Voters in Iceland have rejected the latest plan to repay EUR 3.9 billion (USD 5.6 billion) worth of deposits in a failed online bank to The Netherlands and UK.
Partial results of a national poll show that 57 percent of Icelanders voted against the plan on Sunday. British and Dutch governments had compensated some 400,000 citizens who lost their savings when Iceland’s Landsbanki (Icesave) collapsed in 2008, AFP reported.
The Netherlands and Britain expressed dissatisfaction, and said they are prepared to bring the dispute to the European Free Trade Association court.
Icelandic lawmakers in February backed a repayment plan they had worked on for more than two years. It had been agreed upon by creditors, but the president refused to sign the bill, leading to the referendum.
The agreement would have allowed Iceland to gradually repay its debt at a 3.0 percent interest rate for the EUR 1.3 billion it owes to The Netherlands and the remainder at a 3.3 percent interest rate to Britain until the year 2046.
The amount to be repaid by the Icelandic citizens was calculated to be around EUR 12,000 per person before interest, for a nation with a population of 320,000.
Iceland’s Finance Minister Steingrimur Sigfusson said the voters’ decision would not affect the country’s existing debt repayments nor would it derail its efforts for membership in the European Union.
A previous repayment deal was also rejected by a 93 percent majority in another referendum last year.
On 29 March 2011, students at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, shut down the scheduled Board of Governors (BoG) meeting after the body refused to consider a motion calling for divestment of pension stock from four companies implicated in Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
The direct action was led by Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA), and received the support and participation of 25 allied campus student groups, as well as faculty, staff and community members.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told NNC Pierce Morgan on March 18, 2011 that he might agree to a Palestinian state through negotiations. And he added, “We will make territorial concessions although it is very painful to do that in our ancestral land.” Netanyahu was not talking about Poland where his ancestors lived. He was talking about Palestine where generations of its indigenous population ancestors lived, cultivated the land and are buried.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism created a new Jewish identity of blood and soil. To mobilize their followers and supporters and appeal to their emotions, the Zionists created myths. Zionism started as a tribal religion without god, but in order to fulfill its function as a unifying force, Zionism required external religious and race symbols, not inner content. Its leaders regarded metaphysical religious belief and purity of race as having value in itself. They created a divine paradisiacal state of merger with the gods. Despite his non-religious ideology, Herzl’s writings were replete with religious references. The Jews should settle in Palestine because, in his words, “the Temple will be visible from long distance, for it is only our ancient faith that has kept us together”.
The Zionists and their supporters have invested tremendous financial and scholarly resources to work within the Hebrew Bible historical narratives to affirm the links between the intrusive Zionist population and the ancient Israelite past, and by doing so assert the right of that population to the land. The political end-game shaped the investigation and the outcome. Tracing the roots of Israel’s ethnic state in biblical antiquity is effectively to silence the indigenous Palestinian claim to the past and therefore to the land. The Biblical scholarship employs a bewildering array of terms for the region: “the Holy Land”, “the Land of the Bible”, “Eretz Israel”, “the Land of Israel”, or “Judah and Samaria.” To the casual reader these names appear interchangeable, but they all imply connection to ancient Israel.
Biblical narratives or poems that cannot be supported by archeology and common sense are treated by the Zionists and their supporters as historical language. Historians have to differentiate between biblical myths and the history of real people living in real places and real time. They should have the intellectual courage to challenge any source including the “revealed truth” of higher order as presented in Biblical text if it is used to justify injustice and cruelty by one people against another. Gamla, an ethnic cleansing advocacy group founded by former Israeli military officers, Knesset members and settler activists publishes detailed plans for how to carry out the “complete elimination of the Arab demographic threat to Israel” by forcibly expelling all Palestinians and demolishing their towns and villages. This, the plan argued is “the only possible solution” to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and it is “substantiated by the Torah.” Biblical studies have focused on inventing “Ancient Israel” while ignoring the reality of Palestinian history over thousands of years. Many historic experiences related to the ancient Israelite conquest and settlement of Palestine were described in terms of divine acts with religious zeal.
Many scholars, mostly moderate Jewish, who give primacy to archaeology, relegate the biblical text to a secondary place as a historical source. On 2001 Passover, Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Westwood, Los Angeles told his congregation: “The truth is that virtually every archaeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus [from Egypt], with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.” He based his conclusions on the fact that no archeological findings have produced evidence of the Jews wandering the Sinai Desert for forty years, and the excavations in Palestine show settlement patterns different from the Biblical account of a sudden influx of Jews from Egypt.
Nadva Na’aman of Tel Aviv University wrote, “The comprehensive conquest saga in the book of Jashua is a fictive literary composition aimed at presenting the occupation of the entire Land of Israel, initiated and guided by the Lord and carried out by the twelve tribes under Jashua.” Jashua, the man, was according to the Bible the right-hand man of Moses. After Moses death and the ancient Israelites camping near Jericho, Jashua commenced the military campaigns that, according to the biblical account, culminate in the conquest of the heartland of Palestine where he carried out a systematic campaign against the civilians of Canaan that amounts to genocide.
The historian Giovanni Garbini argues that “we should not even try to write a modern critical history of Israel largely on the basis of a single amalgamated, culturally self-serving, and essentially private version of history [the Bible]?”
Professor William Dever of the University of Arizona writes about the Hebrew Bible that “Many of the biblical stories are legend-like and abound with miraculous and fantastic elements that strain the credulity of almost any modern reader of any religious persuasion. All these factors have contributed to the rise of doubts about the Bible’s trustworthiness.”
In July of 2000, the New York Times ran a lead story under the title, “The Bible, as History, Flunks New Archaeological Tests.” Questioning the biblical stories of the Exodus and Conquest that recounts in lavish and dramatic detail of the ancient Israelites exodus from Egypt and establishing themselves in Palestine, calls into question the Zionists’ rationale for Jewish claims to Palestine.
The American archaeologist and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor, Joseph Callaways wrote in 1985 when he discovered that the city of Ai that is described in the Bible did not exist: “For many years, the primary source for the understanding of the settlement of the first Israelites was the Hebrew Bible, but every reconstruction based upon the biblical traditions has floundered on the evidence from archeological remains.”
The Bible and the claim of the Jews as a distinct race have been used as a tool to cement the inner unity of the Zionist movement and an indispensable weapon in the struggle for claiming the land of Palestine. The religio-historical element as a focus of national identity had greater importance in Zionism than in other national movements. It was religion in the broadest sense, with all its national and historical connotations, that provided the justification for the conquest of Palestine and legitimization of Jews’ return.
Although Semitic originally referred to certain languages and peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean that included not only Jews but also Palestinians, Assyrians, Babylonians and Phoenicians, claim of hostility only toward Jews is generally known as anti-Semitism.
Jews are a religious body, not a separate biological human group. The history of the Jews reveals that they have always interbred with non-Jews and many non-Jews have become Jews. The only valid criterion for determining membership in the group is confessional.
By insisting that a cultural trait, Jewishness, is inherited, the self-proclaimed Jews have contributed to the idea that they belong to an exclusive family, a distinct race, and a chosen people. Under Israel’s “Law of Return” of Jews to Israel, Ethiopian Jews (Falashas) were verified as descendants of an ancient Israelite tribe by testing samples of their males DNA Y-Chromosome. The claim of identifying the Jewish DNA is the pinnacle of charlatan science, an ideology driven hoax!
There was no written history prior to 3,200 B.C. (Before Christ) on Palestine, but archeological excavations suggest the existence of people living in Palestine as early as 8000 B.C. As far as the period of pre-pottery stone-age between 8000 and 5000 B.C, Palestine and Syria were inhabited by farmers and hunters. Their progression from simpler to more complex culture was evidenced in the development of farming technique, the domestication of animals and the establishment of towns.
Ancient Canaanites ruled all Palestine and Jordan until around 1200 B.C, when the Philistines conquered the southern coastal area. Archaeologists found evidence that Canaan migrant tribes settled Palestine and Jordan in the later period of the fourth millennium B.C. Pottery containing offerings in graves suggest the Canaanites believed in after-life. The Canaanite known history coincided with the Early Bronze Age that began around 3200B.C, but some of their settlements have been dated as old as 7000 B.C.
The indigenous Palestinians, the legitimate owners of the land, are the descendants of Ancient Canaanites, Philistinians, ancient Hebrews, Assyrians, ancient Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Christian crusaders and Turks. The groups that lived in Palestine fought, interacted and collaborated, but no group was obliterated.
Modern historians, writers and statesmen should liberate themselves from the biblical myths when reviewing history even if they believe in a revealed truth in their private lives. The challenge for them is to sort out fact from fiction. Palestine belongs to its indigenous population not the hordes of foreign settlers.
– Hasan Afif El-Hasan is a political analyst. His latest book, Is The Two-State Solution Already Dead? (Algora Publishing, New York).
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), part of the Organization of American States (OAS), has officially requested the Brazilian Government to immediately suspend the Belo Monte Dam Complex in the Amazonian state of Para, citing the project’s potential harm to the rights of traditional communities living within the Xingu river basin. According to the IACHR, the Brazilian Government must comply with legal obligations to undertake a consultation process that is “free, prior, informed, of good faith and culturally appropriate” with indigenous peoples threatened by the project before further work can proceed. The Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs must inform the OAS within 15 days regarding urgent measures undertaken to comply with the Commission’s resolution.
The IACHR’s decision responds to a complaint submitted in November 2010 on behalf of local, traditional communities of the Xingu river basin. The complaint was presented by the Xingu Alive Forever Movement (MXVPS), the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations in the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB), the Prelacy of the Roman Catholic Church in the Xingu region, the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), the Pará Society for the Defense of Human Rights (SDDH), Global Justice and the Inter-American Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA). According to the complaint, there were no appropriate consultations with affected indigenous and riverine communities regarding the impacts of the mega-dam project. The document argues that the dam would cause irreversible social and environmental damage, including forced displacement of communities, while threatening one of the Amazon’s most valuable areas for biodiversity conservation.
“By recognizing the rights of indigenous people to prior and informed consultations, the IACHR is requesting that the Brazilian Government stop the licensing and construction of the Belo Monte Dam project to ensure their right to decide,” said Roberta Amanajas, SDDH lawyer. “Continuing this project without proper consultations would constitute a violation of international law. In that case, the Brazilian Government would be internationally liable for the negative impacts caused by the dam.”
The IACHR also requests Brazil to adopt “vigorous and comprehensive measures” to protect the lives and personal integrity of isolated indigenous peoples in the Xingu river basin, as well as effective measures to prevent the spread of diseases and epidemics among traditional communities threatened by the project.
“The IACHR’s decision sends a clear message that the Brazilian Government’s unilateral decisions to promote economic growth at any cost are a violation of our country’s laws and the human rights of local traditional communities,” said Antonia Melo, MXVPS coordinator. “Our leaders no longer can use economic “development” as an excuse to ignore human rights and to push for projects of destruction and death to our natural heritage and to the peoples of Amazon, as is the case of Belo Monte.”
“The OAS’s decision is a warning to the Federal Government and a call to Brazilian society to broadly discuss the highly authoritarian and predatory development model being implemented in this country,” said Andressa Caldas, Global Justice director. Caldas recalls examples of human rights violations caused by other infrastructure projects within the PAC, the federal government’s ‘Accelerated Growth Program.’ “There are numerous cases involving the forced displacement of families without compensation, as well as serious environmental impacts, social disruption of communities, rising violence in areas surrounding construction sites and poor working conditions.”
Criticism of the Belo Monte dam comes not only from civil society organizations, and local communities, but also from scientists, researchers, and government institutions. The Federal Public Prosecutor’s office in Pará state has already filed ten civil lawsuits against the mega-project that are still awaiting final decisions.
“I am very moved by this news,” said Sheyla Juruna, an Indigenous leader of the Juruna community in Altamira. “Today, more than ever, I am sure that we were right to expose the Brazilian Government – including the federal judicial system – for violations of the rights of indigenous peoples in the Xingu and of all those who are fighting together to protect life and a healthy environment. We will maintain our firm resistance against the implementation of the Belo Monte Dam Complex.”
The IACHR’s decision is founded on international law established by the American Convention on Human Rights, Convention 169 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Rights (UNDRIP), and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), as well as the Brazilian Constitution itself.
During Operation Cast Lead Israel committed massive war crimes for all the world to see. Among these crimes the use of White Phosphorus in densely populated areas, use of Depleted Uranium, bombing civilian targets of all sorts without military necessity, destroying civilian infrastructure with no military justification and the infamous massacre of the Samouni family… among many other crimes.
In the aftermath of Cast Lead, Justice Richard Goldstone, a Zionist Jew, was commissioned by the United Nations to write a report on the alleged war crimes. Although the report did not go nearly far enough in exposing the brutality of all the crimes committed, crimes committed by the fourth largest military in the world against a essentially defenceless and captive population, it did allege that Israel (and Hamas) was almost undoubtedly guilty of war crimes and possibly, crimes against humanity.
But on April 1st, 2011 Justice Goldstone had an apparent change of heart and effectively said that he was wrong. With regard to the Samouni family he said, Israel simply made a mistake. It seems that the world in which we live in, a world of impunity for the favoured Israeli state, is set to continue. Unless of course we the people decide enough is enough. — Ken O’Keefe
MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow had a discussion last week (3/31/11) about the U.S. role in the Libya War with Col. Jack Jacobs, an MSNBC military consultant. Jacobs described the U.S. military’s “ability to jam communications that take place between units or among units of Gadhafi‘s army,” then referred to the U.S.’s
ability to jam electronic transmissions that occur when Gadhafi’s army, ground forces try to fire at allied planes. The instant that a radar system is turned on on the ground, we can detect it and in very short order, send a precision-guided munition that follows the radar beam all the way down to its source.
After responding to that with “Wow,” Maddow asked:
One of the things that people have questioned is if the U.S. has this high level of electronic capability, why is Libyan state TV still on the air? Is that not one of the things they would want to shut down?
Maddow’s questions echo similar calls by U.S. journalists during the Iraq invasion for an attack on Iraqi government TV–calls that were heeded when the U.S. destroyed the TV studios with a missile attack on March 25, 2003. As FAIR wrote in a media advisory, “U.S. Media Applaud Bombing of Iraqi TV” (3/27/03):
Prior to the bombing, some even seemed anxious to know why the broadcast facilities hadn’t been attacked yet. Fox News Channel‘s John Gibson wondered (3/24/03): “Should we take Iraqi TV off the air? Should we put one down the stove pipe there?” Fox‘s Bill O’Reilly (3/24/03) agreed: “I think they should have taken out the television, the Iraqi television…. Why haven’t they taken out the Iraqi television towers?” MSNBC correspondent David Shuster offered: “A lot of questions about why state-run television is allowed to continue broadcasting. After all, the coalition forces know where those broadcast towers are located.”
There is a good reason, actually, why Iraqi TV should not have been attacked: Journalists are civilians, even those who enthusiastically support their country’s military efforts, and therefore targeting them is a war crime. The idea that journalists reporting in a country the U.S. is at war with deserve protection seems to have been rejected by the Pentagon, however. As FAIR wrote in “IS Killing Part of Pentagon Press Policy?” (4/10/03):
In the Kosovo War, the U.S. attacked the offices of state-owned Radio-Television Serbia, in what Amnesty International called a “direct attack on a civilian object” which “therefore constitutes a war crime.” On March 25, the U.S. began airstrikes on government-run Iraqi TV, in what the International Federation of Journalists (Reuters, 3/26/03) suggested might also be a Geneva Convention violation, since it the U.S. was “targeting a television network simply because they don’t like the message it gives out.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists declined to count the Serbian journalists killed by the United States in its annual list of murdered journalists, a move that FAIR warned at the time would contribute to a sense that “enemy” journalists are fair game (Extra!, 9-10/00). Maddow’s question suggests that treating reporters as enemy combatants has indeed become the new normal.
In recent weeks an escalation in violence between Israel and Palestinian resistance factions in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip has claimed the lives of more than a dozen Palestinians, the youngest of them 10-year-old Mahmoud Jalal al-Hilu.
Does this escalation increase the likelihood of another large-scale assault on Gaza similar to “Operation Cast Lead” in winter 2008-2009 that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians? There are worrying signs Israel — by its words and deeds — could be laying the ground for an attack.
The ratchet of violence took another turn in the small hours of 2 April when Israel carried out an air attack on the Gaza Strip killing three members of Hamas’ military wing.
Israel did not claim that the three Hamas men were engaged in any hostile activity at the time they were killed (riding in a car), but a statement from the Israeli army alleged that they were “planning to kidnap Israelis over the upcoming Jewish holiday of Passover” — several weeks in the future.
Israel’s latest attack constituted an extrajudicial killing, in which Israel, the occupying power, acted as judge, jury and executioner, issuing allegations for which it offered no evidence, after it had already carried out the death sentence. Under international law, this is a war crime.
Global media tend to report these events as Israeli “retaliation” for Palestinian attacks, but a close reading of Israeli media presents a very different picture: deliberate provocation and escalation by Israel.
On 23 March, Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that, “The current tensions began exactly a week ago when Israel launched an air attack on a Hamas base in the ruins of the settlement of Netzarim, killing two Hamas men. That attack came in response to a Qassam [rocket] fired from Gaza that landed in an open area.” Palestinians responded with a barrage of 50 projectiles into Israel.
Israel then “launched a series of air attacks in which a number of Hamas militants were wounded.” And on 22 March Israeli forces launched the shelling which killed Mahmoud al-Hilu and three other civilians, allegedly in response to mortar fire from an olive grove on the Gaza side (“A small war is starting along Gaza border“).
On 24 March, Issacharoff and Harel observed, “Despite the escalation, Hamas does not seem to want large-scale clashes yet. The organization actually has good reasons to believe that Israel is the one heating up the southern front. It began with a bombardment a few weeks ago that disrupted the transfer of a large amount of money from Egypt to the Gaza Strip, continued with the interrogation of engineer and Hamas member Dirar Abu Sisi [whom Israeli agents kidnapped from Ukraine] in Israel, and ended with last week’s bombing of a Hamas training base in which two Hamas militants were killed. It is noteworthy that Hamas has not fired at Israel over the past two days, even after four Palestinian civilians were killed by errant IDF [Israeli army] mortar fire on Tuesday [22 March]” (“Hamas not likely behind Jerusalem bombing“).
Issacharoff and Harel added in a 25 March analysis that the Israeli attack on the Hamas outpost at Netzarim “is believed to have been authorized by the defense minister and the chief of staff, who should have known there would be people at the outpost during the day and that causing casualties would have different consequences than a routine attack on empty offices. Israel assumed — mistakenly — that Hamas would not respond to the bombing. In fact, Hamas responded by firing 50 mortar shells on Saturday morning” (“Escalation approaching“).
It is difficult to believe, especially in light of the extrajudicial executions on 2 April, that Israeli leaders did not know that killing Palestinians would prompt further retaliation from the Palestinian side. It seems very likely this was their intention.
These events are worryingly similar to the sequence that preceded “Operation Cast Lead.” After a bloody spring of 2008 in which hundreds of Palestinians were killed and injured in Israeli attacks on Gaza, Israel and Hamas negotiated a mutual ceasefire beginning on 19 June 2008. By Israel’s own admission, this mutual truce resulted in a 97 percent reduction in rockets being fired from Gaza over the subsequent four months, and none of the handful of projectiles that were fired were launched by Hamas, nor did they cause any injuries to Israelis.
A mutually agreed ceasefire proved to be the most effective way to achieve the goal Israel claimed was most important: protecting Israeli civilians from rocket fire from Gaza. But on the night of 4-5 November 2008, Israel decided to end the truce. As The Guardian reported on 5 November 2008, “A four-month ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza was in jeopardy today after Israeli troops killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid into the territory” (“Gaza truce broken as Israeli raid kills six Hamas gunmen“).
Then, just as it has with its latest attack, Israel justified the killings with the unverifiable claim that those it killed were involved in a plot to kidnap Israelis.
On 21 March, amid the escalating violence, Hamas’ military wing itself stated that it would be willing to abide by another mutual truce if Israel agreed to one, but Israel showed no interest (“Gaza: Hamas calls for truce,” Ma’an News Agency, 21 March 2011).
Israel’s seemingly constant and deliberate provocation of violence along the border with Gaza comes against a backdrop of belligerent statements and propaganda exercises by Israeli leaders. On 15 March, Israel intercepted a ship en route from Turkey to Alexandria in Egypt, which it alleged without providing evidence, was carrying arms destined for Gaza.
Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom told Israel Radio on 23 March that Israel may have to carry out another large scale attack on Gaza to topple Hamas, adding, “I say this despite the fact that I know such a thing would, of course, bring the region to a far more combustible situation.”
Culture minister Limor Livnat warned, according to Haaretz, Israel might have no choice but to carry out “Operation Cast Lead 2.”
Shalom, reversing the facts and laying the blame for the escalating violence on the Palestinians, put the possibility of a renewed war on Gaza in an overtly political context. Hamas, the vice premier claimed, according to Haaretz, “might have opened a new front with Israel ‘to stop any possibility of dialogue among the Palestinians or to come to the intra-Palestinian negotiation in a far stronger position'” (“Netanyahu: Israel will continue to operate against terrorists in Gaza,” 23 March 2011).
In other words, according to Shalom, it is the continued strength of Hamas that prevents an intra-Palestinian reconciliation on terms favorable to the Israeli-backed Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) of Mahmoud Abbas.
Whether Israel is deliberately laying the ground for a new assault on Gaza, or stumbles into one — if the current escalation does not stop — any such attack must be understood in political terms. It would be an effort to finish the unfinished business of destroying Hamas and any other island of Palestinian resistance.
The commitment of any significant Palestinian group to resistance — political or military — remains a major obstacle to the full legitimation of the warm embrace between Israel and the Abbas-led PA, whose extent was recently laid bare in the Palestine Papers. Indeed the relationship is so friendly that last October the top echelons of the PA in Bethlehem received then Israeli Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi — who commanded Operation Cast Lead — as their honored guest, even providing him with a guided tour of the Church of the Nativity (“Israeli army chief visits Bethlehem,” Ma’an News Agency, 3 October 2010).
Ironically, Hamas remains much less intransigent than Israel, as evidenced by the movement’s repeated offers of ceasefires which Israel rejects or violates; its constant noises about “reconciliation” with Abbas without insisting that the latter terminate his “security” relationship with Israel; and its embrace of the defunct “two-state solution.” Despite these unacknowledged political concessions, Hamas retains a military capability that Israel is unwilling to tolerate either as a challenge to itself, or to the PA.
Until now, there have been good reasons to believe Israel would hesitate to launch a new major military assault on Gaza. It is still suffering the diplomatic and political fallout of Cast Lead, including the UN-commissioned Goldstone report, as well as its massacre of nine activists aboard the Mavi Marmara during last spring’s Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
Without exaggerating the risks, the constraints on Israel may be loosening. In the wake of the revolution in Egypt and amid the political upheaval in the Arab world, some Israelis may think they have a “last chance” to act in the interregnum before a new and less friendly government is seated in Cairo. Western and Saudi military interventions in Libya and Bahrain respectively have also provided new respectability to using military force for political ends.
International complicity also continues to send Israel a clear message that its impunity is guaranteed. The Obama administration’s recent veto of a UN Security Council resolution that merely restated US policy on Israel’s settlement construction in the West Bank was one sure sign that Israel still has a blank check from the United States.
Tragically, the biggest contributor to renewed confidence in Israel that it could once again get away with murder in Gaza, may be Judge Richard Goldstone himself. Israeli leaders have seized on his apologetic 1 April op-ed in The Washington Post as vindication and proof that Israel never committed war crimes in Gaza, and was the victim a “blood libel,” as Jeffrey Goldberg, former Israeli occupation army volunteer and The Atlantic blogger put it.
While Goldstone was clearly trying to appease Zionists who subjected him to an intense campaign of personal vilification and ostracism his article did not in fact repudiate one single concrete finding in the report that bears his name (“Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes,” 2 April 2011).
Two important analyses of Goldstone’s op-ed, and how it is in no way a repudiation of the Goldstone report, appeared on Mondoweiss on 2 April: “What the Goldstone op-ed doesn’t say” by Yaniv Reich, and “Goldstone op-ed praises Israeli investigation of Gaza war crimes, but UN committee paints a different picture,” by Adam Horowitz. Goldstone’s op-ed is the personal opinion of one person. The Goldstone report, an official UN document authored by a commission, remains a compendium of acts by Israel — and indeed by Hamas — uncontradicted by any new evidence, much less by Israel’s self-serving “investigations.”
Yet as we have sadly learned so many times, proper analysis and respect for basic facts have little bearing in the “fog of war,” especially when Israel is that party that launches that war.
Last week Ynetnews.com published an article by Johnnie Moore, a Christian evangelical pastor and vice president of Liberty University (the largest evangelical university in the world, founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell). Moore was visiting Israel with a group of students on a trip that ended 24 hours before the bombing in Jerusalem. A Christian tourist was killed in the bombing, and Pastor Moore was moved to write about the terror attack and his views on Israel and the Palestinians. The article, entitled “No Excuse for Brutality,” was one-sided and inflammatory, asserting that Palestinians are entirely to blame for the conflict.
Normally, as a Palestinian I would brush off such an article as an example of the natural, emotional responses that arise from tragedies and traumas like last month’s bombing. However, Moore’s article is more than a reactionary piece; his comments also reflect the views of many Christian evangelicals in the United States. As a result, I feel it is important to respond to some of the points Moore raised.
Moore opened his article by claiming that the media is biased against Israel, and has justified the terror attack. The effort of some media outlets of putting the attack in context is not to be interpreted as a bias. The political stalemate, the continuation of the occupation, the confiscation of land and demolishing of Palestinian homes, and the “price tag” attacks by settlers executed all over the West Bank explains the rise of violent tendencies. These things should not be used as a justification but rather provide contextual analysis for the cycle of violence endemic to the conflict.
Moore writes that the Jerusalem bombing “should be an embarrassment to every supporter of the Palestinian cause. Instead… this act of war will be met with cheers in Hamas’ training camps even as Palestinian leaders give lip service to the international community and condemn the attacks in English, while praising them privately in Arabic.” This is problematic, first because many supporters of the Palestinian cause did view the bombing as shameful, and second because Moore assumes that the Palestinians are praising the attack in Arabic. As a writer for Al-Quds I can testify that Arab leaders condemned the attack in Arabic just as they did in English, and many Palestinians were outraged by the bombing.
In fact, those who criticize the Palestinian Authority for failing to prevent attacks like these should take a hard look at the situation in the West Bank. The PA controls around 14% of the West Bank, and cannot even issue a building permit for most Palestinians. However, it is expected to police the West Bank in ways that even Israel, with its vastly superior training and weaponry, has been unable to do.
Perhaps the most ill-informed statement in Pastor Moore’s article is his statement that “I knew the message [of Israeli victimization] was understood when one of our students asked, ‘I see Palestinian neighborhoods all over Israel, what is the problem with Israelis having neighborhoods (settlements) within Palestinian areas?’ [The student’s] point was poignant as it highlighted Israel’s preparedness to live in peace with its neighbors and the refusal with which this has been met.”
The comparison between settlements and Arab villages in Israel shows a complete lack of knowledge of historical context. This is not surprising, as few American Christians are familiar with the Palestinian narrative. Palestinian villages in Israel were all founded long before the 1948 war, and since the formation of the Israeli state the Israel government has not allowed new Arab towns to be created within its borders.
On the other hand, in the Palestinians territories (which currently comprise only 22% of the area of the British mandate for Palestine), all Israeli settlements were built in the last 44 years. Moreover, settlements in the West Bank are generally built on privately owned Palestinian land that has been confiscated, while Arab towns in Israel were not built on confiscated land. Another important fact is that Prime Minister Fayyad has indicated on more than one occasion that Jews are welcome to become Palestinian citizens in any future Palestinian state.
Ironically, Moore and his student also seem unaware that many of the “Arab neighborhoods” in Israel are populated by Palestinian Christians. This is a common oversight in American Christian rhetoric about Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When Americans do recognize the existence of Palestinian Christians, it is often only to use their situation to support anti-Muslim propaganda. For example, according to a poll conducted by Zogby International, 45.9% of Americans blame Muslims for the Christian immigration out of the Holy Land, while only 7.4% of Americans cite Israeli restrictions as contributing to Arab Christian immigration. However, when Palestinian Christians from Bethlehem were asked about the primary cause for Christian immigration out of the area, 78% cited Israeli restrictions as their reason for leaving.
Ultimately, Dr. Moore concludes that Israel has a right to exist without the threat of terrorism. There is nothing wrong with this idea: Moore is completely correct in saying that Israel has that right to exist free from fear. However, rights are symmetrical, and Palestinians also have the right to live free of fear and free from the yoke of occupation.
Palestinians often feel the West views Palestinian rights as less important than Israeli rights, and that our blood is valued less than Jewish blood. When American Christian leaders like Moore write articles condemning bombings in Israel but are silent about bombings in Gaza (the most recent of which resulted in the death of 3 children), it tells Palestinians that we are viewed as sub-human. However, we also bleed, just as we care for the blood of others. I myself felt disgusted at the Itamar attack and the bombing in Jerusalem.
I must say that I don’t understand Christians who value the life of one group over another. Even if American Christians consider Muslims as enemies, in the New Testament Jesus commanded his followers to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. The word he used for “love” in Greek (agapao) means to entertain or to welcome in. This concept seems to be in direct opposition to the doctrine of Islamophobia spread by many Christian evangelical groups in the United States. Moreover, Isaiah says “”Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?” The scripture does not apply only to Jews, to the “foreigner” and “alien.” Hundreds of millions of Americans profess to be Christians and believe in the divine inspiration of these verses, so where are these “believers” when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
Moore’s article is a reminder that many American Christians view supporting Israel as a tenant of faith, without thinking critically about the theological and practical implications of this viewpoint. As Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge.” Like many Christian groups who visit Israel, Moore’s group did not bother to visit any Palestinian towns. My guess is that neither Moore nor any of his church members have ever even met a Palestinian. Perhaps then their demonization of Palestinians is unsurprising.
When I was ten, my brother was murdered by Israeli soldiers. As a result, I understand how easy it is to seek revenge and find justifications for violence. As Solomon said, “There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death.” However, I long to see more religious people practice these verses which speak of justice as a higher form of religion, and I long for the day when religion becomes more a tool for bringing people together than for dividing them. On that day the prophecy of Isaiah will be realized “They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.”
Aziz Abu Sarah is a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem who spends his time between Jerusalem and Washington D.C. Aziz is a columnist with Alquds Newspaper and is the director of the Middle East Projects at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University. Aziz runs alternative tours to Israel and the West-Bank through MEJDI a social enterprise he co-founded. His blog can be found at http://azizabusarah.wordpress.com
Gulf War SyndromeThere were two images from the Libyan war that are likely to spell real trouble in the coming years. One was of several U.S. A-10 attack planes, ungainly looking machines ugly enough to be nick named “Warthogs,” taxiing down a runway. The other was of several rebel fighters dancing on top of a burning tank.
That tank, an old Russian-era T-72, was likely knocked out by one of those A-10s, which means those rebels fighters are almost certainly going to be in a world of hurt. Because, while they were celebrating, they were also breathing in the residue from the shell that killed that tank, a 30 mm depleted uranium munition (DUA).
DUA is the weapon of choice when it comes to killing armored vehicles, and A-10s are specialists at using it. The U.S. used 320 tons of it in the first Gulf War, 10 tons in Kosovo, and over 1,000 tons in the invasion of Iraq. It is lethal to tanks, but it also damages anything that comes into contact with it. Common photos back in 1991 were of U.S. soldiers climbing on top of knocked-out Iraqi tanks to have their pictures taken or to look for souvenirs. When they did, they inhaled uranium oxide or impregnated their uniforms with it.
The soldiers didn’t know better because the U.S. Defense Department (DOA) told them DUA was harmless, even though the DOA knew better. In 1991 the U.S. Army’s Armament Munitions and Chemical Command concluded that “any system struck by DUA penetrator can be assumed to be contaminated with DU,” and instructed soldiers to wear protective masks, clothes and respirators “as a minimum,” and dispose of the clothing afterward.
The only problem was that the Army never told the troops, even those whose job it was to deal with vehicles hit by DUA. No one said a word to the 144th National Guard Supply Company of the 24th Infantry Division which picked up 29 U.S. armored vehicles hit by DUA “friendly fire” to ship them home. When the tanks and armored personnel carriers arrived in South Carolina, they were interned in a radioactive waste dump. If the soldiers didn’t know the objects were “hot,” the brass did.
Many of those members of that National Guard company subsequently came down with the “Gulf War Syndrome” (GWS) that afflicted at least 118,000 out of the 700,000 soldiers who served in the 1990-91 conflict. Veterans suffer from chronic fatigue, headaches, muscle spasms, joint pains, memory loss, anxiety and balance problems; were twice as likely to develop amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig Disease); and between two and three times more likely to have children with birth defects.
DUA is one of the most deadly anti-tank weapons around. The enormous weight of the DUA “arrow” in each shell can penetrate four inches of armor as if it were margarine. It then explodes in a 10,000-degree fireball that reduces up 70 percent of the munition to powder. The powder can travel up to 25 miles from the initial blast site.
Depleted uranium is not highly radioactive, but it has a half-life of 4.4 billion years, and, if it gets into your system, it can be very dangerous. According to the U.S. Environmental Policy Institute, DUA “has the potential to generate significant medical consequences.”
“People have always assumed low doses are not much of a problem,” Alexander Miller of the U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute told the Guardian (British), “but they can cause more damage than people think.” A study by the Institute found that DUA could damage bone marrow chromosomes.
Not all of the Gulf War butcher bill can be laid at the feet of DUA. After 11 years of denying there was anything to GWS, the Pentagon finally admitted that at least 130,000 soldiers had been exposed to chemical weapon residue when the Iraqi arms depot at Kamisiyah was blown up. Modern battlefields tend to be toxic nightmares, and that was doubly so in Iraq.
But there is no question that DUA was a major contributor to the syndrome, particularly for those who developed immune related diseases. A standard effect of radiation is suppression of the immune system.
The effects of low-level radiation are hard to track, because many “hard” cancers take 16 to 24 years to develop. Iraqi medical authorities claim that the cancer rate in Basra—an area that was saturated with DUA in the Gulf war and the Iraq War—has jumped ten fold, and birth defects are much higher than in the rest of the country.
DUA is also used in 25 mm cannon shells, and 105 MM and 120 MM tank shells. The Army is using it to manufacture 50-caliber machine gun ammunition and is experimenting with using it for standard issue infantry weapons. It is also used to coat armored vehicles, making them almost impervious to non-DUA shells.
The U.S. is selling DUA to Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, some of our NATO allies—Germany and Italy won’t use it—Sweden, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Thailand, and other countries that the Pentagon will not reveal in the name of “national security.”
Depleted uranium is also a highly toxic metal and can damage the liver and kidneys, particularly if it gets into the water supply. If a DUA round misses a target, its “penetrators” are so heavy that they tend to go deep into the soil. “A major concern of the potential environmental effects of intact [DUA] penetrators or large penetrator fragments,” notes the World Health Organization, “is the potential contamination of ground water after weathering.”
Because of the dangers associated with DUA, in August 2002 a subcommittee of the United Nations found that the weapons violated seven international agreements, including the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions. Efforts to ban it, however, have been vetoed by the U.S., France and Britain. In 2009 Belgium became the first country to ban the use of DUA, and in the same year the Latin American Parliament voted for a moratorium on its use.
The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons that includes 120 non-governmental organizations is currently lobbying to get the weapons eliminated.
There are other rough beasts being visited on the Libyans these days as well, including cluster weapons, highly explosive canisters that can shred everything from people to tanks. U.S. warplanes have been dropping CBU-103, 104, 105, and AGM-154 A and B, all of which have a failure rate of anywhere from 5 to 23 percent. These unexploded “bomblets” can kill for decades.
During the bombing of Laos from 1964 to 1973, 90 million cluster munitions were dropped, killing more than 12,000 civilians. The bomblets continue exact a yearly toll of 100 to 200 people. More than 50 million clusters were dropped during the 1991 Gulf War, and in the two years that followed the war’s end, they killed 1,400 Kuwaiti citizens. A U.S. company hired to clear cluster weapons from a small area in Kuwait found 95,700 unexploded MK-118 submunitions from the notoriously unreliable CBU-99 “Rockeye” cluster bomb.
Unexploded clusters are still causing problems in Kosovo, and they take a steady toll of civilians in Afghanistan.
Libya has no-go areas dating back to the Second World War, when Italians, Germans and British seeded their fronts with land mines. Whatever government emerges in Libya today will have to deal with the aftermath of yet another war, this time created by DUA and cluster weapons. “The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without,” Dwight Eisenhower once remarked.
A problem indeed. One hopes Libya manages to avoid what a village in Vietnam experienced, the one that was destroyed in order to save it.
Yesterday’s unprovoked attack on Israeli peace activists falls in line with the army’s strategy of repression of nonviolent resistance by Israelis or Palestinians against Israel’s increasingly violent occupation in the West Bank.
Beit Ummar has been holding weekly demonstrations against the occupation and the confiscation of its lands by neighboring Jewish-only settlements for the past several years. The demonstrations have ranged from calm to deadly with hundreds injured and jailed. Some have even been killed in settler rampages through the village.
Yesterday, a group of Ta’ayush activists were returning to Jerusalem after spending the morning with Palestinian farmers in the South Hebron Hills. They made the quick decision to check on the closure of Beit Ummar on the drive home.
“Within five minutes of arriving at a series of concrete barriers in front of the village, we were surrounded by soldiers. We walked to a large gate [which the army had installed two months prior in order to seal the village] at another entrance to the village only to find that it was locked shut” Kurz recalled, “At this point there were a lot of soldiers, many of whom were officers. So we decided to have an impromptu nonviolent protest against the closure of the village.” Speaking to one Israeli activist present at the demonstration, the commander in charge threatened that “every time you do this (demonstrate), I will close the village.”
The commander in charge pronounced the area a ‘closed military zone’, after which one member of the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity group asked the commander to see the closed military zone warrant. Being a stout guy, soldiers felt threated by his presence and attacked him. This set off a chain of violent events as soldiers attacked anyone bold enough to look them in the eye. Virtually everyone was arrested. According to activists, the commander never showed them the closed military zone warrant, a legal right afforded by Israeli law.
~
Ynet News uses the term “clashes” in describing the event.
(Emanuel Stoakes talks to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé about the prospect of a peace settlement in the Middle East, the plight of the Palestinian refugees, and his response to his numerous critics.)
After attending the Inaugural Lecture for the European Centre for Palestine Studies at Exeter University (the first institution of its kind in our country), I met the controversial Professor Ilan Pappé, who – with some gentle persuasion on my part – agreed to do an online interview on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In brief, Pappé’s association with “controversy” stems from, amongst other things, his much-debated claim that Palestine was “ethnically cleansed” (in part at least) in the war of 1948; his claim, unpopular in Israel, that “Zionism is far more dangerous to the Middle East than Islam”; and because he has been accused of being, simply, a politically-motivated distorter of the historical “truth” by rival scholars.
Benny Morris, one of the prominent “New Historians” of Israeli history (a category that includes Pappé as well as the venerable Avi Shlaim) described a book by Pappé on Palestine as “appalling… [containing] errors of a quantity and a quality that are not found in serious historiography”; be that as it may, it is worth reviewing Morris’ own justification for Palestinian dispossession.*
King’s College’s Efraim Karsh and the inimitable Melanie Phillips in the Spectator are also voluble detractors; by contrast, John Pilger famously called him Israel’s “bravest” and “most principled” historian, whilst supporters in the academic world, including Noam Chomsky and Nur Masalha, continue to collaborate and concur with him.
Whatever one may think of his opinions, Pappé has borne a heavy cost for his heterodoxy: members of his family have shunned him due to his views, and he faced calls to resign from his former lecturing post at the University of Haifa, prompted by his political activities, and issued by none other than the university’s President.
I began by asking Professor Pappé if he believed that peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority could be achieved through their (apparently moribund) peace talks, and if not, why?
Pappé: I have very little faith in the current phase of the negotiations. As in the past, it seems that the Israeli government is exploiting the ‘peace process’ to receive immunity for its continued dispossession of the Palestinians in the West Bank and the barbaric siege on the Gaza Strip. The current phase has already been exploited by Israel to expand its settlement in the Greater Jerusalem Area – which has been accompanied by demolition of houses and eviction of people – and to tighten its grip over the Palestinian villages and towns which are in the vicinity of the ever-growing Jewish colonies of the West Bank. Similarly, it felt free to tighten the siege over Gaza, despite its promise to the international community to ease it.
At the recent inaugural lecture of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at Exeter University, you introduced Filipo Grandi from United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), who talked about the fate of the Palestinian refugees. Could you briefly outline the current human rights situation of the refugees and comment on their prospects for achieving some sort of improvement in their lives?
These are refugees who have lived in camps for more than sixty years – an unprecedented existence in modern times. Their situation varies between being denied access to meaningful jobs and benefits in Lebanon to a very limited access to the local economy and state benefits in Jordan. And we should not forget the refugee camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where people suffer from the double oppression of being both occupied and refugees.
There are also internal refugees in Israel itself and refugee communities in the world at large. Those in Israel live in better conditions than those in the occupied territories or the Arab world; but psychologically they had to undergo unbearable experiences for the past sixty years, such as watching their houses, businesses, factories, shops, fields and villages being pillaged and taken over by Jews.
There are two elements to this predicament. One is the dismal conditions in which people live, caged in camps that even when they become neighborhoods are on the margins of local society and in a limbo existence. Secondly, there have been more and more refugees as result of Israeli policy since 1948. There is no end to the dispossession, while at the same time the international community had already declared on 11 December 1948 through the UNGA resolution 194 that all these refugees have the unconditional right to return. As long as this continues, there is very little hope for peace and reconciliation in Israel and Palestine.
In the publication “Gaza in Crisis” you mention that you are working on a book with a ‘particular focus on the Israeli decisions taken in the early years’, that you claim ‘have not been deviated from’ up to the present. What were those decisions and how has the political class in Israel consented to their continued application?
The gist of these decisions was that there could be no overall strategy for Gaza after the Israeli ‘disengagement’ from it in 2005. Therefore, there were two options for the Israeli policy makers. Either they would succeed in subjecting the Strip to Israel’s will – and putting it under a joint Israeli and PA control – encircled by barbered and electric wire. In such a case life would have depended on Israel’s goodwill, and the people would have to resign to a life in Ghetto-like conditions. Should the people of Gaza resist the first option they would be subjected to collective punishment until they surrender – this is the second option. There is no real bottom line to collective punishment, but given the circumstances on the ground, by inertia it turns into a slow genocide. The Israeli public did not only endorse this policy, in the main it demands more punitive and more drastic actions against the people of Gaza.
Changing topic slightly, how do you view the Israeli claims that Hamas hides amongst civilian infrastructure and uses human shields, as a justification for civilian deaths as “collateral damage” to IDF offences? What evidence is there for this, and is it a fair point?
This always strikes me as a curious allegation. Gaza is the most densely inhabited urban space upon earth, where can Hamas operate from within a territory that is no bigger than the largest metropolises in the world? When you cage a million and half people in a tiny squeezed space like this, and they resist, and you retaliate, you know in advance what kind of collateral damage you are going to inflict.
Do you see the Palestinian Authority as being possibly “corrupt and complicit” in the oppression of those in the West bank, as has been suggested by some commentators?
I do not think the PA is more corrupt than any government in the world, or let alone in the Middle East. It is complicit but so is anyone who in a way does not actively resist the occupation. And yet, resisting today is almost like signing your own death certificate so that one should be very careful to make moral judgments from the outside.
One can make political judgments and the one I offer is that the PA helps the occupation and the illusion of a peace process and it seems that its dismantlement could be more beneficial for the attempt to expose the rouge nature of the Israeli regime and the criminal character of its policies.
One of your most controversial claims is that Palestine (as it was) was “ethnically cleansed” – at least in part – as a part of a systematic attempt to create a Jewish state at the cost of its Arab inhabitants. In the book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” you write that the Hagana’s Plan Dalet documents such intentions. Could you clarify and explain your position on this subject? Furthermore, how do you respond to the fierce criticism of your views? For example, David Pryce-Jones, described you in the Literary Review as “an Israeli academic who has made his name by hating Israel and everything it stands for.” Others have simply called you a falsifier. What is your response?
I am not going to respond to name calling – “Nazi”, “Falsifier”, “Communist”, “self-hating Jew” or whatever. I am willing to respond to any concrete question. Plan Dalet is a cluster of orders sent by the Hagana High Command from the beginning of March 1948. Each command instructed a specific unit to occupy villages or urban neighbourhoods, destroy them and expel the people living in them. The famous document Plan D, published on March 10, 1948 referred only to the areas the new state would occupy from the UN Arab states, but it included the same graphic description of how to deal with the native population of Palestine. The plan as published and the systematic cluster of orders, together with other evidence I cite in my book, show a clear intention to ethnically cleanse Palestine from its indigenous population, as indeed happened. Moreover, as shown by Nur Masalha, there is already supporting evidence that this intention existed from early on in Zionist thought and strategy.
Finally, could you comment on the under-discussed issue of resources and their allocation in both the West Bank and Gaza, particularly water. Do you think that there is any hope for parity between Palestinians and Israelis in the future in this area, without a separate Palestinian state?
No hope whatsoever. The Israelis are intent of robbing the Palestinians of land, water and any other natural resources – this is what dispossession is all about.
(*Note: In an infamous interview with Haaretz, Morris controversially justified the “tragedy” of the uprooting of Palestinians thus: “there was no other choice… Even the great [sic] American democracy [sic] could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good [sic] justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history…”)
Japan has misled its citizens about the aftermath of the massive tsunami, which hit the country on March 11 causing the US-built G&E reactors to melt and release deadly levels of radiation.
Press TV interviewed Online Columnist Allen Roland regarding the nuclear disaster in Japan, and discussed how the US and the international community might be more alert to the problems that nuclear power stations may pose for the rest of humanity.
Press TV: How is this issue of the Japanese disaster being viewed in America?
Roland: It’s always a pleasure to talk with you. Let’s put it this way. This reminds us so much of the British Petroleum situation, which was less than transparent in this incredible major leak that some people still feel is happening in the Gulf, and it has poisoned the Gulf. So here is the latest: the Wall Street Journal reports today that the EPA has now admitted that radiation is being found in American milk supplies. They say it’s safe to drink of course. In other words, radiated milk is safe but raw milk is not. So we are going through the same thing here. Remember we have a huge indefinite nuclear energy and particularly since one of the top advisors to Obama is the Former Presidents for GE who paid no taxes last year after 14 billion dollars of profit.
So another point, the battle to save Fukushima is now over as many Japanese officials have admitted. The Daily Mail said that the officials say it would mean switching off all power and abandonment efforts to keep the nuclear rods cool. The problem with that of course is there are already three raging meltdowns underway and if you continue to cool the fuel rods then an accelerated meltdown is inevitable. That is what we are hearing. Now listen to this. They are also talking about decommissioning the Fukushima nuclear reactors. Do you know how long it takes to do that? Japanese nuclear reactor experts say it would take twenty years to decommission the Fukushima nuclear reactors. Cesium 137 has now been found 25 miles from Fukushima with dangerously high concentrations.
Remember one million people died in the aftermath of the Chernobyl catastrophe. This is raising questions whether the evacuations around Fukushima should not be expanded. … The Japanese nuclear disaster plans were written by obviously complete imbeciles. The entire Fukushima power plant complex for example called for only one emergency stretcher to be on site and only twenty protective suits. Hundreds of people work there. So what is going on here? Then in a shocking interview, we were told if it goes to a full-scale evacuation of all personnel, and if firefighters are no longer putting water in the cores, it is the only thing preventing a major meltdown and three reactor sites. Once they evacuate they have passed the point of no return. I think they are. Meltdowns are inevitable at three reactor sites. This could be a tragedy far beyond that of Chernobyl. They are even admitting now they are closer to seven, which was a Chernobyl level.
This is big and it’s getting bigger as I talked about last night on Press TV. The radiation levels keep going up. It’s up to ten thousand now and guess what? The Fukushima denials are in full swing. Everyone talking about Fukushima meltdown is “fear mongering”. No, we are not feared mongering. When we start getting radiation levels picked up in the United States from California to Massachusetts, the pressure is on. That’s what’s happening. A reporter brought in from the New York Times today said the level of radioactive iodine was 101 and is continuing to increase. So this is not good. We are not even talking about seafood contamination etc, etc, etc … So we are concerned. In the United States, we are concerned. We want the Japanese to come clean and explain what’s happening because it’s going to affect us. It’s going to affect the whole planet if this really goes into a major meltdown.
Press TV: Regarding Chernobyl, many others believe the level of contamination is far worse than what happened in Chernobyl. Do you think the response the Japanese government has given the disaster corresponds to the reality on the ground?
Roland: No, I think the reality is much worse than what they are letting on. It was nearly one million people that died around the world from exposure to radiation in the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. The fact they are saying it’s close to that right now. That’s not good…
Press TV: Many experts say the troubled power plant in Fukushima actually led to the disaster because it was too old. But, Japan is not the only place on the planet with old nuclear power plants. In your country, there are nuclear power plants as well. What if the same thing happened in America?
Roland: It would be a disaster. We have something like 354 nuclear plants around the world and we have 104 of them here. We also have a huge nuclear industry and the mainstream press is still trying to dampen this because there is money right now trying to be put into nuclear plants. Remember the mainstream press is totally in bed with the corpocracy. Part of that corpocracy is the nuclear industry. It would be a total disaster if something like that happened here. It could be right here in California in the San Francisco Bay area. We have a radiation lab right on a major fault. By the way, many of these plants have the same GE containers, which is now split and now leaking radiation into the ground.
Press TV: Well that is even worse Allen. That is a ‘trouble in the making’ as they call it. Do you think America is doing anything after seeing these events in Japan? Are they doing anything for prevention even in a hypothetical situation?
Roland: I’m already seeing Senator Feinstein and another Senator who will be talking today about how we should really take another look at what’s happening here. It’s not going to be a sure deal. Believe me, the deal has already been made by Obama. It’s part of his payoff to his financial banking backers, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. Particularly because the demand for the truth of what is happening at Fukushima is legitimate. We are afraid ourselves of the same thing happening all over the world, but particularly here in the United States since we have a 1/3 of all nuclear reactors. So this is a building story and until we get the truth, it will continue to build. It’s not getting any better as far as I can see.
Press TV: The Japanese government I’m sure you know have imposed this media blackout so to say on the extent of what’s happening in Japan today. What do you think is going to be the national as well as the international result of that?
Roland: Well, I think that is a sure sign that something is really bad; hence, the media blackout. You are seeing some of the same thing here, but it’s not going to work. This is too dangerous and it has tremendous consequences for children, and pregnant women etc. It has huge consequences. So that blackout won’t work. Why would they be having a blackout unless this is far worse than they thought it was? Or they know but it’s almost as if they don’t want to let it out because it would panic the people. I don’t believe that. I think the Japanese people would respond if they knew the truth. I quite honestly feel that the Japanese people don’t trust their government and for good reason. As well as we don’t trust our government because, it lacks transparency. That answers your question. They wouldn’t have a blackout unless something very dangerous was happening or a matter of fact has already happened.
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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