Voices From Guantanamo: Omar Deghayes
By Jasmin Ramsey | Pulse Media | February 5, 2010
Omar Deghayes spent close to 6 years of his life in the US run Guantánamo Bay detention facility, the same prison that President Barack Hussein Obama said he would close down during his presidential election campaign. Once referred to as a “sad chapter in American history” by Obama, Guantánamo Bay remains in operation today, while its lesser known twin in Afghanistan has undergone ‘improvements‘ and expansion. A list of the hundreds of detainees in Bagram were only obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) after months of campaigning in January 2010. Bagram has been holding, interrogating, and sometimes killing suspects of the US led ‘war on terror’ since 2001.
In 2007 Deghayes was finally released without being charged, but will carry the physical and emotional scars that he suffered during his imprisonment for the rest of his life. He will have to face one of those scars every time he looks in the mirror. For some, Deghayes is just another brown male with a beard and a disturbing story to tell. Who listens?
Near the end of January Patrick Barkham of The Guardian conducted an in-depth interview with Deghayes. In it he notes:
It is not hot stabbing pain that Omar Deghayes remembers from the day a Guantánamo guard blinded him, but the cool sensation of fingers being stabbed deep into his eyeballs. He had joined other prisoners in protesting against a new humiliation – inmates being forced to take off their trousers and walk round in their pants – and a group of guards had entered his cell to punish him. He was held down and bound with chains.
“I didn’t realise what was going on until the guy had pushed his fingers inside my eyes and I could feel the coldness of his fingers. Then I realised he was trying to gouge out my eyes,” Deghayes says. He wanted to scream in agony, but was determined not to give his torturers the satisfaction. Then the officer standing over him instructed the eye-stabber to push harder. “When he pulled his hands out, I remember I couldn’t see anything – I’d lost sight completely in both eyes.” Deghayes was dumped in a cell, fluid streaming from his eyes.
The sight in his left eye returned over the following days, but he is still blind in his right eye. He also has a crooked nose (from being punched by the guards, he says) and a scar across his forefinger (slammed in a prison door), but otherwise this resident of Saltdean, near Brighton, appears relatively unscarred from the more than five years he spent locked in Guantánamo Bay. Two years after his release, he speaks softly and calmly; he has the unlined skin and thick hair of a man younger than his 40 years; he has just remarried and has, for the first time in his life, a firm feeling that his home is on the clifftops of East Sussex.
Deghayes must, however, live with the darkness of Guantánamo for the rest of his days. There are reminders everywhere, from the beautiful picture of Saltdean that was painted for him while he was incarcerated, to the fact that Guantánamo remains open 12 months after Barack Obama vowed to close it within a year.
There are still around 200 prisoners left in the detention camp, many of whom have been there for eight years. Of the 800 freed, only one has been found guilty of any crime and he was convicted by a dubious military commission, a verdict that is likely to be overturned. Deghayes, too, does not want to forget. He says there is so much still to be exposed about the conditions there, and about British collusion in the extraordinary rendition and torture of men such as him in the months following the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Although Deghayes is now free (or as free as he can ever be considering the ordeal he was forced to endure), many others continue to suffer within the walls of America’s infamous torture chambers, otherwise referred to as detention centres, while life goes on as usual for others. Canadian citizen Omar Khadr has matured from a boy into a man within the cell walls of Guantánamo (he was detained when he was 15) while Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government continue to resist demands and even supreme court rulings recommending that Khadr be returned to Canada. Harper recently went so far as to declare that Canadians “don’t care” about Afghan detainee abuse on national television. Some will argue that this is not the case and if you care about the actions your government takes in your name, then write to and call your governmental representatives so that there’s no confusion.
Interestingly, in the clip above Deghayes reveals that even though he has every reason to, he has not allowed himself to be swallowed by bitterness and hatred. Instead, he has been telling his story and campaigning to prevent the same injustices from being imposed on others. Deghayes and others like him provide inspiring examples of how humanity can endure even in the most challeging of circumstances, in this case brought to us by a brown male with a beard. Now, who will listen?
NYT’s Israel Editor’s Sticky Situation
Ethan Bronner’s Conflict With Impartiality
By ALISON WEIR | February 5, 2010
Ethan Bronner is the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief. As such, he is the editor responsible for all the news coming out of Israel-Palestine. It is his job to decide what gets reported and what doesn’t; what goes in a story and what gets cut.
To a considerable degree, he determines what readers of arguably the nation’s most influential newspaper learn about Israel and its adversaries, and, especially, what they don’t.
His son just joined the Israeli army.
According to New York Times ethics guidelines, such a situation would be expected to cause significant concern. In these guidelines the Times repeatedly emphasizes the importance of impartiality.
This is considered so critical that the Times devotes considerable attention to “conflict of interest” (also called “conflict with impartiality”) problems, situations in which personal interest might cause a journalist to intentionally or unconsciously slant a story.
The Times notes that family affiliations may cause such a conflict; as an example, it explains that a daughter’s high position on Wall Street could be problematic for a business reporter.
In situations where such a familial affiliation is considered significant, the journalist may be moved to a different area of reporting.
Ethan Bronner’s situation, therefore would appear to be sticky, at the very least. It is difficult to imagine that a son fighting for the foreign nation an editor is charged with covering does not constitute such a potential conflict with impartiality. Apart from Mr. Bronner signing up with the Israeli military himself, it is difficult to imagine a clearer example of familial partisanship.
Yet, to date, Bronner and the Times have refused to address his situation. Foreign Editor Susan Chira (who may also have family allegiances to Israel) has declined to comment, other than refer people to her curt response to Electronic Intifada, which had asked her whether it was true that Bronner’s son was in the Israeli military:
“Ethan Bronner referred your query to me, the foreign editor. Here is my comment: Mr. Bronner’s son is a young adult who makes his own decisions. At The Times, we have found Mr. Bronner’s coverage to be scrupulously fair and we are confident that will continue to be the case.”
If that were, indeed, the case for Bronner’s reporting, there would undoubtedly be less concern from outside observers. There are numerous instances of accurate reporting by both Israeli and Palestinian journalists; familial and personal affiliation do not necessarily or always result in flawed journalism.
However, while both Chira and Bronner may believe he has been “scrupulously fair” in the years that he has been the paper’s top editor on Israel-Palestine (before assuming his current position as Jerusalem bureau chief in March 2008, he had been deputy foreign editor overseeing the region for four years), a number of studies and analyses contradict this contention.
* In 2005 a study by If Americans Knew found that the Times had covered Israeli children’s deaths at a rate over seven times greater than it had reported on Palestinian children’s deaths – even though Palestinian children’s deaths had occurred first, in far greater numbers, and there was considerable evidence that Palestinian young people were being killed intentionally by official Israeli forces.
* Princeton Professor Emeritus Richard Falk and media critic Howard Friel undertook a meticulous analysis of the Times‘ coverage of the issue; the title of their book indicates their findings: “Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East.” Among others things, Falk and Friel discovered that the Times had failed to report the essential fact that all Israeli settlements are illegal under international law.
* A 2006 study published in the Electronic Intifada revealed that during the previous six years there had been 80 reports by respected international organizations detailing human rights violations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Of these, 76 had been primarily critical of Israel, and four had been primarily critical of Palestinians. The study found that the Times had reported on two of the reports for each, giving readers an exceedingly distorted view of the real situation.
* In a recent announcement expressing concern at Bronner’s apparent conflict of interest, media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) stated that “Bronner’s reporting has been repeatedly criticized by FAIR for what would appear to be a bias toward the Israeli government,” detailing specific examples.
Shifting the Blame
Several years ago the San Francisco Jewish Bulletin published an article exploring Jewish student journalists’ views on how to report on Israel-Palestine. Several said that they would find it difficult to report negative aspects about Israel, one interviewee saying that he would try to avoid printing such news. If that proved impossible, he said, he would then try to find a way “to shift the blame.”
New York Times‘ news coverage often seems to follow this pattern. When the Gaza massacre of December-January is reported, Gazan rockets are inevitably mentioned. However, the fact that these largely home-made projectiles have killed far fewer Israelis in the eight years they have been used (under 20) than Israeli forces killed in a few minutes during the invasion is virtually always omitted. Likewise left out is the fact that their use began only after Israeli forces had invaded Gaza on a number of occasions, killing and injuring numerous civilians.
The Times consistently reports Israeli actions as retaliatory, despite the fact that, according to an MIT study, in at least 96 percent of ceasefires and periods of calm it was Israeli forces that had first resumed violence. In the conflict that began in fall of 2000, Israeli forces killed over 140 Palestinians before a single Israeli in Israel was killed, 91 Palestinian children (major cause of death, gunfire to the head) before a single Israeli child was killed.
An example of Bronner’s Israel-centric reporting is a November, 2009 report on prisoners. Bronner notes that the Israeli soldier captured by Palestinians (the only Israeli prisoner held by Palestinians) is “bespectacled and boyish-seeming,” while failing to mention that many of the over 7,000 Palestinians prisoners held by Israel are equally bespectacled and boyish-seeming – in fact, 300+ are not just boyish, they are children.
While Bronner includes personal information about the Israeli prisoner, he includes very few facts about Palestinian prisoners; for example, that hundreds have never been charged with a crime and that those whom Israel has found “guilty” were tried in military courts under military law in a military occupation of Palestinian land that much of the world deems illegal. While Bronner’s story contains considerable mention of “terrorism,” it fails to report that Israeli forces killed over a thousand Gazan civilians; Palestinians killed one Israeli civilian.
Interestingly, connections to the Israeli military may not be rare for journalists covering the Middle East for US media.
The husband of NPR’s longtime correspondent for the region, Linda Gradstein, was a sniper in the Israeli army (and may still be a reserve officer). “Pundit” Jeffrey Goldberg, who appears throughout the media, immigrated to Israel, became an Israeli citizen, and served in the Israeli military. (It is unknown whether he is still in the Israeli reserves; it is possible he received a dispensation from this requirement.)
The New York Times’ other major correspondent from the region, Isabel Kershner, is an Israeli citizen. While there is universal compulsory military service in Israel, we have been unable to confirm that Kershner herself and/or her family members have been or are in the Israeli military.
Breaking the silence
Recently, the Israeli organization “Breaking the Silence” published 96 testimonies by female Israeli soldiers. They describe a pervasive pattern of violence, harassment, theft, and humiliation practiced by Israeli forces against Palestinian men, women, and children. Below are excerpts:
“We caught a five-year-old… the officers just picked him up, slapped him around and put him in the jeep. The kid was crying and the officer next to me said ‘don’t cry’ and started laughing at him. Finally the kid cracked a smile – and suddenly the officer gave him a punch in the stomach. Why? ‘Don’t laugh in my face’ he said.”
“…it’s boring, so we’d create some action. We’d get on the radio, and say they threw stones at us, then someone would be arrested… There was a policewoman, she was bored, so okay, she said they threw stones at her. They asked her who threw them. ‘I don’t know, two in grey shirts, I didn’t manage to see them.’ They catch two guys with grey shirts… beat them. Is it them? ‘No, I don’t think so.’ Okay, a whole incident, people get beaten up. Nothing happened that day.”
“…two of our soldiers put him [a Palestinian child] in a jeep, and two weeks later the kid was walking around with casts on both arms and legs…they talked about it in the unit quite a lot – about how they sat him down and put his hand on the chair and simply broke it right there on the chair.”
An officer described soldiers shooting to death a nine-year-old as he was trying to run away: “They shot in the air, as they say – shot in the air in the lungs…”
In their testimonies, these soldiers emphasize that mistreatment of Palestinian civilians is widespread, routine, and known to everyone. Both the Israeli and the Palestinian press have published excerpts.
Yet, New York Times Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner has so far failed to report this information about Israeli forces.
And his son has just joined up.
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew and a board member of the Council for the National Interest (CNI). For more information on Ethan Bronner and his upcoming speaking tour on college campuses, join IAK’S email list. Alison can be reached at contact@ifamericansknew.org
SOURCES.
The New York Times Company Policy on Ethics in Journalism. This also states: “Companywide, our goal is to cover the news impartially… and to be seen as doing so. The reputation of our company rests upon that perception…”
“Susan Chira, New York Times Foreign Editor, confirms, excuses Bronner’s conflict of interest,” Israel-Palestine: The Missing Headlines,” Jan. 27, 2010
“New York Times fails to disclose Jerusalem bureau chief’s conflict of interest
Report,” The Electronic Intifada, January 25, 2010
“New York Times’ Ethan Bronner’s Conflict of Interest: Conversation with Bronner and Alternative News Sources” AlisonWeir.org, January 26, 2010
“Off the Charts: Accuracy in Reporting of Israel/Palestine – The New York Times,” If Americans Knew, 2005
“Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East,” Richard Falk, Howard Friel; ZNET Interview, May 31, 2007
“The New York Times Marginalizes Palestinian Women and Palestinian Rights,” Electronic Intifada, Nov. 17, 2006
“Does NYT’s Top Israel Reporter Have a Son in the IDF?” FAIR, January 27, 2010
“Killing Palestinians doesn’t count: Is a ceasefire breached only when an Israeli is killed?” CounterPunch, January 29, 2009
“Reigniting Violence: How Do Ceasefires End?” Huffington Post, January 6, 2009
B’TSELEM – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
“The Coverage–and Non-Coverage–of Israel-Palestine,” The Link, July-August 2005, Vol 38, Issue 3
“Jewish journalists grapple with ‘doing the write thing’” Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, Nov. 23, 2001
“Prisoner Swap Appears Near in the Mideast,” Ethan Bronner, New York times, Nov. 23, 2009
“Political prisoners in Israel-Palestine,” If Americans Knew
Addameer Prisoners’ Support and Human Rights Association
“Israel, Hamas in mutual gestures on prisoners,” Reuters, Sept. 30, 2009.
“Female soldiers break their silence,” YNET, Jan. 20, 2010 (According to its website, “Ynetnews is part of the prominent Yedioth Media Group, which publishes Yedioth Ahronoth – Israel’s most widely-read daily newspaper)
“Testimonies of Israeli Female Soldiers Regarding Violations Against Palestinian Civilians,” International Middle East Media Center, January 30, 2010
“BREAKING THE SILENCE: Women Soldiers’ Testimonies,” 136-page booklet by the Israeli Breaking the Silence organization
What CNN forgot to mention about ‘the Middle East’s only democracy’
By Ben White | Pulse Media | February 5, 2010
The following extracts are taken from an email update (4 Feb 2010) by Yeela Raanan for the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages in the Negev (they have a website here and a Wikipedia entry here):
On Tuesday this week the Government of Israel destroyed crops in the Bedouin village of Al-Mazraa. “Crops” hardly defines the one inch high wheat that the community has managed to grow in the desert land. The Bedouin farmers do not have water allocations like their Jewish counterparts, and are dependent on rain. The annual average is 2 inches of rain.. This year was a better year, but even on a good year the wheat does not grow tall enough to be harvested and is used as grazing for the sheep of the residents of this village – one of the poorest communities in Israel. But the government officials were not pleased that this year was blessed with rain – and re-plowed the land to make sure the meager crop will be destroyed. The excuse – the land is not owned by the residents of the village (the land is disputed land – historically belonging to the Bedouin, but the government claims it belongs to the state). But the real reason is – they are Arabs. As Arabs – even though they are citizens of Israel – they are seen as our enemies.
And:
The village of Twail Abu-Jarwal was destroyed completely three times. On October 26th, January 6th and again on January 21st.
In the village of El-Araqib homes have been demolished four times! On October 29th – two tents, on December 7th – 7 huts, on January 6th and 21st two huts each time.
And:
In addition the Government of Israel demolished:
October 29th: two homes in the village of A-Sir
A house in the village of Al-Matbakh.
On November 5th: a house in the village of Tla-Al-Rashid.
A house in the village of A-Sawa
A house in the village of Al-Baht.
A house in the village of Zaarura.
On December 7th: A house in the village of Um-El-Mileh.
A house in the recognized village of Um-Mitnan.
On January 6th: A house in El-Batal
A house in Hirbat A-Zbala
On February 2nd: three shepherds’ shacks in the village of Al-Mazraa
A house in the recognized village of al-Foraa.
In each one of these homes a family lived, each family with a mom and children. And they still live in the same place, but their re-built shacks are shabbier, the life more miserable, and with a lot more resentment in their hearts…
‘NYT’ has had intimate connections to the Jewish state
By Philip Weiss | February 5, 2010
A friend pointed out to me that the speech that I reported on by the New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem is evidence of the “bubble” that New York Times people live inside. They don’t like to go out of a bubble of assumptions about western culture/Jewishness/establishment status. That is what was so arresting about Times columnist Roger Cohen’s reporting last year; he dared to break out of the bubble. And the Times is hardly along: most American Jews were raised inside that bubble, and the challenge is to break out of its limited consciousness.
Reaching for my shelves here, here are a few of the close personal connections that have existed between the New York Times and the Jewish state:
1. Columnist C.L. Sulzberger wrote in his diaries, A Long Row of Candles, that he had personally received the Stern Gang’s threat to kill UN negotiator Folke Bernadotte in 1948 from “Two handsome, tall young fellows in khaki shorts” who knocked on his door in Tel Aviv. Sulzberger planned to pass the warning on to “Ben Gurion’s high muckamuck in secret service and dirty tricks.” Bernadotte was murdered two months later.
2. Max Frankel, former executive editor of the Times, wrote in his autobiography, “I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert. I had yearned for a Jewish homeland ever since learning as a child in Germany that in Palestine even the policemen were Jews!… I did indeed have many close Israeli friends, not only relatives and journalists but high officials, ranging from Yitzhak Rabin to [Labor official] Lova Eliav. That is why I well understood the full range of Israeli opinion on all of that country’s vital security issues.”
3. Frankel’s successor as executive editor, and protege, was Joseph Lelyveld, a liberal writer. Lelyveld’s father, the late Reform Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld, was president of the Zionist Organization of America and an active lobbyist for the Jewish state. He met with Harry Truman in 1948 shortly before Truman recognized Israel. Lelyveld also lobbied the New York Times, urging the owners to abandon their anti-Zionism. It’s not clear from Joseph Lelyveld’s memoir whether he was a Zionist…
4. Here is Palestinian doctor Ghada Karmi talking to Democracy Now a year ago about her family’s house in West Jerusalem that they were forced from during the Nakba. The New York Times comes in in the third paragraph; and you can see in Karmi’s story the institutional discomfort that the Times has with the Palestinian narrative:
I wanted to find the house. I looked for it desperately in the early 1990s, couldn’t find it, because I didn’t remember. My brother and my sister, who did remember, weren’t with me.
But then I tried again, and I did find it. And we went in. There was a Canadian Jewish family living in it, Orthodox, and they didn’t speak Hebrew. I didn’t speak Hebrew either, but I had an Israeli friend in case I couldn’t make myself understood. So, however, we needn’t have bothered, because they spoke English. And they went—they were very uncomfortable. They didn’t want me to look around. I said, “Can I look around? This was my home.” And they said, “It’s nothing to do with us. It’s nothing to do with us.” In fact, they were tenants. And I went around, but they hurried me out. I didn’t have much time to look around, to relive the memories, to get the feelings, the feelings back, because as a child, you know, it’s the feeling that comes back. You don’t really remember where that chair was, where that wall was, where that—you know. I had to leave, and it was terribly—as you can imagine, it was extremely upsetting.
But then a very strange thing happened. I returned to Palestine in 2005, where I worked in Ramallah for the Palestinian Authority. I wanted to live in Palestine for a while, and I had a visa, and I went in there to do work. I was working for the United Nations. And one day, I got a message from a man called Steven Erlanger, whom I had never met. I didn’t really know who he was, but of course I realized he was the bureau chief for the New York Times, saying “I have read your marvelous memoir, and, do you know, I think I’m living above your old house.” And it was amazing. He said, “From the description in your book, it must be the same place.” Anyway, we arranged to meet. I went over to Jerusalem, and I met him. And indeed, it was my house.
And what had happened was somebody at some point had built a story above the old house, which was of course a one-story place, a villa, typical of that kind of architecture. But somebody had built a floor above it, and that belonged to the New York Times. And the incumbent at the time was Steven Erlanger, who had been moved by the memoir and said, “This is your house?” And I said, “Yes, it is.” And he took me—I remember he took me—he had made friends with the people downstairs, who were not the Canadian Jewish family. They were somebody else. They were really quite nice people, Jewish, and—Israelis, in fact. And they—he told them, “Look, this lady used to live here.” And they said, “Please, come in.” And I had all the time in the world. I went around. I felt terribly sad. He took loads of photographs of me.
And actually, we talked, he and I. I said, “Look. Look at what’s happened. You’ve seen this—you’ve seen me. You know what happened here. How do you feel about Israel now?” And I couldn’t get him to say that what happened in 1948 was an iniquity and an injustice. He didn’t say anything like that. He remained diplomatic, I suppose you would say, noncommittal, very pleasant to me, but it was a very strange episode.
AU criticizes ICC’s move against al-Bashir
Press TV – February 5, 2010
The African Union has criticized the International Criminal Court (ICC)’s decision to consider genocide charges against Sudanese President Umar al-Bashir.
The 53-nation bloc said the ICC’s decision will harm the peace process in Sudan. It also said “justice” shouldn’t be sought at the price of peace. This is after the ICC ordered a review of Bashir’s arrest warrant for alleged atrocities in Darfur.
Sudanese officials have denounced the ruling and described it as a politically-motivated move aimed at destabilizing the country. The indictment against al-Bashir already includes seven counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes allegedly committed in Sudan’s western Darfur region.
Sudan says the ICC move to charge al-Bashir is aimed at stopping democratic process in the African country.
This is the first time in history that an arrest warrant has been issued for a sitting president.
Climate draft offers new support for nuclear power
By Jim Snyder | The Hill | 02-02-10
Climate change legislation being written by a Senate climate trio includes additional loan guarantees, tax breaks and a streamlined regulatory approval process to boost the nuclear energy industry.
A draft of the title, obtained by E2 Wire from an energy lobbyist, shows Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) are contemplating a series of incentives for nuclear power.
The language is the first to emerge from the behind-the-scenes talks the three have led in hopes of striking an accord on climate change to attract centrists.
A spokesman for Kerry said the language was not current but declined to say how it had changed. The draft title reflects themes that Kerry, Lieberman and Graham have already laid out.
President Barack Obama also called for additional support for the industry in his recent State of the Union address. His budget includes $54.5 billion in loan guarantees for the industry, tripling the $18 billion in authority Congress has already approved.
A summary of the draft title attached to the legislative text lists several nuclear incentives:
“Regulatory risk insurance to increase investor confidence and minimize the financial risks associated with prolonged regulatory delays,
Accelerated depreciation for nuclear plants;
Investment tax credits to create parity with the benefits enjoyed by wind and solar power; and
A doubling the authorization for loan guarantees from $48.5 billion to $100 billion, of which $38 billion will be available for nuclear plants.”
Kerry confirmed that tax incentives and loan guarantees are part of the nuclear section.
“We have made huge progress on it and I think we have a terrific title,” he told reporters in the Capitol Tuesday.
Kerry said the distribution of the draft titles has been limited.
“We have not circulated any component of this widely because we are trying to tie all the pieces together before we start having any kind of dissection,” he said.
Kerry said there has also been progress on titles addressing renewable and alternative energy, natural gas and offsets.
He added that the lawmakers are still determining their exact mechanism for putting a price on carbon emissions.
Other provisions include support for worker retraining program to respond to concerns that “an aging nuclear workforce is on the brink of retirement,” according to the summary.
See also:
Nuclear energy firms seek more than loan guarantees for revival
Ben Geman contributed to this post.
Bribery, Indentured Science, PR & Toxic Sludge
By Ronnie Cummins & Alexis Baden-Mayer | Organic Consumers Association | February 4, 2010
Greg Kester, Natalie Sierra and Liz Ostoich, along with municipal governments across the U.S. in need desperately of getting rid of the noxious stuff called sewage sludge, want Americans to believe that that toxic brew is good for you. Specifically, these operators are waging a massive PR campaign to get farmers and gardeners, including school gardens, to “fertilize” their veggies with sewage sludge. Their campaign would have us believe that the chemicals in sewage sludge—thousands of them present in every degree of hazardous and toxic combination—are somehow magically gone from sewage sludge once you “apply” it to your garden.
Before you reach for the science on the practice of “land application” of sewage sludge (and you will not find any science in the hands of the purveyors of this practice), consider the elementary logic: the purpose of sewage treatment being to clean up the sewage that arrives without cease at its doors, sludge will by definition contain everything the sewage treatment plant did in fact take out of the sewage. This means, besides urine and feces from flush toilets, every chemical from every industry, every pharmaceutical, disinfectant, and pathogen from every hospital hooked into the municipal sewer system; it means all the chemicals—tens of thousands of them—produced in our society and flushed or washed into sewers at the industry end or the consumer end: heavy metals, flame retardants, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, pharmaceutical drugs and other hazardous chemicals coming from residential drains. It also means untold—and unpredictable— new chemicals created by the negative synergy in the toxic soup that sewage is and the toxic stew that sludge is. It means hosts of new pathogenic bacteria also created through horizontal gene transfer in the stress of this same toxic soup and this same toxic stew.
Keep these plain, incontrovertible facts in mind as you read on and when you hear the 1984 talk of “biosolids” (the PR word concocted by the sludge gang), of “land application” of “biosolids” (euphemism for disposal of sludge), of “class A biosolids,” or “EQ” (for “Exceptional Quality”) “biosolids.”
Greg Kester represents the California Association of Sanitation Agencies’ Biosolids Program, Natalie Sierra works for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, and Liz Ostoich works for the corporate giant of toxic sludge, Synagro (recently bought by the infamous Carlyle Group). Their job is to make sure that “land application” of toxic sludge on American farmland—the cheapest way to dispose of toxic sludge since ocean dumping was stopped in 1992—remains legal.
Opposition so far comes from people who have been made very sick by sludge “applied” to farmland close to their homes, by those who have had their entire dairy herds wiped out after being fed with hay or silage grown on sludge, and those whose own guts warn them against allowing sewage sludge to be either processed or spread near their homes or their farms. Like Monsanto’s genetically modified organisms (GMOs) polluting the gene pool, once toxic sludge contaminates our farmland, parks, schoolyards, and backyard gardens there is long term—or really, for all intents and purposes, permanent—damage. Growing food organically won’t mean much if the soil is contaminated with the pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and heavy metals contained in sewage sludge. This is exactly why the organic community rose up in 1998 and forced the government to prohibit the spreading of sewage sludge on organic farms and gardens.
Sludge propagandists like Kester, Sierra and Ostoich are the front line troups for municipal governments trying to avoid their responsibility for this noxious product of wastewater treatment: convincing the public that toxic sludge is good for you to have on your land, in your backyard. All three spoke at an industry conference several of us attended last week in San Francisco, “Biosolids: Understanding Future Regulatory Trends and Impacts on Biosolids Management in California.”
Greg “Buy the Science” Kester, California Association of Sanitation Agencies’ Biosolids Program
Greg Kester pitched sewage professionals on a national strategy of getting ahead of the toxic sludge news cycle by “filling in the data gaps” with research funded with what he described as “Congressional funny money” and conducted by organizations like WERF, the Water Environment Research Foundation, a PR think tank and lobbyist for the toxic sludge industry.
What really upsets Kester are reporters who “overlook” what he sees as the “benefits” of toxic sludge. Case in point, the John Hopkins study in Baltimore that examined the possibilities of using toxic sludge “to reduce the impact of lead contamination” in poor black neighborhoods by “tying it up” in the sludge. The plan was to test the blood of the children living in this project—before and after the “application” of the “biosolids”—to see if the lead levels had gone up or down.
The researchers “applied” “sterilized Baltimore sewage sludge mixed and composted with wood chips and sawdust,” along with grass seed, to backyard soil contaminated with lead. After a year, the grass cover was shown to reduce the amount of lead-contaminated soil being tracked from people’s yards to their homes, making it less likely that the lead-contaminated soil would be ingested and absorbed into the blood stream. Kester believes this is really a positive story about how toxic sludge can improve the environment by producing “lush green grass.”
Kester says the industry should have gotten great PR out of this one, but this isn’t how the story played to the media. After all, even contaminated soils can grow grass. The trouble with toxic sludge is that it, too, contains hazardous levels of lead. The “exceptional quality,” “class A biosolids” that were used in the experiment are permitted to have up to 300 mg/kg of lead. The law allows land used to dispose of toxic sludge to cumulatively reach a load of 264 pounds of lead per acre.
The AP reporter who had suggested a comparison with this “study” and the Tuskeegee studies of the 1950s was removed from his post and sent to no man’s land at the United Nations.
A second story Kester thinks could have been played better by the toxic sludge industry is the “application” of toxic sludge to the White House lawn during past administrations. This story made the news again when the First Lady Michelle Obama began growing what she intended to be an organic garden in a piece of that lawn. Kester said the lead contamination caused by use of a toxic sludge product called OrGrow (incidentally, the same thing that was used in the Baltimore study) had left lead contamination of “only” 93 ppm, “lower than expected for urban soils and safe gardens.” Kester is technically, if deceptively, correct: our EPA says that soil with more than 56 parts per million of lead might not provide “adequate protection of terrestrial ecosystems,” but doesn’t suggest worrying about anything below 400 parts per million as a threat to human health. However, some soil scientists advise against feeding children produce grown on soil with more than 100 ppm of lead.
Of course, knowing as we do that that sludge itself contains unpredictable but high levels and thus certainly contributes to the lead contamination of soils, who in their right mind would continue to support the practice of disposing of it on land? And remember also, lead is only one of countless and unpredictable toxins to be found in sewage sludge.
Natalie “Sludge Giveaways” Sierra, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission
Natalie Sierra has helped the toxic sludge industry score a major victory in the green city of San Francisco, where they’ve actually been able to get city residents to take toxic sludge and dispose of it in their own yards and community gardens. As part of the SF Public Utilities Commission’s contract with Synagro to take its toxic sewage sludge, SF gets a little of it sent back to them in a form that’s very similar to what was used in the Baltimore study and at the White House: pelletized, composted, sanitized beyond recognition. This is given away to community, school and home gardeners as “organic compost.” Since May 2007, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has given away more than 125 tons of toxic sludge to the unsuspecting public at “free giveaway” events.
The sludge giveaways have been successful, either because the recipients think they’re getting real organic compost (how should they know otherwise when the city also gives away OMRI-certified organic, genuine compost made from composted food scraps collected in the green recycling bins), or they trustingly assume that the law regarding the use of toxic sewage sludge as fertilizer must be protective of human health. As Greg Kester emphasized in his talk, the toxic sludge industry is counting on the city to stand their ground against complaints from groups like the Center for Food Safety and RILES (ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems), which filed a legal petition with city in 2009 to stop the disposal of toxic sludge on city lands through the “giveaway” program. Precisely because of its reputation as a green city, San Francisco is the strategic battleground in a national dispute pitting the toxic sludge industry against localities that have decided they don’t want to be toxic sludge disposal sites anymore. In Kester and Sierra’s view, sludge “giveaways” are the best opportunity to convince the public that toxic sludge can be “beneficially reused” as “non-toxic, nutrient-rich organic biosolids compost.”
For the “biosolids” conference, which organizers assumed was attended only by industry insiders (admission to the one day event was $226 for people who aren’t members of the California Water Environment Association, a sewage industry trade association), Sierra gave a presentation on local ordinances in California that threatened to limit efforts to dispose of sludge on rural lands. When I questioned her after the conference as to why it was so important to give sludge away to San Francisco gardeners, she claimed that it was an issue of “social justice”—meaning you shouldn’t dump on someone else’s land what you don’t want on your own; that city dwellers shouldn’t be so cavalier about dumping their wastes on the farmland of rural counties. This was a shock to me, considering that, in her presentation about the “challenge” of anti-sludge rural counties, the only concern she had expressed was to “keep rate payers in mind” and “keep costs down.” But, in this “social justice” comment, it appeared for a moment that, in her view, rural communities should not be forced to receive of a city’s toxic sewage sludge for disposal on their farmland. She quickly disabused me of this illusion, assuring me that this was not what she meant. Perhaps she has not yet got her propaganda logic straight.
Liz “Bribery” Ostoich, Synagro
Liz Ostoich works as a project developer for the “land application”-of-toxic-sludge corporate giant, Synagro. Her presentation began with a cartoon image of a person who had gotten whacked very hard on the nose. She said she was going to teach us what she had learned in the school of hard knocks about how to gain local approval for toxic sludge processing. This is what she’s learned:
1. Poor Neighborhoods, Not Rich Neighborhoods
Ostoich advised us to pick the “right location,” not someplace that’s going to involve “taking trucks through a very exclusive neighborhood.”
2. Out of Sight, Out of Mind
A “remote location” is also key. Ostoich warned us to “be in an area where folks can’t really see you, they smell with their eyes.”
Ostoich gave two examples of projects she’d worked on, one Synagro’s Temescal Canyon facility in Corona, CA, “where it was done wrong,” and the other its South Kern County facility, which she told us was “unanimously supported.”
To hear Ostoich tell it, the closing of Synagro’s Temescal Canyon facility was the result of Synagro’s failure to manage the politics and public relations surrounding toxic sewage sludge, not their failure to properly manage the toxic sludge itself. She shared with us her suspicions that complaints that were phoned in from neighbors (suburban sprawl had placed 7,000 homes within a 4 mile radius of the sludge plant) were “bogus and contrived to get us shut down.”
What Ostoich didn’t share with us was that 37 individual small-claims lawsuits for $5,000 each, the maximum allowable amount, were won against Synagro for creating a public nuisance. This was for 11 years of suffering. One of the plaintiffs, Diana Schramm, told a local newspaper, “We would express our frustration to these people, Synagro, that the odor was so intense that it was burning our eyes, burning our noses, burning our throats. It was so frustrating. They just didn’t seem to care about us.”
As a counterpoint, Ostoich used Kern County as an example of a place where Synagro had done things right: “remote location,” “political involvement,” “proven technology,” and “going into it with the right attitude.” As an example of the community support Synagro received for their project, Ostoich read—in full—a letter from the president of Taft College written to California Senator Florez about Synagro’s generosity: an annual contribution of $25,000 to the college. Oh, and the letter happened to mention that Taft College was of the opinion that Synagro was a superb environmental steward. If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em?
That strategy didn’t work so well with the Taft City Council. As councilman Craig Noble said after the council voted to reject a check from Synagro for $25,000, he felt that accepting the money could have created a conflict of interest.
“I hate to take money from somebody that might try to be buying their way into something later on,” Noble said.
It isn’t easy to go up against a public-private trifecta that is so well-resourced and unscrupulous, but we have to try. If we can’t stop San Francisco, home to the man Organic Style magazine calls the World’s Greenest Mayor, from tricking its citizens into taken poison and growing their food in it, there’s no telling what the toxic sludge industry will try and get away with in other towns. That’s why we’re putting out a national call to all of our members and readers to encourage organic consumers across the country to help us stop San Francisco’s toxic sewage sludge giveaways.
US Govt Can Kill Citizens Overseas as Part of ‘Defined Policy’
Director of National Intelligence Tells Congress Americans Can Be Killed
By Jason Ditz, February 03, 2010
In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee today, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair told representatives that American citizens can be assassinated by the US government when they are oveseas.
Blair said the comments were intended to “reassure” Americans that there was a “set of defined policy and legal procedures” in place and that such assassinations are always carried out by the book.
Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R – MI) inquired about the procedures involved, asking what the legal framework was under which Americans could be killed by the intelligence community.
Blair insisted that under no circumstances would Americans be assassinated overseas for criticizing the government, adding “we don’t target people for free speech.” Rather they are subject to assassination when the government decides they are a threat and when they “get specific permission.” Exactly who was giving that permission was unclear.
The question has been increasingly important as the Obama Administration attempts to help the Yemeni government assassinate Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric who is not accused of any crimes by the US government. The administration maintains that secret evidence exists linking Awlaki to terrorism.
There seems to be a chilling lack of oversight in the procedure behind these killings, however, Blair’s assurances against politically motivated assassinations aside. The US has killed Americans in overseas attacks before, but only as “collateral damage.” It has never admitted to explicitly assassinating an American citizen before, though it seems that the policy is in place and such killings are only a matter of time.
The defense industry is pleased with Obama
By Laura Flanders | Online Journal | February 4, 2010
Who says the president is failing to show leadership? In one area at least, there’s no sign of flag or falter. If anything, the administration’s only becoming more forthright. Sad to say, that area is military build-up.
Last year, the White House made a big deal of cutting a weapons program — the F-22 fighter jet — and the cuts conveniently obscured the growth in spending on unmanned aircraft or drones (the weapons that Pakistanis say killed a record 123 civilians in 12 attacks last month; 41 for every alleged Al Qaeda member.)
This year, the president dispensed with window dressing. No big deal about cuts — except on the domestic side. While the administration’s record $3.8 trillion budget shrinks or freezes spending on domestic needs, it requests $708.3 billion for war. That’s $14.8 billion more than we’re spending now.
The total includes $548.9 billion for “regular” war, plus $159.3 billion for special spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Oh yes, the administration’s also asking Congress to increase spending on new nuclear weapons by more than $7 billion dollars over the next five years — despite that peace prize-winning pledge to cut the US arsenal and seek a nuclear weapons-free world.
The quote of the day comes from the CEO of a military contractor-funded policy group called the Lexington Institute. Loren Thompson tells Tuesday’s New York Times, “The defense industry is pleased but bemused . . . It’s been telling itself for years that when the Democrats got control it would be bad news for weapons programs. But the spending keeps going on.”
Take that you Nobel committee!
And to think some whiners complain about Democrats suffering from a lack of direction.
Erekat calls for alternative to two-state solution
Press TV – February 4, 2010
Chief Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat says Palestinians should consider other alternatives to the two-state solution, if the peace process with Israel does not move forward.
Palestinians should develop credible alternatives to the two-state solution, such as a one-state solution or a bi-national state and dissolve the Palestinian Authority, according to Erekat.
Erekat also called for a “campaign of non-violent resistance, such as prohibition of Palestinians working in settlements and boycott of Israeli products.”
Another option that the Palestinians should consider, according to Erekat, is the re-evaluation of the Oslo Accord and “declaring them null and void, partially or completely, or applying them selectively in a manner consistent with Palestinian interests.”
The prominent Palestinian figure also called for a united Palestinian message and position regarding peace talks with Israel.
Erekat went on to urge Palestinians to try to secure a UN Security Council resolution that would recognize the state of Palestine on its 1967 borders recognizing East Jerusalem (Al-Quds) as its capital he further called for a just solution to the Palestinian refugee issue based on Resolution 194.
The chief negotiator also called on Israel to implement a comprehensive settlement freeze, which would include in East Jerusalem (Al-Quds), and reopen Palestinian institutions in the city.
“Israel also must remove settlement outposts established since March 2001, lift the siege and closure on the West Bank and Gaza Strip and halt raids, arrests and assassinations and all activities that may jeopardize building mutual trust and confidence,” Saeb Erekat pointed out.
Raze Illegal Buildings – Unless They Are Jewish
Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler
SILWAN, Occupied East Jerusalem, Feb 3 (IPS) – Backed by armed security men, the municipal inspectors race their jeeps through the narrow alleyways and up a hillside crowded with buildings.
Some of the homes are well-faced with stone; the naked concrete of others gives off something of a temporary air.
One block of flats stands out for its unusual seven-storey height in an area of the city where two or three storied buildings are the norm. And then there is the giant, blue-and-white Israeli national flag draped demonstratively over the front of the building, from the roof down to the ground.
This is the so-called ‘Beit Yehonatan’, the House of Yehonatan, where religious Jews have put down a nationalist marker in the heart of this Palestinian neighbourhood, part of a major effort to change the face of Arab East Jerusalem that has been under Israeli occupation since 1967.
The inspectors’ mission is to deliver demolition orders to owners of illegally-built homes, almost all of them Palestinians.
Beit Yehonatan is also exceptional in this respect. In July 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court ordered that it too was built “illegally” by the settlers and should be evacuated and sealed off.
When, for the umpteenth time, the inspectors arrive at the settlers’ building they find it shuttered. They are unable to gain access. It is not clear whether anybody is at home. Shrugging their shoulders the inspectors move on to deliver demolition orders on more accessible targets – Palestinian families.
Anyway, they know that there are powerful forces determined to ensure that this display of equal application of the law to Jews and Arabs remains precisely that – a demonstration.
The seven-story structure was built in Silwan by the religious nationalist association Ateret Cohanim in 2004 without the necessary permits. Several Jewish families from Ateret Cohanim – a lynchpin group in the Jewish colonisation endeavour in East Jerusalem – are known to live there.
Last week, Jerusalem’s Israeli mayor Nir Barkat launched a new legal maneuver in a bid to stave off implementation of the High Court order that the settlers be evacuated.
This, despite the fact that the municipality’s own legal advisor, Yosi Havilio, ruled that the court order issued two years ago be implemented immediately. Havilio said that the Mayor’s last-ditch attempt to bypass the court by appealing for an additional ruling from “an external legal authority” was “unacceptable”.
Faced by international opprobrium over the repeated cases of settlers moving more and more into Palestinian neighbourhoods, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu says blandly “it is a purely municipal matter”.
That has enabled the mayor to stand his ground. In a letter to Israel’s State Prosecutor Moshe Lador, Barkat insisted that he has police backing too. “The police believe there is serious concern that the day after Beit Yehonatan would be sealed off it would be invaded by Jews and/or Arabs and that could create an unnecessary point of friction,” he warned.
The mayor is also trying to push an alternative gambit to having the “illegal building” closed down. He is proposing to issue a new municipal by-law specifically for Silwan which will allow the construction of buildings there up to four stories high.
The motive is clear: Such a by-law would “whitewash” many of the illegal buildings in the area, including Beit Yehonatan.
Given the mayor’s record, however, this seems unlikely to ease the plight of the Palestinians of East Jerusalem whose homes are regularly pulled down on the grounds that they have not acquired the necessary building permits.
In other parts of East Jerusalem the mayor has indeed approved construction tenders for new Jewish building projects; he has yet, though, to extend such tenders to Palestinian applicants in spite of repeated pledges to do so on the grounds that all residents of Jerusalem, Jews and Arabs alike, be treated “equally” in respect of building applications. In the nearby Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Israeli and international demonstrators have been gathering weekly to protest the eviction of Palestinian families and their replacement by Jewish settlers.
At last Friday’s protest, a leftwing member of the Israeli parliament, Ilan Gilon, poured cold water on the settler claim of ownership over the houses they take over on the grounds that they rely on property titles held by Jews from early in the 20th century.
“If settlers can prove ownership of 28 buildings, Palestinians can prove ownership of 28,000,” he said.
“There are times when one cannot afford to sit quietly by,” the internationally-renowned Israeli novelist, David Grossman, told the gathering. “The settlers and the Right – with tremendous help from the government, the Israeli legal system and important business interests – continue to abuse Palestinian rights in a thousand ways.
“They are complicating the situation to such an extent as to make any peace agreement impossible. Basically, they are destroying our future – of Israelis and Palestinians alike,” Grossman warned.
Copyright © 2010 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
Israeli report claims $2 billion stolen from Palestinians
By Jonathon Cook | February 4, 2010
Nazareth – Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than US $2 billion by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists have alleged.
A new report, “State Robbery,” to be published later this month, says the “theft” continued even after the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994 and part of the money was supposed to be transferred to a special fund on behalf of the workers.
According to information supplied by Israeli officials, most of the deductions from the workers’ pay were invested in infrastructure projects in the Palestinian territories – a presumed reference to the massive state subsidies accorded to the settlements.
Nearly 50,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are working in Israel – following the easing of restrictions on entering Israel under the “economic peace” promised by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister – and continue to have such contributions docked from their pay.
Complicit in the deception, the report adds, is the Histadrut, the Israeli labor federation, which levies a monthly fee on Palestinian workers, even though they are not entitled to membership and are not represented in labor disputes.
“This is a clear-cut case of theft from Palestinian workers on a grand scale,” said Shir Hever, a Jerusalem-based economist and one of the authors of the report. “There are no reasons for Israel to delay in returning this money either to the workers or to their beneficiaries.”
The deductions started being made in 1970, three years after the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories began, when Palestinian workers started to enter Israel in significant numbers, most of them employed as manual laborers in the agriculture and construction industries.
Typically, the workers lose a fifth of their salary in deductions that are supposed to cover old age payments, unemployment allowance, disability insurance, child benefits, trade union fees, pension fund, holiday and sick pay, and health insurance. In practice, however, the workers are entitled only to disability payments in case of work accidents and are insured against loss of work if their employer goes bankrupt.
According to the report, compiled by two human rights groups, the Alternative Information Centre and Kav La’Oved, only a fraction of the total contributions – less than eight percent – was used to award benefits to Palestinian workers. The rest was secretly transferred to the finance ministry.
The Israeli organizations assess that the workers were defrauded of at least $2.25 billion in today’s prices, in what they describe as a minimum and “very conservative” estimate of the misappropriation of the funds. Such a sum represents about 10 percent of the PA’s annual budget.
The authors also note that they excluded from their calculations two substantial groups of Palestinian workers – those employed in the Israeli settlements and those working in Israel’s black economy – because figures were too hard to obtain.
Hever said the question of whether the bulk of the deductions – those for national insurance – had been illegally taken from the workers was settled by the Israeli High Court of Justice back in 1991. The judges accepted a petition from the flower growers’ union that the government should return about $1.5 million in contributions from Palestinian workers in the industry.
“The legal precedent was set then and could be used to reclaim the rest of these excessive deductions,” he said.
At the height of Palestinian participation in the Israeli labor force, in the early 1990s, as many as one in three Palestinian workers was dependent on an Israeli employer.
Israel continued requiring contributions from Palestinian workers after the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, arguing that it needed to make the deductions to ensure Israeli workers remained competitive.
However, the report notes that such practices were supposed to have been curbed by the Oslo process. Israel agreed to levy an “equalization tax” – equivalent to the excessive contributions paid by Palestinians – a third of which would be invested in a fund that would later be available to the workers.
In fact, however, the Israeli state comptroller, a government watchdog official, reported in 2003 that only about a tenth of the money levied on the workers had actually been placed in the fund.
The Finance Ministry has admitted that most of the money taken from the workers was passed to Israeli military authorities in the Palestinian territories to pay for “infrastructure programs.” Hannah Zohar, the director of Kav La’Oved who co-authored the report, said she believed that the ministry was actually referring to the construction of illegal settlements.
The report is also highly critical of the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union federation, which it accuses of grabbing “a piece of the pie” by forcing Palestinian workers to pay a monthly “organizing fee” to the union since 1970, even though Palestinians are not entitled to membership.
Despite the Histadrut’s agreement with its Palestinian counterpart in 2008 to repay the fees, only 20 percent was returned, leaving $30 million unaccounted for.
The Histadrut was also implicated in another “rip-off,” Hever said. It agreed in 1990 to the Israeli construction industry’s demand that Palestinian workers pay an extra two percent tax to promote the training of recent Jewish immigrants, most of them from the former Soviet Union.
Hever said that in effect the Palestinian laborers were required to “subsidize the training of workers meant to replace them.” The funds were never used for the stated purpose but were mainly issued as grants to the families of Israeli workers.
In one especially cynical use of the funds, the report claims, the money was spent on portable stoves for soldiers involved in Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza last year.
In response, the Finance Ministry called the report “incorrect and misleading,” and the Histadrut said it was “full of lies.” However, neither provided rebuttals of the report’s allegations or its calculations.
Hever said the government body responsible for making the deductions, the department of payments, had initially refused to divulge any of its figures, but had partly relented after some statistics were made available through leaks from its staff.
Assef Saeed, a senior official in the Palestinian Authority’s Labor Ministry, said the PA was keen to discuss the issue of the deductions, but that talks were difficult because of the lack of contacts between the two sides.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. A version of this article originally appeared in The National, printed in Abu Dhabi.
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