Israeli fire injures Palestinian worker in southern Gaza
Ma’an –25/03/2010
Gaza – A Palestinian worker was critically injured on Thursday morning as the Israeli forces at the closed Sufa crossing opened fire on a group of men collecting rubble for the re-manufacturing of construction materials, medics said.
Director of ambulance and emergency services in Gaza, Muawiya Hassanein, identified the injured man as Naji Abu Rayda, 32, noting he was shot in the back and transferred to the European Hospital.
An Israeli military spokesman said he was unfamiliar any such incident in the area of the Sufa crossing.
Israeli news sources reported a similar incident near the Rafah crossing, southwest of Sufa. The spokesman said he had no knowledge of an incident matching either description.
According to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, Rayda was injured in the right thigh when he and several other workers were approximately 500 meters from the border fence.
Earlier in the week, Al Mezan reported Israeli soldiers near the Erez crossing opened fired on men “collecting rubble to sell to brick factories, which recycles it into bricks.” The men were reportedly 100 meters away from the border.
“This is the only source of bricks for construction that is available in the Gaza Strip, which suffers from an acute shortage of construction materials due the Israeli siege,” the report said.
Two days earlier, Israeli forces reportedly arrested 20 Palestinian workers who were collecting the rubble from destroyed buildings in the northern Gaza Strip. The report said four of those detained were children. Eight were released the next day after interrogations, the report said.
New poll: About 1 in 3 Americans thinks 9/11 was “a big fabrication”
By Kevin Barrett | March 21, 2010
A new poll has shown that about 1 in 3 Americans — roughly 100 million people — think 9/11 was “a big fabrication.” The poll was evidently commissioned and/or conducted by anti-9/11-truth forces, as demonstrated by the headline: “Americans Disagree with Iranian President on 9/11 ‘Fabrication.'” By framing the issue as one of agreement or disagreement with media-demonized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and focusing on those who disagreed, Angus Reid Public Opinion was spinning the story as hard as it could possibly be spun. But all the spin in the world can’t hide the fact that these are the biggest MIHOP* numbers yet!
According to the new Angus Reid 9/11 poll, 26% of Americans say flat-out that 9/11 was “a big fabrication,” while 12% more aren’t sure. Splitting the difference with the not-sures, we arrive at 32% either flat-out believing or leaning toward MIHOP. Taking into consideration the obvious pollster bias, and the psychological tendency of poll respondents to disguise their real beliefs in order to avoid pejorative labels like “conspiracy theorist” or “Ahmedinejad supporter,” we must conclude that the real numbers are considerably higher.
Compare the Angus Reid poll with the scientific poll conducted by Voice Broadcasting, Inc. for my Congressional campaign, which found that one out of three Wisconsin District 3 voters either thought the 9/11 WTC “collapses” were actually controlled demolitions, or that we needed a new investigation to find out.
* MIHOP = Made It Happen on Purpose (i.e. “they did it”) as opposed to LIHOP = “Let It Happen On Purpose.”
Israel’s latest provocation at al-Aqsa
By Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 25 March 2010
The Israeli government has indicated that it will press ahead with a plan to enlarge the Jewish prayer plaza at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, despite warnings that the move risks triggering a third intifada.
Israeli officials rejected this week a Jerusalem court’s proposal to shelve the plan after the judge accepted that the plaza’s expansion would violate the “status quo” arrangement covering the Old City’s holy places. Islamic authorities agreed to the arrangement after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967.
The site eyed by Israeli officials is located at the Mughrabi Gate, an entrance to the mosque compound known as the Haram al-Sharif, the most sensitive site in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Inside are al-Aqsa Mosque and the golden-topped Dome of the Rock.
Earlier encroachments by Israel on Islamic authority at the site have triggered clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians. A heavily armed visit to the compound by Ariel Sharon in 2000, shortly before he became prime minister, to declare Israeli rights there sparked the second intifada.
In recent weeks, analysts have grown increasingly concerned that a third intifada is imminent as Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has advanced settlement building in East Jerusalem and declared several places deep in the occupied West Bank as Jewish heritage sites.
Another assault on Muslim control so close to al-Aqsa Mosque risked “pouring fuel on the fire,” said Hanna Sweid, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament who filed the original planning objections to the Israeli scheme.
According to evidence presented to the Jerusalem court, Israeli officials used minor storm damage to a stone ramp leading to the Mughrabi Gate as a pretext to tear it down six years ago. The intention is to replace the ramp with a permanent metal bridge and then extend the Jewish prayer plaza into the area where the ramp was.
The scheme is the brainchild of Shmuel Rabinowitz, the rabbi in charge of the Western Wall, who declared the damage to the ramp in 2004 a “miracle” that had offered Israel the chance to take control of more land from Islamic authorities in the Old City.
The rabbi’s plan was approved in late 2007 by a special ministerial committee headed by Ehud Olmert, then the prime minister. The project has also won backing from Netanyahu, though he froze construction work in July under orders from the Jerusalem court.
The judge, Moussia Arad, proposed in January that the ramp be reinstated, or at the very least that the bridge follow the exact route of the ramp, and that all prayer at the site be banned. That position won the backing of United Nations officials monitoring Israel’s work at the Mughrabi Gate.
The Jordanian, Turkish and Palestinian Islamic authorities have all expressed deep concern at Israeli excavations at the Mughrabi Gate that are seen as a prelude to the plaza’s expansion.
Observers had hoped that, faced with the danger of another row with the United States so soon after the diplomatic crisis sparked by Israeli settlement building in East Jerusalem, Netanyahu might agree to the court’s compromise.
They have been proved wrong.
“Netanyahu has a history of trampling on Palestinian rights in the Old City,” Sweid said. “There is every reason to be worried about what he plans to get up to this time.”
In 1996, during his previous stint as prime minister, Netanyahu opened the Western Wall tunnel, another excavation close to the mosque compound, resulting in clashes in which 75 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers were killed.
Israel, which says the mosques sit on the ruins of two ancient Jewish temples, built by Solomon and Herod, refers to the site as Temple Mount and has staked a claim to a degree of sovereignty over the area in recent peace negotiations.
Last week, in a sign of the explosive consequences of tampering with the status quo concerning Jerusalem’s holy places, riots broke out in a “day of rage” in East Jerusalem following Israel’s announcement that it had rebuilt an old synagogue, the Hurva, close to the mosques.
“The Haram al-Sharif is a site of unrivaled Muslim sensitivity and the Israeli government is playing with fire here,” said Mohammed Masalha, a lecturer who heads a coalition of Islamic groups inside Israel that brought the court case.
In evidence presented to the court, Meir Ben Dov, an Israeli archaeologist and the excavations director at the Western Wall for nearly four decades, produced photographic evidence showing that the storm had caused only a minor landslide.
“I was asked by the government to inspect the damage two days after it occurred and I found maybe a dozen stones had been dislodged,” he said. “The ramp could have been repaired in less than a week but instead they decided to demolish it.”
Judge Arad, Ben Dov said, had been “shocked” when she saw the photographs.
Ben Dov said his recommendation that the walkway be repaired for $14,000 was ignored by Israeli officials, including the then-tourism minister, Benny Elon, a settler rabbi who heads a far-right party. Instead the government tore down the ramp and built a temporary wooden bridge to the Mughrabi Gate while excavations were carried out in the area exposed by the ramp’s destruction.
The Jerusalem comptroller, Shulamit Rubin, the city’s watchdog official, criticized the excavations at the time, saying they were illegal because the necessary authorizations had not been sought.
The secretive nature of the excavations was widely assumed by Islamic groups to be evidence of an Israeli intention to search for parts of the destroyed temples. With such evidence, Israel would have a stronger claim to extend its control.
The unscientific approach to the excavations was highlighted in early 2007 when it emerged that three years earlier Israeli archaeologists had unearthed at the site a Muslim prayer room from the time of the Saladin, dating to the 11th century, but had kept the discovery quiet.
In February 2007, when Israel brought heavy machinery to the Mughrabi Gate excavations, hundreds of Palestinians clashed with police while the Islamic Movements within Israel staged large demonstrations. Islamic Jihad said it had fired two Qassam rockets from Gaza in response, and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade threatened to carry out attacks if the work was not halted.
Islamic authorities also expressed fears that the compound of mosques might be damaged by the bulldozers, and that the heavy machinery might also destroy the as-yet-undiscovered al-Buraq mosque, believed to be located close to the Mughrabi Gate and marking the site where the Prophet Mohammed tethered his horse on his Night Journey between Mecca and Jerusalem.
To calm the situation, Israel allowed Turkish experts to examine the excavations a short time later. They reported that Israel was trying to sideline Jerusalem’s Islamic history so that its Jewish aspects could be emphasized.
Israel had another reason for pushing ahead with the illegal excavations, said Kais Nasser, the lawyer representing the Islamic groups. “They needed to unearth something, anything, that could be claimed as an antiquity to nullify Muslim demands for the ramp to be reinstated. Rebuilding the ramp would then be impossible because it would risk damaging an archaeological site.”
Nasser said Israel hopes that if it can present the bridge as the only feasible option, then there will be no obstacles to expanding the prayer plaza.
Ben Dov said he shared such suspicions about Israel’s activities at the site, adding that the goal of Israeli officials seemed to be to gain control over the whole 480-meter length of the Western Wall.
He and other observers have said this is just one more example of a long-standing policy to gradually encroach on Muslim control of the mosque compound.
Among the most significant has been the creation of the City of David, an Israeli archaeological park, directly south of al-Aqsa Mosque in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. The site is run by Elad, an extremist settler group, that has taken over neighboring Palestinian homes and, along with the Jerusalem municipality and government officials, is pushing for dozens more to be demolished. It eventually wants to link up the park with the Temple Mount.
Jewish settlers have also been concentrating their efforts on taking over Palestinian homes in the Muslim quarter, close to the Haram al-Sharif, and have been supported by right-wing politicians, including in the past by Netanyahu.
One settler organization, Ateret Cohanim, has been especially active, and is known to be excavating under Palestinian homes around the compound in the hope of discovering traces of the temples.
“What we see here is an unholy alliance of government ministers, Jerusalem municipality officials and settler organizations trying to revive a supposed golden era of Jewish sovereignty from thousands of years ago,” Sweid said.
In addition, he said, Israel believed that a more significant Israeli presence close to the mosques would strengthen its hand in any final peace talks over the division of Jerusalem with the Palestinians, with Israel able to stake a bigger claim to sovereignty over the site.
At the Camp David talks in 2000, Bill Clinton, then US president, proposed dividing sovereignty so that Israel would have control over both the “subterranean spaces” of the mosque compound and the Western Wall. During the talks Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister of the day, alarmed observers by calling the whole compound the Jewish “holy of holies,” a term previously used in referring only to the inner sanctum of the destroyed temples.
There are additional fears among Palestinians, and the wider Muslim world, of darker plots being hatched by even more extreme groups.
Although Jewish religious purity laws have traditionally forbidden Jews from entering the Temple Mount, a growing number of rabbis are demanding that Jews be allowed to pray in the compound. Even more fanatical groups are known to favor blowing up the mosques and building a third temple in their place.
The recent rebuilding of the Hurva synagogue has added to such concerns. The Israeli media reported that, according to a 300-year-old rabbinical prophecy, the synagogue’s rebuilding would herald the construction of the third temple.
A sordid affair: The Mughrabi quarter’s ethnic cleansing
Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Mughrabi, or Moroccan, quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City after its capture in 1967 is one of the more sordid episodes of the 1967 war.
Until it was destroyed by Israel in 2004, the stone ramp that led to the Mughrabi Gate — one of the main entrances to the elevated compound of mosques known as the Haram al-Sharif — was the only visible reminder that the quarter, once home to 1,000 Palestinians, had ever existed.
At the end of the June 1967 war, as Israeli troops poured into the Old City, the Israeli government was presented with an opportunity not only to restore a Jewish presence to the walled city but to create a newly expanded Jewish quarter that would have the Western Wall at its center.
Before 1948, prayer at the Wall had been possible only at several points along a narrow alley at the margins of the densely populated Moroccan quarter, an area bequeathed in the twelfth century to Saladin’s followers by his son Malik al-Afdal.
But in the immediate wake of the “miraculous” victory in 1967, the Israeli government saw the chance to create a wide prayer plaza in front of the Wall, making it the symbolic heart of an expanded Jewish state that could unite religious and secular Jews.
All that stood in their way were the quarter’s 135 homes.
On the night of 10 June, Uzi Narkiss, head of the army’s central command, authorized 15 private demolition crews to raze the quarter under cover of dark. He, like the politicians, knew that neither the international community nor the Israeli courts would consent to such a brazen violation of international law.
When Teddy Kollek, the mayor of West Jerusalem, had consulted the justice minister, he had been told: “I don’t know what the legal status is. Do it quickly and may the God of Israel be with you.”
Uzi Benziman, an Israeli journalist, described the “near-mystic” compulsion that drove those behind the act of ethnic cleansing: “The officers and the contractors considered themselves emissaries, come to renew Jewish statehood as it had been 1,897 years earlier.”
An officer went from house to house ordering the residents to evacuate. According to observers, those who refused finally fled when the walls of their homes came down. One old woman, found amid the rubble, died a short time later.
As the ruins were cleared and the ground leveled to create an expansive plaza in front of the Western Wall, the contractors were told to use the rubble from the homes to build a ramp up to the Mughrabi Gate. The gate is the only entrance to the compound for which Israel kept the key. Today it is the access point for all non-Muslim visitors, including the Israeli police.
The Western Wall and the plaza, on land that had previously fallen under the control of the Islamic authorities, was placed under the jurisdiction of the Israeli religious affairs ministry. A few days later, on the Jewish holy day of Shavuot, an estimated 200,000 Israeli Jews — one in 10 of the population — came to visit the Wall.
Although Israel had effectively annexed East Jerusalem, its leaders were still troubled by the possible international repercussions of being seen to seize control of the Old City’s holy places, especially the compound of mosques. Under a so-called “status quo” agreement, Muslim officials were supposed to continue controlling the mosque compound, with Israeli oversight.
But that did not stop the rapid emergence of a movement in Israel seeking control of the compound too. Many Jews believe the ruins of the temples of Solomon and Herod can be found under the mosques.
From the early 1970s, extremist rabbis — led by the Shlomo Goren, then the chief rabbi of Israel — began lobbying for Jews to be allowed into the compound to pray, despite traditional rabbinical rulings against such a practice.
Jewish groups soon sprang up demanding more: that the mosques be blown up to make way for a third temple that would bring nearer the arrival of the Messiah.
Since the outbreak of the second intifada, little of the status quo agreement remains. Israeli movement restrictions affecting both Gaza and the West Bank mean that today only a tiny number of Palestinians can reach the mosques. Palestinian institutions are also barred from operating inside Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, settlers and Israeli officials have encroached on more and more land around the mosque compound. At the Camp David talks with the Palestinians in 2000, Israel proposed for the first time that Jews be allowed to pray in the compound and that Israel have a degree of sovereignty over the site.
In recent years Jews have started to be escorted by Israeli police inside the compound through the Mughrabi Gate, though praying so far has not been sanctioned.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net
Venezuela’s proven oil reserves climb to more than 211 billion barrels
Latin American Herald Tribune | March 22, 2010
Venezuela maintained its status as the world’s No.2 holder of proven oil reserves, with a total of 211.2 billion barrels at the close of 2009. That figure includes the 39.9 billion barrels classified as proven reserves during the month of December, the Communications Ministry said in a bulletin.
Worldwide, Venezuela ranked behind only Saudi Arabia (266 billion barrels) and ahead of Iraq (113 billion barrels) and Kuwait (94 billion barrels) in terms of proven reserves at the end of last year. The country’s total proven reserves, however, amount to less than half of the at least 500 billion barrels that are believed to lie within Venezuelan territory.
On January 22, the US Geological Survey released a study indicating that the Orinoco Belt in eastern Venezuela holds 513 billion barrels of technically recoverable crude. The USGS, whose estimate for that 50,000-square-kilometer (19,300-square-mile) area was nearly double the 280 billion barrels of recoverable crude that had been calculated by state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), said the Orinoco Belt was the largest oil accumulation it had ever evaluated.
*The USGS study, the first to precisely evaluate how much oil can be extracted from the subsoil using current technology, also confirmed that the Orinoco oil is tar-like, heavy crude.
The Chavez government has recently begun the process of developing the Orinoco reserves by signing a series of agreements with a score of foreign oil companies, which must form joint ventures with PDVSA in which the Venezuelan government has a majority stake.
Chavez said in late January that the USGS also “is recognizing for the first time the large quantity of gas associated with that petroleum … and are estimating it at 130 trillion cubic feet. We estimate that (the country’s gas reserves can increase) by another 150 trillion.”
He recalled that one of the world’s largest gas deposits — a 33-square-kilometer (12.7-square-mile) area containing 8 trillion cubic feet of gas — was discovered last September off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast.
PDVSA owns the largest stake in the consortium that will develop the block where the find was made, while Spain’s Repsol and Italy’s Eni will have a 32.5% share each.
Low hope for low carbon
By Andrew McKillop | Excerpts | March 22, 2010
Annexed to the climate change and global warming hysteria that received its political kiss of death at the failed Copenhagen “climate summit” in Dec 2009, the rationale for why everybody sensible has to be so concerned about this threat to humanity is that clean and green energy will save us. Not only “the climate” and “the ecology,” including polar bears, low lying countries from Holland to the Maldives, coral reefs, Himalayan glaciers, people living along tropical storm tracks and all the rest — but also jobs in our cities. Along with green jobs, the new crusade for low carbon energy would cut oil import bills to nothing, balance trade with the rest of the world, improve national finances and strengthen the national currency. Everything is possible!
Green growth strategies flourished in the 2003-2009 period, in the wake of constantly rising oil prices and spiraling hysteria about climate change. The bottom line of the climate change priests and soothsayers was that low carbon green energy, developed as the only way to save us from climate apocalypse, would or could also save the economy.
In fact, only high oil prices and high energy prices can make green energy feasible without depending on government aid, the carbon finance circus, and coming carbon taxes, but this is not a politically correct argument. Preferred approaches are to use public funds to sponsor and when it gets necessary, bail out carbon finance gamblers, and supply a raft of public funds to subsidize the green energy fantasies of the corporate elite.
These fantasies already have a bad track record in the short period since “going green” became big business, from about 2003. Several started with a death wish for early bankruptcy, the most recent and biggest example being US maize-based bio-ethanol fuels production, which rode a boom-bust speculative finance cycle through 2005-2008. Making car fuels from food grains and vegetable oils is not only a way to generate high food prices leading to food riots in poor countries, but an expensive, inefficient, low-yielding method to substitute a small amount of present demand for oil-based car fuels. Today’s production overcapacity for windmills and solar photovoltaic power already threatens a repeat of the epic biofuels boom-and-bust, during which even Bill Gates managed to lose money (about US$44 million). Hard-headed short sellers of bio-fuel company stocks, like Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital LLC made hundreds of millions of dollars on the certain and sure collapse of share prices in this overblown sector during 2007.
Coming soon, really big corporate losses feeding short selling profits for some, huge losses for small investors, and demands for government bailouts from the Too Big To Fail among corporate losers, will be generated by the electric car boom-and-bust.
WHY THE HYSTERIA ?
Climate change advocacy and carbon finance have grown together in the OECD countries with corporate interests frenetically wrestling for the widening range of constantly changing government subsidies, aid, carbon credits, clean development offsets, feed-in tariffs and tax favors to develop alternate energy. Advocacy is necessarily tinted with hysteria of the type “We are saving you from death — You don’t ask the price.”
Politicians, who always appreciate any pitch that captivates the child-brained crowd, quickly warmed to global warming hysteria. This was despite its far-out apocalyptic “message” that unparalleled disasters including Biblical-style floods will strike the planet before the end of this century — unless the People behave. Unless the average car buyer gets to like electric and hybrid cars (despite the braking problems), recycles household rubbish to make it easy grubbing out metals, glass and plastic, buys a bicycle imported from China, rides in buses or trains but patriotically buys a government subsidized oil fueled car, pays more for organic and “bio” food, uses less electricity, saves oil in countless ways, and goes green in every confusing and conflicting way they are told.
Maintaining public angst, and public approval were unfortunately confused as being exactly the same thing by political, media and corporate spin doctors. Constant exaggeration of the invented climate menace was decided necessary. This led the high priests of hype, such as Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri, James Lovelock, James Hansen and other climate change gravy train riders to desperately rival each other, and babble ever more ridiculous fire-and-brimstone at the microphone. Drifting always further in delirious wafts and spirals of lies, distortion, exaggeration and blatant propaganda, the high priests of hype were too stupid, too arrogant to see the end coming in late 2009.
THE CONVERGING PLANKS
Rising hype on global warming soon overshot into stratospheric data fraud by UN credible (that is IN credible) high level experts on climate change, led by former railway engineer Rajendra Pachauri and failed politician Al Gore. The spin and hype on global warming catastrophe was however welcomed by political elites in 2008-2009 as a handy way to take the tiny public mind off gargantuan meltdowns in the finance, bank and insurance sector, and the massive bailouts for government-friendly corporate thieves, gamblers and fools.
Agitprop was needed because the economy went out of control. Recession did serious damage not only to real people and their real jobs, but collateral damage to the credibility of politicians, running the magic New Economy hands free, with only the fingers of their corporate finance friends on the economic jugular vein. These greedy fingers squeezed a lot too hard in 2008, with the result being the house of cards fell apart, needing strenuous diversionary tactics.
Any faltering of economic growth, any loss of credibility in the ability of exactly the same politicians, and exactly their same corporate friends to magically restore the economy when it temporarily (of course) stops growing are two more menaces, needing energetic response. Credibility for “global warming catastrophe” was worked into the same set of political elite fears, as corporate green energy player fears of a decline in government subsidies for their newest and best boom-bust gimmick.
In such strenuous and stirring circumstances, climate extremism and doomsterism richly larded with fake facts from junk science was a basic need. Governments must have their purse strings prized open, and kept open by the corporate and policy elite. Politicians need to be loved and admired, or at least re-elected for their far-seeing decisions. Media owners and operators who revel in Great Causes which sell newsprint, and like to imagine they still control what Mr and Mrs Average think, were quick to come on board for the climate crisis ride. They also stayed too long, forgetting that Internet and even word of mouth were working against them.
Overcapacity of wind power and solar electric power manufacturing capacities is now widespread in many countries, even in China and India, as the “low hanging fruit” of the best sites, the biggest subsidies, the largest public support and acclaim is used up — and oil prices although rising are still far behind the peak attained in 2008. As the economic rationale declines, huge new green energy ventures shift toward ego-trips for politicians, and become purely prestige. Chinese vice minister for Industry and IT, Miao Wei, described massive wind farms in China as essentially “vanity projects,” March 11, 2010 in part due to probable rapid wear and tear of turbines increasingly located in hostile locations, such as China’s dusty deserts, and increasingly in deep water offshore wind-farms ever further from land.
Staying credible is always most difficult as the curve of public knowledge rises, and the new gimmick does not deliver. Probably the biggest threat to corporate and Big Government low carbon energy and the related fantasy of the sustainable economy, is loss of credibility for the “menace of catastrophic climate change.” If the menace isn’t so dire as it seemed before the massive failure of the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009, why should governments rack up even more debt, to finance unsure, high cost low carbon energy with public loans, grants and support? This is the question that kills, like a wooden stake for errant low flying vampires.
AL GORE STILL HOPEFUL
Al Gore is not fazed by the Copenhagen rout and continues to announce with eye popping sincerity and conviction (in a February 28 interview with the New York Times) that the world faces “unimaginable calamity” from global warming. He added we must all act now to save human civilization as we know it (perhaps a reference to Afghan war, football, Twitter and Facebook?).
Going further because time is limited to less than a century, the selected, tried and tested members of the global warming hysteria circus, with rich pickings from the corporate and political elite’s full adoption of global warming hysteria, are now fighting to stay up the greasy pole. Following the Copenhagen rout and Climategate, the gravy train riders are likely to go one mile further in their fantasies, and need all the ammunition they can grab. Now joined to their predication of the coming apocalypse, “unimaginable calamity” also includes high oil prices, placed by Al Gore at a price level around $80 a barrel. Even if the consumer herd has forgotten the polar bear’s plight and prefers Haiti quake stories to threats of the Maldives sinking (under a million tonnes of concrete tourist coastal works), they will rise like wounded tigers if gasoline prices rise another 50 cents a gallon. Al Gore hopes !
Al Gore rolls his eyes at the microphone and thunders the killer numbers — the oil bill of the USA costs “hundreds of billion dollars a year.” To be sure, Gore also reminds his uncritical if not brain dead admirers that oil exporter countries are run by dangerous and hostile regimes, uninterested and perhaps not even believing in climate change. And that is dangerous.
The most recent record annual net oil costs of the USA achieved a little more than two of those Al Gore “hundreds of billions,” reaching about $220 billion in 2007. This can be compared with the $1,300 billion US budget deficit for fiscal year 2010 recently announced by Obama, or the cumulative amount of financial bailouts to Wall Street by Paulson, under G W Bush, and Geithner under B H Obama in 2008-2009. This totaled at least $1,500 billion. Similar budget deficits, up to 12% of annual GNP, apply in Europe and state bailouts of corporate financial gamblers in Europe have cost similar amounts as those in USA, well above $1,200 billion in 2008-2009.
* This raft of debt-based spending mostly to bail out reckless gamblers in the finance sector would cover roughly 10 years of total OECD oil import costs at an average $100 a barrel.
Al Gore and the ‘extreme global warming community’ have to stay hopeful, and maintain the hype because signs of flagging interest or “conviction” by political and corporate leaders is starting to show in their careful avoidance of climate crisis sound-bytes, post-Copenhagen. Most OECD heads of state, at least before Copenhagen, vied with each other to beat Al Gore with heart-wrenching appeals to citizen concern, calling the failed and bizarre conference held in a Scandinavian capital in deep winter, “the last chance to save the planet from global warming catastrophe.”
This talk has been glaringly absent since December, suggesting OECD heads of state, notably of the US, Germany, France and UK could soon backtrack on their so-sincere conviction that their voter masses need a politically forced, ultra rapid development of “green energy”. […]
ENERGY TRANSITION AND ECONOMIC ROUT
Debt financing of everything, especially the ever rising and unreal goals set for energy transition by heads of state and political leaders in the big oil importer countries, will continue being needed until and unless carbon taxes and trading attain the annual turnover able to generate the funding needed for the ever larger targets announced by political leaders. Another condition for generating the finance needed for these plans includes a return to economic growth. Present carbon finance and trading are proudly estimated by the World Bank as attaining $126 billion in 2008-2009, but trickle-down and spin-off from trading gains and losses on a raft of complex and ramifying climate change paper, to real spending on real world green energy is low.
Falling credibility of climate change hysteria from extremists like Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri, and lower-rank members of the climate change circus, such as “Gaia philosophy” writer James Lovelock, James Hansen and Club of Rome intellectuals now suggests falling pay-checks and cheap finance loans for the gambling community. At this time, orating about Apocalypse Now from climate change and always going further in bending the shock figures and statistics could be a losing strategy. The risk is clear: the climate change circus has now talked itself off-stage.
Before the Copenhagen rout, announced goals of energy transition in the OECD countries had attained extreme and impossible highs, for example 80% reductions in CO2 emissions and implied cuts of 80% in the dependence on fossil energy by 2040, as announced with a winning smile by Obama, and the leaders of Germany, France and UK before the climate summit. To keep the public and consumers happy, and make their targets for energy substitution with low carbon yet more fantastic, yet more impossible, these leaders added that total energy production and consumption would keep on growing. Thanks to the green economy, economic growth would not only be restored but also “strengthened.”
Financing needs were never spelled out for these playful fantasies, but can be guessed, and are probably in the 15-30 trillions of US dollars range to 2040, at current dollar values. This can appear possible, but in real terms is impossible. Achieving this kind of long-term transition of the global energy system and forgetting the ideological quest “to save human civilization as we know it,” would need a real Marshall Plan for Energy. More likely, current-crop leaders of the OECD are on track to produce a real Economic Armageddon, becoming more possible each day. […]
Steven Chu, Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri and many other defenders of a forced march to energy transition either avoid any discussion of cutting energy consumption, or claim that growth in total energy consumption is entirely possible. In the case of Chu however, there is already de facto admission that “greening” electricity supply will need growth of nuclear power, the Smart Grid, and major advances in energy storage. Again in the US case the very fuzzily-defined and technologically fragile domain of “advanced energy storage” is already forecast as needing tens of billions of dollars investment, on top of the tens of billions of dollars that Obama has made available for nuclear power because of its ability to generate constant baseload power. Smart Grid development, to be sure, is also forecast as needing tens of billion dollars investment in the next 10-15 years.
Exactly like national debt, budget deficits and bailouts for “too big to fail” finance sector gamblers, the dozens of billions add on to the hundreds of billions elsewhere. On the ground, almost nothing happens. Apart from the critical and basic lack of realism of most targets and costs of current-crop plans for energy transition, the most basic unreality concerns a very simply question: Who will pay for the Brave New World of soft energy? An even more basic question is: Do we need energy transition?
VHeadline.com oil industry commentator Andrew McKillop can be contacted at: andrew.mckillop@gsoca.com
Targeting Palestinian Mothers
21/03/2010 — Reham Alhelsi
Targeting the weakest and the most vulnerable is neither new nor surprising when it comes from an entity that stands on the ruins of Palestinian villages and is swimming in the blood of its Palestinian victims. It is the mentality of Zionists who in cold-blood aim to kill Palestinian children, who write on their helmets: Born to Kill and who wear T-Shirts with images of dead Palestinian babies and guns aimed at Palestinian babies. It is an entity that is proud of slogans showing images such as that of a pregnant Palestinian woman with a target sign on her belly and the inscription: 1 shot, 2 kills.
During the Nakba, the Zionist usurpers committed countless massacres. Often it was the women and the children who were first targeted and brutally murdered as a warning and to frighten others and force them to leave. Accounts of the Deir Yassin massacre (9-10.4.1948) mention that among the 254 Palestinians victims were 25 pregnant women who were bayoneted in the abdomen while still alive. Another 52 children were maimed in front of their mothers before having their heads cut off by the Zionist terrorists. After the village of Beit Darras had been surrounded by Zionist terror groups and further Zionist mobilization was on the way to occupy the village, the Zionist terror groups called on the Palestinian residents to leave the village safely from the south side. The villagers decided that it was safer for the women and children to leave, since it was the village the Zionists wanted. Upon leaving the village, all the women and children were massacred by the Zionist terrorists. During the Khisas massacre (18.12.1947) the 12 victims killed by the Zionist terrorists were all women and children. Other massacres such as Sa’sa’, Balad Il-Sheikh, Abu Shusha, Beit Daras, Tantoura, Dawaymeh and many others show the same pattern of killing unarmed pregnant women, mothers and their children. Targeting mothers and children continued after the Nakba. During the Kufr Qasem massacre (29.10.1956) whole families were massacred, and women were butchered with their children. In Qibya (14-15.10.1953), after the Zionist terrorist militia ordered the residents to remain in their homes, it blew up these homes, killing entire families. On 07.02.1951, Zionist terrorists killed 10 unarmed residents of Sharafat, including 3 women and 5 children. Similar patterns follow in the massacres of Azazmeh, Beit Jala, Qalqilia, Gaza and others more.
During the first Intifada several mothers were shot dead by the IOF. Also pregnant women were targeted and a number were killed mainly by the poisonous gas used by the IOF against unarmed Palestinians:
1. Wujdan Hafith Rajab Faris (35 years old) from Khan Younis, Gaza, suffocated by gas fired by Israeli soldiers on 10.1.1988, she was pregnant in 7th month.
2. Amira Ahmad Omar Abu Askar (35 years old) from Jabalia, Gaza. On suffocated by gas fired by Israeli soldiers on 11.1.1988, she was pregnant.
3. Nabila Ali Al-Yaziji (35 years old) from Ash-Sheikh Ridawn, Gaza, suffocated by gas fired by Israeli soldiers on 26.3.1988, she was pregnant.
4. Dawlat Daoud Al-Masri (18 years old) from Jabalia, Gaza, suffocated by gas fired by Israeli soldiers on 27.9.1988, she was pregnant in 6th month.
5. Aziza Salim Jabir (27 years old) from Hebron, was shot dead by a Zionist settler on 06.08.1990, she was pregnant.
Another Zionist method of murdering Palestinian mothers is the network of over 630 Israeli military checkpoints/roadblocks in the West Bank, aka the “traps of death”. Patients in need of urgent treatment and medics rushing to save lives are often delayed at Israeli military checkpoints, constituting another war crime added to the ever-growing list of war crimes committed by the Zionist entity. Alone between 2000 and 2005 137 Palestinian patients, including 37 women, died at checkpoints because Israeli soldiers either prevented ambulances from passing and reaching the patients or prevented them from transporting patients to hospitals beyond the checkpoints. In many incidents, Palestinian mothers, including the elderly, the sick and the pregnant, were stopped and humiliated at checkpoints. Pregnant women are delayed at checkpoints and often prevented from reaching hospitals, causing many to give birth at these checkpoints. The deliberate delays at checkpoints have resulted in several premature births, stillborns and even the death of some of the mothers as Israeli Soldiers ignore the cries of suffering women and demand they get a special permit. Because of these checkpoints, Palestinian mothers are forced to deliver on the road or inside cars at the checkpoint. Many have to travel up to 4 hours and longer to reach a medical centre. One example is baby Zaid who died only moments after his birth when the Israeli soldiers refused to let his mother Nahil Abu Raja (21 years old) from Qasra, south of Nablus, to pass the Huwwara checkpoint and go to Nablus hospital. The medics who reached the checkpoint one hour after Nahil gave birth could only declare the baby dead. Around 6 pregnant women were also beaten or shot at by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints. Many mothers are forced to give birth at home, despite fear of complications because they fear they will be stopped at checkpoints and won’t make it in time to the hospital. In Azzun Atma near Qalqilya pregnant women are even forced to take up residence outside the village until they deliver out of fear that they might not be able to get the necessary medical treatment. The village, encircled by the apartheid wall, is separated by a gate from the rest of the West Bank. This gate is not manned at night, making the village a prison to its residents. According to a B’Tselem report, alone during 2006 some 20 out of 30 pregnant women from Azzun Atma were forced to relocate outside of the village because of their pregnancy.
Since then beginning of Al-Aqsa intifada in 2000 and till 2006 at least 69 Palestinian women gave birth at Israeli checkpoints in front of Israeli soldiers. This led to 35 miscarriages and the death of five mothers:
1. Rana Adel Abdel-Rahim Al-Jayyousi (17 years old) from Qour, Tulkarim: went into labor on 09.03.2002 and because of the closure of roads she was forced to give birth at home. Her baby was stillborn and when her condition deteriorated her family tried transporting her to hospital in Qlaqilia. They were stopped at an Israeli checkpoint for half an hour and when the ambulance arrived, Rana was already dead.
2. Aisha Abdel-Kairm Nassar (28 years old) from Al-Janyeh, Ramallah: on 23.1.2001 was in a critical condition after giving birth, but was stopped at an Israeli military checkpoint and delayed for 45 minutes. She died before reaching the hospital.
3. Rihab Nofal (30 years old) from Husam, Bethlehem: she went into labor on 18.10.2001 but Israeli soldiers stopped her at a checkpoint and prevented her from reaching the nearest hospital. She died.
4. Umayyah Hamad-Allah Imran (25 years old) from Azzoun, Qalqilia: on 24.09.01 she suffered from heavy internal bleeding after she had given birth, but was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint and her transport to the hospital was delayed. She left to hospital at 3 pm and reached it at 8 pm although the hospital lies only 20 km away. When she finally got there, Umayyah was dead.
5. Laila Husam Baheiri (18 years old) from Qalqilia: went into labor on 31.07.2002 but was prevented by Israeli soldiers at a military checkpoint from reaching hospital which led to her death.
© http://avoicefrompalestine.wordpress.com/
Health Insurance Bonanza
Insurance Execs to Live High, While More Americans Die
By JOHN V. WALSH | March 23, 2010
Let there be no doubt about it. The health care “reform” bill voted into law Sunday in the House is a capitulation which will leave 30 million more Americans at the cruel mercies of the insurance companies – precisely what the single-payer movement had been battling against.
In the end the defenders of the legislation and those who signed on to it putting loyalty to themselves and their careers in the Democrat Party above principle, like the narcissistic twerp Dennis Kucinich, were left with only one real argument. How could anyone turn his/her back on the 30 million who would “benefit” from being brought under the control of the private insurers? The most succinct answer was given by Ralph Nader in a joint interview with him and the traitor Kucinich, who caved when his vote and a few others might have halted this legislative atrocity, conducted by Amy Goodman.
Thus, Nader:
“First of all, that (the legislation) won’t even begin until 2014, 180,000 dead Americans later (The number of unnecessary deaths over a three year period due to a lack of any insurance – jw). Second, there’s no guarantee of that. The insurance companies can game this system. The 2,500 pages is full of opportunities and ambiguities for the insurance companies to game the system and to make it even worse.
“And let’s say there are more people covered, right? Well, they’re being forced to buy junk insurance policies. There’s no regulation of insurance prices. There’s no regulation of the antitrust laws on this. Everything went down that Dennis was fighting for. There’s no regulation that prevents the insurance companies from taking this papier-mâché bill and lighting a fire to it and making a mockery of it. There’s no shift of power. There’s no facility to create a national consumer health organization, which we proposed and the Democrats ignored years ago, in order to give people a voice so they can have their own non-profit consumer lobby on Washington. …
“This is really a disaster.”
This bill is a bonanza for the Insurance Industry, which has therefore been uncharacteristically quiet during this so-called debate on health care. Or as Obama, ever the lackey for vested interests especially the ever expanding finance sectors of the economy, put it, the bill extends “our system of private insurance” to more people. Put another way, some more people may be covered with lousy policies with lots of fine print, but even to do that the insurance companies must be guaranteed their take. And to do that, the taxpayers along with the purchasers of the “insurance” will be billed.
There are three essential features of private, for-profit health insurance that make it despicable and inhumane. First, the insurers use their premiums “to enforce inequality in health care,” as Dr. David Himmelstein likes to put it. That is the system is fundamentally non-egalitarian, so that one’s health is not a right but depends ever more on one’s wealth. Second, the insurers work to maximize their profits and so that the Insurance bosses can live like kings. Thus these parasites refer to minimizing the dreaded “loss ratio,” as they call it, which is the fraction of the premiums given over to actual care. To them that is just a “loss”! And finally, the law basically caves in to what is a protection racket or a blackmailing racket by the insurers. That is, if you want health care you must pay off the insurers for doing nothing but denying you some care. That is “our system” of private insurance as Obama calls it. And it is increasingly characteristic of our economy where the ever growing giant parasite which is finance capital demands a take for essential needs – whether it be health care or pensions or education or housing or a decent life for our dependents should our life be suddenly terminated. Thus a nation like ours which such wealth leaves so many without essentials for a decent life.
And not only did Obama foist this on us, but those supposed “crusaders” for single payer succumbed to pressure from their Party. And thus did Dennis Kucinich cave to another atrocity just as he did when he backed the pro-war Kerry in 2004 and the pro-war Obama in 2008. There can be no more powerful evidence that the Democratic Party is a worthless vehicle for change than the performance of Obama, the dream candidate of the progressives, and his Congress on the issue of health care. And when push comes to shove, the Kuciniches, there to make the Party look like it has a sliver of decency, always cave in. After all what could be more important than the careers of these narcissists? To adapt a slogan from the 70s, Insurers and Congressmen live high while sick Americans die.
John V. Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com. The exchange between Nader and Kucinich can be found at: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/18/dennis_kucinich_and_ralph_nader_a
Interestingly in this exchange, for Nader it is all about health care. For Kucinich it is all about Kucinich.
BBC puts US media to shame on E. Jerusalem
By Susie Kneedler on March 24, 2010
The BBC puts U.S. corporate and public media to shame, violating taboos on Israel. On “BBC World News America” last night, host Matt Frei asked Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen point-blank about the Israeli government’s announcement yesterday (news ignored by other outlets) of “another settlement in the heart of East Jerusalem.” Frei even emphasized the gall of the new grab as Netanyahu met privately with President Obama: “Talk about timing, there was news today”–of Israel’s new seizures of Palestinian land.
Bowen confirmed: just as Netanyahu rode “in his official limousine heading for the White House for his long-sought-after meeting with President Obama,” Israel pronounced final approval for more Jewish-only apartments in Sheikh Jarrah, which Frei called “the heart of” the old city of East Jerusalem. “Jewish-only”; when do we hear such a refrain in the U.S. about the aim of Israeli encroachment onto areas belonging to Palestinians?
Bowen posited that though the new building is “small”–20 flats–, its location “not in the big Jewish settlements,” but in the “built-up, old [Palestinian] part” makes the announcement “potentially very sensitive indeed.” [“Haaretz” confirms the BBC report on the new Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land.]
“The theme that runs through” the twin stories about Israel today, said Frei, “is that the Israelis have a law unto themselves–or think they do–when it comes to certain issues.”
Bowen agreed: “They have a “feeling of impunity about certain issues… because of diplomatic cover” given them by the U.S.
Frei asked whether that cover might have been weakened by Israel’s recent actions.
Bowen answered that “When you look at Mr. Netanyahu’s diplomatic agenda, he’s presiding over deteriorating relations with two very important allies, the Americans and the British.” And Bowen picked up General David Petraeus’s testimony that Israeli intransigence endangers U.S. interests.
Netanyahu is merely repeating offenses committed last time he was P.M. Recent diplomatic crises must feel like “deja vu” for Netanyahu, Bowen said–or, rather, for us– because Netanyahu then, too, angered the US by building in East Jerusalem and caused a scandal with an assassination attempt carried out using forged Canadian passports. The diplomatic uproar eventually led to Netanyahu’s massive electoral defeat.
BBC coverage betters that of the dominant U.S. news sources. But why does no one even raise an eyebrow over Netanyahu’s pretext for Israeli theft–that Jews were “building 3,000 years ago in Jerusalem”?
The millennial excuse–called into question by Shlomo Sand, who has demonstrated that Netanyahu’s ancestors were most likely in Eastern Europe–is a new claim for the Israeli government to shovel. For decades, Israeli governments fostered the Western delusion that after a peace deal, Israel would return their ‘67 booty to the Palestinians.
Owen Bennett-Jones did at least confront West Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat yesterday on “The BBC Newshour” over Barkat’s assertion that 2000 years of Jewish longing for Jerusalem justifies turning out the current Palestinian owners. Bennett-Jones incredulously asked: “If everyone went back to where we were 2000 years ago, it would be a crazy world, there would be wars everywhere.” Barkat evaded.
Bennett-Jones asked Barkat how many countries recognize East Jerusalem as the capital of Israel by lodging their embassies there. Barkat fudged, saying “it was a bit of an insulting question,” before repeating his contention that Biblical identification of Jews with Jerusalem justifies modern possession.
But “International Law doesn’t agree with” Israeli ownership of East Jerusalem, Bennett-Jones persisted. Barkat begged the question by changing all the terms, announcing that even “settlements”–the former euphemism for “illegal colonies”–is now a proscribed term. No, stolen areas are simply “Jewish neighborhoods.”
Israeli “annexation” and “occupation” are out: Israel is “re-uniting Jerusalem.” Orwell’s prophecies live.
Destroying educational institutions or using them for military purposes is a war crime
“The Education system in Iraq, prior to 1991, was one of the best in the region; with over 100% Gross Enrolment Rate for primary schooling and high levels of literacy, both of men and women. The Higher Education, especially the scientific and technological institutions, were of an international standard, staffed by high quality personnel”. (UNESCO Fact Sheet, March 28, 2003)[1].
Dirk Adriaensens, member of the BRussells Tribunal executive committee, 23 March 2010
As a result of ongoing U.S. occupation, today Iraq is more illiterate than it was five or twenty-five years ago, because the U.S. Administration and U.S. forces occupying Iraq began to root [out] and destroy every aspect of Iraq’s education [infrastructure].
The Iraqi educational system was the target of U.S. military action, because education is the backbone of any society. Without an efficient education system, no society can function, writes Ghali Hassan in May 2005.[2]
Facts have proven him right. This is also one of the conclusions of the book Cultural Cleansing in Iraq.[3]
Random facts
A recent UNESCO report “Education Under Attack 2010 – Iraq”, dated 10 February 2010, concludes that “Although overall security in Iraq had improved, the situation faced by schools, students, teachers and academics remained dangerous.”[4] The destruction of Iraq’s education is ongoing. Aswat Al Iraq reported on 4 January 2010 that “the 2010 federal budget offers the country’s education and higher education only 10 percent of the funding they need.”
Let’s present a few random facts that give an idea of the scale of the destruction of Iraq’s education sector under occupation.
The director[5] of the United Nations University International Leadership Institute published a report[6] on 27 April 2005 detailing that since the start of the war of 2003 some 84% of Iraq’s higher education institutions have been burnt, looted or destroyed[7].
Like most higher education institutions across Iraq, Baghdad University escaped almost unscathed from the bombing. In the subsequent looting and burning, 20 of the capital’s colleges were destroyed. No institution escaped: the faculty of education in Waziriyya was raided daily for two weeks; the veterinary college in Abu Ghraib lost all its equipment; two buildings in the faculty of fine arts stand smoke-blackened against the skyline. In every college, in every classroom, you could write “education” in the dust on the tables. [8]
Ongoing violence has destroyed school buildings and around a quarter of all Iraq’s primary schools need major rehabilitation. Since March 2003, more than 700 primary schools have been bombed, 200 have been burnt and over 3,000 looted.[9]
Between March 2003 and October 2008, 31,598 violent attacks against educational institutions were reported in Iraq, according to the Ministry of Education (MoE)[10]
Since 2007 bombings at Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad have killed or maimed more than 335 students and staff members, according to a 19 Oct 2009 NYT article, and a 12-foot-high blast wall has been built around the campus.[11]
Education under Attack (2007) reported that 296 people serving as education staff were killed in 2005; and 180 teachers were killed between February and November 2006.[12]
These are just a few examples to highlight the level of cultural genocide in Iraq. The list is endless, the real number of casualties much higher. More information can be found in the book Cultural Cleansing in Iraq and in the BRussells Tribunal archives on Iraqi education under occupation, perhaps the most comprehensive database on the Internet about the assassination of Iraqi academics and the destruction of Iraq’s education.[13] Our campaign to protect Iraqi academics[14] is still ongoing, because the tragedy continues. The UNESCO report “Education Under Attack 2010 – Iraq” is very clear: “Attacks on education targets continued throughout 2007 and 2008 at a lower rate – but one that would cause serious concern in any other country.” Why didn’t it cause serious concern? Is it because it’s US design?
The petition we issued, containing also a call for action, is still valid today and can still be signed: http://www.petitiononline.com/Iraqacad/petition.html. An excerpt:
1. We appeal to organisations which work to enforce or defend international humanitarian law to put these crimes on the agenda.
2. We request that an independent international investigation be launched immediately to probe these extrajudicial killings. This investigation should also examine the issue of responsibility to clearly identify who is accountable for this state of affairs. We appeal to the special rapporteur on summary executions at UNHCHR in Geneva.
We urge that educators mobilise colleagues and concerned citizens to take up the cause of the salvation of Iraq’s intellectual wealth, by organising seminars, teach-ins and forums on the plight of Iraq’s academics.
Occupying schools
When writing “Killing the Intellectual Class” for the book Cultural Cleansing in Iraq, I added a short story about occupation of schools by the MNF-I.
“it certainly is our policy to not establish military headquarters or other operations in protected areas under the Geneva Convention,” said Lt. Col. Gary Keck, a spokesman for the Department of Defense in Washington, when a journalist asked why the US army occupied a girls’ and boys’ school of a town in northern Iraq.[15]
At a UN press briefings in Amman on 30 April 2003, the question was asked:” Do you know of any other schools that are still occupied & would you ask them of making a point to stay away from the schools, so they can be rehabilitated?”
Answer: S. Ingram: I am not aware of any other places that this situation holds. I remember the incident you referred to, there was a school in the north & some contacts were necessary to persuade the US troops there to leave the premises, which they subsequently did. I am not aware of any other places where schools are being occupied.[16]
“I’m not aware”. A pack of lies. Because occupying schools is exactly what the US Army did (and still does) on a regular basis. I heard and read numerous eyewitness accounts about Iraqi protests after US Forces occupied schools and educational institutions.
The origins of armed resistance in Fallujah f.i. can be traced almost precisely to April 28, 2003, when U.S. troops, who had arrived in the city five days earlier, massacred 17 apparently unarmed protesters. The April 28 protest had demanded an end to Fallujah’s occupation and, more specifically, that U.S. troops vacate the al Qaid primary school, where classes had been scheduled to resume on April 29.[17]
And it continued. On the 29th of February 2008, the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMSI) published a press release condemning the American occupation forces for the seizure of an Islamic Secondary School in Baghdad. [18]
On the 1st of May 2008, the Iraqi News Agency “Voices of Iraq”, reported that: “The U.S. military withdrew from a building of the education department in Sadr City in eastern Baghdad, which they used it as a barrack last month.”[19]
This was basically all the hard information I had found about the occupation of educational institutions by the occupation forces and I thought the evidence was a little thin to make a decent case, so I decided not to use it for the book.
But now I read in the UNESCO report 2010:
“MNF-I, the Iraqi Army and Iraqi police units occupied more than 70 school buildings for military purposes in the Diyala governorate alone.”[20]
This is only in one province. There’s no information at my disposal about the other regions, but we can almost certainly conclude that occupying schools by occupation forces was/is a general phenomenon throughout Iraq. Where else would you station a one million strong army and security forces?
On the 11th of April 2003, a number of Iraqi scientists and university professors sent an SOS e-mail complaining American occupation forces were threatening their lives.[21]
The appeal message said that looting and robberies were being taken place under the watchful eye of the occupation soldiers.
The occupation soldiers, the e-mail added, were transporting mobs to the scientific institutions, such as Mosul University and different educational institutions, to destroy scientific research centres and confiscate all papers and documents to nip in the bud any Iraqi scientific renaissance.[22]
John Agresto, in charge of the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in 2003-2004, initially believed that the looting of Iraq’s universities was a positive act in that it would allow such institutions to begin again with a clean slate, with the newest equipment as well as a brand new curriculum.[23]
The Hague IV Conventions[24] on Laws and Customs of War on Land, 1917, make explicit, in Article 56, that educational institutions are to be regarded as private property, and thus must not be pillaged or destroyed, that occupying forces in war are bound to protect such property and that proceedings should follow their intentional damage, seizure or destruction. Article 55 reinforces this duty relative to all public buildings and capital. Further, an occupying power is obliged, according to Articles 43 and 46, to protect life and take all steps in its power to re-establish and ensure “public order and safety”.
In addition, The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict[25] (ratified by the Republic of Iraq in 1967) creates a clear obligation to protect museums, libraries and archives, and other sites of cultural property. Paragraph 1 of Article 4 notes: “The High Contracting Parties undertake to respect cultural property situated within their own territory as well as within the territory of other High Contracting Parties by refraining from any use of the property and its immediate surroundings or of the appliances in use for its protection for purposes which are likely to expose it to destruction or damage in the event of armed conflict; and by refraining from any act of hostility, directed against such property.”
Using schools and universities for military purposes, destroying educational institutions and assisting in looting, criminal neglect when educational staff is being harassed and assassinated, dismantling the Iraqi education system and active involvement in training, funding and arming murderous militia’s….
War crime upon war crime upon war crime. When will there be justice for Iraq? When will there be a serious investigation into these crimes by official International Human Rights Bodies? And who will charge the successive Anglo-American Administrations for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity?
[1] http://portal.unesco.org/es/ev.php-URL_ID=11216&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
[2] http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/HAS505B.html
[3] http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745328126&CID=BRUSSELLS
[4] http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4b7aa9df5.html
[5] http://www.la.unu.edu/about_staff_reddy.asp
[6] http://www.unu.edu/news/ili/Iraq.doc
[7] http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Academicspetition.htm
[8] http://www.brusselstribunal.org/academicsArticles.htm#weed-out
[9] http://www.islamic-relief.com/ecamp/orphans-iraq/education-iraq.htm
[10] http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4b7aa9df5.html
[11] http://www.ohio.edu/outlook/2009-10/March/Iraq-professor-409.cfm
[12] http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4b7aa9df5.html
[13] http://www.brusselstribunal.org/AcademicsResources.htm
[14] http://www.brusselstribunal.org/Academics.htm
[15] http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0404/p07s01-woiq.html
[16] http://www.un.org/apps/news/infocus/iraq/infocusnews.asp?NewsID=509&sID=9
[17] http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/2183.cfm and http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/mar/17/iraq.rorymccarthy
[18] http://heyetnet.org/en/content/view/2670/33/
[19] http://www.iraqupdates.com/p_articles.php?refid=DH-S-01-05-2008&article=30525
[20] http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4b7aa9df5.html
[21] http://www.islamonline.net/english/news/2003-04/12/article02.shtml
[22] Dirk Adriaensens in “Cultural Cleansing in Iraq” p 119, http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745328126&
[23] Nabil al-Tikriti in “Cultural Cleansing in Iraq” p 98, http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745328126&
[24] http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/lawofwar/hague04.htm
[25] http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13637&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Tell Me Again, Who Made The Desert Bloom?
Lawrence of Cyberia | March 19, 2010
In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine, in support of the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The results were published in the Survey of Palestine, which has been scanned and made available online by Palestine Remembered; all 1300 pages can be read here.
One of the subjects investigated in the Survey of Palestine is land use; specifically, which crops were Palestine’s leading agricultural products at the end of the British Mandate, and whose farms were producing them.
So, according to the Survey of Palestine, who really made the barley fields of Beersheba bloom?
The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 210,000 tons of grain.
About 193,400 tons of that grain were cultivated on Palestinian farms; about 16,600 tons were cultivated on Jewish farms.
See the precise numbers, from a scan of the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine, here.
Who made the melon patches of Jaffa bloom?
The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 143,000 tons of melons.
About 136,000 tons of those melons were cultivated on Palestinian farms; a little over 7,000 tons were cultivated on Jewish farms.
See the precise numbers, from a scan of the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine, here.
Who made the tobacco fields of Safad bloom?
The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 1,683 tons of tobacco, on 28,169 dunams of land. Virtually all the land under tobacco cultivation was Palestinian.
Who made the vineyards of Hebron bloom?
The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 40-50,000 tons of grapes, and between 3-4 million litres of wine. About 86% of the land that produced these products was owned and cultivated by Palestinians.
See a scan of the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine here.
Who made the olive groves of Tulkarm bloom?
The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 79,000 tons of olives.
About 78,000 tons of those olives were cultivated on Palestinian farms; a little over 1,000 tons were cultivated on Jewish farms.
See the precise numbers, from a scan of the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine, here and here.
Who made the banana groves of Tiberias bloom?
The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 8,000 tons of bananas.
About 60% of the land that produced these bananas was owned and cultivated by Palestinians.
See the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine, here.
Who made the vegetable fields of the coastal plain bloom?
The British government survey found that in 1944-45 Palestine’s farmers produced approximately 245,000 tons of vegetables.
About 189,000 tons of those vegetables were cultivated by Palestinian farmers; about 56,000 tons were cultivated by Jewish farmers.
See the precise numbers, from a scan of the relevant page of the Survey of Palestine, here.
So, on the eve of the partition resolution, in which the United Nations proposed to allocate 55 percent of the land to Jewish Palestine (including those parts that produced most of Palestine’s leading crops, with the sole exception of the olive crop), and 45% to Arab Palestine, Palestinian Arabs were producing:
92% of Palestine’s grain
86% of its grapes
99% of its olives
77 % of its vegetables
95% of its melons
more than 99% of its tobacco
and 60% of its bananas.
Palestine’s agricultural produce at that time had an annual value of approximately 21.8 million pounds sterling; 17.1 million of which was produced by Arab cultivation, and 4.7 million by Jewish cultivation. (See the exact numbers here).
So, who made the desert bloom? The Palestinians made the desert bloom.
Photos: All the photographs of Palestinian farmers cultivating their crops in Palestine under the British Mandate are from Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History Of The Palestinians 1876 – 1948, by Walid Khalidi.
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With apparently fabricated nuclear documents, Netanyahu pushed the US towards war with Iran
By Gareth Porter | The Grayzone | April 29, 2020
President Donald Trump scrapped the nuclear deal with Iran and continued to risk war with Iran based on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim to have proven definitively that Iran was determined to manufacture nuclear weapons. Netanyahu not only spun Trump but much of the corporate media as well, duping them with the public unveiling of what he claimed was the entire secret Iranian “nuclear archive.”
In early April 2018, Netanyahu briefed Trump privately on the supposed Iranian nuclear archive and secured his promise to leave the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That April 30, Netanyahu took the briefing to the public in a characteristically dramatic live performance in which he claimed Israel’s Mossad intelligence services had stolen Iran’s entire nuclear archive from Tehran. “You may well know that Iran’s leaders repeatedly deny ever pursuing nuclear weapons…” Netanyahu declared. “Well, tonight, I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time.”
However, an investigation of the supposed Iranian nuclear documents by The Grayzone reveals them to be the product of an Israeli disinformation operation that helped trigger the most serious threat of war since the conflict with Iran began nearly four decades ago. This investigation found multiple indications that the story of Mossad’s heist of 50,000 pages of secret nuclear files from Tehran was very likely an elaborate fiction and that the documents were fabricated by the Mossad itself. … continue
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