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)"
Support notwithstanding, Matt has been jailed for contempt of the grand jury. Leah has a new court date. See link to update below.
Following the deaths of American ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three members of his staff in a coordinated attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi on September 11, Washington is deploying two Aegis class destroyers off the coast of Libya as well as having already dispatched Marines to Benghazi and elsewhere in the nation.
The guided missile warship USS Laboon is already positioned in the Mediterranean Sea near Libya and USS McFaul is heading to the same destination from the Strait of Gibraltar. Both are equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles, used in a massive barrage against Libya in the opening hours of so-called Operation Odyssey Dawn on March 19, 2011.
In the words of a Pentagon official cited by CNN, "These ships will give the administration flexibility" in the event Washington orders new attacks inside Libya.
According to the same American news source, "The US Navy typically keeps up to four Aegis-equipped missile warships ships in the eastern Mediterranean to aid in defending Israel and missile defense for southern Europe."
The latter is a reference to the Obama administration' s European Phased Adaptive Approach interceptor missile system which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced to have achieved initial operational capability at its summit in Chicago in May. U.S. guided missile destroyers and cruisers carrying Standard Missile-3 interceptors have been active in the Mediterranean since USS Monterey was deployed there in March of 2011, the month the U.S. and NATO began over six-months of missile and air attacks against Libya.
According to a Reuters report, eight American Marines were flown into Benghazi by helicopter the day after the attack on the U.S. mission, with two of them being killed and two wounded in a fierce mortar attack on the building.
The Associated Press claimed that the U.S. has deployed 50 members of the elite U.S. Marine Corps Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team to Libya.
U.S. Africa Command's first war and NATO's first war in Africa officially ended on October 31 of last year, after the U.S. and Britain launched well over 100 Tomahawk missiles into Libya and NATO followed with over 26,000 air missions, among them almost 9,000 strike sorties, in Operation Unified Protector and the nation's leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was brutally murdered outside his hometown of Sirte.
But as with NATO's military operations from the Balkans to Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, one armed conflict inevitable gives way to another and the Western military bloc continues to execute plans to expand into a global military strike force.
It doesn’t take divine inspiration to predict two topics that will be discussed in American media until election day. Mike Lupica told it like it is in the June 15 New York Daily News, “More money will be spent” in this election “than on any political campaign in world history.” The New York Times editorially rages against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. It details corporate funding of “super PACs.” And virtually every issue of the Wall Street Journal deals with U.S. and Israeli opposition to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
On December 13, 2011, Times columnist Thomas Friedman told Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu that “the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s announcement that he is prepared to spend $100 million to beat Barack Obama was universally reported, as was his accompanying Mitt Romney to Israel. But the national media has yet to merge campaign contributions and Washington’s Middle Eastern policies in full depth. Gary Rosenblatt, publisher of New York’s The Jewish Week, a ‘community journal,’ noted this in its August 3 issue:
“But a major, if little publicized reason for all this attention is that Jews are major financial contributors to the parties - and that’s not even counting Sheldon Adelson.”
Little is said re Zionist contributions to Obama. An August 14 Times editorial declared that “There is… persistent speculation in Israel that Mr. Netanyahu wants to attack in the coming weeks in the belief that President Obama will be forced to support the decision because of his political needs in his re-election campaign. Such a move would be outrageously cynical.” But the Times didn’t put $2 and $2 together and get $4.
There are several reasons why our major media doesn’t fully integrate these themes. Some fear that in-depth discussion of Zionist election money would fuel anti-Semitism. Others more correctly understand that Israel, which they support, not the Jews per se, would be discredited by factual discussion. And while the Times editorially complains when Obama moves to the right, responding to Republican attacks on his foreign policy, it intends to endorse him.
Times editors report endless crimes of the “bought and paid for” hacks. But they don’t think the bi-partisan capitalist establishment can be replaced by anything better. They are ‘lesser evil Democrats.’ They know that full discussion re Zionist money would discredit their party as much as the GOP.
They also know that Obama arranged the biggest weapons deal in American history with an absolute monarchy, Saudi Arabia, the planet’s only government that doesn’t allow women to drive cars. They fear critically focusing on Israel and Saudi Arabia might lead some hitherto Democrats into not voting or voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. They worry that Obama losing votes via either decision might give the election to Romney, who they see as stupid and evil.
They are correct re Romney. But they are “crackpot realists.” They wrote a July 30 editorial “Republicans vs. Women.” But are they genuine pro-feminists when they don’t denounce Obama’s Saudi deal?
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s 1st Prime Minister, was an atheist. But, to win over the Orthodox Agudat Yisrael party, the state he founded was officially Orthodox Jewish and remains so. No Israeli Jewish wife can initiate a divorce. Can we find a Times editorial denouncing the Zionist state’s male chauvinism or complaining about our bipartisan hacks support for these officially ‘kosher’ male chauvinist pigs?
In the security state, democracy has withered. In Tampa during the Republican National Convention, what was known as the “free speech zone” was a portable stage on a crumbling road slicing through barren brownfields. The Westboro Baptist Church – the “God hates fags” gang that pickets the funerals of dead U.S. soldiers based on the logic that they were killed as divine retribution for believing “it’s OK to be gay” – entered the zone one afternoon. As a handful toted flamboyant posters of hate, more than 100 police took up position.
A minute after I chanced upon them, a hundred or so anarchists marched on the scene chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re anarchists, we’re going to fuck you up!” Dozens of reporters and cameraman stalked the edges like lions hunting antelopes. As the protesters encircled the Westboro crew, mixing insults with pleas for tolerance, 100 riot police pounded the street as they rounded the corner. More police poured in from every direction and a helicopter swooped in.
Despite the tension, no violence occurred. Vermin Supreme, the performance activist who sports an upside-down boot affixed to his head, gently dissuaded the police from breaking heads by pointing out over a bullhorn that there was no need for aggression against peaceful protests. The anarchists had made their point and went on their way. But the city of Tampa had also made its point. In the militarized convention space, the only groups exercising the right to dissent are left-wing militants and right-wing fanatics.
There is a strategy to this. Vitale says, “We are producing urban spaces in many cities that are hostile to dissent. The summits accentuate that by adding in a layer of barricades and intensive policing.” The purpose of the intensive policing, he argues, is to insulate the rich and powerful who attend the conventions “from the rabble.” He adds: “Dictators have been doing this sort of thing for generations.”
I asked Vitale if these conventions are pop-up police states. He countered, “I’ve been to police states, and you get shot if you demonstrate, not spend a night in jail.”
That’s true -- for most Americans. But at a rally against voter suppression in Tampa, Life Malcolm, a member of the Black People’s Advancement and Defense Organization, described his hometown.
“Tampa is a police state," Malcolm said. "Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week we are under constant surveillance. We see the police on every street corner, in their cars, on their bicycles, or on foot patrol in our communities. All night long their helicopters are whirling overhead when we are trying to read with our children, put them bed or be romantic with our mates. The police beat us up, scare us, lock us up, harass us. You can’t even walk down the street being black, drive down the street being black.”
As a consequence, said Malcolm, “In our neighborhoods nobody comes outside. Everybody is boarded up in the house because they are afraid to come outside the house and be caught by the police like some kind of animal. In the state of Florida, they used to make their money off oranges, now they make their money off people in orange jumpsuits.”
Long after the media and politicians are gone, dozens of local and state police agencies will be back at work, showered with new weapons, technology and laws to contain troublemakers and undesirables. No matter who wins in November, the march toward a police state will continue unabated.
Amidst the growing solidarity movement with the Palestinian cause, a lot of aspects of the struggle are lost. Many people get caught up in the present events and forget about the core of the struggle. A lot do not have a clear idea of the essence of this cause. To explain the history of the cause, I will need hours of writing. But for now, I would like to share some brief thoughts that I believe are essential. It is great to see all the solidarity around the world, but for any of it to be meaningful, it is important that you know what the cause is all about.
It is important to keep in mind that we are not a charity case.
We are people with a just cause and a long struggle.
To start with, our fight is not for a state in the West Bank and Gaza called Palestine, because simply this is not Palestine. The West Bank and Gaza Strip were occupied by the Zionists in 1967. Our struggle against the Zionists has started long before that.
The essence of our struggle is the right of the return for the refugees (+70% of the Palestinian people). They demand their right to return to their homes and they do have the right to do so. If you think that it is not possible then you are really not in solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
It is also important to keep in mind that you cannot be selective about your solidarity or make concessions on behalf of the Palestinians. You are either with us or you are not. You cannot stand mid-way between the victims and the perpetrators. If you do, it means you decided not to stand for justice. You are already taking a position and you are not being neutral as you assume.
There is no shame in recognizing wrong-doings within a struggle. No struggle in the world is perfect. Someone who discusses those wrong-doings in efforts to improve the struggle is a noble person. And any wrong-doings does not change the facts of the struggle. The perpetrators who caused all the sufferings – for both sides – are the Zionists.
Some people try to delegitimize the Palestinian cause by referencing the use of “violence”. Let me start by stating what I have previously and constantly stated: the use of armed resistance is our legitimate right. And I have made it clear in many of my writings that the armed resistance refers strictly to targeting military targets.
Some Palestinians are shy or apologetic when they discuss our history of armed resistance. I am not. They think that “peaceful” resistance makes them more acceptable by the West. Let me tell you something, we are not in the public relations business. We are in the business of liberating our land and our people.
We do not have a just cause because the world stands with us. The world stands with us because we have a just cause.
But let us cut the discussion of the use of armed resistance short. If you believe it is legitimate but you have trouble making an argument for it, simply, refer them to UN resolution 3070: “The General Assembly also reaffirms the legitimacy of the people’s struggle for liberation from colonial and foreign domination and alien subjugation by all available means, including armed struggle.” If they do not like it, they can take it up with the UN.
If they say they support justice for the Palestinians but they do not like our ways of resistance, then – if they are that passionate about opposing our way of struggle – they can make it stop by ending the injustice in their own way.
No one is tying up their hands.
Unanswered Questions
- For some, there are many unanswered questions in the case of Leonard Peltier but some things just don't add up.
- Three charged. Two acquitted. One convicted.
- No proven identity of the shooter. No confirming ballistics.
Clearly the evidence did not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Leonard Peltier was the shooter. If it could happen to Leonard Peltier, it could happen to you, or someone you love.
- Witnesses flip-flop.
One must ask, what caused the wrongful conviction of Leonard Peltier?
- Was it racism? We can't forget that a predominantly white jury convicted Peltier in a state where racism against Native Americans was the norm.
- Was it personal vengeance for the death of two agents. Was it more important to convict someone than it was to convict the right one?
- Was it an attempt by the government to cause dissension and disrupt the American Indian Movement, an organization that was gathering momentum in the fight for Native American rights?
Public Opinion
- Why was no one ever held accountable for the death of young Joe Stuntz? This is a question that still haunts.
Leonard Peltier has had the support of many individuals and organizations over the years. The activity surrounding his case waxes and wanes as attorneys come and go, appeals are filed and denied, supporters burn out, funds dry up, and personalities conflict.
Leonard Peltier has been recognized as a political prisoner of the U.S. government by individuals and organizations around the world. An example of the varied support for Leonard Peltier is seen in this partial list. :
- Amnesty international
- Archbishop Demond Tutu
- The Dalai Lama
- Dr. Helen Caldicott
- Ramsey Clark (former US Attorney General)
- National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
- The European Parliment
- Kris Kristopherson
- Jane Fonda
- Robert Redford
- Jessie Jackson
The full list of supporers can be found by clicking here.
- The late Coretta Scott King
According to The Observer Archbishop Desmond Tutu has refused to attend a conference in South Africa on leadership because Tony Blair was going to be there and, because of the war in Iraq, Tutu didn't want to be anywhere near the lying toad:
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called for Tony Blair and George Bush to be hauled before the international criminal court in The Hague and delivered a damning critique of the physical and moral devastation caused by the Iraq war.Tutu, a Nobel peace prizewinner and hero of the anti-apartheid movement, accuses the former British and US leaders of lying about weapons of mass destruction and says the invasion left the world more destabilised and divided "than any other conflict in history".Look how much Blair got for attending the conference:Writing in the Observer, Tutu also suggests the controversial US and UK-led action to oust Saddam Hussein in 2003 created the backdrop for the civil war in Syria and a possible wider Middle East conflict involving Iran..A longtime critic of the Iraq war, the archbishop pulled out of a South African conference on leadership last week because Blair, who was paid 2m rand (£150,000) for his time, was attending. It is understood that Tutu had agreed to speak without a fee.It would have killed Blair to agree to speak without a fee.
Let's see how Blair responds to Tutu's criticism:Priceless! The poor state of the economy and the numbers of children that died had nothing to do with "genocide by sanctions" then. And didn't the west side with Iraq in the war against Iran? And who supplied those chemical weapons together with the delivery capabilities? It would be wonderful to believe that the ICC will one day be able to put these questions to Tony Blair but I don't think that day will come.In a statement, Blair strongly contested Tutu's views and said Iraq was now a more prosperous country than it had been under Saddam Hussein. "I have a great respect for Archbishop Tutu's fight against apartheid – where we were on the same side of the argument – but to repeat the old canard that we lied about the intelligence is completely wrong as every single independent analysis of the evidence has shown."And to say that the fact that Saddam massacred hundreds of thousands of his citizens is irrelevant to the morality of removing him is bizarre. We have just had the memorials both of the Halabja massacre, where thousands of people were murdered in one day by Saddam's use of chemical weapons, and that of the Iran-Iraq war where casualties numbered up to a million including many killed by chemical weapons."In addition, his slaughter of his political opponents, the treatment of the Marsh Arabs and the systematic torture of his people make the case for removing him morally strong. But the basis of action was as stated at the time."In short, this is the same argument we have had many times with nothing new to say. But surely in a healthy democracy people can agree to disagree."I would also point out that despite the problems, Iraq today has an economy three times or more in size, with the child mortality rate cut by a third of what it was. And with investment hugely increased in places like Basra."
The verdict echoed the findings of an internal investigation by the Israeli military which was concluded just four weeks after her death and cleared troops of any responsibility in the matter, saying the bulldozer crew could not see Corrie because she was behind a mound of rubble.The Corries' lawyer Hussein Abu said the family would appeal to the Supreme Court."The verdict is based upon distorted facts and could have been written by the state's attorney," he told reporters as her father Craig stood by stony-faced, her mother Cindy looking heartbroken and close to tears, a correspondent said.Cindy Corrie said the family was "deeply saddened and deeply troubled" over the verdict and insisted that her daughter's death could and should have been avoided."We believe that Rachel's death could and should have been avoided," said the white-haired American, her voice breaking with emotion. "We knew from the beginning that a civil suit would be an uphill battle."Israel, she said, operated "a well-heeled system to protect the military.""This was a bad day, not only for the family, but a bad day for human rights, for humanity, for the rule of law and for the country of Israel," she said.But Tom Dale, a former ISM activist who was 10 metres (32.8 feet) away when Corrie was crushed, said the verdict reflected a "long-standing culture of impunity" for the Israeli army, and insisted it was not possible that the driver did not see her."On 16 March 2003, Rachel could not have been more visible: standing, on a clear day, in the open ground, wearing a high-visibility vest," he said in a statement."Whatever one thinks about the visibility from a D9 bulldozer, it is inconceivable that at some point the driver did not see her, given the distance from which he approached, while she stood, unmoving, in front of it," he said."As I told the court, just before she was crushed, Rachel briefly stood on top of the rolling mound of earth which had gathered in front of the bulldozer: her head was above the level of the blade, and just a few metres from the driver."Anyone familiar with the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories "may not be surprised by this verdict, which reflects a long-standing culture of impunity for the Israeli military, but we should be outraged."Corrie's father Craig, a veteran of the Vietnam War, expressed similar sentiments."We've seen from the highest levels of the military that they thought they could kill people on that border with impunity," he told reporters. [May I add that this is largely thanks to U.S. GOV'T SUPPORT!]
Jill Stein, the prospective Green Party presidential nominee, hailed [the recent] agreement regarding solitary confinement, family visitation rights, and more by Israeli prison authorities as a significant victory for non-violent resistance and human rights. The agreement was the result of a hunger strike by over 1600 Palestinian prisoners that lasted in some cases as long as 77 days.
Dr. Stein said that this victory represented a positive step, but that the United States remains complicit in the ongoing systematic violation of human rights by the Israeli government in particular. She issued the following statement:
United States policy regarding Israel and Palestine must be revised to make international law, peace and human rights for all people, no matter their religion or nationality, the central priorities. While the U.S. government sometimes voices support for this principle in name, in practice U.S policy towards Palestine and Israel has violated this principle more often than not.In particular, the United States has encouraged the worst tendencies of the Israeli government as it pursues policies of occupation, apartheid, assassination, illegal settlements, blockades, building of nuclear bombs, indefinite detention, collective punishment, and defiance of international law. Instead of allying with the courageous proponents of peace within Israel and Palestine, our government has rewarded consistent abusers of human rights. There is no peace or justice or democracy at the end of such a path. We must reset U.S. policy regarding Israel and Palestine, as part of a broader revision of U.S. policy towards the Middle East.
On taking office, I will put all parties on notice – including the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority, and the Hamas administration in Gaza – that future U.S. support will depend on respect for human rights and compliance with international law. All three administrations will also be held responsible for preventing attacks by non-state actors on civilians or military personnel of any nationality. The parties will be given 60 days to each demonstrate unilateral material progress towards these ends.Material progress will be understood to include but not be limited to an end to the discriminatory apartheid policies within the state of Israel, the removal of the Separation Wall, a ban on assassination, movement toward denuclearization, the release of all political prisoners and journalists from Israeli and Palestinian prisons, disarmament of non-state militias, and recognition of the right of self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians.Failure by any party to demonstrate sufficient material progress will result in the end of U.S. military and economic aid to that party. Should the end of U.S. aid fail to cause a party to redirect its policies and to take steps resulting in sufficient material progress within an additional 60 days, I will direct my State Department to initiate diplomacy intended to isolate and pressure the offending party, including the use of economic sanctions and targeted boycott. In this way, U.S. policy will begin to become consistent with its practices regarding other violators of human rights and international law in the region.
Consistency in U.S. policy regarding human rights and international law will begin, but not end, with Palestine and Israel. I will apply this same approach to other nations, such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Yemen, among others. I will also ensure that the United States begins to honor its obligations to protect human rights, and will expect that the world community will hold us to the same account we hold others.Finally, as President I will put the full weight of the United States behind the establishment of a Palestine and Israel Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the vehicle for shifting from an era of human rights violations to one based on trust and bringing all parties together to seek solutions. Any stakeholder who enters into this process must pledge to work for a solution that respects the rights of all involved. This will bring America’s Middle East policy into alignment with American values. I understand that in the end, a dedicated commitment to justice will further American interests in the region much better than the current policies of supporting abuses and violence by one side against the other. And I believe that this is in the best interests of all people living in Israel and Palestine.
Unsurprisingly, commentators who routinely denounce cancer analogies when they come from Iranian officials blatantly avoid addressing the use of the identical rhetoric by Israelis themselves when referring to the growing presence of non-Jewish communities within areas controlled by Israel. When IDF chief Moshe Ya'alon referred to Palestinian babies as "cancerous manifestations" and Likud Knesset member Miri Regev called African migrants and refugees "a cancer in our body," they were silent.
While calling the government and founding ideology of a state a "cancerous tumor" is certainly not a nice thing to say and supporters of that state's policies have every reason to take offense to such a description, it is quite obviously a political statement. Iranian rhetoric attacks a political entity, namely the "Zionist regime", which systematically discriminates against and oppresses people based solely on their ancestry and religious affiliation. In contrast, Ya'alon and Regev's statements employ the cancer analogy to defend the concept of ethnic-religious exclusivity and have everything to do with people, whether Palestinian or African, who somehow threaten the continued dominance of a deliberately demographically engineered and maintained state.
To be sure, regardless of its intended target, this kind of rhetoric is purposefully harsh and often gratuitous. Yet, like Ahmadinejad's "insult to humanity" line, the cancer analogy is neither new nor original. While Iranian officials have been employing it since 2000, it has long been wielded for the express purpose of condemning a political system or ideology one vehemently opposes.
In the 1820s, former president John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that "slavery is a cancer to be isolated." On October 16, 1854, in an stridently abolitionist speech in Peoria, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln likened the Constitution's vague references to slavery to a "cancer," hidden away, which an "afflicted man...dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time."
A New York Times article from September 8, 1863 quoted then-Tennessee Governor Andrew Johnson as telling a Nashville crowd in late August, "Slavery is a cancer on our society, and the scalpel of the statesman should be used not simply to pare away the exterior and leave the roots to propagate the disease anew, but to remove it altogether." Johnson endorsed the "total eradication" of slavery from Tennessee.
Mousavian stresses how, from 2003 to 2005, during the first Bush administration,
Iran submitted different [nuclear] proposals, which included a declaration to cap enrichment at the 5% level; export all low-enriched uranium (LEU) or fabricate it into fuel rods; commit to an additional protocol to its IAEA safeguards agreement and to Code 3.1 of the subsidiary arrangements to the agreement, which would provide the maximum level of transparency; and allow the IAEA to make snap inspections of undeclared facilities. This offer was intended to address the West's concerns regarding the nature of Iran's nuclear program by ensuring that no enriched uranium would be diverted to a nuclear weapons program. It also would have facilitated the recognition of Iran's right to enrichment under the NPT. In exchange for these Iranian commitments, the Iranian nuclear file at the IAEA would be normalized, and Iran would have broader political, economic, and security cooperation with the European Union. Furthermore, Iran was interested in securing fuel for the research reactor in Tehran and was ready to ship its enriched uranium to another country for fabrication into fuel rods.The Bush administration refused everything. Mousavian recalls "a meeting I had at the time with French Ambassador to Iran Francois Nicoullaud, he told me, "For the US, the enrichment in Iran is a red line which the European Union cannot cross."
So "the West was not interested in solving the nuclear issue. Rather, the West wanted to compel Iran to forgo its enrichment program completely." This could only lead Tehran to "change its nuclear diplomacy and accelerate its enrichment program, as it sought self-sufficiency in nuclear fuel."
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.
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.
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.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."
That oppressive regime exists to this day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
