The West Bank – I wanted to write about Mahmud, the thirteen year old boy that ever since his return from Ofer prison is the first of the children who hurry to greet me on my arrival.
Perhaps this is because finally someone has taken an interest in his fate.
It isn’t often that someone expresses interest and concern for the children of Qalandiya. More than often people make demands of them, reject them and abuse them.
These children are destined to servitude.
I no longer regard Mahmud as just another child in the bunch, he is an individual, he is noticed, his photograph is taken, he smiles, he waits for that specific day in the week when he receives his photos, and when I ask him about the leg that was injured when he was beaten, he tilts his head with timidity, which is uncommon among him and his friends, and then smiles and replies: “no, it doesn’t hurt any more…”and with a hint of embarrassment he agrees to tell some of his prison stories.
Mahmud said that there were eight people sharing his cell, people of all ages, that the youngest was a boy of ten from Jalazone refugee camp who was serving three months, he said that he himself, Mahmud, wasn’t beaten in prison, he was just taken in for interrogation, that he denied having anything to do with the stones that were thrown and that the investigators demanded that he give them names. On his release he received his clothes back, “they didn’t take the money”, and the profit he made at work on the day he was arrested, had remained in his pockets and was enough to cover the ride back home.
Some hours later, between midnight and dawn, twenty two year old Moatassem Adwan and twenty three year old Ali Kalifa from Qalandiya refugee camp, were shot to death.
And I knew that it was all connected, like links in an elongating chain of horror. I knew that I must also write about all that occurred on that night, for together with knowledge and familiarity comes a duty to tell the story and give voice to the living children and to the children that had been shot.
I knew that I must write about the fifteen year old boy, that when coming to arrest him an entire unit of soldiers raided the allies of the refugee camp on the early morning of the first day of the Ramadan. After having knocked the door open, the soldiers searched the house, making a mess and raising havoc. Having not been able to find the boy they took his cousin as hostage.
About the father who did not praise his lord for having saved his son, but instead like Abraham, the father of the two nations, he took his beloved by the hand on the next morning and went with him so that the exchange could be preformed. He handed in his son to those seeking him.
About the mother who watched the two holding one another, walking away, walking and disappearing, heading towards her destruction.
About the failed plan of those invaders who hurried to pull the trigger as soon as they saw two young men in front them.
I must write about my encounter with Ali Kalifa, the same Ali Kalifa who had a rifle’s bullet penetrate his back, it pierced his body from one side and then exited from the other.
About having taken a photo of Ali Kalifa not long before that bitter day, as it is, children of all ages wish to have their picture taken so that they have a memento of their portrait.
About how this might just have been the last photo to ever commemorate the living Ali. H’, a friend of Ali, told me that this photo had been placed at his parents grieving shade.
About my encounter with this young man who would look you straight in the eyes over a light conversation, about how he would imagine himself living in a reality that is unattainable for someone from a refugee camp. It is just as well since those imaginations and dreams were his haven and comfort.
And that this is the story of the children whose backs and napes are exposed and unprotected, for they, the children of Qalandiya are an allegory to the story of the occupation.
(Translated by Ruth Fleishman)
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As a member of Machsomwatch, once a week Tamar Fleishman heads out to document the checkpoints between Jerusalem and Ramallah. This documentation (reports, photos and videos) can be found on the organization’s site: www.machsomwatch.org. She is also a member of the Coalition of Women for Peace and volunteer in Breaking the Silence.
BETHLEHEM — The Israeli military systematically denies Palestinians the right to protest in the West Bank, a report published Monday by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem says.
The ‘Show of Force’ report finds that Israel does not recognize the “basic right” of Palestinians to protest and responds to demonstrations with an “excessive use of crowd control weapons.”
The army often fires tear gas canisters “directly at protesters,” a practice which B’Tselem says violates the military’s own orders.
In most cases the army treats protests as “disturbances” and disperses processions even in the absence of violent acts by protesters, according to the report.
B’Tselem examined the conduct of Israeli forces in weekly demonstrations held in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh over the past year and a half.
It found that the response of the Israeli army indiscriminately harms all village residents through the closure of roads and the imposition of Friday curfews which expose a large number of people to delays and restrictions.
Residents are also exposed to the effects of excessive tear gas which “penetrates their homes.”
The Israeli rights group documented four consecutive demonstrations with video and field observation between June 17 and July 8 and interviewed village residents.
The Israeli military does not “recognize the right to demonstrate” in the West Bank, B’Tselem stated. It called on the Israeli army to respect Palestinians’ right to protest and use “proportionate” means where necessary to disperse protesters.
In a cabinet meeting on Sunday, the Israeli ministers approved a plan based on the ‘Prawer Report’, which involves the forced removal of 30,000 Arab Bedouin villagers in southern Israel from their homes.
The Bedouin people have lived in southern Israel for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but when Israel was created in 1948, the Israeli government chose not to recognize the Bedouin as residents, and have destroyed their homes over and over again in the decades since.
Israeli troops undertake the removal of a Bedouin community in Israel
After Sunday’s decision was announced, around 150 Bedouins gathered outside the office of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to protest the plan. Some have termed it ‘ethnic cleansing’, and a Bedouin representative told Israeli reporters with Ha’aretz newspaper that the displacement plan represented a ‘declaration of war’ by the Israeli government against the Bedouin people.
Israel has created three ‘recognized’ areas for the Bedouins to settle in, near the municipal dump for the city of Jerusalem, and has repeatedly attempted to force the tens of thousands of ‘unrecognized’ Bedouins from their ancestral homes and into these areas, which many of the Bedouin view as ghettoes. The ‘recognized’ areas also do not include space for the animals of the Bedouin, many of whom are shepherds and require space for the sheep to graze.
When the ‘Prawer Report’, commissioned by the Israeli government to come up with a ‘solution’ to end the ‘Bedouin problem’, was released in June, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed numerous objections to the report.
The report says that the ‘unrecognized’ Bedouin villages must meet a number of criteria in order to be ‘recognized’, including economic sustainability and contiguity – criteria which many Bedouin people say involve the forced urbanization of their rural culture.
According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, “If the same criteria were applied to the Jewish population, whole settlements – including community settlements, observatories, kibbutzim and moshavim – would be doomed”.
As schools around the world begin another year of instruction, one school, near to completion in one of the most grief-stricken and resilient areas of occupied Palestine, has suffered a massive set-back because the Israeli military has carried away its infrastructure- the Vittorio Arrigone school, in the small village of Ras Al Auja in the Jordan Valley.
Israeli soldiers confiscate and take away a donated caravan that was to serve as a classroom (Photo: Jordan Valley Solidarity Campaign)
The Arrigoni school, named after the Italian International Solidarity Movement activist killed in Gaza this April, began in February as a small tent school in the village of Ras Al Auja, and began evolving into a more permanent mud-brick and caravan structure in April. Built jointly by the Ras Al Auja community and the activist group Jordan Valley Solidarity, the school, once built, will educate young children up to the age of 13 in one of the areas of the West Bank hardest hit by the Israeli occupation. From the time that Israel seized control of the area in 1967 until the present, the resident Palestinian population has decreased from 320,000 residents to 56,000, as 36 primarily agricultural Israeli settlements, housing 6,400 settlers, have been constructed on 50% of the Jordan Valley’s land.
Ras Al Auja is a Bedouin community seven km west of the larger community of Al Auja. Both serve as paradigmatic examples of the devastating impact of Israeli occupation on Bedouin in the Jordan Valley. Until Israel’s occupation, Al Auja was for millennia an oasis, famous for its ever-flowing spring. As it says on the website of Jordan Valley Solidarity, “people would come to Al Auja from all over to swim, fish and sit among the banana groves that once grew there.” In 1972, the Israeli water company Mekorot, which has monopolized the West Bank water, dug two deep water wells in Al Auja, cutting off the flow of water before it reached the village. “These wells lowered the water table, drying out the spring. Today the area is a desert, crossed with dried-up canals that see water one or two weeks every year during the rainy season.”
As is commonplace for the larger West Bank Bedouin communities, families must use tractors and mobile water tanks to bring water to their homes and villages, at considerable personal expense. The estimated amount of water that one Palestinian in the Valley consumes per day, for drinking as well as all other activities, is some 70 litres. Jordan Valley settlers, on the other hand, enjoy free access to water and, from the comfort of their heavily subsidized, modern settlement homes, individually consume about 33 times as much water as their Palestinian neighbors in the Valley.
To make matters worse, the families of Al Auja and Ras Al Auja, who settled there after expulsion from Beer Sheva during the 1948 Nakba, used to have “over 100 sheep or goats each, which they grazed on the mountains and watered at the spring”. Now, the settlements of Yitav, Niran and ‘Omer’s Farm’ have colonized the surrounding mountains, an army military checkpoint borders Ras Al Auja to the south, and two enormous settler-only water towers cast a grim shade over the dry Al Auja spring. ‘Omer’s Farm’, in particular, has stolen half the land of Ras Al Auja in the five years of its existence. It consists of a single family, on a hilltop, surrounded by stolen farmland, heavily guarded by the Israeli military.
The men of Al Auja, according to Jordan Valley Solidarity, “are reduced to surviving by working in Israel’s illegal settlements, earning a pittance. The area feels like little more than a work camp, reminiscent of the townships of apartheid South Africa, with all the men away during the day in the settlements.” The Bedouin now work for settlers, to farm land that the latter stole from them. While they were previously self-sufficient farmers, the residents, now wage-laborers, making scarcely enough to get by.
In March 2011, Jordan Valley Solidarity joined with community members to construct a school for children of the 130+ families of Ras Al Auja. Over the course of two weeks, volunteers sewed sack cloths together to construct a makeshift tent school, where women from the community began to teach 30 children, mostly aged between 5 and 8, a basic curriculum of math, English, Arabic, geography and history. It was vitally important to establish a school in Ras Al Auja, says Jordan Valley Solidarity coordinator, volunteer and driving force ‘Jane’, who has been involved with this project since its inception, because “if you don’t have education when you’re a small child, that means that when you go to school you’re behind already. Education is a basic human right. These people have a right to education in their community.”
Before construction of this school, the children of Ras Al Auja were forced to walk 7 kilometres each morning to the school in al Auja. As the foot path trailed right next to two Israeli settlements, exposing children to regular physical and psychological settler harassment, many parents were wary of sending their young children to school. In addition, numerous fathers are off working in these very Israeli settlements, thus unavailable to assist their children in the mornings. Numerous children, therefore, were left without an education until later years.
Today, because the new school in Ras Al Auja only educates children aged 7 to 13, those children over 13 lucky enough to continue their education still need to take this daily trek to the Al Auja Secondary School, where they can study for the Tawjihi (matriculation exams). Mossem Zubaidat, a volunteer with Jordan Valley Solidarity who also works with the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education, relates how “there is no transport to take them to the village, so they use their legs to go to school in summer and winter. It is hard for them to put the bag on their back and walk all the distance… We need to build the school because in Ras Al Auja the people live in boxes, not in houses, they live in tents! We are certain to build a school there, it is our land and we can build a school anywhere!”
The Israeli army does not agree. The Area A, B and C zoning system was established for the West Bank after the 1993 Oslo Accords to designate areas of full Palestinian control, joint Palestinian civil and Israeli military control, and full Israeli control, respectively. Because 95% of the Jordan Valley, including al Auja and Ras al Auja, falls under Area C (50% because of Israeli settlements and 45% because of military training grounds and nature reserves), this means that almost nowhere in the Valley can the Bedouin build any permanent structure without requiring an Israeli permit, which is expensive to apply for and almost impossible to obtain. Between January 2000 and September 2007, Israel issued almost 5,000 demolition orders against Palestinian structures in the Jordan Valley. Of those, 1,663 demolitions were carried out – Israeli bulldozers tore down houses, schools, animal shelters and even entire villages.
The stated purpose of Israel’s vise-like grip on ownership and control of the Valley is to hold a security buffer space between Israel and Jordan, necessary to defend the country; in reality, however, Israel covets the Valley because (1) the West Bank, which could serve as a future Palestinian state, is thereby surrounded on all sides by Israel; (2) the West Bank is thereby cut off from economic interaction and communication with Jordan, and the rest of the Middle East; and (3) in the words of the soon to be published Jordan Valley Solidarity factbook To Exist Is To Resist, the Jordan Valley’s “abundance of water resources, fertile soil and natural minerals offer competitive economic advantages in agriculture, industry and tourism. It also constitutes a geographical “reservoir” of land where the Palestinians could establish housing projects and public facilities.”
Israel’s policy of constant settlement expansion, pervasive military checkpoints, destruction or closure of Palestinian roads (the last few years have seen 17 new roadblocks and 4 new checkpoints in the Jordan Valley), construction of Israeli-only bypass roads and physical intimidation, harassment, and outright demolition of Bedouin villages in Area C is evidence of a conscious attempt to gradually exterminate a Palestinian presence in the Jordan Valley, to cement Israeli control and solidify a long-term Israeli presence that remains illegal under international law. Jane explains the role of Jordan Valley Solidarity in resisting the Israeli occupation: “By supporting communities to construct infrastructure for basic services, we support them to stay in their communities, on their land- because the Israelis want them to leave the Jordan Valley, or to make them move into the 5% of the land which is in area A or B to create an Israeli state with Palestinian ghettoes.” The establishment of a school in Ras Al Auja, like countless other projects in the Valley, is not primarily a gesture of humanitarian aid, but rather a symbol of international solidarity. “The aim of lack of education is to drive people from their land. What that means is that the right to education for people is really important…as a basic human right, it’s not something that can be taken away from children… Therefore our motto is ‘to exist is to resist’, and the people in Ras Al Auja are existing and resisting just by being there, and being on their land is their resistance, so we support them in their resistance…together, [we are] using their own land that the people live on to create a fact on the ground to resist the Israeli occupation.”
It was in this spirit of resistance that, in April, it was decided that a tent school, though an important first step, was too small and impermanent to meet the community’s needs. Accordingly, over 100 international volunteers and community members began constructing two permanent mud-brick classroom buildings. After the death of Italian International Solidarity Movement activist Vittorio Arrigoni in Gaza that April, the Ras Al Auja community, which personally knows the vital role of international activism, requested to name the school Vittorio Arrigoni. From the Jordan Valley Solidarity website- “Vittorio was, and will remain, a great symbol of resistance. To give his name to one of our schools is an honour, and we will do our best to make this school another example of resistance against the occupation.” On 25 April 25t Luisa Morgantini, former Vice President of the European Parliament, Majed Al Fityani, Jericho Governor, 50 Italian volunteers, members of the local community, and Jordan Valley Solidarity volunteers laid the first brick of the Vittorio Solidarity school while singing ‘Bella Ciao’ and the Socialist International anthem.
It is this spirit of resistance that the Israeli army is acting to suppress. During the month of Ramadan, the Ras Al Auja school joyously received a donation of two large caravans, which would serve as classrooms. Yet at 10.30 a.m. on 7 September, in Jane’s words, “the Israeli occupation force arrived and removed the caravans on lorries, leaving paperwork… they made all the village stay back and declared it was a closed military zone while they removed the caravans”.
Jericho Governor Majed Al Fityani, who laid the first brick of the Vittorio Arrigoni school in April, said Wednesday afternoon that “we were surprised by the Israeli actions this morning, we were not expecting this from the Israelis. We are going to request an official answer from the Israelis for why they took the caravans… it is the duty of the government to provide education for the people. it is a question of providing services and facilities for the students, free of charge. It is very difficult to provide services because the school is in Area C, so it is impossible for us to build structures there.”
The start of classes will be postponed until further accommodations are arranged for the students. In addition, a celebration and official announcement ceremony for the school, planned for September 15, will now be postponed.
Nonetheless, the community of Ras Al Auja, along with Jordan Valley Solidarity, remains resilient in the face of this new obstacle. Explains Mossem Zubaidat, “its not the first school we built with Jordan Valley Solidarity. The first school was in Jiftlik, it started in tents, now it’s a building. The second school is in Fasayil. We built it from mud and soil and tents, and now it has become a building. So we have experience with the Israelis about these situations. We are sure that we are going to build that school again, and we must build that school for these people. We are going to talk to the media, we are going to talk to the Jericho Governorate, and we are going to talk to the community, to do something about it. The army says it is illegal, but we say it is legal, because it is Palestinian land!…We have to build the school because we need to stand with these people in their land, not to leave their land to the Israelis. We are going to fight to build that school again, we are not going to surrender!”
At around 6pm downtown, the numbers of protesters who had been calling for an end to military trials, among other demands on the ruling military council, was beginning to thin from tens of thousands earlier in the afternoon to thousands.
Many people were leaving Tahrir Square. However, a few thousand were not going home. They were heading to the Israeli Embassy located about four miles away from the square on the Giza bank of the Nile that divides Greater Cairo into two.
News had been arriving all afternoon that hundreds of protesters with hammers had been demolishing a wall that the Giza governorate had finished erecting just days before around the tall apartment building that houses the Israeli Embassy.
The governor of Giza wanted the wall to protect Tel Aviv’s embassy from the wrath of Egyptians whose hostility to Israeli oppression of the Palestinians was greatly compounded by a recent Israeli attack inside Egyptian territory which left six Egyptian soldiers dead.
We, I and two other journalists, one Egyptian and the other American, could not find any taxis to give us a lift to the embassy. All taxi drivers had already heard through radio reports that big things were happening around the Israeli “compound” and declined a potential LE10 fare.
So we took a LE1 microbus that dropped us as close as possible to “hell”.
As we made our way through streets filled with drivers anxious to avoid passing by the embassy, hundreds of young people carrying Egyptian flags and some Palestinian flags were hurrying on foot from all directions to join celebrations underway on Kobri El-Gamea, the bridge leading to the square on which the 22-storey building housing the embassy resides.
Some 30 years ago, the Israeli government picked this bizarre spot to house its embassy. Unlike nearly every other embassy in Cairo, the Israeli embassy is not housed in a palatial villa, but rather in three levels atop a fairly normal high rise building, far up and looking over a main thoroughfare in Giza.
The axis on which the building stands includes a circular square, off which also is located the Cairo Zoo and Cairo University 600 meters away on one side, and is separated in distance by 100 metres from the villa that houses the Saudi Embassy, and by 500 metres from the Giza headquarters of the Ministry of Interior on the other side.
Many Egyptians have believed for 30 years that Israel chose to implant its embassy in this specific location in order to be able to fly its Star of David, blue and white flag over the Nile.
We arrived on the scene and found at least 5000 people surrounding the building, and they were chanting “Down Down with Israel!” and celebrating.
The tall concrete wall, which for many Egyptians was an ugly reminder of Israel’s notorious Separation Wall on the West Bank, had been turned to rubble.
People were walking around with big chunks of stones from the one week old barrier, planning to take them home as souvenirs. This was Egypt’s small “Berlin Wall” moment.
An army unit composed of a few tanks was still guarding the entrance to the building as it had for months since the outbreak of the revolution on 25 January. Otherwise, all was peaceful.
At around 8pm, a few young people started climbing the building using ropes apparently in order to get to the 21st floor windows.
The crowds egged them on, hoping that they would bring down the Israeli flag from the roof as Ahmed Shahat, a young Egyptian in his 20s, had done two weeks ago, earning himself the title, Egypt’s Spiderman. However, the climbers could not get past the fourth level.
Moments later, hundreds stormed the entrance to the building.
As I could not see exactly what was happening near that entrance because of crowd numbers, I had to rely on reports from those closer to the building to find out what happened then. Most reports confirmed that an army officer or two in charge of the unit did very little to stop the crowds.
Twenty minutes later, the crowd outside the building, which was still growing in numbers, spotted several young people waving Egyptian flags from the 20th storey balcony, just one level beneath the embassy penthouse.
I was able to confirm later that 100-200 people occupied the building and that tens managed to break into the embassy.
Suddenly, around 9pm or so, a small unit of Central Security Forces (CSF), the notorious Egyptian riot police, showed up in the area but did not head towards protesters and instead, made its way 50 metres away from the crowd, leaving soldiers in full riot gear to block the entrance of the Saudi Embassy just around the corner.
At this point, hundreds of young people clashed with riot police up and down the Saudi Embassy side street for about half an hour. Protesters most likely set ablaze two CSF trucks, while a couple of trees also caught fire
Some walked back from the fresh clashes with several “Made in USA” canisters of tear gas that they snatched from soldiers, and displayed them to the larger crowds.
As a firetruck worked to put out the fire on the Saudi street, CSF soldiers disappeared from the scene and things seemed to calm down in that part of the arena.
Suddenly, at around 10pm or 10:30pm, the skies filled up to a saturation point with thousands of 8” by 11” sheets of paper coming down from the top of the embassy building.
As the papers made their way down slowly onto the pavement, the crowd and I included were first under the impression that the revolutionaries were sending us a photocopied political statement of some sort.
We caught the papers and examined them. It took hundreds of people a few minutes of sorting through them before we realised that we were looking at Israeli Embassy records in Arabic, Hebrew and English.
It began to slowly dawn on us that the people upstairs in the building managed to actually break into the embassy. At this moment the crowd went wild and started pushing and shoving to catch whatever papers were coming down from the heavens.
Those who could not catch fallen documents gathered in hundreds of small groups to read what others caught, and took pictures with mobile phones. I walked from one group of “examiners” to the other trying to look at as many documents as possible.
There were records of phone deals between major Egyptian private and public telecommunications firms and Israel. I also saw documents that listed names of business transactions between the embassy and all sorts of Egyptian authorities, from customs officials to CEOs of tourism firms, bringing Israeli travelers to Egypt, and on and on.
Much of the confetti that was dropping on us dated back to the 1990s and even the 1980s, as its typeset indicated.
The revolutionaries upstairs sent at least six or seven separate sets of documents on us every 10 minutes or so for a whole hour. TV cameras hustled to interview dozens of people with documents that they believed showed the depth of the embassy’s penetration into the economic and political scene in Egypt.
I decided to walk around the corner to check on the CSF situation and buy a cup of tea from a street vendor.
The vendor offered me a free tea and asked me in a semi-begging tone to bring him, in return, an “Israeli paper” because he could not walk away from his stand.
I said I would do my best but I had no intention of going back to fight with tens of people, literally, over every document falling from the 21st floor.
At this point I lucked out as a “journalist”, you could say. A man in his early 20s, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, and drowned in sweat asked me for a cigarette. He listened to the conversation people were having about the documents and announced to us in a matter of fact manner that he had just come down from the 22nd floor.
He said that it took over two hours for a group made up of dozens of revolutionaries using hammers to demolish the walls and steel entrances to the embassy floor. I asked him to describe to me what the embassy looked like on the inside as a way of vetting the authenticity of his story. Instead, he pulled out a stack of 10 or so plastic-laminated Israeli embassy employee identification cards, with what appeared to be pictures and names of locals who worked in the compound, and said: “See this. That proves I was one of those who stormed the enemy’s house.”
Around midnight or so, as thousands were still poring over the documents, battles erupted in a few seconds between a group of protesters and CSF units around the Giza Security Directorate headquarters yards away.
In less than 10 minutes, smoke from tens of tear gas bombs and sounds of bullets filled the air and ended the festive atmosphere. Egypt’s Berlin Wall moment did not last more than a few hours.
Long standing hatred between Egypt’s still intact and widely despised CSF and Cairo’s revolutionaries and poor ushered into one long bloody night of street fighting.
The night of 9 September will go down as the bloodiest few hours that Egypt witnessed since Mubarak’s police rained hell on peaceful protesters on 28 January, three days after the outbreak of this unfinished revolution.
Is President Obama trying to kill Social Security without explicitly saying so? He put Social Security “on the table” for consideration by his Deficit Commission — even though Social Security has not contributed to creating or sustaining the deficit/debt in the first place. He kept Social Security on the table when he made a deal to delegate deficit reduction authority over entitlements to an undemocratic Super Committee. Now, in a speech reportedly about jobs, he proposed to extend and increase the ill-considered FICA tax cut he embraced last December — a tax cut that directly undermines the financial integrity of Social Security.
According to the White House Fact Sheet on “The American Jobs Act” the FICA tax holiday for workers will be increased to a 50% reduction, lowering it to 3.1%. Under the 2010 tax deal, the payroll tax for workers was reduced from 6.2% to 4.2%. In addition to expanding the tax cut for workers, the President proposes to extend the FICA tax holiday to employers by cutting in half the employer’s share of the payroll tax through the first $5 million in payroll.
Big questions about the wisdom, efficacy, and implications of a tax-based jobs strategy need to be debated. Even bigger questions about the consequences of the payroll tax holiday in particular need to be answered. These questions are not just about the relationship between payroll tax cuts and job growth. They are about the future of Social Security.
The FICA/payroll tax goes into the Social Security Trust Fund. This is a dedicated fund currently worth $2.6 trillion, which has been built up over time through employee and employer contributions, along with accrued interest. Current and future Social Security beneficiaries receive benefits from this fund. No general revenues are involved, except for administrative and clerical costs.
Under the payroll tax cut initiated in the 2010 lame duck tax deal, the revenue loss to the Trust Fund from the payroll tax holiday is made up through compensatory payments into the Trust Fund from general revenues. The President proposes to continue this scheme — deepening a relationship between Social Security and general revenues (read deficit) that did not exist until the December 2010 tax deal. This will make Social Security increasingly vulnerable to demands for “reform.”
In the worst case, Congress could choose to enact the payroll tax cut without actually appropriating revenue compensation for the Trust Fund. This would mean that the payroll tax cut directly depletes the Trust Fund, creating financial/actuarial problems far sooner than the currently anticipated shortfall date of 2036.
But even if the Trust Fund receives full revenue compensation — for both employer and employee contributions — Social Security will be jeopardized. That’s because the resources in the Trust Fund will be increasingly co-mingled with general revenue funds — and, hence, increasingly connected to the deficit.
If the government can’t pay back Social Security money it has borrowed to pay for other things (through IOUs, bonds, etc), it certainly won’t be shy about cutting Social Security to pay itself back for funds it shared with Social Security to offset revenue losses from the payroll tax holiday.
Also worth worrying about here is contagious political cowardice about “raising taxes.” The payroll tax holiday is framed as just that — a holiday, ie, a short-lived break. But as we know from other tax cuts with built-in expiration dates, the planned end of a tax cut quickly becomes a “tax increase” in popular parlance. There hasn’t been much resolve to allow the years-long tax holiday for the rich to end. When the time comes, will there be greater resolve to allow an end to the 2-year tax holiday for workers and 1-year tax holiday for employers? Even when billed as a “middle class tax increase” and a “job-killing tax on business”?
Once the payroll tax basis of Social Security financing has been corrupted the future of Social Security will no longer be in doubt. It won’t have one.
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel’s foreign ministry has prepared a series of “harsh measures” to “punish” Turkey’s leadership for diplomatic slights, Israeli media reported Friday.
Israel will facilitate cooperation with the Armenians, Turkey’s historic rivals, and may even lobby for international recognition of the Armenian holocaust, the Hebrew-language daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is also planning to meet with Kurdish rebels in Europe in order to “cooperate with them and boost them in every possible area,” Yedioth’s English website said.
“We’ll exact a price from Erdogan that will prove to him that messing with Israel doesn’t pay off,” Lieberman was quoted as saying. “Turkey better treat us with respect and common decency.”
Another means in Lieberman’s “toolbox,” according to the news site Ynet, is a diplomatic campaign where Israeli missions worldwide will be instructed to report Turkish moves against minorities.
The diplomatic crisis between Turkey and Israel that was sparked by the flotilla raid took a turn for the worse in the last week, following publication of a UN probe into the incident, which found Israel’s naval blockade to be legal although it chastised Israel for using “excessive” force in the raid.
Israel has so far refused to apologize for the bloodshed and called the report’s conclusions a vindication of its stance, deeply angering Turkey.
Turkey responded to the report by expelling Israel’s ambassador, suspending military agreements with Israel and warning it was considering lodging a legal case against Israel at the International Criminal Court.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, meanwhile, vowed to accompany any future aid flotillas to Gaza with naval warships, Al Jazeera television quoted him as saying Thursday. … Full article
Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) has decided to shake off allegations of systematic abuse at any cost, as hard evidence corroborates the British Army’s use of torture techniques.
The findings of an inquiry into the death of an Iraqi civilian at the hands of British soldiers has sparked widespread criticism, even condemnation, of the treatment of Iraqi detainees by British soldiers.
Baha Mousa, a 26-year-old hotel receptionist, was detained when soldiers from the First Battalion of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment in the Iraqi city of Basra raided the hotel at which he worked. Two days later, Mousa died while in British Army custody.
The MoD was optimistic about the findings of the inquiry into Mousa’s death trying to bypass any allegations of systematic torture. Nevertheless, as the MoD tries in vain to persuade the public that its detention policies have undergone systematic reforms, analysts have come up with evidence that contradicts any such claims.
A high profile British human rights lawyer, Phil Shiner, has provided several reasons supporting the systematic use of torture and abuse in the British military during the Iraq war.
First, Shiner asserts that the detention policies, which involved torture and abuse, were not restricted to just one battle group, namely 1QLR, as he states that such practices were common, at least, at 14 UK facilities over the period between March 2003 and December 2008.
Shiner asserts that the set of techniques and practices included “unbelievably debased sexual behaviour, mock executions, vicious threats of rape of detainees’ female relatives, and systematic use of hooding, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, temperature manipulation and solitary confinement for weeks.”
Second, Shiner says that the shameful techniques and practices were systematically taught, as the Joint Forward Intelligence Team was the mastermind behind the techniques used by British troops.
Furthermore, as the British Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, refused to accept a key finding of the inquiry, Shiner is of the opinion that the MoD has no intention of implementing the “73 carefully measured recommendations” made by the chairman of Mousa’s inquiry, Sir William Gage.
Shiner predicts that the MoD “will continue to hide damaging documents, mislead our courts, run unworthy legal arguments and use its mighty coercive power to keep the public in the dark, not just about Iraq but also Afghanistan.”
More importantly, Shiner argues that the MoD still approves the very same shameful techniques employed by interrogators in Iraq, though Sir William has severely criticised such practices. Forcing a person or two into a sandbag, harshing, and hooding are techniques that are still used by the MoD.
Video Report
Press TV News/Analysis on September 8, 2011
What do Baha Mousa, Ian Tomlinson, Smiley Culture and Mark Dugan have in common? They are people who have died because of tactics used by UK police and in Baha Mousa’s case, British soldiers, why are “unlawful killings” as they are called taking place in the first place? Whether inside Britain or in war zones, it has put the spotlight on UK’s disproportionate and excessive use of force, as was evident in the recent unrest in the UK.
On July 18, 2011, Sean Hoare was found mysteriously deceased by London police. This is notable for two reasons.
The first reason is that Hoare was a primary whistle-blower in the unfolding crisis at News Corporation. The scandal has implicated multitudes in illegal and immoral electronic eavesdropping on everyone from an abducted teenager to Prince William and his brother.
The second and far more ominous reason is because Sean Hoare’s demise was not suspicious in any way. The London police, though already implicated in the scandal for widespread corruption through bribe-taking and callow complicity in shuttering earlier eavesdropping investigations, assure us it is so.
Naturally, only the pitifully paranoid or unsettlingly obsessed would doubt this claim.
Everyone knows whistle-blowers are by far the most likely people to generally have poor timing in all matters of corporeal termination. At the most inopportune times they are prone to hang themselves, have inconvenient heart attacks, overdose on pills, and get into car accidents in which the other parties mysteriously vanish.
“In novels and films the hero is lauded for his efforts at illuminating this world’s evils. In reality the hero is usually not identified at all, except perhaps by his remains.”
Thus, absolutely no one else was involved in Sean Hoare’s accident. It is a certainty that this will be deemed a former narcotics abuser’s drug overdose. Simple as that. We know this because we are told so (and we know to heed the master’s halt). Here are a few historical examples to erase all doubt.
DR. DAVID KELLY
Dr. David Kelly was a British scientist and expert in biological warfare employed by the British Ministry of Defence. He also became a very inconvenient figure when he met for an unauthorized discussion with a BBC reporter about the true state of the government’s dossier concerning Iraq’s supposed stockpiles of chemical weapons.
Dr. Kelly disputed claims that Iraq had the capability to fire biological weapons within 45 minutes, a major British argument for invading Iraq the second time. While Kelly said he believed it likely Iraq secreted some modicum of chemical weapons following international inspections, he was dubious as to their extent and immediate threat. Following his own inspections in Iraq, Kelly became more certain of his suspicions and spoke to a reporter from The Observer to state that Iraq did not possess mobile germ-warfare laboratories and that Iraqi claims of such devices being innocuous hydrogen-balloon production facilities were entirely accurate.
Yet what might have turned into an embarrassment for the British government and a serious impediment to its second war on Iraq was all but erased from memory when Dr. Kelly decided to kill himself. Despite numerous supportive letters and emails, a supposedly despondent Kelly went for his usual evening walk and ingested 29 painkiller tablets. Then for good measure, he cut his wrists. No one saw him do it and his family says they didn’t believe it, but what would they know? Kelly was gone, along with any hope of others in similar positions coming forward to prevent thousands of deaths and billions squandered. Naturally, Dr. Kelly’s keen sense of timing made it a good day for government and gun-sellers the world over.
COMMERCE SECRETARY RON BROWN
Ron Brown was United States Secretary of Commerce in the first Clinton Administration, appointed following exceptionally successful fundraising. He perished in a 1996 air crash near Croatia. Weather was claimed to have been the cause, though anyone who took the extra step of investigating would have learned the storms were not nearly so severe as initially stated. Following the accident, no public contact was made for a full 10 hours. Rescuers, much as they would later be during the JFK, Jr., disappearance, were directed toward the opposite direction of the crash site. When they finally reached the scene, a flight attendant was said to be upright and conscious (but died of a broken neck before reaching the hospital).
When additional rescue crews arrived, everyone was dead. Witnesses at Brown’s autopsy claimed he had what appeared to be a bullet hole in his temple region. Obviously, they must have been mistaken. It was merely the age-old “Whistle-Blowers’ Malady” which had struck. Ron Brown (who had already stated if he was going to jail, he wasn’t “going alone”) had been under investigation by US independent counsel and nearing indictment before Congress to answer charges of corruption followed up with widely rumored interrogation regarding the Clintons’ questionable financial dealings.
KAREN SILKWOOD
Karen Silkwood was a woman who worked at the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant near Crescent, Oklahoma. As a member of the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union’s bargaining committee, she was assigned to investigate health and safety issues. Apparently there were innumerable violations at the plant, most notably those of exposing workers to contamination. As a consequence, Silkwood testified before the Atomic Energy Commission. Later that year, she was found to have plutonium contamination 400 times the legal limit. Following decontamination she was deemed to have similar levels of poisoning the next day, despite having been assigned only paperwork at the plant. On a third day her levels of radiation were even higher, to the point she expelled contaminated air from her lungs as she breathed. A decontamination team was sent to her home, which was determined to be heavily exposed to radiation.
Silkwood by then had assembled a wealth of paperwork on the conditions at Kerr-McGee, including her own plutonium poisoning, which was found to have originated from a section of the plant she had not been able to access for at least four months. A meeting was set with a reporter from The New York Times and a national official from her union. Yet that night, as she drove en route from a local union meeting, she had a fatal car accident. Naturally, sleeping pills were found on the scene and the police deemed the cause due to a weary driver. Certainly no official report has ever been altered and no surreptitious injection ever made to a person’s body.
Authorities discounted skid marks on the road, damage on the rear of Silkwood’s auto, and microscopic paint chips belonging to another vehicle. All the documentation she was carrying concerning Kerr-McGee’s supposedly dangerous and criminal operations mysteriously disappeared. Still, only the paranoid regard this case as other than an accident. In no way related to the abuses she helped expose, grounds at the plant were still being decontaminated 25 years on.
RUDOLF HESS
Rudolf Hess was the longest-held prisoner of World War II. He was interned at Landau Prison until 1987 when, like all inconvenient figures, he hanged himself with electrical cord. Nothing should be made of the fact that the 93-year-old Hess was physically unable to raise his hands above his head. No mention should be made of the overwhelming evidence that in 1941 he had embarked from Germany on his way to Scotland to meet with members of the highest levels of British establishment after the fall of France in an attempt to end the war before it reached catastrophic levels of devastation. (The earliest period of that conflict was called the “Phoney War.”)
Moreover, one is requested to ignore the verified reports that not long before the incident, even Winston Churchill’s cabinet came quite close (save Winston) in voting to end hostilities and sue for peace before widespread destruction ensued. As to Hess, upon landing short of his destination he requested to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton. Unfortunately for the course of Western Civilization, this was denied and his cache of documents was removed from him. For the next several decades he was held (in isolation) far longer than those who actually committed wartime atrocities. As a possible release neared, he killed himself with no witnesses, though in 2008 Hess’s medical caretaker publicly stated the British SIS had aided Hess in exiting the mortal plane. Though immediately fired for this outrageous act of honesty, that man has thankfully not otherwise suffered.
All of the above people died by accident. Although they knew things that powerful people preferred they did not know, none of them was inconvenient to the powers that be. None of them had millionaires and politicians as enemies.
This is clearly the best of all possible worlds. Neither business nor government has any but the noblest intentions. Decent people are always rewarded justly and richly, and no one ever gets killed for doing the right thing.
Thus, we know that the one man with a semblance of conscience in the Murdoch hacking case had a simple narcotics overdose. Any contrary notion is idiotic, conspiratorial, and laughable.
In novels and films the hero is lauded for his efforts at illuminating this world’s evils. In reality the hero is usually not identified at all, except perhaps by his remains.
And now if the author will be excused, one must need return to bright coloring books, composition of cheerful songs concerning equality, and the reading of fairy tales and fables.
Two weeks after an Associated Press investigation exposed the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s ”demographic units” used to spy on a wide array of Muslim New Yorkers, a journalist has published startling new details that reveal the breadth of that operation. The details are sure to raise new alarms in the Muslim-American community in New York City (NYC) as the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks approach.
The New York City Police Department has been spying on hundreds of Muslim mosques, schools, businesses, student groups, non-governmental organizations and individuals, NYPD Confidential has learned.
The spying operation has targeted virtually every level of Muslim life in New York City, according to a trove of pages of Intelligence Division documents obtained by NYPD Confidential.
The documents do not specify whether the police have evidence or solid suspicions of criminality to justify their watching the Muslim groups.
The breadth and scope of the surveillance described in the documents suggest that the police have been painting with a broad brush and may have targeted subjects without specific tips about wrongdoing.
Specifically, Levitt reveals exactly who the NYPD spied on:
The NYPD’s spying operation has compiled information on 250 mosques, 12 Islamic schools, 31 Muslim student associations, 263 places it calls “ethnic hotspots,” such as businesses and restaurants, as well as 138 “persons of interest,” according to the Intel documents.
Police have singled out 53 mosques, four Islamic schools and seven Muslim student associations as institutions of “concern.” They have also labeled 42 individuals as top tier “persons of interest.”
At least 32 mosques have been infiltrated by either undercover officers, informants, or both, according to documents, which are dated between 2003 and 2006 and marked “secret.”
The NYPD has also been monitoring Muslim student associations at seven local colleges: City, Baruch, Hunter, Queens, LaGuardia, St. John’s and Brooklyn.
The department calls the two student groups at Brooklyn and Baruch colleges “of concern” and has sent undercover detectives to spy on them, the documents reveal.
The department defines a Muslim student association as “a university based student group, with an Islamic focus, involved with religious and political activities.”
The documents reveal that an Intelligence Division Cyber Unit has monitored MSAs at Brooklyn, City and Queens colleges.
The department also lists 10 non-governmental organizations as “of concern.” According to the documents, all 10 organizations have been spied upon by NYPD undercovers, informants, detectives with the Joint Terrorist Task Force or what the documents describe as a “secondary.”
On the NYPD list of 42 top tier “persons of interest” are: a corrections officer, a former imam, an un-indicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a lecturer at Brooklyn College and what the department describes as a “Brooklyn College MSA member [who] has expressed desire to be a suicide bomber in Palestine.”
The police have spied on all these people with either an undercover officer, an informant, or both, the documents say.
• the New York City Council to investigate and oversee the NYPD’s operations, as well as a City Comptroller Audit;
• the Obama Administration to initiate a federal investigation into the extent to which the CIA has engaged in domestic spying within the United States, in violation of law and its manadate;
• Congress and the New York State Senate to hold hearings into the NYPD’s, FBI’s, and CIA’s surveillance and policing practices in Muslim communities with a focus on the role of informants;
• Congress and New York State Senate to pass enforceable anti-racial profiling legislation;
• NYPD and the Department of Justice to revise their internal guidelines to disallow the use of surveillance and informants absent suspicion of specific criminal activity.
The response to the relevations about the NYPD casting a large net over NYC Muslims is by no means the first time civil liberties and Muslim-American advocacy groups have clashed with the NYPD. As I reported for the Gotham Gazette last November:
Arguably the biggest irritant came when the police department released a 2007 report, titled Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat. The report detailed the process by which it saw some American Muslims as being “radicalized” into terrorists and said that, while Americans Muslims are “more resistant to radicalization than their European counterparts, they are not immune.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations promptly criticized the report, saying, “Its sweeping generalizations and mixing of unrelated elements may serve to cast a pall of suspicion over the entire American Muslim community.” In the wake of the report, the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition formed and critiqued the report for presenting “a distorted and misleading depiction of Islam and its adherents.”
Following meetings with Muslim organizations, the police department quietly issued a two-page clarification that stressed that the “NYPD’s focus on al Qaeda inspired terrorism should not be mistaken for any implicit or explicit justification for racial, religious or ethnic profiling.”
While Muslim organizations welcomed the clarification, criticism of the report remains.
“It’s not clear what the NYPD really thinks, because it’s leaving the bulk of its assertions and its conclusions in place,” said Faiza Patel, who works with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Project. The clarification “didn’t address all of [the Muslim community’s] concerns. The way it was done — really kind of hidden there — makes it seem as if the police department is talking out of two sides of its mouth.”
On February 13, 1960, France carried out its first nuclear test in Algeria’s southern Reggane region. According to official statistics, 17 nuclear tests were carried out in total over the next 6 years. The area remains affected, and local scientists say that radioactive contamination has caused genetic mutations and irreversibly changed the region.
There are no official statistics on the number of victims. The only figures can be found in the records kept by the French representative of the local church, which lists 42,000 victims of nuclear tests. Three years ago, the French Ministry of Defense issued a statement, putting the number at 27,000 people. The victims include French soldiers as well as local Algerians who lived in the surrounding areas. … continue
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