NOVANEWS
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Romney promises to abdicate American foreign policy towards Israel . . . to Israel
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Tahrir tells Oakland– ‘Don’t afraid, go ahead’
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Oktoberfest in Palestine
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‘NYT”s Gordon (who gave us Saddam’s ‘mushroom cloud’) relies on Israeli expert to interpret Saddam
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Racism toward Arabs is what unifies the Zionist right, says JJ Goldberg, liberal Zionist
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Palestine’s UNESCO bid to come up Monday (amid Simon Wiesenthal Center hypocrisy)
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4-year-old Palestinian girl is rendered quadriplegic by Israeli military training in occupied West Bank
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Palestine in Oakland– Scott Olsen and Tristan Anderson
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Arab Spring at 9 months — Helena Cobban
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‘A historic forum:’ Sylvia Schwarz tells Minneapolis gathering that privileging Jews is racism
Romney promises to abdicate American foreign policy towards Israel . . . to Israel
Oct 29, 2011
annie
Can it even get worse than this in the GOP Primary? Think Progress reports Romney stated he would abdicate American foreign policy towards Israel . . . to Israel:
Now it seems that a President Romney will allow the Israeli government to decide American policy toward that country. The free daily newspaper Israel Hayom — a media outlet closely associated with right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — asked Romney if, as president, he would ever consider moving the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In his answer, Romney made some astonishing claims. First, that his policy toward Israel will be guided by Israeli leaders; second, on the Jerusalem issue, he’d do whatever Israel tells him to do; and third, he does not think the United States should take a leadership role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
ROMNEY: The actions that I will take will be actions recommended and supported by Israeli leaders. I don’t seek to take actions independent of what our allies think is best, and if Israel’s leaders thought that a move of that nature would be helpful to their efforts, then that’s something I’ll be inclined to do. But again, that’s a decision which I would look to the Israeli leadership to help guide. I don’t think America should play the role of the leader of the peace process, instead we should stand by our ally. Again, my inclination is to follow the guidance of our ally Israel, as to where our facilities and embassies would exist.
Yowza. TP flushes it out in their must read post but there’s even more frightening quotes inthe interview at Israel Hayom. Asked how he would change Obama’s policy if he were in the White House:
By being silent as protesters took to the streets in Iran, by not establishing crippling sanctions against Iran for their nuclear program, and by not mouthing a credible military threat to their ongoing nuclear program. The right course is for the president to declare that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable to America, and to punctuate that commitment. I have called for us to deploy two aircraft carrier task forces, one to the gulf, one to the Mediterranean to communicate our resolve in that regard.
Sounds like war drums for Iran.
Tahrir tells Oakland– ‘Don’t afraid, go ahead’
Oct 28, 2011
Philip Weiss
Amazing pictures by Mohammed Maree (thanks to Raw Story) demonstrating the Melvillean principle: “genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round”.
Oktoberfest in Palestine
Oct 28, 2011
Philip Weiss
October’s almost over, and it’s the weekend, to boot– I better get this picture up! This is Florian Bieringer, 21, at the Taybeh Oktoberfest on a hilltop in Palestine at the beginning of the month. He’s lifting up a Taybeh beer. The Oktoberfest was mobbed by internationals. Beiringer said that the Taybeh Oktoberfest has more integrity than any Oktoberfest he’s been to outside his native Bavaria.
Update: Octoberfest changed to Oktoberfest, at antidote’s guidance.
‘NYT”s Gordon (who gave us Saddam’s ‘mushroom cloud’) relies on Israeli expert to interpret Saddam
Oct 28, 2011
Philip Weiss
Call me conspiratorial, but here’s a story about the Israeli presence in our discourse that makes me want to take a bath. Wednesday’s New York Times ran a story about a collection of Saddam Hussein’s confidential documents that show him to have a conspiratorial turn of mind regarding Israel’s machinations in the Middle East.
But deep in that very story, the reporter, Michael Gordon, says that he relied on an Israeli expert who has access to the archive.
And–surprise—the article is highly favorable to Israel. It paints Saddam Hussein as an anti-semite who routinely misread other leaders and mistakenly saw an American-Israeli conspiracy in several actions of western governments in the 1980s and 90s, and particularly during the Iran-Iraq war.
I know: those Arab conspiracy theorists! But why is the New York Times turning to an Israeli expert? And doing so with so little transparency.
Near the top, the article says that the “voluminous” archive, seized by the Americans when they invaded Iraq in 2003, landed at the National Defense University, that some “outside researchers” examined a “small portion” of the documents, and that 20 documents were made public Tuesday in conjunction with a conference of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
It is not till the tenth paragraph that reporter Michael Gordon states his reliance on an Israeli expert to interpret the documents. Gordon writes that Saddam grievously miscalculated Iranian intentions in 1980, “according to Amatzia Baram, an Israeli expert on Iraq who has studied the documents.” (The article later identifies Hal Brands, an assistant professor at Duke, as another expert who has seen them.)
Here are those 20 documents that the Wilson Center released, on line. I’m guessing it’s a few hundred pages. A lot for a busy reporter to go through.
It is not clear from the article how much of the archive Gordon has gone through himself. It’s not clear how many nuggets Baram found for him. Call me conspiratorial, but I’d like to know.
Just who sent Michael Gordon to Saddam Hussein’s description of New York as a “Jewish city” that brainwashes UN officials? Who sent him to Saddam’s boast from 1982, during the Iran-Iraq war, “Once Iraq emerges victorious, there will not be any Israel… Technically, they are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq”?
Who is Amatzia Baram? He gave a couple of interviews in the AIPAC newsletter Near East Report in 2002, making the case for ousting Saddam. Look at The Israel Lobby by Walt and Mearsheimer (pp. 259-260); Baram recanted in 2007, saying “If I knew then what I know today, I would not have recommend going to war, because Saddam was far less dangerous than I thought.”
And who is Michael Gordon? A guy with a famous episode of piping bad information about Saddam. In 2002 he paved the way to the Iraq war with an article saying that Saddam was getting nukes– the famous “aluminum tubes… mushroom cloud” piece in 2002, based on brilliant inside sources that proved to be hogwash.
Read Michael Massing’s devastating piece on Gordon’s reporting in the New York Review of Books.
Administration “hard-liners,” Gordon and [Judith] Miller added, worried that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’… may be a mushroom cloud.” The piece concluded with a section on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, relying heavily on the information supplied by Ahmed al-Shemri. “All of Iraq is one large storage facility,” he was quoted as saying…
Gordon and Miller argue that the information about the aluminum tubes was not a leak. “The administration wasn’t really ready to make its case publicly at the time,” Gordon told me. “Somebody mentioned to me this tubes thing. It took a lot to check it out.” Perhaps so, but administration officials were clearly delighted with the story.
Racism toward Arabs is what unifies the Zionist right, says JJ Goldberg, liberal Zionist
Oct 28, 2011
Philip Weiss
At the Forward JJ Goldberg has a good piece on the recent call for political unity within the Jewish community on the Israel question, a “pledge” defied by the neocons and by J Street, which are attacking one another. Goldberg is in the J Street camp. His piece ends on the racism of the right wing.
So here’s what I’m starting to think: What unifies the Jewish right is not love of Israel but fear and loathing of the Arabs, and anything and anyone giving Arabs a moment’s satisfaction — even an Israeli prime minister who has served his fellow Jews before — is craven, foolish and treasonous.
Unify that, guys.
Now I would say that loving Israel means dining on racism, breakfast lunch and dinner. That argument is going to take place as soon as the neocons are finally exiled, and the liberal Zionists begin to have it out with the non-Zionists…
Palestine’s UNESCO bid to come up Monday (amid Simon Wiesenthal Center hypocrisy)
Oct 28, 2011
Philip Weiss
It looks like the vote on Palestine’s bid for membership in UNESCO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, will be on Monday:
The Palestinians will need to win over two-thirds of UNESCO’s 193 members on Monday to get full membership.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, is petitioning to block the Palestinians. It offers this piece of hysteria about “Palestine”:
Should ‘Palestine’ become a UNESCO member, it will surely seek to leverage its membership to gain international support to erase the history of the Jewish people in Eretz Israel and seek to have holy sites, like the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, Joseph’s tomb in Nablus, Rachel’s tomb in Bethlehem, and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, declared as wholly Palestinian heritage sites.
That’s rich. Or as they say in middle school, he who smelt it dealt it; Science Magazine has published a sharp critique of Simon Wiesenthal’s efforts to erase Muslim history in Jerusalem through the construction of the Museum of Tolerance on the Mamilla Cemetery, destroying a cemetery with remains going back to Salah-ad-din’s time. Here’s the link and promo:
In science news around the world this week, the Museum of Tolerance is under fire for intolerance…
The article itself quotes a letter by 84 respected archaeologists speaking out against the Wiesenthal’s grave-disturbing methods. And the Wiesenthal Center refused to comment.
4-year-old Palestinian girl is rendered quadriplegic by Israeli military training in occupied West Bank
Oct 28, 2011
Seham
Shame on me. Perhaps aggregating news has made me desensitized to the barbaric daily violence inflicted against Palestinians. I skipped over the following headline from my list today and chose one about Jordan’s Abdullah & Grapel instead, as if they are more worthy of recognition than this little girl:
Child Suffers Quadriplegia After Being Shot By Israel Army Fire During Training
Palestinian medical sources in occupied Jerusalem reported that a 4-year-old child, was shot by a stray live round in her neck fired by Israeli soldiers during training at the Anatot military base, built on lands illegally annexed from the residents Anata Palestinian town, north of Jerusalem.
http://www.imemc.org/article/62371
Her name is Aseel Ara’ra, a picture of can be found here. I wish I could apologize to her.
aseel via Maan
Update: Original version of this piece carried the wrong picture of Aseel. Thanks to commenters for correction.
Palestine in Oakland– Scott Olsen and Tristan Anderson
Oct 28, 2011
Alex Kane
Protesters in oakland carry iraq war veteran scott olsen after he was struck in the head by a police projectile (photo: Jay Finneburgh/indybay.org)
Occupy Oakland protesters got a whiff of the weekly Palestinian experience two nights ago when a crackdown complete with tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades tore through their protest encampment. (See Adam Horowitz’s post here). The injury of Iraq War veteran and activist Scott Olsen, who is in the hospital with a fractured skull, adds to the obvious similarities seen in protest crackdowns in the U.S. and Palestine.
This is in addition to reports that the same arms firm supplies both the Oakland Police Department and the Israeli army with tear-gas.
Olsen was reportedly hit by a tear gas canister in his head, resulting in a fractured skull injury. Olsen was in a coma, although Reuters reported last night that “Olsen was breathing on his own and could undergo surgery in the next day or so.”
The scenes of blood streaming down Olsen’s face were eerily reminiscent of what happened toTristan Anderson in 2009. An American activist from Oakland, Anderson was also struck in the head by a tear gas canister, although in his case it was fired by the Israeli army during a protest in the West Bank village of Nil’in. Anderson was in an Israeli hospital for over a year, and a sham IDF investigation declared the shooting “an act of war,” absolving their soldiers of responsibility.
These two cases, side by side, matter, and not just because of coincidence but for what it tells us.
The similarities between Olsen and Anderson’s injury (although thankfully Olsen seems to be recovering) and the force used on protesters in Oakland make clear how militarized the police in the U.S. are, as Charles Pierce points out in Esquire (h/t Liliana Segura’s Twitter):
Make no mistake about it: The actions of the police department in Oakland last night were a military assault on a legitimate political demonstration. That it was a milder military assault than it could have been, which is to say it wasn’t a massacre, is very much beside the point. There was no possible provocation that warranted this display of force. (Graffiti? Litter? Rodents? Is the Oakland PD now a SWAT team for the city’s health department?) If you are a police department in this country in 2011, this is something you do because you have the power and the technology and the license from society to do it. This is a problem that has been brewing for a long time. It predates the Occupy movement for more than a decade. It even predates the “war on terror,” although that has acted as what the arson squad would call an “accelerant” to the essential dynamic.
Basic law enforcement in this country is thoroughly, totally militarized. It is militarized at its most basic levels. (The “street crime units,” so beloved by, among other people, the Diallo family.) It is militarized at its highest command positions. It is militarized in its tactics, and its weaponry and, most important of all, in the attitude of the officers themselves, and in how they are trained. There is a vast militarized intelligence apparatus that leads, inevitably, to pre-emptive military actions, like the raids on protest organizations that were carried out in advance of the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. Sooner or later, this militarized law enforcement was going to collide head-on with a movement of mass public protest, and the results were going to be ugly. (There already had been dry runs elsewhere, most notably in Miami, in 2003, during protests of a meeting of trade ministers.)
The militarization of the police was clearly accelerated by a “war on terror” framework, and the Olsen/Anderson injuries are the real-life, tragic consequences that these policies have. Now, an American uprising is clashing with that security-first mentality. How many more Scott Olsens will we see?
Alex Kane is a freelance journalist and blogger based in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.
Arab Spring at 9 months — Helena Cobban
Oct 28, 2011
Philip Weiss
Helena Cobban has a long and insightful analysis of the Arab Spring at 9 months. Some of her conclusions:
1. The overwhelmingly peaceable and overwhelmingly civilian mass movements that swept the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt from power were unalloyed good news. The outcomes in both those countries may not be as truly wonderful as we might hope. But the peoples of the two countries have provided themselves with a decent chance of being able to build robust and largely accountable and democratic political systems, in place for the repressive systems they have labored under for so many years. Read this account, from JWB’s upcoming, Cairo-based author Issandr El-Amrani, on how exhilarating he found Tunisia’s recent elections… (Okay, Issandr isless optimistic regarding Egypt. But still, I am sure he would agree with me that the prospects for serious positive political developments there are still far, far greater than any of us would have imagined just one year ago.)
2. The overwhelmingly civilian mass pro-democracy movements in Bahrain and Yemen also been deeply inspiring. Hey– I never gave a shout-out yet to Yemen’s fabulous, inspiring leader Tawakkol Karman for being a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize this year. Huge congratulations, Ms. Karman! despite the creativity and commitment of the members of the movements in those two countries, however, both have met serious resistance… And in both cases, that resistance has been supported by Washington. Shame, shame shame! (And something that all of us in the pro-justice movement here in the United States ought to be working hard to reverse.)
3. In Syria and elsewhere there have also been large-scale civilian mass movements taking real risks to fight for political reform. But it’s been harder to gauge the real reach and influence of those movements. And in Syria, as in Yemen, there have been serious armed elements involved alongside the unarmed mass movements.
4. Libya has been seen as a real test case for the whole western liberal notion of ‘R2P’– [responsibility to protect] which far too many western liberals take to mean that the “international community” (however fuzzily defined) has a prima facie duty to support the human rights of beleaguered peoples in all other countries. Actually, the UN’s R2P documents don’t say that. They say that governments everywhere have the first duty to protect the the lives and safety of their peoples; but that if they fail to do that, then the UN can step in to take such steps as are deemed necessary to save the peoples’ lives. Big difference.
So what we saw in Libya was a UN-allowed, NATO-led military intervention that was launched in the first instance under the rubric of enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya in order to protect the civilians of Benghazi from what was described to us all as a completely certain humanitarian disaster. The western leaders never paid any heed to the facts that– as I blogged at the time– the humanitarian situation in Benghazi was actually getting better in the days immediately before their bombings started; or, that the African Union leaders were poised to undertake the kind of tension-deescalating negotiations that resolution 1973 had also called for.
Since March 19, Libya has seen scores of thousands of conflict-related deaths and maimings, and the country’s political space has been largely taken over by a clutch of mutually competing armed gangs. It looks very like Iraq in 2006 or so. And in keeping with that “Iraqi” theme, we saw the disgusting scenes of Muammar Qadhafi being brutalized while in captivity and then turning up shortly afterwards having been executed by a gunshot to the head.
Is this what the building a strong democracy looks like? No, no, no! I am in great fear as to the suffering and continued conflicts that the Libyan people will see over the months and years ahead.
Like Iraq before it, what happened in Libya is surely not a “model” for any people– in the Arab world or elsewhere– who seek a life of human dignity, security for their families, and accountable governance.
So the “balance sheet” for the Arab Spring is at this point decidedly mixed, but still on balance positive. What is clear is that the social and political forces that were unfrozen by Mohamed Bouazizi (and before him, to be fair, by Khaled Said in Egypt) have set the whole Middle East on a political course whose dynamism still has a lot more unfolding to do.