NOVANEWS
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Maybe this will help on that debt ceiling crisis?
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‘Intelligence’ and Islamophobia – PowerPointed and neoconned
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Silverstein says he’s been banned at Daily Kos
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Anti-boycott law scores own goal: int’l LGBT youth group takes its gen’l assembly out of Israel
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What does secular mean? ‘J Street’ official says American Jews ‘ideally’ want the whole ‘land of Israel’
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Curb your racism
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Surviving the Dahieh War: Rami Zurayk’s ‘War Diary: Lebanon 2006′
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In ‘Int’l Herald Tribune,’ MK Tibi endorses full boycott call
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Hebron settlers release the hounds on Palestinians whose land they’ve stolen
Maybe this will help on that debt ceiling crisis?
Jul 29, 2011
Philip Weiss
Congrats to Code Pink for the great light show last night…. Photo from Medea Benjamin.
‘Intelligence’ and Islamophobia – PowerPointed and neoconned
Jul 29, 2011
Paul Mutter
A barely legible 2009 FBI PowerPoint on “Islam” has come down the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) line at a very unfortunate time following the right-wing terrorist attacks in Norway. But it is very much part of that tragedy. The 62-slide PowerPoint presentation, which the FBI states that it is no longer in use, is for training interrogators to interview Muslim suspects. A few slides in, and one shudders what to think it has been replaced by, though.
A slide titled “Islam 101” presents – as fact – that Islam “transforms country’s culture into 7th century Arabian ways.”
The same slide also acknowledges (unironically, given the quality of the presentation), that Islam is “hard for Westerners to understand.” But at least Westerners think factually – the “Arabic mind is swayed more by words than ideas, and more by ideas than facts,” reads another slide. The Western mind, presumably, is analytical, unlike the “Arabic” one (the report wavers between distinguishing between Arabs and Muslims – this one of the points where it blurs them together).
Analytical information is what this report lacks most. “Muslims,” the report notes midway through, after dispensing with a great deal of basic statistics, “are fundamentally and inalienably spiritual while the West is purely materialistic” (not that this stops politicians, commentators or right-wing terrorists from depicting an mythical alliance between Islam and “the Left” (aka “liberals”) as a major threat to Western civilization).
The content of the PowerPoint is not unlike that of the Islamophobic blogosphere: the ethnic and cultural-religious smears could easily have come from a site like Atlas Shrugs, The Gates of Vienna or Jihad Watch. And it is really symptomatic of how mainstream Islamophobia has become today that such hate speech can be interchanged with statements in “intelligence” training materials. Opportunistic “Islam” experts have ingratiated themselves in the U.S. political establishment and our ostensibly objective intelligence agencies, from the FBI to the U.S. Army.
Surely, when attempting to understand a real, but specific, threat, American officials should be trained to view over a billion people as inscrutable and medieval time bombs just waiting to overrun the West. The Gates of Vienna, for instance, actively invokes this scenario – it proclaims that it’s struggle against “Islamization” is a continuation of an age-old war for civilization; Atlas Shrugs reguraly suggests that “willful stupidity” in the U.S. towards Muslims – and, by extension, multiculturalism – will result in submission to “Islamic supremacism” – not unlike the ultranationalist British National Party in the UK.
Hard to understand, perhaps, but not hard to make money, power and fame from by bashing it. “The Great Fear,” Max Blumenthal notes, geared up during the lead-in to the 2003 Iraq War. The neoconservatives in the White House and Department of Defense had their grand hope of not only settling the score with Saddam and doing good by oil (“60% of the earth’s oil reserves [are] in or near [the] Arabian Peninsula,,” notes the PowerPoint) but also bringing a Pax Americana to the Middle East. This group of like-minded men and women first came together during the 1970s to urge a more hardline stance for Israel and against communism, these neocons now railed against the “Islamofascist” bogeyman. Having their teeth in the first Gulf War and saw the second as a grand opportunity to orient U.S. foreign policy towards their ideological bent.
And what better way to achieve consensus on such a controversial project than by demonizing the enemy’s civilization? We’re not at war with Islam, then-President George W. Bush noted, but Islamophobes seemed to either miss or ignore that message. And so the anti-Muslim machine – a very diverse machine – took the security jitters and anti-Islamic sentiments resulting from 9/11 and turned them into a still-politically potent force. Republican Congressman Peter King’s hearings on “Muslim (and only Muslim) radicalization” in the U.S. are one of this year’s most notable developments, but it is not the only demonstration of the potency of Islamophobia in U.S. politics.
Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann’s foreign policy advisers include the neoconservative Frank Gaffney, who routinely rails against the “Islamofascist” threat to the U.S. and Israel (he sometimes conflates “the threat” with President Obama). Gaffney is no obscure ivory tower intellectual, though. During the Bush administration, Gaffney was an outspoken champion of the argument that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were both involved in the 9/11 attacks. That a serious presidential contender can bring such an individual onto her campaign demonstrates just how mainstream Islamophobia is today. Gaffney is part of the conservative camp that includes Daniel Pipes, founder of Campus Watch, the self-appointed watchdog of Middle Eastern affairs in U.S. academia, and David Horowitz, among others. These intellectuals’ work carried weight with Bush Administration officials such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle.
In such a climate, intellectuals, politicians, journalists, nonprofit groups and intelligence analysts – most of whom are self-taught on “Islam” – have been raking in millions of dollars from their work outlining the supposed “Islamic” threat to America. Other outlets have noted that these “experts” have even been hired by the federal government to do training and consultative work.
The Washington Monthly has outlined how “counterterrorism trainers for hire” have ingratiated themselves with state and local law enforcement across the U.S. – offering helpful advice to police on how to deal with Muslim suspects by employing “legal harassment,” a profiling tactic that assumes Muslims are guilty until proven innocent – one trainer described in theMonthly suggested that U.S. police raid convenience stores owned by Muslims (which, according to the trainer, all launder money for terrorists) under the cover of health code violations.
Even less “intelligence” is needed to be a politician with a similar opinion on the Islamic Question – though most are careful to present “the fight against Islam” in non-violent terms (“war” and “fight” are metaphors, they shouldn’t be taken literally – a clarification that, as in other debates, often only becomes clear following a literal bloodbath). “Anti-Islamization” Dutch politician Geert Wilders, for instance, affirms that “the global anti-Islamic movement” has always been a campaign to be won through “the power of the ballot box and the wisdom of the voter. Not bombs and guns.” In the U.S., the specter of “Sovietization” has been superseded (but not replaced) by the specter of “Sharia Law” replacing the Constitution. Bills have come up through multiple state legislatures to “preempt” the “Islamization of America.” Thankfully, America’s awakened bloggers and legislators won’t let that happen here (although there is still no consensus on what century the bill’s sponsors would like to take the U.S. back to).
It’s perfectly acceptable to draw broad conclusions like these in the mainstream media, too: The Washington Post ran an op-ed that immediately placed blame for the July 2011 Norway attacks on Islamists – and went on to reiterate the need to boost defense spending in light of the omnipresent “jihadist” threat. When it became apparent that Muslims were not behind the attack, the Post did not apologize for the inaccuracies – and the editorialist in question, Jennifer Rubin, simply reiterated her original argument by stating that while she was wrong on the particulars, “There is no shortage of threats. There is no shortage of evil. Democratic governments have many demands on tax dollars, but none is more important than defending the lives and security of our citizenry.” (Rubin also distinguished Breivik as a “lone-wolf” in contrast to “organized jihadists,” implying that the latter is the greater, omnipresent threat).
Not very subtle, but Islamophobia and neoconservativism rarely are.
In the blogosphere, sites like Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch and The Gates of Vienna are just some of the better-known outlets pandering Islamophobia as breaking news and informed commentary. There are thousands of similar blogs and organizations in the U.S. and the EU – and mainstream media is airing these views as part of a “balanced” commentary on “Islam.” U.S. commentators are increasingly linking up with their European counterparts (who for years have been encroaching on the margins of respectability – electorally and rhetorically – in the EU over Muslim immigration).
Speaking of imagined conspiracies (like Hezbollah laundering money through the local 7-11) and polemicists, Robert Spencer, now infamous because of Anders Breivik’s liberal citations of Jihad Watch posts in his manifesto, gets 2 nods in the “Recommended Reading” slide of the FBI presentation – 2 of his books, out of only 8 books in total, the FBI thought necessary to include here on this list are his.
Given the focus these sites give to culture in the Muslim world, it is not surprising that so much of the “jihadist” discussion in the PowerPoint is juxtaposed with (unrelated) aspects of Islamic culture. A photo of a Muslim circumcision ceremony is presented following a slide that reads “Things to use/consider for successful interviews/interrogations with individuals from the M.E.” [Middle East]. Presumably, knowing that Muslims practice circumcision is a crucial component of U.S. security. Also: that they have prayer beads.
One can only guess at how many terror plots have been foiled now that we are armed with this knowledge.
It also helps to portray entire nations – millions of people – as targets who are as much front-line combatants in “the struggle” as soldiers are. But, of course, this kind of total war-mass civilian casualty conceptualization is only a metaphor when Westerners use it.
This PowerPoint offers much insight into the sort of thinking that has made Islamophobia an acceptable aspect of Western political “discourse.” Throughout history, Americans have castigated particular groups as subhuman. Blacks = apes, Japanese = spies, Jews = swindlers, Latinos = illegals. Now, the bogeyman is “the Muslim” (and/or “the Arab”).
For instance, that the Muslim inclination to terrorism can be determined by a sliding scale. Phrenologists rejoice. There is a helpful scale of tolerance on one slide to help determine whether one’s interrogation subject is a mild-mannered “Shaffii” (rated as most tolerant) or a sinister, suicide-bombing “Salafi Jihadi” (rated as least tolerant, with a helpful snapshot of a bearded man wearing a skullcap for profiling purposes!).
The irony is that in casting hundreds of millions of people as potential oppressors and villains, the Islamophobes are aping the “Islamists” they claim to be the vanguard against. Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Anders Breivik have much in common, as the American right is arguing, though for very different reasons than they suggest – they make an operational link; I’m making a philosophical one.
Actual advocates of Islamist terrorism and the Islamophobic commentators that Breivik latched on to too have a lot in common. Some commentators have distinguished Breivik’s actions from Al Qaeda’s because of their “political” character, but this is a nonissue. All terrorist actions – and the ideologies that motivate them – are political actions. The tools of bigotry, incitement to violence and fear mongering are nonsectarian – they serve a calculated purpose, which is to mobilize people to gain legitimacy. Such support legitimizes heinous actions – and Islamophobic speech is helping legitimize any and all measures against “Quislings” who don’t see that “Islam” is “the enemy” (just as anti-Semitic speech after 1917 has often lumped together Jews and Communists).
How is this done? The PowerPoint shows the way. On its sole “Recommended Reading” slide, the Quran is also included, as is Islamist godfather Sayyid Qutb’s seminal anti-Western screed, Milestones – which is basically like saying an FBI agent could get a good understanding of Christianity just from reading the Bible and former KKK leader David Duke’s Jewish Supremacism (or that Judaism can be understood by a reading of the Torah and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion).
The above is the general formula one sees by the detractors of any ideology: pick a main text, and then take an extreme “derivative” of it and paint to that extremism as the norm. It’s very effective – for one thing, it’s not mentally taxing – and it makes someone who is appreciably (or not appreciably) different easier to hate. Islamophobia plays on conformation biases and self-pity – as Antiwar Radio’s Justin Raimondo suggests, just go look at the Book of “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” from the neoconservative bible Project for a New American Century, for a relevant example – one especially relevant because of the imagining of the West against the rest (but specifically the “Muslim” rest). Blending together a visibly outsider (Muslims) with a populist fervor (anti-elitism) into a political package is a surefire way to win at the polls – or at least make a statement people won’t soon forget.
One can only hope that the FBI is getting better intelligence these days from its PowerPoints. It certainly isn’t getting it from most media outlets.
But hope, and facts, are sadly overrated in the face of fear. Which is exactly what extremists – no matter what creed they subscribe to – want.
Silverstein says he’s been banned at Daily Kos
Jul 29, 2011
Philip Weiss
Richard Silverstein believes he’s been banned from posting at Daily Kos because of his non-Zionist politics. And it happened lately. Girding up its loins for the 2012 cycle?
Anti-boycott law scores own goal: int’l LGBT youth group takes its gen’l assembly out of Israel
Jul 29, 2011
Eleanor Kilroy
The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Youth and Student Organization (IGLYO) have released a joint Statement with Israel Gay Youth (IGY) on the former’s decision to withdraw this year’s General Assembly (GA) from Israel.
In June, Palestinian Queer organizations had called on IGLYO Member Organizations (MO) to vote “NO to IGLYO in Israel”. In spite of the fact that the majority of MO voted ‘Yes’, it appears that the latest in a number of anti-democratic laws passed by the Israeli Knesset proved too much even for IGLYO, which had previously blamed Palestinian organisations for discrediting them with their “IGLYO out of Israel” campaign.
IGLYO had hoped to somehow offset its violation of the Palestinian boycott (BDS) call by “joining the annual Human Rights Parade in Tel Aviv, held by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), a close friend and partner of IGY and other LGBTQ organizations in Israel.” IGY receives Israeli government money and works with the Israeli Defense Forces.
In their intentionally vague statement, the Board of IGLYO explain that “recent legal changes in Israel raised some concerns”.
There is a whole raft of discriminatory bills and laws they could pick from, but the following sentence makes it clear they are referring to the most high-profile piece of legislation of 2011: “In robust discussions between IGLYO and IGY following the passage of the new law and following the decision of the Board of IGLYO to open a new round of consultation with member organisations. IGY subsequently decided on July 24th to withdraw its proposal to host the 2011 General Assembly.” [emphasis my own]
As explained in the JNews article, Israel’s anti-boycott law – basic information,
Israeli human rights organisations see the law as a double attack:
1. On democratic values and the rule of law – because it restricts freedom of expression and association and threatens Human Rights Defenders. Boycotts, even if unpopular as a tactic, are a non-violent and legitimate form of public protest.
2. On respect for international law and the chances for peace – because for the first time it provides official legal protection for the illegal settlement project in the West Bank, and conflates the status of the state of Israel with that of the settlements.
It is not only local and international HR organisations that have challenged the bill – Israel loyalists and apologists, even in the U.S., have also reacted with disgust, principally alarmed that Israel’s alleged liberal democracy was being undermined, and this would give succour to is ‘delegitimizers’.
In their statement, Victory: IGLYO moves out of Israel! PQBDS remind us that “These laws, however, are but a part of a 63-year old policy of systematic discrimination against the Palestinian people. It isn’t just recent laws that should raise ‘concerns,’ but all the patently racist laws that have been passed by the Israeli Knesset throughout the last 63 years aiming to maintain a system of domination of one racial group over another.”
This was a hard-won victory, and all the sweeter for it. Congratulations to Palestinian Queers for BDS (PQBDS), and others who advocated for the GA to be moved out of Israel!
What does secular mean? ‘J Street’ official says American Jews ‘ideally’ want the whole ‘land of Israel’
Jul 29, 2011
Philip Weiss
Last Sunday night I went to hear a J Street director speak in Cape Cod, in a community with many Jews, and I kept looking around the room for ones I knew from my childhood summers. Only one—and afterward I had a fight with my mother about the issue. Which is really all I’ve asked for, a battle inside the Jewish family over Zionism. I will get to the fight with my mama before long but meantime it is important to relate what Steven Krubiner, the young well-spoken J Street man had to say. For it speaks to the backwardness of the American Jewish community on the Israel/Palestine issue and underlines a theme here, we Jews fell in love with Zionism some time ago and it will take a long time to break up the romance, and it is very hard to make any progress if the conversation is only inside the Jewish community. No, we Jews must open our ears to the likes of Ali Abunimah and John Mearsheimer and Andrew Sullivan.
Krubiner’s message was the urgency of the U.S. pushing Israel to come to the two-state solution. The only way Obama will do so is if he feels political able, and the only way he will feel that political comfort is if the Jewish community doesn’t abandon Congress and the president over the issue. So Krubiner’s talk was directed at Jews: The hour is getting late, this is an existential crisis for the Jewish state, and you must allow Obama to pressure Israel or Israel is lost.
To make headway with his presumed Jewish audience, Krubiner began in a place of love and fear. He told us that he had been taught to love Israel as part of his Jewish identity – like all other Jews, he said and reader, I did not projectile vomit—and had not even realized there was a conflict over there till his 7th grade social studies teacher was killed in a bombing in Israel, evidently in the early 90s, and this had jarred him. Then Krubiner had helped lead a tour of Jewish communities in Europe and realized there were no thriving Jewish communities, they had been wiped out, an experience that convinced him that Israel was necessary for Jews. After college he had defied his parents to move to Israel. Again, not my storyline, nor the storyline of most American Jews. Zionism calls on a conservative impulse in the Jewish soul.
Krubiner is a liberal, surely thinks of himself as a liberal, but his messaging was very conservative. As I noted earlier here, he never talked about the occupation and didn’t mention settlements until the Q-and-A. Settlements isn’t J Street’s agenda. There was a lot of unpleasant demographic talk. If we make a 6 percent land swap, the state of Israel will go to 86 percent Jewish (yes, and what about the Palestinians dealt out of Israel into a Palestinian state, on ethnic transfer terms, will they dig that?). Or: If you put a GPS device on everyone in Jerusalem and made the Palestinian dots green and the Israeli ones blue, you would find that it’s very “clean,” Jews move around in West Jerusalem and Palestinians stay in East Jerusalem.
Mr. Clean! Not for me!
Krubiner said, “Ideally, especially for American and Israeli Jews they would want… all of the land… of Israel,” from the river to the sea. But they can’t have that without either sacrificing democracy or giving up the idea of a Jewish state. And therefore because J Street is “unconditionally” for a Jewish state in Israel, we must give up the land so that the inevitable Palestinian majority will have a place to go.
The revelation in these statements is that Krubiner is doing outreach to a very conservative community. You can talk all you like about secular Jews, but American Jews believe in a way that can only be called religious (because most have never seen the West Bank) in their right to the “Land of Israel.” And so when asked about settlements, Krubiner was somewhat apologetic about J Street’s backbone moment of February, when it criticized Obama for voting against the U.N. Security Council’s resolution opposing Israeli settlements. Yes, our position didn’t play very well in the Jewish community, Krubiner said. I.e., this community is behind the times, and it is driving policy.
Now as I have pointed out earlier, Krubiner is a smart guy who gets the story. He knows that the occupation is destroying Palestinian souls, as he stated in the one-on-one by the lectern after the speech. And when a questioner asked about democracy without regard to race in Israel and Palestine, Krubiner acknowledged that democracy was a virtuous thing, but he then said that it would take a “sad rollercoaster of violence” to get us to that place. A legitimate point of view of course. Though not in itself a justification for slavery. Remember: an American rollercoaster of violence, the Civil War, is justified historically on that basis, it was worth it to end slavery.
But generally speaking, Krubiner was addressing Jewish fears. He said that the longer we wait on the two state solution, the more frustrated Palestinians will come round to the view that we can just wait the Jews out, we will be the majority in this land in a few years, and “we’ll have the whole state to ourselves.”
I don’t know about that. I am not opposed to partition, but I don’t think that Palestinians want the whole place to themselves. The one-staters in our community want a democracy for the people who were born in that place–and for the people whose grandparents were born there. By playing the fear card, I think Krubiner is trying to get Jews off their butts and energize them politically.
Why doesn’t J Street take its teachings to a non-Jewish audience and try and energize them? The reasons are several. A, the Jewish community is where the Democratic money is and J Street is playing a Washington insider game, B, If you are a Zionist, well, you don’t fully trust the goyim with your fate– so how can you work with them, it goes against the Zionist understanding… C, And how could you trust American non-Jewish liberals anyway? The non-Jewish audience as soon as they become informed will question the right of Jews to have a Jewish state in a land that is not historically ours and at a time when Jews are way safer in the west and there are Jim Crow conditions across the West Bank and a ghetto in Gaza.
On the other hand, the problem for J Street in working inside the Jewish community is, their views are to the right of Atilla the hun. You can’t even talk about settlements. Krubiner made a point of bashing the neocons, saying they had driven policy in this area, so evidently neoconservative has high negatives even for Jews. But it’s not like liberal Jews are all that much better.
I want to conclude on the secular point. We grew up thinking that we were secular Jews. That’s the big category of Jewish cultural life: east coast secular Jews. But as Krubiner proves, there is a large percentage of secular Jews who believe in a religious idea: our right to the West Bank. Ed Koch believes it, it’s why he’s savaging Obama. David Mamet believes it, he doesn’t want to give an inch. We have the right to the Land of Israel. An idea we read in a book with leather covers and God inside, for which we have no evidence. A year or so back I heard that peace processor Aaron David Miller was speaking at a synagogue in Cleveland and said we have to give up the land and the rabbi said, But God gave us that land. Joke was on Miller.
I am saying that intolerant religious attitudes on Israel/Palestine are deeply embedded in the Jewish community. So what progressive would want to move policy forward by working only in that community? It would be like trying to wage the battle for abortion back in the 80s by organizing in the Catholic church. Or waging the battle for women’s lib by organizing in the Muslim community, which tends to be very traditional. All these communities can be moved on these religious questions. But it requires an outside force.
Curb your racism
Jul 29, 2011
Eleanor Kilroy
I’ve watched every episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm I could get hold of, and the clip from this Season 8 episode has left me grim-faced and angry. Larry David and Jeff enthusiastically check-out a (fictional) L.A. Palestinian restaurant, ‘Al-Abbas’, famed for its chicken, and whilst praising the cuisine they set about insulting the people. Scanning a poster with the words,Freedom for Palestine, Jeff concludes “yeah, they do not like the Jews”, and as the men perv over a glamorous woman assumed to be Palestinian, Jeff remarks that “if by some chance she’s going to get over her anti-Semitism” she won’t sleep with Larry anyway. Larry’s retort is that desiring someone “who doesn’t even acknowledge your right to exist, wants your destruction” is a turn-on.
Hilarious. Offensive. Laughable.
Larry David’s right to exist in his homeland, America, seems ‘pretty, pretty’ secure. Slandering all Palestinians as anti-Semitic on an irreverent and popular TV show like this is a new low, and is an example of cultural and ethnic arrogance; it is no joke to imply that the Palestinian people’s ongoing struggle for justice poses an existential threat to privileged, Jewish men. Antony Loewenstein’s comment on the clip: “Is it possible for even liberal Jews on mainstream American TV to not frame Arabs and Palestinians as all anti-Semites? Apparently not”. Meanwhile, Haaretz is grinning like a fool at Larry’s joke that this is best place for Jews to cheat on their wives – since they would never be seen. If you side with the oppressor, you won’t be seen dead in the company of the oppressed.
Surviving the Dahieh War: Rami Zurayk’s ‘War Diary: Lebanon 2006′
Jul 29, 2011
Helena Cobban
Thirty months before there was Cast Lead, there was the Dahieh War, a sustained assault against Lebanon during which the Israeli military flattened an entire neighborhood of tightly packed high-rises in southern Beirut called simply “the Dahieh” (the suburb.) The vast majority of the 300,000 people who lived until then in the Dahieh had fled before the flattening began, finding shelter in other parts of Lebanon or in neighboring Syria. The inhabitants of Qana, in South Lebanon’s mountainous Jabal ‘Amel region, were not so “lucky”. On July 30, 2006, the Israeli military bombed a house in Qana in which scores of civilians had sought refuge: Some 60 of them were killed, including at least 19 children.
We are now approaching the fifth anniversary of that massacre in Qana. (Tragically, the village had suffered an eerily similar tragedy during a precursor Israeli assault, ten years earlier.)
In 2006, the Israeli military continued its mega-lethal campaign against Lebanon for 33 days, July 12 through August 14. They killed 1,200 Lebanese citizens, the vast majority of them civilians. They also destroyed several extensive residential neighborhoods, including the Dahieh, along with bridges, power plants, factories, and numerous other civilian facilities throughout the whole country. (43 Israeli civilians and 121 Israeli military were also killed in the war.) But as with the assault against Gaza 30 months later, even that level of destruction failed to achieve the Israeli government’s goals of bending the targeted population to Israel’s political will.
The Dahieh War was a turning point for activists from throughout the region, demonstrating that even an institution that enjoys chrystal-clear military supremacy can be resisted and showing that when Islamist and secular social activists combine forces they can withstand even the fiercest onslaught.
But what was it like to live in Lebanon and South Lebanon under such a fierce Israeli assault? My company, Just World Books, is proud to be publishing a unique account of those days written by the Lebanese social activist Rami Zurayk. Zurayk’s short work War Diary: Lebanon 2006 will be available as an ebook and a paperback within the coming days– certainly long before the fifth anniversary of the ceasefire. Click on the ‘Buy’ button button there to place advance orders for this moving and very important 60-page work.
Here, exclusively for Mondoweiss, are two excerpts from War Diary: those covering July 30 and July 31, 2006:
July 30, 2006
I waited till the end of this day to write in my journal. I usually purposely delay the daily task of fishing back the memories of my day, at least the most marking of them, from the troubled swamp that is my short-term memory, and then polish them, observe them before laying them on the computer screen. Today I am just afraid of what I have to write.
Last night the Israeli air force destroyed a shelter where more than sixty women, children, and handicapped people had sought refuge in the village of Qana in South Lebanon. They all died, buried under the rubble. I saw on TV their families, their relatives and their friends, those who remained and who looked deader than the deceased, pull them from under the chunks of broken walls and arrange them next to each other, in an infinite line of dusty but intact bodies. If it wasn’t for the way they were being carried, held by their limbs as if they were sheep, one could have thought they were sleeping. From time to time, a press photographer or a journalist extended a helpful hand. From time to time, a man would drop his burden, so light in his arms but so heavy in his soul, and collapse in tears. The women were wailing, the men were shouting their anger, and all, all, even the foreign journalists were expressing loudly their indignation of a massacre they knew would remain unpunished. The Chosen People do not pay debts. And they never give IOUs.
In Tel Aviv, Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State, expressed her sadness, but she went on, these are things that happen in wars.
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, blamed Hizbullah. To convince us, he constructed a very simple argument: If there was no Hizbullah, Israel wouldn’t have needed to bomb Lebanon, and all these innocent deaths could have been avoided. The whole world listened to him. Many people believed him, especially in the West. The black sheep like us knew he was lying, but they were scared of saying anything, so they just moved their heads up and down and sideways so that the world could read in it both negation and acquiescence, and they went baaa baaa.
The families of the victims promised to keep fighting Israel till their last breath.
July 31, 2006
I woke up very early this morning, as I do everyday. I made coffee and switched the TV on. The morning news was full of war and death. There were mostly images of children lying next to each other as if they were peacefully sleeping, eyes wide open. We could tell they were dead because their parents, hysterical with pain, were moving them around to show them to the press photographers without the care usually reserved to the living.
A voice over was informing us that the UN Security Council, which had convened a special session last night, had expressed its profound sadness for the death of the 60 women and children of Qana, buried in their shelter by an Israeli mega bomb. The Security Council had not found it necessary to con- demn this attack or to impose an immediate ceasefire, but there were talks of a 24-hours truce to bury the dead.
The job of the palace eunuchs has always been to counsel the monarch and to take care of his dirty work, without ever antagonizing him.
This is when I decided to go to Sinay, my village in the South. I’d had enough of my daily routine and of my self-inflicted isolation. I had to see with own eyes my country and the state in which the enemies put it. I wanted to surprise Suhayla and my other cousins and tell them my love. I had at least ten other perfectly valid reasons when I only needed one: I needed air, emotions, danger. In my house in Beirut I was starting to get moldy.
I took the road on my brother Tarek’s bike, a 250cc Kawasaki Ninja, stylish in spite of its small engine. I had barely joined the airport road when a speeding truck flashed its lights and overtook me. It was filled with large badly sealed sacks from which emanated the vilest stench, a smell of carrion macerated in rotten fruits. The vehicle was leaving behind it a trail of solid matter of various sizes that collided with my face, my chest, my helmet, and filled my lungs. When a flattened metal can skimmed my helmet, I understood that this was the solid waste hearse of Beirut delivering its load to the burial grounds of Na`meh.
I exited the highway and waited for a few minutes. I knew this trip would be dangerous, but if I had to die, I would rather it be at the hands of the Israelis.
There were very few people on the Khaldeh road, and traffic thinned further towards Na`meh, which stank of badly buried waste. I was riding fast, easily passing all the cars. It was more interesting to ride than I had thought, and I quickly rediscovered my reflexes. A good thing too, because right after the bend at the entrance to Na`meh, the road was blocked with a mountain of metal scrap and cement blocks. This is all that was left of the bridge that once crossed over the highway. A temporary diversion towards a side road had been opened. I took it and found myself in the center of the village. It was swarming with Lebanese army troops. The shop fronts that had been blown out by the explosions were open, and the activity was surprising. I stayed on the small road till Damour where all the cars took the mountain road. I asked the Lebanese army checkpoint if there was another way. The soldiers told me to rejoin the highway, as I would be able to pass with the bike.
I rode alone for a while on the deserted road. Soon, I saw in the distance a mound of debris similar to the one I had encountered in Na`meh. There were many cars parked around it, and a man seemed to be doing some work in the distance. I went towards him.
The crater must have been 30 meters in diameter. It was partly filled with its own rubble, but I could also see a number of destroyed cars. As to the ones I thought were parked, they were all burned and torn. The man was busy filing one of the sides of the gaping hole with stones and sand, in order to make a passage wide enough for cars to wade through on this river of wreckage. I was able to pass easily and stopped to ask him if the road to Saida was clear.
At this moment, a minivan bursting with women and children arrived from the south. To pass the improvised bridge, they had to step out of the bus and walk to the other side. They were coming from Nabatiyeh where they had spent the last 3 days in a dark and stinky shelter where they had to defecate and urinate on the floor, right in front of each others, like beasts in a stable. They had tried their luck at dawn, and had safely reached Saida where they had waited several hours before finding a driver who had accepted to take them to Beirut in exchange for their last savings. The women stood stoically with their long veils twirling in the breeze. They were looking incredulously at the horizon and the sea, without seeming to understand where they were. They breathed deeply, to fill their lungs with the smell of seaweed, thyme and the perfumes of the land as if to eliminate the dirty air of the shelter. The children were catatonic, their heads filled with sleep and with images of noisy death. The families had no idea where to go after reaching Beirut.
I took the old coastal road, as I was told. There were columns of smoke in the distance. I knew it was the Jiyyeh power plant, where the fuel tanks had been burning for over15 days. I reached Sa`adiyat, where my uncle Ziad had taught me how to gather sea urchins way before the wars started. There wasn’t a single car in sight, and I was in Jiyyeh very quickly. This is where the ‘hottest’ beaches of Lebanon are located. They have evocative names : Janna, Pangea, Jonas, Bamboo Bay. Luxurious places where the customers are care- fully filtered at the entrance. I remembered that I had promised myself never to set foot there again. Five or six years ago, my family and that of my friend Tuha had decided to spend the day at the beach. We went to the place called Jonas. The fat man at the gate wanted to take our names in order to book a beach umbrella and I answered him in Arabic. I gave my name as well as Tuha’s, which in reality is Abdul-Fattah Amhaz: you can’t get more Shi`a than that. The man looked at me as if he was regretting to have told us that there were vacancies. He then said: “you know this is a classy beach, you can’t grill meat or prepare a narguileh.” To this day, I feel pain in the stomach and in the nape of my neck when I think about the incident. I know I should have broken his teeth and gone home instead of following my wife’s advice and avoid spoiling the day. But that was a long time ago when I was young and stupid and without rancor.
The stench of burning fuel was infernal, and the carcinogenic cloud had spread over more than a kilometer. I crossed it literally blindly. When I exited this Gahanna, the sea in Rmeileh was turquoise, and the waves were languor- ously dying on the black sticky sand.
The great bridge at the entrance to Saida had disappeared. All that remained were two powerless stumps trying in vain to grasp each other. I took the small road towards the temple of Eshmun, the Phoenician War God. The smell of orange blossoms impregnated the humid and motionless air. Suddenly there was nothing other than this palpable smell that seemed to emanate from the pores of the earth, from the wood of the trees and from the leafy shadows. It intoxicated me and I dissolved myself in it, thinking about death.
At the Saida [Sidon] exit, there were Lebanese army soldiers, slouching at the tables in front of a mana’ish bakery. I made the mistake of asking them if the highway was open. They immediately became suspicious and asked me for my identity papers. I obeyed while remarking sarcastically about the absurdity of their request and about the imbecility of an Israeli spy who would stop to ask directions from the army. They told me to take the old road and to watch out for the Israeli helicopters that were hunting Resistance bikers riding on the southern roads.
The traffic on the road to Sour [Tyre] was moving pretty well and could have almost been ‘normal’, if it weren’t for the absence of trucks, which were also being specifically hunted by the enemy air force. The passing cars were car- rying whole families with mattresses and blankets on the roof. They all had white flags hanging from the windows or tied to the radio antennas.
I reached Ghazieh, which had been bombed several times. In front of the restaurants-butcheries aligned on the main road, men were lighting up large barbecues. The smell of the grilled meat stopped me for a minute and took me back a few months, to a lunch stop we made, a friend and I, on our way back from Sinay. I didn’t stay long. There is nothing worse than the stench of cold barbecue, the sickening stench of which sticks to the hair and to the clothes, and which can only be eliminated with a complete scrubbing.
A few kilometers later, I left the coastal road and rode towards the ochre hills of the Jabal `Amel in its summer attire.
The narrow and sinuous road that links my village to the coast passes by Bissariyeh, Ghassaniyeh, Kawtarieh, then through the isolated valley of Khartoum. There wasn’t any traffic; I had fun carving the bends. The bike was well balanced, and its handling excellent. I would have liked it to have more power, but it was good enough, and it almost made me forget the danger of driving on this road, where the ‘Apache’ helicopters could appear at any time. Lost in my thoughts, I realized the absurdity of being shot by a war machine to which the Americans had given the name of one of the tribes they had exterminated. When it comes to money, the Americans are capable of doing anything, even of recycling the glory of their victims. Will the next generation of U.S. planes be called ‘Hizbullah’?
A few minutes later, I passed the large flamboyant bougainvillea hedge and took the small road to Sinay. Suddenly I was in my cousin’s old house. We kissed without letting anyone see us, because it is not done in the vil- lage, then we cried together for her daughter who had died two months before. We drank the very dark and very sweet tea we make in my region. Sitting on the couch, I let peace penetrate me while my cousins talked about the war.
Please consider buying this wonderful, very human document. The ebook is $4.00 and the papwrback is $7.00. Tell your friends about it, too! Rami Zurayk is also the author of our new bookFood, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring, which explains a lot about how the aid and trade policies imposed on Lebanon and other Arab countries over the past 25 years wrecked rural livelihoods and did so much to help prepare fertile ground for the democrats of the Arab Spring.
If you want to find out more about Zurayk and his work, watch this great 6-minute video of him discussing his work and his activism.
In ‘Int’l Herald Tribune,’ MK Tibi endorses full boycott call
Jul 29, 2011
Omar Barghouti
A very significant — not to mention daring — statement by MK Ahmad Tibi, Palestinian member and deputy speaker of the Israeli Parliament, explicitly lays out the three key injustices that Israel has perpetrated against the Palestinian people for decades (precisely concurring with those mentioned in the BDS Call as the motives for BDS). He also calls for a full boycott against companies involved in any of these three injustices. He writes:
“Because I believe in ending the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, equal rights for Palestinians and Jews, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees forced from their homes and lands in 1948, I support boycotting — and calling on others to boycott — all Israeli companies that help perpetuate these injustices.”
He left out the need to boycott, as well, all institutions that are implicated in these injustices, but that can be implied.
Despite some misguided language on Israeli “democracy” (perhaps the price for publication in the IHT) being hurt by this draconian anti-BDS law (and that is what this law really is, make no mistake), Tibi’s discourse here surpasses that of ANY Palestinian official.
The Israeli Parliament’s antiboycott legislation is an unprecedented effort to undercut nonviolent resistance to Israeli oppression. Many people believe that making nonviolence more difficult will make violence inevitable. I do not. Approving such irresponsible and reactionary legislation highlights Israel’s long decades of injustice to Palestinians and hands us something of a political victory. Through this legislation, Israel has drawn further attention to its violent occupation of Palestinian territory and routine violations of international law.
Colonizing settlers and their elected representatives now rule Israel’s political landscape, and few dare to stand against them. This reticence in the face of repeated abuses by settlers reflects poorly on Israeli society and the U.S. government.
One of Israel’s leading newspapers, Haaretz, noted in an editorial that the antiboycott legislation “is a politically opportunistic and antidemocratic act, the latest in a series of outrageously discriminatory and exclusionary laws enacted over the past year, and it accelerates the process of transforming Israel’s legal code into a disturbingly dictatorial document. It casts the threatening shadow of criminal offense over every boycott, petition or even newspaper op-ed. Very soon, all political debate will be silenced.”