Following the murder of our comrade and friend Viktor, we, activists of the International Solidarity Movement, would like to reiterate our commitment to remaining in Gaza. We will continue to work with and live among the Palestinian population as we continue the work which Vik was so committed too.
In these days of mourning, Palestinians have organized numerous memorials for Vik; they constantly remind us how sorry they are to have lost him, of how they loved him, his closeness, his affection, and his indignation at what is happening here in Gaza. We know that the group that perpetrated this horrible crime does not in any way represent the Palestinian society. The Palestinians of Gaza are our friends, our colleagues, and our reason for being here; we will continue to stand by their side.
As we had done when Vittorio was with us, we will continue to stand alongside the Palestinian people, we will continue to struggle against the occupation, we will continue to accompany farmers to their lands along the border, we will continue to participate in demonstrations, and we will continue to tell the world what happens here in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. We think that Victor would agree with Che Guevara when he said, “Don’t cry for me if I die, do what I was doing and I will live on in you.” The best way to honor Vik is to continue the work that he was doing. In particular we will soon begin crewing a boat whose mission is to monitor the violation of human rights in Palestinian waters. This boat will have its maiden voyage on April 20: Vik had strongly backed this project and he had enthusiastically participated in its realization. Vik has been an inspiration to all of us, we all hope to live up to his example. In a documentary about him, Vik said he would have liked to be remembered by Nelson Mandela’s quote; “A victor is merely a dreamer who never stops dreaming.” Your dreams are our dreams; we will never forget you, Vik.
Contact Persons:
Adie Mormech (In Switzerland, English and French) 0041799407215
Inge Neefs (In Gaza, English, French, Dutch) 00972597738436
Silvia Todescini (In Gaza, Italian) 00972595447660
Mohammed Al Zaeem (In Gaza, Arabic) 00972597355082
April 18, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular |
Leave a comment
An Israeli gunboat has entered the Lebanese territorial waters in a fresh violation of the country’s sovereignty, the Lebanese army says.
The army said in a statement that the gunboat entered illegally at 7:30 a.m. local time on Monday, a Press TV correspondent reported from Beirut.
The Israeli gunboat entered the Lebanese territorial waters on the coastline of the southern border town of Naqoura before returning, the statement said.
On Friday, six Israeli fighter jets violated Lebanon’s airspace and flew over the Shebaa Farms, Nabatieh, Marjayoun, Hasbaya and Kfar-Kila, said the Lebanese army.
Meanwhile, Israeli tanks made an incursion into the Lebanese territory on Thursday.
Two Israeli Merkava tanks infiltrated four meters across the Blue Line in the vicinity of al-Adeisseh before withdrawing.
Israel violates Lebanon’s sovereignty on an almost daily basis under the pretext that the infringements have surveillance purposes.
The Lebanese government, the Hezbollah resistance movement, and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) have repeatedly criticized Israel over its violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty.
UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which brokered a ceasefire in the war of aggression Israel launched against Lebanon in 2006, calls on Israel to respect Lebanon’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
April 18, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism |
Leave a comment
True we are a Republic with elected president and members of both houses, Senate and House of Representatives (not House of Lords). However when it comes to the “people’s houses” there is no president, there is only a King, and the King is always the Israeli Prime Minister. Welcome to America’s Knesset. So far Israel has cost the US tax payers over $ Trillion ($1,000,000,000,000,) just imagine what this $ Trillion could do for our country, in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Montana, Michigan, Vermont and New Hampshire not to mention all the other states.
In two separate statements coming out of Tel-Aviv and Tel-Aviv West (Washington-DC) both the Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and House Speaker John Boehner announced that Bibi Netanyahu is invited to speak before a Joint Session of Congress, an honor that is afforded to very few heads of state. For Netanyahu this will not be the first but his second time before a Joint Session, the first was on July 10, 1996. Bibi is the fourth Israeli prime minister invited to speak at the Joint Session of the American Knesset.
John Boehner who represents a poor and “working class district” much run down, can only hear the “cash register” as he announced through his spokesman “America and Israel are the closest of friends and allies, and we look forward to hearing the Prime Minister’s views on how we can continue working together for peace, freedom and security”.
Nancy Pelosi also an ardent and loyal Zionists seconded the statement of John Boehner as she “Looks forward to the Prime Minister’s address to the Joint Session during this critical time in history for the Middle East”.
For his part Bibi Netanyahu announced to his Likud members that his speech before the Joint Session of Congress will cover two fundamental issues and priorities for Israel stating “The two most important are, first of all, Palestinians recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and the second principle is real security arrangements on the ground”. Of course Netanyahu said nothing and will say nothing about ending the Jewish Occupation that began in 1967, will say nothing about the eviction and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, will say nothing about house eviction and house demolitions to make room for “Jewish Settlers” and will say nothing about the 600 “security checkpoints” with daily humiliations of Palestinians choking their freedom and economy. Only Israel can ask for things (Chosen People) but not the Palestinians, they can only accept what the Jews give them.
Of course Netanyahu knows he is at home in the American Knesset, with political support far more than he has in the Israeli Knesset where he is often hounded by the opposition, as opposed to the American Knesset where members of both houses will wait in line to kiss his ring if not his behind. In the words of Aluf Benn “they love him there or at least scared of the lobby that supports him”. Of course we all know that AIPAC, the American Jewish Party is the majority party in the American Knesset that counts on 90 Senators among its members and counting on some 300 members of the House as members also. The American Jewish Party is the true majority party in the American Congress with no apposition, and if there is an opposition, no one dares to speak up.
Netanyahu’s invitation to the Joint Session is orchestrated to thwart international efforts by the Palestinians to gain official recognition in the UN for a Palestinian State within 67 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital, an effort that will for sure be opposed by the American Knesset if not by the White House.
To preempt this effort, Netanyahu will most likely announce a limited deployment of the Occupation Army from the West Bank, a deployment similar to the one that took place in Gaza, making sure the areas evacuated by the Jewish Army are put under siege, increasing the number of security checkpoints. Of course there is never any talks of evacuating the settlements (Israel for sure will ask the American Knesset compensation exceeding $2 million dollars for each person evacuated and at least $5 million for each “trailer caravan” evacuated, making sure Israel milk the American tax payers as it expand settlements and as it evacuate “illegal settlements” and with the American Knesset more than happy to foot the bill for and on behalf of poor American tax payers who are held hostage by the American Jewish Party and its members in Congress.
Of course Netanyahu knows he is the Boss in the American Knesset and he wants Barack Obama to know that very well. When it comes to the American Knesset, it is Bibi, the Israeli Prime Minister and not the President of the United States that has a say so.
Obama who is often being accused by Israelis and their partners in the US and among Zionist and Christian Evangelical circles as Anti-Israeli and Anti-Semite and lacking birth credential to become the president of the United State, notwithstanding that his entire Middle East team is made up of Israeli loyalists if not agents. And as president has the most “Zionists” in his cabinet and his inner circles of advisers.
It is this close circle of Zionists that made it impossible for Barack Obama to deliver on his promise in Cairo to bring about peace, and it is this close circle of Israel loyalists that has backtracked on the issue of settlements, offering Israel tens of billions to stop moving few trailer caravans with one F-35 for each Israeli caravan removed from the West Bank.
Don’t worry about Barack Obama, he does not have what it takes to bring about peace in the Middle East based on a two state solution one is Israel and the other is Palestine within 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. No one sitting in the White House dares to announce such principle and continues to remain president of the United States for 24 hours, and President Obama knows that too.
That is why the Palestinian leadership must and could not count on the US supporting their demands to the UN General Assembly and for sure the US will not dare even abstain and will for sure “Veto” such a resolution. It vetoed the UN Security Council Resolution calling for an end to the Israeli settlements, and does Ramallah really think that Washington with its American Knesset could support an independent free state in Palestine? We all must remember, the US was never a fair and honest broker, and the US was never fully committed to Israel ending its Occupation that began in 1967, and the US not only gives political support to Israel at the UN it also gives it money and weapons to keep its occupation and to use such weapons to kill and murder innocent Palestinians as it did in its War on Gaza and as it continues to use American weapons and planes to bomb Palestinians on a daily basis. As long as there is an American Knesset in Washington forget about the US being a partner in any peace in the Middle East. The US must first be free from Israel before it can bring freedom to the Palestinians.
~
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sami Jamil Jadallah is born in the Palestinian city of El-Bireh (presently under Israeli Military and Settlers Occupation). Immigrated to the US in 62. After graduating from high school in Gary, Indiana was drafted into the US Army (66-68) received the Leadership Award from the US 6th Army NCO Academy in Ft. Lewis, Washington. Five of us brothers were in US military service about the same time (Nabil-Army), (Lutfi-Marines), (Sam-Army) and (Taiseer-Marines) with two nephews presently with US Army. Graduated from …Read Full Bio
April 18, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
Leave a comment
Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy sent a message to the African Union in their jointly written April 14 op-ed: They’ll block any attempt to negotiate peace in Libya that doesn’t include Gaddafi’s ouster and the opening of Libya’s economy.
On April 14 US president Barak Obama, British prime minister David Cameron and French president Nicolas Sarkozy wrote an op-ed titled “Libya’s pathway to peace.” Appearing in the International Herald Tribune and two other newspapers, the op-ed set out US, British and French goals for Libya. One would be peace, but the pathway was to be Gaddafi’s exit, and his replacement by the Benghazi rebels.
While not presented as such, the op-ed was in fact a rejection of an African Union proposal for a negotiated settlement.
The AU had dispatched a delegation to Tripoli to meet with Gaddafi four days earlier, on April 10. The delegation proposed an immediate cease-fire, delivery of humanitarian aid, and negotiations between the Libyan government and the Benghazi rebels. Gaddafi accepted. But when the delegation arrived in Benghazi the next day, the rebels let it be known that the only peace they were interested in was one that saw Gaddafi, “his sons and his inner circle leave immediately.” (1)
US secretary of state Hilary Clinton quickly echoed the rebels’ position. Nothing could be resolved, she said, without “the departure of Gaddafi from power, and from Libya.” (2)
Peace was impossible in Libya without Gaddafi’s exit, the leaders insisted in their op-ed, because Gaddafi was the main threat to peace. It was “impossible to imagine a future for Libya with Gaddafi in power” they wrote, and added that “so long as Gaddafi is in power, NATO must maintain its operations.” Their case was based on the fiction that the conflict in Libya isn’t a civil war between rebels in the east and loyalists in the west but between the state and the people, as was true in Tunisia and Egypt and is true in Bahrain and Yemen.
As for Gaddafi being an obstacle to peace, that was belied by his acceptance of the AU peace proposal. But the armed uprising has, from the beginning, had nothing to do with peace. It has always been about regime-change.
Gaddafi is wrongly fit by the three leaders, as well as by supporters of the Western military intervention, into the mold of Bahrain’s Khalifa regime, which has used armed force to violently suppress a popular peaceful revolt. The uprising in Libya was armed, not peaceful, and while it may be popular in the east among tribalists, royalists, and radical Islamists led by neo-liberals connected to the United States, it has little popular support elsewhere in the country.
Despite casting the Gaddafi government in the role of the Khalifa regime, the leaders make no reference to the latter, which remains largely invisible in discussions of the “Arab spring” and which provides the Pentagon with a headquarters for its Fifth Fleet and runs a low-tax, no minimum-wage, foreign investment-friendly economy. If the US, British and French leaders were truly interested in protecting civilians they would have long ago imposed a no-fly zone over Bahrain and ordered the Saudi monarchy, surely the most regressive force on the planet, to withdraw its troops from Bahrain. But what they’re really interested in achieving in Libya is what was long ago achieved in Bahrain: a neo-colonial puppet regime that opens its country to Western military bases and unconditional exploitation by foreign corporations and investors.
And so Obama, Cameron, and Sarkozy used their op-ed to declare that there must be “a genuine transition” in Libya “led by a new generation of leaders” and that “in order for that transition to succeed, Gaddafi must go and go for good.” Significantly, the transition would usher in the new Western puppet. There are two indications of this.
The first is the nature of the rebel leadership. Its key members have important connections to the United States. Khalifa Heftir, a former Libyan Army colonel, has spent the last 25 years living seven miles from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia with no obvious means of support. (3) Mahmoud Jibril “earned his PhD in 1985 from the University of Pittsburgh under the late Richard Cottam, a former US intelligence official in Iran who became a renowned political scientist specializing on the Middle East.” Jibril “spent years working with Gaddafi’s son Saif on political and economic reforms … (b)ut after hardliners in the regime stifled the reforms, Jibril quit in frustration and left Libya about a year ago.” (4) Jibril has been out of Libya since the uprising began, meeting with foreign leaders. (5) Then there is the rebel government’s finance minister, Ali Tarhouni, who has been in exile for the last 35 years. His latest job was teaching economics at the University of Washington.
The second indication is provided in the three leaders’ op-ed. Libya, they write, must “develop the institutions to underpin a prosperous and open society.” Revealingly, the three leaders tell Libyans what institutions they should develop. But what if Libyans don’t want an open society at this point in their development? What if they want what the United States, Britain and France have had through long parts of their history (and still do have): a society closed to outsiders in strategic areas?
While the institutions of an open society aren’t exclusively economic, an open society is understood to be one whose doors are open to unconditional integration into the global economy. This differs from the Gaddafi government’s strategic integration, based on linkages aimed at increasing real wages in Libya rather than maximizing returns to foreign investors. This isn’t to say that Libya hasn’t welcomed foreign investment where it makes sense for the development of the country, but it is likely that the open society Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy foresee for Libya, has little to do with what makes sense for Libya, and everything to do with what makes sense for US, British and French investors and corporations.
1. Kareem Fahim, “Truce plan for Libya is rejected by rebels”, The New York Times, April 11, 2011.
2. David E. Sanger, “Possible Libya stalemate puts stress on U.S. policy”, The New York Times, April 11, 2011.
3. “Professor: In Libya, a civil war, not uprising”, NPR, April 2, 2011. http://www.npr.org/2011/04/02/135072664/professor-in-libya-a-civil-war-not-uprising
4. Farah Stockman, “Libyan reformer new face of rebellion”, The Boston Globe, March 28, 2011.
5. Kareem Fahim, “Rebel leadership in Libya shows strain”, The New York Times, April 3, 2011.
April 18, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular |
Leave a comment
The news and entertainment media love anniversaries. So it is strange that the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War has been so low key. The BBC has a regular item each evening explaining the Secession crisis, in contrast to the shrugs of the US channels. The New York Times has been the only publication to pay some attention but on April 12 it ran a piece by Ken Burns, co-director of the celebrated PBS series, pointing out that notwithstanding its centrality in the national story the conflict does not always receive the attention it merits. He compared this phenomenon to the ‘acoustic shadow’ noticed during the Civil War itself whereby towns quite close to a battlefield were bathed in silence while quite distant locations could distinctly hear the roar of the fusillades and the canon’s bark. PBS is airing a re-run of the Civil War programmes but extensive cuts have reduced the fascinating and acute commentaries of the featured historians.
Harold Meyerson has argued in the Washington Post (14/04/11) that the issues that sparked the mighty conflict continually re-appear in new forms. In the 1860s the roots of the clash lay in rival labor systems, with Northerners fearing the expansionist longings of the ‘Slave Power’. Today, Meyerson points out, the Republicans – the then champions of an expansive ‘free labor’ regime embracing public education and the right to organize, are now the sworn foes of public expenditure and trade union rights.
While this observation is on the mark it still does not explain why so many avoid the topic. Apparently – even a century and a half later – there is no commonly-agreed narrative of the meaning of the war. What can still be called Northern opinion insists that the war was about slavery and race, something that many Southerners will not accept. Those South Carolinians who observed the anniversary of their own state’s secession last December portrayed it as a brave blow for state’s rights and minimal government.
It is easy for Northerners to see the bad faith in Southern denials that the glorious cause was no more than a wretched defense of racial bondage. The most insistent secessionists were indeed the large slave-owners, and the Confederacy’s very belated recourse to the freeing of some slaves to form a Confederate regiment cannot alter the fact that the rebellion was animated by the desire to insulate slavery from the peril of a Republican president and the persisting contempt of so many Northerners. Slavery was a delicate institution that could not be subjected to the rough and tumble of party politics.
But if Northerners can spot the beam in the eyes of the Southerners they don’t notice the mote in their own. This is the more difficult to do because it requires simultaneous attention to two considerations. Firstly, in April 1861, and for many months thereafter, slavery remained entirely lawful in the Union. Secondly, so long as both sides remained attached to slavery, the Union case against secession would remain flawed at best. Modern liberal and democratic theory allows for a right of self-determination and each of the seceding states had agreed the fateful step only after the deliberation of a representative body as determined by the prevailing authorities. Of course the slaves themselves had no say in the matter, but neither did they at most places in the North.
Indeed in February 1861 the Congress had endorsed a Thirteenth Amendment – never subsequently ratified by the states and very different from the later one — which would have renounced any right or ability to challenge slavery and reserved to the slave states themselves the entire responsibility for regulating slavery. Lincoln gave his support. Many urged that the Constitution itself already entailed such a concession but it remained unfortunate nevertheless. Lincoln wished to re-assure loyal slaveholders that they had nothing to fear from his administration.
Until president and Congress could agree initiatives to suppress slavery they could not offer abolitionism as the justification for making war against the rebels. Of course the Union had the right to condemn and deplore Secession, and even to refuse to recognise it, and to devise peaceful ways of dissuading them. But Lincoln himself in his first speech to the House of Representatives had insisted in the most emphatic terms that all peoples have a right of revolution and that this extended to communities that were in a minority nationally so long at they had a local majority.
In fact nineteenth-century democrats generally supported national secessions where this received local support, as it did when Belgium seceded from the Netherlands in 1830 or Norway from Sweden in 1905. However Lincoln was to specify an exception to this rule in his speech in Peoria in 1854. In that speech he says that slaveholders cannot claim this right as against a free community. In the US case acquiescence in secession would have allowed the North and the West to become a large and progressive state, a sort of vast and diversified Canada, hospitable to free labor, social protection and gun control. The Confederacy meanwhile, would have become a republican version of the ramshackle Brazilian Empire, a major slave society that eventually managed to shed slavery in a largely peaceful manner.
So the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment had a bearing on the legitimacy of the war against the secession, clearly putting the Union in the right. The virtuous measures taken in 1863 and after lent a quite new purpose to the struggle, rescuing it from its deficiency deficit. Karl Marx went further, since he was confident that the slavery issue could not be kept out of the conflict and the North would be driven to attack slavery since it was the very basis of the Confederate regime.
The coming months and years are going to furnish a succession of thorny topics for the commemoration industry – dating from Reconstruction as well as the War – and it will be fascinating to see how they are navigated. The terrible destructiveness of the war and its very unsatisfactory ultimate outcome for African Americans are issues that will have to be addressed.
But however the later sequence of events is addressed it remains highly unsatisfactory to allow the war’s inception to be enveloped by the ‘acoustic shadow’. We live in a world where the US and other Western governments believe themselves entitled to resort to military intervention almost at will, though the more scrupulous crave the rubber stamp of the UN Security Council, notwithstanding that the stamp of approval is issued from a supine position.
In this context a willingness on the part of the United States to admit the possibility that the war was not the best response to Secession would be a healthy sign. (Recent books by Drew Gilpin Faust, — This Republic of Suffering — and Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club is encouraging auguries.) A willingness to grant this, even if combined with the severest stricture on slavery and Jim Crow, could help the US to find a post-imperial vocation and to defeat threats to free and thriving labor. It would also help to clarify how Washington would react to any future wish of a state to withdraw from the Union. If that wish was reached by clear majorities, after democratic debate, is it really conceivable that anyone would wish the matter to be settled by tanks and aerial bombardment.
~
Robin Blackburn teaches at the University of Essex in the UK and is the author of An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln, and The American Crucible, both Verso 2011. He can be reached at robinblackburn68@hotmail.com
April 18, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | American Civil War, Civil War, Confederate States of America, Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln, Secession, United States |
Leave a comment
Lebanese President Michel Suleiman issued a statement today condemning WikiLeaks and accusing the group of trying to sow division between him and the Hezbollah political bloc. He insisted the leaks were all lies.
The WikiLeaks-published State Department cables claim, among other things, that former Prime Minister Saad Hariri backed Suleiman’s presidency primarily to embarrass Hezbollah and harm Michel Aoun. One cable reports the US opposing Suleiman, believing him to be a “Syrian Agent.”
The most damaging claim, however, was that Suleiman had said in 2007 that Hezbollah was only backing him to keep him from the presidency. Suleiman became president in May of 2008.
Suleiman’s statement also warned the media against publishing stories based on the WikiLeaks cables, saying that the cables “lacked credibility.” WikiLeaks has released about 7,000 cables out of the 251,287 that it has in its possession.
April 17, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering |
Leave a comment
Clashes between police and protesters in Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region have left at least 35 people injured, including seven policemen, reports say.
In recent months, protests have flared up in the region’s second largest city of Sulaymanieh, where thousands of people have spilled out into the streets to protest against corruption and a lack of freedom.
Police fired shots, used tear gas and batons to disperse the protesters on Sunday.
Seven protesters also suffered bullet wounds and some others were hurt by batons or tear gas, Reuters quoted police and witnesses as saying.
Rekawt Hama Rasheed, general director of the health office in Sulaymanieh, said that seven policemen suffered exposure to tear gas.
Several people were also taken into custody, including journalists, but the exact figure is not known, he said.
Two journalists were among the wounded, one of them a photographer, who was shot while covering the clashes, said Rahman Gharib, an editor at the Kurdish weekly newspaper Hawalati.
Kurdistan is dominated by just two parties, the PUK and the regional president’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).
President of Iraq’s Kurdistan region Massoud Barzani had announced plans last month to shake up the regional government and enact reforms, but demonstrators wanted more reforms.
April 17, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Corruption, Solidarity and Activism |
Leave a comment
“Gadhafi Troops Fire Cluster Bombs Into Civilian Areas,” declares a New York Times headline (4/15/11). The lead of the story makes clear that these weapons are considered in many countries to be illegal:
Military forces loyal to Col. Moammar el-Gadhafi have been firing into residential neighborhoods in this embattled city with heavy weapons, including cluster bombs that have been banned by much of the world.
The story, by C.J. Chivers, goes on to explain why these weapons have been banned:
These so-called indiscriminate weapons, which strike large areas with a dense succession of high-explosive munitions, by their nature cannot be fired precisely. When fired into populated areas, they place civilians at grave risk.
Then it gives a graphic description of the human toll of these weapons:
The dangers were evident beside one of the impact craters on Friday, where eight people had been killed while standing in a bread line. Where a crowd had assembled for food, bits of human flesh had been blasted against a cinder-block wall.
And it strongly suggests that the use of cluster bombs deserves to have serious international consequences:
The use of such weapons in these ways could add urgency to the arguments by Britain and France that the alliance needs to step up attacks on the Gadhafi forces, to better fulfill the United Nations mandate to protect civilians.
After all this, the story gets out of the way an awkward fact that complicates this presentation of the use of cluster bombs as proof that Moammar Gadhafi is an international outlaw whose bloodthirstiness must be countered by an intensified military campaign by the civilized world:
At the same time, the United States has used cluster munitions itself, in battlefield situations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in a strike on suspected militants in Yemen in 2009.
Oh–so these “indiscriminate weapons” that “place civilians at grave risk” have been used by the United States as well? But only in “battlefield situations,” far from civilians, right? Well, not exactly. The U.S. was criticized by Human Rights Watch for using cluster bombs in populated areas in Afghanistan, killing and injuring scores of civilians (Washington Post, 12/18/02). Amnesty International (4/2/03) called the U.S.’s use of cluster bombs in civilian areas of Iraq “a grave violation of international humanitarian law.” (See FAIR Action Alert, 5/6/03.) NATO employed cluster bombs in its bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo War, with one attack killing 15 civilians in the town of Nis (BBC, 5/7/99); more than 2,000 unexploded munitions from cluster bombs are estimated to remain on Serbian territory, continuing to endanger civilians (AFP, 3/10/09).
The “suspected militants” attacked by a cluster bomb in Yemen in 2009 turned out to be “21 children and 20 innocent women and men” (NewYorkTimes.com, 12/9/10)–all killed in the U.S. attack.
You can be sure that none of these examples of U.S. use of cluster bombs in civilian areas prompted the New York Times to suggest that they justified military attacks on the United States in order to protect civilians. And you’d be hard-pressed to find any descriptions in the Times of the “bits of human flesh” resulting from any U.S. military action.
As for cluster bombs being “banned in much of the world,” that includes Britain. But as WikiLeaks revealed, the U.S. colluded with the British government to circumvent the ban and allow U.S. cluster bombs to remain on British soil. WikiLeaks also disclosed that the U.S. has been lobbying for countries to keep cluster bombs legal, arguing that they are “legitimate weapons that provide a vital military capability” (Guardian, 12/1/10).
April 17, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes |
Leave a comment
The Israeli Prime Minister has thanked Washington for approving new military aid to Tel Aviv at a time when Americans are protesting at the US government’s military spending.
Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that the move is further evidence of the close friendship between Israel and the US.
Congress passed a budget bill authorizing military aid to Israel this week, AFP reported.
The stipulation gives an additional USD 205 million in aid to Israel for the acquisition of four new batteries of the Iron Dome missile system.
Two batteries, each holding twenty missiles, were deployed last week during Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.
Last week, thousands of peace, labor and community activists took to the streets of New York to voice concerns over the funding of wars abroad. They expressed their concern over the struggling US economy and reduction in social programs.
Since 2007 Washington has been giving Tel Aviv USD three-billion in aid every year. The money is spent almost entirely on purchasing American weapons as part of a ten-year agreement.
The US Congress Office for Technology Assessment says Israel, the largest recipient of US aid since World War II, has undeclared chemical weapons and an offensive biological warfare program.
Tel-Aviv’s nuclear program is described as an open secret. Israel is believed to be the only possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East with an arsenal bigger than that of Britain or France.
April 17, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
Leave a comment
Lobbification is a word I have just coined for the corruptive process that bends politicians to the will of special interests, that is, to the will of lobbies. The result of lobbification can be seen in the stilted and fawning behaviour of the lobbified political brain. Politicians with lobbified brains become the obedient instruments of the lobbies which have captured their political souls. Below are a few examples of the results of lobbification.
An example from the House of Representatives
The majority of the politicians who sit on the US House Foreign Affairs Committee are victims of lobbification. Among the major lobbies that have, over the decades, carried out this corrupting process are the Zionist organizations in their various Jewish and Christian manifestations. In their present state, the lobbified minds of these committee members, so influential in the foreign policy formulation process of our country, are utterly incapable of questioning, much less defying, the hypnotic power of either American Zionists or the Israelis. Here is just one illustration of the resulting mental paralysis.
On Tuesday 5 April 2011 three Israelis appeared before the US House Foreign Affairs Committee. Two were retired Israeli armed forces generals and one was Dore Gold, the president of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs. Gold is one of those transplanted Americans who have chosen careers as Israeli spokesmen. (As an aside, he is also an Inspector Clouseau look alike.) He served as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and political advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Among other dubious accomplishments, it was Gold who convinced the Clinton administration not to press Israel on the issue of the Golan Heights. The Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, once described him as “simply hatred’s scribe”. Here is some of what Gold and his fellow Israelis told the Foreign Affairs Committee:
1. Israel is confronting a new diplomatic assault that could well strip it of territorial defences in the West Bank that have provided for its security for over 40 years…”
2. “The 1993 Oslo agreements envisioned a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with borders to be decided by the parties themselves and not imposed by international coalitions or by unilateral acts.”
3. “Traditional US policy recognized that Israel is not expected to withdrew from all territories it captured in the 1967 Six Day War. This was enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 242…”
4. “…the entire Middle East is engulfed in flames. Just as Israel faces complete strategic uncertainty … it is being asked to acquiesce to unprecedented concessions that could put its very future at risk.” Therefore, “…to agree to a full withdrawal from the West Bank and to acquiesce to the loss of defensible borders pose an unacceptable risk for the Jewish state.”
During this lament our Congressional Representatives sat there, in their collective lobbified frame of mind, and swallowed it all in as if it were gospel. This was completely predictable. The Foreign Affairs Committee is chaired by Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, an ardent anti-Castro Cuban American who has spent her political life doing two things: first, distorting our foreign policy toward Cuba so that no vestige of national interest can be found therein, and second, promoting a tactical alliance between reactionary Cuban American groups and the Zionists. Ros-Lehtinen has recently confirmed her lobbified status by demanding that Congress “make it US policy to demand that the UN General Assembly revoke and repudiate the Goldstone Report“. She did this despite the fact that three of the four signatories of the report have avowed its accuracy and continued relevance. The senior Democratic Party member on the committee is Howard Berman who has never been able to figure out who he should represent more diligently, his California district constituents or Israel.
Both these leading committee members clearly suffer from lobbification and most of the other standing members also display this condition to one extent or another. As a result, when it came to the discussion that followed the Israelis’ presentation, all the possible probing questions remained unasked. Here are some of them, figuratively addressed to Ambassador Dore, and others:
1. What do you mean by “diplomatic assault”, “imposed by international coalitions”, and “unilateral acts”? Do you mean the rather feeble US and European suggestion that your country negotiate in good faith and cease its own series of illegal unilateral acts such as the ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem?
2. And how is it that you are now telling us that, for the last 40 years, your “territorial defences” have made you secure? For the past 40 years you have been telling us how insecure you are! Are we to understand that your constant claim of insecurity was a gross exaggeration? Perhaps nothing more than an addictive frame of mind? Or has it been just a facade behind which you carry on expansion in violation of international law?
3. Why do you bring up the Oslo accords? For the last few decades you have been telling us that they are dead letters, irrelevant to current circumstances. You seem to trot them out when they serve your purposes and cast them into oblivion when they do not. Also, are you not aware that in the past your country has violated these accords at will?
4. Is Israel’s determined refusal to negotiate rational concessions really a function of the assertion that the “entire Middle East” is allegedly “engulfed in flames”? If we simply go back to a period when there was no “complete strategic uncertainty” we find that Israel’s position on compromise was exactly the same as it is today. So isn’t this new concern really a contrived excuse to justify your country’s refusal to come to just and fair settlement with the Palestinians?
5. Why are you bringing up the possibility of “full withdrawal” from the West Bank as if it was a spectre gazing over your shoulder? When is the last time the US government or the European Union demanded this of you? Is not the present understanding of the final character of borders based upon the 1967 Green Line one that includes mutually agreed upon and equitable land swaps? Is not this the recognized contemporary understanding of UN Resolution 242?
6. And what is this business of “defensible borders”? When was the last time your country’s borders proved indefensible to conventional military attack? Isn’t it true that, even without the West Bank, your borders have never been seriously crossed by such forces? Your vulnerability lies in your inability to counter guerrilla and terrorist attacks, and to prevent missile penetration. Ultimate security against these threats does not rest in a policy of colonial expansion but rather in an equitable peace agreement.
What a memorable and actually useful committee meeting it would have been if these or similar questions had been posed. But alas, the lobbified brain functions something like Israel’s apartheid wall. Meaningful questions about Israel and doubts about the real consequences of Zionism cannot easily get over or around the nine-metre-high conditioning that is lobbification.
An example from the US Senate
The on-line magazine Politico tells us that “even as they push for huge cuts, 11 freshman GOP [Grand Old Party – the US Republican Party] senators say the US must continue to provide foreign aid to its strongest ally in the Middle East: Israel”.
In a letter to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) the security conscious 11 stated, “as we work to reduce wasteful government spending … we must continue to prioritize the safety of our nation and the security of our allies, including Israel”.
Only the thoroughly lobbified brain can advocate cutting 500 million dollars from federal programmes for health and nutrition for women, infants and children and simultaneously insist on continuing to give Israel 3 billion dollars a year – and, do so in the name of “prioritizing the safety of our nation”!
The senator who organized the letter to McConnell is Marco Rubio of Florida (a male version of Ros-Lehtinen) and he sits on what committee? The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of course. His lobbified state apparently makes it impossible for him to see the connection between our open-ended support of Israel, Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and our nation’s insecurity. It should come as no surprise that Senator Rubio has said that the US must “stand with Israel without equivocation or hesitation” and cease pressuring Israel over its settlement policies.
Conclusion
As the approximately 206.8 million adult Americans go about their daily lives most probably do not realize that they, or at least the approximately 57 per cent who bother to vote in federal elections, have placed into positions of power individuals who have been corrupted by lobby power. This is due to the fact that most Americans do not understand and/or pay attention to how their own political system works. Few and far between are the school “civics” courses that, in theory, explain its intricacies. And, once the Republicans get done gutting the education budgets, those remaining courses will most likely disappear.
Ignorance is not bliss. It is often the prelude to sudden destruction. It is not bliss to be ignorant of the corruption that is undermining your government . Lobbification is synonymous with just that – a dangerous form of political corruption. Our political system is riddled with it. It has been so for a long time and the situation is not improving.
This condition has recently manifested itself in Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Ohio and a host of other states in the form of feverish acts of self-destruction. And, as we have seen, Congress has no immunity. Yet the citizenry goes blissfully about its business.
To quote the immortal Samuel Johnson, “Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, roll darkling down the torrent of his fate? (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2001, p. 411, No. 19).
Perhaps it is so.
April 17, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel |
Leave a comment
Israel’s Willing Accomplices
In “Muslims Are Their Own Worst Enemy,” Paul Craig Roberts decries “the willingness of some Muslims to betray their own kind for U.S. dollars”:
Don’t take my word for it. Listen to neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman, head of the Foundation for Democracy, which describes itself as “a private, non-profit organization established in 1995 with grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran.”
By now we all know what that means. It means that the U.S. finances a “velvet” or some “color revolution” in order to install a U.S. puppet. Just prior to the sudden appearance of a “green revolution” in Tehran primed to protest an election, Timmerman wrote that
“the National Endowment for Democracy has spent millions of dollars during the past decade promoting ‘color’ revolutions in places such as Ukraine and Serbia, training political workers in modern communications and organizational techniques. Some of that money appears to have made it into the hands of pro-Mousavi groups, who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds.”
So, according to the neocon Timmerman, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, it was U.S. money that funded Mousavi’s claims that Ahmadinejad stole the last Iranian election.
Fool me once…
In a 2009 piece on NED’s funding of Iran’s so-called “Green Revolution,” Daniel McAdams notes the endless gullibility of those who prefer to believe otherwise:
Frankly, what I find more disturbing than the fact that the US government continues meddling in this new magical era of Obama is how many in the United States continue to be taken in by these events color-coordinated from afar…. As if hoping, somehow, that this time it will all be true. That the “people power” really is on the march. That it is a binary world where there are evil incumbents — the old guard — oppressing thrusting “reformers” who are Twittering away toward the bright tomorrow of a world where everyone wants to be just like us! Democracy!
Lessons from Belarus
Daniel McAdams’ excellent 2006 piece on the information war waged by “democracy promoters” against Belarus’ Lukashenko should be a salutary reminder to all those who are unwittingly cheering on the very same forces, which the New York Times belatedly admits, “helped nurture the Arab Uprisings”:
Imagine you are in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, setting up tents and loudspeakers without a permit to occupy the park with a group of several thousand protesters, guzzling beer and vodka. How long do you think it would be before the Secret Service or other uniformed local and federal officers moved in to disburse you? Five minutes?
Yet when less than one percent of the 500,000 Belarusians who voted for the political opposition were recently disbursed from October Square, one block from the presidential residence, the United States and the European Union (where member country France had been engaged in brutally beating youth protesting for more job security) announced a new round of sanctions against the country.
Aside from this absurd double standard is the fact that democracy itself is subverted in this new, revolutionary method of changing governments – all in the name of democracy, of course. Somehow in the new world of color-coded revolutions, a public display of only one percent of those who voted for the opposition – not of all voters, mind you, but just of those who voted for the opposition – is enough for the West to conclude that they represent the true will of the people. It is a new Bolshevism of the West in which a tiny minority is said to in fact be the majority. The media plays into this deception, with its breathless but highly selective reporting of such incidents. The Western media makes no effort to gain actual facts, preferring to rely on salacious but unverified tales of beatings and mass arrests made available in copious quantities by those who stand to benefit most by their dissemination.
April 17, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance |
Leave a comment
Today, 17 April, is Palestinian Prisoners’ Day. The day commemorates the release of Palestinian prisoner Mahmoud Hijazi in the first prisoners’ exchange between the Palestinians and the Israelis in 1974.
This year Palestinian Prisoners’ Day comes in the midst of a wave of mass and arbitrary arrests by the Israeli military forces in the West Bank village of Awarta, following the murders of 5 family members in the nearby settlement of Itamar.
So far more than 500 men, women and children have been arrested, questioned, detained, and asked to sign statements in Hebrew, a language they do not understand.
While most villagers were released within hours of their arrest, 50 still remain in detention without charges, including two children, according to the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights.
The situation for Palestinians in Israeli prisons is grim. According to ADDAMEER, the Palestinian Prisoners’ Rights NGO, over 6,800 Palestinians, from the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and 1948 Palestine, are currently imprisoned by the Israeli state. Of those, over 300 are children, 34 are women, 18 are elected Palestinian representatives and almost 300 are ‘Administrative Detainees’ – that is they have been interned without trial not having been charged with any crime or seeing the secret evidence against them.
The prisoners are being detained in 17 prisons and detention centers; such as, Nafha, Ramon, Ashkelon, Beersheba, HaDarom, Gilboa, Shata, Al-Ramla, Damon, Hasharon, Naqab, Ofer and Megiddo.
Over four decades of illegal Israeli military occupation, Palestinians from all walks of life have been illegally detained by Israel. Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, over 650,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel, reports ADDAMEER.
An estimated 10,000 Palestinian women have been arrested and detained since 1967 under Israeli military orders, which govern nearly every aspect of life in the occupied Palestinian territory. As of 1 February 2011, 36 Palestinian women remain in Israel’s prisons and detention centers, including 3 women in administrative detention. The two prisons in which Palestinian women are detained are located outside the 1967 occupied territory, in direct contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Sign this petition to free all Palestinian Women Prisoners in Israeli Jails:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/6/free-Palestinian-women-political-prisoners/
April 17, 2011
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture |
Leave a comment
Following the murder of our comrade and friend Viktor, we, activists of the International Solidarity Movement, would like to reiterate our commitment to remaining in Gaza. We will continue to work with and live among the Palestinian population as we continue the work which Vik was so committed too.
Today, 17 April, is Palestinian Prisoners’ Day. The day commemorates the release of Palestinian prisoner Mahmoud Hijazi in the first prisoners’ exchange between the Palestinians and the Israelis in 1974.
Aletho News
Aletho News 