We the Palestinians of the Besieged Gaza Strip, on this day, two years on from Israel’s genocidal attack on our families, our houses, our roads, our factories and our schools, are saying enough inaction, enough discussion, enough waiting – the time is now to hold Israel to account for its ongoing crimes against us. On the 27th of December 2008, Israel began an indiscriminate bombardment of the Gaza Strip. The assault lasted 22 days, killing 1,417 Palestinians, 352 of them children, according to main-stream Human Rights Organizations. For a staggering 528 hours, Israeli Occupation Forces let loose their US-supplied F15s, F16s, Merkava Tanks, internationally prohibited White Phosphorous, and bombed and invaded the small Palestinian coastal enclave that is home to 1.5 million, of whom 800,000 are children and over 80 percent UN registered refugees. Around 5,300 remain permanently wounded.
This devastation exceeded in savagery all previous massacres suffered in Gaza, such as the 21children killed in Jabalia in March 2008 or the 19 civilians killed sheltering in their house in the Beit Hanoun Massacre of 2006. The carnage even exceeded the attacks in November 1956 in which Israeli troops indiscriminately rounded up and killed 275 Palestinians in the Southern town of Khan Younis and 111 more in Rafah.
Since the Gaza massacre of 2009, world citizens have undertaken the responsibility to pressure Israel to comply with international law, through a proven strategy of boycott, divestment and sanctions. As in the global BDS movement that was so effective in ending the apartheid South African regime, we urge people of conscience to join the BDS call made by over 170 Palestinian organizations in 2005. As in South Africa the imbalance of power and representation in this struggle can be counterbalanced by a powerful international solidarity movement with BDS at the forefront, holding Israeli policy makers to account, something the international governing community has repeatedly failed to do. Similarly, creative civilian efforts such as the Free Gaza boats that broke the siege five times, the Gaza Freedom March, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, and the many land convoys must never stop their siege-breaking, highlighting the inhumanity of keeping 1.5 million Gazans in an open-air prison.
Two years have now passed since Israel’s gravest of genocidal acts that should have left people in no doubt of the brutal extent of Israel’s plans for the Palestinians. The murderous navy assault on international activists aboard the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in the Mediterranean Sea magnified to the world the cheapness Israel has assigned to Palestinian llife for so long. The world knows now, yet two years on nothing has changed for Palestinians.
The Goldstone Report came and went: despite its listing count after count of international law contraventions, Israeli “war crimes” and “possible crimes against humanity,” the European Union, the United Nations, the Red Cross, and all major Human Rights Organizations have called for an end to the illegal, medieval siege, it carries on unabated. On 11th November 2010 UNRWA head John Ging said, “There’s been no material change for the people on the ground here in terms of their status, the aid dependency, the absence of any recovery or reconstruction, no economy…The easing, as it was described, has been nothing more than a political easing of the pressure on Israel and Egypt.”
On the 2nd of December, 22 international organizations including Amnesty, Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid, and Medical Aid for Palestinians produced the report ‘Dashed Hopes, Continuation of the Gaza Blockade’ calling for international action to force Israel to unconditionally lift the blockade, saying the Palestinians of Gaza under Israeli siege continue to live in the same devastating conditions. Only a week ago Human Rights Watch published a comprehensive report “Separate and Unequal” that denounced Israeli policies as Apartheid, echoing similar sentiments by South African anti-apartheid activists.
We Palestinians of Gaza want to live at liberty to meet Palestinian friends or family from Tulkarem, Jerusalem or Nazareth; we want to have the right to travel and move freely. We want to live without fear of another bombing campaign that leaves hundreds of our children dead and many more injured or with cancers from the contamination of Israel’s white phosphorous and chemical warfare. We want to live without the humiliations at Israeli checkpoints or the indignity of not providing for our families because of the unemployment brought about by the economic control and the illegal siege. We are calling for an end to the racism that underpins all this oppression.
We ask: when will the world’s countries act according to the basic premise that people should be treated equally, regardless of their origin, ethnicity or colour – is it so far-fetched that a Palestinian child deserves the same human rights as any other human being? Will you be able to look back and say you stood on the right side of history or will you have sided with the oppressor?
We, therefore, call on the international community to take up its responsibility to protect the Palestinian people from Israel’s heinous aggression, immediately ending the siege with full compensation for the destruction of life and infrastructure visited upon us by this explicit policy of collective punishment. Nothing whatsoever justifies the intentional policies of savagery, including the severing of access to the water and electricity supply to 1.5 million people. The international conspiracy of silence towards the genocidal war taking place against the more than 1.5 million civilians in Gaza indicates complicity in these war crimes.
We also call upon all Palestine solidarity groups and all international civil society organizations to demand:
– An end to the siege that has been imposed on the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a result of their exercise of democratic choice.
– The protection of civilian lives and property, as stipulated in International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law such as The Fourth Geneva Convention.
– The immediate release of all political prisoners.
– That Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip be immediately provided with financial and material support to cope with the immense hardship that they are experiencing
– An end to occupation, Apartheid and other war crimes.
– Immediate reparations and compensation for all destruction carried out by the Israeli Occupation Forces in the Gaza Strip.
Boycott Divest and Sanction, join the many International Trade Unions, Universities, Supermarkets and artists and writers who refuse to entertain Apartheid Israel. Speak out for Palestine, for Gaza, and crucially ACT. The time is now.
Besieged Gaza, Palestine
List of signatories:
General Union for Public Services Workers
General Union for Health Services Workers
University Teachers’ Association
Palestinian Congregation for Lawyers
General Union for Petrochemical and Gas Workers
General Union for Agricultural Workers
Union of Women’s Work Committees
Union of Synergies—Women Unit
The One Democratic State Group
Arab Cultural Forum
Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel
Association of Al-Quds Bank for Culture and Info
Palestine Sailing Federation
Palestinian Association for Fishing and Maritime
Palestinian Network of Non-Governmental Organizations
Palestinian Women Committees
Progressive Students’ Union
Medical Relief Society
The General Society for Rehabilitation
General Union of Palestinian Women
Afaq Jadeeda Cultural Centre for Women and Children
Deir Al-Balah Cultural Centre for Women and Children
A spokesman for the US-led military alliance says the war in Afghanistan will escalate in 2011 as militants step up their attacks against the foreign forces in the country.
NATO spokesman Brigadier General Joseph Blotz says there is no end to the war and NATO needs to keep pressure on the Taliban all over Afghanistan.
“There is no end to the fighting season; we need to keep pressure on the Taliban all over the country.”
The remarks come as war has taken the lives of over 705 US-led foreign troops so far in 2010, making it the deadliest year for NATO since 2001.
This is while another NATO service member was killed on Monday. The Western military alliance says the soldier lost his life in a roadside blast in the south, without providing further details.
Southern Afghanistan has seen an escalation in violence this year.
A recent comparison of internal maps of the UN indicates “deterioration of the security situation” in Afghanistan despite the United States’ recent claim of progress in the Afghan war.
Fighting has recently spilled over into the previously peaceful regions in northern Afghanistan.
The Wall Street Journal compared two confidential “residual risk accessibility” maps and found that violence has worsened in northern and eastern provinces.
UN personnel use the maps to estimate the dangers of travel and running programs.
US President Barack Obama in his Afghan war strategy review claimed that the US-led forces had made progress in the war-battered country.
Obama had pledged a major drawdown from Afghanistan by July 2011. But Washington has confirmed that American troops will remain in war-ravaged Afghanistan for at least four more years.
The US military adventurism comes as the United Nations recently announced that Afghan civilian deaths had soared by over 30 percent in 2010 compared to the same period last year.
The UN says more than 2,400 civilians died in the crossfire across the country in the first 10 months of 2010.
The 2001 US-led invasion was launched with the objective of bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan. After nine years and despite the presence of over 150,000 foreign troops across Afghanistan, militancy is still high.
This week marks the second anniversary of the horror inflicted on the people of the Gaza Strip. Nothing has changed! Gaza has returned to its pre-invasion state of siege, confronted with the usual international indifference. Two years after the Israeli assault that lasted 22 long days and dark nights, during which its brave people were left alone to face one of the strongest armies in the world, Gaza no longer makes the news. Its people die slowly, its children are malnourished, its water contaminated, and yet it is deprived even of a word of sympathy from the President the United States and the leaders of Europe.
The dehumanization of the Palestinians of Gaza continues unabated. But now the urgent question is how to hold Israel accountable to international law and basic principles of human rights in order to forestall further escalation.
One way to begin holding Israel accountable is through direct witness and citizen solidarity. For example, on December 27, an Asian aid convoy comprising of politicians and activists from 18 countries will arrive in Gaza in an attempt to break Israel’s four year siege and to remind the world of the cruel consequences of the siege and the massacre. It is one of the remarkable undertakings by international Civil Society organizations that have decided to take action into their own hands after the miserable failure of the “International Community.” Some of those activists experienced first hand what it means to show true solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza when nine Turkish activist were brutally murdered in broad-day light on Mavi Marmara.
While in Gaza, the convoy’s activists will undoubtedly hear stories that will curdle the blood. During the massacre, one Israeli soldier commented, “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him.”
Israel could not have carried out its brutal assault, preceded and followed by a punishing siege, without a green light from leading world powers. When Israel attacked Gaza in February/March 2008, Matan Vilnai, then-deputy minister of defense (a misnomer for an aggressive, occupying power), threatened a “greater Shoah” (Holocaust). Some 102 Palestinians, including 21 children, were killed.
The reaction of the international community? Absolutely nothing substantive. On the contrary, the EU decided to reward the aggressor by upgrading its trade agreements with Israel. This upgrade in early December 2008 gave the go-ahead for the larger Gaza massacre of 2009 in which more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed: the majority of them civilians. But now, in spite of Israeli war crimes, both the US and the EU continue to strengthen ties with Israel.
The resemblance of Israel’s violent campaign of domination to that of the apartheid South African regime has recently been articulated by the anti-Apartheid freedom fighter and former South African government minister Ronnie Kasrils: “[It] is not difficult for anyone acquainted with colonial history to understand the way in which deliberately cultivated race hate inculcates a justification for the most atrocious and inhumane actions against even defenseless civilians – women, children, the elderly amongst them.”
The South African apartheid regime came under repeated pressure as the United Nations Security Council passed one resolution after another condemning its inhumane treatment of blacks. This gave much-needed succor to the oppressed, while we Palestinians, today, are bereft of even this tiny comfort because the United States continues to use its veto to ensure that Israel escapes censure.
Today, there is a growing grassroots struggle inside Palestine, much as there was inside apartheid South Africa. An intensified international solidarity movement with a common agenda can make the struggle for Palestine resonate in every country in the world. Our goal now, as civil society organizations, is to lift the siege against Gaza. To accomplish this, many activists, Palestinian and international, have launched a boycott campaign modeled on the global South African anti-apartheid campaign. This campaign is a democratic movement based on the struggle for human rights and the implementation of international law. Our struggle is not religious, ethnic, nor racial, but rather universalist; it is a struggle that guarantees the humanization of our people in the face of a dreadful Israeli war machine.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, has said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” While the Israeli armed forces were bombing my neighborhood, the UN, EU, Arab League and the international community remained silent in the face of atrocities. Hundreds of corpses of children and women failed to convince them to intervene.
Gaza 2009, like the Sharpeville 1960 massacre, cannot be ignored. It demands a response from all who believe in a common humanity. Nelson Mandela pointed the way to this shared humanity when years ago he stated, “But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Now is the time to boycott the Apartheid Israeli state, to divest from its economy and to impose sanctions against it. This is the only way to ensure the creation of a secular, democratic state for all its inhabitants in historic Palestine regardless of race, creed, or ethnicity.
– Haidar Eid is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Postmodern Literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University and a policy advisor with Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.
By RONNIE CUMMINS | CounterPunch | December 25, 2010
After 16 years of non-stop biotech bullying and force-feeding Genetically Engineered or Modified (GE or GM) crops to farm animals and “Frankenfoods” to unwitting consumers, Monsanto has a big problem, or rather several big problems. A growing number of published scientific studies indicate that GE foods pose serious human health threats. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) recently stated that “Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food,” including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. The AAEM advises consumers to avoid GM foods. Before the FDA arbitrarily decided to allow Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) into food products in 1994, FDA scientists had repeatedly warned that GM foods can set off serious, hard-to-detect side effects, including allergies, toxins, new diseases, and nutritional problems. They urged long-term safety studies, but were ignored.
Federal judges are finally starting to acknowledge what organic farmers and consumers have said all along: uncontrollable and unpredictable GMO crops such as alfalfa and sugar beets spread their mutant genes onto organic farms and into non-GMO varieties and plant relatives, and should be halted.
An appeals court recently ruled that consumers have the right to know whether the dairy products they are purchasing are derived from cows injected with Monsanto’s (now Elanco’s) controversial recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), linked to serious animal health problems and increased cancer risk for humans.
Monsanto’s Roundup, the agro-toxic companion herbicide for millions of acres of GM soybeans, corn, cotton, alfalfa, canola, and sugar beets, is losing market share. Its overuse has spawned a new generation of superweeds that can only be killed with super-toxic herbicides such as 2,4, D and paraquat. […]
In just one year, Monsanto has moved from being Forbes’ “Company of the Year” to the Worst Stock of the Year. The Biotech Bully of St. Louis has become one of the most hated corporations on Earth.
Monsanto and their agro-toxic allies are now turning to Obama’s pro-biotech USDA for assistance. They want the organic community to stop suing them and boycotting their products. They want food activists and the OCA to mute our criticisms and stop tarnishing the image of their brands, their seeds, and companies. They want us to resign ourselves to the fact that one-third of U.S. croplands, and one-tenth of global cultivated acreage, are already contaminated with GMOs. That’s why Monsanto recently hired the notorious mercenary firm, Blackwater, to spy on us. That’s why Monsanto has teamed up with the Gates Foundation to bribe government officials and scientists and spread GMOs throughout Africa and the developing world. That’s why the biotech bullies and the Farm Bureau have joined hands with the Obama Administration to preach their new doctrine of “coexistence.” … Full article
Because of modern alarmist reactions to the word “Palestine,” many non-Arabs and non-Muslims take offense when it is argued that Jesus was a Palestinian (peace be upon him).
Jesus’ ethnicity, skin color, and culture often accompany this conversation, but few people are willing to acknowledge the fact he was non-European. A simple stroll down the Christmas aisle will show you the dominant depiction of Jesus: a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white man.
Islamophobia and anti-Arab propaganda have conditioned us to view Palestinians as nothing but heartless suicide bombers, “terrorists,” and “enemies of freedom and democracy.” Perpetual media vilification and demonization of Palestinians, in contrast to the glorification of Israel, obstructs us from seeing serious issues such as the Palestinian refugee crisis, the victims of Israel’s atrocious three-week assault on Gaza during the winter of 2008-2009, the tens of thousands of homeless Palestinians, and many other struggles that are constantly addressed by human rights activists around the world.
To speak from the perspective of the Palestinians, especially in casual non-Arab and non-Muslim settings, generates controversy because of the alignment between Palestinians and violent stereotypes. So, how could Jesus belong to a group of people that we’re taught to dehumanize?
When I’ve spoken to people about this, I’ve noticed the following responses: “No, Jesus was a Jew,” or “Jesus is not Muslim.” The mistake isn’t a surprise to me, but it certainly is revealing. Being a Palestinian does not mean one is Muslim or vice versa. Prior to the brutal and unjust dispossession of indigenous Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel, the word “Palestine” was a geographic term applied to Palestinian Muslims, Palestinian Christians, and Palestinian Jews. Although most Palestinians are Muslim today, there is a significant Palestinian Christian minority who are often overlooked, especially by the mainstream Western media.
That dominant narrative not only distorts and misrepresents the Palestinian struggle as a religious conflict between “Muslims and Jews,” but consequentially pushes the lives of Palestinian Christians into “non-existence.” That is, due to the media’s reluctance to report the experiences and stories of Palestinian Christians, it isn’t a surprise when white Americans are astonished by the fact that Palestinian and Arab Christians do, in fact, exist. One could argue that the very existence of Palestinian Christians is threatening, as it disrupts the sweeping and overly-simplistic “Muslim vs. Jew” Zionist narrative. To learn about many Palestinian Christians opposing Israeli military occupation, as well as Jews who oppose the occupation, is to reveal more voices, perspectives, and complexities to a conflict that has been immensely portrayed as one-sided, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim.
Yeshua (Jesus’ real Aramaic name) was born in Bethlehem, a Palestinian city in the West Bank and home to one of the largest Palestinian Christian communities. The Church of the Nativity, one of the oldest churches in the world, marks the birthplace of Jesus and is sacred to both Christians and Muslims. While tourists from the around the world visit the site, they are subject to Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks. The Israeli construction of the West Bank barrier also severely restricts travel for local Palestinians. In April of 2010, Israeli authorities barred Palestinian Christians from entering Jerusalem and visiting the Church of Holy Sepulchre during Easter. Yosef Zabaneh, a Palestinian Christian merchant in Ramallah, said: “The Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank doesn’t distinguish between us, but treats all Palestinians with contempt.”
Zabaneh’s comments allude to the persistent dehumanization of Palestinians, as well as the erasure of Palestinians, both Christians and Muslims. By constantly casting Palestinians as the villains, even the term “Palestine” becomes “evil.” There is refusal to recognize, for example, that the word “Palestine” was used as early as the 5th century BCE by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. John Bimson, author of “The Compact Handbook of Old Testament Life,” acknowledges the objection to the use of “Palestine”:
The term ‘Palestine’ is derived from the Philistines. In the fifth century BC the Greek historian Herodotus seems to have used the term Palaistine Syria (= Philistine Syria) to refer to the whole region between Phoenicia and the Lebanon mountains in the north and Egypt in the south… Today the name “Palestine” has political overtones which many find objectionable, and for that reason some writers deliberately avoid using it. However, the alternatives are either too clumsy to be used repeatedly or else they are inaccurate when applied to certain periods, so “Palestine” remains a useful term…
Deliberately avoiding the use of the name “Palestine” not only misrepresents history, but also reinforces anti-Palestinian racism as acceptable. When one examines the argument against Jesus being a Palestinian, one detects a remarkable amount of hostility aimed at both Palestinians and Muslims. One cannot help but wonder, is there something threatening about identifying Jesus as a Palestinian? Professor Jack D. Forbes writes about Jesus’ multi-cultural and multi-ethnic environment:
When the Romans came to dominate the area, they used the name Palestine. Thus, when Yehoshu’a [Jesus] was born, he was born a Palestinian as were all of the inhabitants of the region, Jews and non-Jews. He was also a Nazarene (being born in Nazareth) and a Galilean (born in the region of Galilee)… At the time of Yehoshu’a’s birth, Palestine was inhabited by Jews-descendants of Hebrews, Canaanites, and many other Semitic peoples-and also by Phoenicians, Syrians, Greeks, and even Arabs.
Despite these facts, there are those who use the color-blind argument: “It does not matter what Jesus’ ethnicity or skin color was. It does not matter what language he spoke. Jesus is for all people, whether you’re black, white, brown, yellow, etc.” While this is a well-intentioned expression of inclusiveness and universalism, it misses the point.
When we see so many depictions of Jesus as a Euro-American white man, the ethnocentrism and race-bending needs to be called out. In respect to language, for instance, Neil Douglas-Klotz, author of “The Hidden Gospel: Decoding the Spiritual Message of the Aramaic Jesus,” emphasizes the importance of understanding that Jesus spoke Aramaic, not English, and that his words, as well as his worldview, must be understood in light of Middle Eastern language and spirituality. Douglas-Klotz provides an interesting example which reminds me of the rich depth and meaning of Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi words, especially the word for “spirit”:
Whenever a saying of Jesus refers to spirit, we must remember that he would have used an Aramaic or Hebrew word. In both of these languages, the same word stands for spirit, breath, air, and wind. So ‘Holy Spirit’ must also be ‘Holy Breath.’ The duality between spirit and body, which we often take for granted in our Western languages falls away. If Jesus made the famous statement about speaking or sinning against the Holy Spirit (for instance, in Luke 12:10), then somehow the Middle Eastern concept of breath is also involved.
Certainly, no person is superior to another based on culture, language, or skin color, but to ignore the way Jesus’ whiteness has been used to subjugate and discriminate against racial minorities in the West and many other countries is to overlook another important aspect of Jesus’ teachings: Love thy neighbor as thyself. Malcolm X wrote about white supremacists and slave-owners using Christianity to justify their “moral” and “racial superiority” over blacks. In Malcolm’s own words, “The Holy Bible in the White man’s hands and its interpretations of it have been the greatest single ideological weapon for enslaving millions of non-white human beings.” Throughout history, whether it was in Jerusalem, Spain, India, Africa, or in the Americas, white so-called “Christians” cultivated a distorted interpretation of religion that was compatible with their racist, colonialist agenda.
And here we are in the 21st century where Islamophobia (also stemming from racism because the religion of Islam gets racialized) is on the rise; where people calling themselves “Christian” fear to have a black president; where members of the KKK and anti-immigration movements behave as if Jesus were an intolerant white American racist who only spoke English despite being born in the Middle East. It is astonishing how so-called “Christians” like Ann Coulter call Muslims “rag-heads” when in actuality, Jesus himself would fit the profile of a “rag-head,” too. As would Moses, Joseph, Abraham, and the rest of the Prophets (peace be upon them all). As William Rivers Pitt writes:
The ugly truth which never even occurs to most Americans is that Jesus looked a lot more like an Iraqi, like an Afghani, like a Palestinian, like an Arab, than any of the paintings which grace the walls of American churches from sea to shining sea. This was an uncomfortable fact before September 11. After the attack, it became almost a moral imperative to put as much distance between Americans and people from the Middle East as possible. Now, to suggest that Jesus shared a genealogical heritage and physical similarity to the people sitting in dog cages down in Guantanamo is to dance along the edge of treason.
Without acknowledging Jesus as a native Middle Eastern person — a Palestinian — who spoke Aramaic — a Semitic language that is ancestral to Arabic and Hebrew — the West will continue to view Islam as a “foreign religion.” Hate crimes and discriminatory acts against Muslims, Arabs, and others who are perceived to be Muslim will persist. They will still be treated as “cultural outsiders.” Interesting enough, Christianity and Judaism are never considered “foreign religions,” despite having Middle Eastern origins, like Islam. As Douglas-Klotz insists, affirming Jesus as a native Middle Eastern person “enables Christians to understand that the mind and message” of Jesus arises from “the same earth as have the traditions of their Jewish and Muslim sisters and brothers.”
Jesus would not prefer one race or group of people over another. I believe he would condemn today’s demonization and dehumanization of the Palestinian people, as well as the misrepresentations of him that only fuel ignorance and ethnocentrism. As a Muslim, I believe Jesus was a prophet of God, and if I were to have any say about the Christmas spirit, it would be based on Jesus’ character: humility, compassion, and Love. A love in which all people, regardless of ethnicity, race, culture, religion, gender, and sexual orientation are respected and appreciated.
And in that spirit, I wish you a merry Christmas. Alaha Natarak (Aramaic: God be with you).
The atom bomb tests over the Nevada desert are etched in the American consciousness, even though they ended nearly half a century ago. The clouds that looked like gigantic mushrooms rising into the stratosphere remind us of the Cold War-era American-Soviet race to test and manufacture as many nuclear weapons as possible to fight what many felt would be an inevitable nuclear war.
Those days are gone. The Cold War is over. Stockpiles of nuclear weapons are shrinking. All-out nuclear war, while still possible, is no longer regarded as inevitable. And testing has ended – in the atmosphere and below the ground. Thus, it is tempting to think of bomb tests as a relic of history, with no current relevance.
But the tests ARE relevant. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996, ratified by 153 countries, has still not been endorsed by the U.S. Senate, or other atomic nations. Thus, testing could legally resume at any time. Moreover, research on health hazards of test fallout is far from complete.
Some want to close the book on bomb test studies, citing the age of the tests and the difficulty of understanding health risk. But measuring risk is possible, thanks to – of all things – baby teeth.
Atomic Tests in 1950s Create Need for First Tooth Studies
Studying radiation in baby teeth was an unknown technique when U.S. atmospheric nuclear weapons tests started. By the mid-1950s dozens of weapons had been detonated, including hydrogen bombs one thousand times more potent than atomic bombs. The 422 American and Soviet nuclear explosions into the atmosphere during the arms race equaled the yield of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs.
Fallout from bomb tests consisted of over 100 radioactive and cancer-causing chemicals, not found in nature. Each chemical affects the body differently. Iodine-131 attacks the thyroid gland, Cesium-137 disperses into all soft tissues, and Strontium-90 attaches to bone and teeth. The mushroom clouds in Nevada moved eastward with prevailing winds across the continent, where fallout re-entered the environment through precipitation. Scientific measurements showed that only 2 or 3 days after a Nevada explosion, fallout from the test could be present in rain or snow throughout the country, even the east coast 2500 miles away.
Soon after the Nevada tests began, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission began the first program measuring radioactivity levels in human bodies by testing Strontium-90 in bones from autopsies in the U.S. and in Europe. The AEC program showed that Sr-90 levels varied by geographic area, and were greater in infants and children. (1) The program also became infamous for its failure to request family permission before testing skeletons. (2)
Although Sr-90 was just one of the 100-plus chemicals in fallout, it quickly became the favorite for in-body testing, as its half life of 28.7 years makes it detectable for a long period after a bone or tooth is extracted from the body. But Sr-90 was also recognized as one of the most harmful components of the clouds. It was known to penetrate into the bone marrow, where red and white blood cells crucial to the immune response are formed. (3)
Sr-90 became a standard part of the American vocabulary during the Cold War. In the 1956 presidential campaign, Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson declared Sr-90 as:
“the most dreadful poison in the world. For only one tablespoon equally shared by all the members of the human race could produce a dangerous level of radioactivity in the bones of every individual.” (4)
One month after this statement, an article in Newsweek described the Sr-90 threat:
“the testing of hydrogen bombs may have already propelled enough strontium 90, the most pernicious aftermath of nuclear fission, into the stratosphere to doom countless of the world’s children to inescapable and incurable cancer.” (5)
With the AEC bone program largely a secret government venture, the need for a more public study of fallout in bodies became clear. In August 1958, biochemist Herman Kalckar proposed an international, long-term program measuring fallout in baby teeth. Kalckar noted that young children “take up radioactive strontium and caesium more intensely than adolescents and adults.” (6)
Citizens and Scientists Collaborate, Tooth Study Helps End Testing
Kalckar’s idea was an instant hit. The Greater St. Louis Citizens Committee for Nuclear Information, a combination of Washington University scientists and concerned local citizens, began a study in December 1958. Teeth donations were solicited by distributing forms to schools, libraries, churches, dentists, and dental clinics. (7) By the time the study ended over a decade later, over 300,000 teeth had been collected. Federal funds gave some support, but many volunteers handed out forms, collected information from parents, and distributed buttons to children stating “I Gave My Tooth to Science.”
Lab testing of baby teeth confirmed the fears of many, namely, the enormous buildup of fallout in baby teeth. The average Sr-90 level in baby teeth for a St. Louis child born in 1963 was about 50 times higher than that of their counterparts born in 1950. (8) The St. Louis tooth study entered the policy arena when Washington University’s Dr. Eric Reiss presented results to the U.S. Senate. Soon after, President John F. Kennedy signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty.
The Washington University tooth study was duplicated in Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the United Kingdom, and West Germany. All studies detected the same sharp increase in Sr-90 as bomb testing went on.
The St. Louis study also produced good news: five years after the Treaty went into effect, average Sr-90 in the jawbones of stillborn fetuses plunged about 50%. (8) Post-Treaty reductions were so dramatic that the U.S. government discontinued funding for the St. Louis tooth study in 1970, and studies of Sr-90 in bones of children (1971) and adults (1982), leaving the nation with no program measuring radioactivity in human bodies.
Baby Teeth Used to Address Cancer Risk from Bomb Tests
Talk of fallout causing cancer was common in the bomb test era. A Newsweek article covering the St. Louis tooth study asked “But what about the children who have done their growing while strontium-90 levels were high – are they liable to develop cancer?” (9) The St. Louis study addressed the buildup of fallout in human bodies, but not cancer risk. Government officials were in no hurry to look at the fallout-cancer link, so the topic went unexamined.
After decades of asserting fallout levels were too low to cause cancer, the government position changed after the Cold War ended. Federal studies estimated that fallout caused 49,000 Americans to develop thyroid cancer, with few fatalities (10), and about 15,000 Americans died of cancer from fallout. (11) Some believed these figures to be gross underestimates; a blue-ribbon European panel estimated worldwide cancer cases from fallout to be 123,200,000, half of them fatal. (12) But U.S. health officials, not eager to consider mass carnage, stopped studies of fallout in 2002.
The St. Louis tooth study, which had been largely forgotten for decades, experienced a rebirth in 2001. Washington University officials were startled to find hundreds of boxes of teeth not used in the study, stored in a remote ammunition bunker. Each tooth is contained in a small enveloped attached to a 3 x 5 card identifying the tooth and its donor. The school transferred the collection of about 85,000 teeth to the Radiation and Public Health Project (RPHP) research group, which was conducting its own study of Sr-90 in baby teeth near nuclear reactors.
RPHP officials recognized that these teeth could be used for a study of cancer risk of “Baby Boomers” now in their 40s and 50s. A sample of the 85,000 teeth was used to locate cancer survivors (through current addresses) and those who died of cancer (through official death records). In December 2010, the International Journal of Health Services published findings of the study, i.e. that “Boomers” born 1959-1961 who died of cancer had Sr-90 levels in their teeth more than twice (+122%) greater than those the same age who are alive and healthy. (13) While more research is needed to estimate casualties, it appears likely that the government figure of 15,000 U.S. cancer deaths from fallout is quite low.
Baby Teeth Play a Role in Public Policy
A long-ago baby tooth study of fallout can be greatly important in shaping current public policy, in several areas. First, it can help explain why 40% of Americans will develop cancer at some point in their life – many with no known risk factor. Second, it suggests that Americans are being harmed from the same substances produced in 104 nuclear power reactors around the country; the RPHP study of 5,000 baby teeth showed links between Sr-90 in baby teeth and child cancer risk near nuclear plants in New York and New Jersey. (14) Finally, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is still not ratified by the U.S. Senate, and findings of higher cancer rates in “Baby Boomers” from bomb testing underlines the need to ban all further tests of nuclear weapons and their usage in warfare.
Joseph Mangano is Executive Director of the Radiation and Public Health Project.
2. Leary WE. In 1950s, U.S. Collected Human Tissue to Monitor Atomic Tests. New York Times, June 21, 1995.
3. Pecher C and Pecher J. Radio-calcium and radio-strontium metabolism in pregnant mice. In Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine. New York: January-April 1941, Volume 46, p. 94.
4. Salisbury HE. Stevenson Calls for World Pact to Curb H-Bomb. New York Times, October 16, 1956.
5. Danger – Strontium 90. Newsweek, November 12, 1956, p. 88.
6. Kalckar HM. An international milk teeth radiation census. Nature 1958;4831:283-4.
7. Wyant WK. Strontium-90 in St. Louis: 50,000 Baby Teeth. The Nation, June 13, 1959, 535-7.
8. Rosenthal HL. Accumulation of environmental 90-Sr in teeth of children. Hanford Radiobiology Symposium, Richland WA, May 5-8, 1969, 163-71.
9. Moment of Tooth. Newsweek, April 25, 1960, p. 70.
10. National Research Council, Committee on Thyroid Screening. Exposure of the American People to Iodine-131 from the Nevada Bomb Tests. National Academy Press: Washington DC, 1999.
11. Eisler P. Fallout likely caused 15,000 deaths. USA Today, February 28, 2002, p. 1.
12. European Committee on Radiation Research. 2003 Recommendations of the ECRR: The Health Effects of Ionising Radiation Exposure for Radiation Protection Purposes. Green Audit: Aberystwyth, Wales, 2003.
13. Mangano JJ and Sherman JD. Elevated in vivo strontium-90 from nuclear weapons test fallout among cancer decedents: a case-control study using deciduous teeth. International Journal of Health Services 2011;41(1):137-58.
14. Mangano JJ. A short latency between radiation exposure from nuclear plants and cancer in young children. International Journal of Health Services 2006;36(1):113-35.
Press TV’s Saeed Pour Reza talks to Philip Giraldi on ‘Spying on Americans’:
“…many of these state agencies are actually Israeli companies… this happened recently in Pennsylvania, where it was an Israeli company that was collecting this kind of information on war protesters.
“And in the state of New Jersey an Israeli was actually appointed as the homeland security director for the state. So this penetration of American security by Israeli companies and Israeli individuals has been going on for some years…”
– Philip Giraldi, former CIA and military intelligence officer
Monitoring America
By Dana Priest and William Arkin | Washington Post | December 20, 2010
… the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.
The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation’s history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The government’s goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI…
Findings include:
* Technologies and techniques honed for use on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan have migrated into the hands of law enforcement agencies in America.
* The FBI is building a database with the names and certain personal information, such as employment history, of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents whom a local police officer or a fellow citizen believed to be acting suspiciously. It is accessible to an increasing number of local law enforcement and military criminal investigators, increasing concerns that it could somehow end up in the public domain.
The clear majority of the modern works that examine the Palestine/Israel conflict do so with a strong emphasis on the ‘nakba’ of 1948, with subsequent arguments based on covering events that led up to it, and then arguments based on events that have followed from it. For the former it is usually a discussion of the early Zionist writings merging into early Christian Zionist beliefs in the U.S. and Britain, and then gaining huge momentum from the Balfour Declaration, a statement of policy and not international law or international agreement. For the latter, the post nakba events, much of the focus is appropriately placed on the mechanisms of control established by the newly declared Israeli state up to the 1967 war, and after that critical juncture, a discussion of the settlements and their expropriation/annexation of occupied Palestinian land. The formation of valued international norms of law and human rights since the Second World War, established through various international means (the Nuremburg trials, the UN, the Geneva Conventions and other accepted norms of customary law), plays in important role in these discussions.
Basem L. Ra’ad’s new book “Hidden Histories – Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean” adds a relatively new component to the discussion of Palestinian and regional history. It is impossible to not include the above elements in a discussion of Palestine, yet they receive minimal treatment, almost as an already understood if understated context. Instead, Hidden Histories explores two perspectives that are not completely ignored but not fully well developed, in part because the dominant media discourse of the U.S., Europe, and Israel do not particularly want them to be heard.
The first perspective is to examine the ancient histories of the region through current knowledge of archaeology and linguistics, a duality that highlights not the uniqueness of a chosen people and its exile and return, but the commonality of a stable indigenous population that underwent various permutations and adaptations as different forces controlled to the region to varying degrees.
The second perspective looks at the modern implementation of the Israeli narrative – normally looked at in the manner in which the ethnic history is used to justify the appropriation and annexation of the physical landscape, of the declared intent to settle all of Eretz Israel, as a divine right of the Jewish people. Ra’ad turns this appropriation and annexation perspective and focuses on the appropriation of the cultural artifacts, the cultural heritage, the language, and the cultural beliefs of the indigenous Palestinians, to the extent, as he argues, that the Palestinians themselves are becoming unaware of their own true patrimony and unknowingly reflect Israeli mythology into their own background. This is a very important construct to recognize as it is one of the strongest ways in which a dominant society can not only control but emotionally and culturally delete another culture and its history. The people become others, wanderers in the desert, true “Arabs” who arrived with the Islamic conquests of the seventh century, whose true home is beyond the borders of Israel.
A large part of the work then is a call to awareness for the Palestinian people to be aware of the loss of their patrimony, to re-educate themselves as to what is truly theirs in a cultural sense as well as the with the loss of the land. It has been noted more than once in both revisionist and ‘traditional’ historical writings on Zionism that “early Zionists did not shy away from seeing the Palestinians as rooted in the land from prehistoric times….Up to the 1930s, many Zionist theorists saw the Palestinian farmers or “fellahin” as descendants of Judean peasantry, as Jews who converted to Islam to avoid taxation.” Afterward, following upon the more violent nature of the conflict, the holocaust, and the nakba, the “affinity early Zionists felt toward the local Palestinians, for utilitarian reasons, has now disappeared overall and been replaced by antagonism or dismissal.” Even more effectively Ra’ad argues the “Israelis have appropriated a semblance of nativity and have relegated the Palestinians to cultural invisibility or active demonization within the Zionist system.” By appropriating the nativity of the Palestinians, the Zionists attempt to claim or as they would put it to reclaim their divinely ordained land, their own nativity.
The arguments and presentations cover the historical and archaeological evidence from the early existence of a Canaanite culture with a widespread geography that is a precursor to many of the myths and traditions of the region as a whole. By looking at the linguistic patterns and developments throughout the region, Ra’ad argues that “Hebrew is merely a script style that is known in Aramaic as square Aramaic,” and is not the ancient language of the land. Nor can the earlier languages, much more similar to the Arabic language, be considered “paleo-Hebrew” this or “ancient-Hebrew” that. The Arabic language is shown to be “a native regional language,” not imported with the Arab Muslim conquest of the seventh century, and it is the “live continuation and natural extension of the earlier languages as they were submerged.” In other words it is not a foreign language to the region, but a natural evolution under organic adaptations to the trade, commerce, and warfare so prevalent in the region. In sum “whether it is in this totality of artifice of changing the map or in relation to the ancient names on the ground, or theories about ancient languages, there is a great deal of invention, guile, backdating, and fabricated justification.”
For the Israelis, if the god-covenanted land narrative falls apart, their whole universe disappears and they become just another group attempting to survive by way of dominance over a weaker group. To prevent that from happening, the narrative needs to be constructed both forward and backwards: forwards from the given biblical time lines to create a lineage representing the ‘true’ heritage of the Jews; backwards from current times as linguistic and archaeological evidence is phrased and manipulated towards the same heritage. Ra’ad’s work creates a discussion that poses huge problems for the overall narrative.
The future for Palestine involves education to decolonize the mind – their own minds, to reclaim their heritage from appropriation as Jewish heritage. Education is paramount in this, and this work serves as an excellent starting point in re-educating not only the world but Palestinians as to the nature of their patrimony and the manner in which it is being appropriated. With five million Palestinians already deprived of any land as their heritage, it is incumbent upon them to retain, to regain, their cultural voice, their cultural history as a bulwark against further denial and invisibleness under the domination of the Israeli occupation. Beyond that it suggests a way forward for research, to accumulate and record what can be retained and discovered of the Palestinian heritage, to not allow it to be subsumed by the Zionist project of Eretz Israel.
Given the media dominance of the U.S., Europe, and Israel, it will remain a struggle to retain and open up the broader perspective of awareness. Basem Ra’ads “Hidden Histories” is an intriguing and challenging work, a positive study leading toward a more honest fundamental understanding of the Eastern Mediterranean, and it also serves as a warning as to how historical narratives can be manipulated and created by the dominant part of society to fully disown both physically and culturally the weaker part.
– Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle.
The French in Algeria pioneered many of the torture techniques that were subsequently used in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. French ‘counterinsurgency’ specialists, who had already fought the Vietnamese, trained American soldiers and interrogators throughout the 1960s.
Al Jazeera examines the bitterness still provoked by France’s colonial war in Algeria and how it fuels resentment between France and its Muslim community.
Firedamp is a work of gripping fiction rooted in fact. It is a story of love, hate and revolution, of heroes and villains. In the late eighteen/early nineteen hundreds thousands of poor but hopeful immigrant coal miners, railroaded to the Colorado/New Mexico border, found themselves and their families in a hostile environment. Forced to work under deplorable conditions for next to nothing, they fought back. It is this story and the story of the powerfully wealthy men who tried to drive them to do their bidding.
Charles Winslow, the wealthy railroad man / mine owner, and his family are products of my imagination as are most characters in the novel including the Slovak powder-man, Leos Nemcova and his son, born on the docks of NYC in the blizzard of 1888. In the storm’s fury the boy’s mother, Frederica Arial, a strikingly beautiful, manipulative woman, abandons her son and husband. Frederica will stop at nothing to achieve monetary goals in her new world. The story traces all of their lives to Trinidad Colorado. Black John, George Metaxas, King Trec, Hector Finnigan and the Sol Bertilina family are among the book’s fictional characters. From the fabulously wealthy to the wretchedly poor these people are as real as the atrocities committed by them and against them were real: as the tragic revolution those atrocities spawned was real.
In the telling I fictionalize historical figures instrumental in the story’s plot. Winslow’s and Rockefeller’s cold-blooded mine superintendent, LM Bowers, is an example. (Bowers telegrams to Junior Rockefeller and Mr. Junior’s replies are authenticated and on record in the Trinidad, Colorado Public Library.) Louis Tikis, Sheriff Farr, Monty Linderfelt, the Fighting Greeks and the Black Hand Committee were real people and real organizations plucked from Raton NM. and Trinidad CO. history of that time
Before and while writing FIREDAMP I spent weeks listening to those who lived through that era or whose parents lived through it. At the age of eleven, my friend Gabe Lucero went to work in the mines of Dawson, New Mexico. (Gabe’s father and brothers were killed in Dawson Mines disasters.) I interviewed Congressman Judge, J. Edgar Chenowith of Trinidad who as a boy in 1914 stood on the street corner when the women marched in protest to free the 82 year old Mother Jones. (She was incarcerated under orders issued by LM Bowers.) I read reams of newsprint, biased and unbiased, published during these troubled times. I gleaned much first-hand information from Papa John Oborosoler, my daughters’ great grandfather, who left the mines to raise his family on Johnson Mesa. Papa John was delivering vegetables to strikers in the tent city of Ludlow the day Bowers’ hand- picked militia opened fire. The people in the Public Library of Trinidad were an immense help. Peter Collier & David Horowitz’s book, THE ROCKEFELLERS gave me historical insight. I used all of this to spur my imagination. – Ben Zeller April, 2002
The Miami 7, the Fort Dix 6,the Newburgh 4, the Underwear Bomber, the Portland Car Bomber… The FBI has set up then knocked down dozens of terrorist straw men in an effort to convince you that the ‘war on terror’ is real. This is a very real war for your mind and we may all pay a high price for ignoring it.
Even those familiar with the long and shameful history of America’s appeasement of Israel were taken aback by the Obama administration’s extraordinary offer to Netanyahu… continue
American tech giant Google has faced regulatory scrutiny on numerous occasions amid accusations of antitrust violations. Google’s relationship with the CIA, ranging from early financial support to collaborative efforts have been decried as undermining privacy rights and free speech in the digital landscape.
Google’s creation played a crucial role in the US intelligence community’s scheme to attain global dominance by controlling information. … continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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