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NOVANEWS Jun162011 Dear Jello, We are fans of yours, people who have been influenced and inspired by your work. There’s ...Read more

NOVANEWS Dear Friends, Tonight’s 6 items are more talk than reports about what is happening daily here, but are worth ...Read more

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"An Open Letter to Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine: Don't Play in Tel Aviv! Apartheid is Not Punk Rock!”

NOVANEWS

Jun162011

Dear Jello,
We are fans of yours, people who have been influenced and inspired by your work. There’s no doubt that over the past thirty years, while so much of American culture has been inundated by cookie-cutter corporate pop, your words and music stood apart in calling out hypocrisy, corruption and oppression. Without that kind of commitment, it’s safe to say that honest, unflinching, politically-charged music wouldn’t look quite the way it does today.
This is why we must strongly urge you to reconsider your decision for you and the Guantanamo School of Medicine to play your show in Tel Aviv on July 2nd. Sure, you may be sick of hearing it by now. Even a quick glance at your Facebook page will reveal tons of uproar around it. Yet understand, it’s because your work has meant just that much to so many people who care about your political input. If you play that show it will definitely leave a sick smirch right in the center of your work. It will send a message that when it’s really hard to do the right thing, solidarity can be thrown out the window. You’ve never been one to back down during those times, and there’s no reason to start now.
Over the past couple weeks you’ve engaged with many voices in the Palestine solidarity movement, in particular the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) in the UK and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). Without belaboring their arguments, it is worth admitting that your correspondence, while certainly reflecting the kind of humility and fair-mindedness you’ve always brought to your activism, is also inaccurate at many points, and we feel the need to correct these inaccuracies as fellow punks and activists.
Your assertion, for example that “both the Israeli Left and the Palestinian Left are divided” in their support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is at best an over-generalization. The Boycott Divestment Sanctions National Committee (BNC) is supported by all major labor union federations in Palestine, the Global Palestine Right of Return Coalition, the General Union of Palestinian Women, the Union of Palestinian Farmers, disability groups, religious organizations, refugee groups and more. Recently the major political parties in Palestine enthusiastically supported the formation of the Palestinian Trade Union Coalition for BDS (PTUC-BDS).
Nor is it so marginal even among the Israeli left–and its support is growing. In fact, so recognized is the threat that BDS poses to Israel’s machinations that “delegitimization,” that is, the diplomatic and economic isolation of Israel, has now become a common topic in mainstream Israeli politics and media.
You’ve emphasized the “fact-finding” end of your trip, and the announcement of a film crew documenting your trip seems to reflect this emphasis. By all means, go and see for yourself. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters was in a similar position but made the decision to educate himself prior to performing in Tel Aviv;he has since joined the BDS movement in support of cultural boycott. If money is an issue (plane tickets to the Middle East aren’t cheap!) then consider reaching out to raise it. For every Israeli organization willing to foot the bill for you to play, there are plenty of Palestinian groups who will gladly help you witness that reality firsthand. If a Kickstarter account can be started up to fund a film about your trip to Israel, you can most certainly start one up for a fact-finding mission.
You say in your follow-up letter that you “don’t see how the Netanyahu government could manipulate this event for their own purposes. What right wing regime in their right mind would want to namedrop me? I am not exactly known for keep my mouth shut onstage, especially about human rights violations…”
Sure, you ain’t Justin Bieber. But the very fact that you will be speaking out from the stage in the first place will give the Israeli press the opportunity to crow about Israel’s “tolerance” in the midst of an “intolerant” Arab world. Given the dust that has been kicked up around this whole fiasco, it can be all but guaranteed that this is bound to happen. That can already be seen in a small way on JBGSM’s Facebook page, which has been all but hijacked by chauvinistic comments–ranging from claims that Israel is “open to everyone” right on down to the worst kind of gutter anti-Arab racism.
And that’s just a handful of kooks on Facebook–imagine what the Israeli media, with its close relationship to Western “McNews,” can accomplish! Each musician that breaks the call for BDS further normalizes the abhorrent injustices of colonization, occupation, and apartheid that are being perpetuated against Palestinians. As members of the global punk community, this is something we can’t allow our music and efforts to be a part of–punk must stand on the side of liberation and freedom.
Regimes who use the white man’s burden as their cornerstone are always eager to twist criticism around into smug self-satisfaction. Perhaps the government won’t get a financial boon out of the performance, yet it will still be a propaganda victory. In Haaaretz 21/09/05, Nissim Ben-Sheetrit of Israel’s Foreign Ministry stated: “We see culture as a propaganda tool of the first rank, and I do not differentiate between propaganda and culture.” How does this stand with your statement from a 1997 interview that “Culture can help initiate better politics, while politics can be used to suppress culture–they go hand in hand.”
If you break the boycott, you will be an active collaborator with the politics which suppresses Palestinian culture and uses culture to propaganderize and cover up Israel’s crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Then there’s the propaganda benefit to Israeli businesses–also a target of BDS.
Your support of Peace Now is of concern. You may not be aware that Peace Now is complicit with the Israeli regime. As revealed in Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth (8/11/10), “activists” from Peace Now requested to meet with Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon to ask “if the Foreign Ministry could cooperate with Leftist circles in its hasbara [public information] efforts in Israel and abroad–in a bid to present Israel as a pluralist country that allows for a variety of opinion. During the meeting the organization delegates suggested to Ayalon a number of possibilities for including the Left in hasbara efforts, including sending Peace Now delegates to lecture abroad on behalf of the Foreign Ministry.” Peace Now does not represent the “Left” in any meaningful sense of the word–it is a willing tool for whitewashing Israel’s crimes of apartheid and Occupation.
As the Israeli state is preparing another onslaught against the next Flotilla to Gaza, which is meant to breach Israel’s illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip, your voice is needed on the side of the oppressed. A stance of neutrality and equivocation will mean you have chosen the side of the oppressor. You run the risk of breaking this international picket line right when its strength is needed the most. In six years, the BDS movement has managed to win the support of countless artists and musicians, and it’s still young. You, Jello, are in a unique place to either weaken or strengthen this movement.
This is just as important as the call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against apartheid South Africa – a picket line you respected and endorsed. Now, Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa are supporting the call for BDS against Israel. Desmond Tutu said: “If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined. The current divestment effort is the first, though certainly not the only, necessary move in that direction.”
We know you don’t take this decision lightly, Jello. You have never been one to shrug off the crimes committed by the world’s powerful governments against ordinary people. This is about a lot more than the crimes of Netanyahu or the occupation; it’s about what can put an end to them once and for all. At this crucial turning point for Palestine, now more than ever, it’s about solidarity.
Sincerely,
Punks Against Apartheid

Dorothy Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

Dear Friends,

Tonight’s 6 items are more talk than reports about what is happening daily here, but are worth your time.

Item 1 is actually a video about militarism in Israeli society—‘Selling Israeli Militarism like Toothpaste’ interviews both our own Rela Mazali, one of the founders of New Profile and Alex Cohn, a conscientious objector, and also shows how militarism is sold to kids from an actual TV propaganda program aimed at youngsters. Well worth 10 minutes of your time.

In item 2 the PCHR reports that the Israeli High Court has cancelled a previous judgment regarding Cast Lead and will now hear a case that it had originally dismissed.

Item 3 reports that 300 academics support women who not only practice civil disobedience but also report their doings publicly.

In item 4 Alice Walker explains why she is participating in the flotilla to Gaza.

Items 5 and particularly 6 are long, but both, I believe, are worth reading.

In item 5 Mark LeVine reports on ‘Palestinian Youth and the Healing Arts,’ that is to say, ways that the youth have found to express their emotions and to protest without violence.

Item 6 is Jerry Levin’s review of ‘Strong Horse Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilization’ by Lee Smith.  Levin’s review is particularly useful because he points out the fallacies of much right-wing thinking about Muslims and other subjects.  You may very well find Levin’s counter arguments useful in your own experiences with people who believe every bit of propaganda that they hear.

All the best,

Dorothy

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

1. Selling Israeli Militarism like Toothpaste

From children’s shows to national war drills, a discussion on militarism in Israeli society and gender equality in the army To watch a multi-part interview, click the link,

10 minute video

Lia Tarachansky interviewed Rela Mazali, the founder of New Profile, an organization working to demilitarize Israeli society, and Alex Cohn, a war resister who served five months for objecting to serve in the army. Cohn analyses a children’s show that portrays a typical interaction between soldiers and Israeli children as part of a discussion on the insidious prevalence of militarism in Israeli society.

Bio

Rela Mazali is one of the founders of the New Profile movement to de-militarize Israeli civil society. She has also co-founded Gun-Free Kitchen Tables, a new project aiming to drastically reduce the number of small arms in homes and families in Israel. She is also the author of Maps of Women’s Goings & Stayings (2001), and the upcoming book, Home Archaeology.

Alex Cohn is an Israeli activist and conscientious objector who served five months in jail for his refusal to serve in the army in 2005.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=33&Itemid=74&jumival=705

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2,Forwarded by the JPLO List

PCHR
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights

Press Release

Ref: 58/2011

23 June 2011

Israel High Court of Justice vacates verdict in Cast Lead Case: Appoints New Panel of Judges and Orders Case on behalf of 1,046 victims be Re-heard

On Wednesday, 15 June 2011, the Israeli High Court of Justice vacated (cancelled) a previous judgment dismissing a case brought by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, and litigated by Advocates Michael Sfard and Carmel Pomerantz, on behalf of 1,046 victims of Operation ‘Cast Lead’. The case had been illegitimately dismissed in April 2011 when the Court issued its decision solely on the basis of the State’s submission, effectively denying PCHR’s ‘right of reply’. This procedural irregularity was challenged, resulting in the successful decision of 15 June 2011. A new panel of judges will now be appointed, and the case can proceed.

This successful decision constitutes an important step towards ensuring victims’ legitimate right to access a court, and obtain an effective judicial remedy. The policies and practices challenged in this petition serve to comprehensively deny victims’ right to access justice. They perpetuate a climate of pervasive impunity, and effectively contribute to the establishment of an accountability free zone in the Gaza Strip.

Background to the Case

The initial petition was filed before the Israeli High Court of Justice on 21 December 2010 against Israel’s State Attorney on behalf of 1,046 victims of Operation Cast Lead. The petition requests that the High Court of Justice (HCJ) order the State Attorney to refrain from raising a claim under the statute of limitations in future civil suits brought before Israeli courts. According to PCHR, the right of access to the courts demands that the statute of limitations on bringing such civil cases, begin to accrue only once Israel’s illegal closure of the Gaza Strip has ceased.

The Knesset (Israeli parliament) amended the Israeli Civil Torts Act in 2002, reducing the statue of limitations in these types of civil suits to two years, instead of the previous seven-year limitation.The closure policy on the Gaza Strip prevents these victims from meeting with their Israeli lawyers and from entering Israel in order to testify before Israeli courts.

As a result of the physical, financial, and legal obstacles imposed by Israel, Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip – including the thousands of victims of Operation Cast Lead – are effectively prevented from seeking redress before Israeli courts. This situation results in the systematic denial of fundamental human rights.

The issue addressed in this petition relates to the right to reparation and the filing of civil tort compensation cases before Israeli courts on behalf of victims of Operation Cast Lead.

Background Information

Customary international law recognises all victims’ right to reparation (including compensation) in the event of a violation of international law. However, Palestinian victims from the Gaza Strip are currently faced with a number of significant hurdles which effectively prevent them from accessing justice, in violation of their fundamental rights. Claimants face three principal obstacles:

1. Statute of Limitations. Under Israeli law, a complaint for civil damages must be brought within two years of the date of the incident, or the right to compensation is irrevocably lost. As a result of the illegal closure of the Gaza Strip, and the significant number of victims of Operation Cast Lead, this two-year limit means that the victims are often unable to submit their cases within the required time-frame. Prior to 1 August 2002, the statute of limitations was seven years.

2. Monetary Barrier. Israeli courts often require claimants to pay a court insurance fee before the case can begin. While this is a discretionary fee applied by the court, in practice, this fee is always applied to Palestinian claimants. The exact value of the fee is not fixed, and it is determined on a case-by-case basis by the court. With respect to claims for damage to property, the fee usually constitutes a percentage of the value of the property being claimed, however, for death or injury there is no informal guideline. In PCHR’s experience this amount is typically set at a minimum of NIS 10,000 (about US $2800); however, it can reach significantly higher amounts. In a recent case brought by PCHR, the claimants were required to pay an insurance fee of NIS 20,000 (US $5,600) for each of the five wrongful deaths claimed. Thus, grave violations equal extremely high monetary barriers to justice. This insurance fee constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to justice. Simply put, claimants from Gaza – crippled by the economic devastation wrought by the occupation and the illegal closure – cannot afford this fee and their cases are being dismissed and closed.

3. Physical Barriers. Under Israeli law, in order testimony to be valid, the victim or witness must be present in court to undergo cross-examination. However, since June 2007, despite a letter from the court requesting their presence, the Israeli military authorities have not allowed a single individual to leave Gaza to appear in court. As a result, their cases are dismissed and closed. Further, PCHR’s lawyers – although qualified – cannot enter Israel to represent their clients before the courts. As a result, PCHR is forced to work with and hire lawyers in Israel (at extra cost). However, clients are not allowed to enter Israel to meet with their lawyer, and all requests made by lawyers to enter Gaza – to meet with clients, visit the crime scene, and so on – have been denied. Necessarily, this affects the lawyers’ ability to represent their clients, thereby undermining victims’ right to an effective remedy.

The Petition

The petition, brought by PCHR and litigated by Attorneys Michael Sfard and Carmel Pomerantz, challenges the two-year statute of limitations. An injunction is sought from the court suspending the two-year statute of limitations period. The petition highlights a number of barriers to justice created as a result of Israeli policy, including the illegal closure of the Gaza Strip; the petition develops a letter previously submitted by Adalah to the Israeli Attorney General. This petition is brought on behalf of 1,046 victims of Operation Cast Lead, representing the overwhelming majority of cases prepared in the aftermath of the offensive.

They cover virtually the entire spectrum of international humanitarian law violations, and among them are the most infamous cases of the offensive, including those of the Samouni, Abu Halima, and Al-Dia families.

Public Document

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

For more information please call PCHR office in Gaza, Gaza Strip, on +972 8 2824776 – 2825893

PCHR, 29 Omer El Mukhtar St., El Remal, PO Box 1328 Gaza, Gaza Strip. E-mail: pchr@pchrgaza.org, Webpage http://www.pchrgaza.org

———————————–

If you got this forwarded and you want to subscribe, send mail to request@pchrgaza.org

and write “subscribe” in the subject line.
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3. Forwarded by the JPLO List

From: Ruth Hiller [mailto:hillerruth@gmail.com]

Press Release (Please distribute widely)

19 June 2011

300 Academics Join 40 “Civil Disobedience” Women

Willing to Break Israel’s Entry Laws

About 300 lecturers and teachers from institutes of higher education throughout Israel have signed a public advertisement in support of civil disobedience actions of a group of women who openly infringe the law of entry to Israel. The academics put their full names in an advertisement which was published in Ha’aretz newspaper last Friday, 17 June 2011, next to an advertisement – the third in recent months – published by the women’s group called “Civil Disobedience”. (For the advertisement itself, see attachment.)

The women, who have all been investigated by Jerusalem police and who now have official criminal records, called for the Israeli public to join them in their protest activity which consists of driving Palestinian women and children for a day at Israeli recreational sites and the beach.  These actions come in the wake of writer and translator Ilana Hammerman’s initiative, who started publicizing such activities last year.

“We recognize neither the legality, nor the morality, nor the wisdom of the walls between us and our neighbors which have been erected with brute force,” stated the group in its advertisement.

Alongside the women’s statement, a support letter from the academics appeared, including the following words: We, the undersigned women and men, state that we are willing to collaborate with the actions of the “Civil Disobedience” women. In these dark hours, we are willing to drive their guests, Palestinian women and children, to hide them and to support their challenge in any other way, whether in deeds or in words.  The action of these women shows the right way for any Israeli citizen who truly supports a democracy respectful of human rights. Should Israel’s legal system find it appropriate to prosecute and penalize these women we shall be willing to support them, to join them and to be tried alongside them.

For further information and for interviews:

On behalf of the academics: Prof. Yishay Rosen-Zvi: 050-9670033

And for “Civil Disobedience” – Alma Ganihar: 052-6787353; Annelien Kisch: 052-5236132; Irit Gal: 054-5335573

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

4.  Article of interest. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker will join an international flotilla of boats sailing to Gaza to challenge Israel’s blockade of the territory. Here, Walker, best known for her 1983 novel “The Color Purple,” explains why she will be taking part.

Ed Corrigan
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/21/alice.walker.gaza/

Alice Walker: Why I’m sailing to Gaza

By Alice Walker, Special to CNN

June 21, 2011 — Updated 1324 GMT (2124 HKT)

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

  • Our boat will be carrying letters of solidarity to the people of Gaza

  • I am indebted to Jewish civil rights activists who came to the side of black people in the South in our time of need

  • I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource

  • If Israel attacks us, what is to be done?

Editor’s note: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker will join an international flotilla of boats sailing to Gaza to challenge Israel’s blockade of the territory. Here, Walker, best known for her 1983 novel “The Color Purple,” explains why she will be taking part.

Why am I going on the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza? I ask myself this, even though the answer is: What else would I do? I am in my sixty-seventh year, having lived already a long and fruitful life, one with which I am content.

It seems to me that during this period of eldering it is good to reap the harvest of one’s understanding of what is important, and to share this, especially with the young. How are they to learn, otherwise?

Our boat, The Audacity of Hope, will be carrying letters to the people of Gaza. Letters expressing solidarity and love. That is all its cargo will consist of. If the Israeli military attacks us, it will be as if they attacked the mailman. This should go down hilariously in the annals of history. But if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us, as they did some of the activists in the last flotilla, Freedom Flotilla I, what is to be done?

There is a scene in the movie “Gandhi” that is very moving to me: it is when the unarmed Indian protesters line up to confront the armed forces of the British Empire. The soldiers beat them unmercifully, but the Indians, their broken and dead lifted tenderly out of the fray, keep coming.

Our boat will be carrying letters to the people of Gaza.
–Alice Walker

Alongside this image of brave followers of Gandhi there is for me an awareness of paying off a debt to the Jewish civil rights activists who faced death to come to the side of black people in the South in our time of need. I am especially indebted to Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who heard our calls for help – our government then as now glacially slow in providing protection to non-violent protestors-and came to stand with us.

They got as far as the truncheons and bullets of a few “good ol’ boys'” of Neshoba County, Mississippi and were beaten and shot to death along with James Cheney, a young black man of formidable courage who died with them. So, even though our boat will be called The Audacity of Hope, it will fly the Goodman, Cheney, Schwerner flag in my own heart.

And what of the children of Palestine, who were ignored in our President’s latest speech on Israel and Palestine, and whose impoverished, terrorized, segregated existence was mocked by the standing ovations recently given in the U.S. Congress to the prime minister of Israel?

I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left. One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.
–Alice Walker

As adults, we must affirm, constantly, that the Arab child, the Muslim child, the Palestinian child, the African child, the Jewish child, the Christian child, the American child, the Chinese child, the Israeli child, the Native American child, etc., is equal to all others on the planet. We must do everything in our power to cease the behavior that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

I once asked my best friend and husband during the era of segregation, who was as staunch a defender of black people’s human rights as anyone I’d ever met: how did you find your way to us, to black people, who so needed you? What force shaped your response to the great injustice facing people of color of that time?

I thought he might say the speeches, the marches, the example of Martin Luther King, Jr. or of others in the Movement who exhibited impactful courage and grace. But no. Thinking back, he recounted an episode from his childhood that had led him, inevitably, to our struggle.

He was a little boy on his way home from Yeshiva, the Jewish school he attended after regular school let out. His mother, a bookkeeper, was still at work; he was alone. He was frequently harassed by older boys from regular school, and one day two of these boys snatched his yarmulke (skull cap), and, taunting him, ran off with it, eventually throwing it over a fence.

Two black boys appeared, saw his tears, assessed the situation, and took off after the boys who had taken his yarmulke. Chasing the boys down and catching them, they made them climb the fence, retrieve and dust off the yarmulke, and place it respectfully back on his head.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put – without delay, and with tenderness – back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

That is why I sail.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Alice Walker. A longer version of this article will appear on Alice Walker’s blog.


5.  Al Jazeera

June 23.11

Palestinian Youth and the Healing Arts

Mark LeVine

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/06/201162110840143444.html

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6.Friends:

I was asked to prepare a review of a recently published book that essentially absolves the U.S. of culpability with respect to the violence that is afflicting the Middle East and killing young Americans in their prime. The main fault, according to the so-called journalist author lies with misplaced anti-Anti Americanism and a penchant for violence that is uniquely Muslim.

As some of you know, for a variety of reasons my writing and activities in connection with them have slowed down considerably. Nevertheless, the more I read the book, the more disgusted I got, so the short 1000 word piece I started write took on a life of its own and grew like Topsy. It is much longer than that. But friends who looked it over for me suggested I send it on.  So for what it may or maynot  be worth, it follows.

(Also, now that my energy is improving, I have been thinking about organzing another transcontinental speaking tour as I used to do early in the last decades ofthe old century and the first of this one. It would deal with matters such as you find below. If that interests you in terms of arrainging a venue in your area, I can be reached via Facebook, of course, and as per the heading below.)

Jerry Levin

2455-E Arlington Crescent

Birmingham, AL 35205

Phone: Fax 205 264 1244

E-mail: jlevin0320@yahoo.com

Reviewing: The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilization by Lee Smith; Doubleday

When reading any analyses or commentary on Middle East politics, society, and culture written by – let us narrow the field here – a journalist, it is important, I think, to consider for whom he is writing: not his audience but his employer. In the case of Lee Smith, a senior editor at the politically and culturally right of center inside-the-Beltway polemical enterprise, The Weekly Standard, one may safely presume that The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilization is not going to be a disingenuous exposition of the subject. One could also presume that the thesis and its conclusions are also going to be, if not suspect, at least significantly arguable. And one would be right.

As expected, there are glowing uncritical promotional blurbs that appear on and inside the book. Extracted from such neo-conservative sources as Commentary Magazine, The Weekly Standard naturally, and Daniel Pipes’ in the National Review, the hosannas make my point. So if those names resonate positively with readers, then this book report or – better said – this book complaint is not for them.

Not to dismiss Smith’s work out of hand, because a reporter even worth a quarter of his salt is bound to get some of the facts right; but the conceptual uses to which he puts both his correct and incorrect facts, ah, there’s the rub. They indicate that his slipups may be wittingly self-serving. The factual and the not factual constitute a worrying apologetic that pervasively perpetuates domestic politically correct stereotypes about the politics and culture of Arab, Iranian, and other Islamic people. The aim is clearly to justify and absolve chauvinist my country right or wrong interventionist U. S. foreign diplomatic, military, and economic Middle East policies that have been blowing up in the national face with increasing frequency since the 1980s.

They are views that are held not just as articles of faith by tens of millions of people across the entire spectrum of political and cultural thought in the West, especially the United States, but also as unassailable truths. These are the shibboleths professed at times by those inhabiting our domestic left, middle and right that have been providing a conceptual undergirding for the rise of repeated retail militant inciteful U.S. involvement in the Middle East that has been growing in intensity in recent years.

Regrettably too often it has been questioned and challenged most vigorously as to its credibility or necessity only after the fact and only after body bags with no discernible affirmative result have begun to pile up. So the situation there for both our troops and the helpless indigenous civilians living within range of our bullets and bombs has in every case perceptibly worsened. Indeed, one could assert, and I do, that the U.S.’ perilous and increasingly weakened power to influence or outright control events in the Middle East can be traced to when we crossed a policy Rubicon in Lebanon in 1982 and started attempting to affect political events with military force.

One of Smith’s key stereotypes supports a long running assertion that Middle Eastern (read this sotto voce as Muslim) nature and culture is incorrigibly violent, especially when compared to the West, which has been and is genteel by comparison. This judgment is exemplified by a typical every day observation that has taken on aphoristic significance. It goes something like this, “What do you expect? Those people over there have been fighting each other for centuries.” Or as Smith smugly avers, “The cycle of violence; in the Middle East [which is] thousands of years old, is the defining characteristic of [its] political order.” Therefore, current regional instability, according to Smith, is the result of this uniquely inbred indigenous penchant for eternal violent regional internal mayhem. To condense this condition he has coined the phrase, “clash of Arab civilizations.”

The internal Arab clash, Smith asserts, is the cause of instability in the region to an infinitely greater degree and consequence than the so-called East West Civilization clash favored by a plethora of politically correct history specialists. That clash, however, is best exemplified these days by a series of U. S. led or inspired interventionist “the best defense is an offense” style invasions, aka as preemptive attacks. As difficult as it may be for American uber patriots to acknowledge, the reality about violence cycles is this: the main difference between the Middle East’s and our own throughout history is simply quantity. As a perpetrator, ours amount to far less, only because we have not been around as long. To hold that violence is a defining characteristic of the Middle East and not the United States is an exercise in hazardous gratuitousness.

Furthermore, those who subscribe to such generalizations tend to ignore the historical fact that Arabs were held under strict Ottoman rule for hundreds of years, which precluded the kind of violence Smith has posited for the region. The notion also ignores the fact that the Dark Ages apply to Europe not the Middle East, or that Avicenna almost single handedly translated the West out of its centuries of self-inflicted brutish lethal ignorance. Also for that to be true, where violent internecine strife is concerned, somehow World Wars I and II pale in comparison as defining characteristics with the Six Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the first and second Intifadas and the attack on the World Trade Center, which was not Arab against Arab but Arabs against alien forces.

Nevertheless, the author reports with a straight face, the instability that is a result of the so-called internal clash of Arab civilizations, was best described by – are you ready for this? – the late Osama Bin Laden! “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” The operative words in the Bin Laden/Smith thesis are by nature, they and like. It is in the Arab and Iranian man and woman in the souk’s DNA, .i.e., it is in their biological nature to like Strong Horse leaders who plunge them into potentially lethal factional violence. In other words the preference has nothing to do with choices favoring violence imposed on a collective they by their authoritarian leaders but everything to do only with their genes.

Bin Laden, the would-be murderous autocrat, was no more chosen by the people in aggregate of the region than the many autocrats and despots he wanted to see replaced. He was no truth to power democracy advocate; but a power coveting violence rationalizing outsider who used every violent means available to get on the inside in order to run things ruthlessly himself. With respect to governance, however, this is what Bin Laden/Smith insists that they, i.e. a cumulative people, who never have had any political voice and whom he wished to dominate, said they like.

Smith’s view of the Arab character is that of the typical contemporary Orientalist as fleshed out by the late Edward Said in Orientalism, his study of demeaning Western narcissistic conceits about Middle Eastern culture. In it Said catalogued 19th century Western main stream stereotypical patronizing assumptions that were constantly employed to motivate and rationalize its various colonial conquests in the region. Those conclusions are still powerfully in vogue today as they continue to be applied to outside attempts to affect events there in this post-colonial age.

Powerful Western sovereignties, mainly the United States, backing equally powerful national and extra national enterprises are continuing to exploit the region economically with respect to its resources, commercially with respect, for example, to arms sales, and politically with respect to its subsidizing as many regional despots who can be bought. But that is not a collective they; that is a Middle East leadership they. That is who Osama Bin Laden was actually describing and whom David Brooks accurately describe recently in the New York Times as “fundamentally self-dealing.” However, and on behalf of truth in writing, Brooks was actually pinpointing U.S. leadership. Whatever! The shoe fits perfectly over there too.

Smith devotes five pages to refuting Said’s claims. That leads to the suspicion that he doth protest too much, especially his astonishing claim that Orientalism “was not a book about the contemporary Middle East.” That is akin to saying that scripture has no ethical or moral relevance to the current age. Said’s ancestral home in Jerusalem was confiscated by the Israelis after the war for independence in 1948. Today it is occupied by the International Christian Embassy, an unofficial evangelical organization formed to support the perpetuation of the Jewish State of Israel as opposed to a truly democratic pluralist state.

So certainly Said had an ax to grind with respect to what he perceived as the paralyzing effect of Western imperialism on individual rights, liberties, and the development of democratic institutions in the region. But his research and witness, which was first hand and long running, was never published or broadcast on behalf of either personal or collective retribution or restitution but in the hopes that it might inspire pervasive comprehension and justice. It took courage for him to say on National Public Radio in 1988, “I identify with the Canaanites.”

Dr. Said, an Episcopalian Palestinian Arab-American academic, far from being an ivory tower observer was also an outspoken member of the Palestinian National Congress, the official deliberative wing of the diaspora Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But he was far from being a rigid Palestinian ideologue. He quit loudly in disgust when the PLO would not come to grips with the rampant corruption and cronyism of the Israeli and American enabled post Oslo Accords Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat. Said’s plague-on-all-your undemocratic houses should be an indication of his exquisite independence of mind and action.

Smith spent so much time beating up on Edward Said in order to lay the groundwork for a next assertion that the West, in particular the United States, are libeled whipping boys with respect to being a significant cause of Middle East unrest. He asserts that Western “actions and policies have been less important than we imagine.We all took 9/11 too personally.” In other words, why do they hate us? was an irrelevant question, because the attack was “not really about us” but by extension all about they.

Far from taking 9/11 too personally, the problem has been, as subsequent history has proved, that we did not take it personally enough. We are in denial as to the underlying provocations. Officially we remain attached to the Smith thesis that 9/11 was an expression of unprovoked rage committed by a monolithic Middle Eastern they for theological, cultural, and political reasons. While admitting that “Arab rulers played a role in fostering it [anti-Americanism],” Smith insists that “its existence doesn’t depend on them.Anti-Americanism is not the effect of American politics, but is organic to the region.” Let’s see: if all Arabs are not terrorists, then at least according to Smith they are all anti-American in general and anti-Semitic specifically, because hatred is a motivating component of Muslim character.

That logic, could lead one to say that all Jews are Zionist with all that implies about the Jewish State’s violent repression, suppression and oppression of Palestinians both inside Israel and in the occupied territories. But, despite what AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and its adherents would like non-Jews to think, this is far from the truth, especially in Israel. In fact until World War II and the Nazi genocide with which the Muslim world had nothing to do, Jewish anti-Zionism was a powerful political force in the United States, and is still a force large enough to cause Zionist Jews to – feeling threatened – label those Jews self-hating. Trying to shame them by accusing them of anti-Semitism would be oxymoronic.

To support his logic with respect to his pervasive Islamic anti-Americanism theme, Smith rejects out of hand what Americans in the thousands learn when traveling in the region from the they who talk to them one-on-one out of earshot of the Strong Horses’ secret police. “We don’t hate Americans,” they say. “We hate what your government is doing to us.” Smith’s explanation for the furtive distinction is that they don’t really mean it. If all Arabs aren’t terrorists, then at least, he implies, they are liars.

If that out of hand rejection doesn’t work, Smith also scornfully attacks the Muslim and Christian Arab perception that there is a “wide gap between Americans and their leaders,” calling that view an “Arab conceit.” He uses the reelection of George Bush in 2004 to refute it. But this is another attempt at demeaning sophistry that just won’t fly. American unity is only true if one considers majority rule as evidence that no gap exists between Americans and their leaders. The reality, of course, is that tens of millions of Americans constitute an angry gap that voted against the President specifically because of his policy of military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. The difference is that majority rule here can lead us in to inimical foreign policy initiatives in the same way that despotic minority rule does over there.

What Smith denies, along with such doctrinaire neoconservative writers and editors as Charles Krauthammer, Cal Thomas, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Martin Peretz, Alan Dershowitz, and even George Will, as well as a large number of American theo/political commentators like Pat Robertson, is that 9/11 had nothing at all to do with an organic (Smith’s word) anti-American hatred of a generic Middle Eastern they. It did have everything to do with a strategy crafted by a very specific they, a band of domestic outsiders trying to replace despotic insider regimes with equally if not more despotic regimes of their own. They foolishly thought they could mobilize mass Muslim sentiment by whipping up an angry anti-American sentiment that both they and Smith thought was pervasive but is not.

Instead what is truly amazing is how indulgent countless Muslims are about Americans, given our undeniable history of officially supporting and often undergirding most Middle Eastern dictators, autocrats, and monarchial aristocracies. What is even more amazing is their affection for Americans despite our government’s indulgence of the oppressive Israeli police state policies which non-Jews who are mostly Muslim are obliged to endure.

In recent months, we have gained a better understanding as to why the indulgence. All along there has been an underestimated – if estimated at all – simmering Arab radicalism that is vastly different from the only kind of radicalism that Smith insists exists. This is a kind of democracy favoring radicalism that is neither automatically anti-American nor reflexively violent. It was suddenly exemplified by the unfolding events of the so-called Arab Spring that have quickly served to discredit much of Smith’s book, which appeared in bookstores late in 2010 a scant few weeks before the revolts that proved to be monumental exceptions to his just published rule were launched.

We in the West were more surprised than we ought to have been by the massive out pouring of democratic or at least republican radical sentiment and resolve. This is due to the fact, of course, that our domestic organs of mass public information and opinion have played a significan role in perpetuating the incorrigible violently undemocratic Middle Eastern stereotype, while ignoring, obscuring or minimizing the intentions of huddled masses there yearning to be free, masses stretching from the Maghreb through Iran and on into Pakistan, masses who if at all possible hope to achieve meaningful political reform nonviolently.

For instance, it was hardly noted or even commented on that it was nonviolent protests organized by Muslim lawyers that led to the toppling of the Musharraf military regime in Pakistan. This was a harbinger for restless Muslims elsewhere that democratic reform might be achieved without violence on the part of would be reformers. Furthermore their subsequent revolts were inspired and informed by the writings of generations of Islamic liberal nonviolence theoreticians and activists who also gleaned practical advice from such American nonviolence strategists as Gene Sharp, who categorized 198 distinct kinds of nonviolent protest and resistance to oppression.

Whether they succeed in the long run or not is another matter. Nevertheless the current political unrest in the Islamic sphere has been initiated almost entirely by Muslims and, especially in Egypt, by Christian Arabs aching for truly representative governments. A Gallup organization poll released earlier this month (June 2011) reports that support among the masses is huge. 83% of Egyptians in the sampling “sympathized with [the] protesters.” In addition when Egyptians were asked the following question, “Some people think that for an individual person or a small group of persons to target and kill civilians is sometimes justified, while others think that kind of violence is never justified. Which is your opinion?” 97% said, “never justified.” People in fourteen other nations were asked the same question. Egypt led the “never justified” list. Palestine was fourth at 79%, the United States was sixth at 76%, Iran tenth at 70% and Israel eleventh at 69%.

It is not clear whether the revolts currently underway will succeed or will be coopted, as they were in Europe in 1848. Back then entrenched autocracies or power hungry cabals of aristocrats and militaristic plutocrats, who having no interest in liberty, equality and fraternity, were lying in wait for the opportune moment to hi-jack the revolutions for their own selfish uses. There is no reason to think that this could not happen this time. It is also not unreasonable to think that the West and in particular the United States will not revert to historic type and only offer tepid encouragement to liberal reformers while continuing to do business with less than democratic replacement regimes who may yet emerge once our government is sure which way the wind is blowing. This is not based on conjecture. This is based on history.

Another assertion is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only a tangential issue in the Middle East. Smith contends that the central issue is the struggles between Muslim political and geographic entities due to that inbred, inborn predilection for internecine violent Islamic factionalism. However, the fact is that most of the major modern violence in the region has been in response to or because of a single unsettling political event that originated outside its borders – the birth of colonoial Zionism at the end of the 19th Century.

Lest all Jews be tarred with the Zionist brush, it is important to differentiate Zionists from a sizeable number of Jews both inside and outside Israel who oppose Zionism. They oppose it, because its aim from the beginning was the establishment of an elitist Jewish State in which Muslim and Christian Arabs already living there would be turned into second class citizens obliged to accept and endure social and political apartheid. In time the West not only approved of the concept but enabled it in the mid-1940s.

Despite what Smith and others insistently proclaim, one has to be in complete denial of the facts about Israeli social and political policies to be able to persist in describing it as either a democracy in general and/or the “only democracy in the Middle East” in particular. The Israeli government is as heavy handed with its non-Jewish subjects as its Islamic counterparts are with their non-Muslim minorities not to mention their Muslim majorities. At best Israel is a limited democracy-wolf in sheep’s clothing.

At best it is an example of representative governance gone wrong, where a Jewish majority has been able to create an exclusivist state in which Jewish nationality provides supremacist rights and privileges not available to Israel’s non Jewish population. At best Israel is an example of representative governance gone wrong (or actually never went right), just as the United States was in the pre-Martin Luther King, Jr. era, or South Africa was in the pre-Nelson Mandela era in South Africa, or Czechoslovakia and Poland were in the pre-Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa eras.

Besides the myth of Israeli democracy, Smith resorts to other distortions to support the contention that there is nothing credible about the Palestinian movement in the West Bank and Gaza to be free of Israeli military rule and stranglehold on the Palestinian economy. He also ignores the Arab Muslim and Christian Arab struggle for equal social, civil, and human rights inside the Jewish State.

Finally and frequently he characterizes the PLO’s late leader, Yasser Arafat of waging “from 1960 to the time of his death. a campaign of terror targeting European as well as Israelis and other Arabs.” Arafat’s revolutionary lifetime arc actually progressed from terrorism to armed guerilla type struggle to mainly abandoning any kind of militant force. It very nearly paralleled that of his Zionist counterparts, many of whom such as Manchem Begin, Ytzak Shamir and Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister. Very nearly but not quite. It is irrefutable history that each of those Israeli “patriots” during their early careers as leaders of the violent opposition to the British Mandate not only engaged in indiscriminate retail terror against Arabs and the British but also inflicted it on non-Zionist Jews.

But unlike Arafat, those Israeli leaders never gave up terrorism. As leading government figures, each in his time personally green lighted the Israeli army’s retail reign of organized state approved terror against civilians that continues to this day. The Israeli military establishment tries to obscure this inescapable fact by officially terming the slaughter of civilians as comprehensible and therefore acceptable “standard deviations” from acceptable (!) norms. “Standard deviation” is the Israeli way of saying “collateral damage.”

Despite the incessant provocations, for about twenty years Arafat, in order to give negotiation a chance, was able to keep the lid on armed struggle despite the continuing expansion of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and the murder of Palestinian civilians by Israeli soldiers and settlers. But in 2000 he was skillfully provoked by his old adversary, Sharon, into resuming guerilla warfare. Once begun, however, he could no longer keep the lid on the terror violence on his side, which is quite different from saying that he approved and controlled it. This is the historic reality of the inevitable factionalism within revolutionary struggles.

Smith’s so-called Islamic predilection for violence is the proof that the Palestinians’ principal political pursuit as exemplified by Arafat has been and is mindless groundless terrorism. Their desire for and their legitimate efforts on behalf of ending the occupation and establishing a viable state of their own doesn’t exist in his book. The only acceptable reality is the free-lance terror attacks that jeopardize Israeli security. To hold that deceptive thought, however, one must ignore the existence of the word “Liberation” as in Palestine Liberation Organization and deny freedom and justice as being the Palestinian goal and the PLO’s raison d’etre. Which brings up the existential question, When is a thug not a thug? Answer: When he is our thug.

So the brutality of the occupation, which was already the longest of the twentieth century, far from being tangential in the region remains a central cause of its fragile often shattered stability. Its political dimensions are enormous. As Jeff Halper, the Jewish-American Israeli Anti-Zionist anthropologist founder Coordinator of the Jerusalem based Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions (ICAHD) wrote earlier this month (June 2011), “Even though there are larger and bloodier conflicts in the Middle East, until the Palestinians signal the rest of the Muslim world that they have arrived at a political settlement with Israel and the time has come to normalize relations, the conflict is not over.Nothing can happen without them.”

The biggest Middle Eastern clash, Smith notwithstanding, remains as it has been for decades not the intermural political squabbles between Arab states. The on again off again occupation of Lebanon by Syria, Iraq’s short occupation of Kuwait, or the costly theocratic/geopolitical/economic struggle between Iraq and Iran are side shows to the main event that lies west of the Jordan River. That struggle has little to do with Smith’s so-called violent Islamic nature. It has everything to do with the reality of the comprehensible alarm and anger over the ulcerous would be exclusivist debilitating occupation of the western half of the old British Mandate by a Zionist crusade that was mainly Western in origin and has been Western enabled from the time it began.

A last stereotype that serves, in Smith’s opinion, to excuse the United States from provocative culpability in Middle East violence is Arab unity or pan Arabism. It “continues to be a resilient cultural force that Arab leaders use to manage their domestic affairs, legitimize their regional ambitions and create consensus out of dissonance and catastrophe.” Cultural force is one thing. Political force is another. There is, of course, Arab culture, which tends to homogenize social, tribal and family practices, of which both Muslim and Christian Arabs are proud; but except for a comprehensible political hostility to the exclusivist Jewish State, Arabs are far from politically or economically unified.

For just one example, oil production levels are a hot button issue. OPEC decision making conclaves are frequently immediately dishonored openly. Production levels were the underlying cause of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It wanted to raise levels dramatically in order to sell enough oil to pay for its long war to contain Iranian expansion in the Persian Gulf region, a war that Arab oil producers, in particular Saudi Arabia, were eager to help finance through loans. But when the bills came due after the war ended and Iraq wanted to increase oil production in order to produce more oil with which to pay back the loans, the Saudis and others said “no.” The closest additional oil to Iraq was in Kuwait, hence the invasion. It is quite probable that, despite the need, Sadaam Hussein might never have launched it except for a kind of official ambiguous response to the notion of an attack when he put it to the U. S. ambassador. Sadaan interpreted it in a way that our government, perhaps to save face for its oracular blunder, insists never was intended.

Smith did get it right, when he described violent repressive authoritarian sectarianism as a force unique to the region for which there is no Western counterpart today. But even that has little to do with Islam’s bedrock Quranic tenets but much to do with the way the various regional leaders and both their dogmatic domestic undemocratic doctrinaire supporters and equally undemocratic opposition – sectarian or otherwise – manipulate them. The Quran, like Scripture, because of its literal ambiguities means what those in power want and say those ambiguities mean.

But even the spector of expanding constrictive authoritarian sectarian rule is not the sole reason for the regional unrest in which, according to Smith, Americans have played no consequential role. “This is an enticing exoneration,”The New York Times’ book reviewer concluded “but the United States is undeniably a player, and a certain amount of responsibility must surely go along with military hardware, troop deployments and subsidies to various regimes.”

Henry Higgins, of My Fair Lady fame complained, “Why can’t women be like men.” Similarly with Orientalists (among whom Christian fundamentalists and Zionists both secular and religious are numerous and prominent) the insistence seems to be that the Islamic Middle East ought to be more like us. Maybe that really is the problem. But I am reminded that Jesus told his followers, not their enemies, “First remove the beam in your eye.”

So I am afraid that as long as notions like Smith’s have traction in the home of manifest destiny, significant enemies to stability in the Middle East and security here at home will continue to infect U. S. policy makers on the left, middle and right. Driven by myopic jingoism and condescending Orientalism, they will create inimical policies that will cause us to perhaps lose what until now truly have been the long suffering yet forgiving liberal Islamic friends we do have in the Middle East. Instead by perpetuating our perilous course there, we will be enabling new tyrannical regimes. As a result, the collective we here at home and the collective they over there will continue to be big losers.


 

Generals accuse Obama of cutting troops to win votes

NOVANEWS
 

 

President Obama was tonight preparing to defend his decision to order thousands of US troops home from Afghanistan in defiance of the wishes of senior military commanders.

In a primetime speech to a war-weary American public, Mr Obama was to argue that the 18-month-old surge strategy had worked, putting the US military in a “position of strength” that would allow up to 10,000 of those troops to come home by the end of the year. The remainder of the 30,000 extra surge troops are expected to be withdrawn by the end of 2012, leaving 68,000 in place.

Mr Obama’s announcement was due as the number of Americans advocating an immediate withdrawal reached a record high of 56 per cent. Political pressure to bring the troops home has been mounting among Republicans and Democrats alike. They have questioned the justification of the $10 billion (£6 billion) a month cost of the war at a time of deep fiscal pain.

Senior military officials, including General Petraeus, the US commander in Afghanistan, are said to be dismayed at the scale of the cuts. They argued for a far more modest cutback of 3,000-5,000 troops, achievable by changing troop rotations.

A senior associate of General Petraeus said that the commander would never have advocated a larger-scale withdrawal and decried what he saw as Mr Obama’s capitulation to public opinion over military needs. “This will put the mission at risk; this is bad news,” he told The Times. “The mission requirement hasn’t changed, so it means fewer troops will have to carry out the same roles and this will drive up casualties.”

David Cameron, who is to follow Mr Obama’s lead with his own announcement of a partial British drawdown, is facing similar criticism over a failure to adequately heed the advice of his generals. Last night Mr Obama spoke by telephone to the Prime Minister about Afghanistan.

James Arbuthnot, the chairman of the Commons defence select committee, chided Mr Cameron for showing his frustration with military chiefs who have expressed public doubts over the withdrawal, telling them: “You do the fighting, I’ll do the talking.”

Mr Arbuthnot said: “The military advice we are getting is something we should not cast aside or dismiss as not being very important.”

Ed Miliband, the Leader of the Opposition, accused the Prime Minister of being “crass and high-handed” in his put-down of senior officers.

Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, said that the President had promised that, whatever the scale of the drawdown, it would not put remaining troops at any greater risk.

But General Petraeus’s associate said that this was the second time that Mr Obama had made a decision that effectively ignored the preferred option put before him by US commanders.

In 2009 General Stanley McChrystal, the former US commander in Afghanistan, had asked Mr Obama for 40,000 surge troops.

Mr Obama eventually authorised a deployment of 30,000 troops after an ill-tempered, months-long review process in which the President complained that the military were failing to present him with an adequate range of options.

Tensions between the White House and Pentagon have persisted, and last year Mr Obama was forced to fire General McChrystal after unflattering accounts of their disagreements appeared in Rolling Stone magazine. He replaced him with General Petraeus.

General Petraeus is expected to leave Afghanistan next month, weeks earlier than planned, leaving his successor, Lieutenant-General John Allen of the Marine Corps, to oversee the return of the first batch of surge troops.

General Petraeus is due to appear before the US Senate Intelligence Committee today for hearings to confirm him in his new post as director of the CIA, succeeding Leon Panetta who is moving to the Pentagon to become Defence Secretary after Mr Gates retires.

Boehner: House Might Refuse to Authorize Libya War

NOVANEWS

 

House to Mull Rival Proposals on Conflict

antiwar.com

House Speaker John Boehner (R – OH) has warned today that if put to a vote, the House of Representatives would likely not support a resolution authorizing the Obama Administration’s War in Libya in its current form.

Pointing to Senate efforts to authorize the war Boehner noted “we’ve said almost the same exact thing, except that they’re pushing for an authorization in Libya and I don’t think that’s where the House is.”
Rather the House is considering a pair of proposals, one that would authorize the war for a year and another that would require the administration to limit its role in the war to purely support efforts, banning the administration from launching its own attacks.
Boehner pointed to President Obama’s refusal to seek Congressional authorization, and his claims that no such authorization was needed as a big reason for the opposition. The claims have sparked a lawsuit from a number of Congressmen demanding an end to the war

Something Rotten This Way Comes

NOVANEWS

by Philip Giraldi

The issue of Israel is of critical importance to the antiwar movement, as frequenters of this website are surely aware. This is because Israel and its lobby in the United States have succeeded in so intertwining their interests with those of the United States that whenever Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sneezes four hundred congressmen say “Gesundheit!” What Israel does has consequences for every American citizen, and not only because Tel Aviv is the largest recipient of US economic and military assistance. It is indisputable that Israel and its friends in the White House and Defense Department played a major role in creating the lies and generating the momentum in the drive to war against Iraq in 2002, a conflict that continues to claim American casualties and which has left Iraq in ruins. Now the push is on to “do something” about Iran.

There have been a number of bills in Congress that stop just short of declaring war on the Mullahs and there are signs that the Israeli government might be planning a military action before the end of the summer. Does anyone doubt that the United States would immediately be drawn into such a conflict, with disastrous consequences in terms of a terrorist response and energy prices that would skyrocket? It would be a particular misfortune in that there is no actual evidence of the alleged casus belli that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, the US is not threatened by anything Tehran does or could possibly do, and John Citizen has absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose by Washington going to war.

There were two stories last week that illustrate just how bad the situation has become in the wake of the virtual capitulation by President Barack Obama during Netanyahu’s triumphal May visit to Washington, the first time in recorded history that a small nation with less than eight million citizens has subjugated a much larger country with a population of more than 310 million.

The first story is about the annual meeting of Ralph Reed’s evangelical Faith and Freedom Coalition in Washington on June 3rd and 4th, which included cameo appearances and a number of speeches by Republican presidential candidates. Support for Israel was on the menu du jour in nearly every speech and for every panel. It dominated the conference. One panel had as its subject “Israel: surrounded yet undaunted in the face of evil.” Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s oddly named Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission spoke for fifteen minutes about Israel, saying “If we want God to bless America, then we have to bless the Jews. God gave that land to his chosen people forever. That issue is settled by God almighty.” Land called Obama “…the worst president of the United States that Israel has ever had,” an assertion that probably had much deeper meaning than he intended. Danny Danon, a Knesset member for the Likud Party, warned President Obama “Take your hands from Jerusalem! Jerusalem will remain under Jewish control forever!”

Among the Republicans, only Mitt Romney failed to mention Israel, but he had already denounced Obama for “throwing Israel under the bus.” Godfather Pizza magnate Herman Cain demonstrated complete ignorance on basic Middle Eastern issues when he revealed in an interview that he did not understand the meaning of “right of return.” But he reportedly “blew the audience away” with his expressions of support—“You mess with Israel and you mess with the United States of America”—and then flew up to New York City to attend a Salute to Israel rally in Central Park. Michele Bachmann produced a standing ovation when she cited a “shocking display of betrayal of our greatest friend and ally Israel.” She added “I stand with Israel…President Obama…does not speak for us on the issue of Israel.” Tim Pawlenty enthused “We need a president of the United States who stands shoulder to shoulder with our great friend Israel.”

The second story comes from a reported visit by Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk to Israel. The coverage of the visit by Josh Rogin (isn’t he an actor?) on the Foreign Policy website, is headlined as a “new policy approach.” The story features a photo of a beaming Kirk standing next to a similarly glowing Netanyahu, demonstrating beyond all doubt that excellent dentistry is available in both countries. Kirk, who appears to have some problem in keeping his resume straight regarding his military record, traveled to the Middle East on an “intense fact finding” mission funded by you and me, unfortunately.

Senator Kirk envisions a “host of ways” to bring about a lot more Israeli-US defense cooperation, suggesting that the $3 billion plus per year they already get is inadequate to their needs. He would like to have the Israeli navy assist the United States navy in patrolling for pirates in the Indian Ocean. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The world’s mightiest navy with eleven carrier battle groups needs help from Israel’s three corvettes to patrol the Indian Ocean. Ah, but there must be a catch and I would guess that since Israel’s navy is inadequate to the task, the United States will generously pay to muscle it up, provide a few new vessels and maybe some advanced weapons systems. Probably also cover all the operating costs. It makes perfect sense as everyone knows that Israel is vulnerable to attack from the sea, particularly by car ferries manned by ferocious Turks wielding sticks delivering aid to the Gazans.

Kirk would also like to have the Defense Department consider the purchase of Israel’s Iron Dome defensive missile system to protect “our borders” in case either the Canadians or Mexicans decide to attack with Katyusha rockets. Iron Dome was largely developed with US funding but the sales would all go to Israel. Ka-ching!, just listen to that cash register opening up. Kirk would also like to have NATO buy the system to protect against somebody somewhere at some time who might be considering something bad. Ka-ching! Ka-ching!

But Senator Kirk’s brilliant insights into the state of the Middle East do not end with the Israeli navy and buying needful things. Kirk advocates ending US funding to the Palestinians as long as Hamas is involved and also terminating it anyway if the Palestinians dare to declare statehood in the UN. Or if they fail to curb “anti-Israeli incitement in Palestinian schools.” If those three reasons won’t do, there are almost certainly others. Oh yes, and Kirk wants the Turkish humanitarian relief organization IHH, which supported the flotilla bringing aid to Gaza in May, declared a terrorist organization.

Kirk concluded his visit by making a video with Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky on human rights in Iran. Sharansky recited a list of dissidents in prison in Iran. He apparently misplaced the list of dissidents in prison in Israel, which would be a whole lot longer, as would the corresponding list of those shot and killed by Israeli security forces on the West Bank and in Gaza.

I really don’t care what America’s hypocritical evangelicals do except insofar as they waste my tax money on their divinely sanctioned wars and demand my grandson for cannon fodder. The fact that they ignore Christian teachings of love and forgiveness and seem to gravitate instead towards Old Testament bloodshed because of their skewed and ridiculous interpretation of what they think it says in the bible is a symptom of their ignorance and hubris. That a US senator goes to Israel to genuflect and kiss the Netanyahu ring is not that surprising either. But it would be a mistake to dismiss Ralph Reed’s followers and the nincompoops that seem to proliferate in Congress because of their witlessness and hypocrisy.

People like Land and the gaggle of Republican wannabes are both powerful and dangerous. The evangelicals appear to control who will be the next Republican presidential nominee, and their choice might well turn out to be a Bachmann or a Palin, with terrible consequences for the United States if they are elected and are able to carry out their fundamentalist agenda. Senator Mark Kirk is, by comparison, a useful idiot. He will give Netanyahu what he wants in return for support from the Chicago political machine to get reelected. But he buys that support with a Faustian bargain, using taxpayer money and compromising the security of every American. There was a time when someone like Kirk would be laughed out of the public forum, but currently every fool appears to have his day.

Americans have to make a hard decision on what kind of country they want to have. If they want a state shaped by a holy book and guided by the venal and hypocritical they can have it and it will turn out something like the Muslim equivalents in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Thought and moral guidance police on every corner with mandatory prayer services. Or we can opt to throw all this nonsense into the garbage where it belongs. Make Ralph Reed and his cheering Israel firsters go away or emigrate to Israel if that is their wont. We can make do without them.

Bil’in VIllagers to move the wall themselves

NOVANEWS


After the Israeli military finally began to move the wall after a Supreme Court

decision and 2 years of protest, the village of Bil’in will take matters into their

own hands again tomorrow.

 

Photo by: Oren Ziv/ Activestills.org

Popular Struggle has the information on the protest here.

Bil’in Demonstrators to Take Down the Wall
After nearly six years of weekly protests, the army began dismantling the Wall
in Bil’in this week. Protesters will march to the Barrier this Friday implementing
their right to access their lands.
What: Mass demonstration in Bil’in

Where: Bil’in Village, West of Ramallah

When: Friday, June 24th at 12:30
The Bil’in Popular Committee has declared Friday the 24th to be the last day of
the old path of the Barrier on village’s lands, and the beginning of the struggle
against the new path.  A mass demonstration will march on the Barrier to dism-
antle it and access the lands sequestered behind it.
On Tuesday morning this week, army bulldozers began work to dismantle the
Wall in Bil’in. As early as 2007, after two years of weekly protests in the village
and following a petition filed by the residents, Israeli high court declared the
path of the Barrier illegal. The court ruled that the route was not devised according
to security standards, but rather for the purpose of settlement expansion. Despite
the high court’s ruling four more years of struggle had to elapse for the army to
begin dismantlement. During these years two people were killed in the course of the
weekly protests and many others injured.
Yet even according to the new path, sanctioned by the high court, 435 acres of
village land will remain on the “Israeli” side of the Barrier.
On September 4th, 2007, the high court ordered the state to come up with an altern-
ative path for the existing Barrier in Bil’in within a reasonable period of time. Despite
the ruling, many months elapsed and no new plan was offered. On the May 29th, 2008,
the residents of Bil’in filed a petition to hold the state in contempt of the court due to
this delay. In response to the petition, the state offered an alternative path. However,
the plan failed to comply with the high court’s ruling as the proffered path left a large
area designed for settlement expansion on the “Israeli” side of the Barrier. The only
difference between the two paths being that the latter offered to award 40 acres of land
back to the residents.
A second petition claiming the alternative path not in accordance with court ruling was
then filed. On August 3rd, 2008, the court declared that the first alternative path indeed
fails to adhere to the ruling. The court ordered the state to come up with another alterna-
tive path.
On September 16th, 2008, the state offered a second alternative path. This path also left
a large area designed for settlement expansion on the “Israeli” side, offering to return a
100 acres of village land to the residents. A lawyer for the residents asked that the state
be held in contempt of the court for violating a court ruling for the second time.
On December 15th, 2008, the high court ruled that the second alternative path was not
in accordance with the original court ruling.
In April 2009 the state offered a third alternative path which left most of the area destined
for settlement expansion on the “Palestinian” side of the Barrier, thereby returning to the
village 150 acres of 490 acres annexed by the original path.

Killing Democracy One File at a Time: Justice Department Loosens FBI Domestic Spy Guidelines

NOVANEWS

By Tom Burghardt

Global Research,

While the Justice Department is criminally inept, or worse, when it comes to prosecuting corporate thieves who looted, and continue to loot, trillions of dollars as capitalism’s economic crisis accelerates, they are extremely adept at waging war on dissent.
Last week, The New York Times disclosed that the FBI “is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.”
Under “constitutional scholar” Barack Obama’s regime, the Bureau will revise its “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.” The “new rules,” Charlie Savage writes, will give agents “more latitude” to investigate citizens even when there is no evidence they have exhibited “signs of criminal or terrorist activity.”
As the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) recently pointed out, “When presented with opportunities to protect constitutional rights, our federal government has consistently failed us, with Congress repeatedly rubber-stamping the executive authority to violate civil liberties long protected by the Constitution.”
While true as far it goes, it should be apparent by this late date that no branch of the federal government, certainly not Congress or the Judiciary, has any interest in limiting Executive Branch power to operate lawlessly, in secret, and without any oversight or accountability whatsoever.
Just last week, The New York Times revealed that the Bush White House used the CIA “to get” academic critic Juan Cole, whoseInformed Comment blog was highly critical of U.S. imperial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The former CIA officer and counterterrorism official who blew the whistle and exposed the existence of a Bush White House “enemies list,”, Glenn L. Carle, told the Times, “I couldn’t believe this was happening. People were accepting it, like you had to be part of the team.”
Ironically enough, the journalist who broke that story, James Risen, is himself a target of an Obama administration witchhunt against whistleblowers. Last month, Risen was issued a grand jury subpoena that would force him to reveal the sources of his 2006 book, State of War.
These latest “revisions” will expand the already formidable investigative powers granted the Bureau by former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey.
Three years ago, The Washington Post informed us that the FBI’s new “road map” permits agents “to recruit informants, employ physical surveillance and conduct interviews in which agents disguise their identities” and can pursue “each of those steps without any single fact indicating a person has ties to a terrorist organization.”
Accordingly, FBI “assessments” (the precursor to a full-blown investigation) already lowered by the previous administration will, under Obama, be lowered still further in a bid to “keep us safe”–from our constitutional rights.
The Mukasey guidelines, which created the “assessment” fishing license handed agents the power to probe people and organizations “proactively” without a shred of evidence that an individual or group engaged in unlawful activity.
In fact, rather than relying on a reasonable suspicion or allegations that a person is engaged in criminal activity, racial, religious or political profiling based on who one is or on one’s views, are the basis for secretive “assessments.”
Needless to say, the presumption of innocence, the bedrock of a republican system of governance based on the rule of law, like the right to privacy, becomes one more “quaint” notion in a National Security State. In its infinite wisdom, the Executive Branch has cobbled together an investigative regime that transforms anyone, and everyone, into a suspect; a Kafkaesque system from which there is no hope of escape.
Under Bushist rules, snoops were required to open an inquiry “before they can search for information about a person in a commercial or law enforcement database,” the Times reported. In other words, somewhere in the dank, dark bowels of the surveillance bureaucracy a paper trail exists that just might allow you to find out your rights had been trampled.
But our “transparency” regime intends to set the bar even lower. Securocrats will now be allowed to rummage through commercial databases “without making a record about their decision.”
The ACLU’s Michael German, a former FBI whistleblower, told the Times that “claiming additional authorities to investigate people only further raises the potential for abuse.”
Such abuses are already widespread. In 2009 for example, the ACLU pointed out that “Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as ‘low level terrorism’.”
As I reported in 2009, citing a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Bureau’s massive Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), is a data-mining Frankenstein that contains more “searchable records” than the Library of Congress.
EFF researchers discovered that “In addition to storing vast quantities of data, the IDW provides a content management and data mining system that is designed to permit a wide range of FBI personnel (investigative, analytical, administrative, and intelligence) to access and analyze aggregated data from over fifty previously separate datasets included in the warehouse.”
Accordingly, “the FBI intends to increase its use of the IDW for ‘link analysis’ (looking for links between suspects and other people–i.e. the Kevin Bacon game) and to start ‘pattern analysis’ (defining a ‘predictive pattern of behavior’ and searching for that pattern in the IDW’s datasets before any criminal offence is committed–i.e. pre-crime).”
Once new FBI guidelines are in place, and congressional grifters have little stomach to challenge government snoops as last month’s disgraceful “debate” over renewing three repressive provisions of the USA Patriot Act attest, “low-level” inquiries will be all but impossible to track, let alone contest.
Despite a dearth of evidence that dissident groups or religious minorities, e.g., Muslim-Americans have organized violent attacks in theheimat, the new guidelines will permit the unlimited deployment of “surveillance squads” that “surreptitiously follow targets.”
In keeping with the Bureau’s long-standing history of employing paid informants and agents provocateurs such as Brandon Darby and a host of others, to infiltrate and disrupt organizations and foment violence, rules governing “‘undisclosed participation’ in an organization by an F.B.I. agent or informant” will also be loosened.
The Times reports that the revised manual “clarifies a description of what qualifies as a “sensitive investigative matter”–investigations, at any level, that require greater oversight from supervisors because they involve public officials, members of the news media or academic scholars.”
According to the Times, the manual “clarifies the definition of who qualifies for extra protection as a legitimate member of the news media in the Internet era: prominent bloggers would count, but not people who have low-profile blogs.”
In other words, if you don’t have the deep pockets of a corporate media organization to defend you from a government attack, you’re low-hanging fruit and fair game, which of course, makes a mockery of guarantees provided by the First Amendment.
As I reported last month, with requests for “National Security Letters” and other opaque administrative tools on the rise, the Obama administration has greatly expanded already-repressive spy programs put in place by the previous government.
Will data extracted by the Bureau’s Investigative Data Warehouse or its new Data Integration and Visualization System retain a wealth of private information gleaned from commercial and government databases on politically “suspect” individuals for future reference? Without a paper trail linking a person to a specific inquiry you’d have no way of knowing.
Even should an individual file a Freedom of Information Act request demanding the government turn over information and records pertaining to suspected wrongdoing by federal agents, as Austin anarchist Scott Crow did, since the FBI will not retain a record of preliminary inquiries, FOIA will be hollowed-out and become, yet another, futile and meaningless exercise.
And with the FBI relying on secret legal memos issued by the White House Office of Legal Counsel justifying everything from unchecked access to internet and telephone records to the deployment of government-sanctioned malware on private computers during “national security” investigations, political and privacy rights are slowly being strangled.

Understand the Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order Look Inside this Bestselling Book!

NOVANEWS

Global Research,

The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order

by Michel Chossudovsky

In this expanded edition of Chossudovsky’s international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.

This book is a skillful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.

In this new enlarged edition – which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction – the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation.

“This concise, provocative book reveals the negative effects of imposed economic structural reform, privatization, deregulation and competition. It deserves to be read carefully and widely.”
– Choice, American Library Association (ALA)

“The current system, Chossudovsky argues, is one of capital creation through destruction. The author confronts head on the links between civil violence, social and environmental stress, with the modalities of market expansion.”
– Michele Stoddard, Covert Action Quarterly

Click here to learn more about The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order!


Preface to the Second Edition

Barely a few weeks after the military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, overthrowing the elected government of President Salvador Allende, the military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet ordered a hike in the price of bread from 11 to 40 escudos, a hefty overnight increase of 264%. This economic shock treatment had been designed by a group of economists called the “Chicago Boys”.

At the time of the military coup, I was teaching at the Institute of Economics of the Catholic University of Chile, which was a nest of Chicago trained economists, disciples of Milton Friedman. On that September 11, in the hours following the bombing of the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, the new military rulers imposed a 72-hour curfew. When the university reopened several days later, the “Chicago Boys” were rejoicing. Barely a week later, several of my colleagues at the Institute of Economics were appointed to key positions in the military government.

While food prices had skyrocketed, wages had been frozen to ensure “economic stability and stave off inflationary pressures.” From one day to the next, an entire country was precipitated into abysmal poverty: in less than a year the price of bread in Chile increased thirty-six times and eighty-five percent of the Chilean population had been driven below the poverty line.

These events affected me profoundly in my work as an economist. Through the tampering of prices, wages and interest rates, people’s lives had been destroyed; an entire national economy had been destabilized. I started to understand that macro-economic reform was neither “neutral” – as claimed by the academic mainstream – nor separate from the broader process of social and political transformation. In my earlier writings on the Chilean military Junta, I looked upon the so-called “free market” as a wellorganized instrument of “economic repression”.

Two years later in 1976, I returned to Latin America as a visiting professor at the National University of Cordoba in the northern industrial heartland of Argentina. My stay coincided with another military coup d’état. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and the Desaparecidos were assassinated. The military takeover in Argentina was a “carbon copy” of the CIA-led coup in Chile. Behind the massacres and human rights violations, “free market” reforms had also been prescribed – this time under the supervision of Argentina’s New York creditors.

The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) deadly economic prescriptions applied under the guise of the “structural adjustment program” had not yet been officially launched. The experience of Chile and Argentina under the “Chicago Boys” was a dress rehearsal of things to come. In due course, the economic bullets of the free market system were hitting country after country. Since the onslaught of the debt crisis of the 1980s, the same IMF economic medicine has routinely been applied in more than 150 developing countries. From my earlier work in Chile, Argentina and Peru, I started to investigate the global impacts of these reforms. Relentlessly feeding on poverty and economic dislocation, a New World Order was taking shape.

Meanwhile, most of the military regimes in Latin America had been replaced by parliamentary “democracies”, entrusted with the gruesome task of putting the national economy on the auction block under the World Bank sponsored privatization programs. In 1990, I returned to the Catholic University of Peru where I had taught after leaving Chile in the months following the 1973 military coup.

I had arrived in Lima at the height of the 1990 election campaign. The country’s economy was in crisis. The outgoing populist government of President Alan Garcia had been placed on the IMF “black list”. President Alberto Fujimori became the new president on the 28th of July 1990. And barely a few days later, “economic shock therapy” struck – this time with a vengeance. Peru had been punished for not conforming to IMF diktats: the price of fuel was hiked up by 31 times and the price of bread increased more than twelve times in a single day. The IMF – in close consultation with the US Treasury – had been operating behind the scenes.

These reforms – carried out in the name of “democracy” – were far more devastating than those applied in Chile and Argentina under the fist of military rule. In the 1980s and 1990s I traveled extensively in Africa. The fieldresearch for the first edition was, in fact, initiated in Rwanda which, despite high levels of poverty, had achieved self-sufficiency in food production. From the early 1990s, Rwanda had been destroyed as a functioning national economy; its once vibrant agricultural system was destabilized. The IMF had demanded the “opening up” of the domestic market to the dumping of US and European grain surpluses. The objective was to “encourage Rwandan farmers to be more competitive”. (See Chapter 7.)

From 1992 to 1995, I undertook field research in India, Bangladesh and Vietnam and returned to Latin America to complete my study on Brazil. In all the countries I visited, including Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco and The Philippines, I observed the same pattern of economic manipulation and political interference by the Washington-based institutions. In India, directly resulting from the IMF reforms, millions of people had been driven into starvation. In Vietnam – which constitutes among the world’s most prosperous rice producing economies – local-level famines had erupted resulting directly from the lifting of price controls and the deregulation of the grain market.

Coinciding with the end of the Cold War, at the height of the economic crisis, I traveled to several cities and rural areas in Russia. The IMFsponsored reforms had entered a new phase – extending their deadly grip to the countries of the former Eastern bloc. Starting in 1992, vast areas of the former Soviet Union, from the Baltic states to Eastern Siberia, were pushed into abysmal poverty.


Work on the first edition was completed in early 1996, with the inclusion of a detailed study on the economic disintegration of Yugoslavia. (See Chapter 17.) Devised by World Bank economists, a “bankruptcy program” had been set in motion. In 1989-90, some 1100 industrial firms were wiped out and more than 614,000 industrial workers were laid off. And that was only the beginning of a much deeper economic fracturing of the Yugoslav Federation.

Since the publication of the first edition in 1997, the World has changed dramatically; the “globalization of poverty” has extended its grip to all major regions of the World including Western Europe and North America.

A New World Order has been installed destroying national sovereignty and the rights of citizens. Under the new rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO) established in 1995, “entrenched rights” were granted to the world’s largest banks and multinational conglomerates. Public debts have spiraled, state institutions have collapsed, and the accumulation of private wealth has progressed relentlessly.

The US-led wars on Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), mark an important turning point in this evolving New World Order. As the second edition goes to print, American and British forces have invaded Iraq, destroying its public infrastructure and killing thousands of civilians. After 13 years of economic sanctions, the war on Iraq plunged an entire population into poverty.

War and globalization go hand in hand. Supported by America’s war machine, a new deadly phase of corporate-led globalization has unfolded. In the largest display of military might since the Second World War, the United States has embarked upon a military adventure, which threatens the future of humanity.

The decision to invade Iraq had nothing to do with “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction” or his alleged links to Al Qaeda. Iraq possesses 11 percent of the World’s oil reserves, i.e. more than five times those of the US. The broader Middle East-Central Asian region (extending from the tip of the Arabian peninsula to the Caspian sea basin) encompasses approximately 70% of the World’s reserves of oil and natural gas.

This war, which has been in the planning stage for several years, threatens to engulf a much broader region. A 1995 US Central Command document confirms that “the purpose of US engagement. . . is to protect US vital interest in the region – uninterrupted, secure US/Allied access to Gulf oil” .

In the wake of the invasion, Iraq’s economy has been put under the jurisidiction of the US military occupation government led by retired General Jay Gardner, a former CEO of one of America’s largest weapons producers.

In liaison with the US administration and the Paris Club of official creditors, the IMF and World Bank are slated to play a key role in Iraq`s post-war “reconstruction”. The hidden agenda is to impose the US dollar as Iraq’s proxy currency, in a currency board arrangement, similar to that imposed on Bosnia-Herzegovina under the 1995 Dayton Accord. (See Chapter 17.) In turn, Iraq’s extensive oil reserves are slated to be taken over by the Anglo-American oil giants.

Iraq’s spiralling external debt will be used as an instrument of economic plunder. Conditionalities will be set. The entire national economy will be put on the auction block. The IMF and the World Bank will be called in to provide legitimacy to the plunder of Iraq’s oil wealth.

The deployment of America’s war machine purports to enlarge America’s economic sphere of influence in an area extending from the Mediterranean to China’s Western frontier. The US has established a permanent military presence not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it has military bases in several of the former Soviet republics as well. In other words, militarization supports the conquest of new economic frontiers and the worldwide imposition of the “free market” system.

Global Depression

The onslaught of the US-led war is occurring at the height of a global economic depression, which has its historical roots in the debt crisis of the early 1980s. America’s war of conquest has a direct bearing on the economic crisis. State resources in the US have been redirected towards financing the military-industrial complex and beefing up domestic security at the expense of funding much needed social programs which have been slashed to the bone.

In the wake of September 11, 2001, through a massive propaganda campaign, the shaky legitimacy of the “global free market system” has been reinforced, opening the door to a renewed wave of deregulation and privatization, resulting in corporate take-overs of most, if not all, public services and state infrastructure (including health care, electricity, water and transportation).

Moreover, in the US, Great Britain and most countries of the European Union, the legal fabric of society has been overhauled. Based on the repeal of the Rule of Law, the foundations of an authoritarian state apparatus have emerged with little or no organized opposition from the mainstay of civil society.

The new chapters added to this second edition address some of the key issues of the 21st century : the merger boom and the concentration of corporate power, the collapse of national and local level economies, the meltdown of financial markets, the outbreak of famine and civil war and the dismantling of the Welfare State in most Western countries.

In Part 1, a new Introduction and a chapter entitled “Global Falsehoods” have been added. Also in Part 1, the impacts of “free markets” on women’s rights are examined. In Part II, on sub-Saharan Africa, the chapter on Rwanda has been expanded and updated following fieldwork conducted in 1996 and 1997. Two new chapters, respectively, on the 1999- 2000 famine in Ethiopia and on Southern Africa in the post-Apartheid era have been added. The chapter on Albania in Part 5, focuses on the role of the IMF in destroying the real economy and precipitating the breakdown of the country’s banking system.

A new Part 6 entitled “The New World Order” includes five chapters. Chapter 18 centers on the “structural adjustment program” applied in Western countries under the surveillance of the World’s largest commercial and merchant banks. The ongoing economic and financial crisis is reviewed in Chapters 19 and 20. Chapters 21 and 22 examine, respectively, the fate of South Korea and Brazil in the wake of the 1997-1998 financial meltdown, as well as the complicity of the IMF in furthering the interests of currency and stock market speculators.

 

Obama’s speech means nothing to us and our families

NOVANEWS

Veterans, active-duty troops speak out
about the endless war in Afghanistan

coffinphoto.jpg

How many more deaths between now and
the supposed withdrawal date in 2014?

The following is a statement from March Forward! in response to President Obama’s speech on the troop “withdrawal” from Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama said in his speech on June 22, “This has been a difficult decade for our country.”
But it has not been difficult for everyone in the United States. It has not been difficult for the defense contractors, with their billion-dollar contracts churning out an endless supply of missiles to be fired and armored vehicles to be blown up. It has not been difficult for the oil giants, making record profits and getting access to new, untapped corners of the most resource-rich region of the world. It has not been difficult for the politicians, most of them millionaires themselves, getting fatter with lobbying money, whose sons and daughters do not die in combat, who smile and say they “support the troops” while they limit funding for veterans to mere scraps from the table.
It has not been difficult for the Pentagon generals, who sit in plush offices never having to experience the horrors of war while sending us to experience it over and over. Meanwhile they bicker and test out new strategies, then go straight to making six-figure salaries with defense contractors the day after they retire.
No, it has not been a difficult decade for “our country.” It has been a very difficult decade for a particular group of people. It has been difficult for those in need of jobs, an education, a place to live and health care for their families; those who have had no choice but to enlist in the military and are then sent to fight other poor people thousands of miles away. It has been difficult for the workers who are laid-off; the struggling families who have their social services ripped away and the students whose tuition has been raised as they watch hundreds of billions of their dollars funneled into the quagmire in Afghanistan. And this decade has been infinitely more difficult for the people of Afghanistan, who overwhelmingly oppose the brutal occupation of their land.
But for a small group of people, things have been great. And that small group of people are going to keep things going for a least several more years, despite the fact that two thirds of people in the United States oppose the war.
What will change?
If the President expected service members and our families to be happy with the announcement that there will be only a minimal reduction now and that U.S. troops will leave Afghanistan no sooner than 2014, his words are falling on exhausted, wounded, fed-up ears.
We have been through 10 years of war. We have been through constant, repeated deployments, often with little dwell time with our families in between. We have been stop-lossed and stuck in the military. We have been sent to the bloodiest battlefields on the reckless, jumbled orders of arrogant generals and politicians. We have watched over 6,000 of our brothers and sisters come home in coffins. In Afghanistan, we have experienced an ever-increasing number of casualties year-by-year—in 2010, twice as many U.S. troops required limb amputations than either of the two previous years, and experienced a stunning 90 percent increase in life-altering wounds to genitalia.
Obama said in his address that “some” have lost limbs, “some” have been psychologically traumatized. It is not “some,” Mr. President. It is hundreds of thousands. It is record-breaking. It is an epidemic.
For 10 years, we have come home to notoriously negligent mental health care, been pumped full of drugs and sent back on more deployments. We have come home to a shocking 30 percent unemployment rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. We have come home to a new battle, this time with the Department of Veterans Affairs, having to fight for our benefits, disability compensation, medical care and housing.
For 10 years, we have seen the politicians stumble over themselves trying to explain why we must fight, why the wars must continue. We have seen them repeat the mantras of “al-Qaeda” and “9/11,” then see them admit that al-Qaeda has virtually no presence in Afghanistan, that they are ideologically opposed to the Taliban and other resistance forces, that 92 percent of young Afghan men have never even heard of the 9/11 attacks. We have heard them tell us over and over that defeating the Taliban, and driving them from any political power, is the essential, heroic task worth dying for—then we hear them tell us that behind the scenes they are begging the Taliban to agree to a truce and take seats in a unity government. In reality, they are making us fight so they can broker a power-sharing deal with the Taliban.
The token reduction in troops announced by Obama will have absolutely no impact on our lives or those of our families. The eventual reduction of a mere 10,000 troops will still leave more than double the number of U.S. service members in Afghanistan than when Obama took office. It is so insignificant a number that the frequency of our deployments will only be impacted to the smallest degree, if at all.
Our reality will stay the same. The frequent deployments will continue, leaving our families behind, straining relationships as we miss years of our children’s lives. The horrors we see overseas will increase. The treatment we get upon returning home will remain criminally inadequate.
And there is still no end in sight to this reality. The longest war in U.S. history is set to continue indefinitely. We take the political promise of a “full withdrawal” by 2014 like we take any political promise: with the knowledge that these promises mean nothing.
But even if all troops will leave by 2014, which is highly unlikely; that is in 2014. It is 2011. How many of us will die, be maimed and be traumatized between now and 2014? We do not want to wait until 2014. We do not want to wait until next month. We should never have gone in 2001. This is a war—like the war in Iraq, like the bombing of Libya—in pursuit of an American Empire. But it’s not our empire. We don’t hold stocks in defense contractors or own any oil fields. It’s a war for big business, a war for their empire—but it’s a fantasy because the people in those countries do not want to live under occupation, and they will resist. We do not want to fight endlessly in a war for empire. We want all of us home, now.
But our orders from the Pentagon are to continue to be killed, maimed and traumatized; continue to be occupiers in a foreign country against the will of the vast majority of its people; continue fighting a war opposed by the vast majority of people in the United States—all as pawns in a political game—for years and years to come.
This cannot continue, and Washington has proven it will change nothing. Enough is enough. We must take a stand.

From South Africa to Palestine

NOVANEWS

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Dear Sammi,

I am writing to you, a supporter of War on Want, to urge you to buy the new single Freedom for Palestine by Oneworld.

I have visited the occupied Palestinian territories and have witnessed the humiliation of Palestinians at Israeli military checkpoints: the inhumanity that won’t let ambulances reach the injured, farmers tend their land or children attend school.

This treatment is familiar to me and the many black South Africans who were corralled and harassed by the security forces of the apartheid government.

In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom without the help of people around the world, and musicians were central to our struggle. Through music and art we speak to a common humanity, one which transcends political and economic interests.

For this I am proud to support Freedom for Palestine by OneWorld. I urge everyone to buy the single and spread its message.

Please do so now, here or here.

Let’s send a message to governments that a critical mass of people want to see an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the oppression of its people. By acting together we can break cycles of injustice, end the occupation and build a new world based on our common humanity and justice.

Support Freedom for Palestine.

Peace. Shalom. Salaam.

Yours,

Desmond Tutu

Saudi Arabia: Relocation Services Required

NOVANEWS

 

Most expatriates who come to Saudi Arabia to work and live are generally provided housing through their employer.  Saudi is not as simple as New York or London or Hong Kong where it is easy to view rentals and having a competent local help one learn the lay of the land.  To begin with most rentals will require a minimum of six months rent in advance.  Most landlords expect to have one year’s rent paid upfront.  Unfortunately once the rent has been paid there is not a strong incentive to respond to requests for maintenance.

Many expatriates are surprised when seeking to rent in Saudi that a house or an apartment is truly a “shell” which needs to be filled.  Even the kitchen will be an empty room and the tenant is expected to acquire cupboards, cabinets and appliances.  Yes; there are many stores in Saudi Arabia which specialize in “kitchens on wheels” which are kitchen sets with counters, cabinets and cupboards that are on wheels and fitted to the specifications of the kitchen.  Not all homes or apartments in Saudi will have a furnace or heating unit.  That may not be necessary depending in what area one lives.  Yet how do you sort through finding the right place to call home?  Interacting with a landlord?  Knowing that you’ve chosen the right neighborhood for yourself?  Exactly how does one get settled in?

I think Saudi relocation services would be an excellent business opportunity for enterprising graduates.  Who knows a neighborhood or lay of the land better than a native?  I can envision many expatriates drawn to a service where they are able to easily interact with a Saudi who listens and responds to their needs and who will take them to view properties as well as showing and teaching them about the local area.  What an excellent venue for adapting to each other’s society and culture.  Such a service could be expanded from relocation services to seminars on customs, cultures and food.  Abdullah and I had talked about establishing such a service but our paths went a different direction.  Saudi relocation services could be available in all of the Kingdom’s major cities as well as the smaller towns which are also known for expatriate hires.

I have written in the past from the perspective of an expatriate about housing and settling in to the Kingdom.  I’ve focused on thesingle woman and where she can live to the couple who wants to find the special home. But a Saudi would know so much more than an expatriate.  I’d love to hear from some new graduates who would be interested in pursuing such a venture.

Kuwait: Stateless ‘Bidun’ Denied Rights

NOVANEWS

Fifty Years of Waiting, but Government Offers Only Handouts

2011_Kuwait_Bidun.jpg
During February and March 2011, hundreds of stateless Bidun took to the streets in Kuwait to demand government action on their claims for citizenship, as well as access to other rights.
For 50 years, Kuwait has dawdled in reviewing Bidun citizenship claims, while creating a straightjacket of regulations that leave them in poverty and extreme uncertainty. Kuwait has every resource it needs to solve this problem, but chooses to stall instead.
 
Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch
(Kuwait City) – Kuwait has not made good on its decades of promises to address citizenship claims for more than 106,000 stateless Bidun residents, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 63-page report, “Prisoners of the Past: Kuwaiti Bidun and the Burden of Statelessness,” describes how in Kuwait, one of the world’s richest countries, the Bidun live under the radar of normal society, vulnerable and without protection. Many live in poverty. Kuwait considers the Bidun “illegal residents.” The government has denied them essential documentation, including birth, marriage, and death certificates, as well as access to free government schools and legal employment opportunities.
“Like the rest of the Arab world, the Bidun have had enough and are demanding reforms the government should have made  years ago,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The government responded to peaceful demonstrators with promises of reform, but it needs to go further and tackle their citizenship claims.”
In February and March 2011 hundreds of Bidun gathered to protest the government’s failure to act on their citizenship applications. In response, the government has promised some new benefits, including birth, marriage, and death certificates, free health care, and improved access to jobs. If implemented, these would be positive steps, Human Rights Watch said. But it would leave the root cause of their condition – their citizenship claims – unchanged.
Umm Walid, a 43-year-old Bidun widow, said that she had no paperwork establishing her relationship to her deceased husband. “[When] a Bidun dies, there is no death certificate, [so] there is no proof that I even had a husband,” she said. “We don’t have [an] identity.” Basim A. told Human Rights Watch, “[My son] was born without a birth certificate, [and died] without a death certificate.”
 
Statelessness has existed in Kuwait since independence in 1961. After an initial registration period ended, authorities shifted Bidun citizenship applications to a series of committees that have avoided resolving the claims while maintaining sole authority to determine Bidun access to civil documentation and social services. Kuwaiti law bans the courts from ruling on citizenship claims.
Since the mid-1980s, the government has maintained that the vast majority of Bidun are “illegal residents” who have deliberately destroyed evidence of other nationality, while denying individualized reviews of their claims. Unregistered Bidun, whose citizenship applications the authorities have either closed or refused to register, are even more vulnerable than others, with restrictions on their freedom of movement and constant fear of deportation.
International law bans the arbitrary deprivation of nationality and requires countries to consider applicants’ “genuine and effective links” with a country when evaluating nationality claims, including the social, cultural, and economic ties they have established over time. The Kuwaiti government should create a timely and transparent mechanism to review Bidun citizenship claims that incorporates international human rights standards, Human Rights Watch said. The process should take into account the Bidun’s longstanding, historic ties to Kuwait, and should include an opportunity for judicial review.As “illegal residents,” the Bidun face obstacles to obtaining civil documentation, leaving them unable to get consistent social services or function as normal members of society. The Central System for Resolving Illegal Residents’ Status, the “Bidun Committee,” the latest administrative body tasked with addressing Bidun claims, must approve all official matters involving this group.
 
Human Rights Watch interviewed 70 people for the report, including 18 who identify themselves as stateless Bidun, as well as local human rights and civil society advocates, lawyers, and academics. Human Rights Watch also met with officials from the Central System to Resolve Illegal Residents’ Affairs.Bidun interviewed said that the committee has denied their applications for government documents, claiming to have evidence that they had other “true nationalities” – evidence that they have not been allowed to see or contest. They said the body has rejected applications for birth, marriage, and death certificates, leaving them with no way to prove legal relationships to family members.
 
International human rights law requires governments to provide certain civil documentation for all residents, whether legal or illegal, including a child’s right to registration upon birth, and the right to marry and found a family. The Kuwaiti government should ensure the Bidun’s right to civil documentation, including birth certificates, marriage registration, death certificates, and travel documents.
“Denying Bidun basic identification documents on the basis of secret evidence that they have other nationality is as arbitrary as it is unfair,” Whitson said. “The Kuwaiti government’s policy to make Bidun invisible doesn’t make the Bidun problem go away, but it does bring suffering and exclusion to vulnerable people.”
Bidun also face violations of their social and economic rights, including their rights to education, health, and work, Human Rights Watch said. The Kuwaiti government provides certain handouts, and on May 26 agreed to provide ration cards for food allowances through government-run cooperatives. But the government has not recognized enforceable legal rights and benefits for the Bidun, and continues to enforce discriminatory policies against them.While some Bidun carry security IDs to allow them to get services available to the Bidun, unregistered Bidun do not even have these documents and fear leaving their homes because they risk arrest and deportation. The government excludes unregistered Bidun from the handouts it provides, including some of the new reforms promised this spring. Unregistered Bidun face significantly greater obstacles to accessing education, health care, and work opportunities.
Though Kuwait has signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires governments to provide free universal and free primary education, most Bidun children cannot attend the free government schools for Kuwaiti children. Instead, with some tuition assistance, they go to inferior private schools that serve Bidun almost exclusively. Kuwaiti children receive free education through the university level.
Umm Abdullah, a 58-year-old Bidun woman, told Human Rights Watch that of her four grandchildren, two granddaughters did not go to school, and that while one grandson received tuition assistance, the other did not. Bidun who did go to school lamented a lack of higher educational opportunities and jobs, even if they did well in school.
 
“Our school was very bad,” said Fatima A., a 24-year-old Bidun woman. “And [though] I received a 96 percent, afterward, I couldn’t do anything.”As “illegal residents,” the Bidun cannot legally hold most jobs. The government has carved out a very narrow pool of positions for which they can apply. Some Bidun said they had resorted to informal and undependable work, such as selling vegetables on the street, car repair, or tailoring. Those who have opened their own businesses have had to rely on citizen friends or relatives to register licenses and property in their names, as Bidun cannot own property or obtain business licenses.
“My father served in the Kuwaiti army 27 years,” said Zahir, a 50-year-old Bidun, “[But now,] nobody in my family works.”
 
Bidun interviewed also lacked affordable or accessible health care. As indigent patients, some could not afford medical care prescribed for them, while others lacked documentation they said hospitals and clinics required to treat them. Kuwait’s government recently promised free health care to the Bidun. All Kuwaiti citizens get free health care at government clinics and hospitals.The UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of non-citizens has stressed that “all persons should by virtue of their essential humanity enjoy all human rights,” including rights to education and health care with only “exceptional distinctions,” while the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, to which Kuwait is a party, prohibits discrimination on the basis of national origin or statelessness.
 
“Given the vast amount of resources at its disposal, it’s shameful that any child in Kuwait should go without schooling, or that families should live from hand-to-mouth,” Whitson said. “By confining the Bidun to different schools, marginal or illegal jobs, and separate lives, the government is engaging in segregation, an egregious type of discrimination.”
Background
During a citizenship drive leading up to Kuwait’s independence, significant numbers of people living on the outskirts of Kuwait, particularly among nomadic Bedouin tribes, failed to complete application procedures. Some were illiterate and could not produce documents proving their claims under Kuwait’s nationality law, while others simply did not understand the importance that citizenship would later acquire.In the 1960s and 70s Kuwait gave Bidun the same access to social and public services as citizens, except for voting rights. But during the political instability of the 1980s, when the country experienced a series of terrorist attacks, policy towards the Bidun dramatically shifted, and the government removed their access to government schools, free health care, and certain government jobs. Government officials began asserting that the vast majority of the Bidun were nationals of neighboring countries who had destroyed their documents in hopes of claiming the benefits of Kuwaiti citizenship, and that they were “illegal residents.”
Following the 1991 Iraqi invasion and the subsequent liberation, Bidun found themselves facing increasing hardship and suspicion. No longer considered part of Kuwaiti society during a time when suspicion of Iraqi infiltrators ran high, many lost their jobs in the country’s army and police forces.
In November 2010 government officials promised a new initiative to resolve the situation within five years, and following Bidun protests in February and March they made further promises to grant all registered Bidun free health care, provide children with free schooling, and to increase their employment opportunities. However, none of these promises have yet become enforceable legal rights.