On 12 July, the Times devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced water. He also described the "high drama" and "meticulously practised routine" of evacuating another overheated journalist. For her US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater, "saving a life took precedence over [their] security". Alongside this was a report whose final paragraph offered the only mention that "47 civilians, most of them women and children, were killed when a US aircraft bombed a wedding party in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday".
Slaughters on this scale are common, and mostly unknown to the British public. I interviewed a woman who had lost eight members of her family, including six children. A 500lb US Mk82 bomb was dropped on her mud, stone and straw house. There was no "enemy" nearby. I interviewed a headmaster whose house disappeared in a fireball caused by another "precision" bomb. Inside were nine people - his wife, his four sons, his brother and his wife, and his sister and her husband. Neither of these mass murders was news. As Harold Pinter wrote of such crimes: "Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
A total of 64 civilians were bombed to death while the Times man was discomforted. Most were guests at a wedding party. Wedding parties are a "coalition" speciality. At least four of them have been obliterated - at Mazar and in Khost, Uruzgan and Nangarhar provinces. Many of the details, including the names of victims, have been compiled by a New Hampshire professor, Marc Herold, whose Afghan Victim Memorial Project is a meticulous work of journalism that shames those who are paid to keep the record straight and report almost everything about the Afghan War through the public relations facilities of the British and American military.
The US and its allies are dropping record numbers of bombs on Afghanistan. This is not news. In the first half of this year, 1,853 bombs were dropped: more than all the bombs of 2006 and most of 2007. "The most frequently used bombs," the Air Force Times reports, "are the 500lb and 2,000lb satellite-guided . . ." Without this one-sided onslaught, the resurgence of the Taliban, it is clear, might not have happened. Even Hamid Karzai, America's and Britain's puppet, has said so. The presence and the aggression of foreigners have all but united a resistance that now includes former warlords once on the CIA's payroll.
The scandal of this would be headline news, were it not for what George W Bush's former spokesman Scott McClellan has called "complicit enablers" - journalists who serve as little more than official amplifiers. Having declared Afghanistan a "good war", the complicit enablers are now anointing Barack Obama as he tours the bloodfests in Afghanistan and Iraq. What they never say is that Obama is a bomber.
In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghan istan and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan. He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral power - because their collaborators are, as the American writer Mike Whitney put it succinctly, "bait-and-switch" Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.
Those who write of Obama that "when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush" demonstrate the same wilful naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton - and Tony Blair. Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, "ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values' . . . there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain . . ."
Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant. He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.
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)"
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Obama, the Prince of Bait-and-Switch -- John Pilger
"Father of Girl who Filmed Ni’lin Shooting and Canadian activist arrested in Ni’lin"
On the 23rd July, the father of the girl who filmed the Israeli shooting of a detainee in Ni’lin and a Canadian activist were arrested during a non-violent demonstration again in Ni’lin against the construction of the apartheid wall.Full story here: http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2008/07/23/father-of-girl-who-filmed-nilin-shooting-and-canadian-activist-arrested-in-nilin/
via Palestinian Pundit
Life in the Post-Political Age
Portion below; whole thing here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/bageant07242008.html
In the post political world and the candidates who can best thrive in it have tremendous appeal to the economic elites, a system that does not dwell on issues and will never ask the question, "who has power and why", but simultaneously creates a social and media environment of stupefying distractions while destroying traditional social mores (under-credited as a source of much social solidarity). This can only benefit their continued rule of that society.
In such a setting our political choices like our consumer choices, regardless of the product, are primarily about what makes us more fulfilled and feel better about ourselves.
Senator Obama's campaign understood much better the impact of these changes on our electoral system than any of his opponents' campaigns. In the post political world, the campaign that is less political and less issue-based but is savvier in using new modes of communication technology will be the campaign to win the greatest market share of the electorate. The candidate in this case, Obama, was not a political entity but, in essence a product, an ornament that made his supporters feel better about themselves.
One of the most telling facts about the Obama's constituency outside of African Americans (whose support needs no explanation) is that it is a coalition of people who need or demand the least amount of social benefit from our government. They are the under politicized younger voters and upper middle class whites. The two groups, coincidently, are the ones most influenced by trends in consumer popular culture and have the greatest of ease using the latest technologies.
In commercial advertising it is the poor commercial that lists the seventeen functions of the product being marketed. The best commercials are based on image associations entirely unrelated to the functions of the actual product. In the post political world, when the same principle is applied to the political realm, it makes complete sense how Barack Obama no longer is a black man with a strange name but the iPod to Hillary Clinton's cell phone. In the world of toys it is the one that stands out the most is the most marketable.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Bassam Aramin - An Open Letter to Ehud Barak
http://palestinethinktank.com/2008/07/21/bassam-aramin-an-open-letter-to-ehud-barak/
Translated by Mimi Asnes
Honorable General Ehud Barak, you don’t know me personally. I am a seeker of peace, and I struggle with all my strength and ability for the realization of a just peace that will bring calm and prosperity to Palestinians and Israelis together. I have suffered personally from your criminal occupation and I have paid a heavy price. Firstly, I was imprisoned when I was 17 years old and wasted seven years of my life in your barbaric prisons. Secondly, have you perhaps read or heard about what happened to the young girl Abir Aramin? She was a ten-year-old that your soldiers killed with a rubber bullet from a distance of 15 feet on January 16th, 2007 in front of her eleven-year-old sister Areen. Despite this I, the father of Abir—may she rest in peace—believe in the right of the Israeli person, as in the right of all people, to exist and to live in peace and security. So why do you not believe in our right to enjoy these same things, sir?Where was the democratic nature of your state when your heroic soldiers killed my daughter before the eyes of her friends at the entrance to her school in Anata? Where were your democratic ideals when you closed the investigation file into Abir’s murder for lack of sufficient evidence, this despite the fact that the crime is clear and was committed in front of more than ten witnesses? Was Abir really a threat to your soliders, sir?
I carry on, in my possession the weapons with which Abir threatened those soldiers. I have in my hand her school backpack, reinforced and armored, of course—the mechanical pencil she had, laden with dangerous lead cartridges, and her math book in which class she had a test the same day, which of course included detailed instructions on how to prepare chemical weapons. In addition to all this, she had a sharp ruler, which could for sure be used as a weapon to stab someone. Lastly, I found in her possession two pieces of chocolate that perhaps contained a bit of enriched uranium that would have certainly brought devastation upon your state, if she hadn’t been tempted to take them in her hand for a taste seconds before she was shot.
Here I have to give your soldiers credit in their incredible ability to incapacitate and kill with such deadly accuracy. The bullet hit Abir exactly one centimeter from her hypothalamus—this caused her to immediately enter a coma and she died thereafter and went to dwell in the presence of God, sparing her the continuing pain and heartache herein expressed.
Thus, Abir Aramin can be added to the list of great successes and security accomplishments in the name of the State of Israel. But I request, Minister and General, in that I am the father of this young girl, at the very least an admission of responsibility for this murder, or its cause. It is your duty to bring the soldier who murdered Abir to court so he may be tried and judged a murderer and criminal.
I believe that there is no military solution to the conflict and when those cowards murdered my daughter, I announced that I did not want revenge, I wanted justice, even though revenge is much easier. The real fighter is one who chooses the harder path of the two for the sake of peace, and revenge is the path of the coward.
Sir, the Palestinian people cannot forever pay the price of the fear and suspicion of the Israeli people. Free my people from this abominable occupation so that your people may live in prosperity and be free from fear.
For sixty years, the Palestinian people has paid the price of the Israeli military occupation an occupation which, in celebration of the Israeli state’s inception, carries out acts of outright antagonism that spill the blood of Palestinian fighters, women, children and elders indiscriminately. It is the Palestinian general public that provides a target for your war machine that does not protect the small from the grown. Our people has faced the same murderer since Gaza in 1956—and the never-ending series continues.
I will not remind you now of the massacres that your government committed against my people; you know them far better than I. I read about them, heard about them—but you took part in them.
The question I pose to you is this: in light of your rich military experience, and as someone who himself has seen sixty years of conflict go by, when will Israel have the strength to finish the conflict militarily and realize a complete victory over the Palestinian people? Do you continue to believe that what cannot be done by might may be done by more might? Does the occupation conceal in its bag of tricks additional methods of killing that the Palestinian people have not yet had the misfortune to know?
If this is the case, perhaps it is a good idea for the Israeli government to try and use those methods. And perhaps they will be able to accomplish that tantalizingly complete victory…in another 60 years.
Sir, when will you understand that the conflict between us cannot be ended with an army? For despite all the effort and conceit of the occupation, it could not stop the stones of our children from hitting your occupying soldiers. How will you be able to stop the Palestinian uprising? This is a dream that will never come true, even in another 1000 years. Why are you not telling this truth to the residents of Ashkelon and Sderot, that there is no solution that will stop the Qassam missiles flying at them from a destroyed and blockaded Gaza except if there would be an end to the occupation?
This is the truth you’ve been running from for a long time.
Spanish Court Issues Warrants of Arrest Against Seven Israeli Officials
http://tiny.cc/BC3EL
MADRID/GAZA, (PIC)- The Spanish national court, which is the highest judicial institution in Spain, has issued on Tuesday an arrest warrant against seven Israeli officials for committing war crimes.
The Palestinian center for human rights filed a lawsuit against seven former Israeli military officials before the court last month on behalf of six Palestinians who survived an Israeli extra judicial execution operation in the Gaza Strip in July 2002.
Warrants of arrest were issued by the court against Binyamin Ben Aliezer, who was then the Israeli war minister, Avi Dichter, the then Israeli intelligence head, Dan Halutz, former Israeli air-force commander, former chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, commander of the IOF southern command Doron Almog, the national security advisor Giora Eland, and Micky Herzog, military advisor of the war minister.
According to the court ruling, the seven Israeli officials will be promptly arrested once they landed in Spain without any consideration to diplomatic immunity that a number of them may possess now, explaining that the charges filed against the seven officials were grave and classified under "war crimes".
The ruling bothered the Israeli occupation government as the Israeli foreign affairs ministry received a copy of the ruling, and warned the accused officials about it. The ministry was reportedly studying legal dimensions of the case.
An Israeli F-16 fighter plane dropped 1000kg bomb on the house of Sheikh Salah Shehada, who was then with his wife and two of his daughters. The attack killed Shehada, his wife, and his two daughters.
More then 18 Palestinian civilians were killed and 77 others were wounded in the bombardment that also totally destroyed 11 Palestinian houses in addition to that of Shehada.
Moshe Ya'alon, the incumbent IOF chief of staff, acknowledged the crime, and that the occupation army was aware of the presence of Shadah's wife and daughters inside the house.
"We were aware of the presence of Shehada's family beside him during the attack; but we had no option but to carry out the attack even in the presence of his family", said Ya'alon.
More Bad News on Obama -- Justin Raimondo
Portion below; wolething here:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13183
In a future Obama administration, the so-called liberal hawks will have their chief factotum in [Dennis] Ross, who is presumably up for a major role in the Obama administration – perhaps national security adviser, or even secretary of state. That is good news for the tiny yet influential Joe Lieberman wing of the Democratic Party, and very bad news indeed for Obama's anti-interventionist supporters, or even just ordinary war-weary Americans. As Leon Hadar points out:
"Another contingency of liberal hawks occupies positions of influence in Washington think-tanks, including the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, where such scholar-practitioners as former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and Kenneth Pollack have been cheerleaders for the Iraq War and have approved of Bush's policies on Iran and Israel. In fact, one does not have to be a veteran political observer to predict Indyk, Pollack, and other experts on the Middle East, like former peace negotiator Dennis Ross, would probably play a major role in influencing the policy of a future Democratic administration. In that case, the Democratic Party activists who rallied against Joe Lieberman should not be surprised if Bush's Democratic successor ends up pursuing policies that might be described as neoconservatism with a smiling Democratic face."
Ross acted as a front man for the government of then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak during the Clinton-era Oslo negotiations, poses as a "peacemaker," shamelessly promotes Israel's interests, and works for AIPAC and AIPAC-affiliated organizations yet strenuously denies there's such a creature as the Israel lobby. He is virtually the living embodiment of business-as-usual insofar as U.S. foreign policy is concerned, and his closeness to Obama – the two stood side-by-side during the candidate's Mideast tour – bodes ill for the antiwar voter shopping around for a viable candidate.
This isn't "change" – it's the same old B.S., rooted in some pretty basic misconceptions. The idea that the U.S. can "solve" – permanently and decisively – the terrorism problem is an illusion ingrained, perhaps, in the American psyche, which is fond of applying metaphors like "get the job done" to complex realities barely comprehensible to the Western mind. It's as if the making of foreign policy were like plumbing, and it's merely a matter of "fixing" things that somehow got broken. That our own policies caused this breakage in the first place, often directly, is almost never acknowledged, and when it is, the proposed "solution" is guaranteed to worsen rather than alleviate the original problem.
The mistakes of the past cannot be undone, but if we learn from them we can minimize the amount of "blowback" that continues to come at us from all directions. Alas, it appears that, no matter who wins the White House this November, a foreign policy made by those who have learned nothing and regret nothing will remain in place.
"What Obama Missed in the Middle East" -- Ali Abunimah
Portion below; whole thing here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/23/barackobama.israelandthepalestinians
When I and other Palestinian-Americans first knew Barack Obama in Chicago in the 1990s, he grasped the oppression faced by Palestinians under Israeli occupation. He understood that an honest broker cannot simultaneously be the main cheerleader, financier and arms supplier for one side in a conflict. He often attended Palestinian-American community events and heard about the Palestinian experience from perspectives stifled in mainstream discussion.
In recent months, Obama has sought to allay persistent concerns from pro-Israel groups by recasting himself as a stalwart backer of Israel and tacking ever closer to positions espoused by the powerful, hard-line pro-Israel lobby Aipac. He distanced himself from mainstream advisers because pro-Israel groups objected to their calls for even-handedness.
Like his Republican rival, senator John McCain, Obama gave staunch backing to Israel's 2006 bombing of Lebanon, which killed over 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and the blockade and bombardment of the Gaza Strip, calling them "self defence".
Every aspect of Obama's visit to Palestine-Israel this week has seemed designed to further appease pro-Israel groups. Typically for an American aspirant to high office, he visited the Israeli Holocaust memorial and the Western Wall. He met the full spectrum of Israeli Jewish (though not Israeli Arab) political leaders. He travelled to the Israeli Jewish town of Sderot, which until last month's ceasefire, frequently experienced rockets from the Gaza Strip. At every step, Obama warmly professed his support for Israel and condemned Palestinian violence.
Other than a cursory 45-minute visit to occupied Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinians got little. According to an Abbas aide, Obama provided assurances that he would be "a constructive partner in the peace process." Some observers took comfort in his promise that he would get engaged "starting from the minute I'm sworn into office". Obama remained silent on the issue of Jerusalem, after boldly promising the "undivided" city to Israel as its capital in a speech to Aipac last month, and then appearing to backtrack amid a wave of outrage across the Arab world.
But Obama missed the opportunity to visit Palestinian refugee camps, schools and even shopping malls to witness first-hand the devastation caused by the Israeli army and settlers, or to see how Palestinians cope under what many call "apartheid". This year alone, almost 500 Palestinians, including over 70 children, have been killed by the Israeli army - exceeding the total for 2007 and dwarfing the two-dozen Israelis killed in conflict-related violence.
Obama said nothing about Israel's relentless expansion of colonies on occupied land. Nor did he follow the courageous lead of former President Jimmy Carter and meet with the democratically elected Hamas leaders, even though Israel negotiated a ceasefire with them. That such steps are inconceivable shows how off-balance is the US debate on Palestine.
Many people I talk to are resigned to the conventional wisdom that aspiring national politicians cannot afford to be seen as sympathetic to the concerns of Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims. They still hope that, if elected, Obama would display an even-handedness absent in the campaign.
Without entirely foreclosing the possibility of change in US policy, the reality is that the political pressures evident in a campaign do not magically disappear once the campaign is over. Nor is all change necessarily for the better.
2 Arabs Narrowly Escape Lynching in Jerusalem -- Helped by Man Sitting Shiva
Portion below; whole thing here:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3571913,00.html
Dozens of ultra-Orthodox Jews assault two Palestinians in Jerusalem Tuesday evening; 'people in yeshiva were yelling: murder the Jews who protect Arabs,' says Jewish man who saved lynch victims' lives
Roi Mandel
Hatred in Jerusalem:
Two Palestinians narrowly escaped a lynching attempt in Jerusalem Tuesday evening after they were assaulted by dozens of ultra-Orthodox Jews. The two Arabs were wounded, while a Jewish resident who protected them with his body was stabbed.
"Blood was boiling, and these crazy people almost killed me," the Jewish man told Ynet. The police are looking into the incident and searching for the attackers.
According to eyewitness testimonies, an angry mob stormed the backyard of a home located near a Jerusalem yeshiva. The family at the home was sitting shiva at the time after a relative died.
Visualizing Dow 6,000 -- The Road to Perdition -- Mike Whitney
The banking system is broke, busted, penniless; and yet the Fed and the G-7 allow this comedy to persist like nothing is wrong. When will the American people wake up?
And, will someone please explain how free markets can exist when speculators are subsidized by the state, or when the risk is removed from risky investing? That's what it means when the Fed opens its auction facilities to the investment banks and brokerage houses. It makes no sense at all. Government "safety nets" are anathema to free market capitalism. "You pays yer money and you takes yer chances". That's finance capitalism; deal with it.
What we are seeing is a hybridized version of capitalism; "Paulson's Scatterbrain Capitalism"; a hodge-podge of taxpayer bailouts, government intervention and free market mumbo jumbo. It's a toxic mix on off-balance sheets operations, over-the-counter "unregulated" derivatives, dark pool trading, opaque hedge funds, dodgy Enron-style accounting, and complex, hard-to-pronounce debt-instruments wrapped up into one, cheesy, unsustainable shell game, managed by Harvard-educated flim flam men and backed by a 100% government guarantee. That's the system we're supporting with our tax dollars and that's the system that is dragging us headlong to ruin.
It ain't capitalism, my friend. It's a crooked system run by corporate carpetbaggers and banking scalawags who've shot the Golden Goose in hopes of keeping the larder at the cottage on the New Jersey coast chock-full of Dom Perignon and halibut fillets. They created this nightmare and they've doomed us all.
As long as we prop up the existing system, the economy will continue to flounder, unemployment will continue to rise, foreclosures will continue to soar, banks will continue to be shuddered, and the wobbly old greenback will continue its inexorable march towards Pesoville. It's time to clean house and we can start by firing Paulson.
Some People Get Mad Because They Throw Stones, But...
Spokesperson for the de facto Palestinian health ministry in the Gaza Strip, Khalid Radi, identified the victims as 5-year-old Raghad Abu Sabt and her brother 7-year-old Tamir. They were rushed to Ash-Shifa Hospital, but arrived dead.
Investigations are ongoing to reveal the details of the incident.
Via Angry Arab Newservice
Monday, July 21, 2008
White Supremacists for Israel -- Angry Arab Newservice
"White Supremacists for Israel: "Betancourt also spoke out for other prisoners held throughout the world, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest in her native Myanmar, and Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was captured by Hamas-allied militants in 2006." So this new expert on foreign policy thinks that an Israeli occupation soldier is a prisoner, but the more than 10,000 Palestinian prisoners (including women, children, and elderly) are not? It says something about her race/ethnic standards, no?"
Afghanistan Hit by Record Number of Bombs -- Bruce Rolfsen, Air Force Times
July 19, 2008
Air Force and allied warplanes are dropping a record number of bombs on Afghanistan targets.
For the first half of 2008, aircraft dropped 1,853 bombs — more than they released during all of 2006 and more than half of 2007’s total — 3,572 bombs.
Driving the increasing use of air power are fights in southern Afghanistan, where the Marine Corps arrived last winter, and battles in eastern Afghanistan, where Taliban and other insurgents use the border region with Pakistan as a safe haven.
Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, who oversees ground operations in eastern Afghanistan as commander of Joint-Combined Joint Task Force-101, told reporters insurgent attacks were up 40 percent this year compared with 2007.
Information from the Air Force shows that in June warplanes released 646 bombs — the second-highest monthly total for Afghanistan or Iraq. The record was set in August 2007, when 670 bombs fell on Afghanistan.
As high as those numbers are, they may understate the intensity of the combat. The statistics do not include cannon rounds shot by fighters or AC-130 gunships, Hellfire and other small rockets launched by warplanes, and assaults by helicopters. In close-quarter firefights where friendly soldiers could be wounded if bombs are used, cannon fire and missiles are often the preferred alternative.
Inside Afghanistan at Bagram Airfield, the Air Force keeps a squadron each of A-10 Thunderbolts and F-15E Strike Eagles. From outside of Afghanistan, the Air Force launches B-1B Lancers.
Also flying over Afghanistan are remote-controlled MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers, both able to attack targets, and AC-130 gunships. Foreign warplanes dropping bombs include French Mirage 2000 fighters and British Royal Air Force Harriers, typically flying out of Kandahar Airfield.
For Air Force jets, the preferred bombs are laser-guided bombs and satellite-controlled Joint Direct Attack Munitions.
The most frequently used bombs are the 500- and 2,000-pound satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions and 500-pound laser-guided Paveway bombs. Unguided bombs sometimes are used, typically when the target is a safe distance from coalition troops and civilians.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
"The Nakba in al-Ramla" -- Sandy Tolan
Portion below; whole thing here: http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/60yearsofdivision/2008/07/20087199114777437.html
Rabin, the future prime minister, would recall in his memoirs that Ben-Gurion, when asked what they should do with the civilian population of al-Ramla and Lydda, "waved his hand in a gesture which said, 'Drive them out!'"
Shitrit also could not have known that Allon had already considered the military advantages of expulsion.
Driving out the citizens of al-Ramla and Lydda, Allon believed, would alleviate the pressure from an armed and hostile population. It would clog the roads towards the Arab Legion front, seriously hampering any effort to retake the towns. And the sudden arrival of thousands of destitute refugees in the West Bank and Transjordan would place a great financial burden on King Abdullah of Transjordan.Orders to expel the residents of al-Ramla and Lydda were given in the early afternoon of July 12. The Lydda order, stating: "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age," was given at 1.30pm by Rabin.
Marched towards exileThe Lydda residents, prodded forward by soldiers who fired into the air behind them, received the harshest treatment.
Numerous eyewitness accounts, corroborated by Israeli official Aharon Cohen in a July 1948 cabinet meeting, describe Lydda residents being forced to surrender their gold jewellery and other valuable possessions before being marched towards exile.
"Regrettably, our forces have committed criminal acts that may stain the Zionist movement's good name," Shitrit would say later. "The finest of us have given a bad example to the masses."When the bus carrying Firdaws and her family arrived at the front lines at Latrun, they were ordered off and told to march north, towards Salbit. It was only four kilometres – people from Lydda had to walk much further – but by now it was 100C. There was no shade and no road, just a steep rise across cactus and Christ's thorn.
Firdaws looked up across the hard-baked earth as knots of people moved slowly along in the waves of heat.
Thirst gripped everyone's mind as white crusts formed around their mouths. They were always looking for shade and water. They crossed fields of corn, where they plucked ripe ears and sucked the moisture out of the kernels. Firdaws saw a boy peeing into a can and then watched his grandmother drink from it.
Today, from her exile in Ramallah, she remembers watching a pregnant woman stumbling through the hills. There, her water broke, and she gave birth on the hot ground.
Israel’s Collective Psychosis, the Denial Syndrome -- Khalid Amayreh
In his recent book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Hedges tells a chilling story from his trip to the Gaza Strip during the heydays of the Intifada, or the second Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation.
Hedges watched how ten- and eleven-year-old Palestinian children were lured to their neighborhood’s perimeter fence by taunts from a loudspeaker on the Israeli side. “Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!” The Israeli voice barked insults at the boys’ mothers. The boys responded by hurling their rocks at the jeep with the loudspeaker. The Israelis shot at them with M-16s fitted with silencers. Hedges found the victims in the hospital, children with their stomachs ripped out, and with gaping holes in their limbs.
Writing for “Harper’s Magazine” (see The Nation, March 11, 2002), Hedges wrote: “Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered. Death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights in Sarajevo, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”
Another “expression of love”: In November 2001, an undercover unit of the Israeli army buried a mine in the sand that flows around Abdullah Siyam Primary School in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
A few hours later, as Palestinian children headed to school, the mine exploded. Five school kids were instantly reduced to broken flesh. The youngest was six. All the victims came from the same extended family: Akram Naim Astal, 6 and his brother Mohammed, 13; Omar Idris Astal, 12 and his brother Anis, 10; and their cousin Muhamed Sultan Astal, 12. Their young bodies were mutilated beyond recognition. The limbs of one child were found 50 meters away. Some of the kids could only be identified by their school bags, brightly colored and spattered with blood, still dangling from their butchered bodies.
Hasbara doctors in Israel might seek to extenuate the gravity or even whitewash these crimes by claiming that these were “individual acts” that didn’t reflect the overall policy of the Israeli government and army.
However, this is a big lie. In 2001, the noted Israeli award-wining journalist Amira Hass interviewed an Israeli sniper in which the soldier described the commands he received from his superiors:
“Twelve and up, you are allowed to shoot. That is what they tell us,” the soldier said. “So,” responded the reporter, “according to the IDF, the appropriate minimum age group at which to shoot is 12.” The soldier replied: “this is according to what the IDF says to its soldiers. I don’t know if this is what the IDF says to the media.”
A further “expression of love and humanity of Israeli culture” manifested itself, also in Gaza, in 2004, when an Israeli occupation army soldier, dubbed Captain-R, shot a Palestinian girl, Iman al Hums, who was on her way to school. However, the soldier was not sure whether the 13-year-girl died or not. Hence, he walked to the bleeding child, and instead of trying to save her life, he shot her 25 times, emptying his entire magazine of bullets into her innocent body “ to verify the kill,” a standard Israeli army practice in such circumstances.
Now, the reader might be prompted to think that the murderer was arrested and made to stand trial for his hair-raising crime. Well, the opposite happened. The soldier not only was exonerated of any wrongdoing but was also awarded tens of thousands of dollars for being “damaged by unfavorable media coverage.”
In truth, it is not only Israeli army soldiers and officers who play the Nazi game. Zionist rabbis routinely issue religious edicts that would allow Israeli troops to murder non-Jewish children knowingly and deliberately without having to worry about any ramifications, moral or otherwise.
In May 2007, shortly before Israeli occupation soldiers murdered two Gaza children who apparently were searching for scrap metal to sell for a few cents in order help feed their impoverished families, the former Israeli Chief Rabbi, Mordechai Elyahu, petitioned the Israeli government to carry out a series of carpet bombings of Gaza cities.
Elyahu argued that a ground invasion of the world’s most crowded spot would endanger Israeli soldiers. He said, “If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after a thousand, then we must kill ten thousand. If they still don’t stop we must kill one hundred thousand, even a million, whatever it takes to make them stop.”
Earlier, Elyahu, a prominent Talmudic sage, called on the Israeli occupation army not to refrain from killing Palestinian children if that means saving the lives of Israeli soldiers.
The above-mentioned are only sporadic examples of the barbarian spirit inculcated in Israelis, especially soldiers dispatched to the occupied Palestinian territories. It is this barbarian mindset that makes Israeli soldiers abduct Palestinian school children and take them to nearby Jewish settlements where they are used as “training objects” by Jewish youngsters. It is this barbarian mentality that makes Jewish soldiers force helpless Palestinian laborers to do certain depraved acts such as drinking soldiers’ urine and singing, individually or in unison, “wahad Hommas, wahad fool, Allah Iyhay-yee Mishmar Gvul” (one ‘dish’ hummus, one broad beans, may Allah greet the Border Police)!!!
There are of course thousands, even tens of thousands, of examples which one could easily and readily cite to underscore Israeli barbarianism.
To be sure, this disgraceful reality is known to many Israelis. In 2001, Shulamit Aloni, a former minister of education, wrote in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv that “we have become a barbarian people.”
So, what makes a leftist, liberal woman see in Israel what the vast bulk of Israelis, including the country’s intelligentsia, wouldn’t see?
Is it Israel’s collective psychosis, the denial syndrome?
Saturday, July 19, 2008
"The New FISA Compromise: It's Worse than You Think"
Portion below; whole thing (via Antiwar.com) here:
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9530
Compromise or capitulation?
Democratic leaders have worked hard to portray the legislation as a compromise, but close examination of its provisions suggests that it is an unvarnished victory for President Bush and his allies in Congress. The legislation eliminates meaningful judicial oversight of eavesdropping between Americans citizen and foreigners located overseas and effectively legalizes dragnet surveillance of domestic-to-foreign traffic. It stretches out the judicial review process so much that the government will in many cases be able to complete its surveillance activities before the courts finish deciding on its legality. And Democratic leaders have capitulated on the immunity question, agreeing to language that would almost certainly lead to retroactive immunity for lawbreaking telecom companies.
Many supporters of Barack Obama were dismayed last month when he announced that he would support the legislation. Indeed, more than 20,000 have joined a group on his campaign website urging him to reject the bill; the group is now the largest on his website. But thus far, Obama has maintained his support for the bill.
Last week, an Obama surrogate insisted that "with FISA expiring," the bill was the best Democrats could hope to get. The only problem is that FISA isn't expiring. It was enacted in 1978 and is not scheduled to sunset. The Protect America Act did expire in March, but given that the Bush administration managed to prevent terrorist attacks under FISA for almost six years until last summer's passage of the Protect America Act, it's hard to be too alarmed about living under FISA again for the final six months of Pres. Bush's term.
The Democrats' capitulation is particularly puzzling because, as we've pointed out before, the Democrats' firm stance on FISA this Spring turned out to be a political asset, not a liability. When House Democrats called Pres. Bush's bluff and allowed the Protect America Act to expire in March, it got a wave of positive coverage from the media, which pointed out that the PAA's expiration would have little effect on the government's ability to spy on terrorists. Now that Democratic leaders are switching sides yet again, we've seen the re-emergence of unflattering coverage focusing on the Democrats' weakness on national security issues and lack of party unity. Protecting civil liberties ought to be a matter of principle, but even if Democratic leaders are unmoved by civil liberties concerns, one might have expected them to stand up to the White House based on purely political motivations.
Israel Rescinds Beatle Ban
Portion below; whole thing (via Angry Arab Newservice) here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/goodbye-hello-mccartney-to-rock-israel-43-years-after-ban-870854.html
McCartney, 66, and his fellow Beatles were banned from performing in Israel in 1965 when the country's then education minister, David Zarzevski, thought that a show by the band would threaten the morals of the nation's youth.
But this year, Israel's ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, apologised during a trip to the Fab Four's home city of Liverpool for the "misunderstanding".
He sent letters to McCartney, his fellow surviving Beatle Ringo Starr and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison, writing: "There is no doubt that it was a great missed opportunity to prevent people like you, who shaped the minds of the generation, to come to Israel and perform."
So THAT'S what happened to Israel -- they had no Beatles to shape their minds. A shame.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Freddie & Fannie: Too Big to Fail; Too Big to Bail
What Paulson is really wants is for congress to allow the Fed to regulate the financial system without congressional oversight. Paulson's so-called blueprint for financial regulation is a blatant power-grab meant to expand the authority of the banking oligarchy giving them unlimited power over the markets. Journalist Barry Grey sums it up like this in his article on "US Bailout of Mortgage Giants: The politics of plutocracy":
"The plan outlined by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would give him virtually unlimited and unilateral authority to pump tens of billions of dollars of public funds into the mortgage finance companies. At the same time, the Federal Reserve Board announced that it would allow the companies to directly borrow Fed funds... The Democrats...now march in lockstep with the minority party to rush through laws demanded by Wall Street... The buying of legislators and their votes by corporate interests is carried out openly and shamelessly. Members of Frank’s House Financial Services Committee received over $18 million from financial services, insurance and real estate firms this year. Frank himself raised over $1.2 million, almost half of which came from finance and related industries...Senator Dodd’s top contributor in the 2003-2008 election cycle was Citigroup, followed by SAC Capital Partners. He raised $4.25 million from securities and investment firms.
Senator Schumer’s top contributor was likewise Citigroup. He raised $1.4 million from securities and investment firms, his most lucrative corporate sector."
The smell of political corruption is overpowering, and yet, the plan is moving forward regardless. Even if Paulson's plan worked in the short term, the damage would be enormous. It would place the country's regulatory powers and purse-strings in the hands of the same amoral banksters who created this mess to begin with. It is the fast-track to corporate feudalism on a nationwide scale.
Direct from Angry Arab Newservice -- Someone Besides 2 Israeli Soldiers Died
These are 197 dead bodies delivered by Israel to Lebanon in the prisoner exchange. The two dead Israeli soldiers have received more coverage those those 197 dead Arab bodies. Hell, dead Israeli soldiers receive more coverage than all the Arab living. Such are the racist standards of the White Man. This explains why MEMRI sent out a bulletin today protesting that Fath's PLC members (from Fath movement, for potato's sake) honored Dalal Al-Mughrabi (the "professional" propaganda outfit, MEMRI, labeled dead Dalal as a "terrorist"). According to Zionism, even dead Arabs (women, children and the rest) are terrorists. If Dalal was a terrorist, does not that make Ehud Barak a Super-terrorist? Those dead Arab bodies are not all Hizbullah: only 9 belong to Hizbullah fighters. 17 belong to the Lebanese Communist Party, 22 to SSNP, and 30 to the Amal Movement. The rest belong to various Arab countries: they died fighting in Lebanon for Lebanon and for Palestine. They all (148 of them) belonged to various Palestinian organizations. Some were from Tunisia. But make no mistake about it: the supply of Arabs willing to fight Israeli occupation will never deplete. Never.PS I posted this before I read the New York Times. Sure enough, there was not a single picture of a funeral for the dead Arab bodies. Instead, the New York Times have been publishing pictures of Israeli tears for THREE DAYS IN A ROW, including today when the news is the arrival of the 197 bodies.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
New Orleans Was Not an Anomaly -- U.S. Flunks Human Index Report
Portion below; whole thing (via Palestinian Pundit) here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jul/17/internationalaidanddevelopment.usa
The report, Measure of America, was funded by Oxfam America, the Conrad Hilton Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. It shows each of the 11 countries that rank higher than the US in human development has a lower per-capita income.
Those countries score better on the health and knowledge indices that make up the overall human development index (HDI), which is calculated each year by the United Nations Development Programme.
And each has achieved better outcomes in areas such as infant mortality and longevity, with less spending per head.
Japanese, for example, can expect to outlive Americans, on average, by more than four years. In fact, citizens of Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica, South Korea and every western European and Nordic country save one can expect to live longer than Americans.
There are also wider differences, the report shows. The average Asian woman, for example, lives for almost 89 years, while African-American women live until 76. For men of the same groups, the difference is 14 years.
One of the main problems faced by the US, says the report, is that one in six Americans, or about 47 million people, are not covered by health insurance and so have limited access to healthcare.
As a result, the US is ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in terms of infants surviving to age one. The US infant mortality rate is on a par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia and Poland. If the US could match top-ranked Sweden, about 20,000 more American babies a year would live to their first birthday.
"Human development is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it," said the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, who developed the HDI in 1990.
"We get in this report ... an evaluation of what the limitations of human development are in the US but also ... how the relative place of America has been slipping in comparison with other countries over recent years."
The US has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's richest countries.
In fact, the report shows that 15% of American children - 10.7 million - live in families with incomes of less than $1,500 per month.
Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism? -- Lawrence of Cyberia
Portion below; whole thing here:
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/
If it helps diffuse some of the rancor that dogs discussion of the I/P conflict, think of it this way. Most people in the world were opposed to white rule in South Africa. They weren't opposed because they were "anti-White". When the international community had to decide whether Afrikaners had a right to national self-determination in South Africa, where Afrikaner dominance could be established only by the dispossession, displacement and oppression of the existing indigenous majority and maintained only through the apartheid system of government, it decided overwhelmingly that South Africa had no right to exist as a "white and democratic" state. Outside of the immediate coterie of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, it was self-evident that the right of one ethnic group to exclusive self-determination did not outweigh the right of everybody else to equality. The Afrikaners' self-determination had to be achieved within the context of their South African nationality, which they share with fellow South Africans of all races and religions. It would have been absurd to suggest that anti-apartheid campaigners acted as they did because they were prejudiced against Afrikaners and therefore opposed to the principle of self-determination for Afrikaners. Collectively, they were motivated not by animosity toward Afrikaners, but by the belief that - in a land where other people live too - exclusive self-determination for one group impinges unacceptably on the rights of all the others. The absence of any suggestion that this might be a similar motivation for people who oppose Zionism, rather than the Jewishness of the people who benefit from it - is a huge omission.
As for your point that there have historically been prominent Zionists (you mention Martin Buber) who favored a cooperative relationship with the Palestinians - well that's certainly true. But Martin Buber was not a dominant founding father of the Jewish state. So what does it matter in practice that some individual Zionists were genuinely tolerant of Palestinians, respectful of their rights and troubled (as Buber was) about the morality of creating a Palestinian population in exile in order to solve the plight of a Jewish population in exile, if theirs was not the outlook that predominated on the ground? The dominant founding fathers of the Jewish state were people like Herzl and Ben Gurion, whose dominant brand of Zionism was based on the premise that the Palestinian population could be "spirited away across the border", that the Arab majority had to be reduced to no more than 15% of the population and saw nothing wrong with the "transfer" out of Palestine of the existing population. I'm not sure how relevant it is to cite examples of less exclusivist Zionists when the Zionism of the real world is one that created (and maintains) a Jewish majority in Israel by the forced exclusion of a large part of the non-Jewish population.
In fact I think that referring to the existence of Zionists who had problems with a Zionism that relied on transfer to create a more ethnically-homogeneous state, actually undermines the argument that people who oppose Zionism as it exists on the ground do so because they don't like Jewish people. It relies on a faulty logic that says the only possible vehicle of Jewish nationalism and self-determination is the Ben Gurion kind of Zionism that created the current state of Israel, and that as this is the only possible expression of Jewish self-determination then people who criticize it must do so out of anti-semitism. But the Zionism of Martin Buber for example, or cultural Zionists like Ahad Ha'am and then Judah Magnes, or modern post-Zionists like Avrum Burg, shows that Zionism at the point of a gun is not the only possible expression of Jewish nationalism; and that even among some Jewish Zionists there was always an understanding that realizing Jewish self-determination by creating a "Jewish state" in Palestine raised legitimate moral (and practical) concerns, which led them to try to think of ways that Jewish self-determination and nationalism might be realized without requiring the expulsion or destruction of the existing people and culture in Palestine.
Overall, I would say the problem is that the old one-liner, "Earthquake in Peru: is it good for the Jews?", is meant to be a joke, but you treat it as if it is the baseline for how everybody is allowed to think of Zionism. You have no right to assume that if people oppose anything that involves Jewish people it must be because their anti-semitism is showing through. Yet in the way you have (mis)represented the motivations of anti-Zionists, you did just that. You don't consider that there can be perfectly legitimate opposition to Zionism from both Jews and non-Jews that arises not from anti-semitism - not from anything to do with Jewishness at all - but from the belief that it is problematic to create a state for one group of people in a land that already has a people and a culture, which will have to be destroyed to create a Jewish state there. This destruction is not, as you suggest, the result of some bad decisions by successive Israeli governments, its is simply the only way to create a Jewish state in Palestine. I disagree fundamentally with Benny Morris, but when he identified the central issue of the conflict as the need to break (Palestinian) eggs so that you can make the (Israeli) omelet he was at least being honest enough to say out loud the unpalatable reality that most people who speak about I/P issues from a Zionist POV simply ignore: the Palestinians refused and still refuse to give their consent to a project that requires they take the part of the eggs in someone else's omelet.