Israeli Army Attacks Dutch Music Orchestra with Tear Gas
PNN – 29.07.11
Nablus – The Dutch street orchestra ‘Fanfare van de Eerste Liefdesnacht’ (the First Night of Love Brass Band) from Amsterdam was attacked with tear gas today by the Israeli army during their performance in the Palestinian village Kufr Qadum near Nablus, northern West Bank.
The bands tour of Palestine is designed to be interactive, working with children from a refugee camp in the east of Bethlehem and having them play along with the band and dancing in the streets together.
The musicians were confronted with tens of soldiers who shot tear gas cannisters from behind their military jeeps during the musical performance. They then found themselves surrounded with snipers. Several members of the band were injured and suffered from tear gas inhalation.
Kufr Qadum is a village near Nablus that has suffered in recent years from radical jewish settlers who have attacked the villagers, cut down olive trees and set fire to fields. The roads that lead to the village are often blocked by Israeli military checkpoints.
The Dutch music orchestra has travelled around the West Bank for a duration of two weeks to perform in towns, villages and refugee camps. The band consists of 25 musicians with different musical instruments. They were invited by the town council of Kufr Qadum to perform in the village.
See the Dutch band performing ‘Unadikum’ at Yabous Festival in East Jerusalem:
Israeli soldiers attack Palestinian journalist
Ma’an – 30/07/2011
RAMALLAH — Palestinian photojournalist Moheeb Al-Barghouthi was beaten by Israeli soldiers Friday covering a demonstration in the Nabi Saleh village near Ramallah.
Al-Barghouthi, who works for the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, suffered head injuries and sustained bruises across his body in the attack.
He said soldiers destroyed his camera and confiscated some of his equipment.
The journalist said the soldiers accused him of “misrepresenting” the image of Israeli forces. They left him bleeding and handcuffed on the ground in intense heat for several hours, he added.
Al-Barghouthi was treated at hospital in Ramallah for light injuries.
Israel’s military responded in a statement that “the Palestinian in question was detained for violating a closed military area order. The man was questioned and released an hour later.”
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate condemned the attack and expressed “grave concern” for the welfare of Palestinian media workers.
Israel’s War On Theater
By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | July 27, 2011
Freedom Theater, Jenin
Not content to wage war on armed militants (of whom there are very few these days in the West Bank), earlier today the famed special forces of the Israeli army staged a daring raid on Jenin’s Freedom Theater. In a bold tactical stroke, they woke up a night watchman at 3:30AM by throwing hunks of concrete at the theater entrance. They then strip searched him and made him afraid for his life. Those bold national heroes then arrested a Theater board member and abused the theater general manager, a British citizen. When he called the Israeli civil administration, which has sometimes been known to intercede in the most egregious situations, they hung up on him.
I can’t figure out what’s so dangerous about the Theater’s work. Perhaps the performances of Orwell’s Animal Farm in France? Or The Magic Flute? Is there a message of subversion and a call for insurrection I missed in them? Or perhaps they didn’t like the message of support for the Gaza flotilla on its website?
Given that the founder of Freedom Theater, Juliano Mer-Khamis was assassinated outside the venue a few months ago, this comes as a brutish insult from the Israeli authorities. First the Occupation criminalizes resistance through violence. Then resistance through non-violence. Then they criminalize art and expression.
Everyday Israelis believe that somehow these acts of oppression are located far from them. What they don’t understand is that this rot infects from the outside and works its way in. There will come a time, and not very long, when they’ll criminalize artistic expression inside Israel and Israeli Jewish theater managers will be arrested for expressing themselves. That is, if Israeli cultural institutions haven’t become so co-opted that they no longer offer an alternative to the prevailing nationalist consensus.
Israel angry with Iceland as well
Iceland Accused Of Anti-Semitism
The Right Perspective | July 24, 2011
Iceland’s support for Palestinian statehood at the UN is part of a long history of anti-Semitism in the island nation, according to an Israeli-born political activist who heads a political think tank.
“Relations between the two countries under the present left-wing government of Iceland are plainly bad,” writes Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) Chairman, Manfred Gerstenfeld in a July 18 editorial published in Ynet News.
Gerstenfeld notes that when Icelandic Foreign Minister Ossur Skarphedinsson announced his country’s support for a Palestinian state during the early part of July, he did so after a trip to Gaza that “studiously avoided any diplomatic contact with Israel.” During his trip, the FM also called on Israel to end its blockade of Gaza. Adding to the insult, MP Birgitta Jonsdottir “was the first parliamentarian of any country to visit participants of the failed second Gaza flotilla” shortly before Skarphedinsson’s trip.
This is not the first diplomatic slight Skarphedinsson has given Israel, Gerstenfeld notes. “At the previous UN General Assembly, Iceland’s foreign minister spoke out against Israel,” he writes. “When FM Lieberman wrote to him on this issue, Skarphedinsson did not answer. He did not even confirm receipt of Lieberman’s letter.”
Another example of diplomatic disrespect came when “Skarphedinsson also ordered Icelandic diplomats to remain in the hall while Iranian President Ahmadinejad spoke at the Durban review conference in Geneva in 2009. Diplomats from almost all other European countries left,” claims Gerstenfeld.
The Jewish activist claims Iceland’s current political attitude towards Israel falls in line with what he says is an “unimpressive history” the country has towards Jews.
“Few Jews live in the country,” Gerstenfeld writes, adding that “in the past, there have only been Jewish communities established at times when there were either British or American troops stationed in Iceland with a substantial number of Jewish soldiers among them.”
Gerstenfeld goes on to say that “Iceland’s anti-Semitic history” includes clergyman Hallgrimur Pétursson, whose hyms he wrote in 1625 mention Jews more than 50 times, “yet only for their ‘perfidy, falseness, wickedness and other malice’”; rejection of Jewish refugees during the 1930s; granting refugee status to Estonian war criminal Evald Mikson, who changed his name to Eðvalds Hinrikssonar, in the 1980s; and granting citizenship to “the rabid anti-Semite of Jewish ancestry,” chess champion Bobby Fischer in 2005.
The op-ed has opened a soul-searching discussion about the issue of anti-Semitism in Iceland. “What makes me angry is the arrogance and condescension he [Gerstenfeld]‘s displaying towards the Icelandic nation,” Katharina Hauptmann wrote in a rebuttal written on the Iceland Review website this Sunday. “In his little pamphlet he discredits and belittles my adopted home in a patronizing and mean way.”
Hauptmann goes on to give the right perspective on Gerstenfeld’s tainted view – first by mocking his “smug comment” about Iceland “gaining major publicity” with the economic crash of 2008 and volcano eruption of 2010, then knocking down his argument that because “few Jews live in Iceland” and that “there is only one ‘expert on the country’s attitude toward Jews’ in Iceland” that the country as a whole is anti-Semitic.
“Iceland is a nation of 320 000 people – just to remind you – how many experts on Jews and Anti-Semitism must one have?,” Hauptmann asks in her piece.
While noting that “many Icelanders are quite xenophobic and there is quite a lot of room for improvement” based on her own personal experiences as a foreigner living there, Hauptmann notes that “it almost seems as if he [Gerstenfeld] wants people to be anti-Semitic. What a pity.”
“To conclude, Mr. Gerstenfeld’s so called “opinion piece” is nothing but a patronizing, paranoid and polemic piece of propaganda that is unfair and offensive to the people of Iceland.
“The fact that the Icelandic government may have issues with Israel’s treatment of Palestine has nothing at all to do with anti-Semitism.”
Background:
Israel is hunting down International Solidarity supporters
PNN – 23.07.11
Bethlehem – Sami Awad, director of Holy Land Trust, a local NGO that works in developing nonviolent resistance in Palestine, warned on Saturday that Israel is targeting international supporters of Palestinians and is attempting to illegalize their work.
Awad’s statement came after Israel deported five French solidarity activists to Jordan on Friday. A group of French activists were crossing an Israeli military checkpoint between Jenin and Tulkarem, soldiers then detained the five and arrested them. The French activists were later taken to a military detention facility before they were deported to Jordan.
During an interview with PNN, Awad said that Israel is taking advantage of the silence policy some countries implement towards Israel’s crimes against those international activists. Awad warned that the Israeli targeted deportation and denied entry campaign will soon include international human rights and aid NGOs working in the region.
According to Awad Israel’s crackdown on international solidarity activists comes due to the fact that military leaders in Israel have realized the impact solidarity campaigns have on the political situation.
Awad added that the best way to counter the Israeli policies is legal actions. He wondered how legal deporting five internationals without trail is.
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.
Mexico Provokes Israel with Historical Question
Al-Manar – July 11, 2011
Amid Israel’s uninterrupted efforts to manipulate history and conceal historical events, the entity has started interfering in the educational system of some countries.
Israel caused internal trouble in Mexico over a national geography exam question about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Zionist website Ynetnews reported that “a geography question was raised focusing on the economic reasons for the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It included the following answers: “The Jewish community used biased and racist methods against the Arab population when the State of Israel was founded”, and “Israel uses its military superiority to control borders, roads, airspace and maritime space.”
The Israeli community in Mexico was outraged, considering that the exam questions were biased against Israel. As a result, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon raised the issue with his Mexican counterpart, urging Mexico’s Education Ministry to present an official apology.
Sheikh Raed Salah denied Bail
Middle East Monitor | July 9, 2011
After a three-hour hearing yesterday in London, Sheikh Raed Salah was denied bail by the courts and is to remain in a high security prison with dangerous criminals until his appeal against deportation is heard.
The judge stated that the prosecution’s submissions that Sheikh Raed would abscond if granted bail were not convincing, and neither did they find the evidence against him persuasive. They did not allow the bail on the grounds that the Home Secretary must have compelling evidence for taking the steps that she did, and the court was not prepared to contravene this.
Ismail Patel, chair of Friends of Al-Aqsa was present at the hearing, and said: “We are greatly disappointed by the decision reached by the court today. Sheikh Raed poses no threat to the British public and is being made a scapegoat by the Home Office to cover its blunders over this whole incident. The Home Secretary was unduly swayed by the opinions of those with an anti-Palestine agenda when she excluded Sheikh Raed from Britain. Although it has long since become apparent that Sheikh Raed is not a threat in either Britain or his home country of Israel, the Home Office will not admit its failing and as a result, he is being made to suffer the loss of his freedom and liberty.
An even graver concern stems from the fact the government and security services have failed to follow protocol in their treatment of Sheikh Salah by denying him access to his lawyers for four days while in prison. This breach of his basic legal rights reflects how the British government is acting outside of the law in their detention and treatment of Sheikh Raed Salah and it is absolutely unacceptable.”
The actions of the British government are only serving to stifle the legitimate voices of the Palestinian people struggling for freedom from occupation.
Dr Daud Abdullah, director of the Middle East Monitor said: ‘Yesterdays decision is just another attempt by the British government to put obstacles in Sheikh Raed’s way as he attempts to seal justice. Sheikh Raed remains resolute and determined to clear his name despite this.’
Israeli occupation authority destroys solidarity tent supporting sit-in legislators in Occupied Jerusalem
Palestine Information Center – 08/07/2011
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — The Israeli occupation authority (IOA) has destroyed the solidarity tent that human right activists erected in support of the three Palestinian officials the IOA threatens to deport from their hometown.
The solidarity tent was put up opposite to the ICRC headquarters in Sheikh Jarrah suburb in the occupied city where the three officials had been in a sit-in for more than a year now.
According to local residents and eyewitnesses, special forces from the Israeli occupation army stormed the area and surrounded the solidarity tent before they leveled it to ground shortly before the activists held their final session to end a one-week conference in support of the threatened officials.
The three officials, MP Ahmad Atton, MP Mohammed Tutah, and former Jerusalem minister Khaled Arafa vowed to resist the Israeli decision to push them out of the city at all costs, saying they were democratically elected by the Palestinian people in clear and transparent elections witnessed by the entire world. All three are affiliated with Hamas Movement.
High-profile personalities, including members of the supreme follow-up committee, Arab members of the Israeli Knesset, members of the PLC, and officials of local human rights institutions and lawyers have attended the conference and hailed the exemplary steadfastness of the three Jerusalem officials against the deportation order.
The three officials sent letters to consulates and international representatives in occupied Jerusalem asserting that they would remain in a sit-in till the IOA revokes the deportation order against them, describing the Israeli measures against them as “unprecedented” that could pave the way to deport more and more Palestinian-Jerusalemites out of their homes.
“For our part as elected Palestinian officials, we are convinced that we have the full right to stay in our city and to attend to the needs of our constituents as international laws stipulate and dictate; and based on this fact and principle we decided to stay in the sit-in till the IOA revokes its order, and allows MP Mohammed Abu Tair back to the city,” said the three officials in a statement they issued during the conference. Abu Tair was coercively deported by the IOA to Ramallah city.
Regime-Change in a Box
Soft-Powering Cuba
By ROBERT SANDELS | CounterPunch | July 6, 2011
In March, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, placed a hold on a $20 million appropriation for the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The money is for democracy promotion schemes in Cuba. Kerry’s purpose was to hold the funds hostage until the State Department responded to a series of questions he had about waste, mismanagement and the general ineffectiveness of the program to actually bring about democracy in Cuba.
USAID grantees in Cuba are soft-power agents engaged in covert subversion. Soft power, as described by its leading academic proponent Joseph E. Nye, Jr., is “getting others to want what you want.” His ideas, however, fell short of assisted regime change.
Here is an example of how USAID money can help Cuba:
Step 1. Give USAID money to grantees like Freedom House to help Cubans document human rights abuses.
Step 2. Send reports of abuses to international human rights organizations.
Step 3. The US Interests Section in Havana reports the discovery of abuses, cites human rights organization, sends information to the State Department.
Step 4. Alarmed, the State Department cites Interests Section, issues scathing report on human rights violations in Cuba.
Step 5. Congress and the Republic of Miami, in righteous indignation, demand more sanctions against Cuba.
Result: USAID money pays handsomely on its initial investment. Now, why would Sen. Kerry not think these programs are cost effective?
Regime-change in a box
In 2009, Alan Gross went to Cuba on USAID money with equipment to set up Broadband Global Area Networks (BGANs), briefcase-size satellite systems for Internet and cellphone communication networks outside of Cuban government control. The cover story was that he was delivering the equipment to the Cuban Jewish community. They never heard of him even though this was his sixth trip.
The New York Times reported that the United States has deployed this “shadow” communications system in Middle Eastern countries to help dissidents plan anti-government movements.
Kerry said that the Cuban programs in general and the BGAN program in particular only irk Cuban authorities and put taxpayers’ money into the hands of Cuban intelligence, which routinely penetrates the “civil society” organizations and dissident groups the money is supposed to support.
Recent covert attempts to flip Cuban officials, hand out communications gear and satellite antennas disguised as surfboards have been failures amply catalogued in a series of exposés broadcast on Cuban television.
Even as the US government and media gamely maintain that Gross, currently serving a 15-year prison sentence in Cuba, was running an innocent phones-for-Jews program, the State Department doesn’t want to identify USAID contractors for fear they might be arrested like Gross was.
However, there is little likelihood of being arrested for taking cell phones or other real gifts to Cuba. And Miami Cubans can easily purchase cell phone minutes for users in Cuba from the state telephone company Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A. (ETECSA). This can be done via the Internet from anywhere in the world using various foreign commercial service.
If the Obama administration was so keen on having Cubans communicate by cell phone, USAID could have used these services openly, cheaply and legally.
Trouble with the cover story
Anti-Castro fanatics accuse Kerry of aiding Cuban communism, revealing a touching belief that these programs actually work. To Kerry’s assertion that internet-in-a-box exploits landed Gross in prison, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) responded that Kerry was giving his approval to the Cuban government’s “iron-fisted tactics” against “defenders of democracy.”
Wait a minute Sen. Menendez. You’re forgetting the cover story about phones for Jews. Are you saying the Jewish community is a dissident organization?
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) turned on Kerry with particular fury, but if she had listened more carefully she might have seen that the two are not far apart. Kerry is not opposed to overthrowing the Cuban government. He is not against subversion. He has always reassured Miami’s Cuban voters that he supports the blockade against Cuba.
Besides, Kerry threw away highfalutin principles by offering to release all but $5 million of the funds.
The argument over the funding is valid only if we accept at face value the stated USAID goals of bringing democracy, freedom and justice to the Cuban people. Evidently, Kerry and Ros-Lehtinen think or pretend that these are the actual goals.
If we go along with the pretense, we have to conclude that the hapless Gross failed to realize that he could have gone to the Internet and loaded up Jewish cell phones with massive quantities of USAID money from the comfort of his home, avoiding prison and the much greater pretend failure of actually depriving them of telephone contact with Jews around the world; so, no more USAID money for him.
Soft power succeeds by failing
Setting aside the pretense, with Gross in prison his pretend failure is transformed into success because Obama and the lesser fanatics can say he was imprisoned for helping Jews exercise their freedom of speech.
Even better, Miami and Washington can argue that Cuba used Gross as an excuse to reject Obama’s generous peace gestures. Far from failing, Gross forces Cuba to take the blame for US aggression. Liz Harper of the US Institute of Peace summed it up nicely writing that the Gross affair “…at best delayed advancements initially sought by the Obama administration.”
And of course, had Gross set up clandestine communication networks all over Havana and had the dissidents used them to plan demonstrations, pass around diatribes against the Cuban government and so on, there would likely be another victory for USAID when Cuban intelligence eventually shuts them down (“clamping down on free speech”) and arrests are made (“iron-fisted tactics” against “defenders of democracy”).
Even after it was widely reported that Gross delivered nothing to the Cuban Jewish community and that his luggage contained equipment to undermine the Cuban government, The Miami Herald stuck to the script. Gross was imprisoned, wrote the Herald, “for delivering communications equipment paid for by the U.S. government to Jewish groups on the island.”
If the Cubans were to sabotage every US gesture of friendship, that means they welcome US aggression and subversion. “The Cuban regime increasingly needs an external threat to blame for the country’s problems,” said an unnamed Pentagon official.
Moral: If a lemon gets arrested, make lemonade out of him.
No democracy promotion money for U.S.
For a few million in US taxpayer dollars, Cuba gets programs for “community improvement activities, identifying and addressing community needs,” expanded access “to uncensored information to help Cubans communicate amongst themselves and with the outside world.”
In the empathy-grant category, the State Department is currently seeking proposals to help the disabled, orphans and homosexuals achieve a better life in Cuba.
But while the United States delivers BGANs to Cubans, there is no government program to free its own people from government surveillance; there is no shadow network. Indeed, social media and internet systems in the United States are thoroughly penetrated by intelligence agencies. The FBI now has the capability to plant permanent spyware on personal computers. It can find out who you are with a Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier. It can access communications devices directly through internet service providers and cell towers, which is described as a “comprehensive wiretap system.”
If you worry that electoral democracy in the United States is slipping away, go to Cuba where USAID contractors are dedicated to “finding the legal impediments to democratic elections and suggesting the actions that would be necessary to remove these impediments.”
Concerned about the decline of education in the United States? The State Department has a program in Cuba to train “hundreds of students and young adults in critical thinking,” to help them become self-sufficient and to act “independent of government.”
Lockheed Martin: We fix roofs, audit your taxes
Lest it seem from all this spending for other peoples’ needs that US citizens are not getting a fair share of their own tax money, consider the benefits of soft power at home.
For several years, hard-power weapons makers have won Pentagon contracts to deliver soft-power abroad. The Wall Street Journal reported that Robert Stevens, Lockheed Martin’s CEO, wants the company “to become a central player in the U.S. campaign to use economic and political means to align countries with American strategic interests.”
Lockheed-Martin, the Pentagon’s largest weapons contractor, has diversified its portfolio buying companies involved in public relations, surveillance, auditing, and information systems. Many of these contracts have been in support of ongoing military actions in the Middle East and Africa. At the other end of the scale, one of its subsidiaries trained Liberian lawyers and repaired Monrovia’s court house roof.
Some of the same weapons manufacturers have lately been taking market positions in broad swaths of American life. Sandra I. Erwin, writing in the National Defense Magazine, explained that defense contractors were concerned about possible budget cuts and began looking to State Department and other non-defense budgets to diversify their portfolios.
Lockheed Martin has a $33 million contract with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for Webpage and e-services design, auditing and various taxpayer services. It also has a $1.2 billion contract with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for such services as “screener training and checkpoint reconfiguration.
William D. Hartung of the New America Foundation writes that Lockheed Martin has contracts to watch you, audit you, troll for information on you, scan your iris and pat you down at airports; all in a day’s work at the IRS, FBI, CIA, the Post Office, National Security Administration (NSA), the Census Bureau and the TSA.
“As a result, Lockheed Martin is now involved in nearly every interaction you have with the government,” said Hartung. “Paying your taxes? Lockheed Martin is all over it. The company is even creating a system that provides comprehensive data on every contact taxpayers have with the IRS from phone calls to face-to-face meetings.”
The State Department maintains that it underwrites social programs in Cuba to make Cubans independent of oppressive government.
Meanwhile, other government departments are farming out some of their duties to weapons producers who are dependent on government contracts but independent of voter oversight.
This is enough to make a reasonable person conclude that in Cuba, the people need to be made independent of their government while in the United States the government needs to be made independent of its people.
Robert Sandels writes on Cuba for Cuba-L Direct and CounterPunch.
Lawyers: Protect IP Act would align U.S. Internet policy with ‘repressive regimes’
By Stephen C. Webster | Raw Story | July 5th, 2011
A group of Internet and intellectual property law professors have penned a letter to congressional lawmakers in opposition to the Protect IP Act, which would give the government sweeping new powers to take websites offline, censor search engines and sue Internet publishers accused of infringing activities.
In the letter, they warn that the act would “undermine” U.S. leadership on freedom of speech issues, cautioning that provisions within the legislation are more closely aligned with “repressive regimes” than the traditional American stance on Internet freedom.
They also predict that the Protect IP Act would threaten the security of the Internet at large, as it would give U.S. officials the authority to literally break the Internet’s domain name system (DNS), which links servers to web domains for easy access to pages around the world.
The bill, sponsored and heavily promoted by the entertainment industries, would require Internet service providers and search engines to de-list whole domains on the basis of a copyright claim by a content provider. The claim does not have to be proven to an independent body for a site to be taken offline.
Sites that link to domains accused of hosting infringing activities could also be targeted for domain take-downs or other criminal penalties, and servers outside the U.S. are not exempt from the powers the Protect IP Act seeks to cement into law.
Because of the Internet’s highly interwoven architecture, the bill’s broad language would “make it extraordinarily difficult for advertisers and credit card companies to do business on the Internet,” the lawyers warned.
That point was echoed by Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, who said in May that the search giant would fight any order to break the Internet’s addressing system over copyright claims.
The lawyers also suggested that removing websites without so much as a hearing conflicts with standing constitutional law as interpreted by the Supreme Court, cautioning that the act would undermine America’s defense of free speech and “dramatically reduce” the Internet’s usefulness in mass communications.
“At a time when many foreign governments have dramatically stepped up their efforts to censor Internet communications, the [Protect IP Act] would incorporate into U.S. law — for the first time — a principle more closely associated with those repressive regimes: a right to insist on the removal of content from the global Internet, regardless of where it may have originated or be located, in service of the exigencies of domestic law.”
The letter was signed by Professor Mark Lemley of Stanford University, David S. Levine of Elon University and David G. Post of Temple University.
The Protect IP Act, proposed by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), is currently on hold in the U.S. Senate thanks to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), who placed a freeze on it in May.
The full document follows, below:
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Not Hamas-Israeli conflict: The Palestinian cause belongs to the world
By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | October 15, 2023
This, in his thinking, could only mean one thing: “Never before has Israel stood more honored and revered by the nations of the world.”
Blog Roll
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- SCOTT RITTER: Russia Retaliation on Europe No Longer In Doubt
- Guatemala Admits U.S. Pressure Over Cuban Doctors
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- NATO member’s government collapses after Ukrainian drone incident
- Aafia Siddiqui and Pakistan’s bargain with American gulags
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- The world no longer loves Israel (or, coincidentally, the US) – Daily Update
- Nakba Day is almost here, but every day is also Nakba Day – Daily Update
- Gaza: ‘Doctors Under Attack’ Wins Top Award After Being Shelved by the BBC
- The Nakba at 78: A statistical snapshot of Palestine
- Israel Expels Father Louis Salman from Palestine
- How Israel Turned Eurovision’s Stage Into a Soft Power Tool
- Palestinians in Jerusalem receive only 7% of housing units
- If not stopped, Israel will wipe out Christians from Palestine by 2050: Bethlehem pastor
- Hidden Deep in an NPR Story About a Man Who Threatened to Kill Jews at Cornell… He Admits He Did It to Make People Love Israel
- No Tricks Zone
- German Expert: “No Climate Crisis” …”Warming Generally Better For Humanity”
- New Paleo Research: Modern ‘Climate Change’ Has Had No Apparent Impact On Precipitation Patterns
- 90% Subsidized… Bielefeld Germany’s €7 Million Hydrogen Garbage Truck Fleet Sits Idle
- New Study: Declining Trends In 1980-2023 Tropical Cyclone Frequency, Accumulated Energy
- 46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
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