Supremacism, Social Darwinism

The humanitarian myth

Richard Seymour, the author of The Liberal Defense of Murder, analyzes the propaganda manufactured to justify U.S. actions in Haiti after the earthquake.

January 25, 2010

WITHIN DAYS of Haiti suffering an earthquake registering 7.0 on the Richter scale, the U.S. government had sent thousands of 82nd Airborne troops and Marines, alongside the super-carrier USS Carl Vinson.

By this Sunday, a total of more than 20,000 U.S. troops were scheduled to be operating in Haiti, both on land and in the surrounding seas. “We are there for the long term,” explained Alejandro Wolff, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The justification for sending troops is that there is a “security” crisis, which soldiers have to deal with in order to facilitate the distribution of aid.

The situation was and remains a needful one. The Haitian interior minister estimates that as many as 200,000 may have died as a result of the quake, and 2 million have been left homeless. Potable water is extremely scarce, and was so even before the quake. Only half a million have found the makeshift camps that provide some food and water, but have such poor sanitation that they are fostering diarrhea. Clinics are overwhelmed by the injured survivors, estimated to number a quarter of a million.

Since the arrival of the troops, however, several aid missions have been prevented from arriving at the airport in Port-au-Prince, that the U.S. has commandeered. France and Caribbean Community have both made their complaints public, as has Médecins Sans Frontières on five separate occasions. UN World Food Program flights were also turned away on two consecutive days. Benoit Leduc, MSF’s operations manager in Port-au-Prince, complained that U.S. military flights were being prioritized over aid flights. Now, U.S. ships have encircled Haiti in order to prevent refugees escaping and fleeing to the United States.

Not only has aid been obstructed and escape blocked, but what aid does arrive was at first not being delivered, and then only in small amounts. Some five days after the earthquake struck, BBC News reporter Nick Davis described how aid had just started “trickling through.” While aid was arriving in Haiti “in large amounts,” some “bottlenecks” prevented the bulk of it from being distributed.

Asked why the U.S. was not using its air power to deliver aid to areas unreachable by road, Defense Secretary Robert Gates maintained that this would result in riots. The writer Nelson Valdes has described how U.S. and UN authorities advised aid workers not to distribute relief independently, as they would be subject to “mob attacks.”

Eyewitnesses have repeatedly described how rescue workers are scarce on the ground, and relief nowhere to be seen. Hospitals that are functioning despite the wreckage complain of having no painkillers with which to operate on patients with serious injuries. Dr. Evan Lyon of Partners in Health explained that:

[I]n terms of supplies, in terms of surgeons, in terms of aid relief, the response has been incredibly slow. There are teams of surgeons that have been sent to places that were “more secure,” where they have 10 or 20 doctors and 10 patients. We have a thousand people on this campus who are triaged and ready for surgery, but we only have four working [operating rooms], without anesthesia and without pain medications. And we’re still struggling to get ourselves up to 24-hour care.

In effect, the U.S. has staged an invasion of Haiti, under the pretext of providing security for humanitarian aid, and in doing so has prevented the delivery of humanitarian aid. With Haitians in a desperate condition, and the UN-supervised government in dire straits, Washington has sent the International Monetary Fund to offer a $100 million loan, on the proviso that public wages be frozen.

The “security” operation, meanwhile, proceeds apace. As well as U.S. troops, thousands more UN police have been sent to Haiti. Already, UN troops, alongside the Haitian police, have been responsible for several killings, as they have opened fire on starving earthquake survivors who dared to try to retrieve the means of survival from shops and other locations. The US has also insisted that the Haitian government pass an emergency decree authorizing curfews and martial law. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the decree “would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us.”

This process has been facilitated by a flood of alarmist and often racist reporting about “mobs,” “looters” and “gangs” causing a “security crisis.” A “security crisis” validates a repressive response.

The Haitian police have justified their brutal massacres of “looters”–those securing their right to life in desperate circumstances–by telling the media that thousands of prisoners have escaped from the country’s jails, and are running amok, posing a threat to vulnerable citizens. Police have been attempting to whip up fear among earthquake survivors, organising them into vigilantes to attack the escaped prisoners. However, as many as 80 percent of Haiti’s prisoners have never been charged with a crime. “Gangs”–in the vernacular of Washington, the White House press corps and Haiti’s business lobby, the Group of 184–happens to be a synonym for Lavalas activists.

For all the headlines, moreover, there is strikingly little actual violence taking place. Most of the stories of violence center on episodes of “looting,” and most such instances involve desperate people procuring the means of survival. Aid workers also contradict the image of mobs on the attack purveyed by the media and U.S. officials. Abi Weaver, spokesperson for the American Red Cross, confirmed that “we haven’t had any security issues at all.”

“There are no security issues,” said Dr. Evan Lyon. “We’ve been circulating throughout the city until 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning every night, evacuating patients, moving materials. There’s no UN guards. There’s no US military presence. There’s no Haitian police presence. And there’s also no violence. There is no insecurity.” In fact, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, deputy commander of U.S. Southern Command, maintains that there is less violence in Haiti now than before the earthquake.

So if there is no insecurity, and if the US military intervention is actually obstructing aid, what becomes of the pretext for the invasion?

Humanitarian intervention

Notwithstanding this extraordinary performance, many American commentators actually approve of the U.S. response.

Jonathan Dobrer, of the American Jewish University in Bel Air, declared himself “almost sinfully proud of America.” Steven Cohen of Columbia University enthused on the liberal Huffington Post that “We Have Reason to be Proud of the American Response in Haiti.” New York Times op-ed contributor Jonathan M. Hansen called on the U.S. to go further, and use the Guantánamo gulag as a base for “humanitarian intervention” in Haiti.

Indeed, the label “humanitarian” is regularly applied to U.S. actions in Haiti. It is important to recall, therefore, that the overthrow of Haiti’s elected government in 2004 and the subsequent occupation was itself originally cast as a humanitarian intervention of sorts.

Aristide, so the story went, had governed incompetently, his rule characterized by such corruption and violence as to generate countrywide disturbances. In recognition of his inability to govern, he supposedly “resigned” and fled the country. Filling the gap created by the absence of legitimate authority, concerned members of the “international community” prevailed upon the United Nations to send troops into Haiti and facilitate the development of democratic institutions.

Matters are a little more prosaic and grubby than this uplifting scenario would suggest. The U.S. had begun cutting aid programs to Haiti when Aristide was elected with an overwhelming mandate for his second term in 2000. The result was that the national budget was cut in half, and gross domestic product shrank by a quarter in the ensuing period.

The pro-U.S. opposition group, Convergence Démocratique, declared that it would not accept the results and instead began to agitate against the incoming government. Paramilitary attacks, beginning in the summer of 2001, were carried out by former death squad members and organized criminals acting in association with Haiti’s business community. Former army personnel such as Guy Philippe, an admirer of Augusto Pinochet, were organized by the U.S. under the rubric of the Fronte pour la Libération et la Reconstruction Nationale (FLRN).

By February 2004, a full-blown insurgency had been launched, and had begun to take control of large parts of the country. None of the Lavalas rulers had military experience, and they were not prepared to arm and mobilize the population.

Aristide, far from being a violent or incompetent ruler as his critics suggest, was eventually defeated because he was not prepared to violently repress an opposition that was explicitly organizing for his overthrow. His administrations had actually been highly effective in a number of areas, despite considerable pressures from the U.S. and the Haitian ruling class.

Lavalas can be credited with reducing infant mortality from 125 to 110 per thousand live births, bringing illiteracy down from 65 percent to 45 percent and slowing the rate of new HIV infections. It was obliged by the U.S. to accept “structural adjustment” programs, but did what it could to soften the blow by maintaining subsidies, implementing some land reforms, and promulgating certain social programs. It legislated against the exploitation of children as unpaid servants in wealthy homes. It reformed the notoriously labyrinthine judiciary and put several death squad members on trial. It also managed to extract some taxes from the rich, in the face of strenuous resistance.

For these humanitarian accomplishments, Aristide had to go. Once the dregs of former genocidaires and the criminal fraternity had wrought sufficient destruction across the country, the U.S. Marine Corps abducted Aristide on September 29, 2004. The initial line given to the press by James Foley, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, was that it was a rescue mission. The U.S. had stepped in, concerned for Aristide’s welfare, and he had resigned voluntarily.

As soon as Aristide got hold of a telephone, however, he informed every news outlet that would listen that he had been kidnapped by U.S. forces. He was not permitted to return to Haiti, and an occupation began under a UN mandate, enforced by MINUSTAH troops. A new regime was imposed that locked up political activists and priests, and thousands were killed either by MINUSTAH soldiers directly or by gangs operating under their authority. A study published in The Lancet found:

[D]uring the 22-month period of the U.S.-backed Interim Government, 8,000 people were murdered in the greater Port-au Prince area alone. Thirty-five thousand women and girls were raped or sexually assaulted, more than half of the victims were children…Those responsible for the human rights abuses include criminals, the police, United Nations peacekeepers and anti-Lavalas gangs.

Meanwhile, the democratic process that the UN was supposed to oversee has resulted in elections in which the country’s most popular political party, Lavalas, are not allowed to participate. The recent senatorial and congressional elections saw turnouts depressed to as little as 10 percent as a result. This shambolic process has made life easier for Haiti’s ruling class, and the multinationals operating in Haiti, but by no stretch of the imagination is it “humanitarian.”

The point of highlighting this background is to note that, contrary to some short-sighted commentary–like Jonathan Dobrer: “We come, we help, and we don’t stay”–the U.S. has a bloody recent history in Haiti and a well-defined set of goals in the country, including the desire to finish off Lavalas and create a benevolent investment climate for business.

The belief that the U.S. is behaving in a humanitarian manner in Haiti is at best myopic. At worst, it buys into the racist mythologies about Haiti that have been on prominent display in headlines and news copy for over a week now.

Paternalism and racism

The paternalistic assumptions behind the calls for ‘humanitarian intervention’ have sometimes been starkly expressed. Thus, the conservative columnist Eric Margolis lauds the history of American colonial rule in Haiti: “[T]he U.S. occupation is looked back on by many Haitians as their “golden age.” The Marine Corps proved a fair, efficient, honest administrator and builder. This era was the only time when things worked in Haiti.”

Purporting to oppose imperialism, Margolis insists that “genuine humanitarian intervention” is “different,” and calls for Haiti to be “temporarily administered by a great power like the U.S. or France.” He writes: “U.S. administration of Haiti may be necessary and the only recourse for this benighted nation that cannot seem to govern itself.”

Similarly, right-wing New York Times columnist David Brooks, decrying the supposed “progress-resistant cultural influences” that he maintains holds Haiti back, calls for the U.S. to “promote locally-led paternalism.” “We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures,” he complains. “But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.”

To overcome this cultural handicap, Brooks recommends finding gurus who would promote a culture of achievement and responsibility–as opposed to the irresponsible, chaotic, voodoo-ridden culture that he identifies as Haiti’s major problem.

It is unnecessary to dignify such caricatures by considering them as empirical hypotheses. However, it should be noted that neither author gives the slightest consideration to the persistent efforts of the U.S. government to frustrate the rise of popular, democratic movements such as Lavalas, nor to the IMF-imposed programs which saw real wages fall by 50 percent between 1980 and 1990, and which resulted in overpopulated slums and a failing rural economy.

Nor do they acknowledge the brutality of the UN occupation. While Margolis acknowledges that America’s colonial rule was “sometimes brutal,” his understatement is verging on euphemism when he omits to discuss the killing of 15,000 people as Haiti’s rebels, known as Cacos, were suppressed.

Nor does he mention the humiliating system of forced labor that was imposed on Haitians under U.S. rule, or the fact that the gendarmerie built up under U.S. occupation became the organized basis for later dictatorships that would blight Haiti. In short, both writers bring to bear astonishingly little understanding of the country whose fate they are discussing so cavalierly.

However, what is of interest in these caricatures is the genus of imperial ideology that they relate to. Margolis is an old-school conservative (he describes himself as an Eisenhower Republican). He recalls in his phrases the manifest-destinarianism of William McKinley, who argued that the conquest and colonization of the Philippines was justified since Filipinos “were unfit for self-government.”

In the imperial language of the U.S. and Europe in this period, self-government was conceived of either as a cultural state that only white people had achieved, or as a technology that only white people could use. Woodrow Wilson, the invader of Haiti, explained that the Philippines could not be given self-government by the United States, since “it is a form of character and not a form of constitution.” Self-government is a cultural state attained after a period of discipline that “gives people self-possession, self-master, the habit of order.”

For Wilson, only the “nobler races”–namely Europeans and white Americans–had achieved that state. Margolis would not be so explicitly racist, but his subtext is not the less subtle for that.

Brooks, though, is a neoconservative. As such, he brings to bear that tradition’s paternalism, its concern with developing good patriarchal families, and particularly its culturalist reading of social institutions.

In this view, government and other institutions reflect an accumulation of cultural practices that have survived through generations. Capitalism and liberal democracy are thus the result of cultural influences such as Judeo-Christian values. The ability to govern oneself as a society is also said to be a result of cultural attributes that are generally found to be lacking in America’s opponents. These discrete cultures do not necessarily correspond to older notions of ‘race’, but they perform an analogous function in permitting privileged U.S. commentators to applaud the conquest of other societies.

Thus, at the height of the Vietnam War, the “godfather” of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, argued that it was correct for the U.S. to support a right-wing dictatorship since “South Vietnam, like South Korea, is barely capable of decent self-government under the very best of conditions.” Like the Black families that Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously diagnosed as suffering from a “tangle of pathologies,” these people lacked the exquisite cultural refinements that made white Americans so successful.

These are exceptionally explicit commentaries. Most of those lauding American actions are unlikely to be as cynical or brazen as Brooks and Margolis. Yet when 20,000 U.S. troops arrive in a wrecked island country, and begin obstructing aid and beefing up “security” while people die in the wreckage of thirst and starvation, only the willfully purblind or those trapped in the assumptions of the “civilizing mission,” could construe it as a “humanitarian intervention.”

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January 25, 2010 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

Delaying aid for a photo-op

By Jesse Hagopian | January 25, 2010

Hillary Clinton stands beside Haitian president René Préval, speaking to reporters at the airport.

EVERYTHING YOU need to know about the U.S. aid effort to assist Haiti in the wake of the catastrophic earthquake can be summed up by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s touchdown in Port-au-Prince on Saturday, January 16: they shut down the airport for three hours surrounding her arrival for “security” reasons, which meant that no aid flights could come in during those critical hours.

If there was one day when the Haitian people needed aid to flow all day long, that was the day, because the people trapped under the rubble on Tuesday evening couldn’t survive much beyond Saturday without water.

Defenders of Clinton will say that her disimpassioned, monotone, photo-op speech was needed to draw attention to the plight of the Haitians. But no one north of hell can defend her next move: according to airport personnel that I spoke to during my recent evacuation from Haiti, she paralyzed the airport later that same day to have a new outfit flown in from the Dominican Republic.

I am having a hard time readjusting to life back home after having survived the earthquake and witnessed so much death, so even typing those words is making my heart pound uncontrollably. I guess for America’s rulers, a new pantsuit is more valuable than the lives of poor, Black Haitians.

Unfortunately, Clinton’s model of diverting and delaying critical aid to the Haitian people, while emphasizing security, has become standard operating procedure.

Alain Joyandet, the French minister responsible for humanitarian relief in Haiti, charged the U.S. with treating this as a military operation rather than an aid mission. Mr. Joyandet told the Daily Telegraph that he had been involved in an argument with a U.S. commander in the airport’s control tower over the flight plan for a French evacuation flight, saying, “This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti.”

But with the U.S. occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and funding the Israeli occupation of Palestine, it seems our government knows how to do little else when it comes to international affairs.

The day I left via Toussaint L’Ouverture International Airport, I saw lots of crates of food, water and medical supplies piled on the tarmac. But I didn’t see that aid being transported out of the airport to actually get to Haitians.

Undoubtedly, there has been some aid distributed, but because there was no serious effort to disperse that aid in the first four days after the quake, tens of thousands of people trapped under rubble have died needlessly because they couldn’t get a sip of water.

The Geneva-based organization Doctors Without Borders has been turned away from the airport numerous times to allow U.S. troops to land. A ring of U.S. warships surrounds Haiti to make sure that Haitians don’t escape the disaster and try to get to the United States.

The U.S. has taken control of Haiti’s main airport and seaport, and is in the process of deploying 18,000 U.S. troops to bolster the 9,000 UN troops already occupying the island nation–and as an eyewitness, I can tell you those troops are guarding their own compounds rather than distributing aid.

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January 25, 2010 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

UK & Churchill Crimes Exposed from British Raj Indian Holocaust to Palestinian, Iraqi & Afghan Genocides

January 24, 2010

Gideon Polya writes:

I have listed below an expanded list of immense crimes in which Churchill was complicit as a racist soldier, politician, mass murderer and holocaust-denying writer – indeed he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his numerous published works, especially his six-edition set The Second World War in which he ignored his deliberate, remorseless murder of 6-7 million Indians in 1943-1945 [ I have provided estimates of violent and non-violent avoidable deaths in square brackets].

1. British Indian Holocaust (1.8 billion excess deaths, 1757-1947; 10 million killed in post-1857 Indian Mutiny reprisals; 1 million starved, 1895-1897 Indian Famine; 6-9 million starved, 1899-1900 Indian Famine; 6-7 million starved under Churchill, Bengali Holocaust 1943-1945].

2. Sudan atrocities [horrendous British atrocities after the Battle of Obdurman 1898].

3. Boer (Afrikaaner) Genocide [28,000 Afrikaaner women and children died in British concentration camps, 1899-1902].

4. World War 1 promotion [World War I Allied military and civilian dead 5.7 million and 3.7 million, respectively; German-allied (Central Powers) military and civilian deaths 4.0 million and 5.2 million; troop movement-exacerbated Spanish Flu Epidemic killed 20-100 million people world wide. 1918-1922].

5. WW1 Dardanelles Campaign in Turkey [0.2 million Allied and Turkish soldiers killed, 1915; precipitated 1915-1923 Turkish Armenian Genocide, 1.5 million Armenians killed].

6. UK and US invasion of Russia 1917-1919 [millions died in the Russian Civil War and the subsequent Russian Famine; 7 million died in the circa 1930 Ukrainian Famine; and perhaps up to 20 million died overall in Stalinist atrocities].

7. British suppression of the Arab revolt in Iraq (invaded by Britain in 1914).

8. Support for British Occupation and opposition to Indian self-determination [1757-1947 excess deaths, 1.8 billion; 1895-1897 famine deaths1 million; 1899-1900 Indian Famine, deaths6-9 million deaths; 1943-1945 Bengali Holocaust deaths 6-7 million].

9. World War 2 promotion [World War 2 military deaths 25 million and civilian deaths about 67 million].

10. Promotion of Japan entry into World War 2 in order to involve the US and hence ensure victory [35 million Chinese avoidable deaths, 1937-1945; 6-7 million Indians starved, Bengal 1943-1945; millions more died in the WW2 Eastern Theatre].

11. Churchill knew Singapore was indefensible [8,000-15,000 killed, 130,000 captured in the 1941 Malaya campaign; 14,000 Australian, 16,000 British and 32,000 Indian troops surrendered in Singapore].

12. Churchill deliberately did not warn Americans about Pearl Harbor attack [Eastern Theatre WW2 deaths 45 million].

13. WW2 Bengal Holocaust, Bengal Famine [deliberate starving to death of of 6-7 million Indians; confessed by Churchill in a letter to Roosevelt].

14. Churchill rejected top scientific advice and supported bombing of German cities instead of protecting Atlantic convoys [.016 million allied airmen killed; 0.6 million German civilians killed; Battle of the Atlantic almost lost; 7 million dead from famine in the Indian Ocean region related to halving of Allied shipping in 1943].

15. Churchill acknowledged the crucial importance of maintaining Hindu-Muslim antipathy to preserve British rule [1 million dead and 18 million Muslim and Hindu refugees associated with India-Pakistan Partition in 1947].

16. 1944 UK War Cabinet decision Partition of Palestine.

17. UK rejection of 1944 Brand plan to save Hungarian Jews [0.2-0.4 million killed by Nazis and Arrow Cross fascists out of 0.7 million; Zionists also opposed the Brand plan]

18. British, American, Zionist, Australian and European adoption of Churchill’s holocaust commission and holocaust denying legacy, with post-war atrocities involving invasion, occupation, devastation and genocide.

Source

January 24, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Media presents skewed image of Haiti rescue efforts

Why do we see Haitians begging for help but doing absolutely NOTHING to help themselves?!!

Why do they idly sit waiting for help to come (and I’m talking about the ones who were not injured, of course) or … “blocking the roads” instead of HELPING to clear them, HELPING to unload cargo ships and/or to clear port infrastructure from the debris.

BBC showed healthy men running around the collapsed house and doing absolutely NOTHING to save a living person under it who was lucky that the UN soldiers were nearby and just started … DIGGING! Nothing sophisticated but simply digging… I don’t understand…

Global Nomad responds:

I’ve been doing a lot of media interviews over the past five days and I can tell you that the media are not reporting facts per se – they are telling a story, and one they hope will catch their viewers’ attention. Many news outlets do some research, pick a couple of angles that grab attention, and then develop these angles specifically. So, in the Haiti context for example, the bulk of the media is really picking up on the violence/food-riot angle, on the delays-in-logistics-angle, on the involvement of foreign assistance (especially US military and search-and-rescue teams). They then build a story around these themes to show the viewer. Not necessarily a false story, but certainly not the full picture.

The question to ask is, why is the media showing pictures of foreign search and rescue teams, and not Haitian rescuers? Well, on a simple level, the media is playing to US/British/Australian audiences, who want to see their donations hard at work, so they want to see US/British/Australian rescue teams pulling people from rubble. These are the images that will stop people flipping the channel to see what else is on.

Here’s some facts from earlier today on foreign search and rescue teams. As of about 10pm Haiti time on Saturday, there were 1,200 foreign search and rescue personnel in Haiti, and about 100 sniffer dogs. Collectively over the days since the earthquake, they had pulled 83 people alive out of the rubble. That’s about on par for foreign SAR teams- a pretty normal figure following a major disaster.

I don’t know how much it costs to run a SAR team. I can assure you it’s expensive. The bill for 1,200 SAR personnel, complete with dogs, specialised equipment, transportation, lodging etc. will run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per day.

Every life is precious. Every life saved is worth an investment. I’m not interested in making a judgement call about what dollar value you place on the life of a Haitian child pulled from the rubble after 8 hours of digging by one rescue team, as one was this afternoon. That life is a cause for celebration. Absolutely and unequivocably. Note however that a single team can spend hours and hours recovering a single person- or body. It’s no wonder the total number of lives saved is relatively small. Remember too that most of these teams don’t reach ground zero until 48 hours after the earthquake. Most urban burial situations have a window of 72 hours during which people trapped alive in rubble can be rescued. After that, most will be dead. And it’s an arithmetic curve- meaning, for every hour past the point of burial, a disproportionately small number of people will continue surviving.

Here’s the flip-side of the coin.

There are between three and five million Haitians living in the quake affected area. Somewhere between 50 and 150 thousand appear to have died. Uncounted tens of thousands were injured. Many of those injured- I would imagine also in the tens of thousands- would have been partially or completely buried at some point in the earthquake- hence receiving injuries. Those thousands of people had to be dug out by somebody.

As mentioned in my post, experience shows that the people who do the saving of lives are those people who in the first minutes and hours after a quake rush to their homes and their neighbours homes, and pull out friends and loved ones. They are the best to respond a) because they get there first before people die and b) because they know who to look for, and where. In the Bam earthquake in Iran in 2003, the buildings were made of mud-brick which crumbled to dust without leaving air-spaces. Anybody who wasn’t pulled from the rubble in the first few minutes suffocated. Locals saved thousands of lives, compared to the few dozen saved by international rescue teams.

I am in daily contact with several personal friends in Port-au-Prince in the course of my job. Yesterday they drove past a flattened school where dozens of Haitians were digging through the rubble with whatever they had available. Colleagues from our office in Port-au-Prince, within minutes of the quake hitting, were frantically trying to get home so they could rescue their loved ones. Haitians throughout the city have been working tirelessly since the quake hit to free people from the rubble. Their efforts will be credited with saving many thousands of lives.

Remember as well, four days on from the quake, that most rubble that can be dug through by hand will have been dug through – the rest requiring specialised equipment that local Haitians will not have access to. Most people who will survive the quake have already been pulled out; almost everybody else buried right now is either dead, or will shortly be dead. If people knew where their loved ones were buried at the time of the quake, they will have dug through those locations by now. So there is a lot less for local Haitians to do, while the small number of search and rescue personnel (for whom, I hasten to add, I do have a great deal of respect, and who risk their lives to save every life they recover) with their specialised equipment and training can tackle more complicated burial sites.

So my question really would be, why does our media chose to show pictures of Haitians sitting around and focus on foreigners digging through the rubble, when in fact this is an incredible distortion of the reality of what is happening, as you rightly alude to at the beginning of your comment?

I don’t doubt that there are some groups of men sitting around doing nothing, I hasten to add, or that there aren’t gangs making trouble for selfish gain, or that there aren’t some lazy people out there. But seeing a few shots of a few men sitting around is not indicative of what has generally been happening in Port-au-Prince since the quake, nor can we surmise that therefore a significant majority of Haitians are sitting around while their countryfolk are dying.

You’re absolutely right- there is a huge difference between victims and survivors. In any calamity there are both, and the media loves to show victims because it attracts attention, because humans have a warped tendancy to want to keep watching suffering. Survivors don’t get the same attention on our news media. However I can attest that there are vast numbers of survivors in Port-au-Prince right now based on the eye-witness accounts that I am getting across my desk regularly, and simply by looking at the magnitude of what has happened and the part that local Haitians have played in it versus the part that outsiders played. The majority of Haitians are working to pick up the pieces of their lives amidst the shock and violence of what they have just been through as best they can.

I close with an observation that the news cameras weren’t rolling in Port-au-Prince until 48 hours after the earthquake, but that the largest portion of the rescue and recovery efforts- carried out by local Haitians themselves- would have been completed during this time- indeed, during the first 12 hours. So we don’t see those pictures. Their contribution and the incredible bravery, sacrifice and drama of those moments, never made it into our living room. But this is the reality of what happened in Port-au-Prince, and not these 15-second snippets we see broken down for drama’s sake on our evening news bulletin.”

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January 23, 2010 Posted by aletho | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

The myth of Haiti’s lawless streets

To withhold aid because of the ‘security situation’ is a miserable excuse for agencies’ failure to deliver desperately needed help

By Inigo Gilmore | The Guardian | January 20, 2010

A man carries an injured child in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, six days after the earthquake.

Photograph: Emiliano Larizza/Contrasto / eyevine

As a member of the media covering the tragedy in Haiti, it’s with a sense of alarm and astonishment that I’ve witnessed how some senior aid officials have argued for withholding aid of the utmost urgency because of sensational claims about violence and insecurity, which appear to be based more on fantasy than reality.

John O’Shea, who runs the well-known Irish aid agency Goal, has joined this chorus, telling the Guardian he couldn’t get his trucks from the Dominican Republic to Haiti because he had no guarantees his drivers wouldn’t be “macheted to death on the way down”. He added that Goal has no plans to deploy its much-needed doctors and nurses on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

From what I’ve observed, such chilling claims do not match the reality on the ground; and by trumpeting a distorted and sensational picture about the violence, some senior aid officials may be culpable of undermining the very aid effort they are supposed to be promoting. When I traveled into Haiti’s disaster zone last week from the Dominican Republic, I did so alone and on a bus, whose passengers were mostly Haitians, including some living in the US. Since then, whether on the road to Port-au-Prince or within the city, I have not witnessed anyone wielding a gun, a machete or a club of any kind. Nor have I witnessed an act of violence. (I have seen one badly wounded man who had been shot in circumstances which were unclear and who was eventually rescued by US soldiers after an American reporter sought help.)

Any violence is localised and sporadic; the situation is desperate yet not dangerous in general. Crucially, it’s not a war zone; it’s a disaster zone – and there appears to have been little attempt to distinguish carefully between destructive acts of criminality and the behaviour of starving people helping themselves to what they can forage. For Haitians and many of those trying to help them, the overriding sentiment is that a massive catastrophe on this scale shouldn’t have to wait for aid because blanket security is the absolute priority.

Moreover hundreds of journalists, volunteers from churches and private individuals have traveled in from the Dominican Republic, some of them bringing in desperately needed aid. From what I know, not a single person who has attempted to provide assistance to the people of Port-au-Prince, including medics, has run into any serious trouble.

En route to Port-au-Prince I met David Pierre-Louis, a 31-year-old Haitian-American, who had come to find his mother and bring much needed medical supplies. Happily, he found her alive and well, and later, she and a local nurse used the medicine David brought all the way from Seattle to set up a makeshift clinic on a street near her shattered home.

David, who runs a jazz club in Seattle, is now trying to fill the void by sending in his own medical supplies paid for by donations from the Haitian-American community and other concerned Americans. He told me:

“Haitians here cannot understand why they’re not getting help, especially as the way the violence is portrayed is not right. The people are unhappy that there’s been no assistance but do you see them rioting in the streets? No.
“People are hungry and needy and yet they’re being portrayed as savages. Aid is not getting there quick enough and that’s sad because the solution is right there and we have the power to do it.”

John O’Shea has shown in the past that his aid agency has the power to do it. Yet this time, while the Irish people have generously donated more than 1m euros to Goal for their Haiti operations, the agency has yet to swing into action. While announcing that they hope to start some limited food distribution in one location in Port-au-Prince, O’Shea is insisting on a change in the security situation first before their operation can be rolled out, medics and all.

There are some real security issues in Port-au-Prince but some of the more alarming images and incidents portrayed in the media must be seen for what they are, and in context. Reports about marauding, machete-wielding gangs taking over Port-au-Prince are very wide of the mark. The people are welcoming and helpful to those who come to help them and, if anything, go out of their way to ensure you are safe.

Last weekend, in the park near the destroyed presidential palace, which has become a makeshift refugee camp for tens of thousands, we meet three Cuban doctors and nurses. They were working alone, without an escort, and they were treating a large group of injured men women and children, who calmly waited their turn. That night, on the other side of the park, I saw a group of homeless queueing patiently to collect water in plastic containers. No one was harassing them, and there was no sign of any of the criminal gangs that supposedly now rule the streets.

I can see no reason why, with some concerted pressure and a little coordination, aid agencies like Goal cannot deploy securely into the heart of Port–au-Prince, with their clinics and food distribution outlets. With thousands of the injured living in close quarters at makeshift camps, the rapid deployment of medical care is still paramount.

Of all the disasters I’ve covered in recent years, the response to this has perhaps been the most perplexing, and disastrous in itself. From the Haitian perspective, if anyone is dragging their feet it’s the aid agencies. One thing is clear: if aid agencies do not quickly roll out a coordinated and comprehensive response, then not only will many more die, but the deteriorating security situation, which is being talked up so much, may perhaps become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So John O’Shea, if you are reading this, I put down this challenge to you: if you are prepared, in the next few days, to bring an aid van or truck to the Dominican/Haitian border, I will travel with it into Port-au-Prince. I will even help you to distribute the aid.

The Haitian people need help now, not excuses.

January 21, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

US Security Company Offers to Perform “High Threat Terminations” and to Confront “Worker Unrest” in Haiti

Here we go: New Orleans 2.0

By Jeremy Scahill | Rebel Reports | January 18, 2010

We saw this type of Iraq-style disaster profiteering in New Orleans and you can expect to see a lot more of this in Haiti over the coming days, weeks and months. Private security companies are seeing big dollar signs in Haiti thanks in no small part to the media hype about “looters.” After Katrina, the number of private security companies registered (and unregistered) multiplied overnight. Banks, wealthy individuals, the US government all hired private security. I even encountered Israeli mercenaries operating an armed check-point outside of an elite gated community in New Orleans. They worked for a company called Instinctive Shooting International. (That is not a joke).

Now, it is kicking into full gear in Haiti. As we know, the member companies of the Orwellian-named mercenary trade association, the International Peace Operations Association, are offering their services in Haiti. But look for more stories like this one:

On January 15, a Florida based company called All Pro Legal Investigations registered the URL Haiti-Security.com. It is basically a copy of the company’s existing US website but is now targeted for business in Haiti, claiming the “purpose of this site is to act as a clearinghouse for information seekers on the state of security in Haiti.”

“All Protection and Security has made a commitment to the Haitian community and will provide professional security against any threat to prosperity in Haiti,” the site proclaims. “Job sites and supply convoys will be protected against looters and vandals. Workers will be protected against gang violence and intimidation. The people of Haiti will recover, with the help of the good people from the world over.”

The company boasts that it has run “Thousands of successful missions in Iraq & Afghanistan.” As for its personnel, “Each and every member of our team is a former Law Enforcement Officer or former Military service member,” the site claims. “If Operator experience, training and qualifications matter, choose All Protection & Security for your high-threat Haiti security needs.”

Among the services offered are: “High Threat terminations,” dealing with “worker unrest,” armed guards and “Armed Cargo Escorts.” Oh, and apparently they are currently hiring.

January 19, 2010 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

A review of ZIONISM, MILITARISM AND THE DECLINE OF US POWER by James Petras

December 2009 issue of Culture Wars magazine – Ken Freeland

The hegemonic influence of Zionist-Israeli forces over America’s foreign policy, particularly Middle East policy, is a phenomenon without historical precedent. While right-wing radicals, with their focus on patriotism and constitutional values, set off early alarms about this perceived foreign domination, the Left pretty much slept through its insidious ascent to power.

The American Left, indeed, has a long and unfortunate history of giving a free pass to Israel, reserving the whole of its diatribe for imperialists of the indigenous variety. (As James Petras makes clear again and again, this is a predictable result of the antiwar movement’s frequently pro-Israel leadership, and the ubiquitous Zionist-liberal influence within it.)

For the traditional Left, this emergence of a Zionist power elite within the United States presents a significant theoretical problem… it really does not follow from the normal Leftist-materialist construction of the political world, and so it tends to be just ignored. The popular antiwar movement slogan “no war for oil” is its residue: the Left is happy to pin the war tail on the donkey of Big Oil, a traditional bogeyman, and one which fits neatly into a materialist paradigm…

This dismal record of “progressives” is what makes the work of James Petras unique. He is an indefatigable Leftist whose widely published anti-imperialist oeuvre covers some fifty years of contributions to some very prestigious journals. He once shared with me that he broadcasts a 30-minute radio program that is heard weekly in Uruguay. For a professor emeritus (retired), James Petras is one heck of a fireball:

In 2006 he broke new ground with the first installment of what I am going to call his current trilogy: The Power of Israel in the United States. Fully a year before Walt and Mearsheimer would critique this same phenomenon from an Establishmentarian perspective in their The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,” Petras was exposing it from the Left. While other critics considered themselves cutting-edge for attacking the “neo-conservatives” (neo-cons), this did not suffice for James Petras… after all, the roots of neo-conservatism are not conservative at all, but Zionist….and so he coined the term “Zion-con” to emphasize this analytic difference. Where Walt and Mearsheimer, in their effort to encompass the wider phenomenon of Zionist organization and power in America, would stretch the term “Israel Lobby” to cover a multifarious network of Zionist-Israel’s promoters, many of whom do not engage in actual lobbying, Petras approaches the same phenomenon with fresh conceptual clarity, naming it the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which has become the bedrock of his further analysis — “a complex network of interrelated and informal groupings, operating at the international, national, regional and local levels, and directly and systematically subordinated to the State of Israel, its power holders and key decision makers.”(p.46)

The second work in this series, Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire,was published a year ago. While that work is concerned primarily with Latin American and other rulers, examining the extent to which they really represent a political challenge to US imperialism, several chapters continue his analysis of the ZPC, which he says “far exceeds the resources of AIPAC or the ‘the Lobby.’”

As I reflect on Petras’ series of books dealing with this subject, I am reminded of the hurricane I recently weathered: like its pulsating, blistering winds, each of Petras’ attempts to grapple with this problem is more sweeping and intense than the last, sweeping the moribund detritus off the political landscape and leaving us with fresh, clear language that perfectly corresponds with the political realities we face, but were formerly unable to name. As Confucius says, the first step to political reform is calling things by their proper names. And in Zionism, Militarism, and the Decline of US Power, Petras’ Zhi’ngmi’ng (the Chinese word for the Confucian “rectification of terms”) keeps pace with fast-moving political developments: Here we meet with the Zion-libs (as opposed to neo-libs); they are no more grounded in traditional liberalism than the Zion-cons are in conservatism. As to the Zion-cons, they have transmogrified into Zion-fascists:

There is no transcendent event that defines the moment in which Zion-Conservatism became Zion-Fascism. The transition was an evolutionary process during which racism, militarism and authoritarianism developed a mass community base, took hold over time, and became the definitive modus operandi of the ZPC.

Like earlier fascist movements, Zion-fascism subscribes to racialist doctrines of knowledge. According to Zionist epistemology only Jews can (if they dare) criticize Jews as knowledge of Jewry is monopolized by a closed communally defined people. This Zion-fascist theory of knowledge is buttressed by the frequent utterances of progressive or leftist Zionists who frequently dismiss or warn non-Jewish writers that they enter the ‘Jewish’ debate at their peril. (p.41)

Much of this latest book anatomizes the political integuments that connect the ship of state to the ZPC, who then navigate it into the stormy sea of Zionist bellicosity. But considerable space is also devoted to reexamining the long history of US provocation of its “enemies” as a pretext for imperial war, and to which the events of 9/11, according to the author, were no exception.

There are two schools of thought within the 9/11 Truth movement: One of them believes that the events were a false flag operation in which some US government had a direct hand. This is the “Made It Happen on Purpose (MHOP)” school. Its counterpart believes that The US government became aware of the 9/11 plan, but allowed it to happen rather than trying to intercept it so that a pretext for Middle East wars could be provided – the Let it Happen On Purpose” (LHOP) school of thought. Petras’ view is an interesting hybrid, where the US government deliberately politically provokes it into happening, then allows it to happen and covers up the role of its own and allied facilitators (the Israelis) in the interest of targeting Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. While my own predilections are of the MHOP variety, for reasons we do not have the space to consider here, I can very much appreciate the detailed expose Petras provides of US government and Israeli support for the 9/11 actions. Whether or not a widening of US militarized imperialism was the actual motivation for causing, provoking or allowing these criminal events to take place, it is unarguable that this is how those events have been politically exploited.

More conceptual groundbreaking is done in his chapter called “Military-driven vs. Market-driven Empire.” Here he cogently makes the case that America’s costly militarized empire building (at Israel’s behest) is costing it much and gaining it little, while Japan, Russia, China and other market-driven imperialists are making tremendous gains with their more constructive approaches. Anyone not familiar with his earlier work might suspect that Petras is advocating the more profitable market-driven empire in place of this costly military-driven one. So I asked the author to respond to a hypothetical reader who might have this concern. I’ll let him speak for himself:

“Opposing the Iraq war and war threats to Iran is in no way implicitly supporting any imperialism..The book argues that there are two paths to empire via capital expansion and via military conquest . One is more destructive the other is more exploitative of labor. Neither is progressive and both must be fought. However, when US imperial power is used –by Zionists- to serve a foreign power-Israel- we have an additional problem: to recover our national independence so that the American people can decide our policies best.”

A clear and reassuring answer, yet I wish he had been clearer about the “both must be fought” aspect in this book for the benefit of new readers. Of course, anyone who doubts it only needs to review his earlier years of published solid opposition to market-driven imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere.

The threat of the ZPC to basic American democratic values and to the integrity of the antiwar movement is clearly spelled out in the book’s final pages. As a lifelong antiwar activist myself, I cannot too strongly concur with this timely observation:

The collapse of the US peace movement, the lack of credibility of many of its leaders and the demoralization of many activists can be traced to strategic failures: the unwillingness to identify and confront the real pro-war movements and the inability to create a political alternative the the bellicose Democratic Party.

Anyone with in an interest in this problem is encouraged to read my recent report about the subversion of the National Assembly against the War (a recent effort to reunify our fractured antiwar movement) by these very same Zionists, who imposed their “war for oil” slogan over the democratic decision of the Assembly to identify the machinations of the Zionist lobbies as a primary cause (Petras spends a great deal of time in his book debunking the “war for oil” canard, as have other cutting-edge writers, such as Jonathon Cook, Israel Adam Shamir, etc.)

All three books in this trilogy are published only in paperback edition, at low prices affordable to working people. Anyone who has come to understand the problem of Zionism in the US political arena, and anyone who is coming to understand it, will not find a better guide than this irrefragable sociologist James Petras, the C. Wright Mills of our times.

Source

January 17, 2010 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | American Left, Israel, James Petras, Middle East, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment

Inviting David Brooks to My Class

M. Shahid Alam | Pulse Media | January 17, 2010

On January 12, the New York Times carried an article by David Brooks on Jews and Israel. It so caught my eye, I decided to bring its conservative author to my class on the economic history of the Middle East. I sent my students the link to this article, asked them to read it carefully, and come to the next class prepared to discuss and dissect its contents.

My students recalled various parts of the NYT article but no one could explain its substance. They recalled David Brooks’ focus on the singular intellectual achievements of American Jews, the enviable record of Israeli Jews as innovators and entrepreneurs, the mobility of Israel’s innovators, etc. One student even spoke of what was not in the article or in the history of Jews – centuries of Jewish struggle to create a Jewish state in Palestine.

But they offered no comments about Brooks’ motivation. Why had he decided to brag about Jewish achievements, a temptation normally eschewed by urbane Jews. In my previous class, while discussing Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, I had discussed how knowledge is suborned by power, how it is perverted by tribalism, and how Western writers had crafted their writings about the Middle East to serve the interests of colonial powers. Not surprisingly, this critique had not yet sunk in.

I coaxed my students, asking them directly to explore if David Brooks had an axe (or more than one) to grind. Was there an elephant in the room they had missed? What was the subtext of the op-ed?

At last, one student moved in the direction of the missing elephant. David Brooks had not mentioned the ‘aid’ that Israel had received from the United States. Did my class know how much? Several eyebrows rose when I informed my students that Israel currently receives close to $3 billion in annual grants from the US, not counting official loan guarantees and tax-deductible contributions by private charities. Since its creation, Israel has received more than $240 billion in grants from the US alone.

We had grasped the elephant’s ear, but what about the rest of it, its head, belly, trunks, tail and tusks. My students did not have a clue – or so it appeared to me.

My students did not understand – or perhaps they did not show it – that no discussion about Israel, especially in the NYT, could be innocent of political motives. Israel is a contested fact, a colonial-settler state, founded on ethnic cleansing, a state of the world’s Jews but not of its Arab population, which continues to marginalize the Palestinians it calls its ‘citizens,’ to dispossess them in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and strangulate them in Gaza. Supported and coddled by the United States and other Western powers, Israel now faces growing protests from diverse segments of Western civil society. Churches, labor unions, professors, students and other activist groups are calling on corporations and governments to divest from, boycott and sanction Israel. As always, but now more than ever, advocates of Israel continue to manufacture myths, opinions, and ‘facts’ that can cover for its crimes against the Palestinians and other Arabs in its neighborhood.

Isn’t that what David Brooks was doing, I asked my class, by painting Jews and Israel in the colors of pure glory?

I saw a few nods of recognition. But one student demurred. ‘Doesn’t everyone glorify his own country. The US too had engaged in ethnic cleansing. What is the difference?”

There are two differences, I submitted. David Brooks is glorifying Israel but he is not Israeli. More to the point, he is glorifying Israel to cover up for Israel’s present and projected crimes against Palestinians. He is covering up for Israeli apartheid that exists here and now.

At this point, many in my class gasped at what they heard. It was a voice dredged from the past. It was a defense of genocide quite frequently advanced in the previous centuries when white settlers were exterminating natives in the Americas, Oceania and Africa. ‘We had done so much better with the land than the natives.” Occasionally, such repugnant ideas from the past, which we think we have buried forever, leak into the public discourse. Perhaps, it is good that they do, to remind us that the past is not dead.

David Brooks starts his article with statistics to show that the Jews “are a famously accomplished group.” Do we need to be convinced of the accomplishments of the Jews? Is there anyone who contests this? So why does Brooks feel the need to support this with statistics? “They make up 0.2 percent of the world population,” he informs us, “but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.” Just in case, these comparisons failed to clinch the point, David Brooks offers more comparative statistics.

Does Brooks wish to rub in the point? Or is he saying, Look at all the great things we have done for you Gentiles. We are indispensable. Don’t you criticize what we do? Don’t you go against us? Or does he feel so personally inadequate, this forces him to seek comfort not in Jewish accomplishments – as he claims – but in Jewish superiority?

Alas, the Jews in Israel have not matched the achievements of the Jews in the Diaspora. The Jewish state contains close to 40 percent of the world’s Jewish population, but very few of the Jewish Nobel laureates are Israelis. Only nine Israelis in sixty-one years have won the Nobel prize. If we exclude the three ‘Peace’ laureates – wouldn’t you, if you knew who they are – that leaves six. Only three of these six were born in Israel, and one was born there while his parents were visiting relatives in Tel Aviv. Hardly a great total. Ireland, with a smaller population, has six Nobel laureates.

David Brooks knows this. “The odd thing,” he writes, “is that Israel has not traditionally been strongest where the Jews in the Diaspora were strongest.” Why has Israel fallen short? Blame it on the Palestinians and the Arabs. “Instead of research and commerce, Israelis were forced to devote their energies to fighting and politics.” Brook’s intent would have been clear even without my italics.

That was in the past, however. Israel is now bubbling over with innovation and entrepreneurship. Tel Aviv is now “one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots.” Once again, statistics are offered to establish Israel’s leadership in civilian research and development. Israel’s more ominous leadership in military technology is not mentioned.

Moreover – and this is David Brooks’ point – this technological success “is the fruition of the Zionist dream.” Then follows another piece of chauvinism. Israel was “not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world.”

David Brooks disguises Israel’s second round of colonial expansion that began in June 1967 as a diversion from the main goal of Zionism, a distraction created by ‘stray’ settlers in Hebron. The close to half a million Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, supported, financed, and protected by the world’s fourth most powerful military are minimized as ‘stray’ settlers in Hebron, who are a problem only because they are surrounded by ‘angry’ Palestinians.

Israel was founded – David Brooks asserts, invoking the language of Zionism – so Jews could have a “safe place” and create “things for the world.” Has Israel been a safe place for Jews? Safer than the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or even the Arab world before the Zionist movement became official in 1917? Plausibly, the answer is, No.

One must also ask, What ‘things’ has Israel created for the world? What ‘things’ has Israel given to the Arab world, other than wars, massacres, ethnic cleansings, occupations, war crimes, and alibis to its rulers to create repressive regimes. What has it given to that other world – the Western world – that Brooks probably has in mind? It has jeopardized their strategic interests in the Islamicate. On more than one occasion, it has brought the United States close to nuclear collision with the Soviet Union. The most valuable ‘things’ that Israelis provide to Western powers, to the United States in particular as an occupying power in Iraq and Afghanistan, are the technology and tactics they have been perfecting while crushing the Palestinian resistance. But David Brooks cannot talk about this.

Then comes the coup de grace. This is the blow aimed close to Brook’s primary target – the Arabs. Jewish and Israeli superiority must finally be placed against the terrible paucity of Arab creativity. Arabs are asked to declare the patents they have registered in the United States. The astronomical gap between Arab and Israeli patents can have only one cause. The Arabs do not have the “tradition of free intellectual exchange and technical creativity (my italics).” In true Orientalist style, blame Arab failures on Arab culture.
Ironically, the two countries Brooks picks to make his point – Egypt and Saudi Arabia – are the closest Arab allies of the United States. The US never wags its finger at the despotic monarchy in Saudi Arabia or the repressive dictatorship that has controlled Egypt for decades. The United States can only strive to bring ‘democracy’ to its enemies.

Yet for all its triumphalism and crude claims of superiority, the NYT op-ed ends on a disappointing note. Israel’s innovators – the sons of Zionist dreamers – bring no commitment to Israel. Just a little instability, and they will vote with their feet. “American Jews used to keep a foothold in Israel in case things got bad here. Now Israelis keep a foothold in the U.S.” As remarkable as it is, Israel’s success is “also highly mobile.”

Is David Brooks the great friend of Israel that he must believe he is? All that any one has to do to destroy Israel’s economy, he writes, is “to foment enough instability so the entrepreneurs decide they had better move to Palo Alto, where many of them [Israelis] already have contacts and homes.”

What sad and strange thinking. Perhaps, this is what happens when a person is imprisoned inside the nightmare that was sold to the Jews as the great Zionist dream. Brooks confirms that this nightmare cannot be saved by Israel’s technological prowess. Apparently, Israel’s greatest success story – its cutting-edge technology companies – are also footloose. They could be heading for the exits at the first sign of instability.

Technological prowess will not save Jewish apartheid – nothing will. But Jews can shore their lives and build a more promising future for themselves by discovering their common humanity with the Arabs, by making amends to the Palestinians, and learning to give back to the Palestinians what they have taken from them over the past nine decades.

The Zionists are prisoners of a bad dream: they must first free themselves, break free from the prison in which they can only play the part of tormentors, if they and especially their Palestinian victims are to live normal lives.

–M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston. He is author of Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Palgrave Macmillan: 2009). You can reach him at alqalam02760@yahoo.com.

January 17, 2010 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

The United States, Israel and the retreat of freedom

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 14 January 2010

The world is suffering from a “freedom recession” according to a new report from the American think tank Freedom House (“Freedom in the World 2010,” 12 January 2010).

Established in 1941, Freedom House markets itself as “an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change, monitors the status of freedom around the world, and advocates for democracy and human rights.” Its board of directors, chaired by a former US deputy secretary of defense, is a who’s who of Democratic and Republican former US government officials, prominent neoconservatives and Israel lobby stalwarts such as Tom Dine, former executive director of AIPAC. In 2007, more than two-thirds of its $16 million budget came directly from the United States government.

Not surprisingly then, Freedom House’s report reveals more about the groupthink of the US establishment — especially with respect to its continued efforts to dominate the Middle East and ensure Israel’s supremacy — than it does about the countries surveyed.

Focusing on two categories of “freedom” — “civil liberties” and “political rights” — the report divides the world’s 194 countries into three groups: “free” (89), “partly free” (58), and “not free” (47).

Interestingly, Freedom House records “declines in freedom” in “countries that had registered positive trends in previous years, including Bahrain, Jordan, Kenya and Kyrgyzstan.” Jordan was one of only six countries to move from the “partly free” category to “not free.” What does it say about US “democracy promotion” that Jordan, Bahrain and Kyrgyzstan — major political and military operating bases for the “war on terror” and US-led occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan — have become less free as their dependence on the US has increased?

Sadly, while the report frets that “the most powerful authoritarian regimes [such as Russia and China] have become more repressive, more influential in the international arena, and more uncompromising,” it has nothing at all to say about the US role in restricting freedom and spreading mayhem around the world. Sometimes this is truly absurd as the report points to “continued terrorist and insurgent violence in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen,” but fails to note that two of these countries are under direct US military occupation (Afghanistan and Iraq) while the US is intervening militarily in the other three. (The report presents a mixed picture for the US-occupied countries; both are “Not Free” but Iraq allegedly became more free during 2009 and Afghanistan less free.)

Rather than offer any introspection on the inverse relationship between US efforts at global domination on the one hand, and the spread of freedom on the other, the report’s overview essay concludes with a call for more vigorous intervention: “The United States and other democracies should take the initiative to meet the authoritarian challenge …”

Freedom House’s approach to Israel provides the starkest example of the abyss into which liberal thinking has fallen on the relationship between colonialism and freedom. Israel, we are told, “remains the only country in the [Middle East] region to hold a Freedom in the World designation of Free.” We are informed euphemistically that “The beginning of the year [2009] was marred by fierce fighting between the Israeli military and the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip.”

There is no mention of the deliberate targeting by Israel of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and the resulting massive destruction, and death and injury to thousands of Palestinian civilians. Nothing is said of the denial of fundamental political, civil and human rights, or freedom of movement, association and education to four million Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and siege in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There is no mention of the systematic discrimination, and social and political exclusion faced by 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, nor of the denial of the right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees.

There is an acknowledgment that “Hundreds of people were arrested during demonstrations against the Gaza conflict, and the parliamentary elections committee passed a measure banning two political parties from national elections, though the ban was quickly overturned by the Supreme Court.”

Despite this, on the tables accompanying the report, “Israel” receives the highest score of “1” for political rights, and a very respectable “2” for civil liberties — on a par with Italy and Japan. The overall impression is of minor glitches that could occur in any exemplary “Western” democracy.

Then on a separate table of “Disputed Territories” we find “Israeli-occupied territories” and “Palestinian Authority-administered territories” both listed. Both are given the designation “Not Free” and nearly the lowest scores for political rights and civil liberties. There is no narrative to explain who is responsible for this dire state of affairs. This convenient separation allows for all the ugly realities of what “free” Israel does in the occupied territories to be pushed out of sight and ignored.

But in what scheme can Israel be awarded freest of the free status when for two-thirds of its existence, since 1967, it has ruled directly over millions of disenfranchised Palestinians through violence and repression? The idea that the political regime in Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries can be looked at as a “democracy” even while the situation in the occupied territories can be criticized as undemocratic is very widespread among Israelis and American liberals.

Former US President Jimmy Carter has been excoriated (and recently forced to apologize) by the Israel lobby for calling the situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip “apartheid.” Yet even he had simultaneously claimed that within its pre-1967 boundaries, “Israel is a wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew.” True, Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote and are accorded civil rights far wider than their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But even Israeli Jews commonly concede that Palestinian citizens suffer systematic and severe disadvantage and total exclusion from key political decisions about the country.

Israeli Jewish leftists (a rapidly dwindling group) and Western liberal sympathizers tend to view Israel within its 1967 boundaries as a flawed democracy — perfectible with a reallocation of resources and less discrimination against non-Jews, even as they remain fully invested in maintaining Israel as a “Jewish state” with a Jewish demographic majority.

They view the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the original sin that corrupted a purer Zionist vision, and thus remain fixated on the chimera of “ending the occupation” through a “two-state solution.” Once this nirvana is reached, so they believe, Israel can resume its destiny as a liberal democratic state among others.

But it is not just the discrimination and limited rights of Palestinian citizens and other non-Jews that undermine the claim that Israel — considered separately from the West Bank and Gaza Strip — is a democracy. Nor is it even that Israeli settler-citizens in the West Bank have full voting rights for the Israeli parliament while Palestinians in the same territory have none. It is that “Israel” and the “occupied territories” are two sides of the same coin.

Israel’s 1948 and subsequent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and ongoing repressive rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not exceptional or temporary conditions. They are constitutive of the situation that allows Israeli Jews to currently claim they live in a (flawed) liberal democracy.

To be clear, the argument is not that conditions in Israel and the occupied territories are indistinguishable; rather it is that they form a single interdependent system. Israeli Jews can “freely” elect a Jewish government in Israel only because most Palestinians have already been ethnically cleansed. Thus the maintenance of this “liberal democratic” Jewish space depends directly on the permanent denial of fundamental rights to Palestinians.

Palestinian citizens of Israel — who form 20 percent of the population within Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries — are, as noted, accorded limited liberal rights. This helps boost Israel’s external image as a “wonderful democracy,” but if the exercise of these rights ever threatens Jewish domination, they are curtailed. Examples include the constant legal harassment of Palestinian members of the Knesset, and various legislative projects for loyalty oaths or to ban commemoration of the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians. Overwhelming Israeli Jewish opposition to calls by Palestinians in Israel for the country to be a “state of all its citizens” is an indication that Israeli Jews value their own supremacy over democracy.

Israel has sometimes been described as an “ethnocracy” — a state where one ethnic group dominates and enjoys a wide range of liberal rights which are denied to others. But these liberal rights depend directly on the successful repression of the non-privileged ethnic group(s). As rebellions by the disenfranchised require ever greater levels of repression and violence to control, the repression must also be turned inwards.

In recent days, Israel extended for six months a ban on Sheikh Raed Salah, an Israeli citizen, and leader of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, from traveling to Jerusalem, Israel’s ostensible capital, where he had been exercising his civil rights to campaign against Israeli efforts to “Judaize” the city. (Separately Salah was also sentenced to nine months in prison for allegedly assaulting a police officer during a 2007 demonstration; a conviction condemned as political persecution by other Palestinian leaders inside Israel.)

Such repression does not only affect non-Jews. The United Nations-commissioned Goldstone report noted “that actions of the Israeli government” within Israel, during and after Israel’s invasion of Gaza last winter, “including interrogation of political activists, repression of criticism and sources of potential criticism of Israeli military actions, in particular nongovernmental organizations, have contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent with the government and its actions in the Occupied Territories is not tolerated.”

These means of “internal” repression resemble the movement bans, censorship and other forms of harassment that the South African apartheid regime began to deploy in its late stages against dissenting whites, eroding the “liberal democratic” space they had for so long enjoyed at the expense of the country’s black majority.

Maintaining a Jewish-controlled “liberal democratic” regime in Palestine/Israel is incompatible with the exercise of the inalienable rights of Palestinians. It emphatically depends on their permanent violation, especially the right of return. But the exercise of the inalienable rights of Palestinians — an end to discrimination against Palestinian citizens, dismantling the 1967 occupation regime, and the right of return for refugees — is fully compatible with Israeli Jews exercising the human, civil, political and cultural rights to which they are unquestionably entitled.

As a first step toward imagining and creating such a framework, we have to ditch the absurd idea reproduced by Freedom House, that Israeli Jews can epitomize perfect freedom while imposing perfect tyranny and dispossession on a greater number of human beings who belong to the same country.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.

January 14, 2010 Posted by aletho | Deception, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

Meritocracy and Jewish kinship networks

By Philip Weiss | January 13, 2010

A lot of people are talking about David Brooks’s distastefully-smug column in the Times yesterday about Jewish achievement, in which he says that we are 2 percent of the U.S. population and 25 percent of this and that. And that we get all the patents in the Middle East while the Arabs smoke hookahs.

He asks how this can be, and talks about our incredible culture. I agree: it’s a helluva bookish culture. Though that same intellectual culture is going out the window now that the chief occupation of Jewish leadership is saying, Repeat after us, apartheid is democracy.

But I’d like to inject a realistic note here. How much of Jewish achievement reflects the fact that Jews look out for one another? When I had to get a partner on this website to keep it going, I was most comfortable getting another Jew. Years ago when I was at the Harvard Crimson newspaper, my Irish-Catholic friend Mary Ridge informed me that it was a “Jewish club”–we selected for our own kind; and the Crimson produced a lot of professional journalism talent. I have gotten most of my journalism work from Jewish bosses.

Jews have kinship networks as strong as other people’s, maybe more strong. All that Hollywood talent– producers are always aware of who is a Jew, and I am sure they feel more comfortable hiring Jews. Landsman. My parents liked the idea of my marrying a Jew because Jews are gemutlich, as my mom always says– family, kin. We know all the social cues, can finish one another’s sentences, etc.

And look at the New York Times, where Brooks works. Is it an expression of Jewish genius that most of the political columnists are Jewish? Tom Friedman, Nick Kristof, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, David Brooks et al. Or does it maybe reflect the fact that a Jewish family has majority ownership of the newspaper and that most of the big editors have been Jewish and at some level, unconscious or otherwise, they favor Jews?

So I think some of the amazing record of Jewish achievement reflects discrimination; and Jews are powerful enough in this society that we ought to be conscious of that. Brooks has often praised the late sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, and Baltzell said as much about the last establishment; he said that WASPs favor other WASPs, and that it was hurting the American establishment.

I venture that the same thing is happening today in the Jewish portion of the establishment. We discriminate in favor of our own; and it’s doing a number on foreign policy.

What should be done about this? Jews in powerful positions should be aware of this, and seek greater diversity in their hiring.

Source

January 13, 2010 Posted by aletho | Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Israeli deputy FM Danny Ayalon plays “the Great Dictator”

By Ein Katzenfreund | Aletho News | January 13, 2010

Daniel Ayalon looms over Turkey’s Ambassador in a photo-op set up by Israel’s Foreign Ministry

The Israeli government is convinced that the world does not understand the true nature of the regime of Tel-Aviv. The Israeli Foreign Ministry has therefore decided to clarify the true character of the regime in Tel Aviv to the world. To that end the Israeli deputy Foreign Minister, Daniel Ayalon, summoned the Turkish ambassador to Israel, Oguz Çelikkol, to give him a note of protest over an episode of the Turkish espionage drama Valley of the Wolves, and Turkish criticism of Israel. Israel News reports how the Israeli representative behaved:

“In accordance with orders from Lieberman, Ayalon meant to humiliate the ambassador. He called him into a room in his Knesset office and not to the Foreign Ministry in order to ‘reprimand’ him,” the article noted.

The reporters who arrived in order to cover the meeting on Monday had asked Ayalon and Celikkol to shake hands, however the former refused. “The important thing is that they see he’s sitting lower and we’re up high and that there’s only one flag, and you see we’re not smiling,” Ayalon muttered in Hebrew with the embarrassed Turkish envoy next to him.

This footage was then shown on the Israeli prime time news and Israeli newspapers ran front page stories with the picture showing the humiliation of the Turkish ambassador. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is reportedly very comfortable with the behavior of his deputy.

Of course the Turkish press covered the incident also, but from a different viewpoint.

In response Turkey summoned Israel’s ambassador to Ankara demanding Israel apologize, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan commented on the incident saying Israeli attitudes offending Turkey “will always get a response.” Erdogan likely knows that he can deal more harshly with Israel now because after this incident a harsh reply will not only be backed by the majority of the Islamic population of Turkey in solidarity with their suppressed Muslim brothers in Palestine, but also by the proud nationalists of the Turkish military.

It’s easy for the world to understand the Israeli message. This way of humiliating state guests is well known. Charlie Chaplin has shown in his well known film “The Great Dictator” ironically how Hitler tried to humiliate his guest by placing him on a specially low chair.

Israeli deputy FM Danny Ayalon has simply played Hitler’s role exactly. So the Israeli message is very clear: the Israeli government wants the world to know that it is acting as stupid as Hitler in his worst parody. To clarify that Danny Ayalon speaks for Israel as a whole, the Israeli flag was prominently placed on the table.

Meanwhile in Tehran nuclear physics scientist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi was murdered with a remotely controlled booby-trapped motorbike blast which pretty much looks like the work of assassinations trained by the Israeli Mossad.

The author manages a German language news blog at – http://www.mein-parteibuch.com/

January 12, 2010 Posted by aletho | Aletho News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Supremacism, Social Darwinism | Leave a comment

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The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’

Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023

If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .

If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .

If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .

. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.

USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue

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Daniel Ayalon looms over Turkey’s Ambassador in a photo-op set up by Israel’s Foreign Ministry

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