Oxburgh’s 5 page Climategate book report gets a failing grade
Watts Up With That | 14 04 2010
I’ve read blog posts longer than this report. The Global Warming Policy Foundation of London has this to say about it:
Another Unsatisfactory Rushed Job
Press release
LONDON, 14 April 2010 – The Global Warming Policy Foundation regrets that the Oxburgh Panel has been rushed and therefore extremely superficial. The body of the report is hardly five pages long. The Panel should have taken more time to arrive at more balanced and more trustworthy conclusions as there was no need to rush the inquiry.
The Panel worked by interviewing and questioning staff members of CRU, but failed to interview critical researchers who have been working in the same field for many years. The Panel even ignored, as it admits, to properly review their written evidence.
We welcome the acknowledgement by the Panel that the Urban Heat Island effect on surface temperatures records in and around large cities is important but poorly understood. We also welcome the admission that the IPCC ignored the expressions of uncertainty in CRU papers.
We also note, in the context of the long-term temperature record, its comment that “the potential for misleading results arising from selection bias is very great in this area. It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work.”
In general, the report is being politely kind to CRU, but in essence rather critical of the disorganised and amateurish use of statistics. It is hardly an endorsement of the quality of the research being carried out at what is supposed to be the world’s leading unit which has received so much government funding.
Given the huge economic and social implications, one would expect that an independent audit would be more rigorous and more even-handed than the Oxburgh panel.
– end
Steve McIntyre writes that he wasn’t interviewed:
Oxburgh’s Trick to Hide the Trick
The Oxburgh report ” is a flimsy and embarrassing 5-pages.
They did not interview me (nor, to my knowledge, any other CRU critics or targets). The committee was announced on March 22 and their “report” is dated April 12 – three weeks end to end – less time than even the Parliamentary Committee. They took no evidence. Their list of references is 11 CRU papers, five on tree rings, six on CRUTEM. Notably missing from the “sample” are their 1000-year reconstructions: Jones et al 1998, Mann and Jones 2003, Jones and Mann 2004, etc.)
They did not discuss specifically discuss or report on any of the incidents of arbitrary adjustment (“bodging”), cherry picking and deletion of adverse data, mentioned in my submissions to the Science and Technology Committee and the Muir Russell Committee. I’ll report on these issues later in the day as they’ll take a little time to review. First, let’s observe Oxburgh’s trick to hide the “trick”.
Long before Climategate, Climate Audit readers knew that you had to watch the pea under the thimble whenever you’re dealing with the Team. This is true with Oxburgh of Globe International as well.
Oxburgh of Globe International alludes to the “trick..to hide the decline” in veiled terms as follows:
CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.
Without specifically mentioning the famous “trick …to hide the decline”, Oxburgh subsumes the “trick” as “regrettable” “neglect” by “IPCC and others”.
But watch the pea under Oxburgh’s thimble.
The Oxburgh Report regrettably neglected to highlight the fact that CRU scientists Briffa and Jones, together with Michael Mann, were the IPCC authors responsible for this “regrettable neglect” in the Third Assessment Report. They also regrettably neglected to report that CRU scientist Briffa was the IPCC author responsible for the corresponding section in AR4.
Oxburgh pretends that the fault lay with “IPCC and others”, but this pretence is itself a trick. CRU was up to its elbows in the relevant IPCC presentations that “regrettably” “neglected” to show the divergent data in their graphics.
read more here
If you really want to know about Climategate, get this book:
Paperback: click image
Medea Benjamin wants to talk to the Tea Partiers
Medea Benjamin | April 13, 2010
On Tax Day, Tea Party members from around the country will descend on the nation’s capitol to “protest big government and support lower taxes, less government and more freedom. CODEPINK, a women-led peace movement advocating an end to war and militarism, will be sending some representatives. While we come from the opposite end of the political spectrum and don’t support the goals and tactics of the Tea Party, there is an area where we are seeking common ground: endless wars and militarism.
As Tea Partiers express their anger at out-of-control government spending and soaring deficits, we will ask them to take a hard look at what is, by far, the biggest sinkhole of our tax dollars: Pentagon spending. With the Obama administration proposing the largest military budget ever, topping $700 billion not including war supplementals, we are now spending almost as much on the military as the rest of the world combined.
Perhaps the Tea Party and peace folks can agree that one way to shrink big government is to rein in military spending. Here are some questions to get the conversation going:
At the Southern Republican Leadership Conference on April 10, Congressman Ron Paul — who has a great following within the Tea Party — chided both conservatives and liberals for their profligate spending on foreign military bases, occupations and maintaining an empire. “We’re running out of money,” he warned. “All empires end for financials reasons, and that is what the markets are telling us today….We can do better with peace than with war.” Do you agree with Congressman Paul on this?
Every taxpayer has already spent, on average, a staggering $7,367 for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now Obama plans to send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, with a price tag of one million dollars per soldier per year. Opposition to these wars ranges from liberal Congressperson Dennis Kucinich to conservative Tea Party leader Sheriff Richard Mack. During a Congressional vote to end the war in Afghanistan that was defeated but got bipartisan support, Rep. Dennis Kucinich said, “Nearly 1000 U.S. soldiers have died. And for what? Hundreds of billions spent. And for what? To make Afghanistan safe for crooks, drug dealers and crony capitalism?” Do you think Congress should turn off the war spigot and bring out troops home?
The Cold War has been over for 20 years, yet we maintain 800-plus bases around the world, have troops stationed in 148 countries and 11 territories. Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan asks, “How we can justify borrowing hundreds of billions yearly from Europe, Japan and the Gulf states — to defend Europe, Japan and the Arab Gulf states? Is it not absurd to borrow hundreds of billions annually from China — to defend Asia from China?” Should we begin to dismantle this global web of bases?
Far and away the largest recipient of US foreign aid is Israel, a wealthy country (the 11th wealthiest in the world) that gets $3 billion a year from Uncle Sam with no strings attached and no accountability. We also give the repressive Egyptian government over a billion dollars a year to buy their support for a Middle East peace plan that is going nowhere. Are you in favor of continuing this taxpayer largesse to Israel and Egypt?
An area where Pentagon spending has mushroomed is the payment of private security contractors. While many soldiers who risk their lives for their country struggle to support their families, private security company employees can pocket as much as $1,000 a day. High pay for contract workers in war zones burdens taxpayers and saps military morale. Moreover, military officers in the field have said contractors often operate like “cowboys,” using unnecessary and excessive force that has undermined our reputation overseas. Rep. Jan Schakowsky introduced the Stop Outsourcing Security Act that would phase out private security contractors in war zones. Do you support that?
Experts on the left and the right say we could cut our military budget by 25%, including closing foreign bases, winding down the wars, and ending obsolete weapons systems, without jeopardizing our security. Do you agree? If we could make significant cuts to the military budget, how should those funds be reallocated? To pay down the debt? Increase security at home? Rebuild our infrastructure? Stimulate the economy through tax breaks?
###
Meanwhile we have this from Rasmussen Reports:
Pit maverick Republican Congressman Ron Paul against President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 election match-up, and the race is – virtually dead even.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) prefer some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided. […]
Paul, a anti-big government libertarian … continues to have a solid following, especially in the growing Tea Party movement.
Twenty-four percent (24%) of voters now consider themselves a part of the Tea Party movement, an eight-point increase from a month ago. Another 10% say they are not a part of the movement but have close friends or family members who are.
Settlers vandalize mosque, burn cars, uproot olive trees in Huwwara
Ma’an – 14/04/2010
File Photo
Nablus – Israeli citizens living in an illegal West Bank settlement vandalized a mosque the village of Huwwara, after storming the Nablus village early Wednesday morning.
Settlers from the nearby Yitzhar settlement ascended upon the village at 2am and sprayed graffiti, including a Star of David and racist slogans across the the Bilal Ben Rab Mosque in the Qoza area of the village, said Ghassan Doughlas, Palestinian Authority official in charge of the settlement portfolio in the northern West Bank.
Two cars were further set on fire in the village, belonging to Ziad Abdullah Theeb and Sameer Ibrhaim Zahar respectively. The official added that settlers crashed into another vehicle belonging to Zaher’s brother.
According to Israeli media,more than 300 olive trees were uprooted and the racist graffiti was sprayed across the village.
In response to the incident, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a spokesman for the right-wing Jewish National Front party, said: “We are talking about a hostile village that has been the source of a large number of violent attacks against the residents of Yitzhar,” the Israeli daily Haaretz reported.
“The time has come for the Arabs to understand that Jews are not suckers and that Jewish blood will not be shed without consequence,” Ben-Gvir said, according to the daily.
A statement issued by the Israeli army confirmed the incident and said “the Commander of the IDF Judea and Samaria division [the West Bank], Brig. Gen. Nitzan Alon ordered an immediate investigation into the incident, condemned the acts and said that those responsible should be brought to justice.”
The Israeli army added that it “conveyed a message to the Palestinians through the Civil Administration,” reassuring them that it “takes the matter of harming holy sites very seriously.” The Civil Administration erased the graffiti following the incident, the statement said. In December 2009, Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque in the West Bank village of Yasuf.
America’s Loose Nukes in Israel
By Grant Smith | April 14, 2010
Israel decided this week to send Minister for Intelligence Affairs Dan Meridor to the Nuclear Security summit. This U.S. bid to secure vulnerable nuclear stockpiles against non-state actors is both closely watched and furiously spun. Israel avoided exposing Prime Minister Netanyahu to embarrassing scrutiny of Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons arsenal. For this reason, trumpets the New York Times, Israel sent a lower-level delegation. But Israel has long responded defiantly to threats of robust U.S. oversight. A long-running investigation into how weapons-grade uranium went missing from Pennsylvania illustrates why America has been incapable of securing its own nuclear materials and know-how from insider threats. The future of that uranium may determine the success or failure of the Obama administration’s non-proliferation effort.
Steve Levin was a member of the underground Haganah – a precursor to the Israel Defense Forces – and fought during Israel’s 1948 war under Meir Amit, who later became head of Israeli intelligence. Levin was a close friend of David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. In the mid-1940s while leading the Jewish Agency, Ben-Gurion launched a massive clandestine conventional arms financing, theft, and smuggling network [.pdf] in the United States diverting to Palestine small arms, heavy machine guns, munitions-making equipment, aircraft, ships, and tanks destined for American scrap yards after World War II.
On the nuclear front, Levin financed the purchase of the Apollo Steel Company facility in Pennsylvania for $450,000. Founder and President Dr. Zalman M. Shapiro, a genius inventor and head of a local Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) chapter, incorporated the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) at Apollo in 1956. Levin capitalized NUMEC through a stock offering in 1957 and business took off – propelled by the critical knowledge of highly talented scientists. NUMEC co-founder Dr. Leonard P. Pepkowitz previously worked on the clandestine Manhattan Project in 1944 producing America’s first atomic bombs. Pepkowitz later led analytical chemistry research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. NUMEC regularly received large quantities of highly enriched uranium and plutonium from industry giants Westinghouse and the U.S. Navy for reprocessing into nuclear submarine fuel and other specialty uses. Shapiro was meticulous in his stewardship of the company’s financial resources, carefully shopping around for banks willing to accommodate the complex demands of the fast growing NUMEC.
In the early 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began documenting suspicious lapses in NUMEC’s security, inexplicably lax record-keeping, and the ongoing presence of large numbers of Israelis at the plant. In 1962 the AEC considered suspending “classified weapons work” at NUMEC. In 1965 an AEC audit found that NUMEC could no longer account for 220 pounds of highly enriched uranium. In 1966 the FBI opened an investigation – code-named Project DIVERT – and began monitoring NUMEC’s management and Israeli visitors. On Sept. 10, 1968, four Israelis visited NUMEC to “discuss thermoelectric devices with Shapiro,” according to correspondence seeking official AEC consent for the visit from NUMEC’s security manager. Among the approved visitors was Rafi Eitan. After Eitan’s visit, 587 pounds of highly enriched uranium was classified as missing.
Former Deputy of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology Carl Duckett said the agency came to the conclusion by 1968 that “NUMEC material had been diverted by the Israelis and used in fabricating weapons.” An eyewitness gave testimony to the FBI about one late evening in 1965 when he encountered several NUMEC employees loading a flatbed truck with nuclear materials. It was unusual that material was shipping so late at night. Moreover, these particular employees (names were censored from the 2,654 pages of FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act) “never loaded trucks themselves.” The eyewitness was “sure this was high-enriched uranium products due to size and shape of the container and the labeling.” An armed guard ordered the witness away; he was later threatened to never reveal what he had seen on the loading dock.
The FBI, CIA, Congress, the GAO, and the AEC spent fruitless decades investigating the diversion. The FBI insisted on nuclear forensics to determine whether radioactivity in soil samples collected outside Dimona in Israel had any telltale NUMEC signature. But not until U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was arrested spying for Israel in 1985 was Rafi Eitan’s importance fully understood. In 1986 investigators discovered the Eitan who entered NUMEC in 1968 had the same birth date – 11/23/1926 – as the spy handling Pollard. According to Anthony Cordesman, “There is no conceivable reason for Eitan to have gone [to the Apollo plant] but for the nuclear material.” Eitan has since been forced out of the cold as one of Israel’s top economic espionage agents for Israel’s secretive LAKAM, involved in multiple operations against U.S. targets. The Israel lobby’s role, never deeply explored by the Pollard investigators, was perceptible in the background. An operative of a U.S.-Israel business foundation provided the Washington, D.C., safe house where documents stolen by Pollard were duplicated and secreted away to Israel.
But Pollard’s subsequent life sentence in prison is the exception to the rule – crimes for Israel (even nuclear diversion) aren’t punished by America. In a now familiar pattern, the investigation of NUMEC uranium diversion waxed and waned into the 1990s. DIVERT was soon transformed into a futile investigation into whether Zalman Shapiro had foreknowledge or personal involvement in the caper and ways officials in agencies from the State Department to the AEC thwarted warranted law enforcement and accountability for Israel. To date, all of the uranium-diversion masterminds, financiers, and beneficiaries have escaped criminal prosecution, even as U.S. taxpayers fund a nuclear waste cleanup at the (now defunct) NUMEC Apollo facility.
That the U.S. is a sieve for Israeli nuclear espionage is well documented. In 1988 the GAO determined that Department of Energy nuclear laboratories were far too open to foreign visits from “countries identified as sensitive by DOE because they are a security and/or proliferation risk, such as Pakistan and Israel.” The lessons of Eitan went unheeded. The report found that “Of 637 visitors from countries such as India, Israel, and Pakistan, the DOE required background checks for only 77.” In addition to amassing critical knowledge, other nuclear technologies known to have been diverted from the U.S. to Israel include dual-use triggering technologies, klystrons, and krytons.
It never had to be this way. In the early 1960s, just as the problems at NUMEC began, President John F. Kennedy unleashed a robust non-proliferation and law enforcement pincer maneuver. He demanded U.S. inspections of Israel’s Dimona weapons plant in order to prevent Israel from going nuclear. Kennedy simultaneously ordered Israel’s American lobby to register as foreign agents to bring their undeclared activities out into the open. But Israel and its U.S. lobby ultimately prevailed on both counts.
In formally pressing Israel to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty while pushing for a settlement freeze and peace negotiations, the Obama administration is retracing JFK’s final footsteps. Israel’s lobby still has its own sovereign policy priorities. As Zalman Shapiro and lobby elites such as neoconservative gadfly Frank Gaffney gathered at ZOA events on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, pivoting the U.S. military from Iraq toward Syria and Iran was a top priority. The lobby also worked day and night to keep America’s front (and back) doors open for massive aid transfers and trade preferences, buffing up its own image by plucking operatives from the harsh clutches of law enforcement – even winning presidential pardons to erase or exalt other unfortunate historic events that called into question the U.S.-Israel “special relationship.” Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh noted that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) entire executive committee (the Conference of Presidents) favors releasing Jonathan Pollard on the grounds that “his crimes did not amount to high treason against the United States, because Israel was then and remains a close ally.” These unspoken, forced policies directly pit Israeli prerogatives against American national security, governance, and rule of law – they are often only won only through illegal means. As Israel ratchets up its own “project divert” effort to compel others to confront NPT signatory Iran (while derailing meaningful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations), the rest of the world showed true commitment to non-proliferation by sending top diplomats to America’s summit.
Israel simply sent in another spy.
This is why the U.S. must demand more than Israel’s entry into the NPT. Only by recovering all purloined nuclear materials can Obama win confidence in America’s own commitment to controlling loose nukes.
Japan islanders reject US base
Press TV – April 14, 2010
Three mayors from a Japanese island, slated to host a US military base, are to write a letter to President Barack Obama expressing their refusal to the plan. The move is to protest against the Japanese government’s decision to relocate the Futenma US Marine Corps Air Station in Okinawa to the Tokunoshima Island.
“We, all the islanders, protest against the Futenma air base relocation to Tokunoshima,” a draft written by the three mayors says.
The mayors have also said they are preparing to stage another protest rally next Sunday, which they say will involve about 10,000 residents of the island’s 27,000-strong population. Thousands have already rallied against the relocation of US troops to the island last month.
The Futenma base is currently situated on the southern island of Okinawa. The presence of the US base which is in proximity of residential areas has caused various troubles for local Okinwans, who have expressed their dissatisfaction through repeated demonstrations.
Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has struggled for months to find a solution that will satisfy the people of Okinawa Island and the security demands of the United States, its key ally. He has promised to resolve the row by the end of May, despite the fact that Okinawa’s residents have long resented the heavy US military presence.
Okinawans consider the American forces there as a source of crime, pollution and noise.
Richard Falk: “I believe that Hamas should be treated as a political actor”
By Dr. Hanan Chehata | April 9, 2010
INTERVIEW – With Prof. Richard Falk *
HC: Following your appointment as UN Rapporteur to the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2008 you traveled to Israel in order to begin your investigations. Can you tell us a little more about how you were received by Israel?
RF: I was denied entry and expelled at Ben Gurion Airport when I tried to enter Israel for the purpose of carrying out my duties as UN Special Rapporteur. These duties consist mainly of reporting on Israeli compliance with human rights obligations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and include duties of compliance with respect to international humanitarian law. Israeli authorities confined me for more than 15 hours in a detention cell with five other detainees before putting me on a plane. I was given no explanation beyond that my expulsion order came from the Israeli Foreign Ministry that had objected to my appointment from the outset. As my itinerary on the West Bank had been previously submitted to the Israeli embassy in Geneva, and as visas had been granted to the two UN employees assisting me on the mission, it seems clear that Israel wanted to have the incident at the airport rather than tell me in advance that I would be denied entry. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and other UN officials did object to the Israeli refusal to allow me to do my job as Special Rapporteur. It should be pointed out that the UN Charter in Article 2(2) requires Members to cooperate with the UN in carrying out its functions, and that this duty is reinforced by an international treaty outlining this duty of cooperation.
HC: You were denied entry into the OPT. Have you been allowed at any point to enter the territory? If not, how have you been able to do your job?
RF: I have tried repeatedly through formal requests to Israeli authorities to gain entry to the OPT, and these requests have been ignored rather than denied. There may be a possibility of visiting Gaza on an official basis based on Egyptian cooperation. This has so far been difficult to arrange. As far as doing my job is concerned, it is certainly a major disadvantage to be denied entry, but my reporting job can be done without any handicap due to the abundance of open and diverse sources of information and documentation on the critical dimensions of the occupation. I would have to rely on such sources in any event even if access was possible.
HC: In light of the way that Israel has reacted to you and your reports and more recently to the Goldstone report it seems that Israel’s regard for the UN, if anything, has become more hostile. Why do you think Israel seems to hold the UN in such contempt and is there any way for the UN to compel Israel to cooperate with their investigations and abide by UN recommendations?
RF: Israel has a rather opportunistic approach to the UN. It is hostile when it is the object of criticism, and it rejects the authority of the UN in relation to its duties as the Occupying Power of the Palestinian Territories. It consistently complains about the bias of the UN, especially the Human Rights Council, and attacks those that serve the UN as civil servants or appointed officials. Most recently it has mounted a series of vicious attacks on Richard Goldstone who headed a fact-finding mission to assess allegations of Israeli and Hamas war crimes associated with the Gaza War (Operation Cast Lead) that took place between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009.
At the same time, Israel participates fully in the General Assembly, and uses its relationship with the United States to block adverse decisions in the Security Council. What was unusual about its response to the Goldstone Report was the extremely high profile repudiation of the findings and recommendations. Normally, as with the 14-1 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the unlawfulness of the separation wall built on occupied Palestine, Israel merely rejects the external criticism of its policies, and moves on with very little commentary, especially by its top political leaders. We must assume that the Goldstone Report touched a raw nerve in the Israeli political sensibility that explains its almost hysterical reaction, including vindictive attacks on the person of Justice Goldstone, himself a devoted Zionist and distinguished international jurist. It would seem that the conclusion that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians and the civilian infrastructure of Gaza in violation of the international criminal law was too authoritative a repudiation of Israeli policies toward the occupation to be ignored. The fact that the Goldstone Report also recommended that steps be taken to implement these conclusions by holding those responsible for the behavior to be criminally responsible was a further challenge to the legitimacy of Israel’s claims to be upholding its security by launching Operation Cast Lead.
HC: Why have the UN taken no measures against Israel for their breaches of international law?
RF: The quick answer is that the geopolitical impunity enjoyed by Israel is a consequence of unconditional U.S. support, and a reluctance in most European countries to be critical of Israel given the lingering sense of guilt about the Holocaust. A more thoughtful response is that there have been periodic attempts within the UN to hold Israel accountable for violations of international law. The General Assembly and Human Rights Council have frequently condemned Israeli policies in the OPT. The ICJ found that the separation wall was unlawful as constructed on Palestinian territory, and the General Assembly accepted these conclusions overwhelmingly. The Goldstone Report is itself a gesture in the direction of holding Israel accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity as perpetrated in Gaza. In this sense there have been a variety of efforts to condemn Israeli policies and practices from the perspective of international law, but an insufficient will to implement these efforts, and so the end result is a sense of the virtual irrelevance of international law as a behavioral constraint on Israel.
HC: Is the USA the biggest factor impeding the UN in coming to the aid of Palestinians?
RF: I think that in the absence of US support, the UN would be acting vigorously on behalf of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, including the imposition of an embargo on arms sales and support for economic sanctions. The European countries would in this altered setting in all likelihood stand aside, neither being strong supporters of UN actions on behalf of the Palestinians, nor defenders of Israel.
HC: Israel opposed your appointment from the very beginning making allegations that you were biased against their state. Is there any justification whatsoever to these claims?
RF: As I have responded, by now many times, I am not biased, but dedicated to being truthful and accurate, as well as interpreting the relevance of international law and human rights standards as objectively as possible. It is true that I have been critical of Israel in the past, but again on the basis of a widely shared consensus as to the facts and their most reasonable legal implications. The test of bias should be distorted treatment of facts or strained interpretations of law. To be critical of official Israeli policies is not to be anti-Israeli any more than to be critical of American foreign policy, which I have been over the years, means that I am anti-American. To be a citizen in a democracy, or to be a world citizen, means to follow the guidance of your conscience wherever that might lead.
HC: You have been depicted as a supporter of Hamas, how do you respond to such claims?
RF: Again, my effort has been to describe the actuality of Hamas’s positions on contested issues and to report upon its actual role in the OPT, especially Gaza. I have been impressed by the Hamas effort to negotiate a ceasefire with Israel from the time of its election in January 2006, and its consistent effort to reestablish a ceasefire, including one for a long duration. I have also taken note of the refusal of Israel to take advantage of such diplomatic opportunities, and its insistence on treating Hamas as a terrorist organization with whom no negotiations can occur. I have also criticized Israel for punishing the population of Gaza by imposing a blockade that restricts the flow of food, medicine, and fuel to subsistence levels, or worse. Such a blockade is a flagrant form of collective punishment prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. I believe that Hamas should be treated as a political actor, that the blockade should be terminated immediately, and that the UN should insist on the end to the blockade as a condition of Israel’s normal participation in the activities of the Organization.
HC: It seems that supporters of Israel try to equate the words anti-Semitic with anti-Zionist which are of course two different things. They have accused people such as Judge Goldstone, Prof. Ilan Pappe, Prof. Avi Shlaim and you of being “self-hating” Jews. How do you feel about this?
RF: It seems more extreme even than this. Justice Goldstone, for instance, is pro-Zionist, and yet stands viciously accused of being a self-hating Jew, apparently because he dared to be critical of Israel. This means that any defection from either the official policies of the state of Israel or from the Zionist project will be occasion for a Jew to be branded as ’self-hating.’ It is my view that the Jewish tradition considered biblically and over the course of time would require a Jew to honor conscience and truthfulness above tribal identities should these conflict.
HC: As a Jewish gentleman yourself how do you feel about the fact that Zionists and the Israeli government claim to speak in the name of all Jews?
RF: As my prior answer suggests, no government has the authority to speak in the name of others, and certainly Zionism, a movement I have never supported, and Israel, a state to which I owe no special allegiance, is not entitled to represent me because I happen to be Jewish. I have real problems with any coerced allegiance to a political or religious entity, and believe that the crime of treason sets up an unacceptable potential tension between the dictates of conscience and subservience to the will of the state.
HC: In 2007 you described the Israeli policies towards Palestine as a “holocaust-in-the-making“. Given the tightening of the siege on Gaza, which has now lasted over 1000 days, Operation Cast Lead etc.. would you now say that the situation has developed into a full blown holocaust?
RF: This is a delicate issue of language. Genocide is a word with a great emotional resonance, and special historic associations for the people of Israel. I wrote these words before I was appointed as Special Rapporteur, and although I would not retract them, I have refrained from using the word genocide since accepting the UN job. There is an ambiguity in the word genocide: it has legal, moral, and political connotations. It would be difficult to establish a genocidal intent on Israel’s part, given the way in which the ICJ approached the issue in the Bosnia Case. At the same time, I lament the continuation of the siege of Gaza, consider it a crime against humanity, and feel that the UN and many states are complicit to varying degrees.
HC: Your predecessor Prof. John Dugard compared the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to that of apartheid South Africa. Is this a view that you concur with after your own experiences there?
RF: Comparisons of this sort can be illuminating, although misleading at the same time. There are many indications of rigid separation, especially on the West Bank, as well as discriminatory regulations that make the situation for Palestinians resemble that of the black Africans suffering under apartheid, and deserving of comparable opprobrium. At the same time there are differences: the South African leadership defended apartheid as a preferable policy for race relations, whereas the Israelis do not offer an ideological justification for their separate treatment of the two peoples, claiming either the security rigors of occupation or the inevitable consequences of being ‘a Jewish state.’ Prolonged occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, along with the second class citizenship imposed on the Palestinian minority living behind the green line, are humanly abusive, but distinctive in their character, and it is important to understand these realities on their own terms.
HC: The world is watching as genocide unfolds in Palestine and yet nothing is being done to stop it. What can be done, and what should be done by the international community at this stage to ensure that the rights of the Palestinian people are protected?
RF: It is a scandalous refusal to take seriously the pledge after World War II of ‘never again.’ The liberal democracies in Europe and North America have allowed their hatred of Hamas to be a justification for inflicting and sustaining a humanitarian catastrophe on an entire civilian population denied even the option to become refugees. Even neighboring Arab governments have done far too little by way of opposition. And the UN has been largely mute. If ever there was a case where the imposition of sanctions was justified it would be in relation to Israel so long as it maintains the Gaza blockade. Civil society initiatives have challenged the Israeli policies most effectively, including such dramatic efforts as those associated with the Free Gaza Movement and Viva Palestina. These symbolic challenges expose the failures of the international community as constituted by the government of sovereign states to do uphold international law and international morality even in extreme situations of the sort that exists in Gaza, and add political weight to the BDS movement that is gathering strength in various parts of the world. The Palestinian solidarity movement has become the successor to the Anti-Apartheid Campaign as the most important popular struggle on behalf of global justice in the early 21st century. Of course, there are two time horizons that must be taken into account: the emergency horizon in Gaza that requires with utmost urgency the ending of the blockade; the justice horizon throughout occupied Palestine that requires a just peace at the earliest possible time.
HC: Israel has stated that it launched Operation Cast Lead as an act of “self-defence”. However you, and many others, have said that this is not an honest depiction of how events unfolded and that there are other “unacknowledged reasons“ as to why Israel launched its mass assault on the citizens of Gaza. Could you tell us what you think those “unacknowledged reasons” might be?
RF: Of course, unacknowledged reasons are kept secret because their admission would be awkward. As the question suggests, Israel had a diplomatic option by way of a ceasefire if security and self-defense were its concerns. The more plausible explanations for the timing and undertaking of Operation Cast Lead are the following: to redeem the reputation of the Israeli Defense Forces, which had been damaged by their operational failures in the Lebanon War of 2006; to send Iran a message that the IDF was ready to inflict major damage on an adversary without concern for the limitations of international law or world public opinion; to show Israeli domestic public opinion that the Kadima leadership was determined to use whatever force required to uphold Israeli state interests; to destroy Hamas, and reestablish Fatah control in Gaza, and unified Palestinian representation under the auspices of the Palestine Authority; striking Gaza aggressively while the supportive George W. Bush was still in the White House, and prior to the arrival of the untested Barrack Obama; obtaining the release of the single IDF soldier held captive, Gilad Shalit, which would have been hailed in Israel as a sentimental victory.
HC: Colonel Desmond Travers (a co-author of the Goldstone report) has recently called for certain weapons that Israel has used, or has been suspected of using, to be banned internationally, including white phosphorus, Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME), flechettes and Tungsten. Would you support him in this call?
RF: Yes, definitely. All of these weapons inflict cruel injuries, and are already considered unlawful if used in proximity to civilians, which was done throughout Operation Cast Lead.
HC: You have pointed out that Hamas were democratically elected in a free and fair election, that it had proposed a 10 year truce with Israel and has, over the years, expressed readiness to work with other Palestinian groups and yet it is still regarded by Israel and its allies as a terrorist organisation. Isn’t it about time for Israel, the Quartet and others to sit down and talk with Hamas?
RF: It was a mistake from the outset not to take Hamas at their word as turning away from violence and toward political action. When initially elected Hamas established a one-year ceasefire unilaterally, which they kept despite a series of Israeli provocations, including the assassination of Hamas leaders by missile attack. It would seem that Israel, and the United States, were comfortable with the situation of divided Palestinian leadership, and with the accompanying argument that there was no Palestinian partner with whom Israel could negotiate. Hamas has basically displayed a willingness to establish a ceasefire, including one of long duration, along its border with Israel. International actors should even now, however belatedly, treat Hamas as the de facto governmental authority in the Gaza Strip and treat it diplomatically as a normal political entity. To attach the label ‘terrorist organization’ is to signal an unwillingness to substitute diplomacy for violence and a refusal to lift the cruel and criminal siege that is now causing such damage to the physical and mental health of the entire civilian population of Gaza.
HC: You have said that “the American public in particular gets 99% of its information filtered through an exceedingly pro-Israeli media lens.” What is your take on the coverage of the situation by the media in Europe?
RF: I am less familiar with the European coverage, but my strong impression is that although it is generally favorable to Israel, it is less unbalanced in its reportage, and more objective. Also, there is greater access to sources sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle, including Al Jazeera.
HC: The Palestinian Authority recently called for the deferral of your last report on the OPT, why have you not insisted on its immediate debate in the Human Rights Council?
RF: I do not possess the authority to challenge what takes place in the Human Rights Council. I have conveyed my disappointment to the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and I hope that the report will be discussed at the June meeting of the HRC, and that these difficulties will not recur in the future. The report is a comprehensive attempt to depict the unlawful dimensions of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
HC: Is there any hope that Israel will be held accountable for its war crimes against the Palestinian people?
RF: I am not optimistic about accountability being achieved by way of the appropriate international procedures, especially referral to the International Criminal Court for further investigation and possible indictment. The geopolitical veto exercised by the United States on behalf of Israel, possibly reinforced by the EU, will block the implementation of the recommendations in the Goldstone Report probably without ever coming to a formal vote. Perhaps, if public pressure is heightened the geopolitical protection of Israel will become visible rather than, as at present, provided behind closed doors and in the deep recesses of the UN bureaucracy.
But there are two other ways in which some degree of accountability might be achieved: first, as recommended in the Goldstone Report, reliance on universal jurisdiction, which potentially empowers national criminal courts to investigate charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity with respect to Israeli military or political leaders who could be detained or extradited to face charges if entering a country that has introduced universal jurisdiction provisions into its law; second, as undertaken already by the Russell Foundation in Brussels, the formation of a citizens’ tribunal with a panel of jurors made up of respected moral authority figures, and passing upon the allegations against named Israeli officials. This kind of initiative would be symbolic in nature, but it would provide a documentary record, encourage support for BDS forms of nonviolent coercion, and represent an expression of condemnation of those accused and found guilty by world public opinion and by parts of the world media.
HC: You have the unenviable task of being an academic in an American university and a UN human rights Rapporteur in Palestine, how difficult has it been for you to function in both environments after your criticism of Israeli human rights policies?
RF: The tension is present, but so far has not been too serious. There is a shift in mood throughout the United States, making criticism of Israeli policies less controversial than had been the case in the past. The long arm of AIPAC and the Israeli Lobby remains dominant in Washington, D.C., but there is less impact than in the past on the country as a whole.
* UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied (OPT), since 1967. In 2001 Falk served on a United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Inquiry Commission for the Palestinian territories with John Duggard. He is also an American Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University with a long and distinguished career in academics, politics and law.
China Reiterates Opposition to Iran Sanctions… Again
By Jason Ditz, April 13, 2010
The eternal push for additional sanctions against Iran never changes too much.
Earlier today, President Barack Obama declared that he was “confident” China would back the sanctions, a confidence expressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton several times over the past few weeks.
But as has happened every other time this confidence was expressed, China was quick to dismiss the idea and reiterate its opposition to sanctions.
“China always believes that dialogue and negotiation are the best way out for the issue. Pressure and sanctions cannot fundamentally solve it,” insisted China’s Foreign Ministry.
Despite this opposition, the US is still hoping to push forward sanctions against Iran in the next few weeks to punish it over its refusal to accept a third party enrichment deal. Iran has actually agreed to that deal in principle, and reiterated their support again today.
Iran’s willingness to accept a deal and its repeated calls for dialogue do not appear to be stopping the US push for sanctions, ostensibly to punish it for not accepting a deal and not accepting dialogue. This is perhaps unsurprising, however, as the fact that the IAEA has repeatedly confirmed that Iran is not enriching uranium to anywhere near weapons grade and is not diverting it to any non-civilian use has likewise done little to dissuade the US from sanctions on the completely false basis of Iran enriching uranium for military purposes.
Israel’s ‘crisis of legitimacy’
Jared Malsin – 13/04/2010
I know something about how Israel’s security forces treat journalists they view as hostile. In January, I was held for over a week in a dingy detention center at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport before being deported.
Before I was detained, I was interrogated in a spare, windowless office in the airport about news articles I had authored in my two and a half years working in the occupied West Bank for the Palestinian news agency Ma’an.
At one point, the security officer, a woman with piercing blue eyes who never identified herself, paged through the contacts in my cell phones, demanding that I provide information about sources, colleagues, and friends whose numbers I had stored. I refused.
She set the phones down on her desk and I, without thinking, reached for them. She stopped me. “In this office, you have no rights,” the interrogator explained. I didn’t see the phones, like the rest of my possessions, until I was expelled to New York eight days later.
So it’s natural that I’ve been following and investigating for weeks the case of Anat Kamm, the Israeli journalist and former soldier who has been under secret house arrest for months over allegations she leaked military documents, and Uri Blau, the reporter who reportedly used those papers to expose a West Bank assassinations program that violates even Israel’s own laws.
Like me, Blau, a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, also finds himself unable to return to Israel.
I’m not Israeli, and Blau’s situation is different and, in important ways, much more severe than mine. But I believe I can empathize, on some basic level, with the Kafkaesque turn his life has taken.
Blau is in hiding in London, fearing arrest if he returns to his home country. He exposed documents that proved the military was violating a High Court of Justice order by authorizing the killing of Islamic Jihad leaders, even when innocents were also killed.
Blau wrote an article in Friday’s newspaper explaining how he went on vacation in December not knowing the extent to which he was under surveillance: “When I left Israel I had no reason to believe our planned trip would suddenly turn into a spy movie whose end is not clear.”
“I certainly didn’t think I’d have to stay in London and wouldn’t be able to return to Tel Aviv as a journalist and a free man, only because I published reports that were not convenient to the establishment,” he wrote.
Israel’s General Security Service (GSS, known casually as the Shin Bet) suspects Blau received the documents from Kamm, a writer for the popular Israeli news and entertainment site Walla!, who obtained the papers during her mandatory military service years earlier.
For months, Israeli authorities banned publication of any information on the case, or even mentioning the gag order.
After weeks of news of the case leaking out in blogs and Palestinian and international media (including a Ma’an investigation that I assisted), the government caved in and lifted the gag order on Thursday. The floodgates were opened.
Now that Blau and his editors at Haaretz can freely report their side of the story, much of what I learned from sources close to the case in recent weeks has been confirmed.
We now know, for example, that security agents raided Blau’s apartment, and that they seized and destroyed his computer.
We also know that Blau was the original focus of the Shin Bet’s investigation, and that his reports were at the heart of the case.
I spoke with Israeli historian Avner Cohen, an expert on Israeli state secrecy and the author of Israel and the Bomb, a book on the history of the Israeli nuclear program, about the matter.
Cohen said the Israeli state’s motivation in investigating Blau was varied, above all a “breach of field security,” but also a sense of political embarrassment over Blau’s reports. Blau, he said, “was able to put his hands on lots of stuff that was offensive and biting to many people.”
“It is evident that the GSS were performing all sorts of close surveillance on Uri Blau and it appears it led them to find Anat Kamm,” he added.
Over the years, Blau has made a career of exposing wrongdoing by his country’s armed forces. His associates say that, at the age of 19, he began spending his days getting military sources to confirm reports of abuses gathered by senior Haaretz reporters.
I was told that Blau would drive around the West Bank, near the scene of military action, offering rides to soldiers who would then corroborate reports of wrongdoing. Today, he is known to have a deep network of military sources.
Last year, Blau wrote a disturbing exposé about army-endorsed T-shirts, worn by Israeli soldiers, depicting pregnant Palestinian women in a sniper’s crosshairs, among other grotesque images.
He also revealed a secret military database that exposed the true nature and extent of Israel’s illegal West Bank settlements. Seventy-five percent of the settlements were illegal under Israel’s own domestic law, the data showed.
The report that triggered the current controversy was published in November 2008. It cited confidential army documents showing that the military violated a High Court ruling by ordering the 2007 assassination of an Islamic Jihad leader in Jenin, even when arrest was possible, and even when civilians were endangered. The article cited a March 2007 document in which Major-General Yair Naveh authorized forces to shoot three Jihad officials on sight.
In an editorial in Friday’s paper, Haaretz confirmed that Blau was summoned by Shin Bet in September 2009 and told to return documents that he used in preparing several articles.
Haaretz said it signed an agreement with the security agency under which Blau would hand over some documents but would not face further questioning, that his sources would be protected, and that the papers would not be used in any potential prosecution.
The newspaper also noted that the Shin Bet broke this agreement by detaining Kamm on the suspicion that she was Blau’s source, and by announcing in January 2009 that Blau was “wanted for questioning.”
In its editorial, Haaretz underlined the central moral irony of the case: the controversy over Blau’s reporting on so-called “sensitive” security matters hides the real issue: Israel’s military circumvented the High Court by authorizing targeted assassinations outside of the rules of engagement.
“In reality, however, the crime in question is far more severe – the one committed by the security apparatus (GOC Central Command in particular) in ignoring a High Court order and approving the targeted assassination of wanted men who could otherwise have been detained, in strikes that claimed the lives of innocent civilians,” Haaretz’s editorial board wrote.
Regardless, many unanswered questions remain. What information was contained in the other documents that Blau was forced to hand over? What other, even more unsettling secrets might still be submerged in the recesses of Israeli bureaucracy?
Beyond this, what motivated the Shin Bet to commit the blunder of seeking a court-ordered gag order that embarrassingly collapsed under inevitable media pressure?
Avner Cohen told me he thought one aspect of the motivation was related to “Israeli sensitivity about the Goldstone report,” referring to the UN fact-finding mission that accused Israel of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during its offensive on Gaza last year.
Cohen said the underlying context in the Kamm-Blau case is concern within the Israeli government about a “crisis of legitimacy” sparked by the allegations in the Goldstone report.
“There is a nervousness in Israel,” he said. “There is a sense that what has been tolerated by the world for decades, the occupation, the checkpoints and so on, that there is less and less tolerance for Israel as occupier.”
Where Your Taxes Go
The Pentagon’s Escalating Share
By DAVE LINDORFF | April 13, 2010
If you’re like me, now that we’re in the week that federal income taxes are due, you are finally starting to collect your records and prepare for the ordeal. Either way, whether you are a procrastinator like me, or have already finished and know how much you have paid to the government, it is a good time to stop and consider how much of your money goes to pay for our bloated and largely useless and pointless military.
The budget for the 2011 fiscal year, which has to be voted by Congress by this Oct. 1, looks to be about $3 trillion, not counting the funds collected for Social Security (since the Vietnam War, the government has included the Social Security Trust Fund in the budget as a way to make the cost of America’s imperial military adventures seem smaller in comparison to the total cost of government). Meanwhile, the military share of the budget works out to about $1.6 trillion.
That figure includes the Pentagon budget request of $708 billion, plus an estimated $200 billion in supplemental funding, called “overseas contingency funding” in euphemistic White House-speak), to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, some $40 billion or more in “black box” intelligence agency funding, $94 billion in non-DOD military spending (that’s for stuff like the military share of NASA funding, the miilitary operations of the Dept. of Homeland Security and the military activities of the State Dept., etc.), $100 billion in veterans benefits and health care spending, and $400 billion in interest on debt raised to pay for prior wars and the standing military.
The 2011 military budget, by the way, is the largest in history, not just in actual dollars, but in inflation-adjusted dollars, exceeding even the spending in World War II, when the nation was on an all-out war footing.
This military spending in all its myriad forms represents 53.3% of total US federal spending.
It’s also a budget that is rising at a faster pace than any other part of the budget (with the possible exception of bailing out crooked Wall Street financial firms and their managers). For the past decade, and continuing under the present administration, military budgets have been rising at a 9% annual clip, making health care inflation look tame by comparison.
US military spending isn’t just half of the US budget. It is also half of the entire global spending on war and weaponry. In 2009, according to the venerable War Resisters League, US military spending accounted for 47% of all money spent globally on war, weapons and military preparedness, and that share has certainly risen in the subsequent two years. What makes that staggering figure particularly ridiculous is that America’s allies–countries like France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan–account for another 21% of the world’s military spending. Fully 12 of the top-spenders among big military-spending nations are either allies of the US, or are friendly countries like Brazil and India. That is to say, America and its friends and allies account for more than two-thirds of all military spending worldwide.
Who is the real threat to peace here?
China, in contrast, probably the closest thing to a real “threat” to American interests because of America’s treaty commitments to the island nation of Taiwan, and China’s claim that the island is an integral part of the PRC, spends only some $130 billion on its military, much of which is actually devoted to maintaining military control over the country’s own 1.3 billion people, some of whom might prefer to be independent, or to be freer, if they weren’t under a military jackboot.
The next biggest military spender, Russia, spends less than $80 billion a year on its decrepit military–one-twentieth of the US, and isn’t even technically an enemy of the America anymore. Its military is largely busy keeping restive regions from spinning off from the mother country, anyhow.
Meanwhile Iran, which the White House and Congress are portraying as America’s arch enemy despite its not having invaded another country in hundreds of years, isn’t even on the list of the top 17 military big-spenders. Iran’s current military budget is a teensy $4.8 billion, about the same as the estimated $5 billion spent on the military by North Korea–America’s other “major enemy.” Each of those country’s military budgets is about one-quarter of the military budget of Australia, or a third of the military budget of the Netherlands.
Just to give one an idea of how small $4.8 billion is in comparison to the $1.6 trillion that the US is spending each year on war and planning for war, that number is roughly what the Pentagon plans to spend over the next year on childcare and youth programs, morale and recreation programs and commissaries on its bases! It’s about what the Pentagon will spend acquiring replacement Seahawk, Chinook and Blackhawk helicopters this year.
For the average American, what all this means is that of every dollar you send to the IRS, 53 cents will be going to pay for blowing stuff up, fattening the wallets of colonels, admirals and generals, bloating the portfolios of investors in military industries, and of course funding the bonuses paid to executives of those companies, and the campaign chests and expense accounts of the members of Congress who vote for these outlandish budgets. Your money will also be going to pay for the salaries and the bullets of those brave heroes over in Afghanistan who are executing kids, killing pregnant women (and then digging out the bullets and claiming they were stabbed by their families), and for the anti-personnel weapons that are creating legions of legless Afghan kids.
Next time you hear that the government needs to cut funds for providing medical care to the children of laid-off workers, or that supplemental unemployment funds are running out, next time you hear that federal funds that are needed to fund extra teachers at your school are being cut, or that Social Security benefits need to be cut back, or the retirement age needs to be increased to 70, next time you hear that your local post office has to be shut down for lack of funds, next time you hear that Medicare benefits need to be reduced, think about that 53% of your tax payment that is going to finance the most enormous war machine the world has ever known.
And ask yourself: Is this really necessary? Is this really where I want my money going? Is this really making us safer, or our nation more secure?
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation Into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu Jamal. He can be reached at dlindorff@mindspring.com
UK’s discriminatory criminalization of dissent
Sarah Irving, The Electronic Intifada, 13 April 2010
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London police are accused of leveling discriminatory charges against Muslim Gaza solidarity protesters. (Medyan Dairieh/MaanImages) |
“We are very angry, very afraid, very sad, very upset. My wife, she is depressed. When she sees police in the street she’s very frightened. They destroyed our life,” says Badi Tebani.
In January 2009, Tebani’s teenage son Yahia was one of tens of thousands of people who joined demonstrations in London against the Israeli bombing of Gaza. At one of those demonstrations Yahia and many others were “kettled” — surrounded by a police cordon and slowly let out in return for giving their names and addresses and for being filmed.
That was the last Yahia knew of it until the following April, when the family home was raided by 20 to 30 police at 5am. The front door was forced open and Badi Tebani and his family were ordered to lie on the floor. His four sons were all handcuffed. Three police officers knelt on the back of Hamza, 23. He was sleeping in shorts, but they refused to let him put on any clothes, even though they’d opened the windows, letting in the cold. Computers, mobile phones and clothes were all taken and the family car was broken into. Badi and Hamza described how police played games on the boys’ iPhones and made themselves coffee in the kitchen.
According to Badi, it was worse than anything he experienced back in Algeria. Badi is an Algerian who came to the UK seeking political asylum from the violence between the government and military and the political opposition which left 200,000 dead during the 1990s. He has taught here ever since.
The entire family was shocked when they discovered that it was Yahia the police were after. “He is a student at university, he has never has been in prison or in trouble with the police,” says Badi Tebani. “He’s always had a good character, good behavior.”
Yahia was later charged with violent disorder, an offense which carries a jail term of up to five years. He says that during the demonstration he took a chair from a nearby Starbucks to sit on, but police alleged that the cafe was trashed and the furniture used as weapons. Yahia was advised that if he pleaded guilty to the charge he would get community service, so he followed his lawyer’s advice. He didn’t know that most of the protesters who did the same were being sent straight to jail, so he was shocked when a friend was handed a two-year sentence. Yahia is now serving a one-year prison term.
“It’s a very big shock,” says Badi Tebani. “I visited Yahia during the week. He is the kind of person where you don’t know what he is thinking, but I know he is very, very sad, very upset. He will lose a year at university. His friend was sentenced to two years, he just took a stick in his hand for a few minutes, he didn’t throw it, he didn’t do anything. Another, he was sentenced to a year just because he went on the demonstration — he’s 16, he’s at college doing his A levels. They all fear the future because with a criminal record, it’s difficult to find a job.”
“They can’t say our boys are criminals,” continues Tebani. “They demonstrated to support people in Gaza. All the world knows what happened there, how many people were killed, how many houses destroyed. I think the real criminal is Israel. If any judge in the world needs to judge anyone, he needs to judge those responsible in Israel. People tried to help, to stop the catastrophe in Gaza, to ask the British government to stop the war. But the government sends them to jail.”
According to figures collated by Joanna Gilmore of Manchester University, Yahia Tebani is one of 119 individuals arrested at or after the demonstrations. The youngest person arrested was 12, although the average age was 18 or 19. Almost all of the demonstrators charged with violent disorder were Muslim, despite the mixed nature of the protests, which were supported by majority-white organizations like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as well as by Islamic groups.
At least 22 persons have been given custodial sentences, with terms of up to 30 months. Most of these have come from Judge Denniss at Isleworth Crown Court in West London, who has made it clear that he is imposing “deterrent” sentences. A 15-year-old boy was given a non-custodial sentence which involves a curfew and an electronic tag, while a Palestinian who only days earlier had seen images in the newspapers of dead relatives in Gaza was given a two-year jail term.
According to Gilmore, the number of arrests and sentences resulting from the Gaza protests are far greater than those from much larger and more violent anti-war and anti-capitalist demonstrations which have taken place in London.
Lawyer Matt Foot, who is acting for several of the protesters, agrees. “The dawn raids were an extreme measure,” he says. “It’s the first time I’ve come across it on a large scale in recent times for this kind of offense. It was used in the 1980s for the miners’ strike, and in smaller numbers for an anti-Bush demonstration.”
Foot also says he believes that too many people were arrested in the first place, and then that demonstrators were “over-charged” in relation to their actual actions. “At the anti-Bush demonstration, very few people got convicted of violent disorder and if they did they got non-custodial sentences, the judge certainly didn’t talk about deterrent sentences then.” He acknowledges that Islamophobia could have played a part in the decision to arrest and charge so many people with such serious offenses.
“That’s one of the differences with the anti-Bush protests,” Foot adds. “Very few white people were charged in the end. It’s not necessarily the judge’s fault — I think they were over-charged, too many people were charged and I think the courts have then seen 60 people coming through on violent disorder and reacted in a certain way. I think the mischief comes from too many people being arrested and then being over-charged.”
Joanna Berridge of the Gaza Demonstrators Support Campaign fears that the British authorities are using the Gaza protests as an “easy target” to suppress political demonstrations more widely, playing on widespread Islamophobia to set legal precedents which can then be used against other protesters. “It’s first about political policing of protest, with the Islamophobia feeding into it,” she claims.
Foot also points to a lack of coordination between the different cases as having resulted in badly-advised guilty pleas. According to Joanna Berridge, the Islamic Human Rights Commission and a few individual activists distributed information on lawyers and protesters’ legal rights at the demonstrations, but it seems that many of the organizations who called for the protests didn’t follow suit. This, coupled with the fact that many of the arrests happened up to eight months after the protests, meant that many defendants have ended up with duty solicitors from their local police stations, rather than lawyers with specialized knowledge of defending protesters.
“In comparison with the G20 protests, the demographic of the protesters is very different,” says Berridge. “People from movements like Climate Camp knew how to protect themselves, whereas for a lot of the guys on the Gaza demos, it was a spontaneous thing. It was the first march many of them had been on, so they didn’t know their rights. The deterrent sentences have mainly been handed out to people who pleaded guilty, while the majority of those with more legal know-how, who have been involved in protests before, have had their cases thrown out before they even got to court, or been found not guilty.”
The Gaza Demonstrators Support Campaign has responded to the need for better legal knowledge amongst Palestine solidarity campaigners by organizing legal observer trainings. They are also offering practical support, such as translation and refreshments, to the defendants and their families at court, and fundraising for families who have lost breadwinners to jail terms.
A second campaign, run by the Stop The War Coalition, has collected more than 1,500 signatures on a petition against the sentences. Jeremy Corbyn, Labor MP for Islington North, called some of the sentences “extraordinary and out of all proportion to the crimes committed.” The campaign also tabled a parliamentary question on the policing of the protests, which also attracted 55 complaints to the Metropolitan Police and the Independent Police Complaints Commission. A number of these were dropped because the ID numbers on officers’ uniforms had been covered up.
As Matt Foot puts it, “The judges hand down these deterrent sentences and it’s about real people’s lives. They say, ‘these are people of good character’ and then start locking up young people who just care about what’s happening in Palestine, the whole thing becomes hideous.”
“I think the result of these cases on a larger scale will impact heavily on future rights to protest,” emphasizes Joanna Berridge. “It’s really important that these boys don’t get used as an example, because this will stay on their record for years. They were protesting about something as widely recognized as war crimes against Gaza. That’s not been taken into account but it should really be focused on, that these brave and conscious young people were going out and taking a stand and are having their lives ruined as a result.”
Sarah Irving is a freelance writer from Manchester, UK. She worked with the International Solidarity Movement in the occupied West Bank in 2001-02 and with Olive Co-op, promoting fair trade Palestinian products and solidarity visits, in 2004-06. She now writes full-time on a range of issues, including Palestine, “http://www.sarahirving.net,” Her first book, Gaza: Beneath the Bombs, co-authored with Sharyn Lock, was published in January 2010.
Katyn and ‘The Good War’
By Patrick J. Buchanan | April 13, 2010
The decapitation of the Polish government last weekend, including President Lech Kaczynski and the military leadership, on that flight to Smolensk to commemorate the Katyn Massacre, brings to mind the terrible and tragic days and deeds of what many yet call the Good War.
From Russian reports, the Polish pilot waved off four commands from air traffic control to divert to Moscow or Minsk. The airfield at Smolensk was fogged in. There is speculation that Kaczynski, fiercely nationalistic and distrustful of Russians, may have defiantly ordered his pilot to land, rather than delay the 70th anniversary of Katyn. The symbolism is inescapable.
For it was Polish defiance of Adolf Hitler’s demand to negotiate the return of Danzig, a German town put under Polish control after World War I, that gave birth to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which led to Katyn.
After the German invasion on Sept. 1, 1939, ignited the war, Joseph Stalin attacked Poland from the east on Sept. 17, capturing much of the Polish officer corps.
In April 1940, on Stalin’s order, the Soviet Secret Police, the NKVD, murdered virtually the entire leadership of the nation, including 8,000 officers and near twice that number of intellectuals and civilian leaders. Some 4,000 were shot with their hands tied behind their backs in Katyn Forest.
The Germans unearthed the bodies in 1943 and invited the Red Cross in to examine the site. Through newspapers found on the corpses, the date of the atrocity was fixed as more than a year before the German army invaded the Soviet Union.
When Polish patriots, whose sons had flown with the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, went to Winston Churchill to demand that he get answers from Stalin about the atrocity, he brushed them off.
“There is no sense prowling around the three-year-old graves of Smolensk,” said the Great Man.
At Stalin’s request, Churchill bullied the Poles into acceding to Soviet annexation of all the Polish land Stalin had been awarded for signing his pact with Hitler.
At the Nuremberg trials, the Russian delegation, led by Andrei Vishinsky, the prosecutor who did Stalin’s dirty work in the purge trials, charged the Germans with the massacre.
This presented a problem for the Americans and British who knew the truth. They finessed the issue by leaving the charge unresolved.
Before, during, and after the Nuremberg trials that would convict the Nazis of “crimes against humanity,” one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history was being committed. Fifteen million Germans – old men, women, children – were driven like cattle out of ancestral homes in Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, Silesia, and the Sudetenland.
As human rights champion Alfred de Zayas wrote in his courageous Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans, perhaps 2 million died in the exodus. Few German women in Eastern Europe escaped rape.
The Allies turned a blind eye to the monstrous atrocity, as ancient names vanished. Memel became Klaipeda. Prussia disappeared. Koenigsberg, the city of Immanuel Kant, became Kaliningrad. Danzig became Gdansk. Breslau became Wroclaw.
“The Germans deserved it, for what they did,” comes the retort.
Undeniably, the Nazi atrocities were numerous and horrible – against Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews.
Yet, it was innocent Germans who paid for the crimes of the guilty Germans.
What happened in Eastern and Central Europe from 1939 to 1948 provided proof, if any more were really needed, of the truth of W.H. Auden’s insight in his poem “September 1, 1939″: “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”
At war’s end, Churchill and Harry Truman agreed to repatriate 2 million Soviet prisoners of war to Stalin, none of whom wished to go back. For return to Russia meant death at the railhead or a short, brutal life at slave labor in the Gulag Archipelago.
Operation Keelhaul was the name given the Allied collusion with the Red Army in transferring these terrified POWs back to their deaths at the hands of the same Soviet butchers who had done the murdering at Katyn.
On Sept. 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany to restore the integrity and independence of Poland. For this great goal they converted a German-Polish clash that lasted three weeks into a world war lasting six years.
And was Poland saved? No. Poland was crucified.
As a consequence of the war begun on her behalf, millions of Poles – Jews and Catholics alike – perished, the Katyn massacre was carried out, the Home Army was annihilated, the nation suffered five years of Nazi rule and almost half a century of communist persecution.
The tragedy of today is that it was men of the postwar generation, like Lech Kaczynski, who kept the faith of their fathers and led Poland out of that darkness into the sunlight of freedom, who died seeking to pay homage to their fathers who suffered one of the greatest crimes of that bloodiest of centuries.
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At Least 21 Civilians Killed in Mogadishu Violence
Most Die as AU Troops Shell Residential Area
By Jason Ditz | April 12, 2010
Violence in the Somali capital of Mogadishu today killed at least 21 civilians and two government soldiers, and left scores injured. The bulk of the civilian toll came, as it so often does in Mogadishu, with AU shelling against a densely populated residential area.
The first attack involved a bombing attack against a government convoy, which left two government soldiers and four civilians dead. Another civilian was reported to have died of injuries related to a mortar attack on the airport.
The African Union forces responded by shelling a residential neighborhood near the city’s main marketplace, killing at least 16 and wounding 55 others. The head of the city’s ambulance service was highly critical of the AU attack.
“It was indiscriminate shelling,” he noted, adding it was the worst such incident in months. The Somali government confirmed the shelling but declined to offer any details about why the neighborhood was targeted.
But AU troops have regularly shelled the area around the Bakara market, one of the most populated in the city, in “retaliation” after insurgent attacks. The AU has in the past claimed that any areas outside government control are fair game for shelling, but as the self-proclaimed Somali government controls only a few city blocks near the presidential palace this has placed the vast majority of the Somali populace directly in the crosshairs.
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Book Excerpt
“Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism!” The Science is Settled. Right?
ICAN urges the IACC to actually study infant vaccines and autism
By Aaron Siri | Injecting Freedom | March 16, 2026
On behalf of ICAN, we just sent a copy of chapter 11 of Vaccines, Amen to the newly appointed members of the federal Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC).
If you haven’t already read this chapter, you can read the whole thing in the attached letter. I trust that after you read it, you’ll see why the statement “vaccines do not cause autism” is a belief, not science!
IACC Public Comment Letter
1.53MB ∙ PDF file
Includes chapter 11 of Vaccines, Amen
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