The Obama-Gates Scam on Military Spending
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | April 21, 2011
Last week Barack Obama announced that he wants to cut $400 billion in military spending and said he would work with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs on a “fundamental review” of U.S. “military missions, capabilities and our role in a changing world” before making a decision.
Spokesman Geoff Morrell responded by hinting that Gates was displeased with having to cut that much from his spending plan. Gates “has been clear that further significant defense cuts cannot be accomplished without future cuts in force structure and military capability,” said Morrell, who volunteered that the Secretary not been informed about the Obama decision until the day before.
But it is difficult to believe that open display of tension between Obama and Gates was not scripted. In the background of those moves is a larger political maneuver on which the two of them have been collaborating since last year in which they gave the Pentagon a huge increase in funding for the next decade and then started to take credit for small or nonexistent reductions from that increase.
The original Obama-Gates base military spending plan – spending excluding the costs of the current wars – for FY 2011 through 2020, called for spending $5.8 trillion, or $580 billion annually, as former Pentagon official Lawrence Korb noted last January. That would have represented a 25 per cent real increase over the average annual level of military spending, excluding war costs, by the George W. Bush administration.
Even more dramatic, the Obama-Gates plan was 45 per cent higher than the annual average of military spending level in the 1992-2001 decade, as reflected in official DOD data.
The Obama FY 2012 budget submission reduced the total increase only slightly – by $162 billion over the four years from 2017 to 2020, according to the careful research of the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA). That left an annual average base military spending level of $564 billion – 23 per cent higher than Bush’s annual average and 40 percent above the level of the 1990s.
Central to last week’s chapter in the larger game was Obama’s assertion that Gates had already saved $400 billion in his administration. “Over the last two years,” he said, “Secretary Gates has courageously taken on wasteful spending, saving $400 billion in current and future spending. I believe we can do that again.”
The $400 billion figure is based primarily on the $330 billion Gates claimed he had saved by stopping, reducing or otherwise changing plans for 31 weapons programs. But contrary to the impression left by Obama, that figure does not reflect any cut in projected DOD spending. All of it was used to increase spending on operations and investment in the military budget.
The figure was concocted, moreover, by using tricky accounting methods verging on chicanery. It was based on arbitrary assumptions about how much all 31 programs would have cost over their entire lifetimes stretching decades into the future, assuming they would all reach completion. That methodology offered endless possibilities for inflated claims of savings.
The PDA points out that yet another $100 billion that Gates announced in January as cost-cutting by the military services was also used to increase spending on operations and new weapons program that the services wanted. That leaves another $78 billion in cuts over five years also announced by Gates in January, but most of that may have been added to the military budget for “overseas contingency operations” rather than contributed to deficit reduction, according to the PDA.
Even if the $400 billion in ostensible cuts that Obama is seeking were genuine, the Pentagon would be still be sitting on total projected increase of 14 per cent above the level of military spending of the Bush administration. Last week’s White House fact sheet on deficit reduction acknowledged that Obama has the “goal of holding the growth in base security spending below inflation.”
The “fundamental review” that Obama says will be carried out with the Pentagon and military bureaucracies will be yet another chapter in this larger maneuver. It’s safe bet that, in the end, Gates will reach into his bag of accounting tricks again for most of the desired total.
Despite the inherently deceptive character of Obama’s call for the review, it has a positive side: it gives critics of the national security state an opportunity to point out that such a review should be carried out by a panel of independent military budget analysts who have no financial stake in the outcome – unlike the officials of the national security state.
Such an independent panel could come up with a list of all the military missions and capabilities that don’t make the American people more secure or even make them less secure, as well as those for which funding should be reduced substantially because of technological and other changes. It could also estimate how much overall projected military spending should be reduced, without regard to what would be acceptable to the Pentagon or a majority in Congress.
The panel would not require White House or Congressional approval. It could be convened by a private organization or, better yet, by a group of concerned Members of Congress. They could use its data and conclusions as the basis for creating a legislative alternative to existing U.S. national security policy, perhaps in the form of a joint resolution. That would give millions of Americans who now feel that nothing can be done about endless U.S. wars and the national security state’s grip on budgetary resources something to rally behind.
Three convergent political forces are contributing to the eventual weakening of the national security state: the growing popular opposition to failed wars, public support for shifting spending priorities from the national security sector to the domestic economy and pressure for deficit and debt reduction. But in the absence of concerted citizen action, it could take several years to see decisive results. Seizing the opportunity for an independent review of military missions and spending would certainly speed up that process.
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Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in 2006.
The Slanderer as Historian
By Jeremy Salt – Palestine Chronicle – April 21, 2011
Benny Morris is a man who has completely lost his moral compass. One has to assume it was there at some point, but driven by the logic of his own research, and forced to make a choice, Morris opted for justification rather than rejection of the war crimes committed by Israel in 1948. He made his name as an historian with The Birth of the Palestine Refugee Problem 1947-1949 (1989). The central value of this book lay in what Morris found in the Zionist archives, corroborating what Palestinian survivors of the first phase of the Nakba and Palestinian historians had been saying for decades. Morris did not write anything they did not already know. In the western cultural mainstream, however, the book was regarded as ‘groundbreaking’, and in a way it was. The fact that a Jew had written the book was important. Western liberals previously too frightened to speak out for fear of being called anti-Semitic now had some of that burden lifted from their shoulders. The timing of the book’s publication was also important. At a point when the traditional Zionist narrative could no longer be maintained, Morris appeared at the right time to update it, admitting mistakes and even crimes, but always within a Zionist framework of understanding. A serious weakness was his failure, or refusal, to connect the past to the present. There is no examination of the centrality of ‘transfer’ in Zionist thinking from the very beginning, no indication that the 1948 war allowed the Zionists to do what they had been planning all along. The reader needed to know this to fully understand what happened and why. The expulsion of the Palestinians was not incidental, or an unintended consequence of war, but the long anticipated and deliberate, if partial, resolution of a problem which had to be solved if there was to be a ‘Jewish’ state.
Although Morris’ research leads him ineluctably towards obvious conclusions the book ends with judgment hanging in the air, as if he can’t make up his mind. On his own evidence, the Zionists committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1948, up to and including the crime of genocide, but not until he was interviewed by Ari Shavitz for Haaretz in 2004 did Morris openly pass judgment on what he had found out. There is no regret, or remorse, but only justification of war crimes. The Palestinians had to be ‘cleansed’, otherwise Israel could not have come into existence. Ben-Gurion was a ‘transferist’ who unfortunately got cold feet. Israel would have been much better off (‘quieter’) if he had finished what he started. (Morris was speaking at a time when suicide bombers were striking in Jerusalem). He does not rule out a third wave (after 1948 and 1967) of ‘transfer’, involving not just the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza but those over whose heads and on whose land the state of Israel was built in the first place, the Palestinians of Galilee and the Triangle. They are a fifth column and if Morris is not in favor of their ‘transfer’ it is only ‘not at the moment’. For Morris, there is a sickness afoot, not in an Israel built on the crimes he has just admitted, although, of course, he doesn’t call them crimes, but in Palestinian society. The Palestinians ‘should be treated the way we treat serial killers .. something like a cage has to be built for them … there is a wild animal there that has to be locked up one way or the other’. Jabotinsky’s iron wall was the answer. ‘What Jabotinsky proposed is what Ben-Gurion adopted. Ben-Gurion argued [with Moshe Sharett] that the Arabs understand only force and that ultimately force will persuade them to accept our presence here. He was right’. Well, the Zionists finally delivered Jabotinsky’s wall in the form of concrete and created their nature reserve for wild animals in the Gaza Strip, closed off by the sea and fences and open to hunting expeditions in all seasons by the Israeli army.
Morris distinguishes between the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Israeli army in 1948 and the genocide he says was being planned by the Arabs. Obviously the distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide is a fine one but what the Israelis actually did in 1948, as opposed to what Morris says the Arabs were planning to do, was not just ‘ethnic cleansing’ (a phrase not then in use) but genocide, as defined in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, 1948. The convention describes as genocide five acts ‘committed with the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. Three of these acts (Article II) are defined as the following: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part. The match between what the Zionists did, and intended to do, and the terms of the Convention, leaves no room for doubt. The enemy was not just the armed fighters but the entire Palestinian people, men, women and children, along with everything representative of their presence, their homes, their villages, their towns, their fields, their olive groves and grapes, their mosques and their schools. In the interview with Haaretz, Morris establishes himself as a defiant, and arrogant, apologist for crimes that in other circumstances have landed their perpetrators and their apologists before war crimes tribunals. Serb ultra-nationalists used the same language in the 1990s to explain why they had to ‘cleanse’ their claimed homeland of Bosnians and Albanians, whom they also regarded as animals. In justifying ethnic cleansing and speaking of a Palestinian ‘fifth column’ inside Israel, Morris stands in the same rabid company as Avigdor Lieberman, settler rabbis and their racist, fanatical followers, and a sizable number of members of the Knesset whose vulgar, hateful diatribes against the Palestinians and Israeli traitors are an echo of his own.
Having justified the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Morris followed up with an argument for the bombing of Iran. Writing in the New York Times of July 18, 2004, he predicted that Israel would attack Iran within the next four to seven months. He was wrong, of course, as were many others writing on the subject, but not only did Morris think Iran would be attacked, he thought it should be attacked, because, of course, once ‘the mullahs’ got their hands on a nuclear weapon they would use it, and then Israel would be forced to use its nuclear weapons. So better, according to Benny Morris, to disable Iran with conventional weapons now than with nuclear weapons later. There would be thousands of casualties, he admitted (tens of thousands, more probably) but, as he had said insouciantly of the expulsion of the Palestinians in the Haaretz interview, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
Now Morris has come out with a vicious attack on an Israeli historian who, far from justifying the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, has condemned it. ‘The Liar as Hero’, a review of three of Ilan Pappé’s books, appears in the New Republic.(1) which, along with Commentary, is just the kind of publication where you would expect such invective to appear. Ilan Pappé is well capable of defending himself, of course. What characterizes this review, however, is not the mistakes he may or may not have made but the malignant nature of Morris’ attacks on his character. Pappé is never just wrong. He is out to ‘blacken the image of Israel and its leaders in 1948’; he is one of the world’s sloppiest historians and certainly one of the most dishonest; he is a liar; he falsifies history; he is brazen; he ‘omits and ignores significant evidence’; he deliberately slants history; he is profoundly ignorant of basic facts; indeed, his histories are ‘worthless’ as representations of the past’; his contempt for historical truth and fact ‘is almost boundless’; he is a ‘retroactive poseur’; his work is shoddy ‘and has grown shoddier with the years’; by supporting the international boycott of Israel his motive is to hurt the people with whom he works; finally, Morris makes a comparison between Pappé and William Joyce, who broadcast for the Nazis as ‘Lord Haw Haw’ and was hanged in 1945. In other words, Ilan Pappé is a traitor who would be deserving of the same fate.
None of this slander should surprise anyone. Morris has a vicious tongue. He engaged in coarse abuse of Arafat when the ‘peace process’ publicly collapsed. He is a man who is obviously psychologically incapable of drawing the only conclusions possible from his own research. For Morris, nothing the Zionists did explains Palestinian resistance ‘towards the Jewish existence here’. If ethnic cleansing, massacres and the destruction of close to 500 villages, just as a starting point, is not enough, one has to wonder what would be enough for Benny Morris. Like Bernard Lewis, he seeks alternative explanations in the history of Islam and the Arabs. Despite Israel’s land theft, its primitive pre-enlightenment ideology, its wars and its massacres, far eclipsing any ever committed in history by Arabs against Jews, it is the Arabs whose society Morris characterizes as ‘barbarian’ (his Haaretz interview). Some of this came out in the attack he and Ehud Barak launched on Yasser Arafat and Arab culture (inherently dishonest, of course) in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Yet all Morris has to do, as a starting point, is step out of his Jerusalem home and look around him. He must do this but obviously does not see what he does not want to see. He is living in an Arab city that has been taken over and is still being subjected every day to racist demographic warfare. He can drive to Hebron and see what is being done there. Maybe he does drive there, but he certainly does not want to talk about it. Of course, the Palestinians never resisted ‘the Jewish existence here’, as he remarked in the Haaretz interview, but only Zionism and the theft of Palestine from under their feet. Here Morris is manipulating language, using ‘Jewish’ for emotional impact. If anything really damaged the ‘Jewish existence’ right across the Middle East it was Zionism. It deliberately set out to subvert the position of Jewish communities living mostly at peace with Christians and Muslims over many centuries and it succeeded. They are now almost all gone, a tragedy second only to the dispossession of the Palestinians.
Ilan Pappé’s claim that Zionism is ‘a racist and quite evil philosophy of morality and life’ enrages Morris, despite the mountain of evidence that doctrinally, historically, structurally and incidentally, points in this direction. The statement is wrong only in the sense that Zionism is not a philosophy but an idea, and a bad one at that. Pappés language, says Morris, attempting to smear by association, ‘is fully as virulent as Hamas’s or worse’. He criticizes Teddy Katz, and Pappé, who graded the master’s thesis he presented to the University of Haifa in 1998, over claims in the thesis of a large-scale massacre being committed at Tantura in 1948. According to the oral testimony of Palestinian survivors and Jewish witnesses, including members of the Alexandroni Brigade who were involved, soldiers went on the rampage after the village was captured and massacred about 250 people. Some were taken to the beach and shot in cold blood. The Jewish witnesses included a man who supervised the burial of the victims and personally counted about 230 bodies.(2) Following the publication in Maariv of the gist of the thesis, Katz was sued for libel by members of the Alexandroni Brigade. During the trial, under pressure from friends and family, not to mention attacks by hostile academics, Katz, who had also recently suffered a heart attack, broke down and recanted. This might now be called the Goldstone effect. Twelve hours later he withdrew his recantation and insisted that the trial be continued, but the judge refused.
The evidence gathered by Katz is voluminous and thoroughly consistent with descriptions of other massacres carried out across Palestine. Morris, in his review of Ilan Pappé’s books, claims to have interviewed survivors also, but his basic point of reference is the official record. This is his gospel. He says there is no evidence of such a massacre in the archives but only ‘small-scale’ atrocities, along with the shooting of a ‘handful’ of Arab snipers (how small is small-scale and how many Arab snipers constitute a handful?). As all other massacres were recorded, although it is unlikely that all were, we are invited to believe that there cannot have been a massacre at Tantura.
Here, while the Israeli archives confirm much of what the Palestinians have been saying for decades, they cannot be regarded as conclusive. Archives never are. They might tell part of the story but never the whole story. They are the official record, after all, more likely to conceal than reveal. There were killings of large groups of people across Palestine. The Zionist archives record some of them, invariably justifying what was done, but the official reports cannot possibly be regarded as the definitive account. People involved in the cold-blooded slaughter of defenseless men, women and children are not likely to own up. In fact, the evidence for a large-scale massacre having taken place at Tantura remains overwhelming.
The review of Ilan Pappé’s three books has to be seen for what it is, not just a review that any historian would be asked to write but a calculated and very vicious attempt to destroy the author’s reputation. Along with Gilad Atzmon and numerous other Israelis, Pappé has broken with Israel for good reasons. Benny Morris has stuck with it for bad ones. This rancorous diatribe says far more about Benny Morris than it does Ilan Pappé. He can defend his own record as an historian and he is far better placed than Benny Morris to describe the pressures directed against him in Israel, so it will be interesting to see what he has to say in response to this hatchet job by a man who destroyed his own moral credibility a long time ago.
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Jeremy Salt is associate professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Previously, he taught at Bosporus University in Istanbul and the University of Melbourne in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science. Professor Salt has written many articles on Middle East issues, particularly Palestine, and was a journalist for The Age newspaper when he lived in Melbourne.
Fukushima’s Boiling-Water Reactors Continue to Boil and a Sarcophagus Looms
By Mina Hamilton / Dissident Voice / April 20th, 2011
Japan’s Disneyland reopens.
Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan makes a plea to his countrymen to “live life as normal”.
It would be churlish to deny scared kids or worried parents a hug from Mickey Mouse, if that’s what might console. But the proliferation of fantasies regarding the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plants continues at a ferocious pace – and behind-the-scenes, plans for a sarcophagus solidify.
The New York Times talks of the possibility of returning the land to a “greenfield” state. Denis Flory, a Deputy Director General of the International Atomic Energy Association insists Fukushima is not Chernobyl. At a recent meeting, Flory explains, “At Chernobyl a nuclear reactor exploded. In Japan… there may be…” The Deputy Director pauses and looks abashed, “some leaks, but containment is here.”
This absurd claim is made, despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Association’s own data asserts that 70% of the radioactive fuel in reactor no. 1 is damaged. In reactor no. 2, 30% of the fuel is damaged and it’s 35% in reactor no. 3. (Damaged means crumbled, cracked and/or melted fuel. It is now accumulating at the bottom of the reactor vessels and impeding cooling of, as yet, undamaged fuel.)
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency opines that high radiation readings above the irradiated fuel pool at reactor no. 4 may be from “rainwater.”
And, Big News, on Monday, April 18, TEPCO admits its month-long, much-ballyhooed effort to cool the reactors isn’t working, hasn’t worked and won’t work. A new cooling system will have to be designed and installed to bring the temperature of the fractious reactors under control.
A staggering admission.
The term boiling-water-reactor has a new punch. At the Fukushima plants water inside reactors vessels 1, 2, and 3 is hot. In the hottest reactor the water temperature is 338 degrees Fahrenheit, well above the boiling point. (The other two reactors aren’t much cooler.) Weeks and weeks of spraying by helicopters and pumping have been to little avail.
Take the Japanese government’s, TEPCO’s, and the world media’s hard labors to create the belief that the situation is “improving.” Combine this comforting notion with good-old, ordinary denial, with a highly understandable human desire to deny the magnitude of the tragedy, and it’s hard to keep one’s eyes fully open, right on-the-ball.
But here it is before our eyes: Three reactors still reeling out-of-control. Three reactors whose coolant is at a roiling boil — much like the bubble-filled and steam-generating water all of us know from cooking up a bit of pasta for dinner. One of these reactors, no. 2, has a steel containment vessel that may be cracked. Plus, at reactor no. 4, one steaming, over-heated, spent fuel pool the concrete support of which is a tad sketchy.
Unlike our pasta water, in the case of the Fukushima reactors, the boiling water is contaminated with fission products such as cesium, strontium and plutonium. And said water with its toxic load has to go somewhere, i.e. outside the reactor. So at Fukushima there is an ongoing program of what in nuclear parlance is called “feed and bleed.” Or, in simple language, feed water into the reactor vessel and release radioactive steam to the environment. And then there’s the advertent leaks to adjacent turbine buildings, outside ditches, and, alas, the ocean.
The current TEPCO estimate is that this will go on a long time. Month in and month out. Probably, until December. Regular burps of radiation into the atmosphere and regular releases of radioactivity into the ocean for 6 to 9 months?
That’s the short term outlook.
The longer term is 10 to 30 years to remove all the fuel, cut up the reactor vessels, cart the contaminated pieces of steel away, cut up the contaminated concrete and lug that away, take the intact fuel somewhere (the Rokkasho reprocessing facility?) and do what with the damaged fuel? Leave it in place, as was done at Chernobyl? Where, 25 years after the Chernobyl explosion, radioactivity is currently seeping out, requiring the emplacement of a second, larger sarcophagus?
Fukushima, Chernobyl. It’s not a pretty picture.
In the meantime, why not cover-up those ugly skeletal remains at Japan’s crippled plants? With some improvised coverings and, down the road, a sarcophagus or two or three?
Recently, the sarcophagus-approach came a couple of steps closer with the arrival in Japan of two immense concrete pump trucks.
Each of these behemoths, known as 70z’s, weighs 190,000 pounds. They are manufactured by a German company, Putzmeister. In 1986 this company was responsible for the construction of the concrete sarcophagus around the graphite reactor at Chernobyl.
The 70z’s weigh so much they had to be transported by Russian Antonov’s, the world’s second-heaviest cargo planes. Previously used to transport the Russian space shuttle, the planes were specially sent from Russia to the US to pick up the hefty pumps. And where did these pumps come from in the US? From Los Angeles, CA and Atlanta, GA.
One of the pumps was pulled off of the construction site for the MOX-fuel fabrication facility being constructed by the French-government-owned company, Areva, at the US Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. To interrupt a $4.86 billion dollar project (already 5-years behind schedule and $3 billion over-budget) is unprecedented.
Obviously, arrangements were made at high levels of the US, French, Russian and Japanese governments for the deal to go through. What was particularly telling about the deal?
It was already in the works by the end of March. At a time, when the Japanese government and TEPCO were endlessly intoning about getting the stricken Fukushima reactors “under control,” already the giant concrete pumps were being readied for transport to Japan.
On March 31, a spokesman for the company providing concrete for the MOX Fuel facility, was quoted in the Augusta Chronicle, “Our understanding is, they are preparing to go to the next phase and it will require a lot of concrete.”
March 31? “A lot of concrete?”
Of course, it never did make sense that such huge pumps would be necessary for cooling purposes. (Albeit the amazing stretch of the 70-meter crane would reduce radiation exposure of workers, as would impressive remote-control features.)
But why the need for the giant behemoth pumps flown in by Russian super-cargo plane? After all this was the company that poured concrete for the 10-mile-long Gotthard Tunnel burrowing under the Alps, between Switzerland and Italy. The company that, after the 1989 California earthquake, rebuilt the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The company that built the world’s highest tower, the Burj Dubai.
And the only company in the world to have experience building a giant, nuclear- sarcophagus.
After the pumps arrived in Japan, a company spokesman was still saying the giant pumps were for cooling the Fukushima reactors. (For weeks a somewhat smaller pump, also a Putzmeister, was pouring water into the wrecked irradiated fuel pool of reactor no 4.)
When pressed by a CNN reporter, the spokesman admitted pouring concrete was a “plausible scenario.”
Throughout the disaster of the past five, going on six weeks, TEPCO, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency and the Japanese government have seemed bumbling and inept to the point of absurdity. Behind the bland announcements, the silly re-assurances was a different reality: three-plus weeks ago, detailed, complicated plans were being made to stop some key work at the MOX fuel plant in South Carolina and arrange for the special transport of the immense concrete pumps to Japan.
What other secret plans are currently underway – that we will hear about a month from now, if we’re lucky?
What exactly is the proposed design for the sarcophagus or sarcophagi? Drawings up on the TEPCO site suggest a three-sided structure, one with a top and sides – but no bottom. That means the distinct possibility of melted fuel, if it is left on-site (as happened at Chernobyl), migrating downwards toward vital water tables and/or washing out to contaminate the sea. Toxins washing-down and out, continuously, for decades and decades and…
Japanese refugees in the required and voluntary evacuation zones, critics in the Japanese government, Japanese environmentalists, Tokyo residents, fishermen, abalone-divers, dairy farmers, agricultural workers and citizens of the world must demand more transparency regarding these critically important plans.
If the Fukushima clean-up project is left to the nuclear boys-in-the-back-room, the plan is bound to be contaminated. Contaminated by thinking distorted by the bottom-line – and warped by the desire to protect the nuclear industry.
Let’s not let that happen.
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Mina Hamilton is a writer based in New York City. She is a contributor to several books including Critical Mass:Voices for a Nuclear-Free Future and Deadly Defense, an analysis of contamination issues at nuclear weapons facilities in the US. She can be reached at: minaham@aol.
Are Rising Oil and Food Prices a Scam?
By Danny Schechter | Consortium News | April 19, 2011
The global economy and its recovery, and the living standards of millions of plain folks, are now at risk from the sudden rise in oil and commodity prices.
Gas at the pump is up, and going higher. Food prices are following. The consequences are catastrophic for the global poor as their costs go up while their income doesn’t.
It’s menacing American workers too, who in large part have not seen a meaningful raise since the days of Reagan (keeping it this way is clearly behind the current flurry of attacks on unions).
Already, unrest in the Middle East and many African countries is being blamed for these dramatic increases. It seems as if this threat to global stability is being largely ignored in our media, one that treats the oil business as just another mystical world of free market trading.
Why is it happening? Why all the volatility? Is oil getting scarcer, leading to price increases? Is the cost of food, similarly, a reflection of naturally increasing commodity prices?
While it’s true that natural disasters and droughts play some role in this unchecked price inflation, it also seems apparent that something else is attracting increasing attention, even if most of our media fails to explore what is a political time bomb while most political leaders shrug their shoulders and ignore it.
President Obama recently said there is nothing he can do about the hike in oil and food prices. But critics say the problem is that government and media alike refuse to recognize what’s really going on: unchecked speculation!
Not everyone buys into this suspicion. In fact, it is one of the more intense subjects of debate in economics.
Princeton University economist Paul Krugman pooh-poohs the impact of speculation, counter-posing the traditional argument that oil prices are set by supply and demand.
The Economist magazine agrees, summing up its views with a pithy phrase, “Speculation does not drive the oil price. Driving does.”
Others, like oil industry analyst Michael Klare of Hampshire College, see demand outdistancing supply:
“Consider the recent rise in the price of oil just a faint and early tremor heralding the oilquake to come. Oil won’t disappear from international markets, but in the coming decades it will never reach the volumes needed to satisfy projected world demand, which means that, sooner rather than later, scarcity will become the dominant market condition.”
Usually you hear this debate in scholarly circles or read it in political tracts where orthodox views collide with more alarmist projections about the oil supply “peaking.”
But officials in the Third World don’t see the subject as academic. Reserve Bank of India Governor Duvvuri Subbarao charges, “Speculative movements in commodity derivative markets are also causing volatility in prices.”
The World Bank is meeting on this issue this week because it is seen as a matter of “utmost urgency.”
“The price of food is a matter of life and death for the very poorest people in the world,” said Tom Arnold, CEO of Concern Worldwide, the international humanitarian agency, ahead of his participation at The Open Forum on Food at World Bank headquarters.
He adds, “with many families spending up to 80 percent of their income on basic foods to survive, even the slightest increase in price can have devastating effects and become a crises for the poorest.”
Journalist Josh Clark argues on the website “How Stuff Works” that much of the oil speculation is rooted in the financial crisis. He wrote:
“The next time you drive to the gas station, only to find prices are still sky high compared to just a few years ago, take notice of the rows of foreclosed houses you’ll pass along the way. They may seem like two parts of a spell of economic bad luck, but high gas prices and home foreclosures are actually very much interrelated.
“Before most people were even aware there was an economic crisis, investment managers abandoned failing mortgage-backed securities and looked for other lucrative investments. What they settled on was oil futures.”
The debate within the industry is more subdued, perhaps to avoid a public fight between suppliers and distributors who don’t want to rock the boat.
But some officials like Dan Gilligan, president of the Petroleum Marketers Association, representing 8,000 retail and wholesale suppliers has spoken out. He argues:
“Approximately 60 to 70 percent of the oil contracts in the futures markets are now held by speculative entities. Not by companies that need oil, not by the airlines, not by the oil companies. But by investors who profit money from their speculative positions.”
Now, a prominent and popular market analyst is throwing caution to the wind by blowing the whistle on speculators.
Finance expert Phil Davis runs a website and widely read newsletter to monitor stocks and options trades. He’s a professional’s professional, whose grandfather taught him to buy stocks when he was just ten years old.
His website is Phil’s Stock World, and stocks are his world. He’s subtitled the site, “High Finance for Real People.”
He is usually a sober and calm analyst, not known as maverick or dissenter.
When I met Phil the other night, he was on fire, enraged by what he believes is the scam of the century that no one wants to talk about, because so many powerful people armed with legions of lawyers want unquestioning allegiance, and will sue you into silence.
He studies the oil/food issue carefully and has concluded, “It’s a scam folks, it’s nothing but a huge scam and it’s destroying the U.S. economy as well as the entire global economy but no one complains because they are ‘only’ stealing about $1.50 per gallon from each individual person in the industrialized world.”
“It’s the top 0.01 percent robbing the next 39.99 percent – the bottom 60 percent can’t afford cars anyway (they just starve quietly to death, as food prices climb on fuel costs).
“If someone breaks into your car and steals a $500 stereo, you go to the police, but if someone charges you an extra $30 every time you fill up your tank 50 times a year ($1,500) you shut up and pay your bill. Great system, right?”
Phil is just getting started, as he delves into the intricacies of the NYMEX market that handles these trades:
“The great thing about the NYMEX is that the traders don’t have to take delivery on their contracts, they can simply pay to roll them over to the next settlement price, even if no one is actually buying the barrels.
“That’s how we have developed a massive glut of 677 million barrels worth of contracts in the front four months on the NYMEX and, come rollover day – that will be the amount of barrels ‘on order’ for the front 3 months, unless a lot barrels get dumped at market prices fast.
“Keep in mind that the entire United States uses ‘just’ 18M barrels of oil a day, so 677M barrels is a 37-day supply of oil. But, we also make 9M barrels of our own oil and import ‘just’ 9M barrels per day, and 5M barrels of that is from Canada and Mexico who, last I heard, aren’t even having revolutions.
“So, ignoring North Sea oil, Brazil and Venezuela, and lumping Africa in with OPEC, we are importing 3Mbd from unreliable sources and there is a 225-day supply under contract for delivery at the current price or cheaper plus we have a Strategic Petroleum Reserve that holds another 727 million barrels (full) plus 370M barrels of commercial storage in the U.S. (also full) which is another 365.6 days of marginal oil already here in storage in addition to the 225 days under contract for delivery.“
These contracts for oil outnumber their actual delivery, a sign of speculation and market manipulation, as oil companies win government authorizations for wells but then don’t open them for exploration or exploitation.
It’s all a game of manipulating oil supply to keep prices up. And no one seems to be regulating it.
What Phil sees is a giant but intricate game of market manipulation and rigging by a cartel — not just an industry — that actually has loaded tankers criss-crossing the oceans but only landing when the price is right.
“There is nothing that the conga-line of tankers between here and OPEC would like to do more than unload an extra 277 Million barrels of crude at $112.79 per barrel (Friday’s close on open contracts and price).
“But, unfortunately, as I mentioned last week, Cushing, Oklahoma (where oil is stored) is already packed to the gills with oil and can only handle 45M barrels if it started out empty so it is, very simply, physically impossible for those barrels to be delivered.
“This did not, however, stop 287M barrels worth of May contracts from trading on Friday and GAINING $2.49 on the day. “
He asks, “Who is buying 287,494 contracts (1,000 barrels per contract) for May delivery that can’t possibly be delivered for $2.49 more than they were priced the day before? These are the kind of questions that you would think regulators would be asking – if we had any.”
The TV news magazine “60 Minutes” spoke with Dan Gilligan, who noted that investors don’t actually take delivery of the oil: “All they do is buy the paper, and hope that they can sell it for more than they paid for it. Before they have to take delivery.”
He says they make their fortunes “on the volatility that exists in the market. They make it going up and down.”
Payam Sharifi, at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, notes that even as the rise in oil prices threatens the world economy, there is almost total silence on the danger:
“This issue ought to be discussed again with a renewed interest – but the media and much of the populace at large have simply accepted high food and oil prices as an unavoidable fact of life, without any discussion of the causes of these price rises aside from platitudes.”
What can we do about that?
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News Dissector Danny Schechter made the film Plunder The Crime of Our Time (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com) on the financial crisis as a crime story. He wrote an introduction to the recent reissue of a classic two-volume expose of John D. Rockefeller’s The Standard Oil Company, one of the top ten works of investigative reporting in American history. (Cosimo Books) Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
Itamar Killers Found?
By Mohammad / KABOBfest / April 18, 2011
The Israeli press is ablaze this morning with the news that the killers of the Fogel family in the illegal colony of Itamar in the occupied West Bank have been found. After several weeks of besieging the village of Awarta, arresting virtually all of its inhabitants, and causing extensive property damage, the Israeli authorities have announced that two teenagers from the village have admitted to carrying out the killings.
This particular case has been quite interesting, because of the fact that all Palestinian factions publicly distanced themselves from it and denied responsibility for carrying it out. Despite the Israeli government immediately blaming it on Palestinian ‘terror’ without any proof and using the death of the Fogels as an excuse to further expand the illegal colonization of the West Bank, a gag order was placed on the investigation as rumors and theories grew about who the actual culprit may have been.
Itamar is a heavily fortified settlement overlooking the surrounding Palestinian villages on whose land it is illegally built. The colony is notoriously well fortified to ensure intruders do not enter; it is completely surrounded by 8 foot high electrified wire fence with 2 feet of razor wire on top, sensors to determine if the fence has been cut, automatic cameras that cover the entire perimeter, 24 hour security guard presence and protection provided by the Israeli military. All of its inhabitants are heavily armed, and like almost all Israeli settlements it is surrounded by hundreds of meters of empty buffer land that Palestinians cannot step foot in.
The fact that Itamar probably has more security than the White House led many to conclude that whoever killed the Fogels could not have simply snuck in and snuck back out again.
But now the Israeli security authorities, that bastion of transparency and human rights, say they’ve extracted confessions from Amjad Awad, 19, and Hakim Awad, 18, both from Awarta. According to Haaretz, the teens decided on a whim to go to Itamar armed with nothing but wire cutters and a prayer. They walked across the buffer zone without being noticed by the cameras, security guards, soldiers or residents of the colony. They reached the electrified fence, where they spent ten minutes cutting the wire. The automatic cameras and sensors seemed, by a stroke of anti-semitic fortune, to be asleep that day.
Once they’d cut the fence, the two teenagers walked into the colony, where again nobody noticed them. They found a house which by sheer luck was 1) unlocked, 2) empty and 3) had an M16 rifle and ammunition lying about. Amjad and Hakim picked up the gun and the bullets, and stepped out of the empty house. There, they moved to the Fogels’ residence. They walked in, and killed four family members-one with the gun, the others with a knife.
Having defied all odds, the teenagers now left the house and went back outside. They still hadn’t been noticed. Neither the gun shot nor the screams had been heard (the security services here explain that the weather wasn’t conducive to carrying sound waves that evening). While realizing they STILL hadn’t been noticed by any of the residents, soldiers, security guards or cameras, Amjad and Hakim spotted the Fogels’ 3 month old baby through the window. So they decided to go back inside and kill the baby.
Insatiable Arab thirst for blood and all that.
Now the teens, armed with a big stolen M16 rifle, ammunition, and a knife simply walked back out of the colony, again unnoticed by the cameras, soldiers, guards, colonists, sensors and maybe even God himself. They walked across the buffer zone, back to their village, and thought they had gotten away with their dastardly crime. Of course, they had forgotten to factor in the tireless efforts of the Israeli army and intelligence apparatus, who laid siege to their village for days, barring the entry of food and medicine, rounding up villagers en masse, savagely beating others and destroying extensive property in Awarta.
The story presented by the Israeli security forces has more holes in it than a hunk of Swiss cheese treated with birdshot. As Ali Abunimah points out, they can’t even get their claim right about whether or not Amjad and Hakim acted alone or on behalf of the PFLP. And Israel’s penchant for using torture and threats to coerce confessions doesn’t really do much for its credibility here. If 6 year old girls are beaten and 60 year old women are violently detained in Awarta, your brain doesn’t have to go far to guess what the Shin Bet did to extract confessions from the young men.
And before the seething masses of indignant Zionists could finish wringing their hands, out comes the family of Hakim Awad with the inconvenient revelation that their son had recently undergone testicular surgery that made it impossible for him to walk long distances and needing the toilet every hour, and was at home recovering the night the Fogels were killed. Oops.
Zionism really is losing its lustre: They decided to frame a guy who can barely walk for trekking across a buffer zone, through an electrified fence, breaking into two houses, killing an entire family then jogging merrily home.
Israel appropriating historical sites for colonial ends
Sarah Irving | The Electronic Intifada | 18 April 2011
Orthodox Jews walk past Israel’s wall near Rachel’s Tomb in the occupied West Bank. (Inbal Rose/MaanImages)
Moves by the Israeli government and settler movement to appropriate historical sites undermine Palestinian cultural rights and highlight how Israel exploits archaeological claims for colonial ends.
Last spring, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the Ibrahimi Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron and the Bilal Mosque/Rachel’s Tomb outside Bethlehem to be “Israeli national heritage sites.” As The Electronic Intifada has reported since, the State of Israel seems to have two approaches to Palestine’s ancient sites. If, like the sites Netanyahu claimed or the remains at Sebastia, they fit into Israeli narratives about the Jewish history of the region, they are appropriated, renovated and incorporated into “archaeological parks.” If, like excavated finds and important buildings in Gaza, they highlight ancient Philistine or more recent Islamic periods of history, they can be bombed along with Gaza’s residents, or simply allowed to decay as vital conservation chemicals are excluded by the blockade. As an American-accented tour guide, overheard in Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif in October 2010, put it: “Having worked on two or three archaeological digs here [in Jerusalem], I can tell you that if anything is between 200 and 500 years old, it just gets tossed. It’s nothing.”
It’s against this setting that in October 2010, while researching a guidebook to Palestine, I found myself increasingly confused about a number of historical sites scattered around the occupied West Bank. None of them had the religious and historical importance of the Ibrahimi Mosque or Rachel’s Tomb, but they had their own place in Palestinian history and architecture. They were places mentioned in Palestinian tourism publications such as the locally-published Alternative Tourism Group travel guide Palestine and The Palestinians, the official Palestinian Authority Ministry of Tourism website, Jericho Municipality’s tourist listings or the “Places to Visit” section of the PA’s diplomatic mission to Japan website. This implied that they were recognized by Palestinian sources as being part of the country’s heritage. But the information about them was hazy, as if their existence was being acknowledged but at the same time they weren’t being incorporated into the itineraries of the growing Palestinian cultural tourism industry. Palestinian tour organizers I spoke to dismissed my inquiries, saying only that “I’ve never been there” or “we don’t take groups there.” There was, I soon found, a very good reason for this.
The first site that mystified me is a cluster of remains south of Jerusalem, close to the recently-expanded highway that runs through the occupied West Bank desert toward Jericho and the Jordan River. This comprises three buildings (or groups of buildings), only one of which was visible from the main road. This is an Ottoman caravanserai (most of the building is 16th century, although it may have older Mamluk elements), where merchants and their baggage-trains once took refuge for the night on the bandit-ridden road. It’s known as the Khan al-Ahmar or, in the way that many buildings in Palestine pick up Biblical names, as the Inn of the Good Samaritan, a reference to one of Jesus’ parables.
The other two buildings in the cluster are the monasteries of St. Euthymius and St. Martyrius, both founded in the fifth century. Along with other cells, monasteries and lavras (groups of isolated hermits’ dwellings) of the Desert Fathers, these are some of the most ancient Christian monasteries in existence and immensely important to Palestine’s historical, architectural and religious heritage. In the 2008 edition of The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide From Earliest Times to 1700, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Professor of New Testament at the Ecole Biblique et Archeologique Francaise, Jerusalem refers to the Monastery of St. Euthymius as a “forlorn ruin surrounded by graceless factories.” The factories Murphy-O’Connor mentions are those of Mishor Adumim, the industrial section of the sprawling and illegal settlement of Maale Adumim, which is a key part of Israel’s division of the occupied West Bank into unviable bantustans. Assuming that Murphy-O’Connor, researching the 2008 edition of his guide, saw it “forlorn” and abandoned in perhaps 2007, St. Euthymius’ monastery was not to remain a “ruin” for much longer.
Maale Adumim is apparently, like some of the Etzion Bloc settlements (which are increasingly selling themselves as wine tourism destinations), seeking to add heritage tourism to its economic activities. In 2009 an invitation to the opening of a “mosaic museum” at the Inn of the Good Samaritan was circulated around Israeli ministries and media. “On Behalf of the Head of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories,” it offered a range of activities at the 4 June launch, including tours by “Civil Administration’s Staff Officer of Archeology and Antiquities.” Tellingly, descriptions of the attractions on offer emphasized Second Temple-era and Byzantine Christian remains, but made no mention of the Ottoman and possibly earlier Islamic buildings of the caravanserai which is the core of the Khan al-Ahmar site. If there was ever any doubt on the subject, Israeli archaeology was exposed as being entirely complicit with the occupation, sidelining Palestine’s Islamic heritage, appropriating its Christian sites (and in doing so also sidelining Palestine’s own historic Christian communities) and highlighting its Jewish remains above those of the main other cultures which have enriched this land.
The website of the Maale Adumim settlement offered an insight into the activities at the three sites over the last couple of years. It declared that “The Municipality of Maale Adumim is developing the Good Samaritan’s Inn and the hills surrounding it as a tourist complex, aiming to meet the demand for modern tourism services without losing the site’s unique ancient nature” (“The Good Samaritan Inn”). The site details plans for “restoration of the existing building to accommodate incoming groups, including a praying and religious studies section. Development will include a motel and restaurant modeled in an authentic ‘khan’ style.” In the future, a 150-room “ecological hotel” will be built on the cliffs overlooking the site.
By February 2011, the final pieces fell into place when the website of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority (INPA) declared “New Sites’ Opening – The Inn of The Good Samaritan and more.” The INPA runs nature reserves and archaeological parks in both Israel and the occupied West Bank, including the one at Sebastia, which was previously reported on by The Electronic Intifada. According to the website, the Inn of The Good Samaritan, and the Euthymius and Martyrius monasteries are due to open to the public in July 2011. In addition, the mosaic museum and archaeological remains at these sites will also be opened to tourists. The entrance fees for the sites will pour into Israeli state coffers and, as they are situated within a settlement and will very possibly be run by settler staff, Palestinians will most likely be denied even the privilege of paying the 21 shekel ($6 US) ticket price to the Israeli occupation authorities to visit their own heritage.
A second example lies in the green, intricately curving hills of the central West Bank. On the road between Ramallah and Nablus, near the village of Luban al-Sharqiya and the small town of Sinjel, is Khirbet Seilun, or Tel Shilo. The layers of habitation deposits at the tel (an archaeological term referring to a hill made up of centuries of building remains) show that people have lived there since at least the Canaanite Bronze Age, and there are significant Roman, Byzantine and Islamic remains. Khirbet Seilun is regarded as sacred by some Jews because is has been identified by some historians as the Biblical Shiloh, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept for a period on its travels north from Mount Sinai. Excavations in the early 1980s uncovered remains from the Canaanite and Israelite periods, but nothing resembling the Tabernacle, the building which may have housed the Ark at Shiloh. More recent archaeological digs have been controversial because they have uncovered a spectacular Byzantine mosaic which some settlers want to move so they can continue searching for the Israelite sacred remains they believe lie beneath the three Byzantine churches and two small mosques on the site.
Unlike the Khan al-Ahmar and monasteries of St. Euthymius and St. Martyrius, a visitor center at Tel Shilo is already functioning. Rather than being managed by the INPA, the Tel Shilo site is run by the extremist settlers of Shiloh who, journalists and human rights groups report have been responsible for innumerable attacks, including shootings and arson, against neighboring Palestinian villages and olive farmers. The Shiloh settlement was founded in the 1970s by the Gush Emunim terrorist group, which exploded car bombs against the mayors of several Palestinian cities in 1980, seriously injuring Bassam Shakaa, then mayor of Nablus (see “Shiloh: An Obstacle to Peace,” Time, 13 February 1978 and Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians, 2000, p 123). Shiloh and the archaeological remains it has appropriated are now marketed as a destination for pilgrimages and religious tourism but, perhaps unsurprisingly given the beliefs of the settlers here, some non-Jewish tourists report being turned away.
Controversy over the archaeological heritage of Khirbet Seilun looks set to escalate. Last month, The Jewish Press reported that the Israeli government had authorized large-scale new excavations at the site. The aims of the excavations were explicitly said by the paper to be “to showcase the life and times of ancient Israel,” which suggests that the archaeologists carrying them out have specific intentions as to what they will find – or not find (“New archaeological effort seeks to unearth Mishkan’s secrets,” 23 March 2011). The article did not name the director of the new excavations, but previous digs at Khirbet Seilun have been led by Rachel Ehrlich, a hard-line settler who, in a profile on one Christian Zionist website, was described as being “determined to put the site [of Shiloh] on the map [as] the place where the people of Israel first entered the land, where religious life for the Jewish people was centered for the 369 years the Tabernacle stood there” (“Uncovering our Past, Christian Friends of Israel Communities).
Tzofia Dorot, the manager of the Shiloh visitor center, made some telling comments to The Jewish Press about the importance to settler public relations of Israel’s appropriation of heritage sites. She claimed that Shiloh has been “seeing more and more local and foreign visitors” and that three companies with proposals for a “major visitor center” had visited the settlement. This activity occurred in spite of the skepticism from archaeologists about whether Dorot’s “headline-making discoveries” were really likely to be made.
Tzofia Dorot’s comments to The Jewish Press illustrate why the expropriation of Palestinian heritage sites – whether by the State of Israel or by settler groups acting as its proxies – has a significance well beyond the loss of individual buildings or artifacts. In the eyes of settlers and their supporters, in Israel and beyond, stealing Palestinian archaeological and architectural heritage isn’t just about attracting tourists with open wallets. It’s about asserting settler claims to the land, by emphasizing Jewish history over and above that of the peoples and faiths who came before and after them in Palestine. It is also about presenting the Jewish people as the legitimate custodians of Palestine’s Christian heritage, diverting attention from Israeli oppression of the world’s oldest and longest-lived Christian communities and reinforcing misconceptions about the Palestinian struggle as a religious rather than anti-colonial movement. As Dorot sees it, the international “effort to discredit and delegitimize our connection to the Land of Israel is gathering steam.” Thus, showing settler archaeology to gullible tourists, she believes, will be vital in countering “the international community’s clamoring for Israel to make concessions.”
Meanwhile, Palestinian heritage organizations such as PACE and Riwaq are increasingly using models of community participation to raise awareness of the value of archaeological remains and the importance of protecting them (Ghattas J. Sayej, “Palestinian archaeology: knowledge, awareness and cultural heritage, Present Pasts, Vol 2, 2010). In Jerusalem, the Centre for Jerusalem Studies and Emek Shaveh are fighting official and settler expropriation of cultural and historical sites. But defending Palestine’s cultural heritage from the Israeli state and settlers is still low on the priority list.
Archaeologists, including Hamdan Taha, director-general of the PA’s Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, have voiced their concerns. And in March 2010 Algeria, Egypt, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Tunisia submitted a provisional agenda item on Netanyahu’s claims at the Haram al-Khalil and Rachel’s Tomb to the UNESCO executive board meeting, noting that “much of the settlement enterprise is concentrated around archaeological areas where Israel makes claims of exclusive heritage, including the settlements of Shilo, Bet El and Kiryat Arba” (see UNESCO Executive Board, Hundred and eighty-fourth session, Item 37 of the provisional agenda, 19 March 2010 [PDF]). After initial failure to reach an agreement, UNESCO declared that it “regretted” Israel’s inclusion of the Haram al-Khalil and Bilal ibn Rahmeh Mosque on a list of its heritage sites and urged it to remove it; it also “regretted” Israel’s “unilateral actions” regarding historical sites in Jerusalem; no mention was made of Tel Shilo (see UNESCO Executive Board, Hundred and eighty-fifth session, Decisions adopted by the executive board, 19 November 2010 [PDF]). But much greater international recognition of and opposition to Israel’s cultural colonialism is needed, if Palestine’s heritage is to be preserved, both for its cultural significance and economic potential.
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Sarah Irving is a freelance writer. She worked with the International Solidarity Movement in the occupied West Bank in 2001-02 and with Olive Co-op, promoting fair trade Palestinian products and solidarity visits, in 2004-06. She now writes full-time on a range of issues, including Palestine. Her first book, Gaza: Beneath the Bombs, co-authored with Sharyn Lock, was published in January 2010. She is currently working on a new edition of the Bradt Guide to Palestine and a biography of Leila Khaled.
Transformed by truth: Richard Forer’s journey from AIPAC to compassion
By Paul J. Balles | Redress | 19 April 2011
In many Jewish circles today it has become more important to believe in Israel than to believe in God. – Richard Forer
Richard Forer joined the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for the same reason that most Jews joined this Israel lobby. He refers to what he calls “the primal fear of many Jews around the world — the fear of another holocaust.”
He felt strong support for Israel at the time of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the capture of Israeli Gilad Shalit. However, some of his friends disagreed.
Retelling a story of his discussion with a friend, Forer raises every single argument and justification ever offered for the occupation of Palestine.
As a result, Forer decided to study the history, “something I’d never really done. What I found astounded me and blew all of my beliefs apart”.
He found out that everything he, as a Jewish American, had grown up believing was false.
He discovered that the propaganda about Israel wanting peace was not true. What Israel really wanted was more land. “That’s always been their primary objective; peace is secondary to that.”
He learned that Israel’s pre-emptive attacks on Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967 were based on a falsehood that they would have attacked Israel.
Forer discovered that stories put out by Bill Clinton and Dennis Ross after the 2000 Camp David summit were also lies about how Yasser Arafat “would not go along with a very fair and generous offer made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak“.
The entire history of Israel and the Palestinians put out by Israel is deceitful, according to Forer.
Growing up, “I identified more as a Jew than as an American… I felt that Israel was the one place where Jews could go if ever they were persecuted again.”
In his book, Breakthrough: Transforming Fear into Compassion, Forer tells of how he changed his thinking about Israel as a benign and democratic state to a tribe of people dominated by fear.
“If Jews looked at the history and not at the fictions, their fear would crumble,” says Forer.
“They would realize that the Palestinians were not only human but that the Jews have dehumanized the Palestinians through their indoctrination.”
Forer’s transformation took place at the time of the second Lebanese war. The typical response to his transformation was to call him a self-hating Jew.
Forer makes the important point, after his visit to the West Bank, that the Palestinians and Arabs are not angry at Jews but at the Zionist ideology and the government of Israel that oppresses them.
“Every single person I met [in the West Bank] said it’s not about Jews or Muslims, it’s about human beings, it’s a human rights issue.”
Interestingly, Forer notes that the government of Israel does not represent the Jewish people. “That’s just an excuse they make.
Most of the Jewish people in Israel are apathetic. They don’t know what’s going on.”
They don’t even know that the Separation Wall is built mostly in Palestinian territory.
“They just live in denial. If the Israelis were honest, they’d say if the Palestinians would just lie down and do what we tell them to do, then we’ll have peace and maybe we’ll give them 8 to 10 per cent of Palestine.”
In his book, Forer debunks all of the arguments that people make to defend Israel against criticism.
He talks about Hebron, the only Palestinian community with a Jewish presence. He writes about the Separation Wall and about settlements and the seizure of land by Israelis.
Virtually any argument that he heard before his transformation Forer goes into and shows what the truth really is.
A Jew, brought up on Israeli propaganda, had his early beliefs challenged by friends. His honest study of the facts resulted in a monumental transformation.
His courageous decision to share that experience led to the publication of his book Breakthrough: Transforming Fear into Compassion.
The blind will continue to label Forer a self-hating Jew. This will come from apathetic Israelis and Zionists who have fed on fear and falsehood.
Those who read his book may discover that integrity is an antidote for fear of the truth.
Itamar “breakthrough” still unclear
Palestine Monitor | 18 April 2011
Israeli army report relies on confessions of “tortured” teenagers and does not excuse Awarta’s collective punishment.
Yesterday, the Israeli government released what they called “a breakthrough” in the Itamar case, the murders of five members of the Fogel family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar last month. The headline from Ynet news called the Itamar case “solved.”
Since the March 11th murders, the Shin Bet, the IOF and the police have routinely raided and besieged Awarta, the nearby Palestinian village, continually if sporadically detaining villagers, enforcing curfews, and curtailing media access. Immediately following the murders, the entire village was declared a “closed military zone” and drones flew over head as the village rationed water, food and gas.
Between 600 and 700 villagers have been arrested, Ma’an news reported. The human rights advocacy group Addameer denounced the campaign in Awarta as one of indiscriminate collective punishment and called for intervention from the international community. There were hundreds of arrests and “no arrest warrants were presented,” the advocacy group said.
Ghassan Khatib, a representative from the Palestinian Authority called the events in Awarta, “endless campaigns of barbaric acts committed by the Israeli occupation army against the people of Awarta.”
There was no official Israeli news coming out of Awarta due to a media gag-order, but on Sunday, April 17th Israeli authorities announced their breakthrough. Two young men (who share the same family name but are not directly related), Amjad Awad, 19, and Hakim Awad 18, admitted to committing the murders.
The IOF’s report, picked up by Haaretz, the New York Times and Arutz Sheva without scrutiny, offers a play-by-play accounting of the murders. The two suspects were brought to the Fogel family home where they, according to the military, detailed their crime. After stealing a Itamar neighbor’s M16, they stabbed two sleeping children, shot the Fogel parents, and silenced their crying baby with a knife.
Their confessions took place after prolonged interrogations, however, and may be the result of coercion.
“Five months ago Hakim underwent surgery,” said Nawef Awad, Hakim’s mother to Ynet. “I’m sure he was tortured and forced into confessing.”
Hakim was unable do carry out such a gruesome crime, said Nawef, because he was still recovering from a November testicular surgery. She also stated that on March 11th, the night of the murders, “he was at home and went to bed at 9:30.”
Hakim’s sister Julia was also detained, interrogated and put under “severe psychological pressure,” Nawef said.
Itamar is one of 121 Israeli colonies located in the Palestinian West Bank which, under international law, are illegal. Among Palestinians, Itamar has a reputation of being one of the more rigid, Orthodox settlements.
Lebanese President Slams WikiLeaks: Says Leaks Aimed at Sowing Division
By Jason Ditz | Anti-war.com | April 17, 2011
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.
Some Itamar settlers espouse extremist views; father says daughter and grandchildren “received the privilege of being sacrifical lambs”
By Alison Weir | Israel-Palestine: The Missing Headlines | April 17, 2011
Following the brutal murder of five family members in the illegal Israeli settlement of Itamar, some settlers are espousing extremist views, including calls for ethnic cleansing.
In an interview reported by Israel National News, the father of the family killed in Itamar, Rabbi Yehuda Ben Yishai, said that his daughter and her family “received the privilege of being the sacrificial lambs and to sanctify the name of heaven.” Yishai called for a greater strengthening of “Jewish identity and pride.”
The New York Jewish Week reports that some Itamar residents have been calling for the expulsion of all Palestinians from the West Bank, quoting David Schneerson, who lives next to the house of the murdered family:
“As long as there is one Arab here, it’s not enough… Kahane is the closest to correct in all of the politics in areas,” he said, referring to Rabbi Meir Kahane, who advocated the transfer of West Bank Palestinians. “No one wants Arabs here in the state.”
Jewish Week reports that Schneerson, 30, is a Chabad Lubavitch emissary and says that Israeli military officers told David Schneerson that the murderer cased his home.
According to the report, “Schneerson believes that a picture of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, saved the lives of his family and five children.” The story quotes Schneerson: “Our door was open. We are sure that he saw the rebbe and fled.”
The Rebbe, as Rabbi Schneerson is known, is highly revered by thousands of followers in Israel and the U.S.; some believed him to be the messiah.
Schneerson taught an extreme form of Jewish supremacism, stating that Jews constitute a separate, superior species, writing that “the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world…A non-Jew’s entire reality is only vanity” and that “The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews.”
Schneerson was recently honored by a proclamation by President Obama, following a tradition begun by Congress in 1978.
‘US planned Arab world revolutions’
Press TV – April 17, 2011
Press TV interviewed Author Mark Glenn of the Crescent and Cross Solidarity Movement regarding the Arab uprisings and the United States and Israel’s objectives on foreign policy in the Middle East region.
With Egypt’s pseudo-revolution and the ousting of elderly Arab leaders, Author Mark Glenn explains that US-Israeli operations, rather than the people, have caused these revolutions.
Press TV: As we discuss the situation now unfolding in Yemen, let’s start with the offer of mediation that’s been put forth by the Arab mediators, the Persian Gulf, and Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, and now the US and EU’s support for that mediation offer. Although, they are supporting it, a lot of people are saying their stance towards the Yemen crisis is coming too late and it’s too little.
Glenn: Yes, I would tend to agree with that. I think the offer to support the mediation at this point is just theatrics on the part of America and the West. They plan to allow things to run their course with Saleh, and they plan to see him removed from power as Mubarak was removed, and as Ben Ali was removed, and as they presently are trying to see take place in Libya. We have to remember there have been moves at least as far back as 2008 to remove all of these Arab leaders through these various democratic movements that have been funded to the tune of sometimes as much as 100 to 150mn dollars by the United States government.
They have invested a lot in this and we shouldn’t forget that Hollywood resides in America, and our government is no different from that. They are merely reading from a script here and pretending to support Saleh. But in the end they will see him removed just as the other Arab leaders in that region.
Press TV: One concern that has been made by the revolutionary forces in Yemen is that they say any revolution comes with a counter revolution. They are very skeptical about the role that Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council is taking in terms of how it’s going to affect the post-revolution era in Yemen if that transfer of power to Saleh’s deputy is made. Of course not just President Saleh, but his entire regime is to go. It’s a similar situation that we saw turn out in Egypt. Do you think that those concerns are relevant?
Glenn: Absolutely, it’s relevant and well founded because the powers, namely the United States and Israel, are not going to allow this country or any other country in that part of the world to fall to the sorts of wrong forces. So despite the fact they may be allowing people into the streets right now does not preclude the fact that the United States and Israel will make sure whatever new government comes to power in that country will be a government that is going to serve Israel and America’s interest.
Let’s keep in mind that as you pointed out at the beginning of the news cast that two months have gone by now of daily protests, which means that this has had a very negative economic effect on a country that is already very poor. So these countries that are going through these convulsions and revolutions whatever government winds up coming to power in the aftermath of these revolutions are going to have to deal with the severe economic aftermaths that these revolutions cause, which means the very first act that this new government is going to have to undertake upon assuming power is holding its hand out for economic assistance.
Who is it going to go to for that economic assistance other than the West? So whatever new government winds up coming to power it is already being held over a barrel of Western financial interests. We have to keep this in mind. Even though these revolutions, and certainly these are historic things that we see taking place; nevertheless, at the same time Israel and the United States have invested a lot of time, money and resources in making sure that things run just their way in that part of the world.
They are not going to see almost hundred years of all of these painstaking efforts swept to the side just because you happen to have a few million people pour into the streets from various countries. We see now what is happening in Egypt. This is the revolution that has not taken place. The military is in power and telling people to go back to work and get off the streets.
All that has been affected is that a leader has been removed from power and that’s it. No change is taking place and the Egyptian people are starting now to understand this. And this is why you can see the growing amount of discontent on the street in Egypt. We have to keep in mind, and I hate to be the one to have to say these things that Israel and America are not going to allow these things to take place without having some say in it. We can rest assured at the end of the day it will be a very heavy word they will give on this matter.
Press TV: The issue of the fight against al-Qaeda is a major issue now. We’ve seen this being raised by authorities in the United States. Robert Gates was saying the situation in Yemen is a kind of reading to the situation of ignoring the threat of al-Qaeda. That is an issue which has been raised. So first of all how serious are these concerns about the United States about its cooperation with the Yemeni government, and what it calls its fight against al-Qaeda militants?
Glenn: Well what we have to keep in mind is that all of this instability in these countries where you have people pouring out into the streets. A situation like this is absolutely prime for exploitation by groups such as al-Qaeda. So the fact is that the United States is allowing this to take place; all of this instability and basically creating absolutely ripe circumstances for exploitation [of] protests. The United States is allowing all of this instability that is taking place. These things have to take place [so that the US would] be able to maintain the kind of control that needs to be maintained over these countries.
These rulers are old and dying and the demographic makeup of the Middle East is you have half of the population under the age of 24. And what the United States, Israel and these other Western countries are more afraid of than anything else is that a true grassroots revolution will take place in these countries as happened in Iran in 1979. It has been said over and over in various press releases that they cannot allow anything to take place in these Arab countries like what took place in Iran. So what they are doing is preventing these revolutions from taking place by creating revolutions of their own.
There was a New York Times story that appeared earlier this week that basically admitted that the revolutions, which had taken place at least in Egypt and Tunisia were planned by the government of the United States as far back as 2008. So the idea of Al-Qaeda getting a foothold in these countries, if they truly were worried about that they would be doing everything they could to put down these uprisings, and to make an environment that is not conducive to exploitation by these groups.
Press TV: When you say a grassroots revolution in Yemen, do you think that will be probable or are you optimistic that, that is something the Yemeni people could achieve?
Glenn: Well I have no doubt that the Yemeni people as well as the other people in the Middle East are thirsting for freedom. There’s no question about that. It’s a genuine move on their part. They want to be free. The question is whether or not they are going to be successful. It is whether the United States and Israel are going to allow it to happen.
That is the question. And at the end of the day if the goal of the United States and Israel is just to see these rulers removed and no substantial change takes place in that part of the world, and particularly when it comes to American and Israeli foreign policy objectives, then at the end of the day all we will see is these rulers removed and nothing more. Of course miracles happen and revolutions sometimes do succeed. We look at what took place in Iran in 1979 and the United States and Israel were not happy with the outcome of that. If they could have changed things at that time, they would have.
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How Ukraine Tortured and Slaughtered Donbass
By Kit Klarenberg | Al Mayadeen | July 11, 2024
Almost immediately after the proxy war erupted, ISIS-tier footage of the torture and murder of Russians in Ukrainian custody emerged.
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