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Obama and Sarkozy: How Imperialists Deal With Defeat

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | March 21, 2012

Fifty years ago this week, the French admitted defeat in their war against Algerian independence, by signing a formal ceasefire. The government of Nicholas Sarkozy said it would hold no formal ceremonies, because to mark the anniversary would reopen “deep wounds of a painful page in the recent history of France.” It’s all about the French, you see – their pain at being defeated by a people they had subjugated and treated as lesser forms of life for 132 years; their loss of face as a great imperial power, not the Algerian’s pain at the loss of one million men, women and children in the final struggle for nationhood.

This week also marks the 9th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Americans have, of course, never admitted defeat in that war – although defeat is the only reason U.S. troops are no longer in Iraq. President Barack Obama very reluctantly carried out the troop withdrawal agreement that President George Bush was forced by the Iraqis to sign in November of 2008, after it had become clear that America’s unprovoked war of aggression was lost.

Obama was even less gracious in defeat than French President Sarkozy, who at least had the manners to keep personally silent. In proclaiming March 19th “A National Day of Honor,” Obama praised the “unshakeable fortitude and unwavering commitment” of U.S. troops who fought “block by block to help the Iraqi people to seize the chance for a better future.” Other obscenities and damnable lies flowed from Obama’s mouth, as the president embraced George Bush’s great crimes against global peace and his holocaust against the Iraqi people. “The war left wounds not always seen, but forever felt,” said Obama – speaking, of course, only about the wounds suffered by Americans, just as Sarkozy spoke only of the pain of the French. The anniversary of a U.S. invasion of another people’s country, is all about the Americans, you see – the 4500 American dead, to whom, Obama said, “we owe a debt that can never be fully repaid.” No mention of the blood debt that is owed to the more than one million dead Iraqi men, women and children whose country, once the most advanced in the Arab world, was utterly destroyed by the United States, and who hope to never see an American in uniform again.

What are a million Algerians worth to the French? The same as one million Iraqis are worth to the United States. They are not even worth mentioning.

There is no word that can describe the absolute moral turpitude of imperialists, the casualness of their genocides, their infinite capacity for narcissism, and their whining self-pity when confronted with minimal casualties to themselves in the course of their global depredations.

The Americans and western Europeans regret nothing but their own setbacks in the 500-year war they have waged against the darker peoples of the Earth. They have annihilated and enslaved whole continents, and dare to call it civilization. Their only remorse is for their loss, in recent times, of total dominance over the human species, of which they still consider themselves the superior fraction. It is during weeks such as this, when the French and American governments note the historical markers of their national depravity, that affirm the inseparability of racism and imperialism, and the necessity to defeat them once and for all.

Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

March 21, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Gov’t interrogations decision will prompt increased use of torture

A recent decision to prevent the recording of security interrogation means a return to the norms of the witch trials.

Yossi Gurvitz | +972 | March 19 2012

The Israeli government recently made permanent a temporary order – in force for 11 years – that permits the police to avoid documenting security interrogations, Haaretz has reported (Hebrew). Regular criminal interrogations are taped; that will not be the case in matters of suspected security violations. We can safely assume that once the police are allowed not to tape an interrogation, they will not tape it. It saves resources, for starters.

The government’s decision creates a practical distinction between the rights of criminal suspects and security suspects. Criminal suspects have the right to demand, if they are prosecuted, their recorded interrogation which, theoretically, can allow them to prove their confession was forced, or that the description given by the police of what happened in the interrogation room is incorrect. It is a theoretical right because no Israeli court has ever found that such a suspect was tortured – except in very few cases, and almost always after the victims had already been jailed for quite some time.

Security suspects have no such rights. Actually, there will be no independent documentation of their interrogations. The courts will have to take the police’s word for what happened in the interrogation room. This will make it much harder for the accused to prove they were tortured. The problematic history of the police forces prompts a clear conclusion: we will soon have a secret police, whether formal or informal, composed of interrogators whose specialty will be torture.

This has several implications. First, torture leads to more false convictions. It is their function: the torturer is not looking for the truth, he is trying to extract a confession and close the file, and he is indifferent to the question of whether the broken person before him (and breaking a person is what torture is intended to do) is guilty or not. The point of torture, noted Orwell, is torture.

Secondly, such units attract sadists. That the torturer suffers more than the tortured is a myth told to sooth those of anxious conscience. Those sadists will then move on to other positions in the system, taking their unique work ethic with them. Thirdly, the use of torture degenerates the interrogator’s mind. He gets used to thinking that some pain and humiliation will obtain the desired result, and forgets how a true interrogation ought to be carried out. Should one need an example of this process, it is readily available in the abysmal record of the ISA (aka Shin Bet) in fighting Jewish terrorism. If torture is not an option, they can’t get the job done.

Fourth, and most worrying, is the fact that such units tend to expand their activities. The excuse of “public safety” is very wide indeed. After the ISA was denied the right to torture except in the case of “ticking bombs,” there was a dramatic increase in the number of interrogations designated as such – even though the public was never supplied with a full and open description of a single ticking bomb case.

The police – which have for years served as an ISA auxiliary force, with a police interrogator writing down the confession extracted by the ISA officer from a Palestinian detainee as if it was given of his free will – now claims that taping such interrogations may expose “investigative methods.” That’s true. That, however, is also true in the case of criminal investigations. This is the price of the rule of law: it allows the suspect/accused the right to defend himself against the government, and that means that, from time to time, interrogations tricks are exhausted. That’s life. Deal with it. … Full article

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March 20, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Afghan and Iraqi Victims of Torture by U.S. Military Seek Justice From International Human Rights Tribunal

By Steven Watt | Human Rights Program | March 20, 2012

After being shut out of U.S. courts, yesterday we filed a case with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on behalf of three Afghans and three Iraqis who were tortured while held by the American military at detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Pictured above are Sherzad Kamal Khalid, left, and Thahe Mohammed Sabbar, in front of the White House during a visit to the U.S. in November 2005.)

The men are part of a group that in 2005 sued then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and three senior military officials in federal court for their torture and abusive treatment. Because that case was dismissed on immunity grounds before reaching the merits, we are taking their case to the IAHCR, an independent human rights body of the Organization of American States. Our petition, the equivalent of a federal legal complaint, asks the commission to conduct a full investigation into the human rights violations and seeks an apology on behalf of the six men from the U.S. government.

Between 2003 and 2004, the men were imprisoned in U.S.-run detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, where, the petition charges, they were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment including severe and repeated beatings, cutting with knives, sexual humiliation and assault, mock executions and prolonged restraint in excruciating positions. None of the men were ever charged with a crime.

Because a remedy for these men has been denied in American courts, these courageous men are seeking to hold the U.S. government accountable on the world stage.

One of the victims, Ali Hussein, was only 17 years old when he was detained by the U.S. military in August 2003. He was held for four weeks at Abu Ghraib prison and other locations throughout Iraq. Hussein, who is now a law student, was shot in the neck and back before being arrested. He was denied food, water and pain medication for almost two days after he was shot.. He said that military personnel refused to provide him medical care for several hours, and when the bullets were eventually removed, the procedure was done without anesthetic. You can read more about the abuse that Hussein and the other plaintiffs suffered here.

In a statement yesterday, Hussein said, “I think that I and the many others who suffered unfairly at the hands of the American government deserve justice. We want America to admit that what happened to us was wrong and should never be allowed to happen again to anyone anywhere.”

As our petition highlights, “[t]he U.S. government’s own reports document that the torture and inhumane treatment that the petitioners were subjected to was not an aberration; on the contrary, it was widespread and systemic throughout the U.S.-run detention facilities in the two countries. These same reports also document that the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees were the direct result of policies and practices promulgated and implemented at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Despite these reports and petitioners’ and other detainees’ credible allegations of torture and inhumane treatment, the U.S. government has failed to conduct any comprehensive criminal investigation, has not held accountable those responsible, and has not provided any form of redress to the petitioners and the many other victims and survivors of U.S. torture and abuse.”

A district court dismissed the federal case, Ali v. Rumsfeld, on the grounds that constitutional protections do not apply to foreigners in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Iraq and that the American officials were immune from lawsuits stemming from actions taken “within the scope of their official duties.” In his March 2007 ruling, Judge Thomas A. Hogan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia called the case “appalling,” and noted that “the facts alleged in the complaint stand as an indictment of the humanity with which the United States treats its detainees.” The D.C. appeals court upheld the dismissal last June.

The Ali v. Rumsfeld decision is not unique. It is one of several lawsuits in which victims and survivors of torture have been denied their day in American courts. These cases include Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, a lawsuit against a flight logistics company that facilitated CIA “torture flights” across the globe; El-Masri v. Tenet, a lawsuit brought by a man abducted and sent to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan; and Padilla v. Rumsfeld, a lawsuit brought by a U.S. citizen who was unlawfully detained and abused on U.S. soil (this case is currently pending appeal).

Despite U.S. court’s dismissal of these cases, that the United States tortured and abused many men in pursuit of its so-called “war on terror” is not in dispute. As Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who led the U.S. Army’s official investigation into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and testified before Congress on his findings in May 2004, has stated publicly: “[t]here is no longer any doubt as to whether the [Bush] Administration committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Although, to date, no high-ranking government officials have yet been held to account for their actions, yesterday’s filing with the IACHR seeks to do just that and to ensure that the government respects basic human rights, including the right of everyone to be free from torture and inhumane treatment.

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March 20, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Even After Supreme Court GPS Decision, Feds Still Want Warrantless Cell Phone Tracking

By Sarah Roberts | Speech, Privacy and Technology Project | March 19, 2012

Even after January’s landmark Supreme Court decision cast significant doubt on the government’s ability to electronically track a person’s location without a warrant, the Justice Department continues to defend this practice. On Friday, the ACLU, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, arguing that the government should be required to obtain a warrant based on probable cause before seizing 60 days’ worth of location information generated by an individual’s cell phone.

The appeal by the government comes after a federal district court judge in Texas held that the constitution does indeed require a warrant for such information. As long as a cell phone is turned on, it automatically registers its estimated location with the nearest cell towers as frequently as every seven seconds. This means that every person who uses a cell phone is creating a vast record of personal information, from doctors’ visits to church attendance to visits to friends’ homes.

In our brief, we urge the court to hold that the Fourth Amendment requires the government to obtain a warrant and demonstrate probable cause before obtaining cell phone location data. Most people are unaware that their every movement can be tracked through their phones, and we maintain an expectation that such information will remain private. Cell phone location data, especially data collected over a prolonged period of time, is simply too sensitive to allow the government access without proving to a judge that there’s good reason to believe it will turn up evidence of a crime.

This is the first time in years that a higher court will consider the constitutionality of this issue. By refusing to appeal lower-court decisions where a judge required a warrant, the government has avoided allowing appeals courts to make a ruling.

Unfortunately, the government believes that most people know that their cell phones are generating a near-constant record of their locations and movements, and it argues that individuals cannot reasonably expect that this information will remain private.

The government is wrong. We shouldn’t have to choose between using the modern technology that society has come to rely upon and being able to expect that our private information will remain private. Instead, our brief encourages the court to recognize that when we take our cell phone to the gym or to a political rally, we certainly don’t intend for the government to be following along.

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March 20, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Honduras and the Obama Administration

By LAURA CARLSEN | CounterPunch | March 20, 2012

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Honduras on March 6 with a double mission: to quell talk of drug legalization and reinforce the U.S.-sponsored drug war in Central America, and to bolster the presidency of Porfirio Lobo.

The Honduran government issued a statement that during the one-hour closed-door conversation between Biden and Lobo, the vice president “reiterated the U.S. commitment to intensify aid to the government and people of Honduras, and exalted the efforts undertaken and implemented over the past two years by President Lobo.”

In a March 1 press briefing, U.S. National Security Advisor Tony Blinken cited “the tremendous leadership President Lobo has displayed in advancing national reconciliation and democratic and constitutional order.”

You’d think they were talking about a different country from the one we visited just weeks before on a fact-finding mission on violence against women.

What we found was a nation submerged in violence and lawlessness, a president incapable or unwilling to do much about it, and a justice system in shambles.

Two-Year Slide

The crisis in human rights and governance in Honduras has become apparent to the world and is a fact of daily life within the country. In the two years since Lobo came to power in elections boycotted by the opposition, Honduras catapulted into the top spot in the world for per capita homicides — the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) Global Homicide Survey found an official murder rate of 82 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2010. There were 120 political assassinations in the country in 2010-2011. In the region of Bajo Aguan, where peasants are defending their land from large developers, 42 peasants have been murdered, and alongside 18 journalists, 62 members of the LGBT community, and 72 human rights activists have been killed since 2009. The Honduran Center for Women’s Rights reports that femicides have more than doubled and that more than one woman a day was murdered in 2011.

An Inter-American Commission on Human Rights report on the Honduran coup found at least seven deaths, harassment of opposition members, disproportionate use of force by security forces, thousands of illegal detentions,
systematic violations of political rights and freedom of expression, sexual violence, and other crimes, with almost no investigation or prosecution.

Despite the fact that security forces perpetrated many of these crimes, the response of the Honduran government — with the support of the United States — has been to beef up military presence. One of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere, Honduras increased its military expenditure from $63 million in 2005 to $160 million in 2010. The Lobo government justifies the militarization saying that its own police forces can’t be relied on. He told us in a meeting, “We’re working on cleaning up the police but it’s going to take some years. The corruption is deep.”

The impunity with which common criminals, powerful transnational interests, and elements of the state violate the most basic principles of society with government complicity or indifference derives from the fact that the government itself is erected on the violation of those principles. The crisis in human rights and violence—as deep as it is—is but a symptom of a greater evil. When the 2009 coup was allowed to conserve power and seal itself off from prosecution, it immediately undermined governance, rule of law, and the social compact. Honduras’ constitutional crisis has now become a prolonged social and political crisis.

A Coup for Criminals

The coup d’état on June 28, 2009 was not only a criminal act. It was an act designed to benefit criminals.

When members of the armed forces kidnapped democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya and took him to Costa Rica in his pajamas, they destroyed the the fragile democracy built since the era of military dictatorships. None of the convoluted discussions of what the president had supposedly done to deserve forcible removal changed the fact that the millennium’s first coup d’état had taken place in the Americas. The OAS and every major diplomatic body in the world immediately realized that Honduras had become the symbol and the reality of the world’s new battles for democracy.

What many people don’t know is that the unraveling of the story is more tragic than the coup itself—and holds even greater lessons for global governance.. To make a long story short, the Honduran coup regime incredibly survived international embargos and diplomatic negotiations that in the end only served to extend its grasp on illegitimate power. The disturbing suspicion that the U.S. government, the historic godfather of the region, had given its blessing to the new regime became certainty when the State Department negotiated an agreement that paved the way for coup-sponsored elections without assuring the return of the elected government.

Porfirio Lobo came to power, and a nation pummeled by poverty splintered into an ungoverned free-for-all characterized by political polarization, a surge in crime, and widespread land grabs. Honduras is not a failed state. It’s a violated state.

Crime—common crime, organized crime, state crime, and corporate crime—has thrived since the coup. Drug trafficking in the country has increased. The most recent U.S. International Narcotics report calculates that 79 percent of cocaine smuggling flights from South America use landing strips in Honduras. Reports that Mexican kingpin El Chapo Guzman and others use Honduras as a hideout surface frequently. Militarization of the country has taken place alongside the spread of organized crime—a phenomenon that should provoke some reflection. But the Honduran and U.S. governments have been too busy promoting the drug war to pay attention to the correlation between militarization and organized crime.

Land grabs to transfer land and resources from small-scale farmers, indigenous peoples, and poor urban residents into the hands of large-scale developers and megaprojects have generated violence throughout the country. Many of the testimonies of violence and sexual abuse that we heard from Honduran women regarded conflicts over land, where the regime actively supports wealthy interests against poor people in illegal land occupations for tourism, mining, and infrastructure projects, such as palm oil magnate Miguel Facusse’s actions in Bajo Aguan.

The lack of investigation and prosecution for crimes — and the evidence that state forces are involved in human rights violations against opposition and “undesirable” sectors — creates a paradise for criminals and a hell for the majority of citizens.

U.S. Engagement or Complicity?

U.S. responsibility for what happened after the coup is a question that deserves far more analysis and soul-searching. By choosing not to support a return to democratic order and political healing before presidential elections, the United States helped deliver a serious blow to the Honduran political system and society. The United States has a tremendous responsibility for the disastrous situation, and the urgent question is what to do about it.

Biden stressed U.S. programs to vet police and justice officials. When we met with U.S. Ambassador Lisa Kubriskie, she insisted that continuing to fund Honduran security forces would eventually lead to reform by “engaging” with government forces.

But even if that did happen, in the meantime those government forces are murdering, raping, beating, and detaining Hondurans — with U.S. aid.

When does engagement become complicity? Citizen groups and members of the U.S. Congress have come to the conclusion that the line was crossed some time ago. So far, more than 60 members of Congress have signed a letter circulated by Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) to cut off aid to the Honduran military and police, claiming that the funding of these institutions fuels the abuse.

There’s no excuse for spending U.S. taxpayer dollars on security assistance to Honduras as human rights violations pile up. No amount of money poured into these programs will change the systemic corruption and human rights violations until there’s a real political commitment to justice and reconciliation. And that does not appear to exist under the current regime.

Laura Carlsen is the director of the Americas Program based in Mexico City. She is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.

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March 20, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Deception, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

UK bows to Tel Aviv after warning it against attack on Iran

Press TV – March 20, 2012

London has once more humiliated itself before Tel Aviv repeating “all options [are] on the table” for Iran after withdrawing support for any military action by the Israeli regime against the country.

“We both recognise the seriousness of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said after a meeting with Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Meridor in London.

He added Britain is continuing its policy of “pressure” against Iran “while keeping all options on the table.”

Hague also welcomed the “excellent progress on trade between Britain and Israel” as well as their “growing co-operation in the high-technology sector, as reflected in the launch this week of the UK-Israel Technology Council.”

His remarks are almost diametrically opposed to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s comments last week that there is no justification for an Israeli strike on Iran.

“I don’t think as we stand today that military action by Israel would be justified,” British Prime Minister David Cameron told NBC news network on Thursday.

“I don’t think the Israelis should take that action now. We told them they shouldn’t and said we wouldn’t support it if they did. We’ve been very clear,” he added.

Indeed a paradox emerges as London officials have been saying over the past few days that they are very “clear” that they “would not support” a military strike on Iran, however, they will not at the same time rule out a military strike on the country.

Yet with Cameron directly dismissing an attack as a choice, Hague’s remarks appear as an attempt to muzzle London’s Zionist friends, as it has been common British practice over the past years.

Just on the day Cameron made the remarks in Washington, Britain agreed to a plan to strengthen cooperation across a range of technological sectors with the Israeli regime at the first UK Israel Tech Council, held in London.

The move was reminiscent of the row over Israeli spy agency Mossad’s forging British passports, which were used by an Israeli hit squad to assassinate a Hamas leader in Dubai.

It was two years ago on March 23, 2010 when The Guardian reported London had expelled a senior Mossad official at Tel Aviv’s embassy in London over the issue.

Less than two months after the passports dispute, representatives from 23 British companies from the life sciences sector attended an event in the occupied territories welcomed by the then director for UK trade and investment at the British Embassy in Tel Aviv Richard Salt.

Also on May, 2010, the then thriving Liberal Democrat leader and current British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg launched another mollification attempt in an interview with the Israeli Daily Haaretz suggesting the petty issue of passports will not affect London-Tel Aviv friendship.

“Operation Cast Lead and incidents like falsifying documents in Dubai do create tension, but … British criticism of the policy of the Israeli government should not be treated as ‘anti-Israeli,'” he said.

“I think there are issues of principles at stake, which I would like us all to have a look at calmly after the elections,” he added.

The same story of taking a step against Tel Aviv only to recompense by backing off several steps ran in the case of attempts to secure arrest warrants for Israeli officials in 2010 including the then Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Barak and opposition leader Tzipi Livni.

The appeals against Israeli officials were made based on their internationally-condemned war crimes during the same Operation Cast Lead, which Nick Clegg tried to downplay.

At the time, it was Hague himself who led the wave of appeasing attempts.

“We cannot have a position where Israeli politicians feel they cannot visit this country. The situation is unsatisfactory [and] indefensible. It is absolutely my intention to act speedily,” Hague said in June 2010.

The mentioned examples are only part of the wide picture of British servility to the Israeli regime that also includes condemnation of Israeli settlement activities and at the same time praise for mutual ties with Tel Aviv.

They also raise questions whether the hierarchy of power in Britain runs through Israeli lobbies which should be kept appeased as a hidden rule of British policy.

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March 20, 2012 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , | Leave a comment

Jeffrey Sachs’ Grab for the World Bank

By LAURA FLANDERS | CounterPunch | March 20, 2012

There may be worse candidates for the presidency of the World Bank than Jeffrey Sachs (Larry Summers, also a candidate, comes to mind,) but Sachs is well worth raising an alarm about. He combines a new fangled profile as a progressive with policies that amount to full steam ahead for global growth. And he’s running as the candidate of “change”  clearly hoping no one looks too closely at his record as an economic hit-man.

In the US (if not in much of the rest of the world and certainly not CounterPunch) Sachs’s closeness with the singer/crusader Bono bestows a liberal glow. He directs the Earth Institute at Columbia University, advises the UN and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and he’s winning endorsements from among others, Congressman John Conyers and economist Mark Weisbrot.  He’ll attract predictable opposition from the Right who bristle at any mention of foreign aid, but although his media pals like to forget it now, Sachs was once evangelist number one for exactly the heavy-handed “fly-in-fly-out” development tactics that have made the world financial institutions so passionately hated.

Last week, John Cavanaugh of the Institute for Policy Studies and American University development professor Robin Broad laid out a raft of concerns to which Sachs responded thus: “I would be the first-ever development practitioner and anti-poverty professional to be World Bank President, just what is needed given the bank’s mission of a “world free of poverty.”

In Europe’s post-Soviet “transition” years, Sachs’s professional poverty expertise was mostly in increasing it. Russia, following Sachs’s callous “shock therapy” prescription, sold off state companies, suspended public subsidies and drove employment and life expectancy into the ground, with brutal long-term consequences, exacting the most savage costs in terms of death and suffering since the Second World War and the results of the Sachs experiment in Poland, Estonia and Slovenia weren’t much better.  While a handful of global gamblers got rich off the disaster, former World Bank economist David Ellerman, said of Sachs “Only the mixture of American triumphalism and the academic arrogance of neoclassical economics could produce such a lethal dose of gall.”  If Sachs could double suicide rates in Russia as a cocky young Harvard advisor, it’s hard to imagine what he could do to the world as World Bank President.

In recent years, Sachs has taken a few turns. He embraces debt forgiveness (some) and has some nasty things to say about world military spending in his book “The End of Poverty.” But the business of “poverty reduction” is a complex one. The World Bank’s calculations have been incisively discussed here by Adam Parsons. Suffice to say, there’s extreme poverty and there’s just getting by. In the same way when it comes to development, there’s total exclusion from the world economy — and there’s becoming a cog in it. Sachs’s vision of a “world free of poverty” has more cogs in more wheels, but it’s the same deadly machine driving the planet to the same nasty brink.

To cite one example. in his 2007 Reith lecture series “Bursting at the Seams” Sachs pushes new agricultural technology and commercial fertilizers to increase yields in low-life expectancy countries. “Africa can and must have a Green Revolution as India initiated nearly forty years ago.” He celebrates increased yields and dismisses concerns about environmental damage and rising debt, claiming that “Older techniques for replenishing soil nutrients, such as the rotation of farm lands, allowing the replenishment of nutrients on land left to fallow for 10 or 20 years, are no longer feasible.”  To top things off, there’s a dose of “population control” in Sachs’s mix.  “The evidence is overwhelming that it’s possible and necessary to have a rapid demographic transition on a voluntary basis to greatly reduce fertility rates in poor countries,” said Sachs.

Old arguments linking high population with high poverty are back in vogue in the context of contemporary planet-panic, but really, they miss the point. While growing population in poor countries has its environmental impacts, high-level consumption lifestyles in rich countries are much more of an immediate threat. Listen to the small scale farmers of countries like Mali and Burkina Faso who gathered at the World Social Forum in Kenya a few years back and they report that traditional farming techniques like fortifying soil with manure and mixing the crops grown on the same piece of land are rehabilitating degraded farms and farmers, both. Lying fallow for a generation doesn’t come up.

It’s here that one sees the “old” Sachs in the new. To return to Ellerman– the analysts of “shock therapy” have long gotten it wrong, he writes in an essay, Lessons from Eastern Europe’s Voucher Privatization. In the post-Soviet states, the crucial distinction wasn’t so much between the fast-shockers and the incrementalists, rather, Ellerman points out, “Reform-mongers, in their strategies and even more so in their rhetoric, could be divided into those who take an ideological, fundamental, and root-and-branch approach versus those who take an incremental, piecemeal, home-grown, and adaptive approach.”  From what he says now about global agribusiness and it seems that not much has changed in Sachs’s approach to the adaptive, home-grown initiative — even as the sane world is increasingly convinced that those are the only strategies with any chance of heading

The fact that he’s campaigning for the World Bank job as the candidate of the new regime makes all this particularly hard to take. Since Paul Wolfowitz resigned under a cloud in 2007, new rules at the World Bank are finally permitting countries other than the US and Europe to determine who heads the world’s financial institutions (since world war two it’s been the World Bank for the US, and a European at the IMF). Europe nominated Christine Lagarde for IMF president last year. She won over other candidates. For the World Bank post, the U.S. has quietly floated names like Susan Rice, John Kerry and Larry Summers to replace Robert Zoellick when he steps down June 30. Predicting he won’t be the US’s official pick, Sachs has gotten seven countries to endorse him, including Haiti, Jordan, Kenya, Malaysia and east Timor.

By March 23, we’ll know how all this plays out. Meanwhile, according to the open-source website, WorldBankPresident.org which is tracking these developments, a slate of countries with new financial capacity to compete with the US are taking steps to form a World Bank alternative. Quite possibly, at a meeting in India later this month, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa may set up their own development bank with the goal, they say, ”to escape the dollar and the euro hegemonies and, if Chinese plans go well, making the yuan a global currency.” We’ll see what Sachs has to say about that adaptive initiative.

LAURA FLANDERS is the host of The Laura Flanders Show coming to public television stations later this year. She was the host and founder of GRITtv.org. Follow her on Twitter: @GRITlaura.

March 20, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

US builds world biggest spy center

Press TV – March 19, 2012

The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is building the biggest spy center for intercepting and storing electronic communications collected from all over the world and American citizens.

A new report published by the monthly magazine Wired, said that the centre located in Bluffdale, a remote valley in the state of Utah, can process yottabytes (a million billions of gigabytes) of data.

The facility of USD 2 billion is designed to “intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications including the contents of telephone calls, private e-mails, mobile phone text messages and Internet searches.

According to the report, the facility is “the most covert and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever,” and it will use 65 megawatts of electricity a year, with an annual bill of USD 40 million.

The spy center intercepts commutation signals as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.

Using what will likely be the world’s fastest super computer, the NSA can gather data through ‘dumb’ home appliances such as refrigerators, ovens and lighting systems which are connected to the Internet.

The facility is to provide technical assistance to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), collect intelligence on cyber threats and carry out cyber-security objectives, reported Reuters.

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March 19, 2012 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama Apologizes For Kandahar Massacre But Not For His Own Killings

By Sherwood Ross | Blacklisted News |March 19, 2012

How shall the world view the apology by President Obama for the massacre of 16 Afghan villagers allegedly by a lone U.S. serviceman in Kandahar Province when the President is himself personally responsible for the extra-judicial killing of hundreds of civilians by means of drone aircraft strikes whose crime he defends? Army Staff Sgt., Robert Bales, of Lake Tapps, Wash., is being held in prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Mr. Obama is free to travel the campaign trail.

“We’re heart-broken over the loss of innocent life,” the president said of the Kandahar massacre. His seeming expression of contrition rings hollow, though, particularly if one considers how Mr. Obama goes about his daily routine ordering drone strikes and seemingly is unaffected by the “loss of innocent lives” they cause, as well as by the hated companion night raids on Afghan homes, also the result of his policy.

As The New York Times reported March 17th, President Hamid Karzai said “many civilians have died in the (night) raids,” adding, “This has been going on for too long. It is by all means the end of the rope here. This form of activity, this behavior, cannot be tolerated.”

Obama is more than willing to investigate anyone other than himself for war crimes. “I can assure the American people and the Afghan people that we will follow the facts wherever they lead us, and we will make sure that anybody who was involved is held fully accountable with the full force of the law.”  To “follow the facts” the president need look no further than his own mirror. Not surprisingly, he termed the drone strikes “very precise, precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates.” Given the facts, this is a falsehood.

As investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill writes in the March 5/12 issue of The Nation, “President Obama’s first known authorization of a missile strike on Yemen, on Dec. 17, 2009, killed more than 40 Bedouins, many of them women and children, in the remote village of al Majala in Abyan.”

And the Bureau of Investigative Journalism based at City University, London,  put the number of Pakistani children killed in drone strikes at 168. In one raid directed by the Central Intelligence Agency, a drone was dispatched to kill the headmaster of a school, which it did—but 60 children attending classes there were killed as well. “Even one child’s death from drone missiles or suicide bombings is one child too many,” a UNICEF spokesperson said. President Obama takes a very different view. He claims drones have “not caused a huge number of civilian casualties” and it is “important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash.”

Since 2004, the U.S. has made nearly 300 drone attacks just in N.W. Pakistan alone, killing between 1,700 and 2,800 individuals, of whom an estimated 17 percent were said to be civilians, not so-called “militants,” according to the New America Foundation of Washington, D.C.

In Somalia, last October 14th alone, U.S. drones killed 78 and injured 64 in one raid and killed 11 civilians and wounded 34 more the same day in another. And from March 3-12, the U.S. killed 64 people in Yemen by drone strikes. The government called them  “militants” but local residents countered they were civilians.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon reportedly is building 60 drone bases across the world and its clamor for more planes is so great that contractors cannot keep up with demand. Rather than halt the use of these indiscriminate killing machines, indications are the Pentagon sees them as the future weapon of choice, and by some accounts they have now been used in six countries.

On the website of Iraq Veterans Against the War, the AP reports,  organizer Aaron Hughes declared that Afghan war veterans “believe that this incident is not a case of one ‘bad apple’ but the effect of a continued US military policy of drone strikes, night raids, and helicopter attacks where Afghan civilians pay the price.’’

Mr. Obama has continued and expanded the criminal drone policies begun by his predecessor George W. Bush and both  warmongers are eminently qualified to stand trial for their crimes.

#

Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

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March 19, 2012 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

End of the nuclear illusion

By Praful Bidwai | The News | March 19, 2012

A year after the nuclear catastrophe began at the Fukushima Daiichi station in Japan, the world has a historic chance to put an end to one of the biggest frauds ever played on the global public to promote a patently unsafe, accident-prone, expensive and centralised form of energy generation based upon splitting the uranium atom to produce heat, boil water, and spin a turbine. Candidly, that’s what nuclear power generation is all about.

The lofty promise of boundless material progress and universal prosperity based on cheap, safe and abundant energy through “Atoms for Peace”, held out by US President Dwight D Eisenhower in 1953, was mired in deception and meant to temper the prevalent perception of atomic energy as a malign force following the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Eisenhower was a hawk committed to building up the US nuclear arsenal from under 1,500 to over 20,000 warheads and sought to “compensate” for this by dressing up nuclear energy as a positive force. “Atoms for Peace” camouflaged the huge US military build-up in the 1950s.

The nuclear promise was also based on untested, unrealistic assumptions about atomic electricity being safe and “too cheap even to meter”. The projection sat ill at ease with the subsidies, worth scores of billions, which nuclear received. The US navy transferred reactor designs developed for its nuclear-propelled submarines to General Electric and Westinghouse for free. The US also passed a law to limit the nuclear industry’s accident liability to a ludicrously low level.

Fifty-five years on, the world has lost over $1,000 billion in subsidies, cash losses, abandoned projects and other damage from nuclear power. Decontaminating the Fukushima site alone is estimated to cost $623 billion, not counting the medical treatment costs for the thousands of likely cancers.

All of the world’s 400-odd reactors are capable of undergoing a catastrophic accident similar to Fukushima. They will remain a liability until decommissioned (entombed in concrete) at huge public expense, which is one-third to one-half of what it cost to build them. They will also leave behind nuclear waste, which remains hazardous for thousands of years, and which science has no way of storing safely.

All this for a technology which contributes just two percent of the world’s final energy consumption! Nuclear power has turned out worse than a “Faustian bargain” – a deal with the devil. Even the conservative Economist magazine, which long backed nuclear power, calls it “the dream that failed.”

Nuclear power experienced decline on its home ground because it became too risky and “too costly to hook to a meter”. The US hasn’t ordered a single new reactor since 1973, even before the Three Mile Island meltdown (1979). Western Europe hasn’t completed a new reactor since Chernobyl (1986). As a former member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission put it: “The abiding lesson that Three Mile Island taught Wall Street was that a group of NRC-licensed reactor operators, as good as any others, could turn a $2 billion asset into a $1 billion cleanup job in about 90 minutes.”

Nuclear power is now on the run globally. The number of reactors operating worldwide fell from the historic peak of 444 in 2002 to 429 this past March 1. Their share in global electricity supply has shrunk from 17 to 13 percent. And it’s likely to fall further as some 180-plus 30 years-old or older reactors are retired. Just about 60 new ones are planned.

After Fukushima, nobody is going to build nuclear reactors unless they get a big subsidy or high returns guaranteed by the state – or unless they are China, India or Pakistan. China’s rulers don’t have to bother about democracy, public opinion, or safety standards.

Nor are India’s rulers moved by these considerations. They are desperate to deliver on the reactor contracts promised to the US, France and Russia for lobbying for the US-India nuclear deal in the International Atomic Energy Agency. Manmohan Singh has even stooped to maligning Indian anti-nuclear protesters as foreign-funded, as if they had no minds of their own, and as if the government’s own priority wasn’t to hitch India’s energy economy to imported reactors. Pakistan’s nuclear czars are shamefully complacent about nuclear safety.

Nuclear power is bound up with secrecy, deception and opacity, which clash with democracy. It evokes fear and loathing in many countries, and can only be promoted by force. It will increasingly pit governments against their own public, with terrible consequences for civil liberties. A recent BBC-GlobeScan poll shows that 69 percent of the people surveyed in 23 countries oppose building new reactors, including 90 percent in Germany, 84 percent in Japan, 80 percent in Russia and 83 percent in France. This proportion has sharply risen since 2005. Only 22 percent of people in the 12 countries which operate nuclear plants favour building new ones.

Nuclear reactors are intrinsically hazardous high-pressure high-temperature systems, in which a fission chain-reaction is barely checked from getting out of control. But control mechanisms can fail for many reasons, including a short circuit, faulty valve, operator error, fire, loss of auxiliary power, or an earthquake or tsunami.

No technology is 100 percent safe. High-risk technologies demand a meticulous, self-critical and highly alert safety culture which assumes that accidents will happen despite precautions. The world has witnessed five core meltdowns in 15,000 reactor-years (number of reactors multiplied by duration of operations). At this rate, we can expect one core meltdown every eight years in the world’s 400-odd reactors. This is simply unacceptable.

Yet, the nuclear industry behaves as if this couldn’t happen. … Full article

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March 19, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Nuclear Power, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

On Power and Delusions of Grandeur

By Deepak Pritawi | International Policy Digest | March 18, 2012

First the video of United States Marines urinating on bodies of Afghans who had been killed. Then the revelation that copies of the Quran had been burned at Bagram Air Base, which also serves as an American prison camp in Afghanistan. Nearly thirty Afghans and several NATO troops died in the violent reaction. And as I mentioned in my column of March 4, the BBC Kabul correspondent described these events, and the violent public reaction to them, as the tipping point for NATO in the Afghan War.

Just as the U.S. commander Gen. John Allen and President Obama hoped that apologies from them would help calm the situation comes another disaster. If official accounts are to be believed, an American soldier left his base in the middle of the night, entered villagers’ homes, woke up Afghan families from sleep and shot his victims in cold blood. After committing the murders, the soldier was reported to have turned himself up to U.S. commanders, and was flown out of the country. He has since been named as Sgt. Robert Bales. Other reports tell a different story, indicating that a group of soldiers was involved. Looking drunk and laughing, they engaged in an orgy of violence, while helicopters hovered above.

The massacre was committed in Kandahar, a province where NATO forces regularly carry out night raids on Afghan homes. They capture and kill men sweepingly described as Taliban, their supporters or sympathizers. Male family members therefore leave their homes at night to escape foreign forces. This explains why 9 of the 16 murdered were children. The rest included at least four women, and five Afghans were wounded. Several bodies were burned.

The massacre of Kandahar has echoes of My Lai––a village in South Vietnam where American troops massacred unarmed civilians including women, children and old people almost exactly 44 years ago, on March 16, 1968. The full horror of the My Lai massacre took time to surface, for many attempts were made to downplay it. Soldiers who had tried to stop the killings were denounced by U.S. Congressmen and received hate mail and death threats. It took thirty years before they were honored. Only one American soldier, Lieutenant William Calley, was punished. He spent just three years under house arrest, despite being given a life sentence.

The conduct of the U.S. authorities following the massacre of Afghans will be under critical scrutiny. Those who must bear ultimate responsibility will have to live with the guilt for years to come. And the carnage will continue to haunt the conscience of many people in America and elsewhere. The general sentiment in Afghanistan had already been turning dangerously hostile to foreign troops. Now, reports from Kabul say that Afghans “have run out of patience.”

In the midst of these events (U.S. Marines urinating on dead bodies in January, Quran burning in February, massacre in March), President Obama decided to invoke a comparison between himself and two of history’s legendary figures, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. To me, the latest events in Afghanistan are dismaying, and the timing of the president’s attempt to invoke parallels with Gandhi and Mandela is sickening. It goes to show what power does to its holder.

Much has been written about the New York fund-raiser, where President Obama gave his address as he sought support for a second term. I repeat the obvious to say that the country he leads has been engaged in a number of wars resulting in deaths and destruction on a vast scale. Their legacies will continue to take a heavy toll. Even when U.S. forces have withdrawn from occupied lands, or high-altitude bombing without deploying American troops on the ground has ceased, we will not know how long and in how many places Obama’s secret wars are waged. In the November 2008 election, he had offered a hope of change for good. It remains as illusive as it was under his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Obama and NATO have moved and expanded the war theater––in Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Kenya, Somalia and possibly places we are not aware of. His tactics have steadily become more threatening with foes and friends alike, linking ever more war and routine matters of international relations, trade and so forth.

Despite the U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq and the Afghan project heading toward an end, there exists a more explosive situation from South Asia to North Africa. The scenario of a major war in the region haunts many. Obama may appear reluctant to attack Iran or Syria. But that clandestine warfare by major powers and their proxies continues is hardly in doubt. The Obama administration’s aggressive, interventionist instinct is on open display. And to draw parallels between himself and great souls such as Gandhi and Mandela is a grotesque parody of their historic struggles.

At the New York fund-raising event, Obama said that “the change we fought for in 2008 hasn’t always happened as fast as we would have liked … real change, big change, is always hard.” Next, making a leap into history, he continued, “Gandhi, Nelson Mandela––what they did was hard. It takes time. It takes more than a single term …”

Corruption infects our world in many forms: material and moral, visible and invisible, direct and indirect. But the underlying motive behind all things corrupt is a strong opportunistic instinct to benefit oneself at the cost of others by allurement or deception. No wonder politics has fallen so much into disrepute. The aphorism of the nineteenth-century English historian Lord Acton that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” has acquired a special meaning today.

Employing his political mantra of “change” and attempting to show likeness with Gandhi’s and Mandela’s life and achievements is one thing. Truth is a different matter. Gandhi never aspired for any political office, never held one, and did not fight any election. After his incarceration in prison for 27 years, Mandela was a reluctant president of South Africa. And he made clear that he would serve only one term while a new generation of successors was groomed.

Above all, Mandela used his presidency to avoid a bloodbath and stabilize the country as apartheid collapsed. Precisely for these reasons, both Gandhi and Mandela were such formidable opponents of the unequal and unjust systems which they fought.

Non-violence was Gandhi’s tool. When violence erupted, Gandhi withdrew his movement against the British. He thought of others, Muslims and Untouchables he called Harijans (Children of God). He paid the ultimate price when a Hindu fundamentalist assassinated him in 1948. Neither Gandhi nor Mandela considered attacking another country, signing assassination orders, exaggerating or inventing facts about people they saw as adversaries.

Mandela’s African National Congress was inspired by Gandhi. But once the organization had realized that South Africa’s vast black majority was up against an apartheid regime whose brutality was exceptional, the ANC did engage in a low-intensity war. And the United States and Britain listed Mandela as a “terrorist.”

President Obama recently justified his drone attacks inside Pakistan by saying that they “have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.” It is impossible not to interpret this as an admission that drones do kill and wound civilians. But it is a minor matter in the president’s eyes. Only a few days ago, the German news magazine Der SPEIGAL said that while under the Bush presidency there was a drone attack every 47 days, the interval now under President Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, is just four days. The Americans have “already executed 2,300 people in this manner.” Nobody has a chance today if this president decides that their time is up.

Gandhi’s agitation for boycott of British goods in favor of home-made products and his advocacy for an austere life were fundamental elements of the anti-globalization movement of his time. His ethos was “to consume less for the uplift of others from poverty and deprivation.” He lived the life he preached, for which Winston Churchill, then leader of the Empire, disparagingly called him the “naked fakir.”

In the world ruled by President Obama today, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, were he not in his nineties and so frail, would be his greatest enemies. And they could well have been on Obama’s list for drone attacks. Mercifully that is not the case, and this president can indulge in comfort.

Great people like Gandhi and Mandela use power to curb power. Barack Obama stands among those who use power to accumulate more of it. Therein lies the moral of any comparison in this debate.

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March 19, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Colonization of the Mind: Normalize This!

By Samah Sabawi | Palestine Chronicle | March 18, 2012

(Full Transcript. Excerpts from this speech were presented at the University of Sydney Australia during Israeli Apartheid Week 2012.)

I would like to talk about normalization. I found the best definition of the word normalization on the Palestinian Campaign for Cultural and Academic Boycott’s website:

“Normalization is the colonization of the mind, whereby the oppressed subject comes to believe that the oppressor’s reality is the only “normal” reality that must be subscribed to, and that the oppression is a fact of life that must be coped with.”

So projects that constitute normalization are not about freedom, justice or liberation, but about numbing our minds to the horror of the occupation, so we accept it as normal, as permanent, as an unchangeable fixed reality!

A typical normalization project brings Palestinians and Israelis together to talk about acceptance of one another to reduce the ‘hate’ that drives the conflict! But without taking action of any sort to change the environment that creates the animosity. As if Palestinian resistance is driven by emotions of hate not acts of oppression, by irrational anger and not dispossession, by senseless loathing and not acts of ethnic cleansing!

Advocates for normalization would have us believe that their so-called joint peace initiatives are the defining test, to tell the difference between a moderate and a terrorist. A moderate would engage, cooperate, reconcile and co-exist but never directly challenges the oppression. A moderate would learn to live with the status quo and cope with it. Anyone who rejects the status quo and takes action to change it is not interested in peace, is hateful, is a radical and is a terrorist. And for as long as these labels are waved around they hope that people would be intimidated into acquiescence.

An important feature of “normalization” projects is providing the illusion of symmetry, pushing the idea that Palestinians and Israelis share equal responsibility and claiming that both people have been locked into this age old struggle. They try hard to convince you that both people just have two different narratives, reducing the facts to fiction and the reality to storytelling, insisting that if we hear both narratives then we’ll come to agree that the truth lies somewhere out there, in an abstract world, perhaps in a third version that is yet to be told.

And like old people sitting around swapping tall tales over bitter Turkish coffee to pass the time in a place where no one cares about truth or consequence, we the Palestinians are encouraged to sit with Israelis and listen to their narratives while they listen to our narrative and that is the end of that! They go back to their vibrant cities that once carried Arabic names, and we go back behind the walls where nothing changes but the fact that our Bantustans keep on getting smaller with every passing day!

Subscribing to this idea of ‘narrative’ requires that we erase our collective memory and close our eyes to our present reality. It requires that we forget history, forget dates, numbers, UN documents, human rights reports, sights of destroyed villages, camps filled with the internally displaced and camps filled with the refugees from 1948. It requires that we forget all concrete evidence because it all comes down to story telling and narratives.

And while they talk of some looming existential threat we are supposed to forget that it is Palestine that has been wiped off the map and that Palestinians are the ones who are fighting everyday for their right to simply exist on their land.

I guess they hope that it would take a few sessions of narrative swapping to finally make us see the necessity of firing a gas canister into the face of an unarmed protestor. Or that it would take a few football games with house broken Palestinian players paraded in a field to finally make us appreciate why one-ton bombs must be dropped on refugees in Gaza. And maybe if we were to spend a summer camp together getting to know one another, we will finally see the light and apologize for not quietly moving out of their way when they took our homes and tore down our villages.

The message conveyed in normalization projects is consistent: We the Israelis have to do what we need to do because YOU MAKE US DO IT and the only way we might slow down (not stop) is if we feel that you like us and if you make us feel secure enough. Now if you choose to be good Palestinians, join in these initiatives and stop this resistance nonsense, maybe then, we will bring you into the house of moderates where you may not eat with us in the dining room, but at least we’ll take you in from the cold and let you sit on the kitchen floor where it is safe and warm.

So this is how they try to colonize our minds and force us to accept the inequality. Expecting us to exchange our freedom for breadcrumbs and to reduce our existence to coping with this deformed reality.

And while they live in their high towers in narrative land do they not see us marching through our fields where the olive trees that were planted by our ancestors have been ripped from the earth with their hands. Their severed roots reaching out like amputated limps, life seeping away through their tips, reeking of broken hopes and dreams. If they could just STOP the rattling of their bulldozers for just one minute they may actually finally hear that heartbreaking sound the earth makes when it weeps beneath their feet.

If they could hold their fire, turn off their tank engines and lower their guns, they may finally hear our voices. We have been chanting loud and clear! We have told them you are welcome to come and co-resist with us to bring down this ugly system of domination. We have said to them if you want to get to know us, then come and march with us against the wall. Come and stand with us against the bulldozers. Visit us in our prisons. Shelter us from the stones your Jewish settlers throw at our children.

We have said it loud and clear: We will not co-exist with you in your world of inequality. If you want to co-exist with us, you are welcome to join us in our struggle for freedom, because right now, this is the only place where we exist!

We see through their attempts to whitewash the oppression. No hasbara video they will EVER create about their supposedly gay loving and democratic state will alter the reality that every Palestinian family has experienced; arbitrary detentions, torture in their prisons and house evictions and demolitions.

And no sleek brand Israel campaign will ever explain why a woman in Jerusalem has fallen to her knees, broken on the sidewalk, with bits and pieces of her life scattered on the pavement as Jewish settlers look through the windows of what was once her home.

There is nothing normal about this! There is nothing normal about any of it!

There is nothing normal about sentencing nine year olds in military courts. There is nothing normal about forcing pregnant women to have babies at checkpoints. There is nothing normal about the imprisonment of a million and a half people in Gaza, then bombing them at will knowing they have no place to run and no place to hide. There is nothing normal about nailing shut the front doors of houses in Hebron forcing entire families to jump from rooftop to rooftop to go to their schools and work. There is nothing normal about stealing our water then forcing us to buy it back in drops. There is nothing normal about making Palestinians pay for the gasoline the Israeli bulldozers have used when they demolished their house. Above all, there is nothing normal about their expectation that with enough brutality we will give up.

So how about they normalize THIS: We will continue to resist! Their checkpoints have made us cherish our freedom. Their bombs have made us resilient to fear. Their bullets have made us embrace non-violence. Their hypocrisy has made us love the truth. Their tyranny has made us stronger. Their apartheid wall has forced us to stand so tall, so tall, we can see the whole world, and the whole world can see us. While they hide behind their piles of concrete and lies.

So let these walls they have built confine them! Let the word ‘apartheid’ define them! And when they ask you where you stand on normalization, join us and say that you stand with those who have stood their ground, shouting into the barrels of their guns, ‘you may have occupied our villages and towns, but you will never colonize our minds’.

They will never colonize our minds!

Thank you!

– Samah Sabawi is a Palestinian writer and is Public Advocate for Australians for Palestine.

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March 19, 2012 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

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