Al-Khalil, Occupied Palestine – The 22nd of November, one month after the passing away of Palestinian activist and dear friend of the ISM, Hashem Azzeh, the team of al-Khalil (Hebron) visited his widow, Nisreen.
Nisreen with her late husband, Hashem Azzeh. Photo credit: Global Research
While sitting in her living room, Nisreen explained how, after her husband’s death, everyday life for her and her family has only gotten worse.
The Israeli army does not allow any visitors into the house. She also says that the army refers to them not by their actual names, but with numbers.
4 days before this conversation took place, Nisreen was coming back home to find the main access to the house closed. The Israeli soldiers had declared it a military closed zone. They asked her, “Why are you so nervous?” To which she replied, “Because the way is closed.”
The soldiers mockingly answered, “Call Mahmoud Abbas and tell him to stop the Intifada.” But Nisreen answered back to this cruel sarcasm, saying that this is H2 area, “which is ruled by Netanyahu.”
Since the main access to her home is now blocked, she is forced to use an alternative entrance where she must climb some very difficult rocks. Nisreen suffers from knee problems, and she can foresee that when the winter and the snow comes, this passageway will be very slippery, putting her in danger of falling.
Both Nisreen and her brother in law are afraid of their children going out alone on the street. They are especially afraid for Raghad, Nisreen’s oldest daughter who is 17, and her cousin, who is 19 years old. Because of their age, both of their parents are scared that the illegal Israeli settlers and Israeli army will shoot and kill them and place a knife next to their bodies, since this is what they have been doing, targeting youth of similar age, almost on a daily basis from the beginning of October. Read more about this here and here.
Therefore, Raghad is not going out of the house alone, and she had to stop walking her youngest sister to school. Now her mother has taken on that task.
Fear of settler violence is part of every day life for the inhabitants of Al-Khalil (Hebron). Nisreen will never forget how she suffered two miscarriages due to settlers’ attacks. During the first miscarriage, she was three months pregnant; the second time, she was four months pregnant.
After one of these miscarriages, which happened in 2003, she had decided to file a complaint to the Israeli Police. After waiting for 8 years, the case was finally brought to court in 2011. The settlers counted with three lawyers, whereas for her it was very hard to pay for all the necessary expenses.
She recalls how, during the first court hearing, the settlers did not show up saying they were sick. During the second court hearing, when the settlers came with three layers, she had presented a video showing how they had attacked her together with her son Younes, who was three years old at the time. The court even requested her to draw a map of the location where this took place. She did so, but the final decision of the court was that she was lying and she lost the case.
In the meantime, Nisreen continues her struggle to provide a life as normal as possible for her children.
For a deeper understanding of Al-Khalil’s daily life struggle, read an interview ISM made to late Hashem Azzeh in 2013 here.
… We have become so concerned about humanity’s slow response to this challenge that we have decided we must clearly set out what we see as the only viable path forward. As scientists we do not take advocacy positions lightly, but we believe the magnitude of climate change now presents an unprecedented moral challenge that compels us to speak out.
… The voluntary measures put on the table at Paris by over 100 nations are a welcome step, but unless there are strong measures to reduce emissions beyond 2030, global emissions would remain at a high level, practically guaranteeing that young people inherit a climate running out of their control. A new and intensified approach is clearly needed.
Everyone agrees that the most urgent component of decarbonisation is a move towards clean energy, and clean electricity in particular. We need affordable, abundant clean energy, but there is no particular reason why we should favour renewable energy over other forms of abundant energy. Indeed, cutting down forests for bioenergy and damming rivers for hydropower – both commonly counted as renewable energy sources – can have terrible environmental consequences.
Nuclear power, particularly next-generation nuclear power with a closed fuel cycle (where spent fuel is reprocessed), is uniquely scalable, and environmentally advantageous. Over the past 50 years, nuclear power stations – by offsetting fossil fuel combustion – have avoided the emission of an estimated 60bn tonnes of carbon dioxide. Nuclear energy can power whole civilisations, and produce waste streams that are trivial compared to the waste produced by fossil fuel combustion. There are technical means to dispose of this small amount of waste safely. However, nuclear does pose unique safety and proliferation concerns that must be addressed with strong and binding international standards and safeguards. Most importantly for climate, nuclear produces no CO2 during power generation.
To solve the climate problem, policy must be based on facts and not on prejudice. The climate system cares about greenhouse gas emissions – not about whether energy comes from renewable power or abundant nuclear power. Some have argued that it is feasible to meet all of our energy needs with renewables. The 100% renewable scenarios downplay or ignore the intermittency issue by making unrealistic technical assumptions, and can contain high levels of biomass and hydroelectric power at the expense of true sustainability. Large amounts of nuclear power would make it much easier for solar and wind to close the energy gap.
The climate issue is too important for us to delude ourselves with wishful thinking. Throwing tools such as nuclear out of the box constrains humanity’s options and makes climate mitigation more likely to fail. We urge an all-of-the-above approach that includes increased investment in renewables combined with an accelerated deployment of new nuclear reactors.
For example, a build rate of 61 new reactors per year could entirely replace current fossil fuel electricity generation by 2050. Accounting for increased global electricity demand driven by population growth and development in poorer countries, which would add another 54 reactors per year, this makes a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system in this illustrative scenario. … Full article
George Monbiot – columnist with The Guardian newspaper in the UK, and author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning. “Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.”
Tom Wigley – of Climate-Gate infamy, he’s a senior scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division of the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research. “We need nuclear power to solve this problem … people don’t realise just how bad climate change is.”
James Hansen – author of Storms of My Grandchildren.
Barry W Brook – is the Director of Climate Science at Adelaide University, and Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, is on the board of the Science Council for Global Initiatives and the International Awards Committee of the Global Energy Prize.
Gwyneth Cravens – novelist and journalist, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy.
Ted Nordhaus – Chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, political strategist and author of Break Through, Why We Can’t Leave Saving The Planet To Environmentalists.
Mark Lynas – author of The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, also a frequent speaker around the world on climate change science and policy. “Let me be very clear. Without nuclear, the battle against global warming is as good as lost.”
Tom Blees – author of Prescription for the Planet (the seemingly “intractable” problem of nuclear waste is “nothing of the kind”) has “probably done more than anybody to move people to the cause of nuclear power.” Tom also heads the Science Council for Global Initiatives.
Professor Gerry Thomas – of the Imperial College, London, “I am very pro-nuclear as I realise that we have an unwarranted fear of radiation.”
James Lovelock – celebrated father of the Gaia principle.
Fred Pearce – an environment writer with The Guardian newspaper in the UK, and author of The Last Generation: How nature will take her revenge for climate change.
Stewart Brand – a prominent pro-nuclear “environmentalist” and author of Whole Earth Discipline: Why dense cities, nuclear power, transgenic crops, restored wildlands and geoengineering are necessary.
Ken Caldiera – with the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution, recently co-authored an open letter to the environmental movement urging them to bring their support behind the development of new nuclear power.
Kerry Emmanuel – with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on attribution of climate change to hurricane events.
Rachel Pritzker – is the founder and president of the Pritzker Innovation Fund. Rachel currently chairs the advisory board of the Breakthrough Institute.
Suzanne Hobbs-Baker – the brain behind Pop Atomic Studios, an organisation which uses the power of visual and liberal arts to “enrich” the public discussion on atomic energy.
Ed Davey – UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, “When I have listened to the arguments of pro-nuclear Liberal Democrats in recent years, the one argument I found increasingly difficult to answer is the climate-change argument, because climate change poses a real and massive danger to our planet. Not keeping a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity as an option looks reckless when we don’t know the future.”
The right-wing Jewish group ‘Lehava’ held a protest outside of the YMCA in Jerusalem, shouting at Palestinian Christian children and families as they were entering and leaving the annual Christmas-tree decoration party.
Lehava is a group that calls for the expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian population from their homes in what is now Israel, in Jerusalem and in the West Bank. At a protest last year outside of a business that had some Palestinian employees, the group chanted “Stop hiring Arabs,” “stop dating our women” and “employing Arabs equals Assimilation.”
The group, whose name in Hebrew stands for the “Organization for the Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land”, has also disrupted weddings between Palestinians and Israeli Jews, and handed out fliers saying they are trying to “save the daughters of Israel” by preventing them from dating or marrying Arab men.
A 2011 investigation by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz found that around half of the annual budget of the controversial Lehava organization was funded directly by the Israeli government.
The leader of the group, Benzi Gopstein, was reportedly present at the YMCA protest on Friday. Gopstein is on the record voicing support for Pinhas Aburamed, an Israeli man who murdered a Palestinian who he thought was trying to flirt with a Jewish girl. Gopstein said that Aburamed is a hero and should receive a medal.
The event that the right-wing Jewish Lehava group chose to protest was a family event described on the YMCA’s website as “A festive evening in the YMCA lobby decorating the Christmas tree, singing carols and enjoying holiday treats.”
The protesters shouted anti-Palestinian and anti-Christian slogans at the children who came to decorate the Christmas tree, including, “The Arabs won’t defeat us with knifes, and the Christians won’t buy us with presents,” and “Jews want a hanukkiah [menorah], not a fir tree”, according to Israel National News.
Around 1% of the population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza is Christian. The percentage had been higher before the Israeli military occupation and theft of Palestinian land began. The emigration of Palestinian Christians to other countries increased significantly after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 and Israeli settlement expansion increased exponentially.
Many Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Nazareth can trace their ancestry back to early Christians who have remained continuously on the land where Christians believe that Jesus was born, died and resurrected.
On November 30, Hillary Clinton stated that she was “outraged at the cold blooded assassination of Luis Manuel Díaz on stage at a rally last week.” She was referring to the killing of a local opposition leader in Venezuela on November 25. It was clear from her remarks that she was blaming the government for the murder. Her statement appeared to be part of an international campaign to delegitimize Sunday’s congressional elections in Venezuela, and it spread quickly throughout the global media.
Clinton is familiar with these types of international campaigns for regime change. In her recent book, “Hard Choices” she acknowledges her role in helping prevent the democratically-elected president of Honduras, overthrown in a military coup, from returning to office in 2009; and recently released emails add further detail.
This shooting and its aftermath are worth looking at in some detail because they provide a compelling, if typical, example of how the international media has been manipulated, for more than 15 years, to create an image of Venezuela that conforms to certain objectives of U.S. foreign policy.
Within hours of the killing, facts began to emerge that cast doubt on the widely disseminated version of events. Venezuelan authorities started investigating the murder, and issued statements claiming that Díaz was part of a local mafia and was killed by rivals in revenge for a murder that he was implicated in.
For a day or two, these statements did not even appear in the English language media. As the days passed, more details began to emerge. According to these reports, Díaz, the victim, who was the local secretary general of the opposition party Acción Democrática (AD) in Guarico state, was himself on trial for involvement in a murder. He was allegedly a member of a local criminal group, “Los Plateados,” involved in a turf war with a rival gang, “El Maloni.” The 2010 murder in which he was accused of participating involved two members of the rival gang. According to witnesses, he rarely went out of his house for fear for his life. The man accused of killing him at the political rally, Oscar de Jesús Noguera Hernández, was a member of “El Maloni.”
Clearly there are two narratives: the government narrative that this was a mafia killing, resulting from a dispute between rival gangs; and the Hillary Clinton/Venezuelan opposition/international media narrative that it was a political killing linked to the government, intended to intimidate the opposition. Which one is most likely true?
One clue can be found by looking at the Venezuelan opposition’s response to the news and investigative reports about the involvement of Diaz and his accused killers in organized crime. Opposition politicians, who had quickly blamed the government for the murder when it happened, haven’t said anything. They are normally not shy about ridiculing the government for putting its spin on events. According to press reports, politicians from Acción Democrática, a Venezuelan political party, did not show up at Díaz’s funeral. The overall silence has been deafening. This could be because everyone has concluded that the government’s version of the story is basically true.
And reporters for the international and Venezuelan opposition media have shown no interest in the criminal investigation or related facts. Since this was a major event that has shaped perceptions of the electoral process in Venezuela in the middle of a hotly-contested campaign, one might think it would be of interest to reporters covering the campaign. (Another missed story: how did Acción Democrática end up with an organized crime figure as their statewide secretary general?)
So far, no journalist has even bothered to ask opposition politicians, or supporters such as Hillary Clinton or OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro, if they believe this was a political killing in light of the criminal investigation. Almagro has been campaigning against Venezuela since the election campaign started. Immediately after the murder, he issued a statement that strongly implied that the government was responsible.
On Thursday, Venezuela’s attorney general released a statement that one of the arrested suspects, Ronald Hernandez, had confessed to having fired the bullets that killed Díaz. As of this writing, no major English language news outlet has reported this news.
The wheels of justice grind slowly in Venezuela, so it will probably be a while before there is a trial of the accused perpetrators. But for the U.S. government, Hillary Clinton, and their opposition allies, it is mission accomplished. Probably 98 percent of the world who has heard anything about the Venezuelan elections now thinks that the Venezuelan government is assassinating political opponents. Proponents of “regime change” will take international public opinion into account when they decide whether to recognize the results of Sunday’s election, or take to the streets with violent demonstrations as they did in the 2013 presidential elections.
This is how public opinion is shaped when the U.S. government targets a country for regime change, whether it is a dictatorship like Iraq or a democracy like Honduras or Venezuela. It is good to keep this in mind when you are reading the international news.
So-called ‘smart phones’ — far more accurately described as ‘dumb phones’ — combine a mobile phone with a watch, with a road map, with a tourist atlas of the world, with a digital camera, with a personal stereo system, with a music collection, with a video recorder, with a diary, with a calculator, with a credit card, with a travelcard, with an office key, with a torch, with a newspaper, with a television, with something to read on the train, and probably a lot more.
I don’t know, because I don’t own one.
‘But it’s so convenient!’ cry those who stare unbelieving at my twenty-year-old Nokia.
To which I reply: ‘Convenience breeds compliance.’ But to what?
Since they were first introduced into our lives in 2008, smartphones have become our outsourced memory and brain, replacing both with the convenience of not having to remember anything or think for ourselves. If you don’t believe me, then answer me this without looking at your smart phone. What is 9 x 13? What was the capital of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia? In what month of which year did the UK invade Iraq at the tail-end of the US-led coalition? Before smart phones, every child in the UK knew the answers to these questions. Now, no adult does.
But they are now even more than this. Smartphones, under the two years of lockdown, were the instrument onto which the COVID-faithful downloaded the software applications (or app) that connected them to the Test and Trace tracking programme that identified and recorded their location, movements, associations and personal contacts. … continue
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