The aim of Rebellion (Denmark), formed in 2004, is to challenge ‘terrorist legislation’, both in Denmark and internationally.

Terrorist legislation seeks to undermine progressive organisations, resistance movements, trade unions and solidarity movements throughout the world.

We appeal for support from all movements to:

- Defend the right of peoples to resist illegitimate government and foreign occupation!

- Defend the right of peoples to take up arms against oppression where all other means have been exhausted!

Rebellion (Denmark) is accused of the transferral of substantial funds to Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) as a challenge to terrorist legislation.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has for decades been a leader of the struggle of the Palestinian people, engaged in legitimate conflict with occupation forces. We support the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in its struggle for a secular state and democratic state for all. It can in no way be defined as a ‘terrorist organisation’.

FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) has for decades worked and fought for the democratic rights and the equality of the people. The present regime has with US support and in alliance with ‘death squads’, controlled by landowners and drug cartels, continues to persecute the leaders and members of trade unions, political activists, students and peasant organisations of Colombia. Several Latin American nations have negotiated peace by legalising insurgency groups, allowing them to participate in an open political process. The criminalisation of FARC is preventing a political solution in Columbia.

In Denmark, there is an increasing challenge to ‘terrorist legislation’, a growing defiance that Rebellion (Denmark) has striven to create and is itself a part of.

Close to us, the organisation Fighters + Lovers has challenged ‘terrorist’ legislation by selling T-shirts in support of FARC and PFLP. On September 18, 2008 the High Court overturned the non-guilty verdict of the Copenhagen City Court, sentencing five members to between 60 days and six months imprisonment. In March 2009 the Supreme Court revised imprisonment to conditional sentences, also expressing some doubt on the legislation itself.

Increasingly, the theme of terrorism, resistance and liberation movements has entered the debate.

Not least, the theme of the Danish resistance movement against occupation during the Second World War. At the time, they were defined as ‘terrorists’ by occupation forces and their Danish allies. The Horeserød-Stutthof Association, arising out of the resistance movement and following generations, has accelerated the debate. Since 2006 the Horeserød-Stutthof Association has repeatedly transferred financial support to FARC and PFLP, and informed the Ministry of Justice of the transferrals. As yet, the Ministry of Justice has not reacted, revealing hypocrisy in the present enforcement of ‘terrorist’ legislation.

An international group in the Timber Industry and Construction Workers’ Union (TIB) in Copenhagen has also transferred financial support to the resistance movement in Colombia. Here they refer to earlier experience: support for the liberation movements of Vietnam and South Africa, at the time a challenge to the dominant policies of governments. As yet, there has been no judicial reaction.

In the approaching case against Rebellion (Denmark) even an acquittal will not solve the issue. International ‘terrorist’ legislation will remain a global challenge to human rights. Nor will conviction change our aim: continuing support of the right to resistance and solidarity throughout the world.

Palestine and Colombia are the focus we have chosen. From Turkey to Kurdistan, from the Basque Country to the Philippines, there are many others who also could have been chosen. An important criterion for our choice is that liberation forces advance secular, democratic, and humanist goals together with their people.

Through present terrorist legislation, states have attempted to curb the freedom of expression and the political rights of their citizens. The right to extend moral and material support to resistance and liberation movements throughout the world is threatened. The civil and labour rights of citizens to wage legitimate struggles for welfare and democratic reform are also increasingly being curbed.

Rebellion (Denmark) appeals to all movements for democracy and international solidarity to join us in challenging national and supranational terrorist legislation and the so-called ‘global war on terror’.

Demonstrations at Danish Embassies demanding the acquittal of Rebellion (Denmark) in the coming court case would be welcome, as would letters of protest directed to the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Ministry of Justice
Slotsholmsgade 10
1216 Copenhagen K
Telefon: +45 / 72 26 84 00
Telefax +45 / 33 93 35 10

Email: jm@jm.dk

Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Asiatisk Plads 2
DK-1448 Copenhagen K
Telefon: +45/ 33 92 00 00
Telefax: +45/ 32 54 05 33

E-mail: um@um.dk

The website for the founding chapter of Human Rights Coalition (HRC) in Philadelphia says that HRC “was founded in 2001 based on the radical notion that there was a vital segment of the population missing from the organizing work against prisons: the families and loved ones of the over two million prisoners in this country. Not just as spokespeople or tokens, but in decision-making positions, deciding what campaigns to do and what issues to address. Incarcerated brothers took this idea, and asked their family members as well as some supporters to take the lead in building such an organization, and the HRC was born… There are many fronts to fight the prison system on, so many issues to address, but the voices of those most affected: prisoners’ families, ex-prisoners and the prisoners themselves, have to be at the forefront of any movement to change and, sometime in the future, to abolish the prison system entirely, because we are the ones who know the intimate pain this system causes.”

Angola 3 News: Can you please explain the history of the Human Rights Coalition/Fed Up chapter?

Bret Grote: Our chapter of the Human Rights Coalition (HRC) was formed in late 2004-early 2005 and was originally known as Fed Up! The group began as a collaboration between etta, an anti-prison activist who lives in Pittsburgh, and Kevin Johnson, a prisoner confined in Red Onion State Prison, a Supermax facility situated in southwestern Virginia adjacent to the Tennessee border. The two were collaborating on an arts-based educational project.

Given the inherent brutality in Supermax facilities, the diametrically opposed racial demographics between prison personnel and prisoners, and the prevailing culture of violent dehumanization within the U.S. prison system at every level, it is no surprise that reports of severe human rights violations began emerging from Red Onion and its twin institution Wallens Ridge State Prison, which sits 30 miles down the road atop a decapitated mountain, immediately after each opened in 1998 and 1999 respectively.

Fed Up! was formed in an effort to expose conditions of confinement in Virginia’s high-security prisons and mobilize prisoners’ family members and support people against the racism, brutality, deprivation, medical neglect and abuse, and psychological torture that define these facilities.

Over the next couple of years Fed Up! built a contact list of hundreds of prisoners in Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, documented dozens of reports of human rights violations, informed various governmental representatives and agencies-including the governor of Virginia—of these conditions, and mobilized allies for letter and phone campaigns in an effort to penetrate the silence that enables the worst of the abuse, and thereby having a chilling effect on the most grievous brutality.

Sometime prior to or during 2007, Fed Up! became an official chapter of the Human Rights Coalition, a prisoner rights/prison abolitionist organization whose founding chapter was and still remains active in Philadelphia. HRC was the brainchild of prisoners as well. Around the fall of 2007 and early 2008 HRC/Fed Up!—as we were then known—began to focus more exclusively on PA prisons for reasons of capacity and strategy, because, obviously, we have more potential and actual power in this state since we are based here.

During these last two years we have documented hundreds upon hundreds of human rights violations (to view a small portion visit our website) from over 20 prisons in the state system (PA has 27 state prisons). These reports have been collated from thousands upon thousands of pages of prisoner letters and reports, criminal complaints, affidavits and declarations, civil litigation documents, prison records, along with countless hours of interviews and dialogue with current and former prisoners and their family and support people.

What our investigations demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt is that the state of Pennsylvania is operating a sophisticated program of torture under an utterly baseless pretext of “security”, wherein close to 3,000 people are held in conditions of solitary/control unit confinement each day.

Every single prison in the state has a control unit, and most of these consist of barren and often filthy cells that not only are the size of a bathroom, but are in fact bathrooms. Prisoners are confined for 23-24 hours per day in their cells. Reading materials are heavily restricted and censored. All incoming mail is subject to being read, except legal mail, although this policy is often violated while outgoing mail is subject to various forms of surveillance, tampering, and destruction. Restrictions on visitations are extreme and all visits with those in control units are conducted through thick glass with prisoners who are handcuffed throughout. Exercise “privileges” are granted 5-days per week when prisoners are taken to little cubicles of space enclosed by chain-link fencing and resembling dog kennels, presuming that the guards are willing to follow policy that day and that the prisoner in question feels secure being led from their cell to the “yard” by often flagrantly racist and sadistic guards.

While this capsule description of solitary confinement may appear inhumane and degrading enough to constitute torture—and it is—the concise litany of conditions above more or less corresponds to the aspects of solitary confinement that are mandated by policy, with the exception of some forms of mail tampering. The fact of the matter is that these control units are never operated in accordance with policy and instead serve as quite deliberate repositories for excessive and arbitrary violence, starvation and deprivation of water, psychological torment, etc.

Prisoners targeted most heavily by the regime of control unit torture are those who attempt to exercise constitutional rights to file grievances and lawsuits and expose conditions to the public. The other dominant filters that dictate an enhanced probability for placement in solitary confinement are race and mental health, as prisoners of color and those in need of psychological and psychiatric care constitute a higher concentration of prisoners in solitary than in the general prison population, which of course already has higher concentrations of both populations than the general population.

This focus on investigating, exposing, and fighting against state torture has emerged from a twinned set of obligations that need to accompany not only abolitionist movements, but struggles for social justice in general: the need to take immediate action in partnership and solidarity with those most heavily targeted by systems of oppression while simultaneously building a sustainable movement with a visionary, liberatory objective.

During the last year we have engaged in a number of other projects and community outreach and coalition-building efforts as well. Some of the more promising ones in terms of their necessity and importance for sustainable organizing are the recently launched project focusing on women’s incarceration, our Innocence Division which aims to support the wrongfully convicted, and perhaps most crucial, the recent formation along with a number of other local groups of the Human Rights Alliance Pittsburgh, which works to generate an integrated, multi-front human rights movement by means of organizing local communities to struggle for their rights and build political power.

A3N: What role do prisoners and the families of prisoners have in HRC’Fed Up! today?

BG: Prisoners and their family members have provided the inspiration, dedication, strategy, and educational perspective from the beginning of HRC’s work. Understanding the importance of documentation and securing affidavits, educating us on key aspects of the law and how to file criminal complaints, networking and bringing us into contact with other prisoners and activists: all of this has come from those on the inside.

Even more to the point, the resistance, humor, persistence, dignity, and unbreakable humanity of those subjected to conditions designed to humiliate, degrade, terrorize, break, and otherwise kill the human spirit is a constant wellspring of motivation that fortifies our collective commitment at HRC/Fed Up!

Family members’ involvement is central, as our planning meetings and letter-writing nights frequently, though not always, feature the participation of those with loved ones inside. We routinely ask people to step up and respond to our action alerts in defense of those being starved, beaten, denied medical care or otherwise targeted, and it has been the responses of family members that have led to our ability to amplify our voices and have some degree of a chilling effect in certain situations.

Still, we need to make a more dedicated effort in my view to community organizing, since most people in Pittsburgh do not know we exist, and those who do are not always able to make meetings for a variety of reasons, which primarily has to do with attending to familial and work responsibilities. We need to broaden our avenues for participation and create a diverse and steady stream of public forums in which the voices of current and former prisoners and their loved ones will be central and guiding. We need to consciously step up our efforts to build more leadership within targeted communities.

A3N: Can you please tell us about HRC/Fed Up!’s ongoing investigations into SCI Dallas?

BG: In early June of this year we sent a letter to more than 20 current and former prisoners at the State Correctional Institution (SCI) at Dallas, PA, soliciting reports of human rights violations. Since then we have received thousands of pages in reports from dozens of prisoners detailing a wide range of gross and deliberate human rights violations.

The highest concentration of reports come from the Restricted Housing Unit (RHU), which is PA’s own acronym for the solitary/control units, and these conform to the broad characteristics outlined above regarding solitary confinement, although certain depredations have been more prevalent at SCI Dallas. These include high incidence of sexual harassment by RHU staff and even reports of guards encouraging prisoners to sexually assault and rape other prisoners; frequent incitement to suicide, which was fatally successful in a case I’ll discuss below; guards arriving to work drunk—we have had a shocking number of reports regarding this, particularly concerning Correctional Officer Jimmy Wilkes; no effective ventilation, which was exacerbated by the plastic “spit shields” placed on prisoners’ doors in the RHU and a source of extreme misery in the stifling heat of summer; brown drinking and washing water from excessive amounts of iron, which was confirmed in a letter from the Department of Environmental Protection to a prisoner in the RHU that HRC/Fed Up! has obtained.

The assaults, racism, denial of adequate or even any medical care in solitary or general population, especially mental health treatment, denial of due process in internal grievance and misconduct procedures, obstruction of access to the courts via the destruction of legal documents and arbitrary restrictions on usage of the law library are commonplace at SCI Dallas as they are throughout the control units of PA with varying degrees of intensity.

During the course of our still ongoing investigation, on August 24, 2009, a prisoner in the RHU named Matthew Bullock committed suicide. The PA DOC issued a press release, as is their legal obligation, on 25 August 2009 announcing his death. Only two days later we received the first report that guards were involved in encouraging and enabling Mr. Bullock’s death. Since then we have learned through more than half-a-dozen eyewitness reports, several of which were submitted as affidavits, that Mr. Bullock was extremely mentally ill and according to his family had attempted suicide on at least six separate occasions while confined in the PA DOC. Guards repeatedly kicked on the door of his cell and taunted him, telling him to kill himself, and calling him a child molester and rapist, despite his having no record of any such crimes. Mr. Bullock told guards he was going to kill himself on the morning of August 24. Guards encouraged him to do so and subsequently moved him from cell #50, which was/is a psychiatric observation cell with a camera, to cell #48, which had no camera. Guards on the afternoon shift then reportedly failed to make rounds. Mr. Bullock was found hanging in his cell at 6:15 pm.

Because our investigations involve advocacy and are pursued with the explicit aim of abolishing control unit torture and other human rights violations in the prison system, we have earned the trust of many prisoners, and this is the reason that so many have come forward with reports of torture and human rights violations in SCI Dallas and elsewhere. As a result of their courage in speaking out we were able to break the story of the Bullock suicide in the local newspaper, the Wilkes Barre Times Leader. Mr. Bullock’s trial lawyer read the story and contacted our office. We have provided a lot of documentation and witness statements to them, and they have recently opened an estate on Mr. Bullock’s behalf, which is the first step in an eventual lawsuit.

Despite the negative publicity and small measure of exposure, conditions have not improved in the slightest, and acts of retaliation have in fact escalated recently. Reports of assault and instances of days long starvation continue to come into our offices multiple times each week.

HRC/Fed Up! has compiled the evidence we have accumulated and periodically notified those in positions of power with attendant requests for transparent investigations so as to ensure accountability and enforce the rule of law in the administration of the criminal legal system. In early July, over 70 state representatives and senators were put on notice of our preliminary findings, along with the PA DOC, the PA Attorney General and Governor Rendell (who it must be noted has a sordid history of criminal conspiracy and human rights violations himself, stemming from his role as the District Attorney of Philadelphia during the city’s war against the MOVE organization and the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal). Further notices were sent in September, with even more copious documentation. To date no action has been taken by the PA DOC, the Attorney General of PA, or the Governor. Nor has the District Attorney of Luzerne County—notorious site of the kids-for-cash judicial scandal—taken any action regarding criminal complaints regarding the Bullock incident or the acts of assault and starvation and intimidation against Andre Jacobs, a brilliant 27 year-old jailhouse lawyer who was recently awarded $115,000 in a case against the PA DOC.

Our strategy has been to grant PA state authorities the opportunity to do the right thing while simultaneously preparing for the predictable reality that they will not. Our next steps are the filing of formal criminal complaints with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the issuing of a major human rights report detailing our findings regarding SCI Dallas. The basic idea is to methodically link state authorities at every jurisdictional level into a chain of notice and liability and to reflect the failure of the government to enforce the rule of law and uphold basic human rights onto the public consciousness in order to create the degree of exposure necessary for enabling mass movements and coherent, collective action against the injustices of the police-security state.

In the process we seek to bring methodically incremental increases in the forms and effects of pressure so as to provide improvements in immediate conditions. Or, in other words, we seek to win small battles as a method for building power and strength for the larger ones. Success often appears distant.

I just saw on the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader website that another prisoner died at SCI Dallas on Saturday morning (read here). Autopsy results have not been determined and/or released, and the name has not been made public either. The article says the individual fell ill early Saturday morning and died at the hospital. My question is why is this one being reported? Deaths from “natural causes,” i.e. medical conditions, are not required to be made public. Others have died at Dallas recently, or we’ve been informed, and the newspapers did not make mention of this. I’ve checked a half-dozen of our closer contacts and their names are still listed in the inmate locator. Nevertheless, I am concerned.

A3N: Does HRC see solitary confinement as a form of torture? Why do you think prison authorities use solitary confinement?

BG: What HRC or any members involve consider torture might be an interesting question, but it is of limited utility for effective political organizing. How do international law and the U.S. government define torture? The UN Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incident to lawful sanctions.” Sounds clear enough.

How does U.S. statutory code define torture? Section 2340 of Title 18 of the federal criminal code defines torture as “an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.”

Do the conditions of control unit confinement meet this standard? There is not space here to go over the evidence, which could fill several hundred pages on the basis of our two-year investigations in prisons in PA alone, but those familiar with the subject have an unequivocal grasp of the reality that solitary confinement deliberately inflicts “severe pain and suffering,” especially psychological, and cannot be justified on legitimate, i.e. “lawful,” grounds. The reasons for these conclusions are several but I will simply touch on two matters here: the psychological impact of solitary confinement and its failure to meet stated policy objectives.

The scientific consensus deduced from copious research on the psychological impact of solitary confinement is that the experience generates considerable and sometimes permanent mental suffering. One of the foremost experts on the subject, Dr. Stuart Grassian, reveals that “even a few days of solitary confinement will predictably shift the electroencephalogram (EEG) pattern toward an abnormal pattern characteristic of stupor and delirium,” and outlines the following seven symptoms as being characteristic of an “organic brain delirium” associated with solitary confinement: a) hyperresponsivity to external stimuli; b) perceptual distortions, illusions, hallucinations; c) panic attacks; d) difficulties with thinking, concentration, and memory; e) intrusive obsessional thoughts: emergence of primitive aggressive ruminations; f) overt paranoia; g) problems with impulse control.

Questionnaires submitted by HRC/Fed Up! to over 75 prisoners in SCI Dallas and throughout the state confirm the presence of these same symptomatic patterns amongst a disturbingly large number of the solitary confinement population. Incidents of self-harm, including suicide attempts, occur regularly and are certainly under-reported. At SCI Fayette, between the months of July and September, HRC received reports from RHU prisoners that two men set their cells on fire, one of those same men cut himself and swallowed a razor, another man tried to hang himself, and another two cut their wrists and arms. These examples can be multiplied throughout the PA DOC and the entire country.

As for the pretext that solitary confinement reduces violence in prisons and ensures secure facilities, this is supported by literally zero credible evidence to my knowledge. All available testimony and reports would seem to indicate that solitary units create a psychological condition of such absolute repression that instances of violence and brutality proliferate. Not to mention the obvious fact that a stay in the hole exacerbates mental illness, rage, frustration, and other characteristics of anti-social behavioral traits.

Countless prisoners report being forced to max out their sentences because of alleged disciplinary infractions that land them in solitary. The conditions of confinement in the PA DOC are a major contributing factor to recidivism rates that hover around 50% in the first three years after release, helping to feed a chronic crisis of overcrowding. This refutes the notion that the PA DOC has any legitimate security, penological, correctional or other rationale behind the program.

In other words, there is nothing lawful in the sanctioning of one to solitary confinement, as it clearly contributes to social destabilization by engendering even more criminality on the part of prison personnel and prisoners in an endless cycle that diverts funding from desperately needed social programs in order to disappear and warehouse members of the underclass. These conditions are a flagrant violation of article 6 of the U.S. Constitution as well, which affirms that treaty law (i.e. international law) is the “supreme law of the land.” Thus, article 10 (3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights stipulates that “The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation.”

A3N: What role does solitary confinement have in the overall prison system? Since 1970, the prison population has increased from 300,000 to over 2.3 million today. The US now has more total prisoners and the highest incarceration rate than any other country in the world. What do you attribute this increase to?

BG: I’ll be concise here. Solitary confinement is the innermost core of the US-led imperial architecture of terror. A succinct overview of this architecture can be formulated as follows:

1) The solitary confinement population is used to terrorize the prisoner population;

2) The prison population is used to terrorize poor communities in general and communities of color in particular;

3) Social and economic conditions in these communities are used to terrorize the middle classes;

4) The middle classes are used to carry out the social, economic, and political agenda of the ruling/owning class;

5) The ruling class uses this domestic base of power to organize empire abroad;

6) Empire generates a trajectory of apocalypse;

7) We have to stop this.

This sketch can be developed with varying degrees of nuance, focus, and elaboration, but seems durable enough for me.

In this respect the proliferation of solitary confinement/supermax conditions in the U.S. has corresponded closely with the rise of policies of mass incarceration and the global regime of neoliberal capitalism and its economic ideology of corporate supremacy, which I won’t describe here except to say that the deindustrialization of U.S. society has generated an ever-escalating number of people who are useless to the accumulation of wealth. When these populations become fodder for the prison industry they obtain economic capital while the systematic removal of massive numbers of poor people, especially people of color, from anything but marginal or token participation in the economic, social, and political domains serves the political function of neutralizing potential bases for movements against the unjust status quo.

A3N: Concerning strategies of resistance, how do you think human rights and international law framework can be applied to prison conditions as a method/strategy/philosophy for investigations, exposure, and organizing? How does this relate to other struggles against the PIC and for human rights generally?

BG: Human rights, which are rooted in international law and designed to ensure the self-determination of peoples and thus a humane, sustainable, and legitimate social order, have a number of immediate advantages as framing instruments for the widest array of political struggle possible.

First of all, this frame turns reality right side up and exposes with grim clarity the criminality of the corporate-state. No matter the severity of crimes committed by those languishing anywhere in the U.S. prison system—and nobody disputes that some of those in prison are dangerous, violent, and pathologically anti-social—these crimes pale in comparison to wars of aggression, radical and ceaseless violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention against Torture, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Genocide Convetnion, etc. ad nauseam.

In fact, the systemic criminality of the political-economic order generates the oppressive power relations and attendant conditions of poverty, addiction, illicit economic activity, and normalized violence—especially against women and children—that fosters officially defined and punished crime. For those who are serious about ending violence and poverty in our collective communities it is imperative that a core objective of such a project is to mobilize a coherent mass movement from below to put constraints on and eventually eliminate altogether the ability of those in positions of power to engage in serial violations of the rights of others.

This framework has everything to do with accountability and necessitates that we work tirelessly to generate understanding and action around the reality that those who design and operate systems of power in this society are guilty of perpetrating crimes against humanity and must be stopped.

Specifically, in the context of day to day organizing around the prison system, it means that individuals and organizations concerned with the rights and lives of prisoners need to familiarize themselves with the basic principles of international human rights law as it pertains to the criminal legal system (I refuse to call it a justice system) and collect evidence regarding the state’s failure to implement basic human rights and constitutional safeguards for prisoners. The UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment, the Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners, amongst other human rights documents, are appropriate for orienting a host of campaigns toward dismantling the worst practices of the present system while simultaneously implementing alternative structures and practices.

Widespread dissemination of human rights documents and literature and the creation of community and movement curriculums toward this end are other means to build, and in part reconstruct, a rights-based culture of political dissent. Rights-based cultures naturally create movements that make demands and mobilize to enforce those demands, without asking for permission from repressive authorities or the ideal historical circumstances for organizing from below. A rights-based culture is a culture of struggle, cooperation, collective accountability, historical consciousness, and dedicated to creating a better world for those generations that will follow. Rights-based cultures are constituted by unbreakable bonds of solidarity, trust, and responsibility.

As anybody familiar with even a fraction of the history of popular struggles for social justice knows, these movements—while they rise and fall, wax and wane—never disappear so long as injustice exists; they are built to last. In fact, the human rights framework corresponds to the liberation movements of the 60 and 70s embodied in the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement amongst others.

Ultimately, human rights discourse and organizing revolves around the question of power: what forces in society hold power, how is it defined, who makes decisions and who suffers the consequences. For this end it is essential that we work to proliferate human rights alliances so as to build the necessary capacity and solidarity to confront the question of power. That is why the Human Rights Alliance of Pittsburgh, young as it is, strikes me as one of our most promising projects.

More practically, a method of documentation, intervention, and movement-building is effective for 1) tracking and exposing human rights violations in prisons, and other areas of society as well; 2) accumulating evidence to strengthen arguments in support of mass action for social reconstruction; 3) building trust with prisoners and their families by taking advocacy actions to the greatest degree possible; 4) building an organizational network with communication infrastructure that will serve to inform, foster dialogue, and mobilize increasing numbers of prisoners and their families and communities.

A3N: What link can we make between the work of HRC/Fed-Up! and the movement to free the Angola Three and all political prisoners?

BG: The relationship between the work of HRC/Fed Up! and the struggles of the Angola 3 are inseparable. Solitary confinement and the prison system as a whole have the primary function of silencing and/or liquidating precisely those radical movements embodied in the case and lives of Robert King, Herman Wallace, and Albert Woodfox.

Solitary confinement is a mechanism to isolate and neutralize leadership elements, people with the ability to articulate a common vision, support their principles with action, and build trust, solidarity, self-empowerment, and unbreakable determination within oppressed populations inside the prison and out. As Angola’s Warden Burl Cain clarified the matter, albeit while speaking against the release of Albert Woodfox, “He wants to demonstrate. He wants to organize. He wants to be defiant. … A hunger strike is really, really bad, because you could see he admitted that he was organizing a peaceful demonstration. There is no such thing as a peaceful demonstration in prison.” Any act of dissent or protest is unacceptable to the totalitarian mindset.

As Cain further stated about Woodfox, “I still know he has a propensity for violence…he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism, and I still would not want him walking around my prison because he would organize the young new inmates.” For those familiar with the actual program and ideology of the Black Panther Party, Cain’s statement contains a key insight: the struggle for human rights amongst oppressed peoples is an unacceptable threat to a system built and sustained upon the denial of those rights.

Our task in this context is clear: to carry forward in our work with renewed intensity and dedication, honoring those who struggled before us, acting on our responsibilities toward those who will follow, and building the movements of today that will confront and ultimately defeat this unspeakably cruel and inhuman system.

A3N: How can readers best support HRC/Fed Up! with its work?

BG: We have no staff and even less money, so financial contributions are extremely helpful. We have a lot of printing and mailing needs, as we send dozens of letters to prisoners each month, not to mention criminal complaints, letters to state officials and legislators, and other operational costs, including transportation costs for a possible speaking tour and visits to prisons. Checks can be made to HRC/Fed Up! and sent to us at 5125 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15224.

Most importantly, however, get in contact with us so we can learn from each other’s work and practice mutual aid and solidarity in whatever ways appropriate and possible. Send an email to hrcfedup@gmail.com or call 412-361-3022.

And finally, please do send an email and join our Emergency Response Network to help us spread information and take collective action in urgent situations involving starvation, assaults, medical neglect, and other human rights violations in PA prisons. Set up your own ERN for your city, state, and/or region, and lets network to help shatter the silence that enables the torture to continue.

Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.
– President Fidel Castro.¹

The revolutionary [is] the ideological motor force of the revolution…if he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution which he leads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.
– Che Guevara²

I think that the governments of Cuba, Bolivia, and Nicaragua let down the entire Tamil population in the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, as well as “proletarian internationalism” and the “exploited”, by extending unconditional support to Sri Lanka’s racist government.

Cuba did so—along with the Bolivian and Nicaraguan governments and members of ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America)—on May 27, 2009 when signing a UN Human Rights Council (HRC) resolution praising the government of Sri Lanka for “the promotion and protection of human rights”, while only condemning for terrorism the Liberation Tigers for Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which fought the government in a civil war since 1983 until their defeat on May 19, 2009.

During the last year of war, the Sri Lankan government illegally and brutally interned nearly half-a-million Tamil civilians; 280,000 of these civilians were entrapped in several “welfare centers” upon the LTTE’s surrender. Half-a-year later, only a few thousand have been released. Their conditions are the opposite of “promotion and protection of human rights”. Hundreds have died and are dying for lack of food, water, basic health care.

Since advocating for and signing the unbalanced HRC resolution, I have found no text or evidence that these progressive-revolutionary-socialist governments of ALBA have criticized Sri Lanka for routinely practicing brutality and neglecting basic life necessities of these illegally interned people. The conduct of Sinhalese-led governments towards Tamils ever since Sri Lanka’s independence from Great Britain, in 1947-8, has always been one of mistreatment and inequality, even genocide.

While ALBA leader Venezuela is not a member of that council, President Hugo Chavez followed suit by applauding Sri Lanka’s victory.³ I hope that these revolutionary leaders will undo that damage by coming to the aid of the interned and all 2.5 million Tamil survivors of this horrible carnage and condemning Sri Lanka for its beastly and racist conduct. Tamils national rights must also be recognized, especially by governments representing other indigenous and once enslaved peoples.

In this first of a five-part series, I begin to lay the case that Sri Lanka’s governments practice genocide. I will also speculate about why the four ALBA countries involved in this matter could have decided to ignore this reality, why they disallowed an investigation into the assertion, and why they support such a cruel, chauvinistic regime. In the forthcoming parts, I will sketch the history of the Sinhalese and Tamils; outline the right and necessity for Tamil nationhood; delineate their struggles for equal rights; and show the geo-political power game being played out between the west and its’ sometimes antagonistic counterpart regimes in China and Iran; and conclude with the present state of affairs for Tamils.

Human Rights Council Resolution S-11/1: Assistance to Sri Lanka in the promotion and protection of human rights

Upon the end of the war, 17 countries on the 47-member Human Rights Council called for an extraordinary session about the Sri Lankan situation. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, spoke for an “independent and credible international investigation” into the reports of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law on both sides of the civil war.

“For its part, the Government reportedly used heavy artillery on the densely populated conflict zone, despite assurances that it would take precautions to protect civilians”… and the “reported shelling of a hospital clinic on several occasions”…”

“These people are in desperate need of food, water, medical help and other forms of basic assistance… there have already been outbreaks of contagious diseases.”

“The images of terrified and emaciated women, men and children fleeing the battle zone… must spur us into action.”

Pillay’s professional, compassionate and balanced proposal was not tabled or even discussed. Instead 17 members—mostly EU countries and Canada, but also Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico and Chile—proposed only that an investigation into these charges of human rights abuse be pursued by the Sri Lankan government itself, that is: the government investigating its brutality, hardly anything radical or effective. This, and the call for “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid from the UN and International Committee of the Red Cross, was the only significant difference from another resolution proposed by the majority, mostly Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) countries. Chile was the only NAM member to vote against the majority, which wanted no investigation at all. And the “rapid and unhindered access” for humanitarian aid was reduced to: “provide access as may be appropriate”, thereby giving Sri Lanka’s government the power to use food/water/medicine as a weapon against their enemy: the Tamil people and not the now defeated LTTE.

Sri Lanka was present at the HRC sessions as an observer. It had been a member from 2006 to 2008 when it lost reelection as one of the six Asian State members. Poignantly overlooked by most NAM members assembled a year later, it had been severely criticized by Tamils around the world and by internationally respected Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu and Adolfo Perez Esquivel.

“The systematic abuses by Sri Lanka government forces are among the most serious imaginable. Torture and extrajudicial killings are widespread [as is] kidnappings of its own people,” said Tutu in May 2008 when opposing its seat on the Human Rights Council.

A year later, the HRC majority unfastidiously praised Sri Lanka for continuing “to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law”. The key promoter of the majority resolution was, to my dismay, Cuba—the homeland of my heart and where I had lived and worked for the government for eight years.

The Cuban ambassador to the Council, Juan Antonio Fernández Palacios—who also spoke on behalf of the NAM—praised Sri Lanka’s governments over the years, and “congratulates” it on “putting an end” to the armed conflict. A key sentence is: “Sri Lanka’s sovereign right to fight terrorism and separatism within its undisputed borders must be respected.” The words “separatism” and “undisputed borders” will be dealt with at length later. But no one familiar with the history of Sinhalese and Tamils for decades since independence and centuries before could have chosen to speak of “undisputed borders”. Tamils had a homeland, two kingdoms, for centuries before the Sinhalese came to the island and for centuries afterwards.

Cuba also acted as a special advocate for Sri Lanka as an “interlocutor”, in addition to Egypt, India and Pakistan. The resolution about Sri Lanka was actually its own draft, which Cuba tabled.⁴

Just before the vote, the Bolivian HRC ambassador, Ms. Angélica Navarro Llames, made it clear she was perturbed by the manner in which many of the 17 countries had presented their resolution and for insisting upon a special meeting just a week before the scheduled one. She objected to “neocolonialist attitudes”. The Bolivian then spoke of LTTE terrorism used against the people and the government and people, and defended its right to fight for its sovereignty.

Resolution S-11/1 adopted by the majority (29 members for, 12 against, 6 abstentions). Here are pertinent excerpts:

Reaffirming the respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, and its sovereign rights to protect its citizens and combat terrorism,

Condemning all attacks that the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) launched on the civilian population and its practice of using civilians as human shields…

Welcoming the conclusion of hostilities and the liberation by the Government of Sri Lanka of tens of thousands of its citizens that were kept by the LTTE against their will as hostages, as well as the efforts by the Government to ensure safety and security for all Sri Lankans and bringing permanent peace to the country…

Emphasizing that after the conclusion of hostilities, the priority in terms of human rights remains the provision of the necessary assistance to ensure relief and rehabilitation of persons affected by the conflict, including internally displaced persons, as well as the reconstruction of the country’s economy and infrastructure,

Encouraged by the provision of basic humanitarian assistance, in particular, safe drinking water, sanitation, food, and medical and health care services to the IDPs [Internally Displaced Persons] by the Government of Sri Lanka with the assistance of the United Nations agencies…

1. Commends the measures taken by the Government of Sri Lanka to address the urgent needs of the Internally Displaced Persons;

2. Welcomes the continued commitment of Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of all human rights and encourages it to continue to uphold its human rights obligations and the norms of international human rights law;…

5. Acknowledges the commitment of the Government of Sri Lanka to provide access as may be appropriate to international humanitarian agencies in order to ensure humanitarian assistance to the population affected by the conflict, in particular IDPs…

In Favour: Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Uruguay, Zambia;

Against: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland;

Abstaining: Argentina, Gabon, Japan, Mauritius, Republic of Korea, Ukraine.”⁴

I will show in upcoming articles how points 1, 2, and 5 cited here have never been the reality; Sri Lanka has not respected Tamils lives or their rights nor provided them their “urgent needs.”

Terrorism and Genocide

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was first dubbed a terrorist organization by India, in 1992. Ironically, it wasn’t until 1998 that Sri Lanka’s government so characterized them, and it did so only after the US did, in 1997. On May 30, 2006, the EU placed LTTE on its terrorist list and banned the organization. It made it a terrorist crime to economically or military aid LTTE, and it froze all LTTE bank and financial assets in Europe. The EU appeared to be even-handed by calling upon the Sri Lankan government to end its “culture of impunity” and to “curb violence” in its areas of control. At the time of LTTE’s defeat, 32 countries had defined them as terrorists.

Never having been in Sri Lanka or South Asia, it is difficult for me to know whether LTTE was a decidedly terrorist organization or not—that is, one which seeks to terrorize civilians. After reading many accounts of atrocities, such as killing hundreds of civilian Sinhalese in their homes, on buses and trains, I conclude that this once Marxist revolutionary organization resorted to terrorism.

At the same time, it must not be forgotten that any liberation movement the world’s greatest state terrorist, the United States of America does not agree with is “terrorist” and therefore illegitimate. Other terrorists, such as the government of the separatist state of Kosovo, are no longer considered terrorist although its drug-smuggling paramilitary organization had been so described, even by the US. Superpowers support or oppose autonomy-independence when it suits their interests. This is also the case with Ireland, the Basques in Spain, and the Palestinians.

Furthermore, the US systematically practices terrorism in its permanent war—invading or “intervening” militarily in 66 countries, a total of 159 times since World War Two.

We must lament the unacceptable methods the LTTE used against many people, and do so without ignoring the history of why and how it was born. Nor must we reject out-of-hand the basic rights and needs of the Tamil people. Their plight must not be abandoned, especially by governments and organizations grounded in anti-imperialism and equality amongst peoples.

Sri Lanka’s history since independence is one of conducting genocide against the Tamils. Genocide is defined by the UN, and Sri Lanka ratified its promise to adhere to it on October 12, 1950.The Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted December 9, 1948 and entered into force, January 12, 1951, states:

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
   (a) Killing members of the group;
   (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
   (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
   (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
   (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.⁵

Destroying “in whole or in part” an ethnic group is certainly what Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese governments, as well as Buddhist monks, have been doing to the Tamils for six decades. Evidence will be forthcoming. There is so much evidence that even a former US deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan Administration filed a 12-count indictment against S.L. defense secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse and army commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka for “perpetrating genocide against Tamil civilians.”

The suit was filed by Bruce Fein, in February 2009, in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California.

The case can be filed in the US because G. Rajapakse is a naturalized citizen and Fonseka holds a resident green card. They are charged with responsibility for: “3,750 alleged extrajudicial killings, with 10,000 suffering bodily injury and more than 1.3 million displacements,” which, according to Fein, “far exceed displacements in Kosovo which led to genocide counts before the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.”

Fein noted that G. Rajapakse said in a BBC interview that, “if you are not fighting the Tamil Tigers you are a terrorist and we’ll kill you.” The attorney represents Tamils Against Genocide. He believes that G. Rajapakse will be “the best witness of the genocide.”

Why ALBA voted as it did: Some points of contention:

I ask the three ALBA governments, which voted for the above resolution, to take Sri Lanka’s government to account on the serious charge of genocide against the Tamil people. At the very least, ALBA should be able to see that hundreds of thousands of displaced persons are brutally treated, and that routine discrimination and abuse have been the Tamil’s plight at the hands of Sinhalese. This is a dichotomy to ALBA’s ideology of equal rights for all: in language, in religion, in the economy, in all aspects of life. In fact, the very new constitution of Bolivia recognizes itself as a pluri-nation in which all the languages and religions of all the peoples are recognized equally. The same is the case in Venezuela with its new constitution.

How can it be, then, that these peoples’ governments have fallen in the arms of such an oppressive, racist government? Possible reasons are:

1. Separatism! It is ironic and ideologically insupportable that anti-imperialist progressive and revolutionary leaders in Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia—mainly dark-skinned peoples, and many of them, especially in Bolivia, are Original Peoples long abused by many whites and creoles—side with the Sinhalese chauvinist elite in Sri Lanka. Perhaps they have not studied the sordid history of Sri Lanka. But more certainly is it that they do not support separatism or dual nationhood within one land mass. Cuba especially has, from its revolutionary start, argued for unity. What Cuba and the others fail to realize or acknowledge is that the Tamil people had tried for decades to achieve equal rights with the Sinhalese, many of whom assert adherence to Marxism, yet to no avail. Most Sinhalese do not wish to unify equally with the other ethnic group. Once peaceful means are exhausted, armed struggle is the only means to achieve liberation, as was the case with Cuba and other Latin American guerrilla movements.

In the case of Sri Lanka and separatism, ALBA governments could be prompted to side with it because of, in part, the role of China! The threat of separatism, which has been the desire of many Tibetan Buddhists, is an impelling factor for China’s position of one nation in its own region, and may be how it views the situation of Tamils in Sri Lanka. Here, China sides, ironically, with Buddhists against Hindus-Christians-Muslims.

Bolivia and Venezuela, too, are pressed by separatist demands but they come not from an ethnic group but from a rich class of Whites-Creoles, which has no historic ethnic Homeland.

2. Geo-politics! Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-dominated governments have been supported militarily and economically by many States, some of which are sometimes antagonistic to one another. Some leftist governments and leftist organizations often operate on the notion that the enemy of my enemy is a friend. If that is the way some socialist-communist-revolutionaries view China and Iran, both totalitarian regimes, in regards to US-Europe-Canada-Australia-Japan imperialism when it comes to Sri Lanka they are mistaken. Surely there are economic and geo-political interests on the part of China and Iran in investing and trading with countries in development, including Sri Lanka but also Cuba and all in Latin America. Fortunately most Latin Americans and the majority of their governments have ceased jumping when a US president or general barks, and they are combining in regional alliances and seeking foreign investments and aid from non-traditional partners.

Since China and Iran began extending their interests into Sri Lanka and sided with its brutal treatment of Tamils, many leftists and progressive governments could think in the black-white geo-political manner. The US-EU states, for their own propaganda image, question Sri Lanka for possible abuses of human rights against Tamils. Ah, no one with experience or knowledge about the duplicity of the empire and its allies could side with them so one must back the other side.

But China is no longer socialist, rather its economy is mainly based on government-sponsored private enterprise with exploitation of labor in the extreme: no union protection, long work hours, low wages, child labor, no say on the job or national and international policies. The working class no longer even has access to full education and health care without paying on a capitalist basis. In fact, workers in most capitalist countries in Europe have better access to health care than workers do in China. Millionaire capitalists now sit on leadership bodies of the so-called Communist Party, and make important decisions over the heads of workers and the population. China is interested mainly in accumulating capital in the grand old raw capitalist style, and it owns more of the US economy (8%) than any other government or economic entity. China’s economy is intricately interdependent upon the US’s capitalism and its imperialist wars.

Iran is run by fundamentalist religious fanaticism. Its economy is basically a capitalist one. Its working class, just as the working class in China, is not a decision-maker. Iran is also a warring partner with US imperialism in its illegal war against Iraq, whose troops are a key factor in the violence against millions of Iraqis. Iran supports their co-religious Muslims in the Quisling government under US domination.

Is it possible that the developing countries, which back Sri Lanka against the Tamil population, do so out of economic reasons? China and Iran provide needed investments and technology and thus one must not criticize. Is that possible, and if so is it ethical, is it consistent with our humanitarian principles and socialist ideology? Cannot one be a trading partner without cowing politically?

Another issue is secularism. The ALBA countries and all truly socialist oriented governments are not and cannot be theocracies! How can secular nation states and organizations consider the Sri Lanka state “democratic socialist” when it declares a religion, and only one, as THE national and official religion? Secularism is the only common ground by which all can be united.

Conclusion

I concur with progressive Tamils in the Tamil Nadu state of India, who have for decades supported Cuba and the new ALBA formation. The Latin American Friendship Association there has held many solidarity activities for these countries, and published scores of books by Latin American authors, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Upon learning of the HRC resolution, they were appalled. The author of the excerpted letter below is Amarantha Visalakshi. For 25 years, she has translated books about Latin America into Tamil and written some herself.

We here in Tamil Nadu celebrated the 80th birthday of Comrade Fidel by releasing eight books on Cuba’s achievements in various fields… and are in the midst of our preparation for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and evaluation of the consolidation of Latin American countries in ALBA…

We are struck dumb and rendered disheartened and disillusioned by this act [the HRC resolution] by those countries of Latin America on which we have pinned our hopes for the future—Socialism of the 21st century.

Why do these countries wish for wiping out the Tamils from the Sri Lankan soil where they rightfully belong? What are the sources of information for these Latin American countries to decide against the Tamils and in favour of the racist Sri Lankan government in the UN Human Rights Council?… more than any other time we feel the absence of Che Guevara, the true internationalist, who laid down his life for the oppressed people of the world.

I also concur with Australia’s largest left-wing organization, the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Socialist Alliance, which publishes greenleft.org.au.

We need “to undertake work to help convince the revolutionary governments of Latin America, including Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, to cease support for the Sri Lankan government, and to recognize the national rights of the Tamil people. There is a long-run danger if revolutionary governments, for whatever reason, fail to support genuine movements for national self-determination in Third World countries, and endorse repressive regimes on the basis of a bogus ‘anti-imperialism…’”

1. Fidel told writer-photographer Lee Lockwood: Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel, Macmillan, N.Y. 1967.
2. Socialism and man, Marcha, Uruguay, March 12, 1965.
3. “Hugo Chavez praises President Rajapaksa’s leadership in defeating LTTE”, Sri Lanka Daily News, September 4, 2009. In this piece, published by a pro-government newspaper, there is not one quotation by Hugo Chavez, who spoke with Rajapakse when they were in Libya. The piece paraphrases what the anonymous writer asserts Chavez having said; an example: Chavez apparently said that the defeat of LTTE terrorism “is a glowing example to other countries beset with the same problem,” words of the writer. Chavez allegedly praised Rajapakse for his leadership.
4. 1, 2, 3.
5. Source. Although the US signed the 1948 convention, it did not accede to it until November 1988. As of 2008, 140 nation states have acceded.

Robinson Crusoe’s ethics are rooted in his inherent imperialism. Being the only representative of his race and culture for 27 of his 28 years upon the island, and considering both superior to all others, he not only endeavors—regardless if it is applicable, necessary, or even viable—to replicate the society from which he came but, through these means, to reign supreme over his environment. Crusoe is culpable because he acknowledges that he has been freed from socially-defined standards and, more importantly, that such standards might, in themselves, be questionable yet, after rationalizing the ethically justifiable course of action, he frequently opts for a more self-aggrandizing, convenient, or profitable avenue.

For example, he criticizes the Spanish Inquisition as being unjust yet forces a Caribbean native whom he has liberated from being cannibalized—not on moral grounds but in order to obtain a servant—to assimilate to his Anglo-Saxon lifestyle. Crusoe never bothers to ask the native’s given name. Instead, to commemorate the day upon which Crusoe acted so gallantly, “the creature” is nonchalantly dubbed “Friday.” Crusoe then demands that the native be clothed despite Friday being uncomfortable in such adornments and, moreover, the climate not requiring such. Furthermore, Crusoe rarely inquires into Friday’s perspectives, customs, or culture (the latter has to offer them), thus implying that Crusoe believes his ways to be implicitly superior as he proceeds to teach Friday to speak English and convert him to Christianity. It is worthy of note that, when Friday is rescued, he grovels at his liberator’s feet. Crusoe does not lift Friday up but permits him to remain in his subservient position so as to establish the desired hierarchy (he has Friday refer to him as “Master”) as well as to satiate his narcissism. Astoundingly, Crusoe allows this to occur not once but twice. (Similarly, prior to Crusoe’s discovery of humans upon the island, he revels in his “sovereignty” over the island’s fauna, as he observes that he has capricious control over whether it lives or dies.) The epitome of Crusoe’s moral myopia toward Friday resides in Crusoe’s lack of empathy after having once been enslaved himself. Most pointedly, being free of societal customs and beliefs, there is no alibi for why he continues to uphold the institution of slavery, especially considering that, for several years, Crusoe and Friday are the island’s only inhabitants. Granted, he does not literally bind Friday in shackles and chains, however, he treats him as an inferior and in a manner which, if back in Europe, he would by no means apply to a fellow Briton.

It is with such happenstance convenience that Crusoe reinforces his religious views before summarily dismissing them. For instance, after several languid gestures toward reverence, once Crusoe is born-again, he maintains a calendar and observes the Sabbath. Yet, when he loses track of the date, his devotion subsequently subsides. Additionally, when he notices that barley has sprouted near his “castle” (shelter), being unable to reconcile how it arrived there, he attributes its presence to God’s will. He then recalls that he’d discarded several husks which might have contained seeds and dismisses divine intervention as being the culprit. Obviously, Crusoe’s level of devotion is dependent upon need (such as illness or desperation) or occurrences which he cannot readily rationalize and his theological fervor abruptly diminishes once he no longer requires assistance or deduces a non-supernatural cause for previously inexplicable events. Not surprisingly, he considers abandoning his faith in favor of another once he is rescued because doing so would be more lucrative (Catholicism is the reigning religion in Brazil, which is where his tobacco plantation resides).

Even in the wake of society, Crusoe is unable to sever himself from his entrepreneurial tendencies and, however futile, desire for material and monetary possessions. Despite his conjectures that, like Jonah, he might have been cast out for his sins (Crusoe would have never found himself stranded had he not set out to sea to procure more slaves), he produces more food than he can consume only to watch it rot. He practices animal husbandry and agriculture after conceding that the island aptly provides for his needs without having to resort to such labor-intensive activities. He even goes so far as to craft a table and chair. As noted, he has a “castle,” but he also possesses another shelter-cum-estate as well, which he refers to as his “bower.” Even after admitting that money has no intrinsic value in a tender-free existence, Crusoe hordes every coin he finds. Lastly, toward the end of his “reign” upon the island, the self-described “king” begins cataloguing people as possessions: He refers to the island’s inhabitants as his “subjects,” prisoners as “my people,” and even perceives specific (and in his mind, civilized) individuals as being his own, i.e. “the Spaniard” quickly metamorphoses into “my Spaniard.”

Other instances of Crusoe’s moral hypocrisy and logistic incongruity include his consenting that cannibals might well be acting upon political or cultural principles and, as a result, it may not his place to pass judgment upon them. (Friday confirms this when he informs Crusoe that cannibalism is the consequence of warfare and is not a standard practice, as evidenced by 17 stranded Britons currently residing peacefully amongst Friday’s people.) Nevertheless, and despite his newfound religiosity, Crusoe—against his better judgment and moral conscious—proceeds to slaughter cannibals in the name of God. He never reconciles the paradox in his condemnation of the cannibals’ capital punishment and his own country’s like sentence for mutiny.

Not surprisingly, Crusoe hasn’t any friends. Rather, his associations are strictly limited to accomplices, acquaintances, or business partners. (After he is rescued, he does go on to marry but never cites his wife by name.) Every individual’s worth is based upon the person’s utilitarian value as Crusoe refuses to permit sentimentality to intervene in his decision-making. This is best evidenced in his selling of Xury, a Moorish youth who aided Crusoe in escaping enslavement, which Crusoe later regrets—not because he misses the boy (though he does)—but because he is in need of additional labor on his Brazilian plantation. Dauntingly, when he is rescued, Crusoe leaves the island to British criminals without attempting to notify those who have set off to sea in search for help—the aforementioned Spaniard and Friday’s father—that there are new, dangerous inhabitants awaiting them upon their return. These individuals are not even an afterthought in that, in lieu of the maritime risks involved atop the political tension between Spain and Britain, Crusoe never bothers to inform us of the rescue mission’s fate, even after returning to the island years later. This omission is all the more insulting given that the seafarers aided Crusoe in retaining control of the island after mutineers came ashore.

What perhaps best outlines the Crusoe’s Machiavellian nature is his reaction to a single footprint which mysteriously appears on the beach one day. Though, upon his initial appearance upon the island, he longed to be rescued, Crusoe gradually becomes apprehensive of any sign of human life, as seen in him automatically assuming the enigmatic mark to be the sign of a hostile presence. Crusoe’s paranoia stems from fear that his comfortable state of existence and omnipotence might be compromised whereas before, when he was unsure of his ability to survive, he longed for salvation. He fears, not only cannibalistic natives, but also Spaniards. Yet ironically, fellow Britons prove to be his greatest threat (thereby negating Crusoe’s ethnocentricity). His megalomania is exemplified by his inability and unwillingness to admit fault even after he has returned to Europe. Various dates in his calendar are blaringly incorrect and, though a simple pen stroke would eradicate the errors and the reader would be none the wiser (while saying nothing of the intellectual integrity that most authors would insist upon in acknowledging the mistakes so as to better represent the conditions under which they were operating), Crusoe chooses to ignore them.

Though he does possess a few redeeming qualities, such as resourcefulness and determination, Daniel Defoe’s character of Robinson Crusoe is by no means a hero or even an admirable human being. He is an unapologetic racist, imperialist, fickle theist, and megalomaniac par excellence. He continually shirks moral obligation in favor of activities wherein he will profit, be it financially or socially, or which will appease his narcissism. His lethargy is only superseded by potential harm or ennui. He displays little moral development in that he rewards those who were faithful to his financial interests while he was stranded—not out of respect or gratitude—but anxiety and vanity respectively: Fearing that the Inquisition may result in martyrdom, he sells his plantation and donates the proceeds, of which “The world will seldom be able to show the like of.” During his valediction, Crusoe declares that he has since cast off once again, thereby implying that—to our knowledge—he might have committed many of the same moral atrocities on his “new adventure.” And why not? What evidence do we have to the contrary that, after 28 years on a desert island, he is any the wiser since this ten-year voyage opens with his return to the island where (in true capitalistic spirit) he divides “his colony[’s]” land into plots before announcing to its populace that it is not permitted to leave?

“Come on,” I laughed as we walked down the dusty Gazan street, the Mediterranean sun beating down hard on our faces, “it couldn’t have been that bad. I mean, we all dislike school to some degree, but it has its nice things too.”

His grave eyes looked wholly unconvinced, “the day I graduated from university was the best day of my life,” he firmly repeated. And then he added, more to himself than to me, “I wish I could erase all my memories of my time in school.”

By 1991 the first Intifada (Palestinian Uprising) was coming to an end. The streets of Gaza slowly emptied of the Israeli soldiers and tanks. The bodies of martyred Palestinians were less often carried to neighborhood graveyards. And in Beit Hanoun, a northern town of Gaza, six-year-old Ahmad began his first day of school.

He enjoyed school. He worked hard and was always the first in his year. Life, one could say, was becoming rather normal in Gaza. And upon finishing middle school in 2000, as a reward for his scholastic achievement, Ahmad received the gift of a lifetime. He, along with 19 other students from Gaza, was selected by the Ministry of Education to join a Seeds of Peace summer camp in the US.

He had a wonderful time in America. What an adventure for the 14-year-old boy! He improved his English. He made new friends. He experienced a whole knew world in that beautiful state of Maine. A world that told him life was open and free and full of opportunity. So he returned to Gaza, after this month-long excursion, full of hope.

But Ahmad was branded a Palestinian at birth. He would now learn to pay that price. The second Intifada irrupted only two months after he returned home from America, at the start of his first year of high school.

“The week before the Intifada started we were in Jerusalem, in Al-Aqsa Mosque. We were praying,” he said, recalling how close he was to being caught amid the initial Jerusalem massacre. The Israeli onslaught quickly spread throughout all the West Bank and Gaza, leaving no Palestinian in peace.

“There was no space,” he told me, trying to explain how the Israeli offensive effected every aspect of personal life for the Palestinian individual. Student life was only one such casualty.

It became dangerous to go to school. It became impossible to have a normal education. In his three years of high school, Ahmad‘s school was shelled by Israeli tanks six times, twice while students were inside.

“Each day we would have demonstrations against the attacks in Gaza and the West Bank because we had so many martyrs… No school. Just demonstrations… You had to go and demonstrate against the horrible attacks against these children and kids everywhere.”

Still, despite all the madness, or perhaps in spite of it all, the students clung as much as they could to their vocation. They would loyally go to school, as much as circumstance allowed. But even this effort was frequently quashed. Too often the students would trek to school only to find it closed. They would ask the reasons for the closures. The answers became the soul-grating refrain of their lives.

Why?
Because Israeli tanks are getting close to the school and there is no school today.
Why?
Because people in our city have been martyred and there are demonstrations so there will be no school today.
Why?
Because the tanks have closed off Beit Hanoun and the teachers cannot come from outside. So we’ll have no school today.

It was in this environment that Ahmad and his classmates (the ones that were not killed) came to their 3rd and final year of high school in 2003. Called Tawjihi, the entire future educational and career life of the student hinges on these end-of-the-year cumulative exams.

“Tawjihi,” Ahmad aptly described, “is like a stage between life.”

Tawjihi year began normal enough. Normal in the Palestinian sense of the word. Normal attacks. Normal shootings. Normal curfews. But the last two months before the exams began the Israeli army laid siege on Beit Hanoun. No one could enter. No one could leave. Everyday there were attacks and explosions. Everyday there were injuries and martyrs.

“We didn’t study, actually,” said Ahmad, “nothing. You cannot study and people are dying,” he explained, as if that needed explaining to me, a girl who had never once even seen a dead body.

And all the while their exams were approaching. The first day of examination was the 9th of June 2003. And the Israeli army was still in Beit Hanoun.

“What do we do?” said Ahmad, “we need to take our exams. So we decided to go to school even though the Israeli tanks were at the doors outside the school.”

So they went. Despite the fact that they hadn’t prepared at all due to the siege and the killings. Examinations went on for a month. Everyday the students went. And everyday the Israeli tanks were at the doors of the school.

It was the worst month, Ahmad told me. All your time in high school you wait to prepare and do well on these final examinations, only, in the last moments, to be prevented from studying because your city is under attack.

The soldiers left after 67 days of siege. And then their exam results came in.

“I passed,” said Ahmad, “my average was 83.5. So very good.”

So that was his high school story. I asked how he felt during those years, as I was unable to comprehend how one could live through such a horror and move on.

“It’s mixed feelings,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t know what you are doing or what’s going on around you. Sometimes it’s fear because you are afraid to lose more friends and more people. And because you are afraid about your family. And you are afraid about your future.

“You don’t know what is going on. You just go and study for a life you’ve been dreaming about. But then you find you can’t have it because of obstacles put up by enemies. And these are horrible obstacles. They’re not just any kind of obstacles that anyone could pass.

“It’s war everywhere. And people are dying everywhere. And you just don’t know. Maybe it’s your turn. I mean, we believe in God, and we know everyone is going to die. But when it goes on so continuously, everyday there is attacks, you just keep worrying about it. So the feeling was, what should I be doing? Should I go fight and resist? Should I go study as a way to resist, as a better way of resistance? Should I just stay afraid, doing nothing, with my family?”

“I started to believe that maybe the power of this education that I will have in the future will be more than the power of a stone against a tank. I asked myself a million times, if I should do the same [and take up throwing stones at the Israeli tanks like some of the Palestinian youth]. Even if it was a little thing.

“Some people say it’s stupid, a stone against a tank. But it’s their will and determination [that counts]. It comes from deep inside. That you are not afraid from anything, whatever it may be. You just want to fight, resist, for your rights. Even if it takes your life, takes everything: [None of that matters because] I believe that its my right and I have to do it.”

That is one way to resist. But Ahmad decided to resist through his education.

“I had to take care of my family. Reach what my parents wanted of me. They wanted us to be educated, get a good life, good jobs, have a good place in the community. They wanted us to help them and help people. So that was the final, or not the final, but a decision that I made.

“You are feeling many things, but you have to go on, to keep going. The only way is to just keep fighting, through your education, and your dreams, and your beliefs. That was the feeling.

“But I never felt like I have to give up. I didn’t find a way that told me ‘you just need to give up now.’ And every time a bad thing happened, or a disaster happened, it gave me more power to continue.

“Because this became the normal life for us. The abnormal life for other people became the normal life for us. So we had to figure out another way of life for us. It’s our reality. We had to face reality, however it was. So it helped us to figure out that life, in spite of all this.

“And all the challenges that we are facing, and all the power that is fighting and destroying everything here in Gaza, we still need to keep going. It’s not going to stop us. Because if we stop, it wont help us. [The Israelis] will keep going. Whether or not we stop, they will try to get what they want. So why give them more chance to get what they want? We need also to continue.”

He paused at the end of this grand soliloquy, “How difficult it was,” he said softly.

But the difficulty continued as he moved on to get his BA in information technology at a university in Gaza.

“I faced troubles when I was in high school because of the Intifada but the troubles increased in university,” Ahmad explained, “Beit Hanoun is the most violent area in Gaza Strip because it is very close to the [Israeli] border so there were usual attacks. Every day we had events. People killed. People injured. Homes destroyed. Lands demolished. My father’s farm was bulldozed 4 or 5 times. Most of my relatives’ homes were targeted.

“Most of the semesters I couldn’t attend many lectures because of the usual attacks on my city. There were weekly attacks, sometimes daily attacks so I could not leave home, it was not safe to leave. And I’d also have to stay home when there were other attacks around the city, or around the university.”

Many times he was even able to attend final exams.

“I’d just keep studying throughout the semester and when time for exams come, attacks happen in Beit Hanoun and friends and relatives are killed, [so I‘d miss the exams]. I was supposed graduate in 2008, but I graduated in 2009, one year late because of these attacks. Attacks which have never stopped. Even now. Especially in my city.”

Ahmad was finally set to graduate in December 2008. But he was reminded once again that a Palestinian who dared pursue a good life had heavy taxes to pay.

“The end of December turned out to be the beginning of a war, not the beginning of final exams. It was a big, I don’t know how to describe it,” he said, searching for words to describe the deep personal affront he felt, “it was like, ‘here is a gift for graduation: You wont graduate. Just keep waiting for death.’ ”

His month of exams was exchanged for a month of terror.

“It was 23 days,” he said, “but you can say 23 weeks. 23 months. 23 years. 23 centuries. It never ends. You keep waiting, moment by moment. And you know nothing. You can only feel the darkness. There is no light, for any kind of hope, or safety, or human rights, or whatever. Just 23 days full of darkness. Full of horror. Full of victims. Massacres. Everything bad. I cannot remember words to describe it.”

But those days did pass. And he found enough strength to pick himself up out of the rubble and finish the mission he began. He graduated, at last, this past spring. But not, I cannot help but acknowledge, not without sacrifice and loss that no one should ever have to endure.

“These five years in university, I said and will keep saying forever,” Ahmad concluded, “these five years were the most horrible years of my life. Even though they’re supposed to be the best years, the nice years. The time to go out and discover life. But it wasn’t discovering life. It was discovering disasters, actually, here in Gaza.”

Re: Ms Berlanty Azzam (I.D. 801158791)

Ms Azzam is a Gaza resident who is staying in the West Bank illegally. Ms Azzam held a permit to stay in the West Bank for 4 days in 2005 and since the permit has expired has been residing in the West Bank illegally.

As you probably know, every Gaza resident who stays in the West Bank requires a permit, failing to do so is a breach of the law. As Ms Azzam has failed to provide a valid permit she was deported back to Gaza. If Ms Azzam wishes to complete her studies in Bethlehem University, she will need to submit her application to the relevant authorities (COGAT) in Gaza where they will be processed.

Sincerely yours,

Ms Ma’ayan, Israeli Public Affairs Department
Embassy of Israel
2 Palace Green
London W8 4QB
Tel: +44-(0)207-957-9541
Fax: +44-(0)207-957-9555
Email: Public@london.mfa.gov.il

Berlanty was resident in the West Bank since 2005 and all that time resisted the temptation to return home to Gaza to see her folks. If her permit expired in 2005 why did the Israelis wait to ‘discover’ this fact just 2 months before she was due to graduate?

What the embassy tells me does not tally with what the University has been told. In an update issued today Bethlehem University management reports:

• On Tuesday, 3 November 2009 the lawyers at Gisha were informed that the state of Israel claims that Berlanty has no right to be at Bethlehem University – to be in the West Bank. However, Berlanty did not need a permit to remain in the West Bank after entering, and no such kind of permit existed in 2005, so she couldn’t have requested one. Berlanty only needed the Israeli permit to cross through Israel from Gaza to the West Bank, which she received.
• The Israeli High Court of Justice will hold another court hearing on Berlanty’s case next Thursday, 12 November 2009 at 9:00am to have the Israeli military to further explain why Berlanty was removed from Bethlehem to Gaza.
• In their response to the court, the Israeli state admits that a “mistake” was made in removing Berlanty on the night of Wednesday, 28 October 2009. Orders were given by the legal adviser’s office not to do it. It was done anyway and still they refuse to return her to her studies at Bethlehem University.

The West Bank and the Gaza Strip are internationally recognized as one integral territory. The embassy’s explanation is at odds with the contention by Birzeit (another West Bank university) that similar action by Israel against a number of Birzeit students from Gaza was “in clear violation of the fundamental human right to education, the right to freedom of movement and the right to choose one’s place of residence within a single territory, in accordance with internationally accepted standards of human rights law”.

I’m not a lawyer, but it would be nice to hear a legal expert explain what authority Israel has for its bloody-minded and cruel conduct towards hard-working students.

They killed 952 Palestinian kiddies in their homeland between 2000 and the start of the Gaza blitzkrieg in December 2008 (according to B’Tselem statistics). They murdered at least 350 more during their Cast Lead onslaught and have kept Gaza under daily attack ever since. So the brave Israelis must have eliminated nearly 1400 youngsters by now. Would anyone care to guess how many they left bleeding, maimed and crippled?

The “most moral army in the world” also loves waging war against Palestinian university students. Not long ago I wrote about Merna, an honors student in her final year majoring in English. Israeli soldiers frequently rampaged through her Bethlehem refugee camp in the middle of the night, ransacking homes and arbitrarily arresting residents. They took away her family one by one. First her 14-year-old cousin and best friend was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while she sat outside her family home during a curfew.

Next the Israelis arrested her eldest brother, a 22 year-old artist, and imprisoned him for 4 years. Then they came back for Merna’s 18-year-old brother. Not content with that the military came again, this time to take her youngest brother – the ‘baby’ of the family – just 16. These were the circumstances under which Merna had to study.

Israeli military law treats Palestinians as adults as soon as they reach 16, a flagrant violation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Israeli youngsters, of course, are regarded as children until 18. Palestinians are dealt with by Israeli military courts, even when it’s a civil matter. These courts ignore international laws and conventions, so there’s no legal protection for individuals under Israeli military occupation.

As detention is based on secret information, which neither the detainee nor his lawyer is allowed to see, it is impossible to mount a proper defence. Besides, the Security Service always finds a bogus excuse to keep detainees locked up “in the greater interest of the security of Israel”. Although detainees have the right to review and appeal, they are unable to challenge the evidence and check facts as all information presented to the Court is classified. So much for Israeli ‘justice’.

Faced with this mounting mental stress Merna, far from giving up, determined to carry on with her studies. The most moral army in the world may have robbed her brothers of an education, but she would still fight for hers.

To get to Bethlehem University, or any other, many students have to run the gauntlet of Israeli checkpoints. “Sometimes they take our ID cards and they spend ages writing down all the details, just to make us late,” said one. Students are often made to remove shoes, belt and bags. “It’s like an airport. Many times we are kept waiting outside for up to an hour, rain or shine, they don’t care.” The soldiers attempt to forcibly remove students’ clothes and they swear and shout sexual slurs at female students.

Some tell how they are sexually harassed on their way to university and spend the rest of the day worrying what the Israelis will do to them on their way home. The constant humiliation undermines student motivation and concentration.

Five years ago the Israelis forcibly removed four Birzeit University students from their studies in the West Bank and illegally sent them back to the Gaza Strip. All four were due to graduate by the end of that academic year. There was an outcry from around the world and the Israeli Army Legal Advisor was bombarded with faxes and letters demanding that the students be allowed to return to their studies.

The world’s most moral army agreed that the students might be allowed to return to Birzeit if they signed a guarantee to permanently return to the Gaza Strip after completing their studies. This effectively exposed Israel’s policy to impose a final separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, even though the two are internationally recognized as one integral territory. Under international law everyone has the right to freely choose their place of residence within a single territory, but since when did Israel give a damn about international law? The racist regime makes it virtually impossible for Gaza students to reach the eight Palestinian universities in the West Bank. In 1999 some 350 Gaza students were studying at Birzeit. Today there are almost none.

It was no great surprise, then, to hear from Bethlehem University a few days ago that Berlanty Azzam, a 4th year Business Administration student, was being held in detention by the Israeli military authorities with the intention of deporting her to Gaza “for trying to complete her studies at Bethlehem University.”

Berlanty, a Christian girl, is originally from Gaza but has lived in the West Bank since 2005 after receiving a travel permit from the military to cross from Gaza to the West Bank. She too is being robbed of her degree at the last minute. She was detained at the Container checkpoint between Bethlehem and Ramallah after attending a job interview in Ramallah.

The 21 year-old was due to graduate before Christmas. On Wednesday night the “” blindfolded and handcuffed her, loaded her into a military jeep and drove her from Bethlehem to Gaza, despite assurances by the Israeli Military Legal Advisor’s office that she would not be deported before an attorney from Gisha (an Israeli NGO working to protect Palestinians’ freedom of movement) had the opportunity to petition the Israeli court for her return to classes in Bethlehem.

When they’d crossed the border the world’s most moral army dumped Berlanty in the darkness late at night and told her: “You are in Gaza.”

“Since 2005, I refrained from visiting my family in Gaza for fear that I would not be permitted to return to my studies in the West Bank,” Berlanty told Gisha on her mobile phone before the soldiers confiscated it. “Now, just two months before graduation, I was arrested and taken to Gaza in the middle of the night, with no way to finish my degree.”

Bethlehem University wants to mobilize people from around the world to protest. Who better to contact, I thought, than the Palestinian ambassador in London, Professor Manuel Hassassian, who happens to be a former vice-president of that excellent seat of learning? “Have you contacted the Israeli ambassador for an explanation to this outrage?” I emailed him.

Next day, having heard nothing, I emailed again: “Update… She has been removed to Gaza blindfolded and handcuffed! What is the Embassy doing about this please?” Another 24 hours have gone by and the silence is deafening. Still, it’s not unusual for the Palestinian embassy to be fast asleep, out to lunch or off on holiday and no-one covering.

I had of course simultaneously emailed the Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor asking him, please, to make enquiries. “On the face of it, this seems a senseless outrage. The student concerned has, I believe, just started her final year. I wonder what Mr Prosor or Mr Netanyahu would say if the education of their sons and daughters or grandchildren was disrupted in this manner.” And next day, having heard nothing, I sent the same update about Berlanty being blindfolded and handcuffed. Another 24 hours have passed… silence here too; not even the courtesy of an acknowledgement from Israel’s press office, which usually responds like lightning to anything with news value.

If this had been a Jewish girl deprived of her university degree and life chances Israeli embassies around the world would be instantly on the warpath hurling accusations of religious hatred and anti-semitism. But it’s the Jewish state screwing up the young life of a Christian, so that’s alright then.

It should come as no surprise then, that the secret state and the capitalist grifters whom they serve, have zeroed-in on the explosive growth of these technologies. One can be certain however, securocrats aren’t tweeting their restaurant preferences or finalizing plans for after work drinks.

No, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic are busy as proverbial bees building a “total information” surveillance system, one that will, so they hope, provide police and security agencies with what they euphemistically call “actionable intelligence.”

Build the Perfect Panopticon, Win Fabulous Prizes!

In this context, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a remarkable document October 4 by the INDECT Consortium, the Intelligence Information System Supporting Observation, Searching and Detection for Security of Citizens in Urban Environment.

Hardly a catchy acronym, but simply put INDECT is working to put a human face on the billions of emails, text messages, tweets and blog posts that transit cyberspace every day; perhaps your face.

According to Wikileaks, INDECT’s “Work package 4″ is designed “to comb web blogs, chat sites, news reports, and social-networking sites in order to build up automatic dossiers on individuals, organizations and their relationships.” Ponder that phrase again: “automatic dossiers.”

This isn’t the first time that European academics have applied their “knowledge skill sets” to keep the public “safe”–from a meaningful exercise of free speech and the right to assemble, that is.

Last year The Guardian reported that Bath University researchers’ Cityware project covertly tracked “tens of thousands of Britons” through the installation of Bluetooth scanners that capture “radio signals transmitted from devices such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras, and using the data to follow unwitting targets without their permission.”

One privacy advocate, Simon Davies, the director of Privacy International, told The Guardian: “This technology could well become the CCTV of the mobile industry. It would not take much adjustment to make this system a ubiquitous surveillance infrastructure over which we have no control.”

Which of course, is precisely the point.

As researchers scramble for a windfall of cash from governments eager to fund these dubious projects, European police and security agencies aren’t far behind their FBI and NSA colleagues in the spy game.

The online privacy advocates, Quintessenz, published a series of leaked documents in 2008 that described the network monitoring and data mining suites designed by Nokia Siemens, Ericsson and Verint.

The Nokia Siemens Intelligence Platform dubbed “intelligence in a box,” integrate tasks generally done by separate security teams and pools the data from sources such as telephone or mobile calls, email and internet activity, bank transactions, insurance records and the like. Call it data mining on steroids.

Ironically enough however, Siemens, the giant German electronics firm was caught up in a global bribery scandal that cost the company some $1.6 billion in fines. Last year, The New York Times described “a web of secret bank accounts and shadowy consultants,” and a culture of “entrenched corruption … at a sprawling, sophisticated corporation that externally embraced the nostrums of a transparent global marketplace built on legitimate transactions.”

According to the Times, “at Siemens, bribery was just a line item.” Which just goes to show, powering the secret state means never having to say you’re sorry!

Social Network Spying, a Growth Industry Fueled by Capitalist Grifters

The trend by security agencies and their corporate partners to spy on their citizens has accelerated greatly in the West since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

This multi-billion industry in general, has been a boon for the largest American and European defense corporations. Among the top ten companies listed by Washington Technology in their annual ranking of the “Top 100″ prime government contractors, all ten–from Lockheed Martin to Booz Allen Hamilton–earned a combined total of $68 billion in 2008 from defense and related homeland security work for the secret state.

And like Siemens, all ten corporations figure prominently on the Project on Government Oversight’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD), which tracks “contract fraud, environmental, ethics, and labor violations.” Talk about a rigged game!

Designing everything from nuclear missile components to eavesdropping equipment for various government agencies in the United States and abroad, including some of the most repressive regimes on the planet, these firms have moved into manufacturing the hardware and related computer software for social networking surveillance in a big way.

Wired revealed in April that the FBI is routinely monitoring cell phone calls and internet activity during criminal and counterterrorism investigations. The publication posted a series of internal documents that described the Wi-Fi and computer hacking capabilities of the Bureau’s Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit (CEAU).

New Scientist reported back in 2006 that the National Security Agency “is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.”

And just this week in an exclusive report published by the British high-tech publication, The Register, it was revealed that “the government has outsourced parts of its biggest ever mass surveillance project to the disaster-prone IT services giant formerly known as EDS.”

That work is being conducted under the auspices of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British state’s equivalent of America’s National Security Agency.

Investigative journalist Chris Williams disclosed that the American computer giant HP, which purchased EDS for some $13.9 billion last year, is “designing and installing the massive computing resources that will be needed to analyse details of who contacts whom, when where and how.”

Work at GCHQ in Cheltenham is being carried out under “a secret project called Mastering the Internet.” In May, a Home Office document surfaced that “ostensibly sought views on whether ISPs should be forced to gather terabytes of data from their networks on the government’s behalf.”

The Register reported earlier this year that telecommunications behemoth Detica and U.S. defense giant Lockheed Martin were providing GCHQ with data mining software “which searches bulk data, such as communications records, for patterns … to identify suspects.” (For further details see: Antifascist Calling, “Spying in the UK: GCHQ Awards Lockheed Martin £200m Contract, Promises to ‘Master the Internet’,” May 7, 2009)

It seems however, that INDECT researchers like their GCHQ/NSA kissin’ cousins in Britain and the United States, are burrowing ever-deeper into the nuts-and-bolts of electronic social networking and may be on the verge of an Orwellian surveillance “breakthrough.”

As New Scientist sagely predicted, the secret state most certainly plans to “harness advances in internet technology–specifically the forthcoming ’semantic web’ championed by the web standards organisation W3C–to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.”

Profiling Internet Dissent

Pretty alarming, but the devil as they say is in the details and INDECT’s release of their “Work package 4″ file makes for a very interesting read. And with a title, “XML Data Corpus: Report on methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat,” rest assured one must plow through much in the way of geeky gibberish and tech-speak to get to the heartless heart of the matter.

INDECT itself is a rather interesting amalgamation of spooks, cops and academics.

According to their web site, INDECT partners include: the University of Science and Technology, AGH, Poland; Gdansk University of Technology; InnoTech DATA GmbH & Co., Germany; IP Grenoble (Ensimag), France; MSWiA, the General Headquarters of Police, attached to the Ministry of the Interior, Poland; Moviquity, Spain; Products and Systems of Information Technology, PSI, Germany; the Police Service of Northern Ireland, PSNI, United Kingdom (hardly slouches when it comes to stitching-up Republicans and other leftist agitators!); Poznan University of Technology; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria; University of Wuppertal, Germany; University of York, Great Britain; Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia; X-Art Pro Division G.m.b.H, Austria; and finally, the Fachhochschule Technikum, also in Austria.

I don’t know about you, but I find it rather ironic that the European Union, ostensible guardians of democracy and human rights, have turned for assistance in their surveillance projects to police and spy outfits from the former Soviet bloc, who after all know a thing or two when it comes to monitoring their citizens.

Right up front, York University’s Suresh Manadhar, Ionnis Klapaftis and Shailesh Pandey, the principle authors of the INDECT report, make their intentions clear.

Since “security” as the authors argue, “is becoming a weak point of energy and communications infrastructures, commercial stores, conference centers, airports and sites with high person traffic in general,” they aver that “access control and rapid response to potential dangers are properties that every security system for such environments should have.”

Does INDECT propose building a just and prosperous global society, thus lessening the potential that terrorist killers or other miscreants will exploit a “target rich environment” that may prove deadly for innocent workers who, after all, were the principle victims of the 2004 and 2007 terrorist outrages in Madrid and London? Hardly.

As with their colleagues across the pond, INDECT is hunting for the ever-elusive technological quick-fix, a high-tech magic bullet. One, I might add, that will deliver neither safety nor security but rather, will constrict the democratic space where social justice movements flourish while furthering the reach of unaccountable security agencies.

The document “describes the first deliverable of the work package which gives an overview about the main methodology and description of the XML data corpus schema and describes the methodology for collection, cleaning and unified representation of large textual data from various sources: news reports, weblogs, chat, etc.”

The first order of business “is the study and critical review of the annotation schemes employed so far for the development and evaluation of methods for entity resolution, co-reference resolution and entity attributes identification.”

In other words, how do present technologic capabilities provide police, security agencies and capitalist grifters with the ability to identify who might be speaking to whom and for what purpose. INDECT proposes to introduce “a new annotation scheme that builds upon the strengths of the current-state-of-the-art,” one that “should be extensible and modifiable to the requirements of the project.”

Asserting that “an XML data corpus [can be] extracted from forums and social networks related to specific threats (e.g. hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.),” the authors claim they will provide “different entity types according to the requirements of the project. The grouping of all references to an entity together. The relationships between different entities” and finally, “the events in which entities participate.”

Why stop there? Why not list the ubiquitous “other” areas of concern to INDECT’s secret state partners? While “hooliganism, terrorism, vandalism, etc.,” may be the ostensible purpose of their “entity attributes identification” project, surely INDECT is well aware that such schemes are just as easily applicable to local citizen groups, socialist and anarchist organizations, or to the innumerable environmental, human rights or consumer campaigners who challenge the dominant free market paradigm of their corporate sponsors.

The authors however, couldn’t be bothered by the sinister applications that may be spawned by their research; indeed, they seem quite proud of it.

“The main achievements of this work” they aver, “allows the identification of several types of entities, groups the same references into one class, while at the same time allows the identification of relationships and events.”

Indeed, the “inclusion of a multi-layered ontology ensures the consistency of the annotation” and will facilitate in the (near) future, “the use of inference mechanisms such as transitivity to allow the development of search engines that go beyond simple keyword search.”

Quite an accomplishment! An enterprising security service or capitalist marketing specialist need only sift through veritable mountains of data available from commercial databases, or mobile calls, tweets, blog posts and internet searches to instantaneously identity “key agitators,” to borrow the FBI’s very 20th century description of political dissidents; individuals who could be detained or “neutralized” should sterner methods be required.

Indeed, a surveillance scheme such as the one INDECT is building could greatly facilitate–and simplify–the already formidable U.S. “Main Core” database that “reportedly collects and stores–without warrants or court orders–the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security,” as investigative journalists Tim Shorrock and Christopher Ketchum revealed in two disturbing reports last year.

The scale of “datasets/annotation schemes” exploited by INDECT is truly breathtaking and include: “Automatic Content Extraction” gleaned from “a variety of sources, such as news, broadcast conversations” that identify “relations between entities, and the events in which these participate.”

We next discover what is euphemistically called the “Knowledge Base Population (KBP),” an annotation scheme that “focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE), Location (LOC), Facility (FAC), Geographical/Social/Political (GPE), Vehicle (VEH) and Weapon (WEA).”

How is this accomplished? Why through an exploitation of open source materials of course!

INDECT researchers readily aver that “a snapshot of Wikipedia infoboxes is used as the original knowledge source. The document collection consists of newswire articles on the order of 1 million. The reference knowledge base includes hundreds of thousands of entities based on articles from an October 2008 dump of English Wikipedia. The annotation scheme in KBP focuses on the identification of entity types of Person (PER), Organization (ORG), and Geo-Political Entity (GPE).”

For what purpose? Mum’s the word as far as INDECT is concerned.

Nothing escapes this panoptic eye. Even popular culture and leisure activities fall under the glare of security agencies and their academic partners in the latest iteration of this truly monstrous privacy-killing scheme. Using the movie rental firm Netflix as a model, INDECT cites the firm’s “100 million ratings from 480 thousand randomly-chosen, anonymous Netflix customers” as “well-suited” to the INDECT surveillance model.

In conclusion, EU surveillance architects propose a “new annotation & knowledge representation scheme” that “is extensible,” one that “allows the addition of new entities, relations, and events, while at the same time avoids duplication and ensures integrity.”

Deploying an ontological methodology that exploits currently available data from open source, driftnet surveillance of news, broadcasts, blog entries and search results, and linkages obtained through a perusal of mobile phone records, credit card purchases, medical records, travel itineraries, etc., INDECT claims that in the near future their research will allow “a search engine to go beyond simple keyword queries by exploiting the semantic information and relations within the ontology.”

And once the scheme is perfected, “the use of expressive logics … becomes an enabler for detecting entity relations on the web.” Or transform it into an “always-on” spy you carry in your pocket or whenever you switch on your computer.

This is how our minders propose to keep us “safe.”

CIA Gets In on the Fun

Not to be outdone, the CIA has entered the lucrative market of social networking surveillance in a big way.

In an exclusive published by Wired, we learn that the CIA’s investment arm, In-Q-Tel, “want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates–even check out your book reviews on Amazon.”

Investigative journalist Noah Shachtman reveals that In-Q-Tel “is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using “open source intelligence”–information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.” Wired reported:

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. (Noah Shachtman, Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm that Monitors Blogs, Tweets,” Wired, October 19, 2009)

Although In-Q-Tel spokesperson Donald Tighe told Wired that it wants Visible to monitor foreign social media and give American spooks an “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” Shachtman points out that “such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters.”

According to Wired, the firm already keeps tabs on 2.0 web sites “for Dell, AT&T and Verizon.” And as an added attraction, “Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns” against meat processing giant Hormel.

Shachtman reports that “Visible has been trying for nearly a year to break into the government field.” And why wouldn’t they, considering that the heimat security and even spookier black world of the U.S. “intelligence community,” is a veritable cash-cow for enterprising corporations eager to do the state’s bidding.

In 2008 Wired reports, Visible “teamed-up” with the Washington, DC-based consulting firm “Concepts & Strategies, which has handled media monitoring and translation services for U.S. Strategic Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others.”

According to a blurb on the firm’s web site they are in hot-pursuit of “social media engagement specialists” with Defense Department experience and “a high proficiency in Arabic, Farsi, French, Urdu or Russian.” Wired reports that Concepts & Strategies “is also looking for an ‘information system security engineer’ who already has a ‘Top Secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmentalized Information] with NSA Full Scope Polygraph’ security clearance.”

In such an environment, nothing escapes the secret state’s lens. Shachtman reveals that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) “maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites.”

In 2007, the Center’s director, Doug Naquin, “told an audience of intelligence professionals” that “‘we’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence…. We have groups looking at what they call ‘citizens media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there’s social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs’.”

But as Steven Aftergood, who maintains the Secrecy News web site for the Federation of American Scientists told Wired, “even if information is openly gathered by intelligence agencies it would still be problematic if it were used for unauthorized domestic investigations or operations. Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage. That is not permissible even if all of the information in question is technically ‘open source’.”

But as we have seen across the decades, from COINTELPRO to Operation CHAOS, and from Pentagon media manipulation during the run-up to the Iraq war through driftnet warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ electronic communications, the secret state is a law unto itself, a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that thrives on duplicity, fear and cold, hard cash.

Halloween is my favorite holiday. My kids and I get to pretend that we are somebody else, wear a crazy costume, shock and surprise people for one day and then safely return to the comfort of our homes, our lives and our personal identities.

What I will tell my children that we don’t get to do is mock the experiences of millions of members of our communities by perpetuating the lies and stereotypes as reflected in the illegal alien costume. While some have observed that the extraterrestrial mask dehumanizes undocumented immigrants, perhaps even more dehumanizing is the creation of a generic costume that suggests that all undocumented immigrants are not only criminals but that they are all the same, indistinguishable. The “funny” part is the combination of an obviously fake green card that cannot disguise the alien status, which is evident in the mask, get it? The “alien” is simultaneously trying to slip one by but not smart enough to outwit the state, and is therefore imprisoned. End of story.

Absent from this generic orange pantsuit story are the complicated personal, social and political experiences of real human beings facing difficult circumstances with extraordinary courage. Absent are the specific experiences of the Guatemalan workers of a kosher meat plant who were arrested in a raid in Postville, Iowa in 2007 and unjustly charged with identity theft, despite the fact that most did not even know what a social security card was. Absent is the story of Flor Crisóstomo, a factory worker turned activist who was arrested in a raid in Chicago in 2006 and sought sanctuary in a Methodist church in 2008, which she just left his week — at risk of deportation — to continue a new phase in the struggle for the rights of all undocumented immigrants. Absent is Rigo Padilla, a model student and community member who came to the U.S. as a young boy, committed the youthful indiscretion of drinking a few beers at a party and then upon driving a few blocks back to his house, was stopped by police, and is now facing deportation to a country that he barely remembers.

Also absent from this story is a state that has been far from benevolent or neutral, importing labor from south of the border while failing to find a just way in which to regularize and legalize this flow; attempting to criminalize undocumented immigrants when they have only committed a civil violation; empowering local police to act as immigration officers, leading to the deportation of thousands of people who are racially profiled, stopped for minor infractions and then deported; and placing detained immigrants with common criminals in privatized prisons, where they often face harsh conditions and egregious human rights violations.

The truth is that I know too many faces, too many names, too many stories of detention, deportation, family separation and pain to “get” the generic illegal alien joke. Perhaps you know some too. It is time to teach our children that there is nothing laughable about the uncertain fate of 12 million people and their families in a context of increasingly restrictive immigration policy, egregious human rights violations, massive fear, annual family separation and financial devastation of hundreds of thousands who are not wearing a mask, but are in fact exposed and vulnerable every day of their lives, cannot escape their circumstances, and cannot rely on the comfort provided by slipping out of a costume.

This year just before Halloween, I will do something different. I will take my boys to the national Mexican Museum here in Chicago to visit the altars created to commemorate the Day of the Dead, a Mexican tradition designed to remember a person who is no longer with us, allowing us to reflect on the inevitability of death while contemplating the precious value of life. There, we will remember not only the dead in our families, but the 104 immigrants who have died in detention, the thousands of people who have died trying to cross the border, and the two young immigrant men who were beaten to death for being immigrants, Luis Ramirez of Pennsylvania, and Marcelo Lucero of New Jersey.

I will tell my sons that these people were human, not alien, that their lives were as valuable as any others and that their tragic deaths should never be forgotten, not even on trick-or –treat day. I want them to learn that there are some things that we just don’t laugh about.

On January 16, 2007, 10 year old Abir Aramin was walking home from school with her sister and two friends, but instead of having milk and cookies that afternoon; she was shot in the head with a rubber bullet by the Israeli Border Police and after three days on life support Abir’s struggle ended but not the struggle for justice her parents have been seeking ever since.

In 2007, I reported that Avichay Sharon, of Combatants for Peace stated, “Over the past 2 years, the Israeli Border Police and IDF forces have been creating provocations near the school district of Anata [which] has become a part of the daily routine for the children. Ever since construction started on the separation barrier surrounding Anata, the jeeps have been roaming the streets especially near the schools and shooting grenades and tear gas along with rubber bullets.

“Many children have been injured in the past by these brutal actions of the soldiers and on January 16th it became deadly. As in many other cases the police replied that the soldiers were shooting in response to stones thrown at them by children. Even though all the evidence and witnesses stated that no stones were thrown that day” the prosecution dismissed the Aramin family’s case, claiming lack of evidence.

Bassam Aramin, Abir’s father and co-founder of Combatants for Peace said, “I’m not going to lose my common sense, my direction, only because I’ve lost my heart, my child. I will do all I can to protect her friends, both Palestinian and Israeli. They are all our children.”

When Bassam Aramin was 17 he was sentenced to 7 years in an Israeli prison for belonging to the then-outlawed Fatah movement. Although he had been beaten by soldiers in prison, he decided that he would not become a prisoner of hatred.

The “Combatants for Peace” are Palestinians and Israelis, who had all been involved in perpetuating the cycle of violence; Israelis as soldiers in the Israeli army (IDF) and Palestinians as part of the violent struggle for Palestinian freedom. All decided to put down their guns and work together in the good fight for peace through nonviolent actions and by raising voices of conscience as they seek to create political pressure on both Governments to end the violence and end the military occupation of Palestine.

Elhanan wryly reported that Abir’s parents “live under a cruel occupation and they have experienced all it has to offer: exile, imprisonment and the killing of their small daughter Abir by a rubber bullet that was allegedly fired from the rifle of a Border Guard soldier who was sitting in an armoured jeep and thrust the barrel of his rifle through the opening that was allegedly designed for that purpose and allegedly aimed and fired at the head of the girl who was standing beside her sister at a kiosk, allegedly buying candy during the break between the first class and the second.

The projectile was removed from under the girl’s body and transferred to the authorities. The eyewitnesses, as well as the Border Guard soldiers, testified that there was no alleged danger to their lives and that the shooting was done – if it was done – in contravention of instructions. Two pathologists testified that it was probable that the fracture in Abir’s little skull could allegedly have been caused by a rubber bullet. The attending physician at the Hadassah hospital said that it was not a live bullet. The video of the reconstruction of the incident was not given to the defence counsel or to the court, because the soldiers who allegedly carried out the shooting, that is, who thrust the barrel of the rifle through the opening that had been made especially for that purpose, aimed and fired at the head of the girl Abir, were featured in the recording.

Counsel for the State, stammering, unprepared and unkempt, stood like a platoon commander in charge of new recruits with her back to the public and refuted the allegations: So they found a projectile. So what? Who knows how long it had been lying there? So people gave testimony, so what? They (those Arabs) can say anything, does that make it testimony? So nobody was throwing stones at that spot, so what? On a nearby street stones were thrown. If you were in my place, she laughingly says to Michael Sfard, Aramin’s attorney you would have made morsels of them by now.

Judge Beinish reminds Sfard – twice – that there have been such incidents in the past and that soldiers have rarely been put on trial or even indicted, so it would be best to just forget it… But Salwa and Bassam Aramin have no choice but to seek justice in an Israeli court. They demand that the truth come to light in a court of the occupiers – of the killers.

I nearly shouted for the drowsy judges – Beinish, Arbel, Frocaccia – to find a spark of humanity, of motherly feelings, within themselves and to look into the eyes of Salwa, who never stopped crying, and at Bassam’s ashen face, and to say: the High Court of Justice sympathizes with you over the death of little Abir. They didn’t.

Elhanan also noted that Jean-François Lyotard wrote that the perfect crime is not only the killing but also the suppression of the testimony and the silencing of the voices of the victims. And the greatest injustice is to compel the victims to seek justice in the court of their tormentors.

In March of 2006, I visited Anata refugee camp and have been tormented by my memories ever since.

Israel erected their thirty foot high concrete apartheid Wall at the boys high school where 780 Palestinian adolescents, share a slab of cement about the square footage of a basket ball court; their only ‘playground’.

A resident refugee informed me that on a daily basis, “The Israeli Occupation Forces show up when the children gather in the morning or after classes. They throw percussion bombs or gas bombs into the school nearly every day! The world is sleeping; the world is hibernating and is allowing this misery to continue.”

A moment later, a teenage boy approached me as I was taking photos and asked me my name and where I was from. I cringed admitting I was American, for “financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile, the Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families’ sole livelihood for generations.”¹

On July 9, 2004, the International Court of Justice/ICJ, ruled 14-1 that The Wall was illegal and it must come down and also that compensation should be paid to all who had been affected.

The ICJ Judges also decided 13-2 that signatories to the Geneva Convention were obliged to enforce “compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law” and the U.N. General Assembly also passed a resolution 150-6 supporting the ICJ’s call to dismantle the wall.”²

Less than five minutes by car from Anata, one can enter into the Orwellian Disney Land of lush green grounds called the Pizgat Ze’ev settlement.

All the settlements/colonies in the West Bank are illegal under international law.

I was sick at heart as I traveled through the colony and counted three playgrounds and a swimming pool.

I wondered how many USA tax dollars helped to build them, and outraged over the injustices of Walls and military occupation that American money provides against the indigenous people of that land.

Within fifteen minutes after leaving Anata, as I stood next to a playground in Pizgat Ze’ev, a barrage of gunshots issued from the refugee camp and my guide informed me that the Israeli soldiers were showering the refugees with gun fire and terror- another normal daily occurrence for them.

I lost it and sobbed uncontrollably, and imagined the Magdalena when she could not find her Lord.

And then I thought how Jesus cried buckets of tears over Jerusalem when he “saw the city, he wept over it and said, ‘If you had only known what would bring you peace but it is hidden from your eyes.’” — Luke 19:42

Lady Justice, the Roman Goddess of Justice, an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems, is depicted wearing a blindfold to indicate that justice should be meted out objectively, not based in favor of- or against- ethnicity, power, or weakness, but on blind impartiality.

Perhaps it is a case of cold hearts in 21st century Jerusalem that has rendered the Justices of the Israeli High Court with eyes blind to their injustices.

1. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Jan/Feb. 2007.
2. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2009.

I was advised before my journey that Shanghai is not exactly a ‘cultural shock’, quite the opposite; one seems to have met Shanghai in one’s urban fantasy a long time before landing there. Shanghai is in fact the incarnation of the Western urban dream: it is an astonishing materialisation of everything the Western metropolis is claiming to be. In parts it is the embodiment of the urban imagery; it is what New York was aiming at but somehow failed to reach. In other parts, it is the ultimate urban tranquillity of a Parisian tree-lined avenue with small bars and cosy cafés. It offers everything a big city can offer in terms of culture, entertainment, business and food yet it is totally sympathetic to its visitors and inhabitants.

I was teaching jazz in China this week and performed at the Shanghai Jazz Festival, Though I was pretty busy with my students, Jazz combos, concerts and other musical commitments, I tried to absorb as much as I could. I travelled around, tried to meet local people and to grasp this miracle. I, for instance, visited the Shanghai Music Fair, probably the biggest music fair in the world.

China is now the biggest producer of Western musical instruments. And guess what, they are making some unbelievably good saxophones out there. I have tried and reviewed Chinese saxophones in the past. For some reason I was always pretty convinced that the many Chinese brands were made by one or two manufacturers. Somehow, all contemporary Chinese saxophones and clarinets follow a very similar design and they are all equally good. In the music fair I realised that I was totally wrong. There are actually many small Saxophone manufacturers and they are all very good at it. The Chinese manufacturers whom I met were actually seeking criticism. In a very modest manner they would ask for your honest opinion of their different models. They just want to make it better. They want to improve.

China is a financial miracle. It is about to surpass Japan as the world’s second largest economy. It is expected to leave America behind within the next five years and to become the world’s largest economy. China is the largest producer of most industrial and agriculture products. In spite of the ongoing Western criticism of China’s political structure and its one party system, the success of China proves that its political system and economic model maybe far more efficient than anything Western democracies can offer. Unlike the crumbling English Speaking Empire and other Western service economies, China is a productive society and it is ruled by a single “People’s Party”. Rather than copying the Western economic model and value system, China adopted some Western advantages, modified them and integrated them into its own economic model and social system.

China and Israel

In my Shanghai visit I stayed in a rather fancy Western hotel. Already on my arrival just after checking in, while attending the tourist desk, a familiar golden Menora¹ shined at me from one of the tourist brochures. I picked it up, “The Jews in Shanghai”, it said: the story of 30.000 Jews who found shelter in Shanghai between 1933 and 1941. I guess that you can no longer imagine a metropolis on this planet unless it has some relevance to the Holocaust or the Jews. Visitors to Shanghai have a lot to choose from: temples, sight seeing, shopping, new developing markets, food, Chinese folklore and ofcourse even a bit of ‘Shoa business’. I honestly believe that no one, except a few Jews, is interested in the historical role of Shanghai in the Holocaust. And yet, the brochure was there for a reason. Many Israelis and Jews are visiting Shanghai in the last two decades, as China and Shanghai are the future and the Israelis know it very well.

In the breakfast at the hotel I could hear a lot of Hebrew. They were not Israeli tourists. They were actually ‘selling and buying’. They were meeting local businessmen already at 8.00 am. But it wasn’t just business. The Israeli infiltration is noticeable on every possible level.

In the bus that picked us up to go to the festival’s stage, we found an Israeli flag hanging under the driver’s front mirror. A quick inquiry with the assistance of our English speaking stage manager revealed that the band to play before us was an Israeli Dixieland band. I may as well mention that I myself have lived in Britain for 15 years, I travel around the world with musicians from many different parts of the world and I have never seen a single musician leaving nationalist souvenirs anywhere. For Israeli artists, so it seems, leaving their Star of David is apparently a common practice.

I soon realised that I knew those Israeli Dixieland musicians, they were actually my old friends from Israel. Some of them were my teachers and mentors others had been playing in my band. Two of them were very close friends of mine at the time. Needless to say that it was very exciting to meet them after so many years. In fact they were very good at what they were doing. They could play the music and they clearly mastered the Dixieland style. On stage I heard one of my old friends telling the Chinese audience, ‘here we are, 60 years for the People’s Republic of China, 61 years for the Jewish State and all we really want is peace.’ Such a simple message, we the Jews and you the Chinese all share one simple belief.

The Israeli horn player may not have realised that a few hours earlier the People’s Republic of China voted in favor of adopting the Goldstone report at the Human Rights Council. As far as China is concerned, Israeli war crimes should be further investigated.

However, it is common knowledge that most if not all Israeli art exports are sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Israeli artists are operating as messengers of the Zionist propaganda and Hasbara lies. It is a pretty simple concept: as the IDF drops White Phosphorous on Palestinians or starves others, Israeli artists travel the world spreading a 1960’s message of ‘Sex, Love and Peace’. Needless to say, the people around me didn’t really buy it.

Zionism, as we learn from Herzl and his too many followers, is all about tracing the bond between the Jewish national interests and world dominating powers. China is no doubt the rising power; it is in fact a rising sensation. In just one week in China I saw for myself the intensity of the Israeli activity on the ground.

As we all know, some naive peace activists around put all their cards on a possible growing rift between Israel and the USA. They forget that Israel can easily change its leagues as they did rather often in the past. Israel is always building relationships with rising powers. The Israelis have already invested some enormous energy on India and China.

A lot of China’s success story is because it is run by a very unique People’s party political system. It is a miracle because it somehow manages to restrain hard capitalism with a unique socially orientated system. It is a big question whether there is room in this system to accommodate Israel, a bourgeoisie nationalist philosophy based on racial supremacy and choseness in general.

1. Menora: a seven-branched candelabrum that is one of the oldest symbols of the Jewish people.

The Obama Administration objected to the move by Israel that discriminates against American citizens of Palestinian origin. However, there has been no protest from Ottawa even though Time magazine and the Israeli daily Haaretz ran lengthy articles focusing on a Palestinian Canadian businessmen harmed by this new policy. A few weeks ago the Globe and Mail reported that “Although some of the most high-profile cases of individuals being turned away involve Canadian citizens, the Harper government has, so far, made no protest.”

This silence bolsters claims by some commentators that under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, Canada has become (at least diplomatically) the most pro-Israel country in the world. Israeli officials concur. After meeting Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, four other Conservative ministers and Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in July 2009, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has openly called for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel, commented:

“It’s hard to find a country friendlier to Israel than Canada these days. Members both of the coalition and the opposition are loyal friends to us, both with regard to their worldview and their estimation of the situation in everything related to the Middle East, North Korea, Iran, Sudan and Somalia. No other country in the world has demonstrated such full understanding of us.”

Two days after Harper won a minority government in January 2006, Hamas won Canadian-monitored and facilitated legislative elections. Quickly after assuming power Harper made Canada the first country (after Israel) to cut its assistance to the Palestinian Authority. The aid cutoff, which was designed to sow division within Palestinian society, had devastating social effects.

Ostensibly, the aid cutoff was due to Hamas’s refusal to recognize Israel. Yet, Canada has not severed relations with Likud-led Israeli governments, which do not recognize the Palestinians’ right to a state. Harper explained, “Future assistance to any new Palestinian government will be reviewed against that government’s commitment to the principles of nonviolence, recognition of Israel and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations.” But support for Israel was never made contingent on “nonviolence” or an end to settlement construction.

In March 2007, Palestinian political factions representing more than 90 percent of the Palestinian Legislative Council established a unity government. Still, the Conservatives shunned the new government all the while claiming to speak regularly (like the Israelis) with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. When the unity government’s Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti traveled to Ottawa on a global peace tour, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay refused to meet him. Barghouti, who represents a secular party, explained at the time, “I think the Canadian government is the only government that is taking such a position, except for Israel.” Barghouti had already met the foreign ministers of Sweden and Norway, the Secretary-general of the United Nations and then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

However, once Hamas officials were ousted from the Palestinian Authority (PA), Ottawa restarted diplomatic relations and financial support. “The Government of Canada welcomes the leadership of President Abbas and Prime Minister [Salam] Fayyad in establishing a government that Canada and the rest of the international community can work with,” explained MacKay after the unity government’s collapse in mid-2007 and the appointment of a new government in Ramallah. “In light of the new Palestinian government’s commitment to nonviolence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, and in recognition of the opportunity for a renewal of peace efforts, Canada will provide assistance to the new Palestinian government.”

With Palestinian society divided and a more compliant authority in control of the West Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency contributed $8 million “in direct support to the new government.” Part of this aid was directed towards creating a Palestinian police force “to ensure that the PA maintains control of the West Bank against Hamas,” as Canadian ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was quoted by the Canadian Jewish News. US Lt. General Keith Dayton, in charge of organizing the Palestinian force, never admitted that he was strengthening Fatah against Hamas but to justify his program Dayton argued that Iran and Syria funded and armed Hamas. Bolstering Fatah to counteract the growing strength of Hamas was the impetus for Dayton’s mission. However, the broader aim is to build a force to patrol Israel’s occupation, a fact Dayton does little to dispel.

In January 2007, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay offered an immediate $1.2 million for Dayton’s mission. A fifth of Dayton’s initial staff was comprised of Canadians, and during a press conference with MacKay in Jerusalem Condoleezza Rice said Dayton “has a Canadian counterpart with whom he works very closely.” Two years later, Dayton’s military training force in the West Bank reportedly included nine Canadians, 16 Americans, three Brits and one Turk.

In June 2008, a Harper government press release announced, “Canada is a strong supporter of Palestinian security system reform, particularly through our contribution to the mission of Lt. General Keith Dayton, the US security coordinator, and to the European Union Police Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support.”

Canada’s contribution to the Dayton mission was part of a $300 million “aid” package that began in December 2007. According to the government agency Public Safety Canada, “a significant component [of the $300 million will be] devoted to security, including policing and public order capacity-building. This five year commitment will go towards the creation of a democratic, accountable, and viable Palestinian state that lives in peace and security alongside Israel.”

But does anything close to a “viable Palestinian state” exist? Is Israel allowing it to be created? Growing Jewish-only settlements, Israeli bypass roads and the apartheid barrier all make a Palestinian state far from realistic in the short to medium term. Yet Canadian officials act as if Israel is working toward a Palestinian state.

In Gaza, Israel’s occupation has turned into a blockade. For 27 months, Israel has reduced food and medicine from entering the tiny coastal territory to a fraction of what is needed by the besieged population. Yet, the Harper government has refused any criticism of the siege. Canada was the only country at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to vote against a January 2008 resolution that called for “urgent international action to put an immediate end to Israel’s siege of Gaza.” It was adopted by 30 votes with 15 abstentions.

Instead, the Conservative government has been quick to congratulate Israel for any small pause in its blockade. In January 2009 International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda proclaimed that “We commend Israel’s decision to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance [to Gaza] through a temporary ceasefire.” A day after Oda’s announcement, Israeli forces fired on a UN convoy during a ceasefire, killing a Palestinian aid worker. There was no follow-up statement from Oda condemning Israel’s actions.

Compared to Ottawa’s cheerleading, most of the world was hostile to Israel’s attacks on Gaza last winter. In solidarity with Gaza, Venezuela expelled Israel’s ambassador at the start of the bombardment and then broke off all diplomatic relations two weeks later. Israel didn’t need to worry since Ottawa was prepared to help out. “Israel’s interests in Caracas will now be represented by the Canadian Embassy,” explained the Jerusalem Post (Ottawa had been “doing this for Israel in Cuba” since 1973). In August 2009, the Canadian embassy in Caracas also began providing visas to Venezuelans traveling to Israel.

For defining Canadian policy as “we support Israel no matter what it does,” B’Nai Brith International bestowed Harper with its Presidential Gold Medallion for Humanitarianism. The first ever Canadian to receive the award, Harper joined former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, and US Presidents John F. Kennedy and Harry S. Truman. For its part, the Canadian Jewish Congress gave Harper its “prestigious Saul Hayes Human Rights award, named for a former CJC executive director, the first time it’s been given to a sitting PM.”

Despite the government’s strident support for Israel, grassroots opposition to that country’s policy has never been greater. Recent protests against the Toronto International Film Festival’s spotlight on Tel Aviv were a major setback to Israeli public relations efforts. The festival embarrassment followed massive demonstrations against Israel’s assault on Gaza, when many cities across the country witnessed their largest ever Palestinian solidarity demonstrations.

Alongside displays of opposition to specific Israeli policy, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign is growing. Many social groups such as Independent Jewish Voices and Quebec’s most active student Federation, ASSE, have joined the BDS movement, as have a number of unions, including the Canadian Union of Public Employees (Ontario), the Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the teachers Federation in Quebec. Social movements in Canada have never been more critical of Israel.

The socio-economic structure of the Jewish people differs radically from that of other nations. Ours is an anomalous, abnormal structure.

– Ber Borochov, The Economic Development of the Jewish People, 1917

You [Jews] lack the right notion of honour, feeling for duty, morality, patriotism, idealism…

– Max Nordau, Address at the 1st Zionist Congress, 1897

But labour is the only force which binds man to the soil… it is the basic energy for the creation of national culture. This is what we do not have, but we are not aware of missing it. We are a people without a country, without a national living language, without a national culture. We seem to think that if we have no labour it does not matter — let Ivan, John or Mustafa do the work…

– A.D. Gordon, “Our Tasks Ahead,” 1920

Early Zionism was indeed a cheerful dream, it was all about the transformation of the ‘Jew’ into a ‘civilised, respectful and authentic human being’. The founders of Zionism were inspired by the notions of ‘people like any other people’ and ‘nation amongst nations’. Reading early Zionists such as Nordau, Borochov and Gordon provides us with some very contemptuous references to Jewish character and identity that would make Nazi ideology look mildly liberal.

However, one is advised to take a short break for a second and to contemplate critically over the above Zionist dream. One may wonder what kind of people dream of ‘becoming human beings’. Can anyone imagine a French, English or Chinese man or woman who dreams of becoming an ordinary ‘human’? We can easily think of oppressed human beings who demand to be treated as humans (Palestinians, Civil Rights movements, anti Apartheid and so on). Yet, the Zionist dream is rather different. It is not just about the desire for recognition or equality, it is not just about being treated appropriately, it is also a dream of ‘self-transformation’. In fact, it is all about a miraculous metamorphosis from a morbid ‘abnormal’ state of being into an acceptable decent human form.

Within the context of a fictional fable we can easily imagine a cow that fantasises to become a dairy farmer, a pig who ‘dies to’ become a Kosher schnitzel, a snake who aspires to take over the Labour party and then to launch a new Zionist illegal war. And yet, it is pretty unusual to think of people who have managed to develop an aspiration to become ‘ordinary humans’.

An intelligible way to explain or interpret that very unusual dream is probably to assume that those who succumb to the Zionist dream are those who happen to believe that, as far as their natural state of being is concerned, they are indeed remotely human. One would rightly assume that those who dream to become humans must be convinced that humanity is somehow not exactly a characteristic that they happen to possess.

Yesterday during a talk at Librairie Résistances, Paris (a fund raising event for Gaza) I was asked for my interpretation of Israeli ‘evolving barbarism’, how is it possible that 94% of the Israelis supported the IDF genocidal crime in Gaza last December. “In order to understand how these Israeli murderous practices emerged” I said, “all we have to do is to trace back and reread the early Zionist ideologists.” We can easily learn from Zionist thinkers about their ‘dream’ and their vision of their fellow brothers. They, the founders of modern Jewish nationalism happened to admit somehow that something was totally corrupted within the Jewish identity, culture and character. However, they genuinely believed that it was amendable.

Zionism was there to bring about a new Jew, a civilised productive human being. It was indeed a very wet and epic dream. As an Israeli youngster I myself succumbed to this dream. I tended to believe that Israel was ‘my’ historic land, I regarded the Biblical protagonists as my direct ancestors. I was sure that, at least in the case of the so called ‘first Israelis’, the ideological transplant operation was a great success. We, the young Israeli natives tended to believe that we were all nothing less than a success story of ‘modified-civilised-humanist-secular-beings’.

Needless to say that the history of Palestine, the Palestinians and the Nakba was totally hidden from us. We didn’t see the Palestinians around us either, we were hardly aware of their suffering not to say their cause. We were in fact totally blind. We tended also to believe that our army was the ‘most humanist army around’. We grew up with the ‘1967 Victorious Diary’, a legendary chunky photo album every Israeli held in a prominent location on his book shelve. There in that glossy propaganda book an Israeli soldier was giving his water to an Egyptian prisoner. We regarded him as a symbol of our people’s endorsement of universal humanism. We were obviously not aware of the horrendous fact that the Sinai Desert was actually a slaughter field for hundreds of Egyptian POWs. Why didn’t we know? This in itself is a very good question. Our fathers who fought in this war must have known something but they kept quiet. Our parents who witnessed the 1948 convoys of Palestinians refugees should have known something about the Nakba but they somehow kept quiet. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t just our parents, we followed the exact same pattern. Once we ourselves matured into IDF soldiers, we did exactly the same, we turned a blind eye (1982 in Lebanon). And this has never changed. The Israeli moral awakening has never happened. By now I allow myself to argue that it won’t happen. The Zionist dream is just too comfortable. After more than one hundred years of moral phantasmic delusion the Israelis are deeply stuck in an ethical coma.

The Zionist dream of a ‘humanist metamorphosis’ has never matured into reality or practice. Quite the opposite, Israelis and Zionists have learned to see themselves through a phantasmic illusionary prism. Rather than being transformed into humanists for real, they have become ‘leading humanists’ in their own extreme judeo-centric dream.

Freud taught us that the dream is there to prolong the sleep: a siren, a baby cry and a dripping tap that takes place in the outside would be incorporated into the dream so we can keep snoozing. The ‘Israeli humanist dream’ operates in a similar manner, it is there to prolong the Zionist snore, it is there to keep Jews aloof to the crimes that are committed by their state, and in their names. The disturbances that come from the ‘outside world’ such as the Goldstone report or Ahmadinejad’s valid criticisms are incorporated into their dream as ‘white noise’ motivated by ‘pathological antisemitism’. Though in reality the Jewish state is barbarian with no comparison, in their dream, it is nothing but ‘business as usual’.

The daily reality of Israeli barbarism in Palestine should bring us back to elaborate over the Zionist dream of transformation. In spite of the great promise, the Jewish state has failed to become a ‘nation like other nations’. Similarly, the Zionist people are not exactly ‘people like other people’ for no other people approve genocide collectively.

The Jewish state that was supposed to be a celebration of identity transformation became instead the ultimate embodiment of the morbid symptoms Zionism was there to heal. Israel has already managed to surround itself by gigantic ghetto walls, it spits fire and WMD on its indigenous population. It locks millions in concentration camps and starves them. As bizarre as it may be, only in the face of Israeli colossal barbarism, can one adequately understand the full meaning of the irony of the Zionist dream of humanist metamorphosis.

Zionism was doomed to fail: it is a blood related project, it is racially orientated and it is supremacist to the bone. The Zionist dream has become a true devastating nightmare for real: the Golem¹ Jewish State wakes up every morning to commit more and more crimes in the name of the Jewish people. With an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear bombs and motivated by a phantasmic Holocaust religion that preaches nothing but vengeance, there is no greater danger to humanity, humanism and our civilization than Israel and its lobbies around the world.

All I have to say is beware!

1. Golem – a Yiddish Frankenstein.

The historical and political background of the right to food concerns the development of the notion of access to adequate food as a right. Lack of access to food can be due to two reasons: scarcity of food, or problem of access to available food. The issue of world hunger has been characterized as shortage of food. Guaranteeing the right to food has, therefore, been linked to food production to overcome shortage.

However, hunger and malnutrition persist even if food is abundant. For many years the website of the Indian Embassy in Washington, D.C. has described India’s agriculture and rural development as “a saga of success”. It boasts, “From a nation dependent on food imports to feed its population, India today is not only self-sufficient in grain production, but also has a substantial reserve.”¹ It is true that the country now produces enough food to feed its entire population. Despite agricultural successes, India still has a huge number of malnourished people, more than any other country.

The greater cause for hunger and malnutrition, therefore, is the problem of access to adequate food. Poor and marginalized segments of the population lack purchasing power to buy minimum amount of food they need to prevent hunger. Food insecurity exists even if there is food in abundance. Trading more food will not help the poor and the marginalized, if they are excluded from production and have no means to buy the food which arrives on the markets. Producing more food will not assist them in purchasing food, if their incomes remain too low. The problem is one of accessibility of food for the poor and the marginalized. So a focus solely on increasing the supply of food could lead to policy choices that make hunger worse.² Policy makers should address the problem of access to adequate food and make changes in income distribution and trade policies that are needed to ensure that the human right to adequate food is realized in practice.

Access to adequate food is fundamental for the right to adequate food. Accessed food must be adequate in terms of quality, quantity and cultural acceptability. Access to adequate food has been defined in terms of intake of nutrients, calories and proteins. Malnutrition need not be lack of quantity of food intake, but could also be due to lack of quality food. Both are often the results of poverty and discrimination.

Right to adequate food sets obligations on the state. It also helps empower those vulnerable to food insecurity and malnutrition to hold government accountable. Poor and marginalized are not mere passive beneficiaries of government programs or private charities, but participate in the democratic process of policy formation and implementation.

State Obligation to Right to Adequate Food

Given the crucial importance of access to adequate food in a world of plenty where massive hunger persists, it is not surprising that the right to adequate food has received attention in the community of states. More appropriately, it is a reminder to the states of their commitment to ensure that the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger and the right to adequate food is safeguarded.

For sixty years, the legal, political and cultural concept of the human right to food has been evolving as a set of universal norms for the United Nations community, its member states, and civil society. Paragraph 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) declares: “…everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being of himself [sic] and his family, including food…” Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adds: “State parties to the present Covenant recognize the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger…” and agree “to take steps to the maximum of available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized, including “adequate food.” Some two hundred additional UN instruments and declarations address the right to adequate food and nutrition within civil-political, economic-social-cultural, development, indigenous, women’s, and children’s rights constructions.

Under Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, “the right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.”³ The core content of the right to adequate food implies the availability of food in a quantity and quality sufficient to satisfy the dietary needs of individuals, free from adverse substances, and acceptable within a given culture. The right to adequate food is “indivisibly linked to the inherent dignity of the human person and is indispensable for the fulfillment of other human rights enshrined in the International Bill of Human Rights. It is also inseparable from social justice, requiring the adoption of appropriate economic, environmental and social policies, at both the national and international levels, oriented to the eradication of poverty and the fulfillment of all human rights for all.”³

The right to adequate food imposes threefold obligation on States: to respect, protect and fulfill the human right to adequate food. The State is obliged to refrain from taking any measures that result in preventing existing access to adequate food (respect); to ensure that private actors or individuals do not deprive individuals of their access to adequate food (protect); and pro-actively engage in activities intended to strengthen people’s access to and utilization of resources and means to ensure their livelihood, including food security (fulfill as facilitate). Finally, whenever an individual or group is unable, for reasons beyond their control, to enjoy the right to adequate food by the means at their disposal, States have the obligation to fulfill (as provide) that right directly. This obligation also applies for persons who are victims of natural or other disasters.³

States have committed themselves to implement policies aimed at eradicating poverty and hunger, and improving physical and economic access to sufficient, nutritionally adequate and safe food.⁴ In 1996 in their Rome Declaration on World Food Security, world leaders and their representatives stated: “We consider it intolerable that more than 800 million people throughout the world, and particularly in developing countries, do not have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs. This situation is unacceptable.”⁴

Reality of Poverty and Malnutrition

In spite of growing recognition and solemn commitments made by world leaders, the stark reality is that there are more hungry people today. The number of hungry people has increased from approximately 840 million in 1996 to 967 million in 2008.⁴ More than 2 billion people worldwide suffer from “hidden hunger”, or micronutrient malnutrition. Majority of the hungry are in rural areas, as around 70% of the world’s poor people live in rural areas and are dependent on agriculture for their income, food supply and livelihoods. According to a UN-Hunger Task Force report, three out of five small farmers suffer from hunger.⁵

Action Aid International has identified the following groups as the most affected by hunger and malnutrition: agricultural laborers, landless, poor farmers, ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples, informal sector workers, unemployed people, street children, the homeless, people living in areas of conflict or at risk from conflict,⁶ refugees, migrant workers, settlers and the internally displaced. Within these groups, women, children, especially girls, disabled people, the elderly and female-headed households are the most vulnerable.⁷ 125 million people die each year from malnutrition related causes. Children and adults are left mentally and physically stunted, deformed or blind, condemning them to a marginal existence. Hunger repeats itself through the generations, as undernourished mothers give birth to children who will never fully develop.⁸

In India it is evident that, although the 1990s saw a period of sustained economic growth as the country moved towards a more market-oriented economy, this economic growth did not benefit all Indians equally. Middle and upper classes in urban areas have benefited under “India Shining”, but the poor have suffered a decline in living standards and rising food insecurity. Poverty⁹ and malnutrition, especially among women, children, and people who belong to scheduled castes and tribes, remain very high. About 2 million children die every year as a result of serious malnutrition and preventable diseases. Nearly half suffer from moderate or severe malnutrition. This is one of the highest levels of child malnutrition in the world. Nearly a third of children (30%) are born underweight, which means that their mothers are themselves underweight and undernourished.¹⁰

Hunger and malnourishment is predominant in rural areas of India. 70% of Indians still live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods (65%). Very low agricultural wages (minimum wages are not always enforced), landlessness, lack of work during the agricultural lean season, and the impacts of trade liberalization have contributed to food insecurity.

Right to Adequate Food and Agricultural Trade

As noted above, the majority of hungry and malnourished live in rural areas and are dependent on agriculture for their income, food supply and livelihoods. They are food producers, such as landless laborers or small farm holders. Among the factors that contribute to this paradox of hungry farmers is the agricultural trading system, according to Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

The dominant trend in market-oriented globalization is “to expand the global reach for investments and to broaden market for profit.”¹¹ Investments in agriculture, food processing and marketing are on the rise. International trade in food has increased due to reduced trade barriers. Relentless pressure for unrestricted international trade and investment has not only constrained the policy space of governments, but also resulted in national and local governments and economies ceding some sovereignty over their markets.

Today, agricultural trade is far from being free or fair. Many developed countries continue to protect agriculture as a question of national security and food security, while persuading developing countries into unilaterally liberalizing their agricultural sectors, often under the programs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In his address to the Future Farmers of America in Washington on July 27, 2001George W. Bush, then President, stated, “It’s important for our nation to build – to grow foodstuffs, to feed our people. Can you imagine a country that was unable to grow enough food to feed the people? It would be a nation subject to international pressure. It would be a nation at risk. And so when we’re talking about American agriculture, we’re really talking about a national security issue.”¹² In the same speech, Bush argued against “the trade barriers, the protectionist tendencies around the world that prevent our products from getting into markets.”¹²

Despite preaching the “benefits” of “free” trade in agriculture, US, EU, Japan and other industrialized countries continue to skew their farm subsidies so heavily in favor of their biggest agricultural producers. From 1995 to 2006 USDA provided $177 billion in subsidy to its farmers. Top 10% of the agricultural producers received 74% of the total amount. During this period US government provided nearly one billion dollar subsidy to just three American rice growers. Rice is staple food for nearly 3.7 billion Asians. Nobel Prize winner in economics Joseph Stiglitz described the United States Farm Bill as “the perfect illustration of the Bush administration’s hypocrisy on trade liberalization.”

In 2004 EU paid its biggest 2,460 farmers on average $667,000 each, or $1.7 billion in total. In Germany, 14% of the biggest farm producers got 65% of all payments; in France, 29% of the biggest farm producers got 72% of all payments; in UK, 31% of the biggest farm producers got 84% of all payments; and in Italy, 1.6% of the biggest farm producers got 34% of all payments.¹³ These figures make a mockery of claims that the US Farm Bill and EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are geared toward small farmers and rural development. This huge subsidy allows food cartel to sell rice, wheat and other staple foods at very low price to dominate global food market. This displaces local production of basic foodstuffs and farming livelihoods in developing countries. “These subsidies continue to promote over-production and dumping, hurting poor farmers in developing countries,” said Luis Morago, Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair spokesperson. He further said, “Europe’s common agricultural policy and the US Farm Bill continue to ignore small farmers at home and cripple poorer farmers abroad.”¹³

While developed countries pay huge subsidies to their biggest food producers to dominate the production of staple foods like rice, corn/maize and wheat, and milk, developing countries are left at a severe disadvantage, as they cannot afford to subsidize their agriculture, but must reduce tariffs and open up to unfair competition from subsidized products of the developed countries. Measures to help smallholders such as farm subsidies and cheap credit policies has been opposed by international financial institutions and has fallen out of favor at the national level of many developing countries because it does not serve the interests of those who influence the government. In most developing countries small farm holders do not have the strength to either compete in or resist the pressures of market globalization.

Right to Adequate Food and Agribusiness Companies

The agricultural trade liberalization has benefited big farms and agribusiness companies of the developed countries. It benefited 1% of farms larger than 100 hectares, while harming 85% of farms with less than 2 hectares.² The globalization of agriculture has been accompanied by concentration of market power into the hands of a limited number of large-scale trade and retail agribusiness companies. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) notes,

One of the more striking features of industry changes…has been the convergence of ownership between agrochemical and seed/genomic firms. This strategy has worked well to sell proprietary bundled lines of chemicals, genetic technologies and seeds, which can be attractive to farmers as a purchased management tool. However, such bundles can increase reliance on expensive inputs, increase farmers’ costs, and reduce flexibility of on-farm management strategies for pests and weeds, as well as implementation of novel consumer-driven production systems.¹⁴

Transnational corporations have monopolized the food chain, from the production, trade, processing, to the marketing and retailing of food. Globally, the seed industry is increasingly driven by US and Europe based transnational agribusiness companies. Just 10 companies, which include Aventis, Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta, control one-third of the $23 billion commercial seed market and 80 per cent of the $28 billion global pesticide market. Monsanto alone controls 91 per cent of the global market for genetically modified seed. Another 10 companies, including Cargill, control 57 per cent of the total sales of the world’s leading 30 retailers.¹⁵

With the trade deal between India and the United States, known as the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), the Indian markets and agricultural policies are increasingly coming under the influence of transnational companies such as Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland Company, a US grain purchaser and trader and is, with Cargill, one of the companies that maintains “oligopolistic control of the American food-manufacturing and food-processing markets”, and Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.¹⁶ These three companies are members on the KIA Board, which implements the KIA. The Board has decided to focus initially on four core areas: agricultural education, food processing and marketing, biotechnology and water management.¹⁷ “The KIA is part of the US comprehensive strategy on revitalizing the bilateral relationship in agriculture with India,” said Susan Owens, director of the FAS Research and Scientific Exchanges Division. Owen stated: “We want to broaden the scope of the AKI (or KIA) beyond just research…We want to use the AKI (or KIA) to increase agricultural production in India….”¹⁸

Monsanto owns the patent on Bt cotton. In 2005 approximately 1.26 million hectares, and in 2006 nearly 3.28 million hectares of land in India was under Bt cotton cultivation. Farmers who buy GM seeds enter into a licensing agreement with Monsanto for the use of that particular gene and the company prescribed fertilizer. They are forbidden from saving seeds for the next season. They must buy new seed from the company each season. This denies farmers’ right to save seed. The implications of this are huge for poor farmers. Saved seed is the one resource that the poor farmers depend upon to carry them through the year. Denial of this right will greatly impact them economically. For they have to pay more each season to buy new seed. Monsanto is now charging 1850 Indian rupees per 450 gram pack of Bt cotton seeds as compared to 38 Indian rupees charged in China for the same quantity. In India, the price for non-Bt cotton variety is at 450 to 500 Indian rupees. India has recently allowed field trials of GM varieties of rice, brinjal and groundnut.

In many regions of the world, transnational corporations now have unprecedented control over food, and there is no coherent system of accountability to ensure that they do not abuse this power. Global food companies have become too powerful and are undermining the right to adequate food in developing countries.

Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs)

Introduction of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) has become an increasingly important source of competitive advantage and accumulation in the production and trade of agricultural goods. This has resulted in the increasing concentration of control over seeds and other resources in a few transnational companies. The IPR owners, usually transnational companies, can prevent others from producing or selling the seeds or plant varieties over which they own the rights. They can set prices or royalties on the seeds, and terms and conditions for use of the seeds and inputs. This not only denies the right of farmers to save seeds for the next season, but also forces them to depend on transnational companies for seeds and inputs. With raising prices of seeds and inputs, coupled with prevention of saving seeds, small scale farmers become vulnerable whether there is bumper crop, or failure or low yield. In times of bumper crop, they get lower price for their produce, and in times of failure or low yield they incur loss. But the farming costs keep rising.

Because of their sheer size and assurance of huge financial returns due to IPRs, transnational companies are increasingly engaged in agro-biotechnology research. As the goal of companies is profit, their research and production efforts tend to focus on only a few crops, thus weakening biodiversity and sustainability caused by expanding monoculture in food production. The consequences are terrible on “minor crops”, which are commercially not profitable for the companies.

With the trends towards strengthening IPR systems worldwide (and in India), there is an increasing ability of agribusiness companies privatizing genetic resources and agricultural knowledge. The tendency will be to focus on research on lucrative developing country markets, rather than developing country needs. Therefore, IPRs are not designed to respond to socio-economic concerns such as food security of developing countries, or to protect the livelihoods of landless and small scale farmers, but to promote the greed of agribusiness companies at the expense of landless and small scale famers in these countries. Thus, IPRs can impede progress towards sustainability, food security and distributive justice.

Right to Adequate Food — the Guiding Framework for Policies and Action

The present liberalized agricultural trade system excludes millions of landless and small scale farmers, and undermines the ability of developing countries to protect their farmers. What is very clear is that in the long run hundreds of millions will die from hunger, while the markets expand.

Therefore, an approach to international trade based on human rights, particularly the right to adequate food, shifts the focus not only to the impacts of trade and its policies on the most vulnerable and food insecure, but also to enhance the welfare of the vulnerable people. The right to adequate food can only be fully realized by States within a multilateral trading system which enables them to pursue policies aimed at realizing the right to adequate food. Trading system should not only refrain from imposing obligations which directly infringe upon the right to adequate food, but also ensure that all States have the policy space they require to take measures which contribute to the progressive realization of the right to adequate food under their jurisdiction.¹⁹) State, as part of its obligation to protect people’s resource base for food, should take appropriate steps to ensure that activities of the private business companies are in conformity with the right to adequate food.

The report of The International Assessment of Agricultural Science, Knowledge and Technology for Development (IAASTD) provides valuable insights and recommendations recognizing the need for complementary and diversified approaches to sustainable agriculture, pointing out that agricultural models based on small farming can present alternatives appropriate for a human rights based food security. While the report was strongly welcomed by NGOs for its calls for immediate radical changes in international agriculture, there was a strong opposition from countries such as US, UK, Canada and Australia.²⁰ A few months before the launch of the report, major private sector stakeholders, such as Monsanto and Syngenta, resigned altogether from the IAASTD project in October 2007 as the conclusions were clearly against their interests.

Some of IAASTD’s observations and suggestions are²⁰ :

• modern agriculture has brought significant increases in food production. But the benefits have been spread unevenly and have come at an increasingly intolerable price, paid by small-scale farmers, workers, rural communities and the environment;
• the way the world grows its food will have to change radically to better serve the poor and hungry if the world is to cope with a growing population and climate change while avoiding social breakdown and environmental collapse;
• prioritize the promotion of small farmer agriculture and the livelihood of indigenous peoples, giving special attention to the role and situation of women in food production;
• take measures to promote and protect the security of land tenure, especially with respect to women and vulnerable groups, with special attention to equitable land distribution, with agrarian reform if necessary, as mentioned in Article 11(2) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the Voluntary Guidelines for the progressive realization of the right to adequate food;
• take measures to strengthen local markets, shortening the chain from food production to food consumption;
• promote small scale agriculture as important source of employment and livelihood.
• All national and international policies should be guided by a human rights based approach, to guarantee that they respect, protect and fulfill the progressive realization of the right to adequate food;
• develop mechanisms to monitor private companies in order to ensure that they respect the right to adequate food, consistent with the obligation of States to protect this right.

The formulation and implementation of national strategies for the right to food requires full compliance with the principles of accountability, transparency, people’s participation, decentralization, legislative capacity and the independence of the judiciary. Good governance is essential to the realization of all human rights, including right to adequate food.³ When political elites recognize that promotion of human rights, including economic and social rights such as the right to adequate food, actually enhances sustainable economic growth, we can start to expect that freedom from hunger will become a matter of the past.

1. George Kent, Swaraj against Hunger, University of Hawaii, August 9, 2009.
2. “The Right to Food and the WTO,” (April 8, 2009).
3. The Right to Adequate Food (Art. 11): 12/05/99. E/C. 12/1999/5. (General Comments).
4. The Cordoba Declaration on the Right to Food, December 12, 2008.
5. Arun Shrivastava, “Poverty and Food Insecurity in the Developing World: For Us, Tolls the Bell,” in Global Research (May 7, 2009).
6. “U.S. weapons sales are likely to continue to fuel conflict and abet human rights abuses. During the two Bush terms, the majority of U.S. arms sales to the developing world went to countries that our own State Department defined as undemocratic regimes and/or major human rights abusers. And over two-thirds of the world’s active conflicts involved weapons that had been supplied by the United States.” Frida Berrigan, “Weapons: Our No#1 Export?” in Foreign Policy In Focus (July 1, 2009).
7. Annual Report 2005-Right to Food, Action Aid International.
8. ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS: The Right to Food. Report submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, in accordance with Commission on Human Rights resolution 2003/25, E/CN.4/2004/10, 9 February 2004.
9. According to the World Bank poverty line of $1.25 (Rs. 56.13) per day, the number of poor in India during 2004-2005 was 456 million, that is, 41.6% of the population.
10. ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS: The right to food. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, Addendum MISSION TO INDIA (20 August-2 September 2005), E/CN.4/2006/44/Add.2, 20 March 2006.
11. Asbjorn Eide, “The Human Right to Food and Contemporary Globalization.”
12. See Whitehouse.
13. See Oxfam.
14. “Food Security in a Volatile World,” International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).
15. “ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND CULTURAL RIGHTS: The right to food,” Report submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, in accordance with Commission on Human Rights resolution 2003/25. E/CN.4/2004/10, 9 February 2004.
16. Kamalakar Duvvuru, “Monsanto, a Contemporary East India Company, and Corporate Knowledge in India,” in Dissident Voice (July 25, 2009).
17. Dinesh C. Sharma, “Preparing for New Challenges,” in Span (March/April 2007).
18. Julia Debes, “U.S.-India Agricultural Cooperation: A New Beginning,” in FAS Worldwide (September 2006).
19. Background Document Prepared by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Mr. Olivier De Schutter, on His Mission to the World Trade Organization (WTO), presented to the Human Rights Council in March 2009 (background study to UN doc. A/HRC/10/005/Add.2
20. Wenche Barth Eide and Uwe Kracht, “Official Responses to the World Food Crisis in Light of the Human Right to Food,” (February 11, 2009).

It was a relief to hear that the government of Sri Lanka was at last responding to mounting domestic and international criticism, and had begun releasing the Vanni IDPs. Perhaps the shocking report in the Sunday Times on 6 September about human trafficking at the internment camps was partly responsible. An exemplary piece of investigative journalism, it revealed that up to 20,000 IDPs had been ransomed by desperate relatives who were able and willing to pay lakhs of rupees to secure their release, and had left the camps. This exposes so-called ‘screening for Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) cadres’ for what it is: a cover for a lucrative flesh trade, carried out with the collusion of elements in the government and armed forces who get a cut out of it. It also explains why the camp authorities refused to release a one-year-old child to leave with its grandmother, in a case cited by V. Anandasangaree of the Tamil United Liberation Front: since an infant could hardly be suspected of being a dreaded LTTE terrorist, the reason was surely that a ransom had not been paid.

One would have to be naïve indeed to believe that those who have been ransomed are ‘innocent’ while those who remain are more likely to be LTTE cadres. On the contrary, anyone in the camps who had any value for the LTTE diaspora would certainly have escaped by now. Conversely, we can be sure that the unfortunate souls left rotting in these camps are of no interest to whatever remains of the LTTE. They are the victims, not perpetrators, of crimes. The UN too seems to have woken up to the fact that by funding these camps it is colluding, willy-nilly, in a crime against humanity – the denial of liberty and other fundamental human rights to a civilian population – and has made it clear that it cannot continue doing so much longer. UN Under Secretary General for Political Affairs Lynn Pascoe reiterated the demand that the Vanni IDPs should be granted freedom of movement during his recent visit.

While we welcome the government’s announcement that it is willing to release IDPs from the camps to relatives willing to house them, it is a matter of concern that even while President Rajapaksa was telling Mr Pascoe that the reason so few Internally displaced persons (IDPs) had been released to live with their relatives was because there were so few applications, the GA of Vavuniya was refusing to release IDPs to their relatives! This suggests that ransoms are still being demanded, and IDPs unable to pay them are not being released. The government’s condition that IDPs should be released only to relatives makes sense for unaccompanied children, but why can’t adults go and live in rented accommodation instead of staying with relatives if they so choose?

Furthermore, the whole farce of ‘screening’, which has been dragged on for more than four months, should be stopped. The best proof that the LTTE is no longer a threat in Sri Lanka is the release of top LTTE cadres Daya Master and George Master, who were with Prabakaran almost to the very end. Would the authorities have released them on bail if there were any danger from the LTTE? Hardly. If they can be released, why are lakhs of innocent civilians being detained? Did the President avoid the UN General Assembly because he was unable to answer this question?

Release should not be confused with resettlement. IDPs who wish to go and live outside the camps should be free to do so. Those who wish to remain in the camps until their original habitats are de-mined and reconstructed should be allowed to remain, but should be free to move in and out of the camps instead of being imprisoned in them as they are now, and free to leave permanently as and when they wish. The only condition attached should be that they inform the international and local agencies which are providing for them whenever they leave for good, to make it clear that there is no need to feed them any longer. The resources freed by their departure could be used to speed up de-mining and reconstruction in the war-devastated areas, and will undoubtedly improve conditions for those who choose to remain in the camps. The release of all the Vanni IDPs would end this shameful chapter in Sri Lanka’s history.

Resettlement

Pressure on the government to ensure speedy resettlement of all IDPs should also be kept up. This should include not only IDPs who fled the recent fighting but also those who were displaced earlier, including Muslims displaced in 1990. Citizens’ committees would need to be set up to deal with problems, such as those which occur where others are living in the homes of displaced people who wish to return. It will not be easy, but with goodwill, these problems can be resolved, and the sooner the better. All those who want to return to their original homes should be accommodated, if not in their original homes, at least in the neighbourhood, or in some other place of their choice. This is the only way to reverse the ethnic cleansing drives carried out by both the state and the LTTE, and rebuild integrated communities.

An unnecessary obstacle to resettlement is created by the government’s designation of some of the areas from which people have been displaced as ‘High Security Zones’ (HSZs), some of which double as ‘Special Economic Zones’(!). Earlier attempts to dismantle these were stalled by the argument that they were necessary so long as the LTTE had not been disarmed. Now that the LTTE has definitively been disarmed, they serve no justifiable purpose. The only way their persistence can be explained is as a form of ethnic cleansing, since in practically every case, the people displaced by them are Tamils and Muslims. A good example is Sampur in the East, where the inhabitants were driven out by shelling and are now being denied the right to return, while India colludes in this ethnic cleansing by undertaking to build a coal-fired power plant on their land. The process of resettlement cannot be regarded as complete until people displaced by HSZs have also been granted the right of return. But, some people argue, the LTTE is still a threat, and therefore we need to retain the HSZs, along with the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and Emergency provisions. Is this true?

Is the War Over? Or Was the President Lying?

Back in May, President Rajapaksa gave a speech in which he claimed that ‘our Motherland has been completely freed from the clutches of separatist terrorism’. He spoke of ‘the proud victory we have achieved today by defeating the world’s most ruthless terrorist organization’ and ‘the defeat of the LTTE and the breakdown of their armed strength’. There was no ambiguity about his words: he told us that the war was over, the LTTE defeated, their armed strength broken down. On this understanding, there were widespread celebrations, and the President gained enormous popularity.

There is no reason to suppose that the President was lying. Yet in August a senior government official was reported as saying that the LTTE was still capable of reorganising in Sri Lanka, and in September IGP Jayantha Wickramaratne reiterated that the threat of the Tamil Tigers is still alive in Sri Lanka, and they have not been completely defeated. On the face of it, these people were implying that the President was a liar when he said that Sri Lanka had been completely freed from separatist terrorism, and a fraud for claiming credit for the defeat of the LTTE. So why does the President tolerate such insults from his underlings?

The reason seems to be that the government is caught in the same trap of war-dependence which was the downfall of the LTTE. A war justifies repressive measures that would never be acceptable in peacetime, and the LTTE would have been unable to function without these. That is why it broke one ceasefire after another, let slip one opportunity after another to negotiate a just peace. But this had a disastrous effect on its support base. With all due respect to the soldiers who risked and lost their lives in the war, their courage alone would not have brought about the defeat of the LTTE. The Israeli armed forces are many times stronger than the Sri Lankan military, and the Palestinians’ arsenal is pathetic by comparison with that of the LTTE, yet the Palestinian resistance has survived for over sixty years. That is because it has the support of the people: precisely what the LTTE lost due to its dependence on war.

The last straw appears to have been the peace process which began in 2002. It ushered in an unprecedentedly long cessation of hostilities, and made it clearer than ever that the LTTE was incapable of handling peace. I was among those who criticised the 2002 CFA for allowing the LTTE a free hand to kill Tamil dissidents, conscript children and prepare for war, but in retrospect, I can see that it also served a positive purpose. Karuna’s defection was only the visible tip of a vast iceberg of discontent, as Tamil people who had hoped the LTTE would deliver them from fear, humiliation and violence realised that it offered them only more of the same. Their disillusionment and consequent withdrawal of support allowed the state to defeat the LTTE.

Now the Rajapaksa regime faces the same dilemma that Prabakaran faced earlier: if the war is over, how can it justify the measures that give absolute and unaccountable power to the state? So it has to invent an ‘LTTE threat’ in order to continue with policies that would be unacceptable in peacetime. But the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka are not fools. They will realise, like the Tamil people before them, that this ‘threat’ is simply being concocted to justify disastrous economic and political choices. With all the fire and brimstone directed against foreign-funded NGOs, it is amusing to note that Sri Lanka now has a government that is dependent on foreign funding. The Ministry of Finance and Planning reported in August 2008 that the national debt stood at over 3 trillion rupees, with 1.39 trillion being foreign debt. The IMF loan eased the immediate problem, but at the cost of getting the country deeper in debt: in other words, it can repay its debts only by expanding them, placing an ever greater burden on the people. If the EU Generalised System of Preferences facility is lost, the economy will plunge even deeper in the red. In this context, detaining lakhs of civilians and expanding the armed forces constitute unnecessary and ruinous expenditures.

The social and political costs are equally huge. Horrific reports of police brutality, including the murder of two boys, Dhanushka Aponso and Dinesh Fernando, at Angulana and the abduction and torture of student Nipuna Ramanayake by SSP Vaas Gunawardene and other officers of the Colombo Crime Division, are reminiscent of the murders of the schoolboys of Embilipitiya in 1989-90, and result from the same conditions: rampant impunity for crimes committed by politicians in power, the state security forces and the police. This impunity, in turn, is fostered by the suspension of the rule of law resulting from the PTA and Emergency Regulations, which can only be justified by claiming that the LTTE is still a threat.

The only way to reverse the degradation of Sri Lanka’s economy and polity is to acknowledge that the war is over and take the appropriate measures: release all the Vanni IDPs immediately, slash military spending, dismantle the paramilitaries, redeploy demobilised soldiers to civilian reconstruction tasks, replace military and ex-military administrators with civilian ones, dismantle the HSZs, resettle all displaced civilians including those displaced by HSZs, repeal the PTA and Emergency Regulations, restore democratic rights, especially to freedom of expression, and release J.S. Tissainayagam and others incarcerated for exercising this right. The best way to ensure that Sri Lanka retains its EU GSP+ facility is to do the right thing, failing which, the government must take full responsibility for the loss of jobs and revenue.

And at the United Nations we saw the process swing into action as Netanyahu tried to whip up support for another Middle East war for Israel’s benefit.

“Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium… To those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?”

Who with a speck of decency would have given Netanyahu a hearing after the atrocities of the Gaza blitzkrieg and the Goldstone Report condemning Israel’s war crimes?

“This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism… anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.”

Netanyahu could be describing the Israeli regime.

“…The greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.”

He should know. Israel is bristling with both.

“The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

That would be nice for the warmongers in Tel Aviv, who already have them.

“Will the international community thwart the world’s most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?”

I do hope so. But are we all agreed who they are?

“Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.”

Substitute American for Iranian and it begins to make sense.

“In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza… We didn’t get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare. You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent.”

Defenceless Gazans know all about nightmares. Israel, camped on their doorstep and still occupying Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters, lobs high explosives into the tiny enclave’s 1.5 million starving civilians, and there’s no escape.

“There is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country’s civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II. During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties.”

The Nazis launched sophisticated rockets with huge destructive power at London and Southern England from territory they had invaded and occupied. They weren’t firing makeshift missiles built in a garden shed to defend their homeland.

“Israel… tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave. Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way.”

How considerate. But where were Gaza’s terrified civilians supposed to run to? Into the sea? Bombing their homes was the ultimate terror act. There’s no excuse.

“…If Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.”

What exactly are these “risks for peace” Israel has so bravely taken? In 61 years what peace dividends has Israel’s risk-taking delivered?

The pot calls the kettle black

Netanyahu has a rare genius for irony, except that he himself doesn’t see it. That’s what makes him such a comedian. The irony of what he says is totally lost on him. Nearly every offensive remark he makes about Iran and Palestine can be flung back in his face because Israel is no better and in most respects far worse. Netanyahu’s speech to the UN was the most hilarious example in history of the pot calling the kettle black.

His scriptwriters evidently feed off the Zionists’ propaganda training manual, which teaches the art of lying and distortion and how to sugar-coat it all for easy swallowing by gullible audiences. Notice how everything Israel dislikes, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labeled “Iranian-backed”… and how everyone else, too, is in mortal danger from Iran and must therefore huddle together in Israel’s axis of aggression. Also note how situations are defined in language that suit only Israel’s case.

Less amusing is Netanyahu’s arrogant rejection of the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone report condemning Israel’s conduct.

By these twisted standards… [they] would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice… Will you accept this farce? If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity. And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Here’s why.

When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense. What legitimacy? What self-defense?

The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza and promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us — my people, my country — of war crimes? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?

The false choice in that last sentence is a propaganda favourite. Why would anyone with any sense wish to stand alongside either?

And how dare Netanyahu equate Roosevelt and Churchill’s epic struggle against the rampaging Nazis with Israel’s brutal crushing of Palestinian resistance against the illegal occupation of the Holy Land?

What has the UN come to when a regime that is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and not even a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty can call on the world’s nations to gang up against another country for starting its own nuclear programme? Israel itself refuses to submit to inspection and poses an alarming nuclear threat. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either, nor the Chemical Weapons Convention.

And is it not an insult to everyone’s intelligence to hear the UN being lambasted by the leader of a regime that is in open defiance of international law and countless UN resolutions?

The UN Human Rights Council is due to debate the Goldstone report today, when a vote will be taken on how its recommendations should be acted on. There are fears that the British government plans to reject the report’s key recommendations. If that’s the case and others follow suit, Israel will be let off the hook and allowed to continue its crime spree.

It will hand Israel’s comic genius a personal triumph. The Zionist network will no doubt show their gratitude in the usual way.

The 40-year-old actor and theatre director is one of dozens of Arab political activists in Israel who have faced long-term detention during and since Israel’s winter assault on Gaza in what human rights groups are calling political intimidation and repression of free speech by the Israeli police and courts.

A report published last week by Adalah, an Arab legal rights group in Israel, said 830 Israeli demonstrators, the overwhelming majority of them Arab citizens, were arrested for participating in mostly peaceful demonstrations during the 23 days of the Gaza operation.

According to the report, the police broke up protests using physical violence; most protesters were refused bail during legal proceedings, despite the minor charges; the courts treated children no differently from adults, in violation of international law; and Arab leaders were interrogated and threatened by the secret police in a bid to end their political activity.

This month’s report by the UN inquiry into Gaza, led by Judge Richard Goldstone, dedicated a chapter to events inside Israel, concluding similarly that there was wide-scale repression of political activists, non-governmental organisations and journalists in Israel.

The goal, the committee said, was “to minimise public scrutiny of [Israel’s] conduct both during its military operations in Gaza and the consequences that these operations have had for the residents of Gaza”.

Abir Baker, a lawyer with Adalah, said the police and legal system had resorted to mass arrests and a declared policy of “zero tolerance” as the most effective way to suppress peaceful protests.

According to Adalah’s statistics, a third of all those arrested were people under the age of 18, and, in a break with normal legal procedure, 80 per cent were refused bail for the entire period of legal proceedings. Detention is usually reserved for people considered a danger to the public. Most charges related to participation in a prohibited gathering, disturbing the peace or assaulting a police officer. Some children were charged with stone-throwing.

Ms Baker said it was telling that all the detainees in northern Israel, where most of Israel’s 1.3 million Arab citizens live, were kept in detention throughout proceedings, while in Tel Aviv, where joint Arab-Jewish protests were held, all those arrested were quickly released.

She said: “The police used the power of arrest not to punish criminal behaviour, but as a weapon to deter the Arab population from staging entirely lawful demonstrations. This is a tactic we have seen used before in Israel, particularly in the first and second intifadas.”

She noted that there were echoes of events in October 2000, at the start of the second intifada, when Arab citizens held demonstrations in solidarity with Palestinians in the occupied territories. Thirteen unarmed Arab demonstrators were shot dead and hundreds were beaten and arrested.

A later state inquiry castigated the police for treating the Arab minority, a fifth of Israel’s population, as an “enemy”. Unlike in 2000, however, police commanders on this occasion did not resort to rubber bullets or live ammunition.

Mr Jabareen, a prominent political figure in Jaffa, said that during the Gaza assault he had been put under a three-day house arrest and faced a series of interrogations where he was warned he would be jailed.

Three weeks after the Gaza assault ended, at a small demonstration in northern Israel, he said the police set a “trap” for him. “When I arrived, the police commander clearly knew who I was. He immediately had seven officers surround me. I was soon on the ground and they were beating, hitting and kicking me.”

Mr Jabareen was jailed for three weeks and has been under house arrest ever since.

Ms Baker said of his case: “The police commander accused him of assaulting him and yet they have produced no video footage, even though they filmed the entire demonstration, and no medical evidence that the commander was ever harmed.”

Mr Jabareen said his treatment contrasted with that of the ultra-Orthodox in the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem who have been clashing with police for months to prevent the opening of a car park on the Sabbath.

“They are shown on TV throwing punches at the police and hurling stones at them. A few arrests have been made, but despite the high levels of violence, they are almost always released the same or next day. How can I still be under house arrest for eight months? It is clear that different legal standards are being applied.”

Ms Baker said the police had created new offences during the Gaza operation, such as “protests detrimental to public morale.”

Adalah found that a new directive was issued to police commanders about how to handle the protests, though the police have refused to divulge its contents. Ms Baker said she would petition the attorney general for the information.

The Goldstone Committee noted widespread intimidation and humiliation of community leaders. Saleh Bakri, a public figure who participated in a silent candle-light vigil on January 1 in Haifa, was arrested and forced to stand motionless facing the Israeli flag for half an hour as police officers filmed him.

The committee also recorded that at least 20 Arab leaders were forced to attend illegal interrogations by the Shin Bet where they were asked about their political activities. Student activists were asked to collaborate with the authorities and threatened with arrest or harm to their studies if they refused.

Police demanded Amir Makhoul, the head of the Ittijah co-ordinating body for Arab organisations in Israel, attend an interrogation following a speech he gave on December 29 in Haifa. After he refused, he was forcibly escorted to a police station where he was interviewed for four hours.

“They told me I would be thrown in jail if I continued my political work and that they could arrange for me to be dumped in Gaza. Their main concern seemed to be that I was urging the younger generation to be more politically active,” he said.

The Arab minority is staging a general strike on Thursday to protest the increasingly harsh climate and to mark the failure to prosecute any of the policemen responsible for the 13 deaths in 2000.

Ron Jacobs: Hi Sherry. To begin, can you tell the readers about the March for Equality? What is the impetus behind it? Who put out the original call?

Sherry Wolf: David Mixner, who worked as an Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LBGT) liaison in the Clinton administration and Cleve Jones, Harvey Milk’s collaborator and who launched the Names Project AIDS Quilt, put out the call for this march back in June. It was met with horror and opposition from many of the more established, corporate financed national LGBT groups. However, with momentum building at the grassroots, organizations such as Human Rights Campaign and NGLTF thankfully came on board, though they do not run the organizing efforts nor are they shaping the program. This march will not be brought to you by Miller Beer or Citibank!

The (mostly) younger activists at the forefront of mobilizing this march online and on campuses and in communities are sick of the gradualist approach that has dominated our movement for years. The single demand for full equality for all LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law really strikes a chord with activists such as myself and this new generation who find the incrementalist—state-by-state, issue-by-issue—strategy of the LGBT establishment to be a failed one.

RJ: I know that in your book Sexuality and Socialism you talk about the corporatization of the Gay Pride movement and its concurrent moving away from an identification with other disenfranchised and oppressed groups in the US. What would you say is the political identity this march hopes to put forth to the people of the United States?

SW: In a sense, the initiative for this march only underscores the ramifications of my arguments in Sexuality and Socialism. No more crumbs. Enough going hat in hand to Congress and waiting for some tweak in the laws. We want it all!

I got involved in helping to organize this march because I simply find it unendurable that gay politicians like Barney Frank are among the first to argue that demanding equality for LGBT people is the third rail of American politics. This march is about seeking, essentially, to be added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and have all of our rights respected once and for all.

We will have the NAACP’s Julian Bond, UNITE Here’s John Wilhelm, young, multiracial new activists like Aiyi’nah Ford, transgender militants and myself, an unabashed socialist, speaking at this march. Though Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper will be playing and speaking, this is not a Hollywood choreographed affair—it has a shoestring budget and will give expression to this new combative mood and anti-corporate sentiment

RJ: To me, the transformation of much of the Left of the 1960s and ’70s from universal movements into a collection of smaller groups fighting their own particular oppression and for their own piece of the American pie is a big part of why the US Left is where it’s at now — where Democrats are considered socialists. Is this phenomenon (which I consider to ultimately be the result of identity politics gone wild) present in the movement for equality? How should leftists counteract this when it appears?

SW: [The first part of your question is answered above, I believe]

I travel a great deal and speak to small and large audiences from Bellingham, WA to Gainesville, FL and I think that those old school ideas are on the wane—in particular among working-class people and those not attending elite universities. The language of Identity politics persists, in a sense, because a new culture and outlook are still embryonic. But when striking Teamsters (Latino and white, all straight) attended an event in Chicago two weeks ago where Cleve Jones spoke to 250+ people about going to the march, everyone was electrified. The workers gave solidarity to our struggle and the LGBT activists are lending solidarity to their pickets. The May Day protests in many cities this year had LGBT activists carrying rainbow flags—the contingent in Los Angeles where I was that day was very well received by immigrant families.

It’s becoming clearer to more people that the old labor slogan is true: An Injury to One is an Injury to All!

RJ: As you know, I live in North Carolina. Outside of Asheville and a few of the larger cities, there exists a quite obvious homophobia. One sees it on church message boards and bumperstickers and one hears it on the radio and so-called Christian television. This intolerance is quite obvious and, as Beth Sherouse wrote quite articulately in an article that appeared in Counterpunch on August 31, 2009, the fact of this obvious hatred and fear is one reason why LBGT equality must be recognized on a national scale. In her article, she reminds the readers of the federal role in helping end desegregation. Yet, there is another side to that story. The federal government also allowed and encouraged not only segregation, but also fought attempts to roll it back for a long time. I guess my question is — while it is important that federal legislation forbidding discrimination against persons based on their sexuality be passed, how does the equality movement see any such legislation being enforced?

SW: Beth is right and after reading her piece I made it a priority to add more Southern stops on my current speaking tour. If you look at polls one year after the Virginia v. Loving case ended laws preventing Blacks and whites from marrying in 1967, only 20 percent of whites in the U.S. supported biracial marriages. We obviously can’t wait for bigots to come around before passing equal protections for LGBT people. However, it was the ongoing organizing, teach-ins, marches, rallies and even just the posture of Blacks in this country that altered the political climate.

Today, around 80 percent of all Americans—and more than 95 percent of young people—approve of interracial marriages, according to Gallup. A climate of intolerance to anti-gay and anti-trans bigotry can be advanced by students and workers—regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. All progressives must bring these issues into organizing efforts beyond the LGBT movement—inject them into union contracts, workplace organizing, budget fightbacks, campus mobilizations and immigrant defense campaigns. After all, most LGBT people ARE workers, immigrants, Black, Brown and all these other identities as well. In other words, lesbians have to pay the rent too.

RJ: In your book you insist on the need for the LBGT rights movement to link up with other oppressed groups in the US and fight for all of these groups’ freedom. I was wondering if in your organizing work for the October 11-12 March on Washington, do you see any attempts by other organizers to expand the call to all oppressed groups? Or is there a tendency to limit the organizing to LBGT people? If so, can you explain why you think this is so?

SW: We made a conscious decision not to create a laundry list of demands, but to have one single demand for equality in all matters covered by civil law in all 50 states. The veteran activists involved, myself included, want to strike while the iron’s hot. There is a spirit of struggle among young LGBT people who came of age thinking AIDS isn’t the mass killer that it is and who are waking up after Prop 8 to the fact that our rights are completely dispensable, where they even exist. We can still be legally fired, or not hired, in most states for our sexual orientation and/or gender identities.

Arizona’s governor, for example, just ditched domestic partner benefits. Ohio’s Representative, Lynn R. Wachtmann, some neanderthal from the 75th District wrote to LGBT activists, “If sexual orientation and gender identity and expression are added as protected classes, all those who do not identify themselves in accordance with this lifestyle choice will be discriminated against.” I have never been a single-issue activist in my life — I’m a socialist after all — but at some point we must unequivocally demand an end to this crap once and for all.

I’m 44, I came of age AFTER Stonewall and before Generation Twitter, I’m from the generation nobody ever bothered to name. I’ve participated in, and in some cases helped lead or initiate divestment campaigns, antiwar, anti-police brutality, pro-abortion, pro-single-payer health care, anti-budget cuts, pro-labor fights, etc. for 26 years. There’s finally a broad fight for LGBT equality and I’d be insane not to leap in with full-force and try to help make it a success.

My greatest hope out of this march is not simply that we win our demand, but that in a poetic reversal of history other struggles take a page from our initiative and mobilize to make demands of the Obama administration. The Stonewall generation had fought for Black civil rights, women’s liberation, against the Vietnam War and, for many, alongside Cesar Chavez for farm laborers for many years before they ever mobilized for their own rights. This time around, it may be possible that through a quirk of history the LGBT struggle could lead the way for others to ratchet up a fight for genuine universal health care, jobs and an end to the wars and occupations abroad.

RJ: I love it — “the generation nobody bothered to name.” Anyhow, any insights on how the organizing is going? How can people get on board and organize in their community?

SW: The Web site for the march www.nationalequalitymarch.com has a dizzying array of downloadable materials. Go to the site, get the facts, post flyers, send out tweets, post it to Facebook, and by all means everyone should get themselves to the march if they can. Obama has shown that without mass pressure he won’t deliver what we need and want. This march punctuates a turning point of sorts for the LGBT struggle—people who miss out on this protest for civil rights will kick themselves afterwards. Don’t kick yourselves, just come.

RJ: Thanks, Sherry.

Along with Muslims, Latinos are its prime targets, often using militarized unconstitutional tactics against vulnerable, defenseless people. Post-9/11, the Bush administration initiated them, and they continue under Obama.

On May 23, 2007, as a senator, Obama said: “The time to fix our broken immigration system is now. We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace.”

Then on July 8, 2009, Wall Street Journal online writer Cam Simpson said on politicalforum.com: “The Obama administration (today) said it would move forward with a Bush-era program aimed at cracking down on illegal-immigrant workers and their employers, just as Republicans in the Senate are pushing legislation that would mandate a similar move.”

With about 10% of DHS’ $55 billion FY 2010 budget, ICE will continue targeting Latinos at the border, at work sites, and at their homes with some recent examples below:

– in a September 18 press release, ICE’s Miami field office announced it “removed” 423 “criminal aliens from 36 countries” in August, charging them with drugs traffickin, robbery, and various fraudulent activities;

– on September 11, 23 alleged gang members faced deportation after being being arrested in a four-day operation; unmentioned was whether any of them are undocumented;

– on August 25, 15 Latinos were arrested in San Antonio, TX on alleged drugs trafficking charges;

– on August 11, 50 arrests were made on charges of “enter(ing) into sham marriages to gain citizenship,” including those undocumented and their US citizen wives;

– on July 31, 53 alleged South Florida gang members and associates were arrested in a two-day operation; some “were found to be in violation of the immigration law (and) were processed for removal from the United States;”

– on July 31, eight San Francisco area alleged gang members and associates were seized “during a six hour surge;” some were “foreign nationals who are being processed for deportation;”

– on June 30, 116 alleged gang members, their associates and “immigration status violators” were targeted in a five day operation in Houston, Beaumont, and Corpus Christi, TX;

– on June 30 in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, 81 others were arrested; foreign-born ones seized were from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Laos;

– on February 25, 28 “illegal workers” were arrested at Yamato Engine Specialists in Bellingham, WA during an earlier Obama administration raid; and

On February 18, the Washington Post reported that “immigration officers had been raiding targets across Prince George’s and Montgomery counties all night long in search of fugitive and criminal immigrants but only netted a handful.”

Earlier, a Baltimore ICE supervisor warned about being well behind “a Washington-mandated annual quota of 1000 arrests per team” and ordered his agents to seize more saying: “I don’t care where you get more arrests, we need more numbers,” and apparently he meant from any street corner, work place, or personal residence. An hour later, 24 Latino men were seized at a nearby 7-Eleven store.

Since established in 2003, Congress appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars to let ICE “bring in tens of thousands of immigrants who have not evaded a deportation order or committed a crime….” Since then, it continued the operation, and, during 2007 and 2008, expanded tactical home entries using militarized agents for illegal warrantless raids without the consent of their owners.

On July 26, the New York Times reported that:

Federal immigration squads with shotguns and automatic weapons (are) forcing their way into citizens’ homes without warrants or lawful consent, shoving open doors and climbing through windows in predawn darkness, pulling innocent people from their beds, holding groggy occupants at gunpoint, (and) taking people away without explanation — after invading the wrong house.

This is a true account of the depths to which the Bush administration sank in its twilight, when immigration enforcement was ramped up to a feverish extreme.

Shamefully, these practices continue under Obama.

A recent New York City Cardozo School of Law Immigration Justice Clinic (IJC) study titled “Constitution on Ice: A Report on Immigration Home Raid Operations” examined the problem in New York, New Jersey, and Long Island from 2006-2008 and included other examples in California, Texas, Massachusetts, Georgia and elsewhere. Researchers documented a nationwide assault on poor immigrant workers, the great majority being Latinos. Many times ICE broke into homes, seizing all occupants “without legal basis.”

IJC discovered a systematic pattern of misconduct “suggest(ing it) may be a widespread national phenomenon reaching beyond” the areas studied. It involves:

• illegal ICE agent entries with no legal authority;
• illegally arresting people randomly, including innocent ones in their bedrooms;
• conducting lawless searches and seizures in violation of the Fourth Amendment; and
• making arrests based on ethnicity, race, appearance, and English proficiency.

These police state tactics have no place in a democracy, yet ICE (on its web site) lists dozens of monthly swat-type raids, often against innocent people and their families in their homes. IJC described them this way:

A typical home raid has “a team of heavily armed ICE agents approaching a private residence in the pre-dawn hours, purportedly seeking an individual believed to have committed some civil immigration violation. Agents, armed only with administrative warrants, which do not grant them legal authority to enter private dwellings, then push their way in when residents answer the door, enter through unlocked doors or windows or, in some cases, physically break into homes.”

All occupants are then seized and interrogated with no legal authority, and often “no target is apprehended.” These aren’t random, standard operating procedures in violation of the Fourth Amendment that protects citizens and non-citizens alike. The Office of Detention and Removal (DRO) conducts them cooperatively with the Office of Investigations (OI), charged with investigating national security threats, immigration violations, and various other suspected crimes.

Home raid operations include:

• the National Fugitive Operations Program (NFOP) using over 100 seven-person Fugitive Operations Teams (FOTs) to target individuals for deportation;
• Operation Cross Check focusing on specific immigrant populations or ones working in certain industries like dangerous, low-paying meat packing operations, unattractive to workers able to find safer, better-paying jobs;
• Operation Community Shield (OCS) against suspected immigrant gang members; and
• Operation Predator against suspected immigrant sex offenders.

Most often, high priority targets aren’t seized. Instead, “collateral arrests of mere (suspected) immigration status violators” are made, and since 2006 the numbers expanded eight-fold because of primarily relying on home raids despite their illegality.

On April 15, 1980 in Payton v. New York, the Supreme Court ruled that “The Fourth Amendment… prohibits the police from making a warrantless and nonconsenual entry into a suspect’s home in order to make a routine (criminal or civil) felony arrest.” Such “entry… is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.”

Searches are also prohibited. Only an adult resident’s consent permits either or both. Administrative warrants have no authority, and police may only interrogate suspects based on “reasonable suspicion” of unlawful activity. “In addition, agents can never rely solely on the racial or ethnic appearance or the limited English proficiency of an individual to justify a seizure.”

DHS’ own regulations cover these restrictions, and ICE’s Detention and Deportation Officer’s Field Manual states: “Warrants of Deportation and Removal are administrative rather than criminal, and do not grant the authority to breach doors. Thus informed consent must be obtained from the occupant of the residence prior to entering.”

Nonetheless, “empirical data drawn from ICE’s own arrest records (obtained by Freedom of Information Act lawsuits) strongly suggest a significant and disturbing pattern of (agency) misconduct during home raids” during which over 1000 people were seized. The evidence is alarming and shows “an unacceptable level of illegal entries” in clear violation of the law. In addition, most arrest records indicate “no basis for the initial seizure” and a disturbing racial profiling pattern against Latinos.

In recent years, defense lawyers increasingly have used suppression motions to prevent illegally obtained evidence being used. Earlier, they were rare in immigration courts, given the Supreme Court’s decision in INS v. Lopez-Mendoza (July 5, 1984) that deportation proceedings are: “civil action(s) to determine a person’s eligibility to remain in this country… not to punish past transgressions. (As such) various protections (including suppression motions don’t generally) apply… in a deportation hearing.”

In immigration courts, they’re not standard procedures. Since 2006, however, they’re more often used because the High Court also “reasoned that the exclusionary rule may (apply) in immigration proceedings for egregious and widespread Fourth Amendment violations” even though prevailing in immigration cases remains challenging, expensive, and time-consuming.

Political and Local Law Enforcement Concerns

ICE often requests operational help from local police who complain that Fourth Amendment violations undermine their central crime suppression mission. Political leaders voice similar concerns. New York state Senator Kirstin Gillibrand said she was “appalled by some of the practices I have heard about,” and New Haven Mayor John DeStefano said, “We won’t stand for the violation of constitutional rights and racial profiling” in reacting to city raids.

In September 2007, the Nassau County Police Department pulled out of an operation it agreed to because of “serious allegations of misconduct and malfeasance.” In this case, no warrants were used, not even administrative ones. ICE fraudulently claimed they weren’t needed because consent to enter all homes was received. In response, Nassau County Police Commissioner, Lawrence Mulvey, said:

“In my 29 years of police work, I have executed countless warrants and have sought to enter countless homes. ICE’s claim that they received 100% compliance with their requests to enter is not credible even under the best of circumstances.”

Evidence Suggests a National Pattern of Constitutional Violations

Since 2006, lawsuits have been filed against ICE “in every region of the country — including two large class actions” and several with multiple defendants — all alleging a similar pattern of misconduct.

They pertain to illegally entering private homes as well as other misconduct charges. In March 2009, Jimmy Slaughter, an Arizona DHS officer, filed suit as well, stating:

“I was at home with my wife when the door bell rang. I opened the door and noticed approximately 7 uniformed ICE agents with vests and guns…. I opened the door to look at the paperwork and five agents entered my house…. The agents then told my wife to stand in the center of ‘OUR’ living room. Not once did anyone say they had a warrant.”

Numerous other instances confirm a national pattern of constitutional violations, including:

• unannounced pre-dawn raids;
• illegal entries into private homes, at times forcibly with drawn guns;
• some with administrative warrants; others with none; often with no probable cause or consent;
• unconstitutional searches and seizures;
• all occupants arrested and interrogated;
• commonplace use of excessive force; and
• at times, individuals prevented from calling attorneys.

New York Immigration Judge Noel Brennan ruled on one case saying:

It is hard for me to fathom a country or a place in which we live in which the Government can barge into one’s house without authority from the Third Branch after a probable cause finding. So for all these reasons I find that what is essentially a warrantless search in the meaning of the Fourth Amendment… was an egregious violation, and therefore I suppress all the evidence and order these proceedings terminated.

ICE’s 2006 Policy Changes

Three new memoranda issued dramatic enforcement changes that led to and facilitated nationwide home raids. Fugitive Operation Team (FOT) annual quotas were raised eight-fold (from 125 to 1000 arrests) and didn’t have to include “criminal aliens.”

Another change permitted “collateral” arrests of suspected civil immigration status violators. These actions “incentivized the pattern of unlawful behavior” and put tremendous pressure on ICE agents to deliver. As a result, home raids increased sharply and illegally. Wrongful arrests became common. Easy targets were chosen, including women and children, often at the expense of real criminals remaining at large.

Immigrants are some of “the most vulnerable of populations in this nation’s legal system.” Most are poor, are unfamiliar with the law, and many speak imperfect or limited English. Often those seized have no lawyers, are kept in detention, and are then deported summarily with no ability to pursue justice. In addition, “traditional civil remedies are (often) ineffective deterrents to unlawful ICE home raids.”

IJC Policy Recommendations

Major constitutional issues are at stake making everyone potentially as vulnerable as immigrants. If authorities can get away with constitutional violations against some, they can do it against anyone. That said, IJC recommends the following:

• home raids should only be for criminal arrests or civil ones in cases posing real risks to national security or for persons with violent criminal records;
• judicial warrants should be required, not administrative ones;
• in all cases, “high-level centralized pre-approval in advance of any home raid operation” should be required;
• if judicial warrants aren’t obtained, residents’ consent should be required after informing them “explicitly and clearly” of their right to refuse before entry is made;
• in all pre-dawn and nighttime raids, judicial warrants should be required;
• in all cases, a high-level supervisor should be involved on site;
• home raids should be videotaped;
• ICE agents should be trained on home raid procedures stressing compliance with the law at all times;
• local law enforcement agencies should be apprised of raids and their results;
• they should not be asked to participate in or facilitate lawless activities;
• emphasis should be on arresting dangerous criminals, not collateral ones to meet quotas;
• arrests should be race, ethnicity, and English proficiency neutral;
• agent misconduct should be assessed and properly addressed;
• a clear public complaint procedure should be established; and
• illegally obtained evidence should be disallowed.

Obama Administration’s Immigrant Detention Policies

On August 7, Washington Post writer Spencer Hsu headlined, “Agency Plans to Improve Oversight of Immigrant Detention” in saying the Obama administration intends to “restructure the nation’s much-criticized immigration detention system by strengthening federal oversight and seeking to standardize conditions in a 32,000-bed system now scattered throughout 350 local jails, state prisons and contract facilities.”

Since 1979, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) has represented, protected, and promoted “the rights of low income immigrants and their family members (and) earned a national reputation as a leading expert on immigration, public benefits, and employment laws affecting immigrants and refugees.”

It calls US immigrant detention centers “A Broken System” in a recent report that presents “the first-ever system-wide look at the federal government’s compliance with its own standards regulating immigrant detention facilities… based on previously unreleased first-hand reports of monitoring inspections.”

Annually, over 320,000 immigrants are incarcerated. They face enormous obstacles challenging their detention, and they’re held under conditions “as bad as or worse than those faced by imprisoned criminals.” They’re kept in three types of facilities:

• ICE owned and operated Service Processing Centers (SPCs);
• privately run Contract Detention Facilities (CDFs); and
• Intergovernmental Service Agreement Facilities (IGSAs) holding two-thirds of detainees — mostly state or county jails plus a small number in US Bureau of Prisons or other facilities.

Since 1992, immigrant detentions have increased from 6,259 to 20,000 in early 2006 to the current 31,000 total — a number that continues to grow due to policies discussed above.

NILC learned that detention standards are poorly regulated and that government efforts to monitor compliance have been “woefully deficient and in need of a major overall.” Testimony obtained from ICE employees revealed that monitoring is understaffed. Before inspections, facilities get at least 30 days notice to fix or cover up problems and abuses in advance. Multiple review levels are used, yet headquarters rarely requires violations to be corrected and often gives facilities “higher overall assessments than the review team’s original ones.”

Systemic problems were also uncovered pertaining to annual review procedures and their inadequately identifying and correcting noncompliance with acceptable standards. ICE plans to let private contractors monitor compliance, yet current failures suggest that new management will let a broken system fester and worsen as the detention population grows and overcrowded facilities get further stretched.

Despite repeated calls for reform, greater transparency, accountability, and better controls, “the government has not taken effective measures to ensure that even its nonbinding standards are met.” It shows an appalling indifference to some of the nation’s most vulnerable people, no match against a system in place to repress them.

Currently, numerous violations are systemic, serious, and numerous. They include:

(1) Visitations by family, lawyers and others

Detainee visitations are severely restricted in violation of clear constitutional and statutory rights, especially to free access to counsel and close family members.

(2) Recreation

Standards require safe recreational time for physical, mental and emotional well-being, including for those with special needs or in segregation. Yet they’re routinely denied or offered at the discretion of facility staff. In addition, programs are way inadequate, and many detainees get limited or no access to outdoor recreation and a chance to interact with others in a natural environment.

(3) Telephone access

Many facilities didn’t comply with standards. Monitoring of confidential legal calls was conducted, and restrictive time limits were imposed. Numerous facilities also prevented detainees from contacting courts, consulates, and getting access to free legal service providers.

(4) Access to Legal Material

Immigration law is so complex that good counsel is essential. Yet it’s expensive and few detainees can afford it. Instead they must rely on pro bono help if available or their own resourcefulness. Standards require facilities to have a law library and an adequate environment to research and prepare legal documents. Yet numerous facilities have none, and the limited information on hand is inadequate and outdated. Still other facilities require specific document requests, even though detainees have no way to know what applies to their case.

(5) Group Presentations on Legal Rights

Facilities are required to let authorized attorneys or representatives, on written request, conduct immigration law and detainee rights presentations. Few do it, and individual counseling is also limited.

(6) Correspondence and Other Mail

Most facilities restrict access, monitor incoming and outgoing mail, and confiscate items at times. As a result, confidential correspondence is compromised. At times, identity documents are destroyed. Detainees miss court deadlines, and they’re intimidated from freely sending and receiving mail.

(7) Administrative and Disciplinary Segregation

It’s supposed to be non-punitive isolation to ensure detainee safety or facility security. Instead it’s done punitively for extended periods for even slight rule infractions. Reports also uncovered severe privilege restrictions, unsanitary conditions, and poor health care protection for segregated detainees and the entire facility population.

(8) Disciplinary Policy

They’re supposed to protect detainees from arbitrary disciplinary actions with rules conspicuously posted so they’re known and can be obeyed. Yet most facilities don’t do it.

(9) Detainee Handbook

Facilities are required to develop and make available a “facility-specific handbook” covering policies, rules, and procedures. However, those having them “presented an inaccurate or incomplete picture of facility policy” because important information was missing, erroneous, incomplete, or inappropriate.

(10) Hold Rooms in Detention Facilities

Physical space requirements and design specifications are supposed to be followed and monitored. Yet poor compliance was found, including inadequate toilet facilities and detainees held there too long in violation of rules requiring a maximum of 12 hours.

(11) Detainee Grievance Procedures

They’re to assure detainees can file grievances with uninvolved officers without fear of retaliation. Widespread noncompliance was found, and most often facilities don’t inform detainees of their rights.

(12) Detainee Transfers

Procedures are to protect their security in transit and make a traumatic experience easier, especially when to locations remote from their families. Transfers also interfere with attorney-client relations and harm constitutionally protected due process rights.

(13) Funds and Personal Property

Rules are supposed to safeguard detainees’ money and personal property with written procedures for receiving, processing, storing, and returning them. Evidence showed instances of theft, forfeiture of funds and property, and failure to conduct audits to assure none of this would happen.

(14) Admission and Release

Official procedures protect the health, safety, and welfare of detainees. Most facilities don’t do it, including providing proper medical care and personal hygiene considerations from admission to the time of release.

NILC concluded that “the nation’s immigrant detention system is broken to its core (and) reveals pervasive and extreme violations of the government’s own detention standards as well as fundamental violations of basic human rights and notions of dignity.”

On August 6, the Obama administration announced remedial plans amounting only to a cosmetic fix for a dysfunction system. A day ahead, the New York Times headlined “US to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants” and called the effort “an ambitious plan… to overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains immigration violators, trying to transform it (into) a ‘truly civil detention system.’ ”

According to ICE Assistant Secretary, John Morton, ICE will create an Office of Detention Policy and Planning (ODPP) effective immediately. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said: “This change marks an important step in our ongoing efforts to enforce immigration laws smartly and effectively. We are improving detention center management to prioritize health, safety and uniformity among our facilities while ensuring security, efficiency and fiscal responsibility.”

What’s planned, in fact, is more centralized control and better ways to track, process, incarcerate, and/or deport growing numbers of undocumented immigrants — not treat them humanely as international law and DHS/ICE regulations stipulate.

The Obama administration has expanded and intensified the same harsh Bush administration policies, and ICE’s August 6 announcement signifies nothing more than a cosmetic repackaging of a broken system.

In May, the Obama administration asked Congress for a 30% funding increase to expand the controversial Bush administration Secure Communities program (begun in December 2007) to identify, arrest, incarcerate, and deport undocumented immigrants, mostly Latinos from Mexico and Central America.

In declaring “zero tolerance” for undocumented immigrants, he’ll also keep building the $8 billion virtual border fence, planned for hundreds of miles, and will continue the same harsh Bush administration policies.

On August 4, the Immigrant Solidarity Nework said that despite early pledges that he’d moderate them, Obama “is pursuing an aggressive strategy for an illegal-immigration crackdown that relies significantly on programs started by his predecessor.”

They call for “no-nonsense immigration enforcement” followed later in the year or early next year by immigration legislation to create a new bracero program, among other harsh measures, that immigrant rights group oppose. They also include extensive employee paperwork audits, an expanded (and much criticized) program to verify worker immigration status, and greater cooperation between federal and local authorities while rejecting proposals for legally binding rules regarding detention center conditions. Non-binding Bush administration ones still followed hold no one accountable and let detainees be treated harshly under a system described above.

In response to Obama’s decision, the National Lawyers Guild’s Paromita Shah, associate director of its National Immigration Project, said the government is “disregard(ing) the plight of the hundreds of thousands of immigration detainees” by continuing a dysfunctional system. DHS “has demonstrated a disturbing commitment to policies that have cost dozens of lives” and shows an appalling indifference to the fate of defenseless people.

Highlighting the plight of immigrants, the National Immigrant Justice Center’s Mary McCarthy described the current detention system as a “human rights nightmare. The past administration created this, and now we need to dismantle it.” Instead, Obama officials plan to make a “broken system” worse, then harden it with discriminatory immigration reform legislation later in the year. According to University of Houston immigration law Professor Michael Olivas, “We literally have the worst of all worlds,” and nothing is being planned to improve it.

Lewis said: “It is particularly regrettable that he [Livingstone] learned the wrong lessons from history by handing a propaganda coup to the leader of a terrorist organisation. Hamas has not only breached international law by firing rockets at civilian populations in Israel but continues to violate the human rights of Palestinians in Gaza”.

Perhaps they aren’t paying attention at the Foreign Office. The only people breaching international law in the Holy Land and violating the rights of Palestinians are the lawless Israelis.

As the MP for Bury South, near Manchester, and a former vice-chairman of Labour Friends of Israel, Lewis voted enthusiastically for the Iraq war and against any investigation. In January, with the stench of death and destruction caused by Israel’s blitzkrieg on Gaza still in the world’s nostrils, he told a rally in Manchester: “This community stands shoulder to shoulder with the people of Israel in the good and the bad times. We do not apply double standards to Israel and the challenges that she faces. It’s the first duty of any government in any democracy to protect the security of its citizens. No government in a democracy would survive if it allowed rockets to be fired from a neighbouring territory on to its civilian population and did nothing in response.”

He told the crowd that those who fired rockets “are no different to the terrorists who created murderous carnage in London on 7/7.”

Even by the standards of today’s political class, it is pretty stupid to pledge Manchester’s support to a vicious, racist regime like Israel, and claim equivalence between the perpetrators of the London bombings and a poorly armed resistance movement desperately trying to defend its 1.5 million citizens under blockade and daily bombardment by an illegal occupier.

In July Lewis told the House of Commons: “Israel is a close ally of the UK and we have regular warm and productive exchanges at all levels.” Warm, no doubt, with the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) and thousands more maimed and wounded.

Lewis is also chief executive of the Manchester Jewish Federation and a trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust. Along with Miliband, he is the unfortunate face of British diplomacy in the Middle East.

A victory for truth and common sense

Lewis claims Livingstone’s conversation with Meshaal, published in the New Statesman, was a propaganda coup for Hamas. Actually the interview was a victory for truth and common sense. The Hamas chief was able to speak openly and, for once, be heard in the British media.

One of the functions of a Zionist stooge is to condemn remarks by anyone they brand a terrorist or belonging to a terrorist organisation. But nobody buys that terrorist nonsense any more. Few people in the UK, apart from Israel’s hirelings, regard Hamas or Meshaal as terrorists. The general public have come to realise that the racist regime in Tel Aviv, of which Lewis is a devoted fan, tops the terror league.

Meshaal made it clear in the interview that Hamas, since it was formed 22 years ago, has confined its military operations to occupied Palestine. He explained the conflict simply and concisely. “Our struggle against the Israelis is not because they are Jewish, but because they invaded our homeland and dispossessed us. We do not accept that because the Jews were once persecuted in Europe they have the right to take our land and throw us out.

“The injustices suffered by the Jews in Europe were horrible and criminal, but were not perpetrated by the Palestinians or the Arabs or the Muslims. So, why should we be punished for the sins of others or be made to pay for their crimes?”

Asked how many elected representatives of Hamas were locked up in Israeli prisons, he replied that around 4,000 members were in Israeli detention out of a total of 12,000 Palestinian captives. “These include scores of ministers and parliamentarians (Palestinian Legislative Council members). Around ten have recently been released, but about 40 PLC members remain in detention. Some have been given sentences, but many are held in what the Israelis call administrative detention. The only crime these people are accused of is their association with Hamas’s parliamentary group.”

Will no-one offer a truce that lifts the blockade and opens the crossings?

Livingstone asked how the blockade of Gaza could be lifted. “The rule of international law must be respected,” replied Meshaal. “The basic human rights of the Palestinians and their right to live in dignity and free from persecution would have to be acknowledged. There has to be an international will to serve justice and uphold the basic principles of international human rights law. The international community would have to free itself from the shackles of Israeli pressure, speak the truth and act accordingly.”

Not a problem for honourable men, surely. But honour is not to be found among those who are bought and paid for.

What was the true cause of the bombing and invasion of Gaza, Livingstone wanted to know. Meshaal referred to the truce with Israel from 19 June to 19 December 2008. The deal entailed a bilateral ceasefire, lifting the blockade and opening the crossings. Hamas observed the ceasefire while Israel only partially did so and then resumed hostilities. “Throughout that period, Israel maintained the siege and only intermittently opened some of the crossings, allowing no more than 10 per cent of the basic needs of the Gazan population to get through.”

Israel blew any chance of renewing the truce by deliberately and repeatedly violating it.

As soon as Hamas is offered a truce that lifts the blockade and opens the crossings, said Meshaal, they will respond positively. So far, no one had made such an offer. Meanwhile the blockade amounted to “a declaration of war that warrants self-defence”.

Livingstone put it to him that Hamas’s refusal to recognise Israel was an insurmountable obstacle to peace. “Israel does not recognise the rights of the Palestinian people,” came the reply, “yet this is not raised as an obstacle to Israel being internationally recognised nor to it being allowed to take part in talks.” He pointed out that both Arafat and Abbas recognised Israel but it hadn’t produced peace dividends. “Israel concedes only under pressure.” In the absence of any tangible pressure by the international community, there could be no settlement.

Challenged to clarify whether Hamas wished to establish an Islamic state in Palestine, Meshaal replied that their priority as a national liberation movement was to end the Israeli occupation of their homeland. “Once our people are free in their land and enjoy the right to self-determination, they alone have the final say on what system of governance they wish to live under. It is our firm belief that Islam cannot be imposed on the people.” However, Hamas would campaign for an Islamic agenda as part of the democratic process.

Implementing international law and human rights is the only solution

Does anyone seriously have a problem with the interview or the fact that it took place? It contains nothing to justify hysterical outbursts from the likes of Lewis. The exchanges showed Meshaal to be articulate and moderate in his language. But this doesn’t fit with the demonized picture carefully painted by Zionist propagandists, and it is easy to see why Israel and its chums wish to keep him isolated and muzzled.

As Meshaal pointed out, the conflict can only be resolved by implementing international law and the human rights charter, and putting pressure on Israel. Deep down, everyone knows that. But such a reminder is unwelcome because it requires action of the kind that would embarrass the major powers, whose leaders foolishly pledged undying loyalty to the Zionist entity and have turned a blind eye to its criminal behaviour for 60 years.

The spectacle of the US House of Representatives voting 404 to 1 to condemn the Palestinians’ makeshift rocket attacks while saying nothing about Israel’s assassinations, ethnic cleansing and military assaults with the most modern weapons, killing women and children in their hundreds, gave us a glimpse of what passes for democracy in the ‘Land of the Free’.

Netanyhu is now trumpeting louder than ever his determination to reject all codes of civilised conduct and continue the crime spree, believing he can do so with impunity. He pushes his luck too far. Obama may cave in but for decency’s sake, and for justice and reason, it is time the rest of us consigned that ridiculous pledge by the west to the wastepaper basket.

Obama meets Netanyahu and Abbas today. Let’s hope he remembers what the man said about implementing international law and upholding human rights. The idea is for Obama to free himself from Israeli pressure and turn the screws on Netanyahu, not the other way round. The idea is to show that there are serious consequences for lawlessness.