BOOK REVIEW
Critics of globalization point out with some justice that poor people around the world suffer far more than the citizens of industrialized nations during downturns in the global economy. Peasants in developing countries can find their lives hanging in the balance during a rise in food prices or a decline in the global market value of the goods they produce. Never was this more true than during the hey-day of the European imperialism in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Aggressive trade practices and the ruthless use of military force effectively subdued nations in Asia, Africa, and South America and brought these countries into a global trade system. By the 1870s, and certainly by the turn of the century, many European countries, above all Great Britain, had created the world’s first global market economy. Financial markets in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and elsewhere were linked by telegraph to places where raw materials were produced for European consumption, while established trade routes were patrolled by European navies (particularly the Royal Navy). The economic power of the extensive British Empire was unparalleled and the inner workings of the global system dominated by London determined the fate of innumerable people around the world.
It is with the workings of the British economic system and their impact on indigenous populations in India, China, and elsewhere that Mike Davis’ book Late Victorian Holocausts is concerned. Davis’ point of departure is a simple question. Why is it that widespread hunger in Western Europe disappeared in the nineteenth century while famine and disease raged throughout multiple places in what today we would call the “Third World”? Davis provides a simple answer: European imperialism (especially British imperialism) created a global economic system through which the food and wealth of conquered nations (i.e. colonies) was siphoned off for the benefit of wealthy and powerful Europeans, while those in the colonies were left to starve and die. The result was mass death (what Davis calls “holocausts”) on an unprecedented scale in India, China, Brazil and other places, that was most intense during the El Niño drought years of 1876-77 and 1888-1902.
This imperial global economic system was certainly not a “free” market in any sense of the word. It was in fact bolstered by a long series of tariffs and unfavorable trade relationships that were forced by Europeans upon the peoples they conquered. Colonies were in turn subjected to economic pressure dictated by and manipulated from financial centers in Western Europe. It was these economic forces, as well as brutal gunboat diplomacy, that Davis argues created the Third World as we know it today.
THE “FREE MARKET” AS A MECHANISM OF MASS MURDER
Davis’ primary focus in fleshing out his story is the crown jewel of Britain’s colonial empire: India. Drought was the precipitating cause of the hardship faced by the Indian people. However, Davis demonstrates with statistics and anecdotes that it was the unregulated “free market” system imposed on India by Britain that led to the deaths of tens of millions in the mid-1870s and late 1880s.
How did death and human suffering on such a massive scale happen? Following the English conquest of India in the early nineteenth century, economic relationships in the sub-continent underwent revolutionary changes. Thousands of miles of railroad track were laid. Telegraph wire was strung between outlying areas and the capitol city of Bombay (Mumbai today). Central grain collection depots were created and Indian grain was exported in massive quantities to the British Isles. Also, Indian subsistence farmers were gradually forced out in favor of large land enclosures. Within these new enclosures cash crops like cotton were planted, which supplied the textile mills of Lancashire, but which could not feed the Indian peasants who farmed the land. Finally, the tax burden upon the Indian peasantry was increased exorbitantly to pay for these “improvements”. British authorities needed the revenue to finance war in neighboring Afghanistan.
The innovations imposed by the British on India re-directed the trajectory of Indian commerce and especially food production toward Great Britain and away from the local village markets where the food was needed. Rail lines and the adjacent grain depots enabled British authorities to stockpile grain and keep it under guard away from the people who needed it most, while telegraph lines dictated the price of grain on world commodities markets to local producers. When grain prices rose across the board in global trading, peasants could not afford to buy food.
In the face of these crippling economic forces, British colonial authorities did nothing, primarily because they would not “tamper” with the operation of the liberal “free” market that Britain had created. The Viceroy of India during the famine years of the 1870s was Lord Lytton, a mentally unbalanced English noble. Davis recounts that in the midst of widespread famine and the deaths of millions all around him, Lytton maintained a strict laissez-faire attitude toward famine relief. As Lytton wrote at the time, “there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of the Government with the object of reducing the price of food,” a policy proposal Lytton termed “humanitarian hysterics” and “cheap sentiment”. (p. 31)
Lytton and his fellow administrators preferred instead to blame the “laziness” of famine victims themselves for causing their own dire fate. Citing Lord Temple, “Nor will; many be inclined to grieve much for the fate which they brought upon themselves, and which terminated lives of idleness and too often of crime”. (p. 41) The task of saving life, therefore, was “beyond our power to undertake,” claimed Temple and Lytton, and it was “a mistake to spend so much money to save a lot of black fellows”. (p. 37)
British officials were thus completely unwilling to intervene in the operation of the “free” market despite seeing death on a massive scale all around them. Overall at least 7.1 million people, and perhaps as many as 10.3 million people, died during the famine years of 1876-1878. (p. 111) Furthermore, despite death on this scale and falling production caused by drought, British officials in India still managed to export 6.4 million cwt. of wheat to Great Britain. (p. 31)
LIFE AND DEATH FOLLOWS THE MARKET CYCLE
The years following 1879 were a time when the world market continued to expand. Monsoonal rains settled back into a normal pattern and grain production around the world rose considerably. These were also years when Britain and other colonial powers expanded their reach into the interior of the subjugated countries they held. In India, even more land is brought under cultivation. These lands are then connected to the market by expanded telegraph and rail lines. Then in 1888-89 and 1891-92, the bottom again fell out of the system as El Niño drought gripped the temperate regions of Asia once more.
The resulting death from famine and disease, caused by the very same factors operating in India and elsewhere in the 1870s, was unfathomably huge. By 1902 in India alone between 12.2 and 29.3 million people perished. In China, where the British, Americans, and other European powers controlled practically all trade using military force, between 19.5 and 30 million people died. In Brazil another 2 million perished over the same time span. (p. 7).
THE “FREE” MARKET AND THE MAKING OF THE THIRD WORLD
Mike Davis demonstrates beyond a doubt that the economic structure of exploitative globalization is not a new phenomenon in the world. The lives of millions of people who formerly had survived in localized economies based on subsistence farming were wiped out “in the process of being forcibly incorporated” into the modern world system. (p. 9) Davis reminds us that markets are never free and they never operate according to “iron laws” of economics. Rather, markets are created and often the power underpinning their operation is fiscal manipulation and simple brute force.
Great Britain’s global imperial economy was a case in point. It was never a “free” market. England imposed unfavorable trade terms and high tariff walls on India, China and on all of the other countries in its empire. Local economies forced open by the British were sucked dry of their vital raw materials and in return peasants were forced to buy expensive British manufactured goods. This practice was put into place throughout the colonial world by France, Portugal, Spain, Germany and other colonial powers. If anything, the economies of European colonies were more captive markets than free markets.
The latter point is perhaps the most important conclusion of Late Victorian Holocausts; specifically, that what we call the Third World today was a product of European and, to a lesser extent, American economic exploitation. The incorporation of formerly powerful countries like China and India into the global economy by Great Britain and others effectively destroyed indigenous production. Contrary to conventional wisdom, until around 1850, India and China had actually held their own against Europeans when it came to industrial production. The localized production of wealth and industry, however, was halted and then reversed by the imposition of the global economic system. It is for this reason, Davis concludes, that India’s per capita income did not increase between 1757 and 1947; and in fact declined by more than 50% between 1850 and 1900. (p. 311).
August 18, 2010 — MJ Rosenberg
I don’t know why I am at all surprised that the American Right — including the Republican Party — has decided that scapegoating Muslims is the ticket to success. After all, it’s nothing new.
I remember right after 9/11 when the columnist Charles Krauthammer, now one of the most vocal anti-Muslim demagogues, almost literally flipped out in my Chevy Chase, Maryland synagogue when the rabbi said something about the importance of not associating the terrorist attacks with Muslims in general.
It was on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, but that did not stop Krauthammer from bellowing out his disagreement with the rabbi. Krauthammer’s point: Israel and America are at war with Muslims and that war must be won.
It was shocking, not only because Krauthammer’s outburst was so utterly out of place but also because the man was actually chastising the rabbi for not spouting hate against all Muslims — on the Day of Atonement.
The following year, the visiting rabbi from Israel gave a sermon about the intifada that was then raging in Israel and the West Bank.
The sermon was a nutty affair that tearfully made the transition from intifada to Holocaust and back again. I remember thinking, “this guy is actually blaming the Palestinians for the suffering of his parents during the Holocaust.” I thought I had missed something because it was so ridiculous.
Then came the sermon’s ending which was unforgettable. The rabbi concluded with the words from Ecclesiastes. “To everything there is a season. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap…A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance….”
He then looked up and said: “Now is the time to hate.”
At first, I thought I had not heard him correctly. He could not be calling on the congregation to hate. There were dozens of children in the room. It wasn’t possible.
But it was. To their credit, many of the congregants I spoke with as we left the sanctuary were appalled. Even the right-wingers were uncomfortable with endorsing hate as a virtue. Yet, the rabbi was unrepentant. I emailed him to complain and he told me that he said what he believed. Nice.
One could ask what the Middle East has to do with the vicious outbreak of Islamophobia (actually Islamo-hatred) that has seemingly seized segments of this country.
The answer is everything. Although the hate is directed at Arab-Americans (which makes it worse) it is justified by invoking [the mass media/official narrative of] 9/11, an attack [supposedly carried out] by Muslims from the Middle East.
This hate is buttressed by the hatred of Muslims and Arabs that has been routinely uttered (or shouted from the rooftops) in the name of defending Israel for decades Just watch what goes on in Congress, where liberals from New York, Florida, California and elsewhere never miss an opportunity to explain that no matter what Israel does, it is right, and no matter what Muslims do, they are wrong.
Can anyone possibly argue that such insidious rhetoric has no impact on public opinion? At the very least, it gives anti-Arab and/or anti-Muslim bias a legitimacy that other forms of hate no longer have. Bigots who hate African-Americans or Jews, for instance, feel that they must claim that they don’t. That is not the case with Muslims who can be despised with impunity.
And here the liberals are worse than the conservatives because liberals exempt Muslims and Arabs (and now Turks) from the humanitarian instincts that inform their views of all other groups. Conservatives combine their Arab-bashing with a general xenophobia…
Liberals, on the other hand, single out Muslims for contempt. They do it actively — i.e., by defending every single Israeli action against Arabs with vehement enthusiasm. And they do it passively, by refusing to evince an iota of sympathy for Muslims who suffer and die at the hands of Israelis — like the 432 Palestinian children killed in the 2008 Gaza war.
Liberals join conservatives in rushing to the floor of the House and Senate to defend the Israelis against any accusation (remember how they robotically attacked the Goldstone report on Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, not caring at about the horrors Goldstone described). And then they read their AIPAC talking points, enumerating all the terrible things Arabs have done while Israel has, Gandhi-like, consistently offered the hand of friendship. It would be laughable if the effect of all this was not so ugly.
Why wouldn’t all this hatred affect the perception of Arab-Americans too? Hate invariably overflows its containers, just like hatred of Israel sometimes crosses over into pure old-fashioned anti-Semitism.
Bottom line: it’s a witches’ brew that is being stirred up, and it is one that will no doubt produce violence. But the witches are not all on the right. Just as many liberals are stirring the pot to please some of their donors.
I’m not saying you should not blame Beck and Limbaugh for all this hate. But don’t forget to blame your favorite liberal and progressive politicians. With a few (very few) exceptions, they are just as bad.
While Economists Lied, the Economy Died
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | August 18, 2010
On August 17, Bloomberg reported a US government release that industrial production rose twice as much as forecast, climbing 1 percent. Bloomberg interpreted this to mean that “increased business investment is propelling the gains in manufacturing, which accounts for 11 percent of the world’s largest economy.”
The stock market rose.
Let’s look at this through the lens of statistician John Williams of shadowstats.com.
Williams reports that “the primary driver of a 1.0% monthly gain in seasonally-adjusted July industrial production” was “warped seasonal factors” caused by “the irregular patterns in U.S. auto production in the last two years.” Industrial production “shrank by 1.0% before seasonal adjustments.”
If the government and Bloomberg had announced that industrial production fell by 1.0% in July, would the stock market have risen 104 points on August 17?
Notice that Bloomberg reports that manufacturing accounts for 11 percent of the US economy. I remember when manufacturing accounted for 18% of the US economy. The decline of 39% is due to jobs offshoring.
Think about that. Wall Street and shareholders and executives of transnational corporations have made billions by moving 39% of US manufacturing offshore to boost the GDP and employment of foreign countries, such as China, while impoverishing their former American work force. Congress and the economics profession have cheered this on as “the New Economy.”
Bought-and-paid-for-economists told us that “the new economy” would make us all rich, and so did the financial press. We were well rid, they claimed, of the “old” industries and manufactures, the departure of which destroyed the tax base of so many American cities and states and the livelihood of millions of Americans.
The bought-and-paid-for-economists got all the media forums for a decade. While they lied, the US economy died.
Now, back to statistical deception. On August 17 the census Bureau reported a small gain in July 2010 residential construction housing starts. More hope orchestrated. In fact, the “gain,” as John Williams reports, was due to a large downward revision” in June’s reporting. The reported July “gain” would “have been a contraction” without the downward revision in June’s “gain.”
So, the overestimate of June housing not only made June look good, but also the downward correction of the June number makes July look good, because starts rose above the corrected June number. The same manipulation is likely to happen again next month.
If the government will lie to you about Iraqi weapons of mass production, Iranian nukes, why won’t they lie to you about the economy?
We now have an all-time high of Americans on food stamps, 40.8 million people, about 14% of the population. By next year the government estimates that food stamp dependency will rise to 43 million Americans. So last week Congress cut food stamp benefits. Let them eat cake.
Wherever one looks–food stamps, home foreclosures, bankrupted states, mounting joblessness, the message to long-suffering Americans from “their government” is the same: go eat cake, while we fight wars for Israel that enrich the military/security complex and while we bail out banksters whose annual incomes are in the tens of millions of dollars and up.
It is impossible to get any truth out of the US government about anything. If private companies used US government accounting, the executives would be prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated.
“Our government” is committed to fighting wars to enrich the military/security complex and Israel’s territorial expansion at the expense of cuts in Social Security and Medicare.
All most members of Congress, especially Republicans, want to do is to pay for the pointless wars by cutting Social Security and Medicare.
When they worry about the deficit, it is usually Social Security and Medicare–so-called “entitlements” that are in the crosshairs.
You don’t have to be smart to see that Wall Street’s and the government’s response to the amazing US budget deficit is not to stop the senseless wars and bailouts of mega-millionaires, but to cut “entitlements.”
I will end this column on unemployment. “Our government” tells us that the unemployment rate is just under 10 percent, a figure that would have wrecked any post-Great Depression administration. But, again, “our government” is lying.
Compare this fact with the number you read from the financial press. Right now, if measured according to the methodology of 1980, the US unemployment rate is about 22%. Thus, the reported rate of unemployment hides more than half of the unemployed.
And Secretary Treasury Tim Geithner welcomed us in the August 2 NewYork Times to “the recovery.”
Utterly amazing.
###
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Ma’an – 17/08/2010
BETHLEHEM — An Israeli human rights group has released pictures of Israeli soldiers and border guards alongside blindfolded and handcuffed Palestinian detainees — some of them dead.
Breaking the Silence set up a group on Facebook entitled “the norm denied by Avi Benayahu,” an Israeli military spokesman who described the recent release of photographs by an ex-soldier next to detainees as exceptional.
“The new campaign came into being in the wake of the publication of Eden Abergil’s photos, in order to show the prevalence of this phenomenon among IDF ranks,” Breaking the Silence said in a statement to the Israeli news site Ynet.
“The photographs that had been published are merely the tip of the iceberg. Many people possess thousands of photos, but only a small part is being published … we turned Eden into a scapegoat, while the norm is what needs to be targeted.”
The original photos prompted a harsh reaction from the Palestinian Authority. “This shows the mentality of the occupier, to be proud of humiliating Palestinians. There is nothing in the world that can justify [this] humiliation that is part of the Israeli occupation practices on [a] daily basis,” the PA’s Government Media Center said in a statement.
“Occupation is unjust, immoral and, as these pictures show, corrupting. It should end and Palestinian rights and dignity be respected. We call upon all human rights defenders to make all efforts to end the Israeli occupation and close this dark era for humanity,” the statement added.
Abergil posted the photos in her Facebook album “Army…best time of my life:)” in early August. The series of images, since removed from her page, displayed Abergil posing with blindfolded and handcuffed detainees who were apparently seized during a recent army raid in the occupied West Bank.
By Philip Weiss on August 15, 2010
Californian George Bisharat and Nimer Sultany (a civil rights attorney in Israel now at Harvard Law School Ph.D. program) have a fabulous op-ed in the Miami Herald, challenging Americans to demand equal rights for Palestinian Israelis as part of any peace deal.
Consider what it would be like if:
• Our Constitution defined the union as a “white Christian democratic state?”
• Our laws still barred marriage across ethnic-religious lines?
• Our government appointed a Chief Priest, empowered to define membership criteria for the white Christian nation?
• Our government legally enabled immigration by white Christians while barring it for others?
• Our government funded a Center for Demography that worked to increase the birth rates of white Christians to ensure their majority status?
These examples all have parallels in Israeli practices.
While Israel’s Palestinian citizens have rights to vote, run for office, form political parties and to speak relatively freely, they remain politically marginalized. No Palestinian party has ever been invited to join a ruling coalition. In recent years, Palestinian politicians and community leaders have been criminally prosecuted or hounded into exile.
Nadim Rouhana, social psychologist and director of Mada al-Carmel (a center studying Palestinian citizens of Israel) reports: “Our empirical research reveals that many Palestinian citizens are alienated from the Israeli state. At a deep psychological level, the daily message conveyed in Israeli public discourse is: `You are not one of us. You don’t belong here. You are permanent outsiders.’ Imagine: we, whose families have lived here for centuries, hear this even from recently immigrated Jewish Israeli politicians.”
By Henry Norr on August 11, 2010
The case of Alan P. Gross is very old news, but I’d missed it until last night, when I heard a funny report about it from veteran activist, author, and filmmaker Saul Landau on a KPFA radio show called La Raza Chronicles. [The segment begins about 9 minutes 18 seconds into the online archive.] Googling to learn more, I found not only several online posts by Landau (here and, with Nelson Valdes, here), but also a slew of articles in mainstream outlets (especially the Washington Post) and the Jewish press.
For others who may have missed the story, though, here’s the gist: Gross is a 60-year-old “international development expert” employed by something called Development Alternatives Inc., a Beltway contractor to (allegedly) the U.S. Agency for International Development. He’s been sitting in a Cuban jail since last December on suspicion of spying on behalf of American intelligence. He had entered Cuba five times on a tourist visit, but was actually engaged in delivering cell phones, laptops, and satellite phones (prohibited in Cuba) to “human rights and political activists” and families of dissidents. His psychotherapist wife Judy claimed to the Post that “her husband, a ‘gadget geek,’ had seemed unaware that he was courting danger when a Bethesda contractor signed him up to provide Internet access to civil-society groups on the island.”
(How does a “tourist” manage to get so much gear into Cuba? I have no idea, even though I myself supposedly carried 128 typewriters with me when I traveled to the island on the Venceremos Brigade in 1969 – one of several imaginative tidbits I discovered, between page after page of redactions, when I got copies of my CIA file under the Freedom of Information Act back in the 1970s.)
Why bring up the Gross story here? Not just that one of Alan’s first jobs was taking Jews from his hometown of Baltimore on trips to Israel, or that his résumé as a “development worker” included a stint “assisting Palestinian dairy farmers,” or that Judy had a welcome-home Shabbat dinner on the stove when she learned that he had been arrested. (All this from a lengthy profile published in the Post in May.) The immediate connection is that his mission, in addition to “helping Cubans download music, access Wikipedia and read the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was provided on flash drives,” was to deliver communications gear specifically to members of the Jewish community of Havana, to help them “communicate among themselves and with Jews overseas,” according to sources speaking to the Post “on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.”
Landau poses some interesting questions about all this, questions he says the mainstream media has failed to ask: If the purpose of Gross’s mission was to facilitate phone-calling, why didn’t he just buy some Cuban-made cell phones with prepaid long-distance plans, instead of bringing satellite phones that – in addition to putting their users at risk of arrest – cost thousands of dollars? (“Do religious Jews believe God will talk to them only via satellite phone?,” Landau asks.) Did the Jews of Havana actually need any of this stuff, since U.S. Jewish organizations already provide them plenty of modern communications gear? If Gross was actually involved with that community, which has only about 1,500 members, how come its leaders say they never met him? And if his claim is true, how is that USAID pays for such equipment for Jews, while the Department of Homeland Security seizes computers sent to other Cubans by (presumably non-Jewish) religious groups here? (“Did some U.S. government official choose Jews (the “chosen” people) to receive high-tech equipment?”)
Meanwhile, at a reception last month for Hannah Rosenthal, the U.S. government’s special envoy to “monitor and combat anti-Semitism,” Hillary Clinton made a public appeal “to the active Jewish community here in our country” to join in efforts to get Gross released and returned. As Landau suggests, however, the U.S. government undoubtedly has it in its power to get him sprung, even without mobilizing the Jewish community: surely the Cuban authorities would be happy to swap “a Gross for a Five” – the five Cuban intelligence agents who have been sitting in U.S. prisons since 1998 for spying not on our government but on militant Cuban-American exile [terrorist] organizations.
Blaming Teachers and Firefighters, Not Wall Street Criminals
By Dean Baker | August 11, 2010
The latest cool thing for the Washington elite is to beat up on school teachers and firefighters for their overly generous pensions. It turns out that some of these public sector employees get enough money in their pensions that they can actually enjoy a decent retirement.
This is an outrage in modern America. After all, the Wall Street boys have made it so the vast majority of private sector workers can’t get by in their old age, and they plan to cut Social Security and Medicare to make it even harder. So given that factory workers and retail clerks can’t count on a decent standard of living in retirement, where does a school teacher get off earning a pension of $3,000 a month? The media want the public to be outraged over this incredible injustice. Of course, the men and women behind the curtain are saying: “Pay no attention to the Wall Street people earning millions of dollars a year.”
The attempt to provoke anger has momentum because most state and local pension funds are hugely underfunded. This is blamed on corrupt politicians who concealed pension fund expenses and used dubious accounting.
While this may be true in some cases, the real culprits of the underfunded pension funds are the country’s leading economists. Economists from across the political spectrum told the country that we could assume that stocks would provide an average return of 10 percent a year even when the stock bubble was at its peak in 2000. This consensus included the center-left economists in the Clinton Administration as well conservative economists. It was treated as absolute gospel in all the plans to privatize Social Security. Both the Congressional Budget Office and the Social Security Administration assumed that the market would give an average of 10 percent nominal returns in their analysis of Social Security privatization proposals.
Given the consensus within the economics profession, who could blame the managers of state and local pension funds for using the same assumption? After all, were they supposed to question the assessments of economists teaching at Harvard and M.I.T.?
And, it does make a difference. If the economists’ projections had been right, $1 billion held in the stock market in 2000 would be worth about $2.5 billion today. Instead, it is worth about $1 billion. In short, if the economists had been right, most of the troubled pension funds would be just fine today.
So let’s give credit where credit is due. The media want us to beat up school teachers and firefighters, but the real reason that more tax dollars might be needed to meet pension commitments is that the economists were clueless.
Dean Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
He is the author of Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy and False Profits: Recoverying From the Bubble Economy.
He also has a blog, “Beat the Press,” where he discusses the media’s coverage of economic issues.
Haaretz | August 9, 2010
The Wall Street Journal said Monday that the United States had signed on to sell dozens of F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, but that details in the final deal had been negotiated to quell Israeli concerns over the possible exchange.
Saudi Arabia F-15
Last month, a senior defense source told Haaretz that Israel was trying to prevent the United States from selling new F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia in order to upgrade the 150 F-15s already in the Saudi air force.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak raised the deal in meetings with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Advisor General Jim Jones over a month ago in Washington.
It was also reported that Israel made its reservations clear at a meeting in Tel Aviv between top Israeli defense officials and a delegation led by U.S. under secretary of defense for policy Michele Flournoy.
According to the Wall Street Journal report, the Obama administration in fact agreed to sell advanced F-15 fighter jets to the Saudis, however excluding long-range weapons systems as well as other components in order to quiet Israel’s concerns.
However, despite the reported Israeli concerns over the weapons deal, U.S. officials speaking to the Wall Street Journal made it clear that Washington did not make changes to appease Israel.
“It’s not that Barak swoops into town, we suddenly make a bunch of concessions that the Israelis never knew about before, and they’re assuaged,” the official said. “There were no refinements, no changes.”
The official concluded that Israel had acquiesced to the deal not because of changes made to it, but as a result of Israeli officials having a better understanding “what the configuration looks like.”
The report said that the $30 billion, 10-year package came after U.S. officials offered “clarifications” to Israel about the deal, with officials close to the deal saying that, while Israel still had its reservations, it was unlikely to to challenge the sale.
In addition to the exclusion of long-range weapons, according to the Wall Street Journal, the 84 F-15s included in the deal will have onboard targeting systems of the kind the U.S. sells to foreign nations, yet inferior to those in American-used F-15s.
Last month, security sources told Haaretz that if the deal would indeed be completed, Israel hoped Saudi Arabia will receive fewer advanced versions of the F-15 than those possessed by Israel, which seeks to maintain its air force’s superiority. “Today these planes are against Iran, tomorrow they might turn against us,” the source said.
Israel and the United States held a number of meetings over the past 18 months on maintaining Israel’s security standings in the Middle East.
The two sides agreed that neither would surprise the other by agreeing to a military deal with a third party. A senior source in the U.S. administration told Haaretz the United States has promised Israel it would have priority access to any new weapons system and, in some cases, exclusive rights to buy new weapons systems, as opposed to Arab states.
“The administration is conducting open and completely transparent talks with Israel on the matter, and we are updating Israel on any planned deal to hear its reservations,” the official said. “We believe that there are many cases in which the Iranian threat commits us to strengthen the ability of states in the region to defend themselves.”
The Lobby Stands Triumphant
By M.J. Rosenberg – TPM – August 7, 2010
You might think that former Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS) Donna Shalala would be furious after being detained at Tel Aviv airport for the sole infraction of being an Arab-American.
This is from the Israeli daily Yedioth Achronoth:
When Shalala arrived at the airport, she was not recognized as a VIP and was even afforded what she claims to be “special” treatment because of her Arab last name. She claims she was held for two-and-a-half hours during which she was asked invasive and humiliating personal questions. Despite the delay, she managed to board the flight to the US. Officials who spoke with her said she was deeply offended by the treatment she received.
But guess what. Shalala, after a few day’s reflection. is not offended at all. .
On the contrary, back in Miami she defended the Israeli policy of ethnic profiling — followed by humiliation applied to such security threats as post-60 year old former cabinet officials and university presidents.
“While I was inconvenienced, Israel’s security and the security of travelers is far more important,” said Shalala, who is of Lebanese descent. “I have been going in and out of Israel for many years and expect to visit again.”
What!
So I checked with my friend who knows the scene at the University of Florida. “Are you crazy? If Shalala hinted at criticizing Israel, millions of dollars the university is counting on would dry up instantly. She can’t say a word or the university will have to put all its expansion plans on a shelf forever, not to mention the scholarships that will disappear.”
And that is how it works. I have been remiss on focusing mostly on Congress. I am afraid that even I don’t know the half of it. Excuse me while I go vomit.
After Tuesday’s border clash, Israel will continue to ignore UNIFIL and the Lebanese army
By Gideon Levy | Haaretz | August 5, 2010
Those bastards, the Lebanese, changed the rules. Scandalous. Word is, they have a brigade commander who’s determined to protect his country’s sovereignty. Scandalous.
The explanation here was that he’s “indoctrinating his troops” – only we’re allowed to do that, of course – and that this was “the spirit of the commander” and that he’s “close to Hezbollah.” The nerve.
And now that we’ve recited ad nauseum the explanations of Israel Defense Forces propaganda for what happened Tuesday at the northern border, the facts should also be looked at.
On Tuesday morning, Israel requested “coordination” with UNIFIL to carry out another “exposing” operation on the border fence. UNIFIL asked the IDF to postpone the operation, because its commander is abroad. The IDF didn’t care. UNIFIL won’t stop us.
At noon the tree-cutters set out. The Lebanese and UNIFIL soldiers shouted at them to stop. In Lebanon they say their soldiers also fired warning shots in the air. If they did, it didn’t stop the IDF.
The tree branches were cut and blood was shed on both sides of the border. Shed in vain.
True, Israel maintains that the area across the fence is its territory, and UNIFIL officially confirmed that yesterday. But a fence is a fence: In Gaza it’s enough to get near the fence for us to shoot to kill. In the West Bank the fence’s route bears no resemblance to the Green Line, and still Palestinians are forbidden from crossing it.
In Lebanon we made different rules: the fence is just a fence, we’re allowed to cross it and do whatever we like on the other side, sometimes in sovereign Lebanese territory. We can routinely fly in Lebanese airspace and sometimes invade as well.
This area was under Israeli occupation for 18 years, without us ever acknowledging it. It was an occupation no less brutal than the one in the territories, but whitewashed well. “The security zone,” we called it. So now, as well, we can do what we like.
But suddenly there was a change. How did our analysts put it? Recently there’s been “abnormal firing” at Israeli aircraft. After all, order must be maintained: We’re allowed to fly in Lebanese airspace, they are not permitted to shoot.
But Tuesday’s incident, which was blown out of proportion here as if it were cause for a war that only the famed Israeli “restraint” prevented, should be seen in its wider context. For months now the drums of war have been beating here again. Rat-a-tat, danger, Scuds from Syria, war in the north.
No one asks why and wherefore, it’s just that summer’s here, and with it our usual threats of war. But a UN report published this week held Israel fully responsible for creating this dangerous tension.
In this overheated atmosphere the IDF should have been careful when lighting its matches. UNIFIL requests a delay of an operation? The area is explosive? The work should have been postponed. Maybe the Lebanese Army is more determined now to protect its country’s sovereignty – that is not only its right, but its duty – and a Lebanese commander who sees the IDF operating across the fence might give an order to shoot, even unjustifiably.
Who better than the IDF knows the pattern of shooting at any real or imagined violation? Just ask the soldiers at the separation fence or guarding Gaza. But Israel arrogantly dismissed UNIFIL’s request for a delay.
It’s the same arrogance behind the demand that the U.S. and France stop arming the Lebanese military. Only our military is allowed to build up arms. After years in which Israel demanded that the Lebanese Army take responsibility for what is happening in southern Lebanon, it is now doing so and we’ve changed our tune. Why? Because it stopped behaving like Israel’s subcontractor and is starting to act like the army of a sovereign state.
And that’s forbidden, of course. After the guns fall silent, the cry goes up again here to strike another “heavy blow” against Lebanon to “deter” it – maybe some more of the destruction that was inflicted on Beirut’s Dahiya neighborhood.
Three Lebanese killed, including a journalist, are not enough of a response to the killing of our battalion commander. We want more. Lebanon must learn a lesson, and we will teach it.
And what about us? We don’t have any lessons to learn. We’ll continue to ignore UNIFIL, ignore the Lebanese Army and its new brigade commander, who has the nerve to think that his job is to protect his country’s sovereignty.
By David Samel on August 2, 2010
A barely-noticed incident gives occasion for reflection into the grossly skewed nature of the Israel/Palestine conflict.
A rocket launched from Gaza reached the city of Ashkelon, causing some property damage but no injuries. Israel responded by launching airstrikes at various targets in Gaza, killing one Hamas official named Issa al-Batran. Hamas was not suspected of launching the Ashkelon rocket, but the IDF explained its retaliation against Batran: “The IDF holds the Hamas terror organization solely responsible for the occurrences in the Strip and for maintaining calm there.”
So Israel’s rule of engagement is that any incident of violence directed at Israel from an Arab community may be answered by a lethal attack on an official of that community, regardless of whether there is any suspicion of the official’s personal responsibility for the act against Israel. The idea is that the leadership of a community is not only “responsible . . . for maintaining calm” among the entire populace, but that any random official could pay with his life for a breach of calm that he neither planned, carried out, or was aware of.
Let us imagine Palestinians employing the same rule.
If an IDF soldier, or a settler, committed a single aggressive act against a Palestinian, even if there were no resulting injuries, Hamas would be entitled to assassinate any IDF officer (and perhaps any Israeli official – the Minister of Transportation, or Education?) for failure to prevent the attack. Practically, of course, such retaliation is unthinkable, due to the overwhelming imbalance of power. Palestinians simply do not have the capability of killing any Israeli target. But the question here is one of law and morality, and random assassination of an Israeli official or even IDF officer for a settler’s attack would be indefensible.
It gets worse. The Israeli assassination of Batran is not an isolated or anomalous example of transferred responsibility. To the contrary, it represents the mildest and least objectionable form of Israel’s longstanding practice. At least the victim here actually was a Hamas official, and indeed was apparently a bomb-maker, though not responsible for the rocket projected toward Ashkelon. Israel, however, has been consistently using the same rationale for collective punishment attacks against civilian populations for decades: in Qibya in 1953; in southern Syria and Lebanon following the Munich Olympics incident of 1972; in Lebanon in 1982, 1993, 1996, and 2006; in Gaza 2008-2009.
And this is just a very small sample. A truly exhaustive catalog of Israel’s deliberate lethal attacks against civilians would fill many volumes. David Hirst’s book, The Gun and the Olive Branch, is a good place to start. Israel’s policy of treating any aggressive act by any Arab as a justification for revenge attacks on other Arabs is so deeply ingrained in international discourse that this latest incident barely hits the radar screen. “Only” one person, an actual Hamas official, was killed, although a dozen others were injured.
No one questions the morally repulsive nature of the policy of treating Arabs as fungible objects who need not be distinguished from each other in matters of life and death and criminal responsibility. What happens when grievances against Israeli policy give rise to lethal attacks against random Israelis? It is called by its proper name: terrorism.
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
Aletho News 