The Albuquerque Police Department has found its way into another lawsuit. This time a former employee is suing on grounds of wrongful termination for not complying to Police Chief Gorden Eden’s orders to find ways to deny public records request.
The New Mexico police agency has been a long-time violator of public records requests. Just last month, PINAC News reported on the many lawsuits that have been brought against the department for violating public records laws or increasingly delaying public records request.
The lawsuit, which can be read here is being brought by Reynaldo Chavez, who is the former records custodian for the police department.
Chavez is seeking monetary damages for conspiracy, breach of contract, spoliation and violations under New Mexico’s Whistle Blower Protection Act.
Reynaldo Chavez
Named in the suit is Albuquerque Police Department Police Chief Gorden Eden, Assistant Chief Robert Huntsman, Legal Counsel Kathryn Levy, and the Executive Director of its Administrative Support Bureau William Slausen.
According to the suit, Chief Eden constantly ordered Chavez to find ways to avoid releasing public information to requesters such as the media, private individuals and bloggers.
The suit specifically states Chavez was ordered to, ” deny, withhold, obstruct, conceal, or even destroy records.”
Chavez goes on to say in the suit that he was told to:
“Creatively identify an allowable exception [of] the Inspection of Public Records Act to withhold production of responsive public records in an effort to “baffle” or frustrate the requestor or otherwise burden them,” and ” to fabricate reasons to burden requestors with additional requirements when such requirements were not needed such as case numbers or increased particularity in a given request.” and “arbitrarily delay production of responsive public records without justification supporting such delay.”
The Albuquerque Police Department released the following statement:
“[We] carefully evaluate document requests to ensure that it does not release sensitive information, such as social security numbers, documents that are confidential by law, or evidence that could compromise an investigation. Albuquerque Police Department is committed to transparency and strives to improve how quickly it is able to respond to requests from the public.”
Chavez eventually became fed up with the Chief’s unlawful demands and as a result Chavez complained to upper level police officials. Once word got back to the Chief, Chavez was fired.
In the lawsuit, Chavez included 11 exhibits of proof showing how the police department gave incomplete reply’s to records requests; one of which included a quote from Police Department Legal Counsel Kathryn Levy saying, “There are items we just will not release and we will just pay the fines or lawsuits.”
In another instance, Levy instructed Chavez to give a KRQE reporter a box of records that had nothing to do with the requested information regarding the Department of Justice’s investigation into the beleaguered police department.
Recently, Eden’s department has been under scrutiny by even the United States Department of Justice, which usually gives a free pass to departments with excessive force issue.
A federal investigation into the Albuquerque police department found “a pattern or practice of use of excessive force, including deadly force” that violated the Fourth Amendment, the Justice Department said Thursday. The probe, launched in 2012, found that the Albuquerque Police Department too often uses deadly force, applies less lethal force—like Tasers—unnecessarily, and too often uses force against people with mental illness. The report also details problems within the department that include inadequate training and lack of accountability.
Chavez also claims the defendants do not qualify for immunity, because they were acting outside of their official duties when they instructed him to impede various requests and then retaliated against him by firing him.
All states have Freedom of Information Act Laws, so complying with those laws was the main scope of Chavez’s duties.
After the shooting death of a mentally ill man, James Boyd, which made national headlines, Chavez received numerous records requests seeking email correspondence, a list of personnel involved in the incident, forensic ballistic reports, audio and video tape as well as many other requests pertaining to the murder of Boyd. The video involving the shooting death of Boyd can be seen below.
Chavez’s lawsuit also alleges that, “Defendants individually and collectively reviewed responsive information and instructed Mr. Chavez to withhold or delay production of certain materials to requesters without a lawful exception allowing such withholding or delay.”
Chavez says the department was “tactically coordinating” which records requests would be fulfilled and which ones would be delayed, or not fulfilled at all, so certain requests would not be granted to the media. In other requests, Chavez was instructed to give them so much material that the requester would tire from sifting through it all, and never actually find what they were requesting.
Also implied in the lawsuit is that, “Upon information and belief, responsive material, including video footage, relating to the shooting of Mr. Boyd remains unproduced to requesters.”
But perhaps even more alarming than withholding unseen video footage in the Boyd case are claims that APD monitored following protests against the officers who shot Boyd and that, “APD deployed as many as four detectives dressed in plain clothes to observe the protesters. One of these detectives surreptitiously recorded various citizens.”
Chavez’s lawsuit also claims that when he went to his superiors and told them that he believed in good faith that their actions were improper, and in violation of the law, that he was retaliated against–and then fired, which is where the violation of New Mexico’s Whistleblower Protection Act comes in to the suit.
Ultimately, according to Chavez, the defendants worked in concert with one another for the purposes of retaliating against him for standing up to his superiors who apparently still have something to hide regarding the Boyd shooting.
After much outrage and many protests from the public, the two officers involved in Boyd’s shooting were finally charged with 1st degree murder, but that was later reduced to 2nd degree murder for both of them. Keith Sandy retired over a year ago. And Dominique Perez was ultimately fired. Their trials are set tentatively for August of 2016.
Back in June of 2015, PINACreported that officer Keith Sandy planned and premeditated to shoot Boyd in the penis before he even arrived on the scene where the mentally ill, homeless man was camping. His statements were captured on his own dash cam recording.
An attorney seeking justice in the Boyd case claims that Sandy would have indeed shot Boyd in or near the penis, except for Boyd turned around after officers tossed a flash grenade in his direction and began shooting him. Ballistic reports show Boyd was shot in the buttocks instead.
They also claim Boyd was a threat, even though he was standing at least 30 ft away from the heavily armed officers. Boyd was holding two knives, but never came towards the officers before they shot him.
Not surprisingly, APD claimed, as every department does, that the shooting was justified because Boyd was making “threatening gestures” with the knives he was holding, although the video shows that obviously isn’t the case.
While police unions are indeed a problem for departments that would like to ferret out the so-called bad apples, one could also conclude that so is a chief who talks out of both sides of his mouth.
On one hand, Chief Eden admits there are bad apples and the police union protects them, so he can’t fire them to clean up his department. On the other hand, Chief Eden [allegedly] encourages his records custodian to impede public records requests so the public isn’t able to see the problems within his department.
In light of the lawsuit filed by Reynaldo Chavez, perhaps it’s reasonable to conclude that Chief Eden falls into the category of police who are on the force who don’t belong on the force. The public deserves transparency from the government that is supposed to serve it, and that’s much of what PINAC is all about. A media outlet shouldn’t fear standing their ground on records requests for fear that they may lose access to news in the future. This lawsuit highlights how that often happens, and not just with the Albuquerque Police Department.
PINAC writer Ben Keller contributed to this report.
A new religious movement was born September 11th, 2001. This movement was conceived by the American government and comprises many members of the American and European elite, politicians, editors of mass and so-called alternative media, publishers and academics. The movement’s unifying faith is the legend of 9/11, namely that 19 Arab terrorists hijacked four airliners and flew these airliners into the known landmarks in a suicide operation. The legend of 9/11 is composed of a number of distinct beliefs. Here are ten of the most tenacious beliefs that unite cult members:
1. They believe that 4 young pilots who love money, alcohol and sex, could be convinced to kill themselves for a religious purpose.
2. They believe that four teams of four to five rather smallish men could subdue 40 to 80 passengers without using firearms and without raising the suspicion of the pilots.
3. They believe it is possible to subdue a pilot and co-pilot in their flight cabin before either can transmit a hijacking code, a verbal Mayday message, or raise the suspicion of the crew.
4. They believe a person who could hardly control a one-engine Cessna can fly a Boeing passenger airliner on instruments alone for more than an hour in a foreign country and crash this airliner at 500 mph into the side of a building 20 feet above ground.
5. They believe the capital of the United States, Washington, D.C. , is undefended against approaching unidentified aircraft.
6. They believe crashing aircraft can disintegrate, leaving no visible debris such as fuselage, wings, tail or engine.
7. They believe an airliner with 45 passengers can crash without leaving visible bodies and blood.
8. They believe debris from a crashing airplane can be found eight miles away.
9. They believe it is possible to induce a free-fall collapse of a skyscraper by hitting it with an airplane (even if the skyscraper was designed to withstand such a strike) and then letting the resulting fire bring it down.
10. They believe that 19 Arab terrorists actually boarded the four aircraft that crashed on 9/11.
Religious movements are generally peaceful, but this is not the case with the 9/11 Cult. The cult’s members control weapons of mass destruction and the information flow to the public. When such powers are concentrated in the hands of cult members who base their decisions on irrational and unsubstantiated beliefs, rather than on facts, everyone is in danger.
Members of this cult, no matter their status, fame or power, must be designated as madmen. It is important to secure the removal of such madmen from positions of influence and power as soon as possible, in order to give international peace and security a chance.
* Thanks to Barrie Zwicker (Canada) and Prof. David Ray Griffin (USA) for critical observations
Despite a recent trend in the US to decrease the use of solitary confinement as a punishment for children, Nebraska, a state of almost 2 million people, considers the method appropriate and has applied it broadly.
Solitary confinement, as a form of torture, has been practiced in the US since the early 19th century but was later halted nationwide after reported negative psychological effects on children.
Human rights activists expressed concern over the trend as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mendez, said in 2011 that “even 15 days in solitary confinement constitutes torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and 15 days is the limit after which irreversible harmful psychological effects can occur.”
Mendez, the Argentinian human rights advocate tortured by local forces almost 50 years ago, called for an “absolute prohibition” on solitary confinement for children and those afflicted with mental illness.
Recent years have seen mounting reports of some states’ efforts to eliminate or at least reduce the significantly spread practice. Rikers Island, well known for its abuse-related practices with detainees, ruled out the use of solitary confinement for under-21s. The Pelican Bay State Prison based in California was slammed last year as its detainees filed a successful class lawsuit against the state for using prolonged solitary confinement system at the large scale.
Recommended to be used for no more than 240 minutes per day by the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, Nebraska officials appear to bypass the rules.
Constitutional rights violations and negative effects of solitary confinements for juveniles have never been considered enough by Nebraska officials to put an end the use of torture.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)-Nebraska discovered numerous reports of abuse in solitary confinements across different detention centers in the state and issued open records to get more information of the practice.
According to the ACLU, “a young Nebraskan’s experience with solitary confinement is completely arbitrary and dependent upon the facility in which he or she is placed.”
The Douglas County-based Correctional Youth Facility set records of having a detainee stayed for 90 days, whereas the usual maximum of stay for adults doesn’t exceed 15 days. A Madison County detention facility had at least one solitary sentence lasting 52 days.
The ACLU report explained the possible jaw-dropping consequences solitary confinement detainees might have.
“For adults, the effects can be persistent mental health problems, or worse, suicide. And for children, who are still developing and more vulnerable to irreparable harm, the risks of solitary are magnified — protracted isolation and solitary confinement can be permanently damaging, especially for those with mental illness.”
The punishment often excludes the child from attending educational classes or so from communicating with other children, further cutting their opportunity to develop and learn. Two instances of solitary confinement were prompted after it was found that the juveniles involved had an “excessive” number of books.
While the liberal media is working on damage limitation as the fairy dust on its childlike delusions is blown away by the harsh winds of reality in places like Cologne, it is time for European nations to ask themselves whether they believe in their own right to exist.
Just because post-WWII European liberals have been culturally neutered doesn’t mean that the armies of young men pouring in from Arab countries and sub-Saharan Africa have been, too.
The liberals are in denial at the dissonance between their theses and actual reality, and engaged in damage limitation – or simply blaming the victims – to make up the shortfall.
But rape and pillage – such as we have seen across Europe – is what invading armies do. It’s what our invading armies do – why should anyone else’s be different?
The young men themselves understand exactly what’s going on, even if the fools around them do not.
Meanwhile, the poor white Europeans are so afraid of calling a thing by its proper name, it requires second generation immigrants to do it for them.
European demoralization
The idea popular – not least among liberal Europeans – is that Europeans’ influence in the world has been an unmitigated evil. Associated with this assumption is another assumption: that any instinct towards self-survival among members of European cultures is evil, too.
While it is true that Britain, for example, (along with other key European countries) had empires and some (perhaps much) of what those empires did was bad, none of that loot trickled down to the common man.
The reality is that Britain has been run by a banking cartel since the creation of the Bank of England, and its indigenous peoples have been mowed down in their millions in wars to fill the coffers of the rich. Untold numbers were also worked to death in fields and mines.
While that was the business model, the people were inculcated with a sense of ‘them and us’ – the clansman and the outsider – because it was useful to the rulers.
Now, the ingenuity and hard work of European men is no longer so much in demand. The known world has been conquered, and the banks own all of it apart from a few hold-outs – and those are currently being bombed. But the main job was pretty well done by the end of WWII.
At that point, a new doctrine was handed down. Under this doctrine, Europeans no longer have any business being tribes. Wars, naturally, were not the fault of the banking oligarchy which now owned the entire world thanks in the main to the labors and gullibility of Europeans. No, wars were the fault of the European peoples themselves.
So, rather than peoples falling neatly into friends and foes as they had before, the world was Dale Carnegie-ized.
The Newthink dictated that if you simply refused to acknowledge any sort of differences between your group and anyone else’s long enough, you could ‘Make Friends And Influence People’ until the world was a big, happy smorgasbord – all holding hands round a tree, singing Kumbaya and sharing a Coke and a smile.
This, in essence, is what liberals believe. They think that if you pretend what you want to be the case is the case long enough, the lion will lie down with the lamb, and they will enjoy a nice vegetarian nut roast together.
Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Warm and cuddly and gooey. A bit like the denouement of a saccharin chick-flick.
But it has a problem. And that problem is that it is complete nonsense.
Even our rulers have to admit this, because every now and then they – via their owned media – fire us up with nationalism in bursts whenever there’s a need for a quick (or not-so-quick) genocide somewhere to take down a country, install a compliant central bank, and get that country back to handing its assets over to the banks rather than to its own people. Then tribalism is fine.
Limited tribalism during the World Cup is also fine since it gives the males a chance to work off their instinct to protect their own – in a loud yet managed, sterile and futile way.
What this means – to go back to the lion and lamb motif – is that you are now the lamb, and any teeth you had have been removed, and you secretly went vegan after reading some books Deepak Chopra lent you.
And now as you snuggle up next to the lion your entire survival strategy is predicated on the lion having read the same books and feeling the same way about what he read as you do.
European invasion
If I want to go to New Zealand, for example, there is a process. Quite a strict one. And if I turn up in that country without the correct documentation, then I will not be getting in.
But not so in Europe. At least not now. And not for certain people.
There are genuine asylum seekers in the world. And there is a process for assessing them.
But that is not what is happening here. What is happening, is that the European nations themselves are being kettled by their own governments’ policies and occupied by gangs of unknown young men, many of whom have simply joined the bandwagon because the word is out that the Europeans have lost the will to fight.
But porous borders and financial support when you get in do not extend to everyone.
Almost 18,000 British citizens are denied access annually for their spouse to join them in the UK by the government if that spouse comes from outside the EU.
So this ‘compassion’ is extremely selective.
The laws of legal physics have been magically suspended. And the governments – whose primary duty and justification for existing in the first place – is to maintain the integrity of a nation’s borders are, seemingly, helpless.
I don’t need mainstream media to explain to me what I can see happening. Any time I see an army of young men marching into a foreign country in the face of supine, defeated troops who have lost the will or the wit to fight for those people who pay their wages, then I know what is happening: an invasion is taking place.
As usual, the justification for this insanity is the very ‘compassion’ which has become both de rigour and legally enforceable in all countries where noticeable numbers of Europeans reside – but nowhere else, it seems.
Our leaders have no scruples about murdering a million Iraqis or bombing Fallujah with phosphorous bombs or providing media and financial support for the eradication of the Palestinians, but now – all of a sudden – we are told to be squeamish: the doors simply must not be closed; we have to help.
This new-found compassion and glaring contradiction should tell you everything you need to know: the fix is in. Europe is slated to be ethnically cleansed.
No-one voted for this. Few people want it. Yet everyone has to pay for it. And until the governments do their duty and protect their nations from invasion, it is beyond me why there isn’t a tax revolt.
The wars against Syria and Iraq are criminal. And so is the dereliction of basic duty of the European governments to maintain the integrity of our borders.
And those who are the decision-makers in both scenarios are marching to a drum none of us have any part in beating.
Thus, we are living under a tyranny. So let’s just admit as much.
Liberal insanity
Politically correct liberal insistence upon things being – in fact – how some in socialist think tanks might wish them to be has gone beyond the point of tolerable insanity; it has the aspect of a death wish; of an enforced, self-service, pay-as-you-go ethnic cleansing of Europe’s indigenous peoples. And no amount of pleading the compassion card is going to diffuse this reality.
If we are looking for causes of the crimes against Syria and Iraq, they are to be found in the nature and acceptance of usury, and the policies of think tanks designed to further the interests of a very few people.
The vast majority of European peoples did not create either problem. They certainly do not benefit from them. There is no reason why they should pay for them.
My nation’s forebears laid down their lives in their millions to defend their land. I do not believe I am alone in regarding as pernicious, criminal, treacherous and evil that collusion between politics, education, media and business which treats any instinct for survival among indigenous European peoples as a disposable and distasteful commodity.
Voices of reason are coming to the fore – from Hungary and Slovakia, for example.
As European nations continue to accept thousands of refugees, officials are failing to consider that most young adults entering are males, a fact that could have a huge impact on gender equality, says Valerie Hudson, professor at Texas A&M University.
Critics of Europe’s loose and liberal policy towards refugees flooding its shores were galvanized by the harrowing news out of Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve.
According to an internal report by Germany’s state police, the Bundespolizei, obtained by DER SPIEGEL, it was written by an official that “[W]omen, accompanied or not, literally ran a ‘gauntlet’ through masses of heavily intoxicated men that words cannot describe.”
RT spoke with Professor Valerie Hudson on a subject that European leaders are apparently ignoring as they continue to open the door to thousands of migrants from North Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East with little or no concern for the sex-ratio makeup of the arrivals.
RT:The majority of migrants arriving in Europe are young unmarried males. How could that affect the overall social and cultural landscape on the continent?
Valerie Hudson: Over two-thirds of the migrants in this wave are male. As far as Sweden is concerned, I put to one side adult males because one never knows if adult males may be bringing a family subsequently. I looked primarily at older teens – 16-17 years old – and what I found is that most of these are unaccompanied and over 90 percent are male and that means a significant alteration in the sex ratios for Sweden for that age group. My calculations show that there are now approximately 125 boys aged 16-17 for every 100 girls aged 16-17 in Sweden. That is highly abnormal. It is significantly more abnormal than China, whose sex ratio for this age group – due to the problems of the one-child policy – is only 117 boys for every 100 girls aged 16-17.
RT:Norway has a government-run program teaching migrants how to treat women. Meanwhile in Germany, we now have the Cologne mayor calling on women to alter their behavior around men. Which is the way to go?
VH: That’s an excellent question. What boggles my mind is that no one in Europe has been asking this question. I’ve been studying societies with abnormal sex ratios favoring males for over 20 years… and I can tell you on the basis of my research that societies with highly masculinized sex ratios, that is, with far more men than women in the young adult age group, are unstable. They have higher rates of violent crime, property crime, crimes against women. Women’s freedom to move about in an unconstrained manner is curtailed and there is also a very high demand for prostitution and trafficked women to fill that need, that demand. And so I think someone should be asking whether the alteration in the sex ratio for Europe is not a tragic loss for the women of Europe, for ideals of gender equality in Europe and so forth.
RT:One attacker in Cologne was quoted as saying that “they should be treated kindly as Merkel has invited them”. Could it be that migrants indeed have a sense of entitlement when coming to Europe?
VH: There are two issues here, and they’re separate issues. One is the question of assimilation, the idea that many of the migrants are coming from cultures in which women are perhaps not viewed as the equals of men, and standards of modesty, standards of male-female interaction in public spaces is vastly different. So yes, anything that one can do to ease assimilation would be helpful.
But there’s a second problem, and it’s the second problem that I’ve been dealing with, which is: It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about migrants from Afghanistan or Greek Orthodox migrants or Hindu migrants. When you get masculinized sex ratios – even if it has nothing to do with migration, like we see in India – you’re going to get these same problems of crime and instability and curtailment of movement for women. So it’s not simply an assimilation issue; it’s also a sex-ratio issue. Canada for one has taken a different approach to migration… it will not allow in unaccompanied males unless they are of a particularly vulnerable group, like gay men. They are refusing to allow these alterations in their sex ratio to take place, and I think it behooves European countries to think about similar measures.
RT:Could there be any backlash from local politicians pushing citizens to change their ways for accommodating migrants?
VH: Well, there ought to be backlash to this. The rest of the world looks to North and Northwestern Europe as the shining example of how a society can achieve gender equality. On any measure of women’s rights or gender equality, nations like Sweden and Norway are at the top of the heap. What a tragic loss it would be not just for those countries, but for the world. For those nations to now say their women: ‘You know, maybe you should stay home on nights of public festivals; maybe you should dress differently.’
Women in Europe fought not for decades but centuries to create the kind of culture where gender equality could flourish. Sweden prides itself on having a feminist foreign policy; Sweden prides itself on having a complete abolitionist approach to prostitution. These are countries that have embraced feminism. So to now turn around and say ‘You know women, maybe you should alter your behavior,’ isn’t that a stunning loss for these nations?
What has been missing in this debate is that a normal balanced sex ratio is a very precious thing. It is a public good. And the state government has an absolute obligation to its citizens to attempt to preserve that normal balanced sex ratio. So to the extent that they have neglected this issue, that it has not even made it onto their radar screen, is actually an indictment of the leadership.
“Just as we stood for freedom in the 20th century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the 21st century. And . . . as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it, we can start it.
“So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
Uh…
These words, the core of President Obama’s first major foreign policy speech, delivered in Prague in April 2009, now resonate with nothing so much as toxic irony — these pretty words, these words of false hope, which disappeared into Washington’s military-industrial consensus and failed to materialize into action or policy.
James Carroll, writing at Mother Jones in 2013, describes what happened in the wake of this extraordinary policy declaration:
“In order to get the votes of Senate Republicans to ratify the START treaty, Obama made what turned out to be a devil’s bargain. He agreed to lay the groundwork for a vast ‘modernization’ of the US nuclear arsenal, which, in the name of updating an aged system, is already morphing into a full-blown reinvention of the arms cache at an estimated future cost of more than a trillion dollars. In the process, the Navy wants, and may get 12 new strategic submarines; the Air Force wants, and may get a new long-range strike bomber force. Bombers and submarines would, of course, both be outfitted with next-generation missiles, and we’d be off to the races. The arms races.”
And the cause of global nuclear disarmament, once a dream with geopolitical cred, may wind up entombed in eternal apathy. As Carroll put it: “Nuclear abolition itself is being abolished.”
But I refuse to believe that. What I do believe is that change of such magnitude simply cannot emerge from the actions of top-down leadership, even sentimentally sympathetic leadership like Obama’s, until a counterforce for disarmament is able to stand eyeball to eyeball with world decision makers and the military-industrial matrix in which they operate.
Say hello to the Marshall Islands, the tiny, heroic island nation in Micronesia, with a population just over 70,000. This former U.S. territory, which still bears the terrible scars of 67 above-ground nuclear blasts between 1946 and 1958, when this country used it as an expendable nuclear test site, has engaged the United States — and, indeed, all nine nations that possess nuclear weapons — in lawsuits demanding that they comply with the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and begin the process of negotiating global nuclear disarmament.
Specifically, the lawsuits — filed both in the International Court of Justice in the Hague and U.S. federal court — are demanding compliance with Article VI of the treaty, signed by the U.S. in 1970, which reads: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
General and complete disarmament…
Do these words actually have meaning? Right now the Marshall Islands stand alone among the nations of Planet Earth in believing that they do.
The U.S. suit was filed in April 2014 and dismissed as “speculative.” This ruling was appealed, the appeal was contested, and last month the attorneys for the Marshall Islands filed their reply brief, challenging, among other things, the U.S. government’s contention that an international treaty is the province of the Executive Branch to comply with (or ignore) as it chooses.
The brief is demanding that the Judicial Branch assert itself in this matter and rule on the island nation’s claims that A) as a signatory to the treaty, it is owed U.S. compliance to negotiate disarmament in good faith and dismantle its own nuclear weapons cache rather than upgrade it; and B) U.S. failure to do so creates a “measurable increased risk of nuclear danger” for the Marshall Island (and, of course, everyone else on the planet).
There’s no clear time frame for what will happen next, but at some point, a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will either uphold the case’s dismissal or call for oral arguments to proceed.
“Under the treaty, they are obligated to do what they said they were going to do,” David Krieger, president of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which is working with the Marshall Islands on its case, said to me. The case alerts the public to how its interests are “being jeopardized by the failure of nuclear-armed countries to fulfill their obligations.”
Today, as I write this, North Korea is claiming that it has successfully tested a hydrogen bomb; if true, this is seriously disheartening news for the rest of the planet, and the claim is reaping universal condemnation. But the nuclear-armed nations aren’t condemning themselves for doing the same thing. Clearly, such enormous power is difficult — if not impossible — to give up on one’s own.
Is there a force for peace that can break this impasse? A tiny, wounded nation, which is still reaping the consequences of being forced to serve as a nuclear testing ground, says yes there is. The challenge is real, not symbolic. It’s also unprecedented. Multiply their effort by the hopes of almost everyone on the planet and maybe we could produce a leader who means what he says:
“So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
On January 5, 2015, PBS aired a new Frontline documentary NETANYAHU AT WAR, a profile of the troubled relationship between the Israeli Prime Minister and President Obama. It is now available on the PBS website in some markets and will perhaps be on other platforms such as Netflix, who have previously carried Frontline specials.
The film is typical of what we should now call Hasbara 2.0. No longer are we subjected to the Irving Howe-styled apologias wherein Israel is some great social democratic wonderland besieged by the terrorist Arabs. Now we are given a much more nuanced vision where there are problematic Israelis (here, the antihero of our narrative, Bibi) but where a criminal like the late Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin is a fallen hero and American presidents like Bill Clinton and Obama are the poor Sampsons who are betrayed by Likudnik Delilah. In other words, it is a complete and utter farce that unfortunately deceives many people.
The point to begin with is the interviewees. The talking heads here are not experts on the topic, like Dr. Norman Finkelstein or Dr. Ilan Pappe. Instead, we get Peter Beinart, Avi Shavit, and David Remnick regurgitating Beltway gossip and Tel Aviv talking points like they are great chroniclers of the modern realpolitik. For the Palestinians, we have the voice of Saeb Erekat, the negotiator whose diplomatic skills were summed up best by Dr. Finkelstein:
Abbas and his imbecile sidekick Saeb Erekat are playing good cop/bad cop. Abbas says “yes, this agreement might work,” whereas Erekat whispers to the media—you know, the “senior Palestinian negotiator who doesn’t want to be identified”—that “oh, this agreement is horrible, it’s terrible, it’s awful, they can shove it.” Erekat thinks that’s being clever, it’s putting pressure on the Americans, as if anyone on god’s earth gives a flying fig what Erekat has to say about anything.
Ergo, if PBS thinks getting Erekat on the record is a big score, we are in for a travesty.
On the American side, we have the likes of Dennis Ross, Sandy Berger, and Martin Indyk giving high praises to the Oslo years and Clinton’s annexation process. Consider this passage of narration:
Known as the Oslo Accord, it was designed to end years of violence by laying out a peace process, a deal that could give Palestinians their own state and land captured in the ‘67 war.
This is perhaps able to be true in some technical sense, maybe if one stands on their head and squints, but it is totally removed from reality. From the outset, be it Republican or Democrat, the Palestinians have never found a fair negotiator in the United States. Consider what Dr. Chomsky wrote in September 1993:
The US was therefore in a good position to advance its rejectionist program without interference, moving towards the solution outlined by Secretary of State James Baker well before the Gulf [War] crisis: any settlement must be based on the 1989 plan of the government of Israel, which flatly bars Palestinian national rights (Baker Plan, December 1989).
Even when President H.W. Bush was allowing Secretary Baker to infamously goad the Israelis by telling them the White House phone number during his House testimony, the Americans have always been all show and allowed the dispossession to continue.
Consider another line of narration:
Palestinians launched a new round of violence, a sustained uprising, the [Second] Intifada.
This is so preposterous when one remembers the words of Alex Kane:
Neve Gordon… tells us that the 2nd Intifada began as a nonviolent popular uprising, but only turned violent after Israel brutally suppressed the uprising, firing 1.3 million bullets into the West Bank and Gaza Strip after Israeli security forces were directed to “fan the flames”, as Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar reported in 2004.
This is just par for the course here and demonstrates the level of duplicity that PBS is involved in here with your tax dollars.
The film serves two purposes. Besides the aforementioned hasbara effect, it also tries to salvage what it can of the Obama legacy and create a post facto explanation for why this Presidency has been an almost complete disaster. In that regard, it shapes recent history into a bizarre narrative, failing to mention the words “Cast Lead” or “Protective Edge” while trying to float the preposterous idea that Obama tried to be ahead of history and support the Arab Spring. My own view, while perhaps incorrect, is that he instead succeeded in subverting the genuine democratic uprisings across the region to serve his own ends. When things in Egypt became far too complicated by having a Muslim Brotherhood government across the Sinai from besieged Gaza, a coup was initiated and al-Sisi installed.
Of course, this obviates the question of whose voice should be heard here. My own wish would be that of the late Edward Said. Although Dr. Said was not alive for these events, there is a double meaning that makes his presence necessary. First, in his writings he was absolutely open and honest about both Israeli brutality and Palestinian bravery, yet also the failings of leaders like Arafat. But also of a second degree of value is the infamous image of him speaking with a younger Obama at a dinner. Perhaps his voice would continue to speak a truth to Obama’s career that needs to be heard.
Andrew Stewart is a documentary film maker and reporter for Rhode Island’s Future,who lives outside Providence. His film, AARON BRIGGS AND THE HMS GASPEE, about the historical role of Brown University in the slave trade, is available for purchase on Amazon Instant Video or on DVD.
May 2003 – A report by Sandra Jordan for Channel 4’s Dispatches and Unreported World
Palestinian civilians live under the threat of Israeli Defence Force attacks that do not discriminate between militants and children. Israeli settlers live in fear of suicide attacks. But it is not only Palestinians and Israelis who are dying. Since the Gulf war, three Westerners have come under Israeli army attack.
An American peace activist was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer; a British peace protester was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper and remains in a coma; and a British cameraman was shot dead by the Israelis.
Within hours of arriving Sandra and Rodrigo are shot at and tear-gassed by Israeli troops breaking up a memorial service for Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist crushed by an Israeli Army bulldozer two days before.
That sets the tone for a five-week stay in which they document the shooting by Israeli troops of the British peace campaigner Tom Hurndall, the death of James Miller, the award-winning cameraman who worked extensively for Channel 4, killed as he filmed Israeli troops bulldozing Palestinian homes, and the deaths and mutilation of many innocent Palestinians and Israelis.
It’s difficult enough for the Left to make any headway against the formidable forces arrayed against it without some of its members abandoning concrete analysis and coherent argument in favor of fantasy and appeal to emotions.
Appearing to equate Islamists seeking a harsh theocratic rule in Damascus to “revolutionaries” linked to the struggles of Palestinians and opponents of neo-liberalism in the West, the petition called on the Syrian president to leave immediately and submit to a peaceful transition. One problem. The petition’s drafters failed to mention that this could only mean surrender to the rule of murderous sectarian fanatics in Damascus, with regrettable consequences for anyone who didn’t share the fanatics’ religious views. Or that the bulk of Syrians didn’t favor this outcome.
Nowhere did the petition mention:
o Takfirism or Wahabbism;
o Political Islam, backed by imperialist powers and their regional allies, as the driving force of the rebellion;
o Washington’s efforts to “build” a US partner who would govern in Damascus;
o The material support Washington provided to anti-Assad forces even in advance of the Arab Spring;
o Constitutional changes the Syrian government made in 2012 in response to the March 2011 uprising to open political space in the country;
o The reality that the largest Sunni fighting force in Syria was, then as now, the Syrian Arab Army;
o The fact that Assad had commanded sufficient popular support to continue in power despite, at that point, two years of war and the concerted opposition of the world’s most formidable powers and their regional allies— hardly a feat to be expected of a government that was oppressing its people.
In place of concrete realities to engage our minds, the petitioners offered honeyed, nebulous, words to play on our emotions. We were to sign up to a romantic vision of heroic revolutionaries struggling for freedom and dignity against an evil dictator in a fairy book world where imperialism; sectarian intolerance; Saudi, Turk, Qatari and US agendas; the Syrian government’s concessions; al Qaeda; and a decades-long struggle within Syria between political Islam and secularism, didn’t exist.
Instead, they asked us to “defend the gains of the Syrian revolutionaries,” but didn’t say who the revolutionaries were or what gains they had won.
They called for “a peaceful transition of power,” but didn’t say to what.
They asked us to “support the people and organizations on the ground that still uphold the ideals for a free and democratic Syria,” but didn’t say who they were or where we could find them, or what a democratic and free Syria would look like (free from what and to do what?)
They said that the rebellion in Syria was linked to “the Zapatista revolt in Mexico, the landless movement in Brazil, the European and North American revolts against neoliberal exploitation,” and “the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom, dignity and equality,” yet they didn’t say how. Was it also linked to the revolt of the southern states against the Union?
And yet while they demanded that “Bashar al-Assad leave immediately,” the Syrian government was the only organization on the ground of any significance, then as now, that (a) (with the constitutional changes of 2012), offered Syria a democratic future of multi-party parliamentary and contested presidential elections and (b) offered freedom from domination by the political agendas of outsiders, both those of the Western powers who seek a US “partner” to govern in Syria and the sectarianism of the West’s retrograde anti-democratic regional allies.
It’s as if in the middle of Operation Barbarossa—Nazi Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union—that a call had been made for Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to leave immediately and arrange “a peaceful transition” so that Russia could “begin a speedy recovery toward a democratic future.” Of course, a call for a peaceful transition would have meant nothing but surrender to the Nazis and their multinational coalition of Italy, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Finland and Spain, with the consequent enslavement of the Slavs. (The United States isn’t the only country that could put together a multinational coalition.)
Likewise, it’s clear that, then as now, Assad leaving immediately would bring al Qaeda-linked organizations to power in Damascus, with carry-on massacres of populations the “revolutionaries” deemed heretics and apostates. Demanding Assad leave immediately and peacefully was a call for surrender to sectarians backed by retrograde despotisms allied to Washington—an odd way to show solidarity with the Syrian people and hardly likely to promote their freedom and dignity.
Of course, much has happened since the petition was drafted in May 2013, and some of petition’s supporters may have changed their views since, but others, including Gilbert Achcar, continue to use demagogic methods, appealing to emotion rather than reason, to authority rather than evidence, taking cover in ambiguities and romantic fantasies, while shunning concrete social, political, military and economic realities.
To anyone who insists on evidence and critical analysis, Achcar and company are a good part of the reason it’s still possible to refer to a “loony left.” For the cautious, they’re suspected of advancing a sinister political agenda under cover of promoting leftist and humanitarian concerns. Neither possibility is pleasant to contemplate.
Public opinion is increasingly influenced by mixing politics, business and entertainment with good causes. When Mark Zuckerberg announced he was giving away most of his money, people got excited. But charity and good causes are rarely what they seem.
Politics – as the adage goes – is show business for ugly people.
If by ‘show business’ we mean the implementation of a script worked out in advance by people the public never hears about and dressed up to resemble a spontaneous and passable substitute for reality, then I would agree.
What I see, though, is just as all other norms are being redefined and merged with their polar opposites to form a new mush designed to confuse and debilitate, so the beautiful people are being blended with the ugly ones to form a new compound agent.
The first feet over the line appeared in the 1960s. They belonged to JFK who was the first TV president star, and Muhammad Ali, the first major sports star activist.
Since then, the trickle has turned into a deluge, with a lot of the traffic coming from Hollywood and big business.
Just to be clear: I’m not bemoaning the injection of a lack of purity into the political discourse. I have no time for any politician in power of any stripe who does not actively and openly work to wrest power away from international bankers. Outside of Iceland, I’m still waiting.
But today, it is commonplace – almost expected – for a star or an industrial magnate to get behind a cause.
Charities, philanthropies and foundations
Charities and philanthropies have two attractive qualities if you’re in the business of pushing through an agenda quietly. Firstly, they are tax-exempt. Secondly, they are beyond criticism.
People’s naiveté is staggering. They believe that industrial magnates and investors – men who have spent their lives screwing people over – suddenly and for no reason fall under the influence of benevolent fairy dust.
They want to believe that the Warren Buffetts and George Soroses – men whose careers are characterized by reflex ruthlessness – are suddenly compelled to go out and do random acts of kindness.
What, in fact, is happening is that these men are creating foundations: corporations that will never pay any tax and which will continue to advance an agenda none of us voted for – in perpetuity.
A foundation will hire and retire generations of directors and workers, all of whom will be suborned to the Articles governing that foundation at the time it was created. The DNA of the founder is enshrined in a legal entity, given boundless amounts of money, and then allowed to follow an agenda invariably directed towards ‘change’ – change no one ever heard about, never mind voted for.
What foundations (and charities or so-called philanthropies) do not do is give away money. What they, in fact, do is allow money to be released to persons or organizations, which must then do very specific things with it. In short, they subcontract out the implementation of their guiding Articles to the recipients of their ‘charity’.
If it is still hard for you to embrace the notion that what is termed ‘charity’ or ‘philanthropy’ could be anything but benign, I recommend watching Norman Dodd interviewed by the excellent G. Edward Griffin. Norman Dodd was, in 1954, the Staff Director of the Congressional Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. He knew how they really work.
Agenda 21
Mainstream media works hard, generally speaking, to defuse criticism of Agenda 21. Similar to philanthropy, it uses warm, fuzzy terminology. It talks, for example, about ‘sustainable development’ – and who could be against that?
Glenn Beck nailed it when he said: “Sustainable development is just a really nice way of saying centralized control over all of human life on planet earth.”
Bill Gates has gone from knowing how to make computer software (which defies any intelligent attempt to use it and now spies on you), to being an expert on the environment (i.e. how all of us should live), which is at the core of Agenda 21.
He couldn’t make an operating system that didn’t crash and turn blue every time you wanted to do something, but he’s got the solution to the problem which was identified by his buddy Al Gore, who went from almost inventing the internet and almost being president of the United States to almost winning the Nobel Peace Prize (he shared it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and who – like Bill – is an expert on how we all should live.
Bill explains with nerd-like zeal the need to reduce carbon emissions to “almost zero” (which, since humans are carbon-based life forms, would require our virtual extinction), and among his toolkit for achieving this aim is “a really great job on new vaccines.”
Bill Gates also has a tax-free foundation. Knowing how – and, in fact, if – the rest of us should have children is something of a family business for Gates. His father, W. H. Gates, was a director of Planned Parenthood, and also a ‘philanthropist’.
Eye candy
Actors and pop stars get adoration and money – at least the successful ones do. And if you live in a grim area and work in a boring job that can seem like the zenith of all possible joy.
However, the appeal wears off after a while. You don’t just want to speak other people’s words. You want to say something significant yourself. You’ve spent your life scrambling up a greasy pole to get respect, only to find yourself secretly afraid that people don’t take you seriously.
Such people, then, are nothing if not vain. That’s partly why they went into the business in the first place.
So it’s not difficult to utilize both their vanity and their proven skills in delivering dialogue they didn’t write and don’t understand, in order to push forward agendas they could never grasp.
Such people are Bill Gates and Warren Buffett writ small. Very small. Because while they might seem like gods to you, they have no real power. They are only ever one misjudged comment away from never working again, and they are all terrified of having to go back and live with the unwashed masses.
People such as Gates and Buffett and Gore are pretty dull to most people. Joe Public is not accustomed to listening to suits. But he has thousands of hours invested in giving his rapt attention to Hollywood stars and musicians.
This makes them useful to those who really do understand power; who can make where the rubber meets the road – where vanity meets inanity – serve to push forward the agenda the grown-ups came up with.
Pop people are basically used by the system to sell a new weaponized culture to the target audience. It is an obvious move to use those tried-and-tested puppets to sell more of that same agenda.
So Angelina Jolie was gushed over by the Telegraph, in part for her intrepid journey to Darfur and then for lecturing the Council on Foreign Relations (a place where real power resides) on the need to do the things in Darfur – stuff the CFR was planning on doing anyway, but was unable to express in a way that did not send people to sleep.
Bono, for his part, has gone from anthems against the establishment to eulogies in its praise. He is big friends with Bill Gates, for example, and likes to chew the cud with him on the ‘charity’ they are both involved in.
You name the star, they’ll have a cause. From Emma Watson (who at the age of 25 is already an ‘activist’) to George Clooney to Scarlett Johansson – they are all out there treading the boards of seemingly worthy narratives, looking authentic and concerned, and investing dullness with magic.
The fact that few if any of them could write an undergraduate paper unaided on the subject they are supposedly experts in doesn’t matter. People follow the stars. And the people who control the stars know that.
Very occasionally, someone goes off-script; someone claws his way to a position of prominence by sheer grit and talent and then just says what he thinks. Tyson Fury comes to mind.
Then the media is less interested in causes and more interested in damage limitation, wringing its hands at the incongruity of someone capable of Wrongthink being fantastically good at something.
Something tells me Mr Fury isn’t going to be invited to share his thoughts with the Council on Foreign Relations or to hug trees with Bill Gates.
I also wonder how long we’ll have to wait to find a star using the Oscars to speak out in favor of no sex before marriage or tipping buckets of cold water over themselves to highlight the evils of usury.
The better part of a decade ago, I described the Toronto Star‘s Mitch Potter as “a canary in the mineshaft of liberal Canadian racism.” A piece on 1948 Palestine published in a recent edition of The Star shows the canary very close to asphyxiating.
Since Potter insists he was within his rights to describe Palestinian fighters in Gaza as “lemming-like,” he’ll surely forgive the metaphor.
The article, entitled “The Toronto man who saved Nazareth,” celebrates the heritage of Ben Dunkelman, the most prominent Canadian to travel to 1948 Palestine to support the Zionist war effort. In more than 2500 words spread across The Star‘s “Insight” section, Potter and his editors transform this Canadian’s role in occupying Palestinian communities into fodder for patriotism. “What he did was bring his hard-earned Canadian military professionalism to help organize a chaotic fighting force and help set down the rules of engagement,” the Star quotes one of a number of friendly sources as explaining. “And that included saying, ‘No, we will not expel civilians.'”
The record of this “gentle giant of a man,” as Potter introduces Dunkelman, is well documented. The son of the founder of Ontario retail giant Tip Top Tailors and a veteran of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, Dunkelman was not an obscure figure. In Canada, he was an eminent member of the country’s community of patriotic respectables. In Palestine, he was a participant in the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the Galilee, commanding troops who repeatedly massacred civilians.
Dunkelman’s record of Canadian patriotism and Zionist colonization has long made for a popular sell. He has been happily remembered as “a Canadian and Israeli war hero,” as The Globe and Mail once described him. His basic character should be apparent to anyone who picks up his autobiography, Dual Allegiance.
Potter’s article for The Star pines over lost pages of this book without conveying to readers its utterly thuggish tone. The first five pages, to give you a sense, move from a description of a fight Dunkelman picked with a Palestinian (“Kneeling astride him, I began hitting him again and again, until his body went limp”) to boyhood reminiscences that feature a young Dunkelman in Toronto, soon to enroll in Upper Canada College, “waving a little Union Jack.” A lovely patriotic tale.
In Palestine, Dunkelman did not stop at beating Palestinians with his fists. In the summer and autumn of 1948, he served as commander of the Seventh (Armoured) Brigade of the newly established Israel Defence Forces (IDF). This is a representative sample of how Potter now presents this history to The Star‘s readership: “Named to lead Israel’s 7th Brigade in the final phase of the 1948 war, Dunkelman pushed methodically — and almost bloodlessly — through the Galilee with a series of nighttime flanking movements, eventually ending at the Litani River in Lebanon. He quite literally shaped borders, delivering territory Israel might not otherwise hold today.”
“Bloodlessly”?
One of the Seventh Brigade’s “nighttime flanking movements,” on October 29-30, 1948, brought the Palestinian village of Safsaf under Dunkelman’s command. A Palestinian woman from Safsaf, Umm Shahadah al-Salih, described what happened the next morning. Villagers were ordered to assemble in file around two houses to the north of the village.
“As we lined up, a few Jewish soldiers ordered four girls to accompany them to carry water for the soldiers. Instead, they took them to our empty houses and raped them. About 70 of our men were blindfolded and shot to death, one after the other, in front of us. The soldiers took their bodies and threw them on the cement covering of the village’s spring and dumped sand on them.”
If Potter’s editors can cough up subway fare to Yonge and Bloor, he can read this and other accounts for free at the local library, in Nafez Nazzal’s The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee, 1948. The Seventh Brigade’s trail of death, destruction and mass displacement of Palestinians from the Galilee into Lebanon is detailed authoritatively by Nazzal.
But right, this is a Canadian discussion of Palestine. Surely, Palestinians can’t be trusted! Unfortunately for Potter and The Star, more than mistrust of Palestinian testimony would be needed to make their whitewashing of these massacres halfway credible. In 1978, the year that Nazzal’s study was published, Israel began declassifying documents on these events. The Israeli record tells much the same story.
Israel Galili had been chief of staff of the Haganah, the main precursor to the IDF. In a declassified November 11, 1948 briefing cited by Israeli historian Benny Morris, Galili described the conduct of Dunkelman’s men in Safsaf. He spoke of the fate of “52 men tied with a rope and dropped into a well and shot,” and of three cases of rape, including of a 14-year-old girl. He also described large-scale killing of civilians by the Seventh Brigade in the villages of Saliha, Jish, and Sa’sa’. In Sa’sa’, Galili said, Dunkelman’s troops committed “mass murder” and then forced all remaining survivors out: “The whole village was expelled.”
Palestinian witnesses recount the most horrifying details. One survivor of the occupation of Safsaf recalled the stabbing of a pregnant woman with a bayonet. The witness lived out his life in the Ayn Al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon; his testimony was kept alive by his nephew and cited in Ilan Pappé’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. In his memoirs, Dunkelman admits to authorizing looting by his forces, but predictably does not discuss most abuses. He does, however, proudly relate how one of his units set a landmark in the summer of 1948 with “the first bayonet charge ever mounted by the Israeli Army.” Facing an Arab position in the central Galilee, the company commander “ordered his men to fix bayonets; then, yelling like banshees, they rushed the Arab positions. When the astonished Arabs saw what was coming up the hill at them, they kicked off their boots and fled in terror.”
We don’t know much about specific atrocities with bayonets. We do know that Operation Hiram, during which Dunkelman’s troops carried out severe atrocities, helped push Palestinians out of the Upper Galilee en masse. On October 31, Dunkelman received an order from the IDF’s northern command spelling out this objective: “The inhabitants should be assisted to leave the conquered areas,” Dunkelman was instructed.
Here massacres by Dunkelman’s troops played their part. “What happened at Safsaf and Jish no doubt reached the villagers of Ras al Ahmar, ‘Alma, Deishum and al Malikiya hours before the Seventh Brigade’s columns,” writes Morris. “These villages, apart from ‘Alma, seem to have been completely or largely empty when the IDF arrived.” A week and a half into November 1948, an IDF intelligence report observed that “more than 50,000 new refugees” had crossed the border into Lebanon as a result of Operation Hiram.
Dunkelman — cue Potter’s praise — did not order expulsions in every Palestinian community that his forces occupied. He specifically opposed the (widespread) expulsion of Palestinian Christians by Israeli forces. When in July 1948 his troops occupied one of the main Christian centres in Palestine, the city of Nazareth, he spared it the harsher treatment he accorded to predominantly Muslim villages in its vicinity.
Potter is effusive with praise! He laments to The Star‘s readership that Dunkelman “won no medals for refusing to molest civilians” in Nazareth, but takes the opportunity to trumpet Canadian civility: “Transpose that morality to the modern era and imagine how the U.S. military interrogations at Abu Ghraib might have played out with a Dunkelman in command.” If those held at gunpoint were Muslims? Should we really follow this thread? “In many of the Palestinian oral histories that have now come to the fore,” observes Ilan Pappé, “few brigade names appear. However, Brigade Seven is mentioned again and again, together with such adjectives as ‘terrorist’ and ‘barbarous.'”
Israel has not declassified enough documentation for us to know for certain whether Dunkelman ordered his troops to massacre Palestinian civilians in line with instructions from higher-level IDF officers, took the initiative himself, or left the details to lower levels of command. But there is no record of him taking any action to discipline the culprits. By all accepted standards, he is therefore among them. Only the best liberal patriots want to award war criminals prizes for each possible war crime they didn’t commit.
Introducing a co-edited volume entitled Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad Sa’di explore the challenges of asserting Palestinian memory “under the conditions of its silencing by the thundering story of Zionism.” Engaging with 1948 as a landmark of enduring trauma, both individual and collective, may not be simple. But one can imagine an alternate universe in which Canadian journalists made a respectable effort. In which some attempt was made to look to the kind of work assembled by Abu-Lughod and Sa’di, to consider the recorded memories of those who lives were uprooted by Dunkelman’s troops, to bring their experiences into this history.
Instead, The Star basks in patriotic self-satisfaction and ignores the evidence.
This is not just a question of professional standards, or of historical accuracy. As Abu-Lughod and Sa’di argue, “the Nakba is not over yet.” It was Israel’s current defence minister, Moshe Ya’alon, who described Israel’s twenty-first-century assaults on Palestinians as “the second half of 1948.” How this war is represented abroad can affect its continuation into the present. I haven’t paid much attention to Potter’s work since his distortions of Israel’s 2006 assaults on Gaza and Lebanon. But it seems he’s decided to whitewash past and present attacks on the Palestinians in much the same spirit.
People in Canada need to demand better. In the coming period, we will have to face the fact that the end of the Harper years did not spell an end to Canadian support for Israel’s perpetual warfare against the Palestinian people. The liberal patriotic impulse is to bury this problem in comforting myths: to pretend that even in its support for Israel, Canadian liberalism shines. This requires nothing less than falsification of the record. An open discussion of the realities of Palestine will raise troubling questions about local burdens of responsibility. If this is what drives so many opinion-makers to avoid it, it is also what makes it urgent.
Dan Freeman-Maloy is an activist and writer based in Montreal. For a more detailed review of the record of Western recruits in 1948 Palestine, see this article of his from the Journal of Palestine Studies.
The United States is the greatest threat to world peace, not North Korea, which only seeks to protect itself from the depredations of US imperialism, an American scholar and political analyst says.
Dennis Etler, professor of Anthropology at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Wednesday, after Republicans called North Korea’s surprise nuclear test yet another failure of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy.
Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio argued that North Korea was playing off President Obama’s weakness. “Our enemies around the world are taking advantage of Obama’s weakness.”
Professor Etler said, “As the US presidential race heats up all the old, tired campaign saws of yesteryear are being recycled. Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, with little of note in his political career to tout, seems to have little else to offer.”
“One tried and true political tactic is to accuse your opposition of being ‘soft’ on national defense or crime and proclaim that once elected more resources, that is money, will be thrown at the problem to ensure the country’s safety,” he added.
America’s bogeyman
“Generally speaking there has to be a bogeyman to give life to the charge. In this instance Rubio has chosen a villain who all can hate on, Kim Jong-un, perhaps the most vilified and ridiculed adversary in the US pantheon of enemies. Thus, in a statement issued Tuesday night Sen. Rubio says ‘We need new leadership that will stand up to people like Kim Jong-un and ensure our country has the capabilities necessary to keep America safe.’”
“Lost in the demagogic rhetoric is the fact that it is the US that has threatened the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, commonly known as North Korea, since its inception after WW2, not the other way around,” he noted.
N Korea never used nukes, US did
Professor Etler said the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea “never invaded the US, but the US did invade North Korea. In fact the DPRK has never invaded another country. Unlike the US it has never sent bombers to drop napalm on foreign villages in order to indiscriminately burn and maim their inhabitants, it has never sprayed toxic chemicals such as agent orange on other nation’s forests and crops, producing generations of deformed infants, it has never sent drones to assassinate its political enemies, killing innocent bystanders as collateral damage.”
“It has never used depleted uranium, white phosphorous or cluster bombs in combat on foreign soil and it has never dropped nuclear bombs on population centers, murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians,” he stated.
“The DPRK has however been invaded, sanctioned, embargoed and threatened for over 50 years by, and is still officially at war with, the United States which always portrays itself as above reproach and a bastion of peace and freedom.”
Why US politicians set-up straw dogs
Professor Etler said, “It is the US that has the largest nuclear weapons arsenal and is the greatest threat to peace and stability throughout the world not North Korea, which only seeks to protect itself from the depredations of US imperialism and Japanese militarism to which it has been subjected throughout the 20th century.”
“The US feels that it is its prerogative to do and say what it pleases. To threaten, bully, invade and destroy any nation it sees fit to. But any country that attempts to protect itself from the provocative actions of the US is deemed irrational and a threat to world peace and US security. Rubio’s rhetoric is just more of the same,” he pointed out.
“The same jaundiced diatribe that has been repeated time and again as US politicians set-up straw dogs to frighten the electorate into voting for them. In this instance North Korea serves as a convenient scapegoat and whipping boy to further Rubio’s political ambitions,” the analyst concluded.
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