Israeli Forces Attack Media Professionals Trying to Cover a Story in Kufr Qaddoum

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UPDATE:  apparently the Foreign Press Association has demanded an investigation into this incident.  'bout damn time!  http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/news/news/5096-video-foreign-press-association-in-israel-demands-investigation-of-soldiers-beating-journalists.html


http://youtu.be/-uymV3EHLAY

From Mazin Qumsiyeh's blog:

Also on Thursday, Israeli forces attacked media professionals trying to cover a story in Kufr Qaddoum.

One reason why Americans do not get the story about what our tax money is doing in Israel.

"festive psychological torture in Gaza" -- from Eva Bartlett's blog "In Gaza"

Tweet http://ingaza.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/festive-psychological-torture-in-gaza/

Sun Aug. 19

1:05 pm

I’ve been back in Gaza 4 days now and now hear the familiar roar of a Zionist warplane over Deir al Balah where I live. I was wondering where they were, knew they hadn’t gone away. Now, with the passing war-roar, things seem sickeningly normal here.

Five minutes later another passes over, again north to south. Now for the expected sonic boom or real bomb blast…A minute later and the dissipated roar returns, circling perhaps. Five minutes later, another passing of the warplane’s roar, south to north. Apprehension, apprehension (although in truth, most Palestinians are so accustomed to these intrusive fly-overs they don’t think twice).  In Gaza, when one hears a plane’s engines, it is never that of a passenger plane. What’s going to happen, and when? This time? Here again? I recall a year ago during Ramadan when, in the early hours of the morning, we watched rooftop as numerous IOF warplanes flew over us and on to bomb eastern Gaza, returning soon after to bomb the coast a few hundred metres away from us.

Emad tells me that the shock waves of a recent blast in the area blew his brother’s door off its hinges. His brother lives one floor below us.

Two minutes later, the roar is lower, coming from the north.
Again, a few minutes later, also from north, progressively louder.

Five minutes later, again from the north.

Although IOF warplanes seem to have paused this psychological torture during the last few days of Ramadan fasting, it’s back to business as usual now.

Nima Shirazi Indicts Israeli Apartheid with Words of Israelis Themselves

Tweet http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2012/08/some-notes-on-ahmadinejads-insult-to.html

via Aletho News

EXCERPT:

In April 1976, just two months before the Soweto Uprising, South African Prime Minister (and known former Nazi sympathizer) John Vorster took an official state visit to Israel, where he was hosted by Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin.  A number of friendship pacts and bilateral economic, military and nuclear agreements were signed.  At a banquet held in Vorster's honor, Rabin hailed "the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence" and praised Vorster as a champion of freedom.  Both Israel and South Africa, Rabin said, faced "foreign-inspired instability and recklessness."

Vorster lamented that both South Africa and Israel were victims of the enemies of Western civilization.  Only a few months later, an official South African Government's document reinforced this shared predicament: "Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples."

Michael Ben-Yair, Israel’s attorney general from 1993 to 1996, has written that following the Six Day War in June 1967,

We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one ‑ progressive, liberal ‑ in Israel; and the other ‑ cruel, injurious ‑ in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture.

That oppressive regime exists to this day.

Avraham Burg, Israel's Knesset Speaker from 1999 to 2003 and former chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, has long determined that "Israel must shed its illusions and choose between racist oppression and democracy," insisting the only way to maintain total Jewish control over all of historic Palestine would be to "abandon democracy" and "institute an efficient system of racial separation here, with prison camps and detention villages." He has also called Israel "the last colonial occupier in the Western world."

Julian Assange Speaks from the Ecuadorian Embassy [VIDEO]

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http://youtu.be/E5bzWZ1gYIY

Bonfire of the Vanities: Robert Parry and the Red Mist of Partisanship -- Chris Floyd

Tweet http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2272-bonfire-of-the-vanities-robert-parry-and-the-red-mist-of-partisanship.html

EXCERPT:

And I think this is Parry’s main problem: he still doesn’t see – or can’t quite believe – what is going on right in front of his eyes. He thinks we have some kind of normal politics in some kind of normal nation. He can’t seem to grasp that a bipartisan system that has wrought the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children and a million more Iraqis in a war of aggression; that has killed countless thousands of Afghans in a pointless, atrocity-ridden, deeply corrupt occupation;  that operates a global death squad – out of the White House, directed by the president himself;  that kidnaps and tortures innocent people and then protects the torturers; that prosecutes truth-tellers and investigative reporters – like Robert Parry – who expose state crimes; that gorges its wealthy, greedy, above-the-law elites with tax cuts and bailouts and war profits and privileges without end while sharpening its bipartisan knives to gut the last, frayed remnants of the social safety net, is a system that has gone far beyond “moral ambiguity” and “imperfection” and “lesser evilism.” It is itself a product and producer of evil.

Parry says there are no viable alternative parties to this double-headed beast. And he is right. He says there are no popular movements out there right now “that can significantly alter government policies strictly through civil disobedience or via protests in the streets.” And he is right. Therefore what is left to us, at the present moment, in this election, but the power of refusal? (Whether this is exercised by “throwing your vote away” on a third party or absenting yourself entirely from the legitimization and normalization of imperial monstrosity.)  Where is the dishonor, the vanity in such a stance, in refusing to accept and affirm mass murder, repression, corruption and injustice in an implacable system that offers no other choices?

Would Parry have told Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Boris Pasternak or Josef Brodsky or other Soviet dissidents that they should not have disassociated themselves from the implacable system they confronted? “You should join the Party, Aleksandr, you must work within the system. That’s the only way we’ll see real change.” Perhaps Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst  of the White Rose should have stifled their concerns about the “imperfections” of the German government and sought the path of “lesser evilism” instead, working to advance, say, Albert Speer or Herman Goring or some other figure who might have “done some rotten things” but “fewer rotten things than the other guy.”

Yes, I know the United States in 2012 is not the USSR or Hitler’s Germany. And Parry would doubtless say, “Of course they were right to disassociate themselves from such monstrous systems.” But where do you draw the line? How much evil is acceptable?  Is there a certain number of victims that a system must reach before one is allowed to disengage from it honorably and morally?  To murder six million in death camps or millions in purges is obviously unacceptable; but to kill 500,000 children – is that OK? A million innocent people in a war of aggression – is that beyond the pale? Or can you work with that, can you accommodate that, should you swallow these mountains of dead, washing them down with a big swig of moral ambiguity?

Romney might well prove to be a “worse” president than Obama. (Although Parry does not address the realpolitik argument that a Romney victory would likely wake the ‘left’ from its slumber and cause it to oppose heinous crimes and vicious policies – aggressive war, murder programs, safety net slashing – that it is now happily supporting because a Democrat is doing them.) But that is not the issue. The issue is whether or not one gives legitimacy and justification to a brutal and unjust system by actively supporting and empowering it – and thus perpetuating its bipartisan evils far into the future.

Robert Parry says we should do this. He says: if you don’t support one murderer, the other murderer (or rather, would-be murderer, since Obama has actually directed death squads and drone attacks that have killed hundreds of innocent people, including American children, while Romney is still just hoping to do so) might be worse. To choose one murderer over another murderer is the only moral choice open to us, Parry says.  To refuse to cooperate with evil – as Tolstoy did, as Solzhenitsyn did, as Sophie Scholl, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King did – is pointless, perfectionist, vain. That’s what Robert Parry evidently believes.

But with all due respect to Parry and his valuable body of work, I disagree. On this, I will take my stand with Thoreau. I refuse to give this evil my assent.

Scott Olsen & Other Vets for Peace About to be Arrested in Obama Hdqrtrs #freebrad #oo

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Evicted from Their Home

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Elsy Castillo, 25, and her 8-year-old daughter Dairl, react as they are forced to leave the area near the Jacobo Arbenz housing settlement by the military and police in Guatemala City, Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2012.  Security forces evicted about 200 families on Monday from vacant lots that they took over in January, called the Jacobo Arbenz housing settlement, which is located in front a military base. On Wednesday, forces returned to the area to force families that didn't leave to move out.

United Church of Canada Decides To Boycott Settlement Products

Tweet via Aletho News
http://www.imemc.org/article/64076

Following around six hours of deliberation, the United Church of Canada (UCC), the largest Protestant denomination in the country, voted for boycotting products made in Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem.

The Toronto Star newspaper reported that a spokesperson of the UCC general council identified as Bruce Gregersen, stated that the decision is considered a significant step.

The UCC will be holding another vote on Friday to decide whether this boycott would be a regarded as a permanent policy of the church.

Israeli Ynet News reported that the Centre for Israel and the Jewish Affairs in Canada said that it was “outraged by this decision”, and considered it “a move that singled out Jewish communities for boycott”.

The Centre claimed that this decision is considered a “reckless path”, and added that the decision just dismisses the concerns of the Jewish community in Canada. 

According to the Ynet, Chairman of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, David Koschitzky, stated that mainstream Jewish organization, including the Canadian Friends of Peace Now, “do not approve of this boycott decision”.

He added that this decision ignored around 100.000 families, members of different Jewish federations in Canada, and said that this decision “also ignores written rejection letters of 70 Canadian Rabbis, representing tens of thousands of Jewish families in the country”.

Israel’s settlements are located in the occupied Palestinian territories, including in and around occupied East Jerusalem. There have been several churches and organizations around the world, including educational facilities that have previously voted in favor of boycotting products made in Israel’s settlements as settlements.

Israel’s settlements in occupied Palestine are illegal under International Law, and even violate the Fourth Geneva Convention to which Israel is a signatory.

Palestinian Refugees Forced Out of Iraq Feared Lost at Sea En Route to Australia

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http://tinyurl.com/9p253o5
from Electronic Intifada

EXCERPT:

More than two dozen Palestinian refugees forced out of Iraq after the US invasion are feared lost at sea, including entire family groups with young children.

They were among dozens of people aboard rickety boats that left Indonesia in late June bound for Australia but have been lost without trace for a month and a half. Australia has denied reports that it holds them in detention.

The Palestinians were among hundreds who had made circuitous journeys over many years from Iraq to Jordan and then to Cyprus where their asylum applications were rejected and they faced harsh conditions.
After reaching Cyprus, some set out for Malaysia, where it is possible under certain conditions for Palestinians to go without visas, and then onwards to Indonesia where people smugglers are paid to take them to Australia by boat.

Palestinians in Iraq faced violence and persecution after the 2003 US invasion. They were collectively blamed without any evidence for suicide bombings that were part of Iraq’s post-invasion sectarian civil war. Many spent years stranded at the Iraq-Jordan border.

Olympic Visitors to London See Numerous Bus Ads for Palestine and Bahrain

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http://youtu.be/cwc5olFKuXQ

"TrapWire Leaks Shine Light on New Video Tracking Technologies" --Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch

Tweet http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15767&printsafe=1

EXCERPT:

TrapWire, a company founded and run by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers, that offers to track “suspicious” activities from surveillance video, has been spotlighted in a new Wikileaks release.

The system is described on the TrapWire’s website as "a unique, predictive software system designed to detect patterns of pre-attack surveillance and logistical planning.” The U.S. Department of Homeland Security paid TrapWire $832,000 to deploy Trapwire in Washington DC and Seattle in December 2011, according to federal spending data records.

The information on Trapwire’s contracts emerged from one of the five million internal emails from Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based company that brands itself as a "global intelligence" provider, were recently obtained by Anonymous, the hacker collective, and were released in batches by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, earlier this year.

The Trapwire technology was created at Abraxas corporation, which was founded by Richard "Hollis" Helms, a former CIA agent (but not the former head of the CIA under Nixon). Abraxas spun off Trapwire into another company which still has several senior employees who once worked at the agency. They include Dan Botsch, who worked at the CIA for 11 years as a Russian and Eastern European analyst,  Michael Maness, a 20 year CIA veteran who worked in counterterrorism and security operations in the Middle-East, the Balkans and Europe, and Michael K. Chang, a 12 years CIA veteran on counterterrorism operations.

The company appears to have deleted the list of senior employees from its website when the Wikileaks release occurred. But the company still promotes their prior experience: “Our professionals have led successful intelligence operations against terrorist organizations and fought on battlefields across the globe.”

The software has been described as a real life version of a system portrayed in Minority Report, a Hollywood blockbuster. “Anyone who takes a photograph at high-risk locations is logged as a suspected terrorist on a vast network of secret spy cameras linked to the U.S. Government, according to leaked emails,” writes Rick Dewsbury at the Daily Mail, a tabloid newspaper in the UK.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2187602/U-S-Government-secretly-spying-using-civilian-security-cameras-say-Wikileaks.html

Mainstream media have reacted more cautiously to the TrapWire leaks. The New York Times commented that the “reports appear to be wildly exaggerated” noting that the Homeland Security had ended trials on the technology last year “because it did not seem promising.” The company refused to comment.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Halts Nuclear Reactor Licensing Decisions

Tweet finally some sanity!  seems like a gamechanger for the anti-nuke movement!  yay!
http://www.cleanenergy.org/index.php?/Press-Update.html?form_id=8&item_id=313
Excerpt:
Decision Follows 24 Groups’ June Petition in Wake of Major Waste Confidence Rule Decision;   Most Reactor Projects Already Stymied by Bad Economics and Cheaper Fuel Alternatives

WASHINGTON, D.C.  – The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) acted today to put a hold on at least 19 final reactor licensing decisions – nine construction & operating licenses (COLS), eight license renewals, one operating license, and one early site permit – in response to the landmark Waste Confidence Rule decision of June 8th by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

The NRC action was sought in a June 18, 2012 petition filed by 24 groups urging the NRC to respond to the court ruling by freezing final licensing decisions until it has completed a rulemaking action on the environmental impacts of highly radioactive nuclear waste in the form of spent, or ‘used’, reactor fuel storage and disposal.

In hailing the NRC action, the groups also noted that most of the U.S. reactor projects were already essentially sidetracked by the huge problems facing the nuclear industry, including an inability to control runaway costs, and the availability of far less expensive energy alternatives.

Diane Curran, an attorney representing some of the groups in the Court of Appeals case, said:  "This Commission decision halts all final licensing decisions -- but not the licensing proceedings themselves -- until NRC completes a thorough study of the environmental impacts of storing and disposing of spent nuclear fuel.  That study should have been done years ago, but NRC just kept kicking the can down the road.  When the Federal Appeals Court ordered NRC to stop and consider the impacts of generating spent nuclear fuel for which it has found no safe means of disposal, the agency could choose to appeal the decision by August 22nd or choose to do the serious work of analyzing the environmental impacts over the next few years.  With today’s Commission decision, we are hopeful that the agency will undertake the serious work.”   

Stephen Smith, executive director of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, petitioner to the Court, said: “We’re pleased with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's ruling; it is long overdue. Nuclear power is not a clean generating source when it creates long-lived radioactive and toxic waste that has no long-term safe disposal technology in place. We believe it is appropriate to halt nuclear licensing decisions and stop creating an inter-generational debt of nuclear waste that will burden our children and grandchildren for centuries to come.”

Lou Zeller, executive director of Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, another petitioner to the Court, said:  “It appears that the Commissioners have, at least initially, grasped the magnitude of the Court’s ruling and we are optimistic that it will set up a fundamentally transparent, fair process under the National Environmental Policy Act to examine the serious environmental impacts of spent nuclear fuel storage and disposal prior to licensing or relicensing nuclear reactors.”

Former NRC Commissioner Peter Bradford said: “It is important to recognize that the reactors awaiting construction licenses weren't going to be built anytime soon even without the Court decision or today's NRC action. Falling demand, cheaper alternatives and runaway nuclear costs had doomed their near term prospects well before the recent Court decision. Important though the Court decision is in modifying the NRC's historic push-the-power-plants-but-postpone-the-problems approach to generic safety and environmental issues, it cannot be blamed for ongoing descent into fiasco of the bubble once known as ‘the nuclear renaissance’.”

America's Dark Shadows: Aurora, Sikhs and Guns -- Michael Vlahos

Tweet http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=9709

EXCERPT (recommend reading it all tho):

A nation's character is marked by mysterious patterns, and none is more salient in American life than killing with the gun, says Michael Vlahos, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He asks this pivotal question: Can the inhuman act of a single person lay bare the neuralgia of an entire people?

Though painful, this statement cannot be avoided: The gun-massacre of innocents is integral to the American way of life. Call it part of our foundational myth. It is the red reality through which a continent was taken and settled. 

Today, we call an act like the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, or the even more recent one in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, "senseless." Yet, we should face these events as what they really are, a much bigger national tradition. Ritual slaying is everywhere in our American history, especially sacrificial killing with guns.

Even if we cannot admit this, American exceptionalism is never better illustrated than in ritual human execution. Other cultures have slaughterers. Only we have made ritual killers such a mirror of us. In our history and our cinema, there are a few — like John Brown — we even celebrate.

Our gun-slinging killing rituals are also dark expressions of a political ethos that surrounds the theology of the citizen's relationship to the state. "Citizen and state" is the most contentious creedal element in national identity, and is itself argued through the symbolic venue of killing with a gun. Pro-gun and anti-gun sectarianism remains the deepest fissure, a split almost, in our national identity today.

Fast food and strip mall, school and university shootings around the country should raise an existential national question: Why are gun-massacres so rooted in the American way of life — and so tied to the political struggle over collective identity?

Iran and Everything Else -- (The Great) Michael Parenti

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 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article32104.htm

EXCERPTS:

All I knew about the Shah at that time came from the U.S. mainstream media. But after listening to these students I began to think that this Shah fellow was not the admirably benign leader and modernizer everyone was portraying in the news.

The Shah’s subsequent overthrow in the 1979 revolution was something to celebrate. Unfortunately the revolution soon was betrayed by the theocratic militants who took hold of events and created their Islamic Republic of Iran. These religious reactionaries set about to torture and eradicate thousands of young Iranian radicals. They made war upon secular leftists and "decadent" Western lifestyles, as they set about establishing a grim and corrupt theocracy.

U.S. leaders and media had no critical words about the slaughter of leftist revolutionaries in Iran. If anything, they were quietly pleased. However, they remained hostile toward the Islamic regime. Why so? Regimes that kill revolutionaries and egalitarian reformists do not usually incite displeasure from the White House. If anything, the CIA and the Pentagon and the other imperial operatives who make the world safe for the Fortune 500 look most approvingly upon those who torture and murder Marxists and other leftists. Indeed, such counterrevolutionaries swiftly become the recipients of generous amounts of U.S. aid.

************

It was President George W. Bush who in January 2002 cited Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an "axis of evil." Iran exports terrorism and "pursues" weapons of mass destruction. Sooner or later this axis would have to be dealt with in the severest way, Bush insisted.

These official threats and jeremiads are intended to leave us with the impression that Iran is not ruled by "good Muslims." The "good Muslims"---as defined by the White House and the State Department---are the reactionary extremists and feudal tyrants who ride high in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirate, Bahrain, and other countries that provide the United States with military bases, buy large shipments of U.S. arms, vote as Washington wants in the United Nations, enter free trade agreements with the Western capitalist nations, and propagate a wide-open deregulated free-market economy.

The "good Muslims" invite the IMF and the western corporations to come in and help themselves to the country’s land, labor, markets, industry, natural resources and anything else the international plutocracy might desire.

Unlike the "good Muslims," the "bad Muslims" of Iran take an anti-imperialist stance. They try to get out from under the clutches of the U.S. global imperium. For this, Iran may yet pay a heavy price. Think of what has been happening to Iraq, Libya, and now Syria. For its unwillingness to throw itself open to Western corporate pillage, Iran is already being subjected to heavy sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies. Sanctions hurt the ordinary population most of all. Unemployment and poverty increase. The government is unable to maintain human services. The public infrastructure begins to deteriorate and evaporate: privatization by attrition.

Iran has pursued an enriched uranium program, same as any nation has the right to do. The enrichment has been low-level for peaceful use, not the kind necessary for nuclear bombs. Iranian leaders, both secular and theocratic have been explicit about the useless horrors of nuclear weaponry and nuclear war.

Appearing on the Charlie Rose show when he was visiting the USA, Iranian president Ahmadinejad pointed out that nuclear weapons have never saved anyone. The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons; was it saved? he asked. India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons; have they found peace and security? Israel has nuclear weapons: has it found peace and security? And the United States itself has nuclear weapons and nuclear fleets patrolling the world and it seems obsessively preoccupied with being targeted by real or imagined enemies. Ahmadinejad, the wicked one, sounded so much more rational and humane than Hillary Clinton snarling her tough-guy threats at this or that noncompliant nation.

(Parenthetically, we should note that the Iranians possibly might try to develop a nuclear strike force---not to engage in a nuclear war that would destroy Iran but to develop a deterrent against aerial destruction from the west. The Iranians, like the North Koreans, know that the western nuclear powers have never attacked any country that is armed with nuclear weapons.)

I once heard some Russian commentators say that Iran is twice as large as Iraq, both in geography and in population; it would take hundreds of thousands of NATO troops and great cost in casualties and enormous sums of money to invade and try to subdue such a large country, an impossible task and certain disaster for the United States.

But the plan is not to invade, just to destroy the country and its infrastructure through aerial warfare. The U.S. Air Force eagerly announced that it has 10,000 targets in Iran pinpointed for attack and destruction. Yugoslavia is cited as an example of a nation that was destroyed by unanswerable aerial attacks, without the loss of a single U.S. soldier. I saw the destruction in Serbia shortly after the NATO bombings stopped: bridges, utilities, rail depots, factories, schools, television and radio stations, government-built hotels, hospitals, and housing projects---a destruction carried out with utter impunity, all this against a social democracy that refused to submit to a free-market capitalist takeover.

The message is clear. It has already been delivered to Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, and many other countries around the world: overthrow your reform-minded, independent, communitarian government; become a satellite to the global corporate free-market system, or we will pound you to death and reduce you to a severe level of privatization and poverty.

Not all the U.S. military is of one mind regarding war with Iran. While the Air Force can hardly contain itself, the Army and Navy seem lukewarm. Former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, actually denounced the idea of waging destruction upon "80 million Iranians, all different individuals."

The future does not look good for Iran. That country is slated for an attack of serious dimensions, supposedly in the name of democracy, "humanitarian war," the struggle against terrorism, and the need to protect America and Israel from some future nuclear threat.

Sometimes it seems as if U.S. ruling interests perpetrate crimes and deceptions of all sorts with a frequency greater than we can document and expose. So if I don’t write or speak about one or another issue, keep in mind, it may be because I am occupied with other things, or I simply have neither the energy nor the resources. Sometimes too, I think, it is because I get too heavy of heart.

West Provoking Civil War in Syria: Jonathan Steele -- Informative Interview with George Galloway

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http://youtu.be/L5IYjkIvzsQ

Palestine 1896 -- First film footage taken in Palestine (Lumier Bros.)

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http://youtu.be/1vaIK8wlAl0

Three Little Birds -- Apartheid [wonderful song!]

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http://youtu.be/9haR4zyPqig

to read their important story on the In Gaza blog, go here:  http://ingaza.wordpress.com/2012/07/28/three-little-birds-talented-ottawa-band-takes-principled-and-musical-stand-against-apartheid/

Anaheim Anger: Fatal police shooting sparks calls for justice

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http://youtu.be/2DUb8k9NfAs

Obama for America TV Ad: "Drone Warrior"

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http://youtu.be/TxlngJMPXbU

A.M. 1090 Progressive Radio Fest Showare Center in Kent

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Phil & Richard face the multitudes from our appointed spot on the public sidewalk.

Phil & Richard

Our "competition".  ;)

David near the end of the gig.

Sibyl & Ann catch the incoming cars and pedestrians.

Voices of Palestine crew celebrates new black & white signage, heroically arranged by Richard, with some extra help from Anne and Ziyad.

The guard chased us off the property with our signs, so David and Phil doffed their signs and managed to pass out almost 400 flyers to the folks as they entered the show.  One of the flyers, written by Richard, was aimed directly at the "progressive except for Palestine" talk hosts and the other was written by an ex-IDF soldier explaining to the seemingly clueless media that Israel was like a bear sitting on a hive of honey and then complaining when it got stung.  David had his Palestine map shirt and Phil was wearing his Veterans for Peace shirt.  Great job!

Stateless Rohingya...Running on Empty -- from Aletho News

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http://youtu.be/wShJ0dv121U

Pro-Palestinian Ads Ignite Firestorm Of Controversy

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http://youtu.be/pOxJF4dRHtw

Goodbye, Sassy, Good Old Girl

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My sister's effervescent sidekick will be so missed.

Mr. Fish & Real Democracy

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Mr. Fish via Charles Davis
http://www.clowncrack.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/RealDemocracy.jpg

Eli Cane: Wounds and Scars [Native America Under Attack]

Tweet  http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/eli-cane-wounds-and-scars/

 EXCERPT:

On August 26, 2011, 68-year-old Vernon Traversie was admitted to the Rapid City Regional Hospital in South Dakota for emergency double bypass surgery. After his operation, Traversie, who is blind, discovered that he had been brutally mutilated while under anesthesia. In addition to the surgical scars, his torso was covered in gashes, with the letters KKK carved into his stomach. Traversie is a Lakota Sioux who lives on the Cheyenne River Reservation.

“They’re squeezing us, just like they were before Wounded Knee,” said Guy Dull Knife Jr., who lives on Pine Ridge Reservation. Along with Cheyenne River, Pine Ridge is one of over a dozen territories scattered throughout the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Minnesota that were granted to the Lakota Nation by the U.S. government in a series of treaties, most of which were signed in the late 1800s. Pine Ridge, about a hundred miles south-east of Rapid City, is in the heart of America’s Great Plains—prairies, canyons, buttes, and dry riverbeds stretch impossibly far in any given direction, framed by the Black Hills on one side and the Badlands on the other. I speak to Guy regularly to get updates on his life and news of the reservation—a result of my visits over the last few years to film a documentary that I am producing.

Renegade Jewish Settlers Part 1/5

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http://youtu.be/dq1LK2qMwLA

Visualizing Occupation: Freedom of Movement

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http://972mag.com/visualizing-occupation-freedom-of-movement/45605/


Whereas West Bank settlers can travel freely between Israel and the West Bank, Palestinian movement is governed by the Israeli security establishment. This illustration is the fourth in a series of infographics on the effect of the occupation on the Palestinian civilian population.
By Michal Vexler

Team Palestine at All Nations Cup in Tukwila! Really Fun to Watch!

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Ziyad tells t-shirts supporting Team Palestine

Queen of Team Palestine

Team Palestine's Enthused Supporters

Team Palestine's Entrance to the Field

Teams from Around the Globe

Team Palestine on Way to Match w/Brazil, a hard-fought test.  Brazil ended up on top, 3-0.

Backer of NY Ads Exposing Palestinian Land-Loss Says Response Has Been ‘Astounding’ & News ‘Coverage is Pouring In’

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EXCERPT from Mondoweiss:

Last night I talked to Henry Clifford, the 83-year-old Connecticut man who paid for the smashing ads on New York commuter train platforms that describe the dispossession of Palestinian lands over the last century.

"I've been plowing this field for many years and I am absolutely astounded by the response I've received, and the news coverage," the former financier said. "We've been begging for coverage for years. Now it's pouring in."

He said he had been interviewed by CBS, Fox News, NBC and many radio stations, and the questions were fair ones.

"I have received nothing but positive responses with two exceptions [by email]," said Clifford, whose email address hcliffordws@aol.com, is on the ads. "This has produced an overwhelming response."

SWAT Team Invades Occupy Seattle Home -- Good Discussion with Activist Phillip Neel

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http://youtu.be/ySlgtgvQ-QQ

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y for Olympia Co-op Members & BDS!

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Bruce Johnson, on right, and other attorneys discussing happy court result with co-op members and supporters.


 http://www.theolympian.com/2012/07/12/2171566/olympia-food-co-op-defendants.html

[FROM THE OLYMPIAN] Five Olympia Food Co-op members who had sued to overturn the store’s boycott of Israeli goods must pay $160,000 in damages, the result of a judge’s prior ruling that the lawsuit was an illegal Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
SLAPPs are defined as nuisance lawsuits designed to stifle free speech and create onerous legal costs for those who choose to exercise their free-speech rights. SLAPPs are illegal under a state law that the defendants’ attorney, Bruce Johnson, and another staff attorney at Davis Wright Tremaine helped draft.

The 16 defendants are entitled to $10,000 each under Washington’s anti-SLAPP statute, Thurston County Superior Court Judge Thomas McPhee ruled Thursday.

The defendants are former board members who voted to enact the boycott in July 2010 and current members who joined the board after the boycott was enacted.

The 16 people who’d sued had argued that the co-op’s board acted outside its authority and didn’t follow its own rules when it enacted the boycott. In February, McPhee rejected that argument and ruled that the lawsuit was a SLAPP.

Olympia Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement member Andrew Meyer said Thursday that McPhee’s award recognizes that the co-op acted within its rights to continue the boycott until Israel secures “equal, civil and human rights for Palestinians.”

Attorney Bob Sulkin, who represented the 16 people who’d sued, declined to comment outside court. It’s unknown whether he will appeal.

McPhee ruled that the defendants also are entitled to attorney’s fees but did not decide on a dollar amount. Johnson said outside court that he has asked for $280,000 in attorney’s fees. McPhee told Johnson during Thursday’s hearing that he wants to see a detailed itemized account of each defense attorney’s work on the case within two weeks.
Sulkin called Johnson’s request for $280,000 in attorney’s fees “outrageous.”

He argued Thursday that the co-op itself was responsible for paying for damages under the SLAPP statue. That’s because those who’d sued are in essence “shareholders” in the “corporation” known as the co-op, he said.

“We are nominal parties, nominal,” Sulkin said in court. “The corporation is the real party and interest here.”

McPhee said, “I don’t find that argument persuasive.”

The co-op board voted in July 2010 to boycott Israeli products; it was not a unanimous decision. Products that were removed from the co-op’s two stores, one on Olympia’s east side and the other on the west side, include gluten-free crackers, ice cream cones and a moisturizing cream.

jpawloski@theolympian.com
360-754-5445
theolympian.com/thisjustin
@JeremyPawloski

Read more here: http://www.theolympian.com/2012/07/12/v-print/2171566/olympia-food-co-op-defendants.html#storylink=cpy

History Repeats Itself -- Visualizing Palestine

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Al-Walaja Village: The Impact of the Annexation Wall -- [Video Demonstrates This Incipient War Crime]

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There Is One State Now in Palestine -- Miko Peled, Author "A General's Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine"

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Water Torture -- Gideon Levy

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 http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/water-torture.premium-1.449448

 Avi is an inspection coordinator for the "Civil Administration" - the occupation regime, to speak without euphemisms. Presumably Avi likes his job. Maybe he's even proud of it.

He doesn't bother mentioning his last name in the forms he signs. Why should he? His ornate "Avi" signature is sufficient to carry out his diktats. And Avi's are among the most brutal and inhumane diktats ever to be imposed in these parts.
Avi confiscates water containers that serve hundreds of Palestinian and Bedouin families living in the Jordan Valley.

The containers are these people's only water source. In recent weeks, Avi has confiscated about a dozen containers, leaving dozens of families with children in the horrific Jordan Valley heat, to go thirsty.

The forms he takes pains to complete, in spiffy style, say: "There is reason to suspect they used the above merchandise for carrying out an offense." Avi's bosses claim the "offense" is stealing water from a pipe. This is why the containers are seized - with no inquiry, no trial. Welcome to the land of lawlessness and evil. Welcome to the land of apartheid. Israel does not permit thousands of these wretched people to hook up to the water pipes. This water is for Jews only. Even the greatest Israeli propagandists could not deny the nationalist, diabolical separation taking place here.

The axis of evil is located about an hour's drive from your home. But emotionally distant and far from the heart, it inspires no "social protest." And on the scale of Israeli evil, it is one of the worst. Backed with forms and bureaucracy, applied by ostensibly nonviolent inspectors, it involves not a drop of blood, yet leaves no drop of water either.
The Civil Administration is supposed to take care of the people's needs. But it does not stop at the most despicable measure - depriving people and livestock of water in the scathing summer heat - to implement Israel's strategic goal: to drive them from their lands and purge the valley of its non-Jewish residents.

The stealing of water, whether it did or didn't take place, is of course only the excuse. Even if there was such a thing - what choice do these people have? The authorities won't allow them to connect to the water pipe running through their fields; pipes whose water is flowing to saturate the settlers' green vineyards and fields.

Last week I saw the people whose water container Avi had confiscated, leaving them thirsty. Newborn babies, a handicapped little girl, a small boy post-surgery, women and old folks, and, of course, the sheep - the only source of income here. Denizens with no water - in Israel, not in Africa. Water for one nation only - in Israel, not in South Africa.

But this is not the only watershed. A few days ago, the Israel Defense Forces decided to hold training exercises in the area. What did it do? Evicted the residents from their homes for 24 hours. Not all of them - only the Palestinians and Bedouin. It occurred to nobody to evict the residents of Maskiot, Beka'ot or Ro'i. The authorities don't call that apartheid, either.

Where did the IDF evict them to? Wherever the wind carries them. Thus some 400 people were forced to leave their huts and tents and spend a day and a night on the arid soil by the roadside, exposed to the elements.

Amjad Zahawa, a 2-day-old infant, passed his third day under the hot sun, with no shelter over his head. Greetings, Amjad; welcome to the reality of your life.

Avi, as we have already mentioned, loves his work and is proud of it. Dozens of others like him are also doing this contemptible work. But they are not the only ones at fault. Behind them stand millions of Israelis who are entirely untouched by all this. They blithely drive through the valley roads, paying no heed to the endless embankment alongside the road, imprisoning the residents and blocking their access to the road.

There is an iron gate every now and then. The soldiers, representatives of the merciful occupier, show up every few days to open the gate for a moment. Sometimes they forget, sometimes they are late. Sometimes they lose the key, but what does it matter? 

The occupation is enlightened, Israel is right, the IDF is the most moral army, and apartheid is merely an invention of Israel's haters. Go to the Jordan Valley and see for yourselves.

"Israel’s social protest: Will you stand with the Palestinians?" -- Udi Pladott

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Do Israelis involved in the social protest movement really have a moral argument for affordable housing in Tel Aviv while, only a few kilometers away, the same system of power targeted by protesters has turned entire villages into refugee camps?

By Udi Pladott | Jul.08, 2012 | 5:54 PM

"If you have come here to help me, then you are wasting your time…But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together." (Lila Watson)
 

Last week Haaretz published an opinion piece by Yotam Marom, an Occupy Wall St. organizer. The article was presented as “Advice from the Occupy Movement” for Israel’s social protest movement, which recently faced egregious police violence in Tel Aviv. Israeli activists, however, do not have to look overseas for guidance or inspiration in countering forces of oppression in Jewish Israeli society. The legacy that passes through Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, and the Indignados in Spain can be found much closer to home: Israeli activists need only look over to Bil’in, Ni’lin, Nabi Saleh, Sheikh Jarrah and al-Arakib to learn about the pain of repression and value of resistance.

Marom correctly points out how the forces of deprivation disproportionately impact those already marginalized, but he forgets to identify the group of people most clearly marginalized, oppressed, displaced and dispossessed by decades of Israeli policy and practice: the Palestinian people. As Israeli protesters rally against rising prices for housing, food, education and healthcare, there is no acknowledgement that their current level of welfare, however relatively eroded, has been accumulated on the backs of the Palestinian people. Can one really articulate a compelling moral argument for affordable housing in Tel Aviv while, only a few kilometers away, the same system of power targeted by protesters has rendered entire villages into refugee camps?

Some of our finest moments here at Occupy Wall St. were exactly those in which we recognized - as Marom points out - that oppressed communities face various systemic forms of violence every single day, and that this violence is much more destructive than what we face in the streets of New York City at our protests. Only when we followed the lead of the people most impacted by this violence and stood with them against home foreclosures and against the NYPD’s racist policy of “Stop & Frisk” did we actually embody the world we want to live in.

Organizers in today’s social movement in Israel have crafted messaging to avoid alienating some of the Israeli public and attract a “broad tent.” Perhaps it was with that careful, circumscribed messaging in mind that Marom avoided any mention of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians - neither those who are citizens of the state, nor those living in the Occupied Territories or beyond. But would not a much heartier coalition be created in standing with the most oppressed?

Last summer, and again in these past several weeks, Israelis demonstrated a readiness to take to the streets to challenge the system of economic power that has prevailed there for so long. Please don’t constrain the reach and potential of your movement by adopting national and ethnic fault-lines to construct and constrict your movement’s collective identity. These fault lines have been perpetuated and celebrated by the same system that is the target of your protest. The very absence of solidarity between all the people within its domain makes it possible for this system to function. It pits Israelis against African asylum-seekers, for example, deliberately obscuring the reality that Tel Aviv’s poor neighborhoods had been severely underserved long before the recent influx of refugees and other migrant workers.

Over here, the Global Justice Working Group at Occupy Wall Street  has highlighted how our struggles at home are intertwined with worldwide struggles against oppression and injustice, seeking guidance from the people directly affected by the target of our protests and following their lead whenever possible. This brought the group to trace the use of U.S.-made (and often U.S.-taxpayer financed) tear gas against civil society protesters in several countries. The gas used against our friends in Oakland and Seattle is produced by the same companies supplying the forces of oppression in Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and yes – also in Nabi Saleh and Bil’in. Israelis rising up for social and economic justice would do well to identify their oppressor and see who has borne the brunt of the suffering under its violent force: these people are your allies - those whose liberation is bound up with yours.

As Marom points out, we can learn a great deal from the violent response of the state when we succeed in challenging the status quo. Obviously, the repression of dissent in Israel did not start this past week. There is a rich history of violence to study. Even if you choose to not extend your inquiry beyond the green line, you may recall how, last April on Israel’s Independence Day, the police lay siege to the Zochrot office in Tel Aviv  because activists there wanted to read a list of Palestinian villages that were razed in 1948. You may also recall the events of October 2000, which left thirteen Palestinian citizens of Israel dead. They also were your allies. Stand with their families. Stand for their memory, and for a future in which their communities will not be constantly threatened and impoverished.

In Israel, where your liberation is intertwined with that of the Palestinian people, look at where you can work together, not only under Israeli leadership. What are the Palestinian people asking for? Where can you stand with them? There have been several groups of Jews and Palestinians working together for justice for many years. Will you direct your energy in support of Solidarity - Sheikh Jarrah? Will you support Boycott from Within and other Israelis who heed the call from Palestinian civil society to join the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement?

A fight for freedom and independence and security and equality that comes at the expense of another people is not a true fight for liberation. When our fight for liberation ignores the subjugation of other people by our own hands, we remain bound and tied.

The Israeli social protest movement faces a challenge and an opportunity to end its isolation, and to join a global movement. It is a movement for social and economic justice; it is aimed at ending the domination of our political systems by the financial elites, but even more than that it is a movement that transcends the boundaries between nation-states and calls for reclamation of the Commons for all peoples. Liberate yourselves by fighting for an end to the occupation of Palestine, without which none of us will ever be free.

Israeli Recycling -- Nidal El-Khairy

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Israel often releases prisoners and leaves them in areas where Palestinians are not allowed to be in and rearrests them immediately. This is a part of a systematic psychological war on Palestinian political prisoners.

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nidal-el-khairy/israeli-recycling

Voices of Palestine Seattle Vigil Focuses on Water Rights in Palestine, Thirsting for Justice

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Welcome to the Buffer Zone - Harry Fear for GazaReport.com

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Celebrate This Tomorrow, Rather Than Our Imperial Militarist State!

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LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Local 11-637 of the American Federation of Musicians, and the Louisville Orchestra Inc. (LOI - the management), recently signed an agreement, ending a lockout of workers from their jobs that began in May 2011.

To understand this we need to travel way back to 1697 and listen to William Congreve:  "Music has Charms to soothe a savage Breast,/ To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak."  More recently, an unsoothed savage breast, marked by malignant greed, class antagonism and lack of common decency, descended upon the Louisville Orchestra. Management offered an unacceptable contract, and the union said "no."

Louisville Orchestra management then began hiring "scabs," non-union replacements: "Openings are available for qualified symphonic musicians looking for permanent employment to replace musicians ...." 

The bosses claimed they had no money to pay the musicians a decent wage, and then said they must also "downsize," a euphemism for throwing employees out of their jobs.

The Louisville Orchestra and the Fund for the Arts boards of directors are dominated by Louisville's financial elite: bankers, stockbrokers, realtors, manufacturers, law firms, health care providers and profiteers, and utility executives. There is big money behind these folks.

Yet and still, orchestras are in crisis all over the country. The League of American Orchestras reported that US orchestra paid attendance fell 8% between 2002 and 2007. Young people don't attend orchestra performances as much as older people. As older people move on, will there be replacements from the younger generation? Yes, but only if there is music appreciation in the school curricula.

Truth be told, music appreciation in the classroom is dying. In Indiana, the Monroe County Community School Corporation voted to trim $4.5 million.

Louisville Orchestra management filed for bankruptcy in late 2010. In May, 2011 the union contract expired. Both the Bankruptcy Court hearings and the negotiations between the musicians union and management were well covered by local media and extended over more than six months.

When the 2011-12 school year started in September 2011, the staff of the Jefferson County School Board (JCSB), as well as its seven board members, were well aware that the management of LOI was not going to be able to fulfill a contract that both parties had signed long ago for a music appreciation program, scheduled for the spring of 2012. The contract was supposed to be the continuation of a 70-year-old joint effort.

Regretfully, JCSB became an objective ally of Louisville Orchestra management. The school board cancelled this 70-year-old music appreciation program for all 14,000 4^th- and 5^th-grade students this year, depriving LO musicians of a desperately needed source of income. The JCSB, in essence, let itself be dictated to by a vendor that could not fulfill a signed contract.

"Keep Louisville Symphonic,"' a nonprofit formed by the locked-out orchestra musicians, was, on the other hand, indeed able to fulfill the contract that LOI could not. But the school board scrapped the program just the same, using the excuse that it was too late for the music appreciation program to take place in the coming school year. 

When the orchestra management began advertising for outside musicians, so as to break the back of the union, there were reports that the musicians recruited to replace the locked-out Louisville Orchestra musicians would be coming from the ranks of Catholic high school music students and from the Jewish Community Center Orchestra.

Catholic Social Justice informs us: "The economy must serve people, not the other way around. All workers have a right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, and to safe working conditions."  What would Thomas Merton say about scab musicians?

I spoke with a prominent member of the Louisville Jewish community, and he called the replacement musicians by their rightful name: "scabs." Yet the deafening silence on this issue by the mainstream Jewish community contradicts a point made by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: "Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible."

A notable exception in the Jewish community was Uriel Siegel, the distinguished maestro who served as music director of the Louisville Orchestra for six years, and who came back to Louisville a few months ago to picket the Kentucky Opera alongside the locked-out musicians and their supporters. (The lockout also had adverse consequences for the Kentucky Opera and the Louisville Ballet.)

The union musicians and the orchestra management finally did reach an agreement. It was a tribute to the tenacity of our brave band of musicians; they got what they got under dire circumstances - musicians with major illnesses who were facing big hospital bills and no health insurance, for example.

Local government had become involved. A key role was played by Louisville Metro Council President Jim King, no big-time friend of working people but someone who may be positioning himself to run for mayor next time around. He was perceptive enough to want an agreement. Kentucky AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan played an important role, as well.

The musicians behaved with dignity, integrity and steadfastness in the face of a management determined to break its back and destroy its union. To those who knew right from wrong in this struggle of workers versus bosses and said nothing, we quote the words of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

Ira Grupper, irag@iglou.com, is a retired labor and peace activist in Louisville. This article was originally published by FORsooth, newspaper of the Louisville chapter of FOR, Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Who will you be voting for in 2012?

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TalkingStickTV - Chris Hedges - Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

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