On Democracy and Slave Owners
By Seraj Assi | Palestine Chronicle | July 22, 2011
This month the Knesset in Israel approved the final reading of the Boycott Prohibition Law, which imposes severe punishments on any person or organization that calls, directly or indirectly, for boycotting Israel, including the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
The Boycott Law is by no means surprising. For it joins a series of fascist laws that were recently approved by Knesset starting from the “Nakba Law” through the Loyalty Law, along with a list of new law bills under preparation.
What is unique about these laws is that they render unnecessary any effort to explain what make them fascist. Yet it seems that all these laws represent a state of denial and political disconnect on the side of Israel. The Boycott Law in its turn misses the point because the campaign for boycotting the Israeli products primarily includes the Israeli law itself. For the boycotters’ main message to the State of Israel is that its existence on Palestinian lands is completely illegal.
This takes us directly to the question of Israel’s democracy as a whole. We should remember here that the Constitutional Law of 1985, which was passed by the vast majority of the Knesset, bans the participation in the Knesset elections of any party that opposes the principle of the “Jewish State”.
The Law makes it clear that the Israeli democracy is an exclusively ethnic democracy fashioned for the exclusive interests of the Jewish community. This kind of democracy can therefore be seen as a modern colonial version of the slave-owners’ democracy in ancient Greek society. At bottom of the whole structure are the natives, namely the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have been made into a class of “free servants” of this hegemonic democracy.
Israel’s democracy thus functions as the political rule designed by the Zionist institution to maintain the repression of Arab-Palestinian citizens and Palestinians everywhere through legal manipulations. The idea is to reduce all forms of resistance against Zionist hegemony in the region to the narrow official circles and state courtrooms and turn all political struggles into civil struggles.
It is thus a democracy goaded into the service of the Zionist colonial enterprise. For any voice that is not directly aligned with the Zionist interests is immediately silenced- hence the abundance of this kind of fascist legislations. Perhaps this examines why the supremacy of the so-called Israeli democracy is stated in such a violent way so that any critique of its core principles and foundations is met with fanatic nationalist hysteria.
Statements flooding from Israeli official circulations to defend Israel’s democracy by all means clearly testify to the strategic role democracy plays in service of the Zionist agenda. For Zionist statesmen know very well that without this kind of democracy, it will be almost impossible to carry out Israel’s ethnic hegemony in the region while effectively reducing all forms of resistance to peaceful and gentlemanly legal struggles. This is the winning formula of liberal Zionism.
The irony is that Israel’s democracy has long been propagated worldwide as a witness to an Israeli multicultural and hybrid space where Arab citizens can vote and Arab Knesset members can enjoy full parliament privileges. Here precisely lies the bitter irony of the practice of this kind of democracy. For according to this democracy, Arabs in Israel are allowed, once every few years, to decide which particular representatives of the Zionist gang should be in the Knesset to oppress them!
Hypothetically speaking, Israel could become the greatest democracy in the world- a haven of human rights and social justice and a dreamland of multiculturalism and hybridity. To be sure, however, it will always remain a colonial state whose existence was founded on the dispossession of another people. The combination of democracy with the multicultural space, whether real or fictional, should not hide the deep hegemonic structures of this hybridity and the historical conditions that created it, namely, the Zionist occupation of Palestine.
Unfortunately, one now has to undertake excavations in order to reveal this truth and bring it to the knowledge of the masses and intellectuals alike. It now requires an enormous intellectual effort to remind liberal activists, academics, politicians and intellectuals that any critique of Israel and its institutions must begin with its colonial foundations instead of its contemporary political hypocrisy and undemocratic pitfalls.
Seraj Assi is a PhD Student in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC.
The Pentagon & slave labor in U.S. prisons
June 14, 2011 | Kinetic Truth
Prisoners earning 23 cents an hour in U.S. federal prisons are manufacturing high-tech electronic components for Patriot Advanced Capability 3 missiles, launchers for TOW (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) anti-tank missiles, and other guided missile systems. A March article by journalist and financial researcher Justin Rohrlich of World in Review is worth a closer look at the full implications of this ominous development. (minyanville.com)
The expanding use of prison industries, which pay slave wages, as a way to increase profits for giant military corporations is a frontal attack on the rights of all workers.
Prison labor — with no union protection, overtime pay, vacation days, pensions, benefits, health and safety protection, or Social Security withholding — also makes complex components for McDonnell Douglas/Boeing’s F-15 fighter aircraft, the General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin F-16, and Bell/Textron’s Cobra helicopter. Prison labor produces night-vision goggles, body armor, camouflage uniforms, radio and communication devices, and lighting systems and components for 30-mm to 300-mm battleship anti-aircraft guns, along with land mine sweepers and electro-optical equipment for the BAE Systems Bradley Fighting Vehicle’s laser rangefinder. Prisoners recycle toxic electronic equipment and overhaul military vehicles.
Labor in federal prisons is contracted out by UNICOR, previously known as Federal Prison Industries, a quasi-public, for-profit corporation run by the Bureau of Prisons. In 14 prison factories, more than 3,000 prisoners manufacture electronic equipment for land, sea and airborne communication. UNICOR is now the U.S. government’s 39th largest contractor, with 110 factories at 79 federal penitentiaries.
The majority of UNICOR’s products and services are on contract to orders from the Department of Defense. Giant multinational corporations purchase parts assembled at some of the lowest labor rates in the world, then resell the finished weapons components at the highest rates of profit. For example, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Corporation subcontract components, then assemble and sell advanced weapons systems to the Pentagon.
Increased profits, unhealthy workplaces
However, the Pentagon is not the only buyer. U.S. corporations are the world’s largest arms dealers, while weapons and aircraft are the largest U.S. export. The U.S. State Department, Department of Defense and diplomats pressure NATO members and dependent countries around the world into multibillion-dollar weapons purchases that generate further corporate profits, often leaving many countries mired in enormous debt.
But the fact that the capitalist state has found yet another way to drastically undercut union workers’ wages and ensure still higher profits to military corporations — whose weapons wreak such havoc around the world — is an ominous development.
According to CNN Money, the U.S. highly skilled and well-paid “aerospace workforce has shrunk by 40 percent in the past 20 years. Like many other industries, the defense sector has been quietly outsourcing production (and jobs) to cheaper labor markets overseas.” (Feb. 24) It seems that with prison labor, these jobs are also being outsourced domestically.
Meanwhile, dividends and options to a handful of top stockholders and CEO compensation packages at top military corporations exceed the total payment of wages to the more than 23,000 imprisoned workers who produce UNICOR parts.
The prison work is often dangerous, toxic and unprotected. At FCC Victorville, a federal prison located at an old U.S. airbase, prisoners clean, overhaul and reassemble tanks and military vehicles returned from combat and coated in toxic spent ammunition, depleted uranium dust and chemicals.
A federal lawsuit by prisoners, food service workers and family members at FCI Marianna, a minimum security women’s prison in Florida, cited that toxic dust containing lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic poisoned those who worked at UNICOR’s computer and electronic recycling factory.
Prisoners there worked covered in dust, without safety equipment, protective gear, air filtration or masks. The suit explained that the toxic dust caused severe damage to nervous and reproductive systems, lung damage, bone disease, kidney failure, blood clots, cancers, anxiety, headaches, fatigue, memory lapses, skin lesions, and circulatory and respiratory problems. This is one of eight federal prison recycling facilities — employing 1,200 prisoners — run by UNICOR.
After years of complaints the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and the Federal Occupational Health Service concurred in October 2008 that UNICOR has jeopardized the lives and safety of untold numbers of prisoners and staff. (Prison Legal News, Feb. 17, 2009)
Racism & U.S. prisons
The U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any country in the world. With less than 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. imprisons more than 25 percent of all people imprisoned in the world.
There are more than 2.3 million prisoners in federal, state and local prisons in the U.S. Twice as many people are under probation and parole. Many tens of thousands of other prisoners include undocumented immigrants facing deportation, prisoners awaiting sentencing and youthful offenders in categories considered reform or detention.
The racism that pervades every aspect of life in capitalist society — from jobs, income and housing to education and opportunity — is most brutally reflected by who is caught up in the U.S. prison system.
More than 60 percent of U.S. prisoners are people of color. Seventy percent of those being sentenced under the three strikes law in California — which requires mandatory sentences of 25 years to life after three felony convictions — are people of color. Nationally, 39 percent of African-American men in their 20s are in prison, on probation or on parole. The U.S. imprisons more people than South Africa did under apartheid. (Linn Washington, “Incarceration Nation”)
The U.S. prison population is not only the largest in the world — it is relentlessly growing. The U.S. prison population is more than five times what it was 30 years ago.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan became president, there were 400,000 prisoners in the U.S. Today the number exceeds 2.3 million. In California the prison population soared from 23,264 in 1980 to 170,000 in 2010. The Pennsylvania prison population climbed from 8,243 to 51,487 in those same years. There are now more African-American men in prison, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began, according to Law Professor Michelle Alexander in the book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
Today a staggering 1-in-100 adults in the U.S. are living behind bars. But this crime, which breaks families and destroys lives, is not evenly distributed. In major urban areas one-half of Black men have criminal records. This means life-long, legalized discrimination in student loans, financial assistance, access to public housing, mortgages, the right to vote and, of course, the possibility of being hired for a job.
A Life Worth Less Than Train Fare
The Ongoing Struggle Against Police Violence
By MIKE KING | CounterPunch | July 20, 2011
Another young, unarmed black man, Kenneth Harding, has been gunned down, shot numerous times in the back as he fled, his empty hands in the air in broad daylight. His crime had been a simple train fare evasion for which San Francisco police executed him in the street. Dozens of witnesses saw a sight that has become commonplace in US cities, capturing images with cell phones of police surrounding the man and watching him struggle and writhe from a distance, in a swelling pool of his own blood. Without either offering the severely wounded man assistance, searching him, or otherwise looking for the supposed weapon, the police, most of whom had their backs turned to the suspect, would later try and say that he had fired at the them and randomly into the crowd that had assembled. No one in the crowd said anything about him having or firing a gun. Police would later say one had mysteriously appeared, via an informant. The police publicly named Harding as a “person of interest” in a Seattle killing, a day after he had been shot dead by police. They are using a criminal conviction to attempt to further devalue his life. This piece is not about previous convictions, or the “official story” which the police are constructing as I write, about post-mortem murder suspicions and mystery guns. One thing is clear, as far as police knew he was a simple fare evader. As far as multiple witnesses could see, Harding had no gun and the shots all went one way.
Whether BART police, Oakland PD, or SFPD, the stories have been very similar. Suspects are gunned down in the street, no weapon, usually shot in the back as they ran, almost all men of color, a homeless or mentally-ill white man here or there. We get a similar story each time. One that is weak, lacks probable cause for lethal force, and is based on the opinion of the offending officers whose word is unquestioned by superiors, city officials, or the corporate press. Unless there is a video. Mehserle, the cop who shot Oscar Grant, thought his glock was a lighter and larger and fluorescent tazer, though it had a completely different grip. An exception to the rule, Mehserle did time for his crime – a few paltry months. He was recently released. The OPD shot Derrick Jones in the back, he was carrying a scale. No charges were filed. Several killings of unarmed men of color in Oakland have yielded temporary suspensions, followed by reinstatement with back pay. Some acting, individual OPD officers have killed more than one unarmed man on separate occasions and still patrol the street, guns loaded, and ready to go.
The root causes of these murders by the police are multiple and far too complex to be fully discussed here: insulated and unaccountable police power committed to upholding a particular racial and economic order; psychological fear-turned-violence or plain hostility among the police; white supremacy at several levels of society from the motivations of suburban law-and-order voters to the historical legacies of the police in this country; to geographies of segregation, of which the Bayview is a prime example.
The result is a system of violence that is specifically targeted, on one level, and completely indiscriminate on another. Targeted in the sense that concentrated police presence, aggressive police tactics (profiling, checkpoints, not so random Muni train inspections for tickets, etc.), and police self-conceptions as occupiers of hostile territory are all almost entirely exclusive to poor, urban communities of color. The nature, logic, tactics and history of the police in communities of color is not a few bad apples, related to violent crime rates that have fallen, or a new phenomena. Within these targeted communities the violence of the police is often completely indiscriminate. A simple traffic stop, a response to a domestic argument, a skipped train fare. Case, after case, after case. Candlelight vigil, after community mural, after RIP rap, it is the same over and over. No gun. Hands up. Running away. Shot in the back. No accountability.
Some people use the words “police terrorism” to describe this reality. You don’t see this in the mainstream news, or on the lips of aspiring city council people, or from most non-profits in the community. Even people within movements against police violence get silenced for using this language by people who deem themselves more responsible or better educated. We have sketched the nature of the police in the city. What is the definition of terrorism? The US State Department defines terrorism as:
“Premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets… usually intended to influence an audience.”
The police in the Bayview or East Oakland understand themselves as occupiers of the community, a premeditated understanding, though not inaccurate, of an enemy relationship – not between cops and robbers, but between cops and communities of color. The political motivation is one of containment – containment of a community plagued by unemployment, failing schools, anger, hopelessness, drug abuse, and violence. Police respond to crimes to an extent, but their more general responsibility is to control space, maintain order, and intimidate. This process is one of dehumanization of communities through social and economic exclusion enforced through various forms of containment, of which the police are the most visible.
People not subjected to this reality have the luxury of imagining it as something other than it is. Many can blindly accept law enforcement arguments, however unlikely. Many can actively or tacitly support the social relationships that have one group of unaccountable, overpaid men with guns, who almost always live in some other community, containing and terrorizing neighborhoods because the people who live there are poor, and of color, and somehow still considered worth less – worth less than a train fare apparently.
For the police and the people of the Bayview / Hunter’s Point, naivete and rationalizations are hard to come by. There is a war going on. The police talk about a war on crime, a war on drugs, a war on gangs. People in the city talk about a war on the community, a war on the youth, a war on black men. The logic of occupation is the same in the Bay Area as it is in Baghdad or Afghanistan. The police and military cross train each other in counter-insurgency, police train soldiers headed to battle, soldiers return to train city police in urban battlefield tactics. Studies show that war, occupation, and Manichean frames invariable lead to dehumanization of generalized enemies, and that dehumanization increases the propensity for indiscriminate violence. This context of dehumanization and police violence in the Bayview is driven by age-old racism, and more recent economic restructuring (neoliberalism), along with efforts at gentrification, which have exacerbated racial inequalities from income to health to imprisonment. The State has relieved itself of the obligation to do anything about this reality except to respond with naked force. Couple this with shrinking budgets for schools, social programs and public assistance as police budgets swell, and you have an increase in inequality and potential unrest related to that inequality, which simply serves as a justification for more and more police and prisons under the existing political common sense of those in power.
The solution to an occupation is not kinder tools of occupation. The solution to war is not sensitivity training for soldiers. The solution to war, is a just peace. Who gets to kill with impunity, and who gets shot in their back for nothing and left for dead, is about power, about long histories of racial oppression and how they get played out day after day, year after year.
If the problem is inherently political than the solution is political as well. So long as the unemployment rate in Hunter’s Point is four times the city average, police will be concentrated there and will harness a disproportionate amount of community resources, leaving little behind for social programs. Schools stay below average at best, jobs are not created, unemployment remains high, more police are sent, and so on.
A vicious cycle of racialized poverty is interwoven with a vicious cycle of police occupation and terror. This is a war with several fronts of various direct and indirect forms of structural violence – schools, employment, housing, etc. – of which the police are the most visible and dramatic. The solution to this war is a just peace. A just peace is not possible without self-determination. Unarmed teenagers getting gunned down for not paying train fare is not a mistake, or an aberration, or “bad apples”, it is a discrete, everyday act of war, the inevitable outcome of every occupation. Enough innocent blood has been shed, it is upon us to not only bring an end to this ongoing madness, but to foster self-determined communities which unravel and dismantle the vicious cycles of violence of which the police are but the armed guardians.
Mike King is an East Bay activist and Ph. D. candidate in sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
The Humanity and Courage of the Prisoners… And the Moral Responsibility to Support Their Demands
By Li Onesto | Revolution | July 18, 2011
Prisoners at the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison have been on a hunger strike since July 1—demanding an end to what amounts to torture and brutally inhumane conditions. The weekend of July 2-3, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) reported that 6,600 prisoners, in 13 different prisons, refused food in solidarity with the strike. And there has been growing support on the outside from people who are demanding that the CDCR meet the prisoners’ demands.
The 13th day of the strike, alarming, urgent reports started coming out that the medical condition of some of the prisoners was at a severe crisis. Mediators in contact with prisoners reported that some of the strikers had lost 25-35 pounds. According to a July 13 press release from Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity, a source with access to the medical condition of the prisoners, who asked to remain anonymous, said the health of the hunger strikers was quickly and severely deteriorating—that some were in renal failure and had been unable to make urine for three days; and some had blood sugars measuring in the 30 range, which can be fatal if not treated. Legal representatives who visited prisoners in the Pelican Bay SHU on Tuesday, July 12, reported that many prisoners were experiencing irregular heartbeats and palpitations, dizziness, shortness of breath and other respiratory problems; some were suffering from diagnosed cardiac arrhythmia. There were reports that prisoners at Calipatria State Prison and Corcoran, on a hunger strike in solidarity with the prisoners at Pelican Bay, were also in a dangerous medical condition.
Now consider this: By the time you read this, it will be at least one week since these reports started coming out. And the CDCR is still refusing to even consider any of the demands of the prisoners.
What are these demands? To be treated like human beings. The prisoners want an end to long-term solitary confinement where they are kept in windowless cells with no human contact for 23 hours a day. They want an end to collective punishment, and the practice of “debriefing,” which amounts to forced interrogation on gang affiliation. They are asking for decent food, rehabilitation and education programs, one phone call per week, one photo per year, two packages a year, more visiting time, permission to have wall calendars, and warm clothing. (See “Prisoners at Pelican Bay SHU Announce Hunger Strike,” Revolution #237, June 26, 2011, for the prisoners’ demands.)
Now think about this: Hundreds of prisoners, right now, are willing to die for these basic and just demands. They are doing everything they can, in the most isolated, inhumane conditions, to refuse to be treated like animals. And because of this, a light is being shined on the torture and inhumanity going on behind these prison walls. We can’t say “We didn’t know.”
So the question is: What are people on the outside going to do? People have the moral responsibility to act in a way commensurate with the justness of the prisoners’ demands and the urgency of the situation.
The CDCR does not treat these prisoners like human beings. It argues that these prisoners are the “worst of the worst” and deserve what they are getting. But as human beings, we need to be clear: NOBODY—no matter what they have done—deserves to be tortured. NOBODY deserves to be put in such extreme conditions of isolation where prison guards try to extinguish everything that makes you human, that keeps you physically and mentally alive, that connects you with the world and other people, that gives you a reason to live, to love, to learn and think. And this is not just being done in the SHU at Pelican Bay. There are tens of thousands of people in prisons throughout the U.S. caged up in maximum security units, subjected to this kind of torture.
Many of the prisoners have made it clear they are willing to die if their demands are not met. And what people on the outside do will be a big factor in what happens now, for good… or bad. In this kind of urgent, life and death situation, there can be no excuse for standing to the side. There is no justification for not joining the fight for these demands, for not taking a stand here in the interest of humanity.
Ask yourself this: What would it mean if people on the outside don’t stand up and do everything they can to make sure these prisoners don’t die, to really fight for these prisoners to be treated like human beings? What would this say about our humanity? But also, what will it mean if hundreds and thousands of people do stand up together, wage a determined struggle for the just demands of these prisoners, and in this way, assert our own humanity?
As a statement from prisoners in Corcoran Prison put it: “It is important for all to know Pelican Bay is not alone in this struggle and the broader the participation and support for this hunger strike and other such efforts, the greater the potential that our sacrifice now will mean a more humane world for us in the future.”
NOBODY Deserves To Be Treated Like This
Close your eyes and imagine you’re in a cell that’s 8 x 10 feet—with no windows, no air, just concrete walls all around you. This tomb includes a slab of cement to sleep on, a toilet and sink. That’s it. You’re deprived of human contact. Your food is shoved through a slot in the door. You can’t take a photo of yourself to send to your family. Maybe once a day, but maybe not, you are let out of this cell for one hour, into a space a little bigger, with a little bit more air. You are denied medical care. And if the guards decide you’re not cooperating—for something as minor as not returning a food tray or banging on the door—a team of them, in full riot gear, with batons, handcuffs, will “extract” you from your cell, hogtie you and beat you with no mercy. You have been in this cell, subjected to this torture, for five years, or 10 years, or maybe 30 years, deprived of human contact, never feeling the sun, never seeing the sky or a blade of grass, never hearing a note of music.
This is life—or more accurately, a slow death—for 70,000 men and women who have been put in maximum security units in prisons all over the USA. This kind of solitary confinement stands in violation of international human rights standards, including the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This kind of sensory deprivation and lack of human contact is known to create severe psychological disorders, to literally drive people crazy. Putting an END to all this is what the hunger strikers at Pelican Bay State Prison are willing to die for.
Think about how prisoners in these conditions are on a hunger strike. Many of them have no way of even knowing what is happening outside of their cell. They have no way to communicate with each other and no way—or very limited ways—to talk with friends, family and supporters on the outside. Meanwhile prison officials have tried all kinds of ways to sabotage the strike—including lying to prisoners, telling them the strike is over, and trying to create divisions among the prisoners. And still, a hard core of the prisoners on hunger strike have remained strong and even more determined.
On Friday, July 14, Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity issued a press release reporting that the strikers at Pelican Bay had unanimously rejected a CDCR proposal to end the strike. According to PHSS, CDCR responded to the prisoners’ five demands by distributing a vaguely worded document stating it would “effect a comprehensive assessment of its existing policy and procedure” about the security housing units—and this document gave no indication if any changes would be made at all. After this settlement document was distributed to all hunger strikers at Pelican Bay, some prisoners who had gone off the strike resumed refusing food.
This System Is the “Worst of the Worst”
This system wants people to believe these prisoners deserve what they are getting and that everyone else is safer because of this. Prison officials say this hunger strike just goes to show that these prisoners should be in the SHU. Terry Thornton, spokesperson for the CDCR, said, “That so many inmates in other prisons throughout the state are involved really demonstrates how these gangs can influence other inmates, which is one of the reasons we have security housing units in the first place.” (New York Times, July 7, 2011)
But even the mainstream press has reported on how this hunger strike has united prisoners across different nationalities and others divisions which prison officials have always used to set prisoners against each other. The New York Times reported, “The hunger strike has transcended the gang and geographic affiliations that traditionally divide prisoners, with prisoners of many backgrounds participating.”
The SHU at Pelican Bay is a prison within a prison. These supermax prisons were built, prison officials say, for the “worst of the worst.” In fact, a huge percentage of prisoners are in the Pelican Bay SHU simply because prison officials have decided to “validate” them as affiliated with a gang. A prisoner can end up in the SHU because he has a certain tattoo or hangs out with someone who guards say is a gang member. A prisoner in the SHU can target another prisoner as a gang member—whether it is true or not—in order to get out of the SHU. A prisoner can end up in the SHU because they are rebellious, because they dare to think. A letter from a hunger striker at Pelican Bay to the Prisoners Revolutionary Literature Fund (PRLF) said:
“Just being a rebellious or progressive prisoner gets one targeted and labeled a ‘gang member’ and sent to Shu. The Shu is made out as a big stick to intimidate the prison population into passivity, (think deportation threats to migrants or the whip shown to the slave). It doesn’t mean it’s going to be used but the thought of it existing is enough to control a large portion of the prison population so it becomes a tool not used for rehabilitation but for social control… It is these conditions where even reading material such as philosophy or history is censored. Pelican Bay Shu is designed to control, nothing more. We’ve seen even Revolution newspaper being censored and banned from this prison at one time. Take a minute to think of living in a certain zip code or apartment building where city officials notify you that Revolution newspaper is banned and is not allowed in your neighborhood. How would you feel about these city officials? How would you feel about the system that upholds the actions of these city officials?”
In many ways this hunger strike is objectively exposing the complete illegitimacy of this system and the hypocrisy of the USA which goes around the world posing as the “leader of the free world” and the protector of democracy and human rights.
Step back and look at the bigger context of the courageous prisoners on a hunger strike and the conditions they are protesting:
How the system uses police murder and brutality, extreme repression, its laws and courts and prisons to maintain the oppressive economic and social relations in society, to maintain control over a section of the people it fears will rebel against their oppression.
This is a system that fears the potential of the millions of people for whom it has no future.
This is what has been behind the so-called “war on drugs” that, over several decades now, has criminalized generations of youth and led to mass incarceration—to a prison population in the USA of over 2.3 million, mostly Black and Latino men.
***
The demands of the prisoners are completely just. And an incredibly powerful statement is being sent out from behind the bars at Pelican Bay, joined by many in other prisons throughout the country. These prisoners are demanding to be treated like human beings, asserting their humanity and challenging everyone to respond with their own humanity. There is an urgent need for people from all walks of life to speak up with courage and determination to wage a fight to force the CDCR to meet the prisoners’ just demands.
The Method in Netanyahu’s Madness
Israel Rules Out Non-Violence
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | July 18th, 2011
It was an Arab legislator who made the most telling comment to the Israeli parliament last week as it passed the boycott law, which outlaws calls to boycott Israel or its settlements in the occupied territories. Ahmed Tibi asked: “What is a peace activist or Palestinian allowed to do to oppose the occupation? Is there anything you agree to?”
The boycott law is the latest in a series of ever-more draconian laws being introduced by the far-right. The legislation’s goal is to intimidate those Israeli citizens, Jews and Palestinians, who have yet to bow down before the majority-rule mob.
Look out in the coming days and weeks for a bill to block the work of Israeli human rights organisations trying to protect Palestinians in the occupied territories from abuses by the Israeli army and settlers; and a draft law investing a parliamentary committee, headed by the far-right, with the power to veto appointments to the supreme court. The court is the only, and already enfeebled, bulwark against the right’s absolute ascendancy.
The boycott law, backed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, marks a watershed in this legislative assault in two respects.
First, it knocks out the keystone of any democratic system: the right to free speech. The new law makes it illegal for Israelis and Palestinians to advocate a non-violent political programme — boycott — to counter the ever-growing power of the half a million Jewish settlers living on stolen Palestinian land.
As the Israeli commentator Gideon Levy observed, the floodgates are now open: “Tomorrow it will be forbidden to call for an end to the occupation [or for] brotherhood between Jews and Arabs.”
Equally of concern is that the law creates a new type of civil, rather than criminal, offence. The state will not be initiating prosecutions. Instead, the job of enforcing the boycott law is being outsourced to the settlers and their lawyers. Anyone backing a boycott can be sued for compensation by the settlers themselves, who — again uniquely — need not prove they suffered actual harm.
Under this law, opponents of the occupation will not even be dignified with jail sentences and the chance to become prisoners of conscience. Rather, they will be quietly bankrupted in private actions, their assets seized either to cover legal costs or as punitive damages.
Human rights lawyers point out that there is no law like this anywhere in the democratic world. Even Eyal Yinon, the naturally conservative legal adviser to the parliament, assessed the law’s aim as stopping a “discussion that has been at the heart of political debate in Israel for more than 40 years”. But more than half of Israelis back it, with only 31 per cent opposed.
The delusional, self-pitying world view that spawned the boycott law was neatly illustrated this month in a short video “ad” that is supported, and possibly financed, by Israel’s hasbara, or propaganda, ministry. Fittingly, it is set in a psychiatrist’s office.
A young, traumatised woman deciphers the images concealed in the famous Rorschach test. As she is shown the ink-splodges, her panic and anger grow. Gradually, we come to realise, she represents vulnerable modern Israel, abandoned by friends and still in profound shock at the attack on her navy’s commandos by the “terrorist” passengers aboard last year’s aid flotilla to Gaza.
Immune to reality — that the ships were trying to break Israel’s punitive siege of Gaza, that the commandos illegally boarded the ships in international waters, and that they shot dead nine activists execution-style — Miss Israel tearfully recounts that the world is “forever trying to torment and harm [us] for no reason”. Finally she storms out, saying: “What do you want – for [Israel] to disappear off the map?”
The video — released under the banner “Stop the provocation against Israel” — was part of a campaign to discredit the recent follow-up flotilla from Greece. The aid mission was abandoned after Greek authorities, under Israeli pressure, refused to let the convoy sail for Gaza.
Israel’s siege mentality asserted itself again days later as international activists staged another show of solidarity — this one nicknamed the “flytilla”. Hundreds tried to fly to Israel on the same day, declaring their intention to travel to the West Bank. The goal was to highlight that Israel both controls and severely restricts access to the occupied territories and to Palestinians.
Proving precisely the protesters’ point, Israel threatened airlines with retaliation if they carried the activists and it massed hundreds of soldiers at Ben Gurion airport to greet arrivals. Some 150 peaceful protesters who reached Israel were arrested moments after landing.
Echoing the deranged sentiments of the woman in the video, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, denounced the various flotillas as “denying Israel’s right to exist” and a threat to its security.
In reality, however, the surge in flotilla activity reflects not an attack on Israel but a growing appreciation by international groups that Israel is successfully sealing off from the world the small areas of the occupied territories left to Palestinians. The flotillas are a rebellion against the Palestinians’ rapid ghettoisation.
Although Netanyahu’s comments sound delusional, there may be a method to the madness of measures like the boycott law and the hysterical overreaction to the flotillas.
These initiatives, as Tibi points out, leave no room for non-violent opposition to the occupation. Arundhati Roy, the award-winning Indian writer, has noted that non-violence is essentially “a piece of theatre. [It] needs an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?”
Netanyahu and the Israeli right understand this point. They are carefully dismantling every platform on which dissident Israelis, Palestinians and international activists hope to stage their protests. They are making it impossible to organise joint peaceful and non-violent resistance, whether in the form of boycotts or solidarity visits. The only way being left open is violence.
Is this what the Israeli right wants, believing both that it will confirm to Israelis’ their paranoid fantasies as well as offering a justification to the world for entrenching the occupation?
Netanyahu appears to believe that, by generating the very terror he claims to be trying to defeat, he can safeguard the legitimacy of the Jewish state — and destroy any hope of a Palestinian state being created.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He won this year’s Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
B’Tselem: Rights Of Palestinian Minors Being Abused
By Kevin Murphy | IMEMC | July 18, 2011
An Israeli robotic arm with a rifle attached to it injures a Palestinian kid in the occupied Palestinian lands. (File photo)
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem released a report Monday on the findings of a investigation into the arrest, detention and interrogation of 50 Palestinian minors detained by Israeli military forces for throwing stones. The investigation shows a pattern of consistent abuse of the rights of minors both under Israeli and international law.
B’Tselem’s report into the arrest and detention of Palestinian minors on suspicion of throwing stones by Israeli forces has exposed a system of legal abuses conducted by the Israeli justice system such as beatings, forced confessions and the denial of legal representation and parental presence during interrogation.
The report was based on the testimony of 50 Palestinian minors on their experiences at the hands of the Israeli military justice system.
Thirty of the minors interviewed reported that they were taken during the middle of the night by Israeli military forces.
During the interrogation 47 stated they were not allowed adequate sleep, 23 stated they were not allowed access to the bathroom or to food or water and 19 said they were treated violently.
More broadly the report documents that at least 835 Palestinian miners were charged between 2005 and 2010 for throwing stones of which only one was acquitted.
Imprisonment was the punishment imposed in 93% of cases between 2005 and 2010. 60% of 12-14 year-olds were imprisoned despite this being illegal under Israeli law. Sentences increased with the age of the offender.
Many Palestinian minors enter into plea bargains with Israeli authorities so as to cut down on the time of their detention which is enforced throughout court proceedings.
The human rights organization stated their belief that the Military Youth Court, established in 2009 to hear the cases of Palestinian minors in the West Bank, has not alleviated the situation of accused Palestinian minors despite declarations by the court that it would rule in the spirit of Israeli youth law.
Palestinian youth are tried under adult military law which does not conform with Israeli or international standards for criminal proceedings against minors.
The treatment of Palestinian minors has twice been discussed in recent months in the British Parliament after British MP’s and Lords reported widespread human rights abuses against charged Palestinian minors similar to those reported in B’Tselem’s report following a fact finding mission to the West Bank.
Crackdowns, Torture and Intimidation in Bahrain
By Stephen Lendman | July 16, 2011
Largely ignored by Washington, Western governments, and America’s media, the ruling Al Khalifa monarchy continues cracking down brutally against nonviolent protesters since civil resistance began last February.
On July 14, UK Telegraph writer Richard Spencer headlined, “Bahraini woman poet tells of torture while in custody,” saying:
Incarcerated after reciting a poem critical of government policies, “Ayat al-Qurmezi (age 20) became one of the symbols of the (ongoing) protests…. After she was arrested….she was beaten, electro(shocked) and threatened with sexual assault while in custody.”
On July 11, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) headlined, “Teachers ordeal in Bahrain: arrested, tortured, sacked, suspended and prosecuted,” saying:
Teachers and Bahrain Teachers Association (BTA) members participated in protest demonstrations, demanding respect for human rights and democratic change. As a result, they faced “arbitrary arrests, military prosecution, torture, suspensions, salary cuts, and investigation.”
BTA board members were arrested, held incommunicado with no access to family or lawyers. A month later, some were released. Others are still detained, including BTA President Mahdi Abu Deeb, charged with:
“deliver(ing) speeches haranguing and instigat(ing) protesters and inciting them against the political regime, flouting the real voluntary and lofty goals of the association.”
On June 6, Deeb and BTA Vice President Jaleela Al Salman were tried in military court charged with:
“inciting others to commit crimes, calling for the hatred and overthrow of the ruling system, holding pamphlets, disseminating fabricated stories and information, leaving work on purpose and encouraging others to do so and taking part at illegal practices.”
So far, at least 66 teachers were arrested. In addition, riot police repeatedly targeted 15 or more girls’ schools. Teachers and students were arbitrarily arrested, detained, and “physically abused.”
Other schools were also attacked. Many teachers were arrested, interrogated, intimidated, abused, charged with going on strike, participating in peaceful protests, and inciting anti-regime sentiment.
In custody, they were beaten and tortured. One female teacher said:
“Around 10 policewomen were asking me and beating me at the same time. Then they handcuffed me and kept beating me on the head and back while kicking me and stepping on my feet.”
Others were threatened with rape and beaten. A woman who had major back surgery was repeatedly kicked there after explaining her medical condition.
Many faced secretive military trials and convicted. More trials are expected. Many others were arbitrarily suspended from positions or sacked. More remain under investigation. Intimidation throughout Bahrain is pervasive.
On June 14, Human Rights Watch headlined, “Bahrain: Stop Military Court Travesty of Justice,” saying:
HRW called for ending military tribunal injustice, and “free(ing) everyone (including opposition politicians, medical professionals, students, teachers, journalists, and human rights activists) held solely for exercising their rights to free speech and peaceful assembly.”
HRW’s Middle East director Joe Stork said:
“Most defendants hauled before Bahrain’s special military court are facing blatantly political charges and (unfair) trials.”
Human Rights First (HRF) on Bahrain
On July 14, a HRF press release headlined, “NEW REPORT: Despite National Dialogue Crackdown Continues in Bahrain,” saying:
The Bahraini government “continues to intimidate, torture, and detain human rights defenders, and shoot at civilians.” According to HRF’s Brian Dooley:
“Human rights defenders with whom we spoke are wary that the dialogue is (nothing) more than elaborate play-acting for the international community’s benefit.”
The report titled, “Bahrain: A Tortuous Process” presented findings based on a July 6 – 12 fact-finding mission. It included interviews with human rights defenders, other activists, victims and their families, dozens of recently released detainees, journalists, medical professionals, students, and Bahraini government officials.
In addition, HRF personnel “witnessed riot police firing on unarmed women without warning with a variety of weapons.”
Nonetheless, peaceful marches and protests continue, despite security force attacks, using sound bombs, tear gas, rubber bullets, and live fire.
Human rights defenders are prime targets, facing arrests, detentions, torture, and illegitimate trials. In fact, (on June 21) prominent activist Abdulhadi Al Khawaja received life in prison in one of many show trials.
Others like him express views anonymously, fearing reprisals if go public. They also assume their phones are tapped and goings monitored. A Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights member said:
“We live under the constant fear of arrest. They can come at any time for us.”
Another activist said homes and other facilities are regularly raided, adding:
“I still wake up scared. I have clothes ready, next to the bed. I get up sometimes in the middle of the night and look out the window if I hear a noise, thinking it’s them again. It’s a permanent fear that they could come at any time, day or night.”
Human rights defenders complained about Washington’s double standard, muting its regime criticism, stressing Bahrain’s an important regional partner, ally, and home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
Disingenuously on July 2, Obama welcomed Bahrain’s National Dialogue, calling it “an important moment of promise….The United States commends King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa for his leadership in initiating the dialogue.”
In contrast, one participant told HRF:
“There are four halls, each having between 50 to 80 participants” allowed five minutes to speak. “The session ends while some still have not talked. Nothing is known about how all these chaotically dispersed talks will end up….” King Hamad has final say.
“You have it all predetermined and the final document has already been decided. These meetings are nothing more than a camouflage. It is a joke to call it a dialogue to start with.”
Based on numerous interviews, HRF reported “credible, consistent accounts of torture,” other forms of abuse and humiliation, including detainees forced to kiss photos of the king, belly dance, make animal noises, and sign confessions.
One former detainee said he was blindfolded for weeks, forced to stand for hours, wasn’t allowed to wash or pray, and was even beaten when permitted to use the toilet. Others had similar horror stories. Injured detainees were also abused, including on their wounds. Intimidation, humiliation, and forced confessions are routine.
On July 6, HRF’s Brian Dooley witnessed riot police attacking peaceful pedestrians, saying:
“People were standing in doorways, chatting….It was a calm, chatty atmosphere…. (S)uddenly riot police (with) shields appeared behind us.” With no warning, they opened fire, using “sound bombs, tear gas canisters, and rubber bullets.”
People started screaming. Some were struck, including by shrapnel. “I could see people ahead of us running, panicking. The police kept on firing at us….We were not part of a rally, or even near (one). There were a few dozen people spread out along the length of the street in small groups like ours, and the police just appeared and attacked us.”
Others told HRF similar stories, police firing on unarmed, peaceful civilians without warning. People not in detention face harassment. No one feels safe. Abuses continue regularly.
Protected by Washington, Bahrain is a lawless police state, targeting anyone seen challenging regime authority and many others for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Nonetheless, peaceful protests continue, despite punitive reprisals, including arrests, detentions, torture, show trials, and imprisonment. Nary a word from Washington complains.
A Final Comment
A new Zogby International Arab American Institute poll shows unfavorable attitudes about America. In fact, Obama’s 10% or lower approval rating surpasses Bush’s lowest level. In fact, he scores worst on Palestine and engagement with the Muslim world.
In five of six countries surveyed, Washington scored lower than Turkey, China, France or Iran. Specifically, “US interference in the Arab world” is called the greatest obstacle to regional peace and stability after Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
Libya perhaps was one war too many. Waging it increased negative perceptions about America and Obama.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com
Irish delegation to visit Bahrain
Press TV – July 11, 2011
An Irish delegation plans to visit the Bahraini capital Manama to attempt to determine the fate of 47 doctors and nurses arrested during the anti-government protests in the Persian Gulf state.
The delegation, headed by Professor Damian McCormack, includes Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Marian Harkin, Fianna Fail Senator Averil Power, former foreign affairs minister David Andrews, and representatives from the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organization (INMO).
Bahrain has released 34 doctors and paramedics who were detained during the brutal crackdown on massive demonstrations in March but announced that they would soon be tried in special military courts. Many of the doctors have stated that they were coerced to sign confessions through torture while in police custody.
The delegation, which plans to leave for Manama on July 12, has requested to hold talks with Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa through Bahrain’s embassy in London.
“It’s quite extraordinary for doctors to be arrested in any country. These doctors were arrested for doing their jobs,” the Herald quoted Senator Power as saying.
Israel to Expel 124 Pro-Palestinian Activists
Al-Manar – July 10, 2011
The Zionist entity is to expel 124 mostly European activists who had managed to arrive on flights to the country as part of a pro-Palestinian protest, an official said on Saturday.
“Access to Israeli territory was blocked to 124 pro-Palestinian militants coming from Europe, who are now being held in Israel jails,” said Sabine Hadad, spokeswoman for the immigration service.
They will be expelled “as soon as there are places on appropriate flights,” she said, adding that because Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath, “there are not a lot of flights and this could take a bit of time.”
She said most of the activists were French, with the others being American, Belgian, Bulgarian, Dutch and Spanish.
While awaiting expulsion, they are being held at two jails — one near Tel Aviv and the other in the Negev desert.
The activists were participating in the “Welcome to Palestine” campaign, which some have called the “flytilla,” in which up to 800 activists were to fly in on a peaceful mission to visit Palestinian families.
Zionist authorities said they largely managed to pre-empt the campaign by foreign activists demonstrating for the right of access to the occupied West Bank.
Officials said that by notifying foreign airlines of ticket-holders who would not be admitted to the occupied territories, they had prevented hundreds from boarding at their ports of departure.
The “flytilla” took place as a flotilla of ships was being prevented by Greece from sailing to the Gaza Strip in a bid to break the Israeli blockade on the Palestinian territory.
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The silver that medicine dropped — four thousand years of clinical use, four decades to erase.
Colloidal Silver — First Edition, 2026, Paperback
Lies are Unbekoming | October 16, 2026
Silver was medicine. Not alternative medicine. Not folk medicine. Medicine. In surgery. In obstetrics. In the burn ward. In water treatment. In the household medicine chest. Every physician before 1938 knew this.
By the 1870s, silver nitrate was standard in surgical wound care across the leading hospitals of Britain, Germany, and the United States. Colloidal silver preparations — Collargol, Argyrol, Protargol — entered European and American practice through the 1890s and early 1900s and became standard antiseptics in military field medicine. By the time Fleming grew his first penicillin mould in 1928, silver was the first-line antimicrobial of the Western pharmacopoeia. The Lancet and the British Medical Journal carried the clinical reports in volume. The practice ran continuously through the Victorian era, the Edwardian era, the First World War, the interwar period. By 1980, almost all of it was gone.
What has not been treated at book length, until now, is how a four-thousand-year clinical record disappeared from mainstream medicine within four decades of the Flexner Report — and what the honest account of silver looks like once that record is reassembled.
Colloidal Silver reconstructs the pre-1938 record from The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, and the primary literature of the era; recovers Robert Becker’s bioelectric framework from the regeneration research the pharmaceutical model buried; and places silver inside a practical terrain-paradigm guide to its current place — in water, on the body, inside the body, and in the chronic conditions where antibiotics have failed. … continue
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