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BBC – Evidence of Israel’s nuclear weapons (Banned/Censored)

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April 9, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News, Timeless or most popular, Video | Leave a comment

Nuclear Charades in Prague

The New START Deal

By BINOY KAMPMARK| April 9, 2010

When the two largest holders of nuclear weapons sign treaties reducing their lethal stockpile, the optimist might have reason to crow.  Another step taken to rid the world of various, fabulously terrifying weapons.  US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev have penned their signatures to yet another document in the Prague – a new START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty).  According to the American president, the treaty will slash U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads by 25 to 30 percent.  A limit will be placed on launchers (800), and nuclear-armed missiles and heavy bombers capped to 200 each.

There is little doubt where this is going.  The Obama administration is keen to establish its disarmament, and importantly, non-proliferation credentials.  In May, the government is set to argue at the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference that the NPT needs a good insertion of teeth.  The US Senate will then have to be convinced that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is worth their time ratifying.  But this, in the vast scheme of things, is an elaborate smokescreen.

A few cruel realities remain in this game of charades we saw unfold at Prague.  Such reductions simply look like trimming and weight loss programs for ungainly military beasts.  Fat is being cut from these creatures in the hope of making them leaner and fitter in the task of killing.  Modern technologies are being harnessed on both sides that do little for the confidence of the jaded peace activist.   Money is being channelled into laboratories to ensure the ‘efficiency’ of current and future arsenals.

Fundamental to this strategy is a re-orientation of US goals in any future use of massive conventional force termed the Prompt Global Strike program. (PGS, in military nomenclature, is the capability to strike at any point within an hour of authorised launch.)  Congress was already being teased with the idea in 2006, when the Pentagon, with the blessing of STRATCOM Commander, General James Cartwright, attempted wooing politicians with the idea of a Trident missile capability based on non-nuclear warheads. But the defense establishment would have to bide their time – Congress wasn’t quite ready to fall out of love with the nuclear option.

The Pentagon’s current drive to develop ballistic weapons that will neatly fill any notable gaps left by a reduction of nuclear weaponry is very much in evidence.  Sceptics within the security establishment are being converted.  The cut backs on nuclear weapons will be simply replaced by an arsenal of missiles armed with conventional warheads.  The Russians, on this score, are justifiably worried.  In the words of a pensive Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, ‘World states will hardly accept a situation in which nuclear weapons disappear, but weapons that are no less destabilising emerge in the hands of certain members of the international community.’

Ultimately, the only way one can trash the stockpile is by trashing the very idea of deterrence.  Now that is a far more formidable proposition, and something activists and policy makers should tackle.  No one can prove that deterrence has worked.  But nor can it be shown that it has failed.  A nonsensical expression such as the ‘The Long Peace’ (a term coined for the Cold War), was premised on that very assumption.  The fear now is that nuclear weapons might well be phased out (a problematic assertion in itself) in favour of a mighty conventional deterrent.  And so, we come full circle, paving the way for another arms race, and yet another escalation in the name of peace and security.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

April 9, 2010 Posted by | Militarism, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

The Dark Underbelly of Israel’s Security State

The Anat Kamm Affair

By JONATHAN COOK | April 9, 2010
Israeli forces have extrajudicially executed hundreds of Palestinians during the past several years. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Next week 23-year-old Anat Kamm is due to stand trial for her life — or rather the state’s demand that she serve a life sentence for passing secret documents to an Israeli reporter, Uri Blau, of the liberal Haaretz daily. She is charged with spying.

Blau himself is in hiding in London, facing, if not a Mossad hit squad, at least the stringent efforts of Israel’s security services to get him back to Israel over the opposition of his editors, who fear he will be put away too.

This episode has been dragging on behind the scenes for months, since at least December, when Kamm was placed under house arrest pending the trial.

Not a word about the case leaked in Israel until this week when the security services, who had won from the courts a blanket gag order — a gag on the gag, so to speak — were forced to reverse course when foreign bloggers began making the restrictions futile. Hebrew pages on Facebook had already laid out the bare bones of the story.

So, now that much of the case is out in the light, what are the crimes committed by Kamm and Blau?

During her conscription, Kamm copied possibly hundreds of army documents that revealed systematic law-breaking by the Israeli high command operating in the occupied Palestinian territories, including orders to ignore court rulings. She was working at the time in the office of Brig Gen Yair Naveh, who is in charge of operations in the West Bank.

Blau’s crime is that he published a series of scoops based on her leaked information that have highly embarrassed senior Israeli officers by showing their contempt for the rule of law.

His reports included revelations that the senior command had approved targeting Palestinian bystanders during the military’s extra-judicial assassinations in the occupied territories; that, in violation of a commitment to the high court, the army had issued orders to execute wanted Palestinians even if they could be safely apprehended; and that the defence ministry had a compiled a secret report showing that the great majority of settlements in the West Bank were illegal even under Israeli law (all are illegal in international law).

In a properly democratic country, Kamm would have an honorable defence against the charges, of being a whistle-blower rather than a spy, and Blau would be winning journalism prizes not huddling away in exile.

But this is Israel. Here, despite a desperate last-stand for the principles of free speech and the rule of law in the pages of the Haaretz newspaper today, which is itself in the firing line over its role, there is almost no public sympathy for Kamm or even Blau.

The pair are already being described, both by officials and in chat forums and talkback columns, as traitors who should be jailed, disappeared or executed for the crime of endangering the state.

The telling comparison being made is to Mordechai Vanunu, the former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant who exposed Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal. Inside Israel, he is universally reviled to this day, having spent nearly two decades in harsh confinement. He is still under a loose house arrest, denied the chance to leave the country.

Blau and Kamm have every reason to be worried they may share a similar fate. Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, which has been leading the investigation, said yesterday that they had been too “sensitive to the media world” in pursuing the case for so long and that the Shin Bet would now “remove its gloves”.

Maybe that explains why Kamm’s home address was still visible on the charge sheet published yesterday, putting her life in danger from one of those crazed talkbackers.

It certainly echoes warnings we have had before from the Shin Bet about how it operates.

Much like Blau, Azmi Bishara, once head of a leading Arab party in Israel, is today living in exile after the Shin Bet put him in their sights. He had been campaigning for democratic reforms that would make Israel a “state of all its citizens” rather than a Jewish state.

While he was abroad in 2007, the Shin Bet announced that he would be put on trial for treason when he returned, supposedly because he had had contacts with Hizbullah during Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006.

Few experts believe Bishara could have had any useful information for Hizbullah, but the Shin Bet’s goals and modus operandi were revealed later by Diskin in a letter on its attitude to Bishara and his democratisation campaign. The Shin Bet was there, he said, to thwart the activities of groups or individuals who threatened the state’s Jewish character “even if such activity is sanctioned by the law”.

Diskin called this the principle of “a democracy defending itself” when it was really a case of Jewish leaders in a state based on Jewish privilege protecting those privileges. This time it is about the leaders of Israel’s massive security industry protecting their privileges in a security state by silencing witnesses to their crimes and keeping ordinary citizens in ignorance.

Justifying his decision to “take the gloves off” in the case of Kamm and Blau, Diskin said: “It is a dream of every enemy state to get its hands on these kinds of documents” — that is, documents proving that the Israeli army has repeatedly broken the country’s laws, in addition, of course, to its systematic violations of international law.

Diskin claims that national security has been put at risk, even though the reports Blau based on the documents — and even the documents themselves — were presented to, and approved by, the military censor for publication. The censor can restrict publication based only on national security concerns, unlike Diskin, the army senior command and the government, who obey other kinds of concerns.

Diskin knows there is every chance he will get away with his ploy because of a brainwashed Israeli public, a largely patriotic media and a supine judiciary.

The two judges who oversaw the months of gagging orders to silence any press discussion of this case did so on the say-so of the Shin Bet that there were vital national security issues at stake. Both judges are stalwarts of Israel’s enormous security industry.

Einat Ron was appointed a civilian judge in 2007 after working her way up the ranks of the military legal establishment, there to give a legal gloss to the occupation. Notoriously in 2003, when she was the chief military prosecutor, she secretly proposed various fabrications to the army so that it could cover up the killing of an 11-year-old Palestinian boy, Khalil al-Mughrabi, two years earlier. Her role only came to light because a secret report into the boy’s death was mistakenly attached to the army’s letter to an Israeli human rights group.

The other judge is Ze’ev Hammer, who finally overturned the gag order this week — but only after a former supreme court judge, Dalia Dorner, now the head of Israel’s Press Council, belatedly heaped scorn on it. She argued that, with so much discussion of the case outside Israel, the world was getting the impression that Israel flouted democratic norms.

Judge Hammer has his own distinguished place in Israel’s security industry, according to Israeli analyst Dimi Reider. During his eight years of legal study, Hammer worked for both the Shin Bet and Israel’s Mossad spy agency.

Judge Hammer and Judge Ron are deeply implicated in the same criminal outfit — the Israeli security establishment — that is now trying to cover up the tracks that lead directly to its door. Kamm is doubtless wondering what similar vested interests the judges who hear her case next week will not be declaring.

Writing in Haaretz today, Blau said he had been warned “that if I return to Israel I could be silenced for ever, and that I would be charged for crimes related to espionage”. He concluded that “this isn’t only a war for my personal freedom but for Israel’s image”.

He should leave worrying about Israel’s image to Netanyahu, Diskin and judges like Dorner. That was why the gag order was enforced in the first place. This is not a battle for Israel’s image; it’s a battle for what is left of its soul.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.

April 9, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism | Leave a comment

Witnesses: Soldiers look on as settlers beat 2

Ma’an – 09/04/2010

Hebron – Two 19-year-old men were transferred to a Hebron hospital for treatment Wednesday after being harshly beaten by Israeli settlers near the Ibrahimi Mosque, locals said.

Witnesses identified the two as Muhammad Abdul Raouf Al-Muhtaseb and Rushdi Al-Muhtaseb, both 19, and said soldiers looked on as settlers attacked the men and did nothing to interfere.

On 31 March a similar incident was reported, with A’teiyah Yousef Maswada, 31, transferred to hospital following an attack by some 10 settlers outside of the mosque.

Palestinian police reported the attack, and eyewitnesses including Christian Peacemaker Teams corroborated the account, with Israeli police unavailable for comment by phone.

Shopkeepers in the area said the man was en route to the Ibrahimi Mosque when he was assaulted, and was described as having a bloody face, CPT reported, noting that witnesses said the man did not go to the hospital. By the time Israeli police arrived on the scene, the CPT observer noted, shopkeepers said the settlers had fled.

April 9, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

US-Russia Disarmament Treaty on Shaky Ground

Lack of Missile Defense Consensus Means Deal Could Fall Apart at Any Moment

By Jason Ditz | April 08, 2010

Much has been made of the signing of the new nuclear disarmament treaty signed by Presidents Obama and Medvedev, an ambitious plan to reduce the number of nuclear warheads in the US and Russian arsenals. But the treaty seems to be on an extremely shaky foundation, and the prospect that it will survive over the long term seems uncertain at best.

Russia today reiterated their concerns over the US missile defense shield, and warned again that it could “derail” the treaty. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov insisted that they could “opt-out” of the treaty at any time if they become too uncomfortable with the US installing of defensive missiles along their border.

The final draft of the treaty contains no mention of missile defense at all, something which the Obama Administration has spun as a major victory but which may in reality be a major hole in the treaty, a lack of comprehensiveness that could make it short-lived.

Keeping the missile defense unmentioned is particularly important as the Obama Administration struggles to win ratification of the treaty in the Senate, which will require a two-thirds majority and is already seeing some vocal opposition.

Russia and the US have been clashing over America’s missile defense plans for several years now, and the finalization of the treaty, which was supposed to come last year, was delayed for many months by the inability to reach a consensus. Finally the matter was just “dropped” so a pact could be reached.

So the treaty is signed now, but the major stumbling block is still there. Barring a future understanding on the issue, something neither side appears to be working particularly hard on, missile defense will remain an issue that must inevitably render the treaty untenable.

April 9, 2010 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

How Brainy Is Obama?

By Alan Bock | April 09, 2010

Most of the other hypotheses don’t seem to make much sense, so I’m starting to approach the tentative conclusion that Barack Obama is just not that smart. It should hardly come as a surprise. He undoubtedly has an IQ slightly higher than normal or he wouldn’t have made it through college and law school (though it might be interesting to see his transcripts, which to my knowledge he hasn’t released yet). But in retrospect what he seems to have displayed throughout his career is cunning rather than anything resembling real learning.

This would hardly be unique among American presidents, and in fact there are some who argue that high intellect and/or book-learnin’ are not only seldom to be seen in the presidency but perhaps not especially desirable. President Clinton was obviously an engaged policy wonk with what one suspects is a pretty high IQ and a degree of intellectual curiosity. George W. Bush was not quite the dunce some made him out to be, but one would be hard pressed to find evidence of intellectual curiosity, a philosophy of governance formed by much deep thinking, a willingness to dig into policy details, or a capacity to learn much from either study or experience.

Barack Obama has obviously been extremely ambitious for a long time; perhaps he has had the presidency in mind since early college days. So he has been alert to the main chance, aware of the kinds of alliances he ought to make, aware that a sensitive autobiography would make him look special in the eyes of the easily duped intellectuals of our fading empire, aware of how to present himself as a multicultural black man. But his reputation for being really smart is belied by so many of his actions.

What has me going this time is not health care, though there’s plenty of evidence there, but Afghanistan. His recent visit there cemented this war as “his” war. But the war makes so little sense that you would think almost any reasonably intelligent person – I suspect he didn’t take any international relations classes in college, and he certainly has not shown any special interest in that field heretofore, so maybe that’s a mitigating factor – would have been able to figure it out.

The official line about keeping al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan is obviously absurd; al-Qaeda hasn’t been there since 2002. He has to know – doesn’t he? – that the Taliban is an indigenous Afghan outfit without international ambitions, so while a takeover would be sad for many Afghans, it would have few if any international repercussions. He is obviously aware enough that Karzai is a corrupt tool, and uncooperative to boot, that it annoys him. So why does he insist on maintaining a U.S. presence in the Graveyard of Empires?

What are the possibilities? Does he really want to preside over the fall of the American Empire? Is he so deluded as to think we can bring a semblance of democracy, stability, or semi-decent governance in the next 15 months or so? Is he just cunning enough to realize that historians tend to rank American presidents who have presided over wars as “greater” than those who presided over peaceful periods?

I’m coming to think that maybe he’s just not that smart… Full article

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Link for more in depth coverage of Obama’s academic background

April 9, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

Kyrgyzstan moves to shut US-run Manas air base

Press TV – April 9, 2010

Kyrgyzstan’s new leaders have said they intend to remove a US military base, which currently serves as the premier air mobility hub for the US-led forces in Afghanistan, from their soil.

The interim government led by ex-foreign minister Roza Otunbayeva, has said it wants the US base, Manas, closed down for security reasons. The remarks came amid growing uncertainty over whether the new Kyrgyz authorities would allow the US to use the base.

Russia, which itself maintains an air base at Kant, just 20 miles from Manas, has been keen to block US military presence in the region. Moscow has been increasingly concerned about US military’s prolonged presence in the geo-strategically important Region.

This is while the opposition has taken power and dissolved the parliament. Otunbayeva has promised a new constitution and a presidential election at some point in the next six months. She says a care-taker government will serve as both presidency and parliament for now.

The ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev has refused oppositions demands to resign. Meanwhile, protestors in the capital Bishkek have demolished and burned the house of the toppled president.

The opposition claims to be in full control of the capital, the armed forces and the media. Earlier, the interim government allowed police to use firearms and shoot looters across the Kyrgyz capital. Wednesday’s unrest that toppled the government claimed at least 75 lives with over 1000 others injured.

April 9, 2010 Posted by | Militarism | Leave a comment

“Racism” charges dropped against Scottish solidarity activists

Press release, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, 8 April 2010

Five Palestine campaigners who contested the relevancy of a “racially aggravated conduct” charge in relation to their protest against Israel’s blockade of Gaza had all charges against them dropped today.

The campaigners, all members of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC), had interrupted the August 2008 Edinburgh Festival concert by the Jerusalem Quartet. Tours by the classical musicians are regularly sponsored by the Israeli government, which the campaign group claims makes them a legitimate target for protest.

The campaigners had been accused of making “comments about Jews, Israelis and the State of Israel,” but during a three-day legal debate at Edinburgh Sheriff Court, a BBC audio recording of the event revealed that there had been no reference made to “Jews.” Comments included “they are Israeli army musicians,” “end the siege of Gaza,” “genocide in Gaza” and “boycott Israel.”

Sheriff James Scott ruled that “the comments were clearly directed at the State of Israel, the Israeli army and Israeli army musicians,” and not targeted at “citizens of Israel” per se. “The procurator fiscal’s attempts to squeeze malice and ill will out of the agreed facts were rather strained,” he said.

The sheriff expressed concern that to continue with the prosecution would have implications for freedom of expression generally: “if persons on a public march designed to protest against and publicize alleged crimes committed by a state and its army are afraid to name that state for fear of being charged with racially aggravated behavior, it would render worthless their Article 10(1) rights. Presumably their placards would have to read, ‘Genocide in an unspecified state in the Middle East;’ ‘Boycott an unspecified state in the Middle East,’ etc.

“Having concluded that continuation of the present prosecution is not necessary or proportionate, and therefore incompetent, it seems to me that the complaint must be dismissed.”

Mr. Fraser, the Procurator Fiscal Depute, said he would be appealing the ruling.

Today’s ruling will disappoint the musicians whose concerts now attract regular protest. After a similar disruption of their Wigmore Hall concert last week they issued a statement claiming to “have no connection with or patronage by the [Israeli] government.” However, organizers of their November 2009 Australia tour acknowledged that “The Israeli government provided about $8,000 towards the costs of the tour,” but explained, “this was only a minuscule proportion of the total cost.”

Outside Edinburgh Sheriff Court, supporters held banners reproducing the “racist” slogans, and a number of enlarged concert programs indicating Israeli Embassy sponsorship of the quartet’s tours were on display.

SPSC chair Mick Napier had mixed feelings about the ruling: “While this particular attempt to criminalize solidarity with Palestine has failed, British government support for Israel continues. In England, more than 20 prison sentences — some for over two years — have been handed out to those who protested Israel’s massacre of 1,400 mostly civilians in Gaza last year. On the subject of racism, of the 78 charged, all but two are young Muslims.”

“If our case had gone to trial, it would have been Israel in the dock, not us. We had a string of witnesses from Palestine, Israel and South Africa lined up to discuss the real racism and apartheid that Palestinians face daily. As long as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues, Israel’s political, cultural and sporting ambassadors will face boycott protest similar to that faced by the racist apartheid South African regime in the last century.

“It’s time for politicians to fall into line with public opinion. Alex Salmond’s recent call for a review of trade relations with Israel is a step in the right direction, but what that means in practice remains to be seen.”

Link

April 8, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

A presidential death warrant

By Paul Woodward on April 8, 2010

American soldiers have to be trained how to kill, but for American presidents killing comes naturally.

Anyone who aspires to become president must surely ask themselves: am I willing to end someone else’s life, be that an individual or perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of people? After all, even though it’s not spelled out in the Constitution, it’s clear that a pacifist could never hold this office. Killing comes with the territory.

Even so, I can’t help wondering when it was the Barack Obama posed this question and decided, “yes I can.”

With candidate George W Bush we didn’t need to ask the question. He had a track record — as the Governor of Texas he presided over 152 executions. But with Obama, we may never know when he came to regard killing as a tolerable part of his job.

It’s hard to imagine that as a community organizer he ever entertained the idea that wiping people out could become a dimension of working towards the greater good, yet at some point he must have seen this coming and — from all the evidence we now see — not flinched.

But to contrast Obama and Bush as killers, here’s what’s scary and yet passes without comment: Obama’s approach is dispassionate, with no explicit moral calculation. Whereas Bush felt driven to assume an air of righteousness and moral superiority, casting his actions within a drama of good and evil, Obama presents the image of an administrative process through which, after careful analysis and legal and political deliberation, lives are terminated.

Under the morally insidious rubric of “procedures” — a notion that peels away personal responsibility by replacing it with impersonal rules-based behavior — the president, the CIA, the military, the administration, the media, and the American public are all being offered an excuse to look the other way. An unnamed official assured a Washington Post reporter: “[there are] careful procedures our government follows in these kinds of cases.”

When Anwar al-Awlaki, an American born in New Mexico is shredded and incinerated — his likely fate at the receiving end of a Hellfire missile — there will be no account of the last moments of his life. No record of who happened to be in the vicinity. Most likely nothing more than a cursory wire report quoting unnamed American officials announcing that the United States no longer faces a threat from a so-called high value target.

Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California and chairwoman of a House subcommittee on homeland security, was out prepping the media and the public on Tuesday when she called Awlaki “probably the person, the terrorist, who would be terrorist No 1 in terms of threat against us.”

Although it was only this week that a US official announced that Awlaki is now on the CIA’s assassination list, US special forces were already authorized and had made at least one attempt to kill the Muslim cleric who now resides in Yemen.

While both the military and the CIA make use of drones for the purpose of remotely controlled assassination, the fact that Awlaki is now considered a legitimate target for “lethal CIA operations” raises questions about the methods the agency might use.

Last summer CIA Director Leon Panetta shut down a secret CIA program which would have operated assassination teams for hunting down al Qaeda leaders. The news was presented as though the new administration was again distancing itself from the questionable practices of the Bush administration, yet at the time, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C Blair told Congress that the termination of that particular program did not rule out the future use of insertion teams that could kill or capture terrorist leaders.

One of the many ironies here is that the Obama administration appears to have abandoned one of the Bush era rationales for torture in favor of its own rationale for murder.

The most frequently used justification for torturing terrorist suspects has been the claim that in the scenario of a so-called ticking time bomb, vital information might be forced out of a suspect enabling an imminent act of terrorism to be thwarted.

Anwar al-Awlaki is supposedly just such a suspect. “He’s working actively to kill Americans,” an American official told the Washington Post. But whatever vital intelligence he might be able to provide, we’ll probably never know. Once dead he won’t hatch any new plots, but as for the ones already set in motion, well, we’ll just have to wait and see what sort of surprises may yet appear.

Needless to say, I am not suggesting that torturing terrorist suspects is any more acceptable than murdering them.

Ken Gude, a human rights expert from the Center for American Progress, argues that Awlaki is a legitimate target for assassination because of his claimed role in assisting the 9/11 attackers. On that basis, his killing would appear to be an act of extra-judicial punishment rather than the removal of a potential threat. But even if the administration sticks assiduously to its focus on future threats, it should not claim a God-like power to predict the future. Nor should it assume that the threat someone poses is necessarily diminished once they are dead.

In weighing the fate of Anwar al-Awlaki, this administration would do well to remember the case of Mohammed El Fazazi, a Moroccan cleric who from a Hamburg mosque preached to Mohammed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh and Marwan al-Shehhi, three of the men who participated in the 9/11 attacks, that it was the duty of a devout Muslim to “slit the throats of non-believers.”

Eight years later, Fazazi had a new message as he appealed to Muslims to air their grievances through peaceful demonstrations. He is helping turn young men away from violent jihad. But what would stir the hearts of such men now if rather than hearing Fazazi’s moderated message, instead they held the memory of a day he became a martyr when struck by an American Hellfire missile?

April 8, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Cameras and Kuffiyehs: Palestine’s video resistance

Don Duncan | The National | April 07. 2010

NI’LIN, WEST BANK // Every Friday, the slingshot-wielding boys of the West Bank village of Ni’lin make their way to protests at the Israeli-constructed separation wall, which has deprived the village of 300 hectares of its farmland. But weaving among the boys, or shabab, are other youngsters with a different weapon of choice – video cameras.

For the past three years, the Israeli human rights NGO, B’Tselem, has been providing cameras and training to young Palestinians as part of its “Shooting Back” project – a bid to document and collect hard video evidence of abuses and misconduct by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Today, there are 150 cameras all over the West Bank and Gaza for this purpose and most of the footage captured – some 1,500 hours so far – ends up on the floor-to-ceiling archive shelves in the Jerusalem office of Yoav Gross who directs the NGO’s video project.

Several pieces of footage captured by B’Tselem’s camera volunteers have served as key evidence, instrumental in Israeli court rulings in favour of Palestinian plaintiffs.

The presence of cameras, now on both Palestinian and Israeli sides, has also served as a deterrent to violence and abuse. But three years after launching the project, B’Tselem has seen another, unintended consequence of its deployment of cameras to Palestinian youth.

“People started to take this tool, the video camera, and use it as a way to express themselves, to tell stories,” said Mr Gross. “We didn’t train them to do that. We trained them to document human rights violations. But pretty soon we got the sense that this can be a powerful tool for them to empower themselves.”

What has emerged is a generation of young Palestinian filmmakers, who are at ease with the camera and are becoming fluent in editing and the language of visual storytelling.

Back at a Ni’lin protest on a recent Friday afternoon, Arafat Kanaan, 17, decided to leave his camera at home and stood back from the protest. He had been detained by the IDF the previous week and, obscuring half of his face with a piece of cardboard. He has to worry about cameras too – IDF ones.

“The camera is like a weapon for us,” he said. “It can display and show everyone in the world what is the truth.”

His sister Salam, 19, was one of the volunteers to capture IDF misconduct – the shooting of a handcuffed Palestinian detainee in Ni’lin – that lead to the successful prosecution of an Israeli soldier.

Together with Salam and a friend, Rasheed Amira, 17, Arafat has set up Ni’lin Media Group, which produces weekly video packages of each protest and longer form documentary-style videos on life under occupation. He posts them to the group’s youtube channel (www.youtube.com/user/NilinMediaGroup) and screens the films to the community on Ni’lin’s central square.

“We collect ourselves into a group because it gives us the power to continue the work and to train others,” said Arafat.

The evolution from straight documentation to complex storytelling is evident elsewhere.

Seventeen-year-old Diaa Hadad, a Palestinian who lives in the Jewish-settled H2 sector of Hebron, wanted to show the effects of settlement and IDF sanctions on Palestinian movement in the sector. He chose to do so through a one minute film called H1H2. The film is a split screen. On the right half is the bustling market street of Bab a-Zawiya, in the Palestinian-dominated H1 sector of the town. On the left side is a-Shuhada street in H2, once a similarly busy market street for Palestinians, but now utterly empty due to Israeli restrictions and settler violence.

“I made this film to show the people outside what is happening here,” Diaa said, sitting on a wall outside HEB2, a community media centre for Palestinians in H2. “We are living here and a lot of incidents occur here and nobody knows what is happening, even people from Bab a-Zawiya, two kilometres away, in H1.”

Behind him lies the landscape of occupation he is trying to document. Numerous army CCTV cameras silently monitoring the contested territory, IDF watch towers, and the barbed wires of settlement demarcation.

“We give the audience the full picture of what is happening here in the West Bank – violations, normal life, occupation, normal life – and what is the connection between the occupation and normal life. This is very important,” said Issa Amro, 30, director of HEB2, which, drawing on Hebron’s new class of video-adept youth, has launched a community television service streaming live on http://www.heb2.tv.

“If you keep showing settlers throwing stones at a certain family, then you don’t know how this family is living,” said Mr Amro. “If you show how this family is living, you become connected to them in another way and you care about them personally.”

It is exactly this philosophy that is driving grass roots filmmaking in Gaza, a territory with no Israeli army or settler presence within the strip. The challenge facing Gaza’s young filmmakers is the siege – on information – leaving the territory.

“The films we are making in Gaza are so important because the world media is not focused on the details on the ground, the real life here,” said Mohammed al Majdalawi, 22, via telephone from Gaza. He recently made a short documentary about the Gazan hip-hop scene.

“There are no Israeli journalists allowed to go inside [the strip],” said Mr Gross of B’Tselem, “which basically leaves the Israeli public with a very shallow image of what goes on inside Gaza. This sense of a very humane existence in Gaza has kind of disappeared from Israeli discourse.”

That’s starting to change. Mr al Majdalawi’s work was one of five such films from Gaza published recently by Israel’s number one news site Ynet.com, read by up to one million Israelis every day. Other films featured on the site showed the children workers of Gaza’s supply tunnels, the video game craze that has gripped the strip, and a play camp for children.

Back at the wall in Ni’lin, the protest unfurls as expected. Like every Friday, the shabab have poised themselves behind the wall while the protesters make their way through an opening in it to yell and wave banners at the IDF stationed behind jeeps on the other side of a barbed wire fence. Now it is time for the Ni’lin shabab to launch their barrage of rocks. The air is taken over with the whirrs and whizzes of rocks flying across the seven metre high wall.

During the first and second intifadas, the shabab gained iconic status, a dramatic manifestation of the David and Goliath proportions of the wider struggle. Today, the “video shabab”, a growing, non-violent clique who command an increasing access to powerful technologies and means of distribution, are providing stiff competition.

After a few minutes of orders in Hebrew, delivered in vain from the other side of the wall, the IDF sends over round after round of tear gas, scattering the shabab and the clutch of activists gathered, up the rocky hills of Ni’lin. The video volunteers remain, donning their gas mask, shooting through the haze.

foreign.desk@thenational.ae

April 8, 2010 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

Protectionism didn’t cause the Great Depression

By Ian Fletcher | Online Journal | April 8, 2010

The debate over free trade is riddled with myth after myth. One that keeps resurfacing again and again, no matter how many times it is discredited, is the idea that protectionism caused the Great Depression. One occasionally even hears that the same protectionism — specifically the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 — was responsible in significant part for World War Two! This is nonsense dreamed up for propaganda purposes by free traders, and can easily be debunked.

Let’s start by reminding ourselves of a basic fact: the Depression’s cause was monetary. The Federal Reserve had allowed the money supply to balloon excessively during the late 1920s, piling up in the stock market as a bubble. The Fed then panicked, miscalculated, and let the money supply collapse by a third by 1933, depriving the economy of the liquidity it needed to breathe. Trade had nothing to do with it.

The Smoot-Hawley tariff was simply too small a policy change to have so large an effect as triggering a depression. For a start, it only applied to about one-third of America’s trade: about 1.3 percent of our GDP. One point three percent! America’s average tariff on goods subject to tariff went from 44.6 to 53.2 percent — not a very big jump at all. America’s tariffs were higher in almost every year from 1821 to 1914. Our tariffs went up in 1861, 1864, 1890, and 1922 without producing global depressions, and the great recessions of 1873 and 1893 spread worldwide without needing the help of any tariff increases.

If Smoot-Hawley had caused a global trade disaster, it would necessarily have been by triggering a sharp decline in American imports of goods subject to the increased tariff. Did this happen? The data say no.

In the words of economic historian, former member of the U.S. International Trade Commission, and avowed free trader Prof. Alfred E. Eckes, “Official data show that higher U.S. tariffs had little impact on American imports. From 1929 to 1932, imports of dutiable and duty-free goods fell almost the same percentage, suggesting that higher tariffs had little impact on most trading partners . . . The sharpest drop in exports involved commodity-exporting countries, including some like Brazil, largely unaffected by higher U.S. tariffs.”

World trade did indeed decline, but this was due to the Depression itself, not higher American tariffs. This is no surprise, as declines in the values of the currencies of America’s major trading partners wiped away much of the effect of the tariff anyway.

In light of the facts noted above, it is, in fact, true that just about every serious economist or economic historian — as opposed to the ideologues of the editorial pages or the think tanks — who has examined this question in detail has come to the same conclusion. This is not a liberal vs. conservative issue, either: famous economists who have denied that Smoot-Hawley caused the Depression range from Milton Friedman on the right to Paul Krugman on the left.

The same fact can be ascertained by looking at Smoot-Hawley’s impact on the world economy at large. As the economic historian (and free trader) William Bernstein puts it in his book A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, “Between 1929 and 1932, real GDP fell 17 percent worldwide, and by 26 percent in the United States, but most economic historians now believe that only a miniscule part of that huge loss of both world GDP and the United States’ GDP can be ascribed to the tariff wars . . . At the time of Smoot-Hawley’s passage, trade volume accounted for only about 9 percent of world economic output. Had all international trade been eliminated, and had no domestic use for the previously exported goods been found, world GDP would have fallen by the same amount — 9 percent. Between 1930 and 1933, worldwide trade volume fell off by one-third to one-half. Depending on how the falloff is measured, this computes to 3 to 5 percent of world GDP, and these losses were partially made up by more expensive domestic goods. Thus, the damage done could not possibly have exceeded 1 or 2 percent of world GDP — nowhere near the 17 percent falloff seen during the Great Depression . . . The inescapable conclusion: contrary to public perception, Smoot-Hawley did not cause, or even significantly deepen, the Great Depression.”

The oft-bandied idea that Smoot-Hawley started a global trade war of endless cycles of tit-for-tat retaliation is also mythical. According to the official State Department report on this very question in 1931: “With the exception of discriminations in France, the extent of discrimination against American commerce is very slight . . . By far the largest number of countries do not discriminate against the commerce of the United States in any way.”

That is to say, foreign nations did indeed raise their tariffs after the passage of Smoot, but this was a broad-brush response to the Depression itself, aimed at all other foreign nations without distinction, not a retaliation against the U.S. for its own tariff. The doom-loop of spiraling tit-for-tat retaliation between trading partners that paralyses free traders with fear today simply did not happen.

The myth of Smoot-Hawley continues to poison U.S. policymaking even today, as it renders the U.S. government fearful of retaliating against problems like Chinese currency manipulation. But hopefully, the present controversy over free trade will eventually provoke enough public debate that this hoary myth can finally be put to bed forever. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, please see Chapter Six of my book Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why.

April 8, 2010 Posted by | Deception, Economics | Leave a comment

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