Crazy Life by Toad the Wet Sprocket [For Leonard Peltier]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWIY3DCX-8U

"You'll Pry My Car Out Of My Cold-Dead Hands" -- Cindy Sheehan

Tweet http://www.eurasiareview.com/2010/05/youll-pry-my-car-out-of-my-cold-dead.html

The scope of the tragedy of the undersea oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico is shocking. Please don’t call it a “spill” the gash in our Mother Earth is literally hemorrhaging oily death-blood.

British Petroleum, the company who owns the offshore well, gave “liberally” to candidates in the 2008 election cycle, with the largest donor receiving $71,000 for his campaign—Barack Obama.

We should scream bloody-murder about BP and boycott them straight to bankruptcy. Additionally, the company that everyone on the “left” loves to hate: Halliburton probably shares a majority of the blame for this catastrophe of biblical proportions, too.

BP and Halliburton should be forced to pay for the clean up and all the future disaster, but will their tools in Congress make them do that? Will the courts force them to pay for their crimes against the planet? Has Exxon had to pay fairly for its crimes when the Valdez crashed and burned in Alaska? It’s been over 21 years since that calamity and Exxon has paid only two-billion in cleanup and a paltry one-billion for damages—a figure that was slashed by a District Court and the Supremely Corporatist court from the original five-billion dollar award. And the cleanup and adverse affects from the Valdez disaster continue until today.

This world is addicted to the death-blood of fossil fuels. Big wars and little wars are being waged all over the world for this “black gold.” Here in the U.S it’s no different, and probably even worse than other parts of the world.

I don’t own a car myself, but each one of us uses fossil fuel products to some extent or another. Fossil fuels can be found in everything from paper to clothing—and the ubiquitous plastic that is found everywhere and in almost manufactured thing.

You know one of the major reasons we are addicted to war in this country is because we are addicted to petroleum. Our cars are precious (Freudian?) extensions of ourselves and their use is encouraged by the relative cheapness of gas—the average price for a gallon of gas is about 50 cents lower than a gallon of milk.

We can sign petitions to demand that offshore drilling leases be terminated or not granted, but the oil companies own our government in large part. What can we do besides taking the profoundly simple and effortless step of signing a petition? We can become more responsible for this planet and the future of ALL life on it.

No matter how much, or little, petroleum is in our life, we can reduce that figure. Here are some steps that we can take—I remember some of these from the “energy crisis” during the Carter Administration.

1) BOYCOTT BP AND ALL OF ITS PRODUCTS AND SUBSIDIARIES.

2) DRIVE YOUR MAYHEM-O-BILE LESS.

3) USE LESS PETROLEUM PRODUCTS FROM ANY COMPANY.

4) WALK, BIKE, OR USE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION.

5) WALK OR BIKE TO PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION.

6) USE LESS ELECTRICITY.

7) IF YOU HAVE TO BUY GAS, TRY TO BUY FROM CITGO.

8) INVESTIGATE PRODUCTS MADE FROM HEMP OR OTHER ALTERNATIVES TO PETROLEUM.

9) BUY LOCALLY GROWN PRODUCE AT FARMER’S MARKETS.

10) DON’T STOP PROTESTING THE OIL WARS.

11) Sell your Dino-Car.

Even though we are propagandized through the media and Madison Avenue, most of us are not wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporations, yet.

These steps will take a little more effort than signing a petition, or calling your Congress criminal, but these steps are urgent to overcome the stranglehold Big Oil has on our government and our lives.

The U.S. Military Industrial Complex is the world’s number one user of fossil fuel and our efforts can but make a tiny dent—but as I like to say: “How does one eat an elephant?”

One bite at a time.

Bendib Gets It Too!

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Mike Luckovich -- Nails It Again!

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"Gil Scott-Heron Boycotts Tel Aviv, Sends Powerful Message to Israelis" -- By Noam Sheizaf

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via The Only Democracy in the Middle East? blog

This is a translation of my article regarding the cancellation of spoken words artist Gil-Scott Heron’s gig in Tel Aviv. His show was scheduled for late May, but it was later removed from Scot-Heron’s site and though there was no official statement yet, it seems to have been canceled for political reasons.

The original Hebrew version of the article was posted Wednesday on the web magazine The Other.

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

A small commotion erupted this week among the public that appreciates black music in Israel upon learning that ground-breaking artist, poet and musician, Gil Scott-Heron apparently canceled his Tel Aviv show for political reasons. There was no official statement; However, following protests of some of his pro-Palestinian fans during a show in London on the weekend, Scott-Heron announced from the stage that he would not be coming to Israel. The show, planed for May 25, was removed from the line up on his site.

Scott-Heron is a political man. He came out against US presidents, preached against nuclear energy, and asked the new generation of Hip-Hop artists to write meaningful lyrics rather than merely attach words to music. His most famous piece, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” is considered the anthem of alternative culture. I assume these and similar reasons made Scott-Heron appeal to a couple of hundred Israelis. The only surprise is their ability to make a U-turn the moment that protest was directed at us.

In the last few days, Israelis who awaited the show in Tel Aviv filled Scott Heron’s website and Facebook pages dedicated to the issue with angry comments. The arguments were of the type common to such occurrences: one shouldn’t mix music and politics (”music brings people together; politics pulls them apart”); one must distinguish between the government of Israel and the citizens; it is hypocrisy and double standards to boycott Israel when there are so many more horrible governments and deadlier regimes in the world.

But beyond the usual arguments, an offended tone sneaked in: “Why should we, music lovers, who love GSH also because of the place we live in, should be blamed for the occupation or apartheid?” writes one Israeli on Facebook, and added elsewhere, “to cancel the show, it is to spit in the face of the leftists in the crowd.”

“In Israel there is a true music scene,” comments another Israeli on Scott Heron’s site. “For me, music represents peace and love, not war and hate. If you come to Israel you will see it with your own eyes”. Avi Pitshon wrote in Haaretz in relation to a similar incident, in which a few Israelis joined a call to the Pixies and Metallica to skip playing in Israel, “the radical left cannot hurt the powerful, those who shape policy, and is therefore trying to hit whoever is under the spotlight: music loving citizens.”

It seems that what hurts Pitshon and the other Israelis most is not the anti-Israeli stance of Scott Heron and others like him, but the choice to specifically boycott them, the public who is for peace, loves Soul and Hip-Hop, and sees itself more in touch with Detroit and Chicago than the Tomb of Rachel and Elkana. After all, the voice of these embittered music lovers didn’t rise when a pretty effective boycott was organized in the EU against produce from the settlements: the settlers are the bad guys in this story. But to boycott us, us who took part in three Peace Now demonstrations and two events commemorating Rabin? What is the world coming to?

The Israeli left (and yours truly included) is deeply longing to be part of some global communion. People here imagine themselves through American culture, Italian cuisine and French novels, as if we were born to a bourgeois family on Paris’ Left Bank and our life project is to confront the feelings of alienation inherent in human existence. Tel Aviv and its suburbs are arranged with their face towards the West and a wall separating their back from all the turmoil in the East: the settlers in the territories, the Ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem, and also these Palestinians. The occupation is such a boring and tedious story, the making of a stupid government and wicked right-wingers. Clearly, we are not part of this madness.

A worldview so detached leads to many disappointments. So we are shocked to discover that the Palestinians hate us just as much as the hate the right-wingers, we are insulted when the reception clerk in a Spanish hotel lets a curse out behind our back, and cannot understand why an old rapper, who has seen a few things in his life, would tell us that, on second thought, Tel Aviv doesn’t suit him right now. What the hell? We blow a fuse. What’s the connection between the Barbie Club [a Tel Aviv nightclub] and the territories? After all, they are at least a 20 minutes car ride away!

To the credit of the Israeli Right one should say that it is much more consistent and well argued. From the Right’s perspective, these conflicts with the world are the price for our clinging to parts of our historical homeland and our survival in a hostile region. The Right doesn’t try to evade taking responsibility for sitting on top of Palestinians, and if someone, whether Obama or Scott Heron, doesn’t like it, there is no choice but to bite the bullet.

In contrast, “the enlightened camp” is busy with the endless theatrical performance of their moral difficulties, whose real purpose is to create a barrier between them and all those action for which they refuse to take responsibility. Thus, when the order arrives, the leftist climbs into the tank without a second thought, but later he will do an anguished film about it for the Cannes festival. Thus the obsessive persecution of settlers. Thus Tel Aviv behaves as if it were a Mediterranean suburb of London while in a spitting distance from it eastward and southward lies an immense jail holding millions of people without rights for over half a century.

The self-pity tops itself with the absurd claim that such cancellations will benefit the occupation, because they would discourage those most in favor of two states solution. As if the role the world is to caress Tel Aviv’s residents’ back until they draw the courage and convince the right, to please stop building villas on the hills of Samaria and abstain from kicking Palestinians out of their houses in East Jerusalem. Beyond the fact that this method has been completely discredited by history–the Israeli Left doesn’t even convince itself anymore–the theory doesn’t hold water: excited or depressed, these thousands of peace and love and music lovers do not show up in Bil’in or Sheikh Jarrah, whereas the few dozens of human rights activists who do go there are begging the world for a little international pressure to save Israel from itself.

A few years ago, the dynamics surrounding Roger Waters (ex Pink Floyd) visit’s to Israel recalls somewhat the current case. Waters didn’t boycott, but he said a few words about peace and ending the occupation. Immediately, a few of the “enlightened camp” ordered him to focus on the guitar and stop lecturing us. There is something really bizarre with our ability to sing about another brick in the wall while forgetting about the miserable Farmers whose fields are behind our wall. (As it is hard to understand Israelis who return from Berlin with “an original stone from the wall” when the improved local version stands for free in our living room.) Considering the deep disconnect between the Israelis and the protest anthems that they are humming, it seems that Scott-Heron did us a favor by reminding us that in a place where pregnant women give birth at checkpoints and people are locked in their houses, even music doesn’t cross borders.

Reminder: Vigil for Palestine- End the Israeli Occupation. Saturday, May 1

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKQqItZu4Is&feature=related

Saturday, May 1

Noon-2:00 pm

Westlake Plaza, 4th & Pine

====================================================

Amin Odeh
VoicesofPalestine.org

"Stand up for what is right, even if you are standing alone"

"Radical Muslim group run by Israeli Jews!" -- American Everyman via Aletho News

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Jon Stewart, shame on you. You’re a propaganda spewing puppet and you’re no better than Glenn Beck.

South Park ran an unedited image of Muhammad in 2001 in an episode called “Super Best Friends“… and nothing happened.

In fact, the episode had been on the South Park website for viewing at any time for the past few years (they just removed it)… and nothing happened.

For 4 seasons they had that image in their opening segment for every single show… and nothing happened.

So for years on end no Muslim group, “radical” or otherwise, has threatened Matt and Trey or Comedy Central about the image of Muhammad that has been available for all to see every single day.

All of a sudden last week a group called “Revolution Muslim” threatened violence against Comedy Central if they aired an image of Muhammad which forced Comedy Central to censor the show and now you have even liberals talking about those “radical Muslims” and their threats of violence. Karl Rove couldn’t have done it any better.

Problem is, Revolution Muslim was started and run by a “converted” Israeli settler who studied at an orthodox rabbinical school in Israel before becoming a settler in the occupied territories.

You don’t think a orthadox Israeli settler would have any desire to see progressive Americans start to hate “radical Muslims” do you? You think “Revolution Muslim” helps or hurts the Israeli PR campaign after Operation Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report?

Here’s the research your team should have done before you went out and spun-up the neoconish ”radicalized Muslim” hype for your progressive audience…

“Revolution Muslim” is always there to say just the wrong thing to make Americans hate “Radical Muslims”. They praised the killing of Daniel Pearl with a childish puppet show. They sent “Get Well” wishes to the guy who shot those 13 people at Fort Hood.

Yousef al-Khattab, 41, a radical Muslim in the borough of Queens who runs RevolutionMuslim.com, claims on the site that the soldiers massacred at the Texas base deserved to be massacred, and he insists the victims are in “eternal hellfire.” As for the suspected gunman — Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan — Al-Khattab hails him as a hero. Fox News

You can count on “Revolution Muslim” to say the wrong thing at the right moment to get Americans to hate all those “radical” Muslims.

But the only thing is… “Revolution Muslim” (his creative fake “Scary American Terrorist” website) was started and run by a man named Yousef al-Khattab. Yousef al-Khattab was born Joseph Cohen, in Brooklyn, New York. He was jewish. But not just jewish, he was a settler who went to Palestine to live on the illegal Israeli settlements.

Joseph Cohen isn’t alone though. There is another “radical Muslim” convert from Judaism (the original fake “scary American Terrorist“) who makes sure that “radical” Muslims are hated in America, his name is Adam Pearlman and he went by the “radicalized” Muslim name “Adam Gadahn“. Adam Pearlman is actually the grandson of a (deceased) member of the board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League.

Gadahn grew up on a goat farm in rural Riverside County and moved to Santa Ana to live with his grandparents, the late Dr. Carl Pearlman and his wife, Agnes, in the mid-1990s. It was here that he learned of Islam via the Internet and later fell in with a radical sect at the Islamic Society of Orange County OC Register

And the funny thing is, after all that hate speech and those calls to violence, Cohen never got arrested. Hell, even Fox News knew exactly where he was. Guns, death threats, and all the rest and amazingly Yousef al-Khattab (Joseph Cohen) was never arrested.

A New York City bicycle cabbie who mocked the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl and posted a prayer on the Web calling for the murder of Jews is now sending a ‘Get Well Soon’ message to the suspected Fort Hood gunman, the New York Post reported.

After growing up in a jewish neighborhood in New York and attending a orthodox rabbinical school in Israel, Joseph Cohen went to live in a settlement in the West Bank to help steal Palestinian land from Palestinians.

His story is that he “converted” to Islam after meeting someone in a chat room. You know what “settlers” are like in the occupied territories don’t you Mr. Stewart? Ever see that video of them beating the old Palestinian woman with a baseball bat?

Ever see that video Mr. Stewart? If not, take a look here. This video was released by B’Tselem (an Israeli peace organization).

Al-Khattab has claimed that he has nothing to do with the site anymore but the person he founded it with left prior to all of this earlier this month. al-Khattab claims to have quit the site in late Dec. last year. His partner who started it with him also claims to have quit the site earlier this month. I guess no one wanted to go to jail for issuing death-threats over the internet. But someone did it.

I find it funny that after being born and raised as a jewish person, after attending orthodox rabbinical school in Israel, and after being radical enough to move to occupied territories in Palestine to live as a settler (the most hard-core of Israeli Zionists), ALL OF A SUDDEN Joseph Cohen dropped all of that teaching and suddenly became a “radical Muslim’ after a chat in a chat room. He became a “radical Muslim” then just HAPPENED to move back to the city he lived in before… Brooklyn, N.Y.

Anybody believe that crap? Jon Stewart does. So much so he mocks “radical Muslims” for threatening South Park.

Now, go here and watch Jon Stewart joke and make derogatory comments about the group that threatened the creators of South Park for showing the image of Muhammad on their recent show. Then he thanks all the “other” religions for not behaving like the “Radical Muslims” did when Stewart makes fun of their religion. He then shows clip after clip showing how they have made fun of Jewish people without anyone threatening violence.

Radical Muslim is a COINTELPRO site, run by a “converted” jewish settler pretending to be a “radical Muslim”. He is the ONE Muslim that complained about the South Park episode… an ex-radical Israeli settler, Mr. Stewart… real Muslims haven’t threatened South Park once since 2001 when they FIRST ran an image of the prophet on their show.

Marauding IDF Jeep Kills 2 Palestinian Girls, 5 and 7 years Old

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Deaths and injuries: Tubas – 19:00, in the Northern Jordan Valley two girls, five-year-old Jana Imad Ali Hussein Fuqaha and seven-year-old Masah Imad Ali Hussein Fuqaha, were killed by an Israeli Army jeep, travelling at great speed, that ran into a tractor transporting the family near the village of Ein al Beida. The collision also resulted in injuring the girls’ 12-year-old brother and their father.

Information from the Lorca list:

While Occupation and blockade are business as usual for Israel, there should be no business with Israel

In Occupied Palestine

Zionism in practice

Israel’s Daily Toll on Palestinian Life, Limb, Liberty and Property

- and if you have friends who would also like to receive these newsletters, please ask them to contact us at leslie@palestine.org.nz

Issue of U.S. Political Prisoners Raised in UN Report by Black Attorney Group

Tweet http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/printer_6923.shtml

(via Leonard Peltier's Newsletter)

EXCERPT:

The United Nations' Universal Period Review process was introduced in 2006 and community-based, non-governmental and other organizations are allowed to point out human rights issues within their countries and where they feel violations of international law or UN treaties have been committed. via Leonard Peltier's newsletter

For Black America, the process is another way to hold the U.S. government accountable and to demand the release of Black Power era leaders and members of organizations whose political views are objectionable, said Mr. Willis, in an interview.

Beyond freeing an aging population of some 100 former Black Panthers, members of the MOVE organization and other revolutionary-oriented groups, taking the issue to the United Nations puts America and her dirty laundry on front street, said the longtime activist and lawyer.

“They (American officials) do not want to have these issues reach the world's people. How do you go into Iraq or Afghanistan telling people about their democracy when you got Black people that are locked down in prison for 30-40 years as political prisoners?”

Whether the problem was leftist ideology, nationalists and those calling for a Black homeland, demands for a new economic order or Native American rights and anti-Vietnam War efforts, government security agencies infiltrated dissident groups.

The security activity went hand-in-hand with crackdowns on Black, Latino, Native American and even some White groups demanding a more just and peaceful society—and greater demands for respect for rights and opposition to police violence.

“Such repression resulted in murders, injuries, false arrests, malicious prosecutions and lengthy imprisonments of scores of political activists,” the report said.

The continued incarceration and mistreatment of these prisoners violates UN treaties and conventions that guarantee human rights, forbid torture and outlaw racial and political targeting by government, the report charges.

Surveillance and destroying organizations

The plight of political prisoners is largely rooted in the 1960s-1970s era surveillance against Black groups, which included respected civil rights organizations as well as so-called Black radicals, according to Mr. Willis. About two-thirds of the jailed dissidents are Black, he said.

The FBI teamed with local law enforcement to attack, disrupt and destroy groups like the Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was admitted during congressional hearings in 1976 empanelled to probe these secret domestic wars.

The covert Counterintelligence Program run by then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and approved by the White House, focused in specially on the Black Panther Party, and most political prisoners are either former Panthers or from MOVE, a radical “back-to-nature” group whose homes were bombed by the Philadelphia Police Department in 1985.

“U.S. political prisoners have languished in U.S. prisons for decades under cruel and inhumane conditions. Several have died in prison; others have endured years of solitary confinement, poor medical health care, various other forms of abuse, and perfunctory parole hearings resulting in routine denial of human rights,” the report noted.

The report calls for the unconditional release of political prisoners jailed as a result of the government's Counterintelligence Program, an executive review of all cases related to the covert operation, a murder probe into the deaths of Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and actions to repair and redress harm done and to prevent similar acts in the future.

While Atty. Willis is pushing the plight of political prisoners, he said the impact of the government wrongdoing went beyond the heavy price young activists paid at the time.

“Movements move forward with masses of people but they move forward with a certain kind of leadership,” said Mr. Willis.

During the revolutionary times of the 1960s and 1970s, youth and students were influenced by the efforts of the Nation of Islam, Congress of Racial Equality, and NAACP as well as the African liberation movement on the continent and Cuba's revolution, he continued.

A type of leadership was developing that America had never seen before and the government moved to crush that leadership, Mr. Willis said.

The Panthers and SNCC were wiped out and law enforcement and government sent clear signals that if others persisted in demanding progressive action they would also be destroyed, he said.

“Our community suffered. Our community deserves reparations just on that issue because it set us back in the 1960s and we see where we are now, we haven't recovered from that,” he said. “It's not just those in prison that suffered, and they certainly suffered mightily because they have been locked down and some of them are dying in prison. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered. But the community suffered,” he said. Young leaders Hampton and Clark headed the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. They were shot and killed in a police raid on a west side home in 1969.

U.S. power vs. the power of the people

While the U.S. wields considerable power at the United Nations, in particular with its veto power on the Security Council, Atty. Willis rejects the notion that holding the superpower to international standards is a futile effort.

The General Assembly is largely made up of delegates from around the world, and public opinion and moral authority is bigger than U.S. power, he said.

The lawyer pointed to fighting in Chicago for two decades for Blacks tortured in a police precinct and officers under former police commander John Burge. It was only after the case, which involved hundreds of suspects coerced into making confessions because of torture, was put before international bodies that U.S. law enforcement officials moved against Mr. Burge. He will go on trial May 10 in federal court and is accused of obstruction of justice and perjury.

“It was only after the United Nations mentioned torture in the context of Abu Grahaib, Guantanamo Bay and Chicago, in the same paragraph, that John Burge was indicted within months of that,” Mr. Willis said. The Justice Dept. reached out about the case after the world body noted the violations, he said.

This is What I Call Throwing Your Body Against the Gears of the Machine!

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Humanity: Ahmed Deeb is Killed -- Eva Bartlett in Gaza

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*[photo: Max Ajl] Ahmed Deeb before he bled to death from the Israeli-fired explosive bullet which severed his femoral artery.

In Gaza, April 28, 2010

4:57 pm April 28

An SMS informs me that the young man from Sheik Radwan who was shot by an Israeli soldier today is dead. A visit to Shifa hospital confirms it. Ahmed Deeb, 21, was among protesters closest to the border fence at the former Nahal Oz crossing, east of Gaza City, when he was targeted in the leg. The 'dum dum’ bullet hit his femural artery, exploding inside and severing it, causing massive bleeding, said Dr. Abdullah el Attar at Shifa hospital.

Life is short, the saying goes. But in Palestine that expression is literal, and everyone knows it. The demonstraters, proud and fearless, delight in being on Palestinian land rendered off-limits by Israeli authorities, going as close as possible to the fence, dressing the fence with the Palestinan flag, and dancing in the face of armed Israeli soldiers.

But does this warrant being killed, or even just maimed?

If Ahmed Deeb was like any of the Palestinian youths I’ve met in Gaza, he dreamed of freedom –the freedom of movement and of seeing places outside of Gaza –and of work –the work denied the majority in Gaza under siege.

If Deeb was like many of the Palestinian youths I’ve met in Gaza, he was not afraid to die, constantly facing death in Gaza where at any moment Israeli warplanes, tanks or gunboats can fire first and justify later. If he was like any person in Gaza, he likely felt he was already dead, living a life where it’s hand-to-mouth and not believing tomorrow will be different or dreams will be fulfilled.

But he was certainly like most Palestinians I’ve met, in all of occupied Palestine, in his samoud, his refusal to back down or shut up. No matter how many massacres, invasions, nor how long the siege.

Oh brutality, you hateful regime.

Oh humanity, you are lacking for this country.

People of Al Walaja vs. Israeli Bulldozers! Give Up Bulldozers!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er1vAJObtzM

ActiveStills — April 26, 2010 — Around 50 Palestinians and internationals had managed to stop the work of the bulldozers for several hours in the village of Al Walaja, on 25.04.2010. The Israeli soldiers tried to remove people from the area, but demonstrators managed to stay until they were violently dragged one by one. The Israeli soldiers also used stun grenades and tear gas canisters directly at people, as well as pepper spray. One Palestinian got arrested and several were injured. Once completed the Wall will totally surround the village.

Even Wikipedia knows about Al Walaja:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Walaja

EYE WITNESS REPORTS FROM GAZA -- October 2009

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHa-CzNCF3c

Bendib Cartoon! Congress & Wall Street

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"Terrorizing Immigrants" -- Stephen Lendman

Tweet Everyone knows about the Immigrant Rights March on Saturday, I hope. Here is the info on it:
http://wsjwj.org/calendar/052010.asp

*************
Here is part of Lendman's article:
http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=65423&s2=27

EXCERPT:

In September 2009, NNIRR [Nat'l Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights] published a report titled, "Guilty by Immigration Status" on violations of immigrant family, worker, and community rights in 2008. Worrisome is that anti-immigrant police state measures may be used against anyone authorities target. As a result, no one is safe or legally protected, even law abiding residents and citizens.

Today, the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division violates the constitutional rights of targeted persons questioned, detained, jailed, and/or deported, solely for their suspected immigration status.

According to an Amnesty International report titled, "Jailed Without Justice," immigration detentions in the last decade tripled - from 10,000 to 30,000 daily through 2008. Over 300,000 men, women and children are detained annually, and the numbers are rising. They include asylum seekers, torture survivors, victims of human trafficking, lawful residents, parents of lawful children, and suspected undocumented immigrants.

Hundreds of facilities around the country detain them, pending criminal and/or deportation proceedings. According to James Pendergraph, former ICE executive director of State and Local Coordination (on August 21, 2008):

"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we (ICE) can make him disappear."

In her December 16, 2009 Nation magazine article titled, "America's Secret ICE Castles," Jacqueline Stevens explained that besides publicly known detention sites:

"ICE is also confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no information about their ICE tenants - nary a sign, a marked car or even a US flag" - a blatantly illegal act, given that persons in them have "disappeared," their constitutional rights with them.

Facilities have no beds, mattresses, showers, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, toothpaste, sanitary napkins, mail, legal information, or the ability to contact an attorney. The Obama administration stonewalls attempts for information and won't address complaints - policies common in police states; Obama more ruthless as Bush.

"AIPAC: The Voice of America — Part 1: The Orange and the Pea"

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOZZ5zGAWKE

"In Israel, It Has Been 'Arizona' All Along" -- Assaf Oron

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http://theonlydemocracy.org/2010/04/in-israel-it-has-been-arizona-all-along/

EXCERPT:

I am encouraged by the wave of justified indignation, and spontaneous boycott movement, against the new Arizona law. Indeed, requiring citizens and legal resident to carry proof of their status at all times, and encouraging police to profile passersby who “look suspicious”, runs counter to the soul of democracy. The bigots who put together the Arizona law should be made to pay. And hopefully it will be declared unconstitutional.

This is also a teaching opportunity, to explain why the country I come from, Israel, has never really lived up to its “Middle East’s Only Democracy” (TM) branding.

See? In Israel, laws like the Arizona one – and worse – have been in effect ever since independence. No, I’m not talking about the Occupation, but inside Israel proper.

Any resident sixteen years of age or older must at all times carry an Identity card, and present it upon demand to a senior police officer, head of Municipal or Regional Authority, or a policeman or member of the Armed forces on duty.

And guess against which ethnic/national group this requirement is enforced most often….

In Israel, one of the rites of passage is going (sometime after your 16th birthday) to the Interior Ministry and getting your first ID card. And yes, you do tend to carry it with you at all times when leaving the home.

What happens it a police officer asks you for it and you don’t have it? Well, in principle they could arrest you and you might spend a night (used to be a couple of nights) in jail. In practice, to Jewish-Israeli citizens who look and sound Jewish-Israeli, this rarely happens. Very rarely. I mean, they might get in trouble with the police if they engage in wrongdoing, but almost never they would be booked just for not carrying an ID.

Things slightly change if you are a non-Jewish Israeli. In 1988 I boarded the night bus from Tel Aviv to Eilat (extreme south of the country). Two Bedouin-Israeli youth were about to board, when a policeman came and started questioning them. They got smart and talked back. I know that in America you never talk back to police, but in Israel it is more common and socially acceptable, and Jews would usually get away with it. But being Bedouin, the policeman got mad and asked them for their ID’s. They didn’t have ID’s on them. They didn’t get to board the bus, instead they seemed to have gone on a field trip with the policeman.

Now, this goes on all the time. If you walk a typical Israeli downtown, especially in Jerusalem, you will always see police officers or soldiers “chatting” with some Arab-looking men and checking their ID’s. The police are acting completely within their rights. See, that’s the beauty: in Israel citizens don’t really have inherent rights because there is no Constitution. There have been some “Basic Laws”, including a “Human Rights and Dignity Law”, representing an attempt to cobble together a quasi-Constitution. Former Chief Justice Aharon Barak has invented for them the self-serving, completely blown-out-of-proportion brand-name “the Constitutional Revolution”. Truth be told, these laws are subject to change or cancellation by a 61-member majority of the 120-member Knesset – and they have been changed countless of times. Much worse: all these laws have gaping loopholes left in them for “security considerations” and “security measures”, which allow all security forces to continue business as usual, including routine profiling and ID checking (see below for a partial list of these “security measures”).

"It Won't Stop in Arizona" -- The Unapologetic Mexican

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Malicious Charges on the Innocent in Iraq -- Trudy Rubin

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BAGHDAD — I came to Iraq to find my driver Salam, who has been unjustly imprisoned for the last 16 months.

I found him in a grimy police station jail, a shadow of the ebullient man I knew, with marks of torture on his legs. His suffering reflects the trauma so many Iraqis still endure in a country trying to recover from decades of dictatorship and botched U.S. occupation.

But what makes Salam's case so scary is that he's being punished for opposing the sectarian slaughter that nearly drove Iraq over the edge.

Salam is a Shiite whose uncle was hung by Saddam Hussein, but he couldn't stand watching innocent Sunnis slaughtered. He tipped U.S. and Iraqi forces about a family of Shiite Mahdi Army militia who were killing his Sunni neighbors in 2007. Two members of the militia family were jailed and one went into hiding.

Once U.S. troops left Salam's neighborhood, the Mahdi Army family took its revenge.

Members of this family used personal connections with senior army and intelligence officers to get Salam arrested. How can it be that relatives of militia killers are free to bring bogus charges and get the innocent jailed? In fact, the practice of bringing malicious charges — known in Arabic as kaydia — has become so widespread here that Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council has urged judges and prosecutors not to issue warrants unless there is sufficient evidence. The judges aren't listening.

Every Iraqi to whom I've told Salam's story knew of similar cases of arrests on bogus charges for reasons of revenge or personal vendettas. I'm told it's possible to rent fake witnesses who wait outside the courthouse.

In Salam's case, the miscarriage of justice reveals a rot that threatens every tenuous advance this country has made in the last couple of years.

I could feel a chill as I approached the Baghdad police station where Salam is being held. It is a gray two-story concrete structure, with balconies painted an incongruous blue, and an entry room crammed with desperate people trying to find out about relatives inside.

Officials were extremely nervous about Salam's case, and didn't want to let a journalist near him. I waited for 90 minutes in a dark room with a mustachioed intelligence colonel chain-smoking behind a desk. Only calls to Iraqi officials I knew well finally got me permission to meet Salam.

I was brought to the police chief's office, where I sat in a line of chairs along one wall, and watched as Salam was led toward me.

"You cannot write anything," the police chief told me. Wearing blue sweatpants and a white T-shirt, Salam looked 50 pounds thinner than when I last saw him. Here is the story he told: The initial charges against him, of murder, were brought by a member of the Jaish Mahdi family named Leila Tha'ad, the mother and aunt of the men who were arrested in the U.S. bust. Judge Abdullah al-Alousi acquitted Salam of these charges on Jan. 14, 2010, after he had already spent one year in jail.

As he walked out of the prison, two Iraqi army Humvees pulled up; men jumped out and seized him. He was taken first to a notorious prison, and then to an army base at Muthanna airport, where, he says, Leila Tha'ad has close contacts with senior military and intelligence officials. "They tortured me, they used electric," he said, showing the burn marks and scabs on his legs. "They did it in other places, too. They accused me of being an American spy."

So here we have it. An Iraqi who helped U.S. troops catch militia killers — and I spoke at the time to U.S. officers who verified this — is tortured by Iraqis for his efforts. An Iraqi who helped his own military catch sectarian killers — and Salam gave me a list of Iraqi officers who can verify this — is jailed on the word of a Mahdi Army woman.

I asked knowledgeable Iraqi security sources — whom I can't identify because they fear retribution — whether they thought Salam was innocent and being treated wrongly, and they answered yes.

The story gets worse. Salam was thrown back in jail, and now faces a host of new charges — brought by friends of Tha'ad's family — including a charge of terrorism.

Salam's two sons were also arrested and remain imprisoned; one was badly tortured. In January, Salam's brother was shot dead, by Mahdi Army friends of Tha'ad, he believes.

Salam was stoic as he talked, but at one moment his shoulders started shaking. He handed me a letter he had written in Arabic to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in which he recalled that Maliki asked Iraqis to help in the fight against terrorism. "Instead of being rewarded by respect and pride," he wrote, "some of those who have weak souls and are working in government have thrown me in jail along with my sons. ..."

Indeed, Maliki built his reputation with his crackdown on radical Shiite militias in Basra. As Iraqi politicians struggle to form a new government six weeks after elections, Maliki, who's seeking a second term, talks constantly of moving beyond the sectarianism that nearly tore Iraq apart.

Yet so long as Salam and others like him remain imprisoned, such pledges ring hollow.

Until he is freed, I intend to keep writing about his case, not only because it's a travesty of justice, but because it symbolizes everything that needs changing inside Iraq.

"Right of Return Not Negotiable" -- Ahmed Moor

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http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11224.shtml
via the Sabbah Report

"To the extent that Israel must exist exclusively for the Jewish people, the enfranchising of the roughly four million Palestinians living under Israeli occupation today does pose a threat to its existence." (Yotam Ronen/ActiveStills)

Washington insiders are now touting a misguided Obama-dictated plan to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Most recently, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stephen Solarz took to the pages of The Washington Post to float the idea of an imposed peace, which largely undermines non-negotiable historic Palestinian rights. The authors call for the annulment of the Palestinian right of return, and the creation of a "demilitarized Palestinian state."

The trial balloon avoids any talk of Israeli parliamentary dynamics and the incapacity of the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cede anything without sowing the seeds of its own dissolution, something Netanyahu probably realized while negotiating the composition of his coalition government. But its most glaring failure is the presumption that Palestinians will meekly accept American dictates regarding the right of return. As a Palestinian, I believe that any plan that seeks to sacrifice our inalienable human rights to ensure race-based majorities in Israel will fail.

Brzezinski and Solarz begin their piece by paraphrasing a statement made by Israel's current defense minister, Ehud Barak. They write that the "absence of the two-state solution is the greatest threat to Israel's future." Presumably, Barak is indirectly referring to the one-state solution, or the growing call by Palestinians and anti-Zionist Jews to create a democratic state in all of historic Palestine. It is telling that the Israeli defense minister -- and Brzezinski and Solarz -- appears to view a growing movement in the Holy Land for equal rights and enfranchisement as "the greatest threat to Israel's future."

In a sense they're right. To the extent that Israel must exist exclusively for the Jewish people, the enfranchising of the roughly four million Palestinians living under Israeli occupation today does pose a threat to its existence. But so do the approximately 20 percent of Israelis who are non-Jews (mostly Palestinian citizens of Israel) who are growing more rapidly as a population than Jewish Israelis. It is this anachronistic obsession with the racial makeup of the state that created the Palestinian refugee problem in the first place. Mandate Palestine was ethnically cleansed by Zionist armed forces in 1948 to create room for a Jewish majority state, as documented by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Incidentally, it is this original sin that Brzezinski and Solarz seek to reward by obliterating the Palestinian right of return which is enshrined in international law. One wonders what prescriptions Barak, Brzezinski and Solarz will offer in the event of a Palestinian baby boom within Israel in the coming decades.

Putting aside the racial justification that underpins the existence of the Jewish state for a moment, it's worth examining the reasons any two-state solution cannot work today. First, as previously noted, Palestinians will not relinquish the right of return. Mahmoud Abbas, who cannot claim any electoral or moral legitimacy, is hardly in a position to negotiate the right away. Second, there are approximately 500,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and no one is capable of removing them from their homes. One can talk about land swaps, but the reality is that the Israeli state has done a thorough job of colonizing large swaths of land around Jerusalem and deep into the West Bank, effectively cutting it in two. Territorial contiguity is enormously important when engineering a state and it doesn't appear likely here. Third, the Holy Land is relatively arid. Much of the water Israelis consume comes from the coastal and mountain aquifers, both of which lie under Palestinian land. Notwithstanding international law and the prevailing sentiment of much of the world, Israel simply will not relinquish control of such strategic freshwater reserves.

Finally, there are Israeli security considerations. As Brzezinski and Solarz generously admit, Israel will never agree to a Palestinian state with a conventional military. A state without a military option isn't really a state at all, especially since Israel will likely continue to conduct raids into Palestinian territory.

Because the two-state solution is unworkable, both for practical and moral reasons, there is only one outcome that satisfies basic American liberal values of freedom of speech, race-blindness, equality under the law, etc. That's the one-state solution. When I lived in New York, I lived alongside people who hailed from places around the world, many of whom were American Jews and Israelis. However, I do not have the same right in my country of birth. Reasonable people can ask why Jews can live alongside Palestinians in America, but cannot fathom living alongside Palestinians in Israel.

The road to the one-state outcome is fraught with much difficulty. The struggle is likely to be as protracted as South Africa's struggle, and contentious issues like national rights, official languages and a suitable flag will need to be hammered out. But many Palestinian and Jewish activists have already embarked upon this road. Many of these individuals have come to support the one-state solution after accepting that the two-state solution is never going to materialize; Bantustans are all the international community can realistically offer the Palestinians, something few Palestinians will agree to.

My advice to the American president is to accept reality for what it is. We Palestinians will struggle for equal rights in our country in the same way blacks in America fought for their rights. We will persist in overwhelmingly demanding the implementation of our right of return. Our right of return is our right to sit anywhere on the bus, or attend any school. It would be a tragic irony if America's first black president leaves office with a legacy of supporting the world's last apartheid state.

Ahmed Moor is a Palestinian-American freelance journalist living in Beirut. He was born in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished with permission. [disclaimer -- siratyst didn't ask -- hope it's okay