges, Attorney General Jerry Brown has brought the case back. In 2007, he charged eight men – all of them now in their 60s, 70s and 80s – with murder. One defendant has been dropped from the case.
The remaining defendants are Herman Bell, Ray Boudreaux, Richard Brown, Henry (Hank)Jones, Jalil Muntaqim (Anthony Bottom), Harold Taylor and Francisco Torres.
The case has attracted international attention, and Nobel Prize winners including Desmond Tutu have called on Brown to drop the charges.
Locally, it’s led to a fascinating battle within the San Francisco Labor Council.
On Feb. 9, the council passed a resolution calling for the dismissal of all charges.
Letter Carriers local 214 delegate Dave Welsh saluted the Labor Council’s decision, writing that progressive activists would “savor this small but significant victory.”
Then Gary Delagnes, the SF Police Officers Association President, launched an attack on the resolution and tried to get the council to repeal it.
But on April 13, in a victory for the activists and their backers, the
Delegates Assembly of the SF Labor Council voted against a motion to rescind or repeal the SF 8 resolution. The 45 to 40 vote upheld the resolution.
In a statement issued after the April 13 vote, the Free the SF 8 Committee argued, “This vote is a tribute to the solidarity of the progressive labor movement in San Francisco and its willingness to value political principles and refuse to endorse a 37-year old prosecution based on statements made under police torture. We thank all the delegates and the rank and file members of the Bay Area unions that voted and signed statements of solidarity calling for the dropping of charges against the San Francisco 8!”
Delagnes’s opposition to the resolution cited old allegations from the complaint against the SF 8. Supporters of the SF 8 note that the prosecution claims to have a murder weapon but says it is now missing.” Further, the prosecution admitted in 2008 that DNA taken from the defendants in June, 2006 did not match DNA from the crime scene, and fingerprints alleged to match one of the defendants apparently don’t match at all.
Activists also point to the millions of dollars the case will cost the State of California in the midst of a budget crisis and massive layoffs of workers.
Monday, May 04, 2009
An Essay Inspired by Caryl Churchill's "7 Jewish Children"
Beginning of essay below; please read the entirety (at Palestine Think Tank) here: http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/05/03/an-open-letter-to-caryl-churchill-from-a-palestinian-mother/
Palestinian Mothers are thanking you [Caryl Churchill] for your great contributions to peace and understanding. We support your calls for common sense and reminding everybody of what we have in common of unconditional love for our children, we support your mission; your words healed some of our wounds.http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/video/2009/apr/25/seven-jewish-children-caryl-churchill
Allow me to join you.. And tell her that….Tell her soon she will grow up like all young girls do, she will get married and become a mother…
Tell her blood is dearer than oil. Explain to her what kind of oil you are talking about; explain to her how many chocolate bars one can buy for the price of one bomb.
Tell her she should reject discrimination and call for equal rights for all when she grows up… No… do not tell her that now… discrimination is a big word… just tell her every human being is special and we are all equal, you might have to tell her why some people are more equal than others.
Spain: Judge Presses on with Israel Probe
Part of article below; whole here: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2009169248_apeuspainisraelprobe.html
A Spanish judge said Monday he will keep investigating seven current or former Israeli officials over a 2002 air force bombing in Gaza that killed a suspected Hamas militant and 14 civilians.
Prosecutors last month urged Judge Fernando Andreu of Spain's National Court to suspend the inquiry on the grounds Israel was still investigating the attack. But Andreu rejected the request on Monday, saying he has found no evidence of such an investigation in Israel.
Israel's Foreign Ministry called the decision "ridiculous" and groundless. A Palestinian human rights group hailed it as a "great victory."
Andreu first agreed to open the case in January at the request of Palestinian relatives of victims of the attack. Nine children were among the dead.
Andreu said he was acting under Spain's observance of the principle of universal jurisdiction, which holds that grave crimes such as genocide, terrorism or torture can be prosecuted here even if alleged to have been committed elsewhere.
Andreu said the 2002 bombing in densely populated Gaza City might constitute a crime against humanity. That attack with a one-ton bomb dropped from an Israeli F-16 targeted and killed alleged Hamas member Salah Shehadeh along with 14 other people. Israel has defended the attack as a legitimate strike against a terrorist.
On Monday, the Spanish judge wrote that Israel's military conducted an internal investigation but Israeli military and civilian prosecutors declined to open proceedings of their own. He said for this reason Spain has jurisdiction to keep investigating.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
This Didn't Happen on May Day in Seattle...
as far as I know. It was a highly spirited march of 5,000 people demanding an end to the borders and for Obama to "escucha la lucha continua" or words to that effect. Si se puede and the ever popular and liberatory "el pueblo unido, jamas sera vencido" rang out through the whole 3.5 mile march from Judkins Park down to Occidental Park. I strolled along with Doug yelling Happy May Day to all the workers waiting for their busses. Most of them smiled.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Wow -- So Cool the Pope's Going to Palestine -- Yeah, Right
May 1, 2009
Jerusalem – Ma’an – A Palestinian Christian was hospitalized after being severely beaten by Israeli police in East Jerusalem's Old City on Friday.
The Palestinian who lives on Latin Patriarch Street in East Jerusalem, Samer Andrea Karkar, was assaulted near an Italian restaurant and store, both of which he owns, on the same street.
The pope is scheduled to visit the area during his upcoming visit to Jerusalem next Thursday.
Witnesses told Ma'an that Israeli police had prevented Palestinian residents from passing through the street under the pretext that it was being renovated before the pope's visit. When Samer tried to convince the police to allow his sister and her sleeping children to return home, police ordered him to leave one of them behind, for reasons that were not immediately clear.
Police then told Samer that they "do not want to see him on the entire street" and eventually threw him on the ground, while other police officers beat him so severely that he was ultimately taken for treatment at Hadasa Hospital in Jerusalem.
He was also taken into a police station, despite that his restaurant was still open.
As’ad Mazzawi, a lawyer and eyewitness of the incident, went to the police department, but was not allowed inside. After Israeli police interrogated Samer, he was released and transferred to the Israeli hospital for medical exams.
Police have been telling the residents and store owners in the East Jerusalem neighborhood that the area will be shut down for the pope's visit, and that residents should stay inside their homes for the duration of his visit, without attempting to leave them.