NOVANEWS
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If I must die
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Reports of Mossad role in assasination shine light on Israeli hypocrisy
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Oh, the outrage! ‘Haaretz’ runs ‘Pinkwashing’ piece from NYT!
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Today in Pittsburgh, Jesse Lieberfeld, 17, will deliver a hammer blow to American Jewish support for Israel
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Sundance Film Festival to feature doc on system of control in longest-running occupation
If I must die
Jan 16, 2012
Refaat Alareer
tadamon kite, Palestine
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself–
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
kites in Gaza
(Crossposted at Refaat Alareer’s blog In Gaza, My Gaza!)
Reports of Mossad role in assasination shine light on Israeli hypocrisy
Jan 16, 2012
Alex Kane
Mourners carry a flag-draped coffin of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the Iranian scientist assassinated last week (Photo: Mehdi Ghasemi / Iranian Students News Agency)
Reports that the Israeli Mossad were behind the recent assassination of an Iranian scientist continue to be published. Israeli media today is full of articles summarizing a Sunday Times(UK) report that gave details of the Mossad operation in Tehran.
The Sunday Times report follows a TIME magazine article, based on unnamed sources, that also says Israeli intelligence was behind the hit.
These reports, coupled with Mark Perry’s bombshell, deal a blow to one of Israel’s core arguments against Iran: that it is a state-sponsor of terrorism whose pursuit of nuclear weapons could embolden “militant Islam” to undertake global aggression.
Benjamin Netanyahu laid out this rationale when he spoke to Congress last year:
But while we hope for the best and while we work for the best, we must also recognize that powerful forces oppose this future. They oppose modernity. They oppose democracy. They oppose peace.
Foremost among these forces is Iran. The tyranny in Tehran brutalizes its own people. It supports attacks against Americans troops in Afghanistan and in Iraq. It subjugates Lebanon and Gaza. It sponsors terror worldwide.
When I last stood here, I spoke of the consequences of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Now time is running out. The hinge of history may soon turn, for the greatest danger of all could soon be upon us: a militant Islamic regime armed with nuclear weapons.
Militant Islam threatens the world. It threatens Islam.
…like other fanatacisms that were doomed to fail, militant Islam could exact an horrific price from all of us before its eventual demise.
A nuclear-armed Iran would ignite a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. It would give terrorists a nuclear umbrella. It would make the nightmare of nuclear terrorism a clear and present danger throughout the world.
Now, Israel itself stands accused of an act that former CIA officer Paul Pillar calls “international terrorism.” And Perry’s report that Mossad agents cultivated Jundallah, a militant Islamist organization in Pakistan, to carry out a covert war on Iran makes Israel’s cries about “militant Islam” ring hollow.
Here’s Pillar on the Iran assassination:
The killing of an individual foreigner overseas, if carried out for a political or policy purpose by either a nonstate actor or clandestine agents of a state, is an act of international terrorism. At least that is how U.S. law defines it, for purposes such as the State Department’s annual reports on terrorism. This form of terrorism is part of what put Iran on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the Iranian regime perpetrated numerous assassinations of exiled Iranian political dissidents, in Europe as well as in other countries of southwest Asia. The Iranians effectively ended this assassination campaign about a decade and a half ago, largely to improve relations with the European countries on whose soil many of the assassinations occurred and perhaps also because by then Iran had bumped off nearly all of the people on its hit list. We should assume, however, that Iran retains the capability to assassinate far-flung targets again, and that it would consider doing so if searching for ways to strike back at adversaries that are striking it.
Iran itself has been a victim of this form of terrorist violence. This has included some instances, such as the killing of Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan, in which Iranian interests have paralleled those of the United States. It has included during the past two years the killing in Iran of several nuclear scientists, the most recent of whom died this week from an explosive placed on his vehicle. Actions are more important than nomenclature, so if you prefer not to apply the T-word to these killings then just imagine what the reaction would be if something similar were occurring in the United States. Imagine the response if even just one scientist (let alone four or five) who was employed, say, at one of the U.S. national laboratories had been been similarly assassinated and a foreign hand was suspected. There would be screams of “act of war” and the U.S. president would be hard-pressed to hold back impulses to strike back forcefully. Now put yourselves in the Iranians’ place. Not only do they face the serial assassination of their scientists, but they face it amid an environment filled with numerous other indications of foreign hostility, including the economic warfare, the saber rattling and the contest among American politicians to see who can shoot the most rhetorical venom at Iran. From this perspective, aptly described by Vali Nasr, it should hardly be surprising if Iran strikes back while it sees more reason than ever before to develop a nuclear weapon in the hope of deterring U.S.-led aggressiveness.
Who’s the terror-sponsor now?
Oh, the outrage! ‘Haaretz’ runs ‘Pinkwashing’ piece from NYT!
Jan 16, 2012
Philip Weiss
Haaretz picks up NYT Pinkwashing story
Noam Sheizaf reports on the absurdity of Jeffrey Goldberg and JJ Goldberg slagging the New York Times for running Sarah Schulman’s great Pinkwashing piece on Israel back in November– when Haaretz picked the piece up this weekend in Hebrew! Sheizaf notes that the pinkwashing piece, which said that Israel is using its general freedom on gay rights to try and mask human-rights abuses, was also the last straw claimed by Netanyahu in declaring to the Times that he would never darken its sheet again! (Apologies to Groucho Marx on that one). Once again, Israelis and Palestinians are able to argue issues the U.S. can’t stomach.
Or more to the point, Jeffrey Goldberg and JJ Goldberg hold a line here that they don’t worry about when Israeli media cross. And why? Because actually they don’t believe that Americans would stick by Israel if there were an open debate on the matter…
Today in Pittsburgh, Jesse Lieberfeld, 17, will deliver a hammer blow to American Jewish support for Israel
Jan 16, 2012
Philip Weiss
Martin Luther King Jr
I wish I were in Pittsburgh. This afternoon at Carnegie Mellon University, an 11th-grader will step nervously to a microphone and deliver a hammer blow to American Jewish support for Israel.
Jesse Lieberfeld, 17, a junior at Winchester Thurston High School, will read an essay, “Fighting a Forbidden Battle: How I Stopped Covering Up for a Hidden Wrong,” about how he sees himself in Martin Luther King, because of his own struggle with his religion’s ordination of support for Israel. The piece is one of two winners in the annual Martin Luther King Jr. essay-writing contest sponsored by the university. It is brave and clear and necessary:
the term “Israeli/Palestinian Conflict” was no more accurate than calling the Civil Rights Movement the “Caucasian/ African-American Conflict.”
In both cases, the expression was a blatant euphemism: it gave the impression that this was a dispute among equals and that both held an equal share of the blame. However, in both, there was clearly an oppressor and an oppressed,
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published the essay yesterday. It will soon be required reading for leaders of all American Jewish organizations. Jesse Lieberfeld is delivering news about his generation’s outlook.
I once belonged to a wonderful religion. I belonged to a religion that allows those of us who believe in it to feel that we are the greatest people in the world — and feel sorry for ourselves at the same time…
This last mandatory belief [in Israel] was one which I never fully understood, but I always kept the doubts I had about Israel’s spotless reputation to the back of my mind. “Our people” were fighting a war, one I did not fully comprehend, but I naturally assumed that it must be justified. We would never be so amoral as to fight an unjust war.
Yet as I came to learn more about our so-called “conflict” with the Palestinians, I grew more concerned.
The Post-Gazette warned readers about what Lieberfeld was writing with an intro about “blunt talk” and “searingly honest” pieces–the other winner is Erika Drain’s essay about black identity. That brainy 17-year-old Jews, the future of my ethnic/religious group in the U.S., are wrestling with the Israel question in the public square spells doom for the lobby, and in turn for Israel’s heedless conduct.
Notice the way that Lieberfeld ties his agony and commitment directly to MLK’s:
He too had been part of a struggle that had been hidden and glossed over for the convenience of those against whom he fought. What would his reaction have been? As it turned out, it was precisely the same as mine. As he wrote in his letter from Birmingham Jail,
Here is more, but you should read the whole great piece at the Post-Gazette link:
I decided to make one last appeal to my religion. If it could not answer my misgivings, no one could.
The next time I attended a service, there was an open question-and-answer session about any point of our religion. I wanted to place my dilemma in as clear and simple terms as I knew how. I thought out my exact question over the course of the 17-minute cello solo that was routinely played during service. Previously, I had always accepted this solo as just another part of the program, yet now it seemed to capture the whole essence of our religion: intelligent and well-crafted on paper, yet completely oblivious to the outside world (the soloist did not have the faintest idea of how masterfully he was putting us all to sleep).
When I was finally given the chance to ask a question, I asked: “I want to support Israel. But how can I when it lets its army commit so many killings?” I was met with a few angry glares from some of the older men, but the rabbi answered me.
“It is a terrible thing, isn’t it?” he said. “But there’s nothing we can do. It’s just a fact of life.”
I knew, of course, that the war was no simple matter and that we did not by any means commit murder for its own sake, but to portray our killings as a “fact of life” was simply too much for me to accept. I thanked him and walked out shortly afterward. I never went back.
Sundance Film Festival to feature doc on system of control in longest-running occupation
Jan 16, 2012
Annie Robbins
The Sundance Film Festival begins later this week in Utah. How exciting to get the announcement that the film fest has picked up Praxis Films’ The Law in These Parts.
THE LAW IN THESE PARTS explores the four-decade-old Israeli military legal system in the Occupied Territories. Since Israel conquered the territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 War, the military has imposed thousand of orders and laws, established military courts, sentenced hundreds of thousand of Palestinians, enabled half a million Israeli “settlers” to move to the Occupied Territories and developed a system of long-term jurisdiction by an occupying army that is unique in the world.
THE LAW IN THESE PARTS explores this unprededented and little-known story through testimonies of the military legal professionals who were the archtects of the system and helped run it in its formative years.
Directed by Ra’anan Alexandrovicz. Laura Poitras producer. Sundance’s synopsis:
“This film is not about the people who broke the law, but about those entrusted with the law,” says director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz about his latest project. Ambitiously perceived, sparely designed, and meticulously executed, The Law in These Parts is commanding and compassionate as it goes to the heart of Israel’s moral quandary. In this country founded on democratic principles, Alexandrowicz asks—in both simple and profound terms—can justice truly be served in the occupied territories given the current system of law administered by Israel for Palestinians?