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EU Selling Torture Equipment

BRUSSELS – Equipment designed for torturing prisoners is still being exported from European Union (EU) countries despite a four-year-old ban on such trade, according to a new report by Amnesty International.

The human rights group has found that companies active in several of the EU’s 27 states have exploited loopholes in controls aimed at putting an end to the selling of instruments of torture.

The EU rules – in force since 2006 – need to be widened to cover a number of devices that remain outside their scope, Amnesty has argued. It highlights how Nidec, a company trading from Spain, has been dealing in ’stun cuffs’ in the past few years. Intended for restraining a detainee by placing them around his or her limbs, such cuffs inflict a painful electric shock. Unlike similar “stun belts”, the cuffs are not explicitly banned by the EU’s rules.

Brussels officials say that the new report should trigger a discussion about how the rules can be strengthened. One source, speaking on condition of anonymity, explained that no action has been taken to date because a newly appointed European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, only assumed office in February. “For the time being, everything is rather open,” the source told IPS. “This is not because we like loopholes, it is quite simply because a new team has been getting started.”

But Amnesty’s specialist on the EU’s foreign policy David Nichols described those comments as “a convenient excuse for inaction.” He said that human rights groups had brought the flaws in the EU’s rules to the Commission’s attention long before now and that its staff had ample power to rectify the situation.

Furthermore, the report finds that national authorities in some European countries are continuing to issue export licenses for torture equipment. Both Germany and the Czech Republic approved exports to nine countries – including Georgia, Pakistan, India and China – where the security forces had previously used the equipment concerned for torture between 2006 and 2009. Among the equipment were chemical sprays, shackles and electric shock weapons.

The Amnesty study also finds that EU governments are not being sufficiently transparent about how they are implementing the rules. While each government is required to produce an annual report giving details of applications from traders to sell torture equipment, just seven have done so until now. These are Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, Slovenia, Britain and Spain.

Brian Wood, another Amnesty campaigner, said: “We fear that some states are not taking their legal obligations seriously.”

As part of the ‘war on terror’ declared following the Sep. 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the U.S. has used leg irons and leg cuffs on prisoners held in Afghanistan and Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay. One of these detainees Abu Zubaydah has told the International Committee of the Red Cross of how these shackles pulled painfully on his ankles after his jailers repeatedly slammed him against a wall.

While Spain and Britain have banned the exports of leg irons, leg cuff and gang chains, companies based in other EU member states appear to have been selling some of these instruments. During the 2008 Eurosatory, an annual arms fair held in Paris, the French firm Rivolier exhibited such cuffs on its promotional stand.

The EU’s rules stipulate that cuffs of this nature should be controlled but nonetheless allowed to be sold in certain cases. According to Amnesty, these rules should be revised so that the trade in any leg restraints deliberately designed to cause discomfort is banned.

Michael Crowley from the Omega Foundation, which conducts research on human rights issues, noted that all of the EU’s countries are nominally opposed to torture. “As part of their commitments to combat torture wherever it occurs, member states must now turn their words into deeds,” he said. “They must impose truly effective controls on the European trade in policing and security equipment and ensure that such goods do not become part of the torturer’s toolkit.”

The Amnesty report also says that some EU member states are themselves using devices which are meant to cause pain to prisoners. In the Czech Republic, restraints have been used to chain detainees to a wall or a fixed object, even though the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental body dedicated to upholding human rights, has deemed the practice as “totally unacceptable”. Eltraf Bis, a Polish company, has also been found to have sold handcuffs intended to be connected to walls.

Amnesty argues that such devices can be clearly distinguished from devices required to restrain hospital patients in some cases of medical necessity and that they should be prohibited.

(Inter Press Service)

March 18, 2010 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

‘Government knew of Jewish terrorist’s plan to open fire on Shfaram bus’

By Jack Khoury | Haaretz | March 16, 2010

Newly discovered footage of a terrorist attack perpetrated by an Israel Defense Forces soldier in the Arab town of Shfaram five years ago indicates that authorities were aware of plans to commit the attack, a lawyer representing Israeli Arabs suspected of taking part in the subsequent lynching of the gunman said Sunday.

In August 2005, Eden Natan-Zada opened fire in a passenger bus in Shfaram with his army-issued M-16 assault rifle, killing four. Immediately following the attack, a large crowd gathered around the bus, surrounding the gunman and beating him to death.

Last year, prosecutors charged 12 individuals with taking part in the lynching of Natan-Zada, a move that ignited criticism from the Israeli-Arab community.

An attorney representing some of the lynch suspects recently became aware of the existence of the aerial footage which was taken moments before, during and after the attack.

The lawyer, Maher Talhami, said the cameras followed the trail of the bus in which Natan-Zada rode in entering Shfaram. Immediately after the attack, the footage shows angry mobs gathering at the scene.

Talhami argues that the camera’s focus on the bus suggests that authorities were aware of the impending attack. The lawyer obtained the footage while combing through the evidence gathered in the case.

According to Talhami, the unmanned aerial vehicle flew at an altitude of three kilometers over the town and was filming just as Natan-Zada’s bus entered Shfaram.

The footage shows the bus until the moment of the attack, which took place at 5:22 P.M. Police helicopters then hovered over the scene of the attack and continued filming.

Talhami said the timing of the filming indicates that defense officials knew of Natan-Zada’s plan to perpetrate the attack.

“We are talking about video shot by a drone,” Talhami said. “Obviously not every private individual or civilian agent operates a drone on his own volition.”

“The method of surveillance of the bus proves that there was early information available to the defense establishment,” Talhami said.

March 16, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Israel extends West Bank closure until Tuesday

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News – March 14, 2010

Israeli security forces announced that a full closure on the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank would be extended until Tuesday, supposedly to protect a group of Israeli settlers as they begin construction of a Jewish synagogue on stolen Palestinian land in the Old City of Jerusalem.

The announcement was made Saturday night by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in the midst of a number of violent attacks by Israeli soldiers and police against unarmed Palestinians. A non-violent demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem was met by a violent response from Israeli troops, including tear gas and concussion grenades. Israeli troops also fired tear gas and concussion grenades at Palestinians waiting at a checkpoint into Jerusalem on Saturday.

While Barak termed these incidents ‘riots’, witnesses at each of the events confirmed that Israeli troops fired unprovoked at unarmed Palestinian civilians.

The Israeli security forces have also banned Palestinian men and boys under the age of 50 from attending services at the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. These age restrictions are common occurrences, which Palestinian Muslims say violate their freedom of religion and freedom to worship.

Non-violent protests have sprung up in various places in the West Bank over the last several days, following the Israeli government’s announcement that they had approved over 1600 new units to be constructed in Jewish-only settlements on stolen Palestinian land in East Jerusalem.

March 15, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Israel tortures Jerusalem minors

Pal Telegraph, March 13, 2010
Loai Rujby and Mahmoud Dweik

Occupied Jerusalem – Jerusalem Center for Social and Economic Rights revealed Saturday that Israeli police tortured Jerusalemite children, who were arrested before by Israelis.

The Center published two statements made by Loai Rujby, 14, and Mahmoud Dweik,12, both residents of Al-Yemen area of the Silwan neighborhood, who were arrested on January 10, 2010 and in November, last year. Both statements provide accounts of how Israeli soldiers tortured the two children.

The center said that the children’s accounts were clear-cut evidence of the torture policy adopted by Israeli occupation against the Palestinian minors, which increased by recent arrest campaigns that target children and minors.

In his testimony submitted to the Research and Documentation Center in Jerusalem, the 14-year-old Rujby confirmed that he was beaten harshly, tied up and denied access to food or bathroom.

Loai Rujby is a seventh grade student at the orphanage school in Al-Thoury area. He has been arrested 7 times, twice of which while being in the classroom, and every time he is accused of “throwing stones at the settlers’ house.”

Child Dweik, who was arrested in November 2009, his testimony was congruous with what Rujby said, that he was beaten and threatened during his detention.

March 14, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Brutalizing Palestinian Children

By Stephen Lendman | March 11th, 2010

As an isolated incident, it would be appalling and criminal. As a regular occurrence, it’s state-sponsored terrorism against defenseless children, subjected to barbarism by Israeli soldiers committing crimes against humanity to crush their will for wanting to live free on their own land – what Westerners take for granted; what Palestinians since 1948 haven’t had, and since 1967, under military occupation denying their very humanity.

Nora Barrows-Friedman does heroic reporting for Pacifica Radio’s KPFA Flashpoints Radio and as an activist/teacher/journalist in Occupied Palestine during regular visits. On March 8 on the Electronic Intifada, she wrote about Amir al-Mohteseb, a 10-year old Hebron child, arrested, detained, and savagely beaten after his 12-year old brother Hasan endured similar treatment a week earlier.

On March 7 at 2AM, “Israeli soldiers (broke) into (his) house, snatch(ed) Amir from his bed, threatened his parents with death by gunfire if they” interfered, took him down the stairwell, and brutally beat him causing internal abdomen bleeding, requiring overnight hospitalization. “In complete shock and distress, Amir would not open his mouth to speak for another day and a half.”

Before the incident, he told Barrows-Friedman he was playing in the street on his way with Hasan to see their aunt when:

“Two….soldiers stopped us and handcuffed us, (took) us to two separate jeeps, (took) me to the settlement and put me in a corner, (put) a dog next to me,” refused to let him use the bathroom, threatened to hold him forever, wouldn’t let him call his mother, blindfolded him, and held him until his father managed to get him late at night.

He was terrified, held for 10 hours, traumatized by the incident, and unable to sleep, “worried sick about his brother in jail and extremely afraid that the soldiers would come back” and do it again, which they did, and do repeatedly to hundreds of Palestinian youths, their siblings, parents and friends, guilty of being Palestinian on land Israel wants to make historic Palestine an ethnically pure Jewish state.

On March 9, Haaretz writer Nir Hassan headlined, “Israel using strong arm tactics against young Palestinian stone-throwers,” saying several Silwan, East Jerusalem youths “were arrested and taken from their home(s) in handcuffs in the middle of the night over the past few months, as part of a police crackdown on suspected stone-throwers….,” not militants, gunmen, murderers, or bomb throwers threatening civil society – alleged stone-throwers punishable by imprisonment up to 20 years under Military Order 378 if convicted.

Children 12 – 15 have been targeted, arrested, detained, and savagely beaten following complaints by Jewish settlers who usually take the law into their own hands using weapons they’re allowed to carry.

Parents intervening are threatened, often beaten, and at times detained and charged with interference. Some arrested children “had their remands extended by the court, and others were released on certain conditions. All the suspects against whom (authorities have dubious evidence) will be brought to trial” before military or Magistrate Court judges where due process and judicial fairness are denied, so their fate is pre-determined.

On February 17, B’Tselem highlighted the same story about Silwan, East Jerusalem youths seized from their beds in the middle of the night, handcuffed, taken to the Russian Compound police station and interrogated “on suspicion of stone throwing.” According to some, children aged 12 – 15 were threatened, detained, and beaten.

Muhammad Dweik, aged 12 said:

“Around 4:30 – 5:00 in the morning, I woke up from the sound of knocking at the door. Shabak (ISA) agents asked my father for (his son’s) ID card. My father told them that I don’t have” one. They refused his father’s request to let him bring him to the police station later that morning.

“They tied my hands behind my back and took me. The policemen put me into a Border Police jeep. A friend of mine was also inside it. A policeman who sat next to me kept kicking me in the leg all the way.”

Lu’ai a-Rajabi, aged 14, was also arrested and interrogated, denied he threw stones at settler houses, and was punched in the nose with his hands and legs cuffed. He was then hit in the face and head, ordered to confess, and, while he was sitting, three interrogators beat and kicked him “all over my body, and (swore) at me and Allah.”

They told him to sign a Hebrew document saying he wasn’t beaten. He refused and was beaten again. The next day, he was brought before a Magistrates Court judge who extended his detention for a week.

Others, as young as 12, told similar stories of arrests, detentions, interrogations, and beatings when they denied doing anything. One youth told B’Tselem he hasn’t been able to sleep, afraid he’ll again be arrested.

This treatment “contravenes the Youth Law, as amended in 2008 (Amendment No. 14),” under which suspected minors are entitled to consult a parent or relative prior to interrogation, and have an adult present while ongoing. “The Law also generally prohibits interrogating a minor at night and states (they) should not be arrested if the objective can be achieved in a less harmful way.”

Nonetheless, Israeli security forces violated their rights for being alleged stone-throwers, and all of them are Israeli residents. It’s virtually impossible for Israeli Jews to be subjected to similar treatment, either adults or youths. Palestinians get no such respect or safety under laws not protecting them or their rights.

As for Amir, after Barrows-Friedman’s interview, he “sent a message to American children,” saying:

“We are kids, just like you. We have the right to play, to move freely. I want to tell the world that there are so many kids inside the Israeli jails. We just want to have freedom of movement, the freedom to play,” and grow up like kids in America and the West. In Occupied Palestine, he’ll be lucky to survive, perhaps never his former self or living free from occupation and brutality.

Relevant International Law

Since September 2000, the beginning of the Second Intifada, over 2,500 Palestinian children (as young as 12 or younger) have been arrested, hundreds at any time imprisoned within Israel, treated the same as adults, kept with Israeli prisoners, stabbed or otherwise harmed as a result, subjected to sexual abuse, and denied family visits or other outside contacts.

Yet, numerous international laws, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Israeli law define a child as anyone under 18. So do UN Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty with provisions stating:

— imprisoning children should only be a “last resort and for the minimum period and should be limited to exceptional cases;”

— fundamental international law must be respected at all times with no exceptions;

— the welfare, special needs, best interests, and human rights of juveniles “shall be a primary consideration;” and

— they must be helped to return to society as soon as possible.

Yet, in violation of international law, Israel willfully and repeatedly arrests children randomly, at checkpoints, on streets, at play, and in the middle of the night at home, then subjects them to threats, cursing, beatings, detention, and imprisonment, often without informing their parents.

In facilities like Megiddo military prison, Hasharon (Telmond) prison, and others, children are held in inhumane conditions in overcrowded filthy cells. Some are kept in 1.5 square meter windowless solitary confinement under bright 24-hour light. None get enough or proper nutrition, medical care, clothing changes, sleep, or consideration for basic sanitation standards.

They’re subjected to harsh interrogations, including torture, abuse, and degrading treatment, hard enough on adults, but on children are traumatically life changing.

Most are accused of stone-throwing. In isolation, they’re pressured to confess, even if innocent, then sign a Hebrew document they can’t read or understand stating their guilt – to stop the pain that continues until they do for up to eight days after which they’re brought before a military or magistrate judge. Some are also coerced to be collaborators under threat of future arrests, imprisonment, and mistreatment, including against parents and siblings.

Israel remains unaccountable because world nations violate their obligations under Geneva’s Common Article 1 obliging:

“The High Contracting Parties (to) undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances;”

— the Lisbon Treaty obliging the 27-member EU states to affirm fundamental freedoms, peace, democracy, human rights and dignity, justice, equality, the rule of law, security, tolerance, solidarity, mutual respect among peoples, the rights of the child, strict adherence to the UN Charter and international law, and to prevent conflicts and combat social exclusion and discrimination; along with

— the indifference and complicity of Arab states.

Short of fundamental change, Palestinian men, women and children will continue to be victimized by state-sponsored terrorism, a condition no longer to be tolerated by nations claiming they’re civilized.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

March 11, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Homes and livelihoods gone in an instant

Eva Bartlett writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 11 March 2010

Israeli bulldozers destroyed three homes and 17 dunams of agricultural land in eastern Khan Younis on 18 February.


Radia Abu Sbaih, 47, lives with her sister and one niece on family land roughly 700 meters from the “green line” boundary between Israel and Gaza. Until 18 February 2010, they had nearly 600 olive, fruit, date and nut trees, an agricultural cistern, a water well, various vegetables and a house.

Theirs was one of three homes demolished by Israeli military bulldozers that day in al-Mossadar, eastern Gaza. Around 8am that morning, approximately five Israeli military bulldozers and upwards of 10 Israeli tanks, accompanied by more than 50 foot soldiers, invaded the farming region, according to locals.

“We were in our home when we heard the Israeli tanks and bulldozers approaching. We ran off immediately,” says Sbaih.

She walks over felled trees, past the bulldozed cistern, and to the ruins of their home.

“It’s all destroyed. Look, our clothes are buried,” she shouts, pulling at a sweater caught beneath the concrete block pile.

Household belongings are strewn on top of and beneath the pyramid of rubble. A gas range, several cooking pots, a plastic water bottle filled with olives, another with olive oil — both from their land and their destroyed olive trees — denote where the kitchen once stood.

Radia Abu Sbaih on her land after it was destroyed by Israeli military bulldozers.

“We were self-sufficient. Twenty people lived off this land. We had our own water source and we grew all our own vegetables: onions, spinach, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, radishes, beans …” Nothing, save a stray sprig of green onion, remains.

Beyond the lean-to sun shade, a donkey stands next to the crushed remnants of his cart.

“Now we have no electricity, no shelter, no water. I walk one hour both ways every day to bring jugs of water for drinking,” says Sbaih.

But for her, it is the loss of their trees that hits the hardest. In the hour or less it took the bulldozers to raze all their property and possessions, Radia Sbaih’s trees were cut to the ground and plowed into the valley. Haggard limbs studding the earth and thick ground-level stumps are all the evidence of the 10 dunams (a dunam is the equivalent of 1,000 square meters) of formerly thick growth.

“They were healthy trees, many over 50 years old. And so many fruit trees: guava, orange, lemon, pomegranate, date, almond, sugar cane, cactus fruit …” recalls Sbaih.

“This was our life, we grew up here, we put our sweat, love and everything we had into the land,” she says. “We watched the trees mature and cared for them as though they were family.”

Sbaih’s niece feeds trampled olive branches to kindle a smoky fire for tea. An Israeli warplane thunders over and Sbaih comments, “It’s normal, they’re always over us.” The roar is accompanied by the continual whine of Israeli “drones” (unmanned aerial vehicles) patrolling the skies.

“We actually didn’t have any problems during the war,” Sbaih says, recalling the winter 2008-2009 Israeli massacres on Gaza. “But now we are destroyed. If it rains, where will we go? We have no shelter, not even a tent.”

As the tea boils, the rain starts to fall.

Sbaih’s words and losses are echoed by the two other families half a kilometer south.

Moin Abu Said, 32, stands beside the fresh ruins of his home roughly 600 meters from the border. His father Ali, 63, sprawls on a blanket spread nearby on churned earth.

“I’ve got three children. When the bulldozers and tanks came, I was taking my son Nassim to school, around 7:30am. I heard the noise of the invasion even from the school.”

Abu Said returned to find the house that he had worked eight years to build completely flattened.

“We only lived in it one month,” he says in disbelief.

He points out the wreckage of a chicken barn, home to 1,000 chickens, the stubs of olive, date and lemon trees.

Like most in the border region, this is not the first time Abu Said’s land has been razed.

“Ten years ago they bulldozed everything, but we replanted. Now it’s all gone again.”

Aouni Abu Said, Moin’s brother, still has a home. Shot-up by Israeli machine-gun fire, the nearby one-level house somehow escaped the bulldozers. But his family was caught in the attack, terrified.

“My wife and kids were in kitchen when the Israelis began shooting at our house,” he says, pointing out the lattice of bullet holes in the kitchen windows and walls, children’s bedroom and nursery.

“The area was filled with Israeli tanks, bulldozers and soldiers from morning till around 4:30pm,” he says.

Closer to the border fence, but still 450 meters away, Abdel Hai Abu Said, 40, his wife and their six children sit with his father near the A-frame wreckage of their two-story home.

Two of Abdel Hani Abu Said’s children sit on the ruins of their home.


Five dunams of olive and date trees were mowed, along with 150 pigeons and a donkey.

“[The donkey] was in a concrete shelter when the bulldozers attacked,” he explains, pointing out the carcass in the treeless field.

One room of the house remains partially intact, ceiling corners sloped at 45 degree angles and walls punctured by bullet holes and cracks. The cramped, dust- and rubble-filled room serves as their shelter at night, despite the dangling clumps of concrete and the threat that the house might completely collapse.

A plastic bag keeps the surviving items of clothing protected, another the pieces of bread.

“We lived in this house for 11 years,” Said says. “Upstairs there were three bedrooms for my wife and our children. My father and aunt slept downstairs.”

Salem Abu Said, Abdel Hai’s father, was born 1943 in Beerseeba, before the 1948 ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine by the nascent Israeli military.

“First I was expelled from my land, and now our house is destroyed. Once again, I have to start all over.”

All the families report that the area was calm, without regular Israeli invasions, at the time of the invasion. They had a false sense of security and worked the land, lived off of it and planned their futures. In half a day this was all destroyed.

All images by Eva Bartlett.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who arrived in Gaza in November 2008 on the third Free Gaza Movement boat. She has been volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement and documenting Israel’s ongoing attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. During Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, she and other ISM volunteers accompanied ambulances and documenting the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.

March 11, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Gaza war injured still lack prosthetics

IRIN – 10/03/2010
Imad Ghanem, 21, a cameraman for the Hamas-allied Al-Aqsa TV, lies on a bed
at Ash-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, 9 July 2007. [MaanImages/Hatem Omar]

Gaza City – A half-finished two-story building in central Gaza City is one of the few places providing support to amputees, most of them civilian victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as they try and come to terms with their injuries.

Ten patients were waiting to see Dr Hazem Ash-Shawwa, the director of the Artificial Limb and Polio Centre, when IRIN visited. Mostly young, they had been caught in the violence of Israel’s 23-day assault on Gaza at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, and were still learning to use their new prosthetic limbs.

“We have 250 new amputees following the Israeli war to add to the 5,000 cases we had before the war,” said Ash-Shawwa. “Some of the injured from the Gaza war are still having problems with their amputated limbs as they were not treated properly at the time due to the hectic situation; initial treatments focused on saving lives.”

A new upper floor extension to the center is under construction, reflecting the demand for its services, but a lack of funds has delayed work.

In the center’s ground-floor training room, 15-year-old Jamila Al-Habbash took a firm grip on the parallel bars and shuffled forward. She lost both her legs in a missile strike by an unmanned Israeli drone as she played on the roof of her home in eastern Gaza City; her sister and cousin were killed in the blast.

Mohamed Ziada, one of five specialists at the center, said Jamila was making good progress since her artificial legs were fitted in December, and may soon not need her crutches. He pointed out that treating teenagers was expensive as they quickly outgrow their prosthetics and need numerous re-fittings.

‘Worse than a nightmare’

Fifteen-year-old Ghassan Mattar also lost his legs when an Israeli missile hit his home in eastern Gaza City on 5 January 2009, an incident documented by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). “I still can’t believe I’ve lost my legs. It’s worse than a nightmare,” he told IRIN.

The only rehabilitation hospital with the capacity to treat amputee patients effectively is the Al-Wafaa Rehabilitation Centre in northern Gaza. Ghassan should have been sent there directly but the hospital was hit by artillery fire during Israel’s Gaza incursion, and its wards were evacuated, according to PCHR.

Ghassan was able to leave Gaza for Egypt and received six months of treatment at the Palestine Hospital in Cairo. However, back in Gaza he found his artificial legs were giving him problems as they did not fit properly so he visited the artificial limb center and got a better fitting pair.

A below-the-knee prosthetic costs about US $800 at the center. An above-the-knee limb is twice as much, and an arm costs $1,200. Although seemingly expensive, Ziada told IRIN it was a fraction of the cost charged in other countries.

Imports interrupted

The problem facing the center is that a blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel since June 2007 has interrupted imports of both prosthetic limbs – mainly from Germany – and the raw materials with which to make them.

“We use hundreds of different parts, plastics and materials to make prosthetic arms and legs. Without even just one of the materials, the limb cannot be made,” Ziada said.

It takes about 30 hours to manufacture a limb when all the parts are available. “The Red Cross helps the centre to mediate between us and the Israelis to let materials cross, which takes about three months,” Ziada added.

Prosthetics specialists from other countries who had tried to come and train Gazan doctors had been denied entry into Gaza, according to Ziada. “We need at least another five specialists because of the large number of amputees from the Gaza war.”

The center is assisted by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and NGOs Handicap International and Islamic Relief.

Israel says the aim of its 27 December 2008 – 18 January 2009 incursion was to destroy the military infrastructure of Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, and to prevent the firing of rockets into Israel. According to the PCHR, 5,303 Palestinians were injured in the conflict.

This item comes to you via IRIN, the humanitarian news and analysis service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The views expressed are the author’s alone.

March 11, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

US drone attacks kill 14 in NW Pakistan

Press TV –  March 10, 2010

Two US drone attacks on Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region have killed at least 14 people and injured a number of others.

Eight people were killed when a drone fired five missiles at a vehicle in Mizar Madakhel village, Pakistani intelligence officials confirmed on Wednesday.

The second drone fired three missiles at villagers recovering bodies from the site of the first attack killing six others, Press TV correspondent reported. Several Pakistanis were also wounded in the strikes.

The US carried out numerous such attacks on Pakistan’s tribal areas last year killing hundreds of people – mostly civilians.

Washington claims the strikes target pro-Taliban militants. Islamabad has repeatedly condemned the attacks, saying they violate Pakistan’s sovereignty.

Earlier in March, a Washington-based think-tank reported that US drone attacks have killed over 1200 people in Pakistan over the past six years.

March 10, 2010 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Israeli Defense Ministry goes on trial for Corrie death

By Mya Guarnieri – Ma’an – 09/03/2010

Jerusalem – On Wednesday, the Israeli Defense Ministry will go on trial as a court hears a case filed by the parents of an American woman run down by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza, in March 2003.

A civil suit seeks to hold Israeli forces responsible for the death of Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old activist who was crushed to death as she protested a Palestinian home from demolition in the Gaza Strip.

“We claim that her assassination was intentional,” or, at the very least, that the army is guilty of “huge negligence,” Hussein Abu Hussein, the attorney who filed the petition on behalf of Corrie’s parents, commented.

Abu Hussein cites the state’s acknowledgment of the fact that Corrie and other members of the International Solidarity Movement—a Palestinian-led peace organization that advocates non-violent means of resistance to the Israeli occupation—were demonstrating in the area for several hours before Corrie was struck by the bulldozer. He also points out that Corrie was wearing a fluorescent orange vest to increase her visibility.

At the time of her death, the Israeli military response was that the driver of the machine did not see Corrie.

“If you see people, you should stop and think of all the needed steps not to harm [them]. Instead of stopping the D9, which weighs 64 tons, they continued. And due to that, [Corrie] was killed,” Abu Hussein said.

Four of Corrie’s fellow activists who witnessed her death were initially denied entry into Israel where they were asked to testify at the trial, but US pressure reportedly changed the Israeli position. A US citizen and three UK nationals will now be able to speak at the trial, which is expected to last two weeks.

Israel will not issue an entry permit to Dr Ahmed Abu Nakira, the Gazan physician who saw Corrie after she was injured and declared her dead. The state rejected the request for his entry on the grounds that there is no coordination between Israel and Gaza, due to the Israeli blockade that began after Hamas rose to power in 2007.

“It’s an obstacle to justice,” Abu Hussein said. “On the one side, [Israel] won’t give permission [for Dr Abu Nakira] to come; on the other they won’t allow him to testify by video-conference, which is used daily by courts everywhere in the modern world.”

Speaking shortly after Corrie’s death, an Israeli military representative called the incident a “regrettable accident.” An internal investigation conducted by the Israeli army later absolved the soldier operating the bulldozer of any wrongdoing.

The report, released in April 2003, claimed that Corrie was not killed by the “engineering vehicle” but “was struck by a hard object, most probably a slab of concrete which was moved or slid down while the mound of earth which she was standing behind was moved.” The army accused Corrie and the other activists present of behaving in an “illegal, irresponsible, and dangerous” manner.

Abu Hussein says that the army’s investigation lacked transparency. The civil suit, which was filed in 2005, is the only way to hold the state accountable for Corrie’s death, he says.

While it is exceedingly rare for the Defense Ministry to take direct responsibility in such cases, the state has made financial reparations to a handful of families like the Corries. Just two months after Rachel’s death, British journalist and filmmaker James Miller, 34, was shot to death by an Israeli soldier. After an army investigation found no wrongdoing, the UK warned it would extradite the soldiers involved. Last year, Israel settled out of court with Miller’s family for approximately 1.5 million pounds (2.25 million US dollars).

“The family is not seeking money. They’re seeking acknowledgment of responsibility by the state,” Abu Hussein says. If the Corries do receive compensation from Israel, they intend to donate the sum to “the matter Rachel was struggling for—for peace.”

The Corries’ suit “underscores that Israel doesn’t prosecute” soldiers accused of wrongdoing and that the state behaves as though it is “exempt from accountability,” Abu Hussein said.

“In the cases brought by Palestinians against the IDF [Israeli forces], more than 90 percent are denied,” he says, pointing to a culture of immunity that has been criticized human rights groups.

From 2000 to 2009, the Israeli NGO Yesh Din monitored almost 2000 Israeli military investigations into incidents in which a Palestinian or international claimed the army was guilty of a criminal offense, including unlawful shooting that led to injury or death. Indictments were filed in only six percent of these cases. Many of the soldiers who were prosecuted cut deals with the court that reduced the severity of both the charges and punishments.

“When we look at the number of cases, and we look at the fact that only six percent yield indictments, it is safe to assume that a soldier in the field today will know that he can get away with pretty much anything,” Yesh Din’s research director Lior Yavne remarked.

A representative for the Corries emphasized that the family hopes the upcoming trial will bring attention to ongoing human rights abuses perpetrated by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. “The issue is Palestine and human rights defenders,” the liaison says. “They want to highlight Gaza in light of [the UN-commissioned] Goldstone [report] and Operation Cast Lead.”

Mya Guarnieri is a regular contributor to The National (Abu Dhabi), The Huffington Post, and The Jerusalem Post.

March 9, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Does Israel hope to spark a new wave of suicide bombing?

By Stuart Littlewood | 9 March 2010

Here in the civilized West we hate suicide bombers with a passion.

We’re taught that the proper way to blow fellow humans to smithereens is to do it from 40,000 feet.

Or failing that, send Apache helicopter gunships at street level firing their laser-guided missiles and 30mm cannon.

Or failing that, turn loose our main battle tanks to shred and vaporize the “enemy”, reduce their homes to rubble with depleted uranium (DU) shells and spread birth defects for generations to come.

Nowadays we don’t even have to leave home to do it. We can train our really brainy chaps to steer armed drones to the target from the comfort of an armchair.

B-52s, F-16s, Apaches, drones and tanks – that’s the ticket. Awesome hardware gives any murky mission a moral superiority that gets nods of approval from the governing élite in the drawing rooms of London and Washington.

What is not acceptable is delivering the high explosive in person, all the way to the target, and looking your enemy in the eye as you push the detonator. That simply isn’t cricket.

“There can be no justification, under any circumstances, for taking innocent lives through terrorism.” Those were the very words used by Liberal Democrat Party leader Charles Kennedy in 2004, when he sacked British MP Jenny Tonge from her front-bench spokes job for suggesting she might consider becoming a suicide bomber herself if she had to live through the situation the Palestinians were in.

Statistics from Israel’s B’Tselem make the Palestinians’ situation clear. Between 2000 and the start of Israel’s “Cast Lead” blitzkrieg on Gaza in December 2008, the Israelis’ vast standing army, equipped with the most advanced weaponry American money can buy, killed 4,790 Palestinian civilians in their homeland. Of these, 952 were children.

Yes, 952 young Palestinian lives horribly snuffed out and their parents desolated…

In response Palestinians, with their garden-shed weapons, killed 490 Israeli civilians, including 84 children. In this vicious game of murder the Israelis were leading the Palestinians by 11 to 1.

Those were the “circumstances” in which Kennedy sacked Jenny Tonge.

Terrorism most foul

During the Cast Lead onslaught – the foulest act of state terrorism for decades – Israel slaughtered at least 350 more children, and Gaza has been under daily attack ever since. So the “most moral army in the world” must have blown to bits, shredded, incinerated or smashed with snipers’ bullets at least 1,400 youngsters in the last nine and a half years. The numbers left maimed and crippled don’t bear thinking about.

In their study, Palestinian Suicide Bombers: A Statistical Analysis, Sean Yom and Basel Saleh found that many Palestinian suicide attackers had been on the receiving end of violent encounters with the Israeli military, resulting in injury to themselves, or arrest, or a close family member being killed.

From October 2000 to March 2004, over 2,800 Palestinian fatalities and 25,600 non-lethal injuries were inflicted by the Israeli armed forces. Revenge, often fuelled by deteriorating economic prospects and the imposition of harsh policies, provided recruiters with a ready supply of volunteers. Persuading individuals not to support or participate in violence would necessarily involve “improving the structural health of Palestinian society”.

Fat chance of that. Israeli policy is to grind the Palestinians into poverty and helplessness, to take away everything they own and let them rot in a Zionist-prepared hell. Far from allowing the health of Palestinian society to improve, they tighten the screw of oppression further. In the period covered in the study they deliberately destroyed some 4,700 Palestinian homes while continuing their normal programme of slaughter, dispossession, abduction and all the other atrocities they are famed for.

Since 1967, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), Israel has demolished in total 24,145 homes in the occupied territories, including 4,247 (a UN figure) destroyed during Operation Cast Lead. Palestinians tend to have large families. Consider how many homeless have been created.

Professor Robert Pape’s comprehensive analysis, Dying to Win, based on his work for the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, advances the idea that suicide terrorism exerts coercive power “to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland… The bottom line, then, is that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation”

Occupation includes control of territory, as in Gaza, not necessarily military occupation.

And of course, when it comes to Israel, we’re not talking about a democracy but a vile ethnocracy.

Religion has little to do with it. Pape dismisses the often-repeated view that Islam is the root of the problem. “Rather, the taproot is American military policy.” And the notion that Islamic fundamentalism is bent on world domination is “pure fantasy”.

Many suicide bombers are simply motivated by the desire for revenge. According to one researcher, harsh state repression “should not be perceived only as a reaction to suicide bombing” but “often precedes and is a major cause of suicide bombing.”

One Saturday night in 2001 Saeed Hotari blew himself up at the entrance to a disco in Tel Aviv, killing 21 teenagers and injuring 132. Hotari was one of nine children from a poor Palestinian family living in Jordan and had been in the West Bank for two years hoping to find a better life. He left a message saying: “If we don’t fight, we will suffer. If we do fight, we will suffer, but so will they.”

The disco bombing was cited by the Israeli government as one of the reasons for building the Apartheid Wall.

In 2003 a female Palestinian lawyer, Hanadi Tayseer Jaradat, aged 29, killed 21 civilians at Maxim restaurant in Haifa. She acted to avenge the killing of her brother and a cousin (some sources say her fiancé) by Israeli security forces.

Surgeon Abdel Aziz Rantissi, co-founder of Hamas, warned: “Israelis will have no stability and no security until the occupation ends. Suicide bombers are Israel’s future.” Rantissi was assassinated in 2004 in a helicopter attack on his car. A mother and her five year-old daughter were killed in the attack and four other bystanders wounded.

How much can a person take before snapping?

Arrest, detention without due process, constant humiliation, homelessness, unemployment and other family suffering at the hands of the Israeli army are not the only spur. Yahya Ayyash, nicknamed “the Engineer” and regarded as the father of suicide bombing, became Hamas’s chief bomb maker and for several years topped Israel’s most wanted list. From a relatively well-off family, he gained a BSc in electrical engineering at Birzeit University and planned to study for a Master’s degree in Jordan but the Israeli authorities wouldn’t allow him to.

Thwarted in his life’s ambition Ayyash joined Hamas. “Don’t get sore, get even” might have been his motto. He used household chemicals to manufacture an explosive brew called Mother of Satan. His devices were used in a number of “massacres” and he quickly achieved hero status, narrowly escaping capture many times. It is claimed he was responsible for the deaths of around 90 Israelis, a high price for the occupier to pay for robbing this youngster of his rights to travel and study – rights we in the West take for granted.

Eventually in 1996 Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, eliminated Ayyash by persuading a relative to give him a rigged mobile phone that exploded when he used it. Some 100,000 people are said to have turned up at the funeral. Forty more Israelis were then killed in retaliatory bombings.

Yet Israelis still revel in targeting Palestinian students. Five years ago they forcibly removed four Birzeit University students from their studies in the West Bank and unlawfully sent them back to the Gaza Strip. All four were due to graduate by the end of that academic year.

There was an outcry from around the world and the Israeli military agreed to let them return to Birzeit, but only on condition that they signed a guarantee to permanently move back to the Gaza Strip after completing their studies. This revealed for all to see Israel’s plan to separate the West Bank from the Gaza Strip, even though the two areas are internationally recognized as one integral territory. Under international law everyone has the right to freely choose their place of residence within a single territory. Ten years ago around 350 Gaza students were studying at Birzeit, but today there are almost none and the racist regime blocks Gaza students from reaching the eight Palestinian universities in the West Bank.

It was no surprise to learn last Christmas that Berlanty Azzam, a fourth year Business Administration student from Gaza studying at Bethlehem University, was suddenly “deported” by the Israeli military back to Gaza. Berlanty, a Christian girl, had lived in the West Bank since 2005 and resisted all temptation to visit her family home in Gaza in case she was prevented from returning to Bethlehem.

The 21-year-old was only a few weeks from graduating when she was arrested after attending a job interview in Ramallah. In a deliberate attempt to rob her of her degree “the most moral army in the world” blindfolded and handcuffed her, loaded her into a jeep, drove her to Gaza and dumped her in the darkness late at night.

In the case of another university honours student in her final year, Israeli soldiers frequently rampaged through the Bethlehem refugee camp where she lived, ransacking homes and arbitrarily arresting residents. They took away her family one by one. First her 14-year-old cousin and best friend was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while she sat outside her family home during a curfew.

Next the Israelis arrested her eldest brother, a 22-year-old artist, and imprisoned him for four years. Then they came back for her 18-year-old brother. Then they came again to take her youngest brother – the “baby” of the family – just 16. These were the heartbreaking circumstances (Mr Kennedy please note) under which this student was studying for her degree.

Luckily, she had the guidance of caring university teaching staff to keep her on the straight and narrow. The “most moral army in the world” may have robbed her brothers of an education, but she was determined to complete hers.

Although Palestinians take their education seriously, not all students cruelly obstructed by the Israelis react as Yahya Ayyash did. However, there must be a limit to how much injustice and frustration a young person can take before he/she snaps.

Modern suicide bombing appears to have started in 1980 in the Iran-Iraq war when an Iranian youngster exploded himself against an Iraqi tank, but it was Hezbollah’s devastating attacks two years later in Lebanon which attracted world attention. US forces and the Israeli invader were soon expelled. The technique was then exported throughout the Middle East and beyond.

The threat of suicide bombing has receded in the Holy Land while Israeli military atrocities escalate. The regime’s leaders, seeing the Israel brand image plummet, are now pulling every dirty trick imaginable – even to the point of trying to annex sacred Islamic heritage sites – in a frantic bid to provoke a third initifada (uprising) and cast themselves once again as the victims of terror. Something has to give. Many Palestinians will snap, and no-one will be surprised to see another Ayyash emerge.

Here in the West few of us can fully comprehend what turns a bright, intelligent person into a suicide bomber. But then, we don’t have a jackboot on our throat. We don’t have our front door battered down in the middle of the night by military thugs, our family abducted, our home bulldozed and our land confiscated.

The moral to the story is surely this. You mess with other people’s rights and freedoms, and trample on their dreams, at your peril.

March 8, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

The New Jim Crow

How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

By Michelle Alexander | March 8, 2010

Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.

Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality. There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.

Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.

Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:

*There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.

* A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.  The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.

*If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life.  (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status.  They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.

Excuses for the Lockdown

There is, of course, a colorblind explanation for all this: crime rates. Our prison population has exploded from about 300,000 to more than 2 million in a few short decades, it is said, because of rampant crime. We’re told that the reason so many black and brown men find themselves behind bars and ushered into a permanent, second-class status is because they happen to be the bad guys.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades — they are currently at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.

The drug war has been brutal — complete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoods — but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation’s prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80%-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.

This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. That’s why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle-class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; it’s all about violent crime.

Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff: “[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.

The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes — sentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.

Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove that they could be even tougher on the dark-skinned pariahs. In President Bill Clinton’s boastful words, “I can be nicked a lot, but no one can say I’m soft on crime.” The facts bear him out. Clinton’s “tough on crime” policies resulted in the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. But Clinton was not satisfied with exploding prison populations. He and the “New Democrats” championed legislation banning drug felons from public housing (no matter how minor the offense) and denying them basic public benefits, including food stamps, for life. Discrimination in virtually every aspect of political, economic, and social life is now perfectly legal, if you’ve been labeled a felon.

Facing Facts

But what about all those violent criminals and drug kingpins? Isn’t the drug war waged in ghetto communities because that’s where the violent offenders can be found? The answer is yes… in made-for-TV movies. In real life, the answer is no.

The drug war has never been focused on rooting out drug kingpins or violent offenders. Federal funding flows to those agencies that increase dramatically the volume of drug arrests, not the agencies most successful in bringing down the bosses. What gets rewarded in this war is sheer numbers of drug arrests. To make matters worse, federal drug forfeiture laws allow state and local law enforcement agencies to keep for their own use 80% of the cash, cars, and homes seized from drug suspects, thus granting law enforcement a direct monetary interest in the profitability of the drug market.

The results have been predictable: people of color rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. In 2005, four out of five drug arrests were for possession, only one out of five for sales. Most people in state prison have no history of violence or even of significant selling activity. In fact, during the 1990s — the period of the most dramatic expansion of the drug war — nearly 80% of the increase in drug arrests was for marijuana possession, a drug generally considered less harmful than alcohol or tobacco and at least as prevalent in middle-class white communities as in the inner city.

In this way, a new racial undercaste has been created in an astonishingly short period of time — a new Jim Crow system. Millions of people of color are now saddled with criminal records and legally denied the very rights that their parents and grandparents fought for and, in some cases, died for.

Affirmative action, though, has put a happy face on this racial reality. Seeing black people graduate from Harvard and Yale and become CEOs or corporate lawyers — not to mention president of the United States — causes us all to marvel at what a long way we’ve come.

Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that’s with affirmative action!

When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our “colorblind” society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure — the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate.

This is not Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. This is not the promised land. The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010). The former director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU in Northern California, she also served as a law clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court. Currently, she holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.

March 8, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

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