Dissident Voice » Prejudice

Fort Hood Tragedy Sparks Islamophobic Response

Stephen Lendman — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:59:33 +0000

On November 5, The New Times headlined, “Mass Shooting at Fort Hood, saying:

the Army confirms that the gunman (thought to be killed) was Army Major Malik Nadal Hasan. Reports said 12 were dead (raised to 13, including one civilian) and 31 others wounded from an incident at the base Readiness Processing Center where troops prepare for deployment. Two other soldiers were detained as suspects. Another was believed at large. The shooting began about 1:30PM after which Fort Hood was locked down.

CNN reported over 100 rounds fired. Some military retirees were skeptical, calling it bogus. An unidentified Army captain said it’s impossible for a non-combatant like Hasan to fire that much with two pistols without being subdued. He’d have had to reload giving someone a chance to do it. Others said the same thing.

Sergeant Donald Buswell called the official story illegitimate saying a room full of combat veterans wouldn’t let one shooter do this kind of damage. “Multiple shooters is the only plausible scenario. This sounds like Major Hasan has been used, and perhaps is a patsy.” Vietnam veteran Michael Gaddy said the Army’s version doesn’t compute. “People on the ground have told me cell phone towers were jammed to prevent unauthorized dissemination of information after the shooting.”

Citizens for Legitimate Government (legitgov.org) said “Hasan’s neighbors, medical trainers, colleagues, friends, cousin, uncle, grandfather – even the store owner where he bought his food — all… praise(d his) temperament. This appears to be a psy-ops, six ways to Sunday.” His grandfather called the act “impossible. He is a doctor and loves the US. America made him what he is.”

Early November 5, the day of the incident, “he showed no signs of worry or stress when he stopped at (a) 7-Eleven for his daily breakfast of hash browns, said Jeannie Strickland, the store’s manager… (there was) nothing weird, nothing out of the ordinary.”

The FBI and Pentagon investigated alleged contacts he had with a “Yemen-based militant” over the past year after intelligence agencies reported emails he exchanged with imam Anwar al-Awlaki, known for his anti-American teachings. Al-Awlaki was once spiritual leader at the suburban Virginia mosque where Hasan worshipped. The communications suggested nothing out of the ordinary. Yet Charles Allen, former Bush administration Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis, described Al-Awlaki (with no proof) as an “al-Qaeda supporter..who targets US Muslims with radical online lectures encouraging terrorist attacks from his new home in Yemen.

Members of two Joint Terrorism Task Forces contacted Hasan’s superiors, reviewed his military records and computer for suspicious activity and found nothing. Yet Senator Joe Lieberman told Fox News (Sunday, November 8) that “strong warning signs” showed he was an “Islamic extremist,” and two officials said on ABC News that intelligence authorities knew he tried to contact suspected al Qaeda members. On November 11, Senator John McCain called the tragedy an “act of terror.”

Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R. MI ranking House Intelligence Committee member) plans an investigation on “homegrown Jihadism.” He sent a preservation order to the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DNI chiefs directing them to save relevant documents for his committee’s review.

A November 7 UK Telegraph report linked Hasan to three 9/11 “hijackers” because Al-Awlaki was their “spiritual advisor.” The FBI will now check if he met them. Telegraph writers Philip Sherwell and Alex Spillius said “the army missed an increasing number of red flags that Hasan was a troubled and brooding individual within its ranks.” It quoted an unnamed source warning military officials that he was a “ticking time bomb” after he allegedly defended suicide bombers, expressed anti-Jewish sentiments, and claimed the “war on terror” is a war against Islam. So do many others.

ABC News said Hasan “wanted out of the Army after being constantly harassed by others in the military and was called a ‘camel jockey,’ his family said. As (he) was about to be deployed to (Afghanistan), he was suffering from some of the same stresses that he was trained as an Army psychiatrist to treat.” As a result, he hired a lawyer to help him get out of the Army.

A London Guardian article cited base commander, Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, saying Hasan shouted “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) before shooting. One of his colleagues, Col. Steven Braverman, said he did his job well. There were no signs of trouble. “We had no problems with his job performance while he was working with us.” But he was “mortified by the idea of” deploying to Afghanistan, according to his cousin Nader. “He had people telling him on a daily basis (about) the horrors they saw over there.”

After Eighteen Years in the US, No Due Process, No Judicial Review, Just Deportation

Tanya Golash-Boza — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:01:11 +0000

Vern entered the United States in 1991 and applied for political asylum. He was issued a work permit as his case was being processed, and began to work in a frozen food processing plant in Ohio. He met a Honduran woman, Maria, also applying for political asylum, and they began to date. Years went by, and each year, they received work permits that allowed them to continue working. Hopeful their cases would eventually be resolved, Vern and Maria married, and had their first child in 1996.

In 1998, Vern received a notice that he should leave the United States — his asylum application had been denied. Vern was devastated — he had established a life in the US, and had few ties to Guatemala. He decided to stay, and hope that his wife’s application would be approved, and that she could apply for him to legalize his status. They had another child, and continued to make their lives in Ohio. Vern rose up the ranks in the food processing plant, eventually becoming supervisor. Maria also worked there, but she worked on the line, earning less money than Vern.

Vern and his wife had a comfortable life in the US, but Vern lived in fear that immigration agents would come for him. To avoid this, he stayed out of trouble. He did everything he could to avoid problems with the police; he never drank, avoided making traffic violations, and abided by the laws at all times. He learned English, took his kids on outings every weekend, and tried to blend in as much as possible.

It wasn’t enough. One Sunday morning, two ICE agents came to Vern’s house and arrested him in front of his children — aged 12 and 9. The immigration agents were part of a Fugitive Operation Team — designed to find “fugitive aliens” — people like Vern who had ignored their deportation orders. Vern was put into detention, and, eight days later, he was in Guatemala, the country he had left eighteen years before.

Vern was never given the opportunity to explain to a judge that he had ignored his deportation order because he had already formed a family in the US, that his family depended on him to meet their daily needs, that he had worked at the same job for sixteen years, that he had never had any trouble with the law, that his two children are Americans, or that his wife was very close to attaining legal status, and thus to ensuring his own legal status. Vern had no opportunity to explain anything. He had sought entry to the United States, and had been denied admission. In one reading of the law, despite his years in the US, the fact that he entered illegally means that he never actually entered the US. As an extraterritorial subject, Vern was not afforded the Constitutional protections and due process we presume to be part of the US legal system.

Vern, like most non-citizens who face deportation, had no right to judicial review of his case. If a person entered the country illegally, he is considered to be seeking entry to the US, and not to be a person physically present in the US. As a person seeking entry, he is not entitled to Constitutional protections and judicial review in immigration proceedings. The right of the United States to deny due process to people seeking entry has merit insofar as it makes sense to avoid burdening the court systems and to protect the sovereignty of the US. However, it makes little sense to refer to a person as seeking entry when he has lived in the US for over two decades, is married to a US citizen, has US citizen children, and has few if any ties to any other country. To deny that person judicial review of his deportation order is to ignore the notions of due process and Constitutional protections that are so important to the United States. It also ignores his human right to form a family and to be with his family.

Fort Hood & the Perversion of Language: “The Shooter Was a Soldier”

Jason Adams — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:02:47 +0000

… now this may sound convoluted, but not if one tracks the cultural response of hostility from every passionate point of view when a leadership itself is so prone to unjustifiable violence and un-American diminishment of the constitution. What do you think is going to happen? What do you think the American hopeless will do…? We better consider what the fundamentalist within will put on our table…

This quote is from Sean Penn speaking last August in Denver, CO at a rally to open the presidential debates to “third parties” and independent candidates. This excerpt was part of Penn’s attempt at foreshadowing how violence could become the last line of defense against a corrupt government and debased political process that is devoid of substantive democratic debate and participation.

“Shooter”

Last Thursday afternoon at the initial press conference regarding the Fort Hood shooting, it would take General Cole over a minute – and a check of his notes — to quickly and begrudgingly clarify that “the shooter was a soldier”. To be fair, this was probably a difficult and embarrassing admission for the General; indeed, the reservation, disbelief, and shock that embodied the General’s speech and demeanor during this press conference smacked of genuine surprise and exigent circumstances as opposed to premeditated, administrative misdirection. Linguist John McWhorter has noted that the pervasive and grammatically incorrect use of the term “troops” to identify individual soldiers killed or sent to war is impersonal and demeaning; additionally, he states that “using a name for soldiers that has no singular form grants us a certain cozy distance from the grievous reality of war”. Nidal Hasan as “shooter”, and not the more accurate, descriptive, and clear “soldier”, further decouples the actions of the Major from the appropriate military context and pushes it into the realm of inexplicable civilian criminality.

Shock

The real shock of last Thursday’s events is that they were much of a shock at all. There was the justifiable visceral shock of individuals having to emotionally internalize and absorb this act of brutal violence and murder; on the other hand, there was a larger, needless, abhorrent, and dishonest intellectual shock and morally-bankrupt flight to fantasy used by individual actors within our reified mainstream media to explain the day’s events. This faux shock took the form of prejudiced, irresponsible, and sadistic language, images, and fabrications designed to cover-up our society’s colossal failures of military aggression (i.e., global war on terrorism), soldier care and protection, and American democracy as a whole. One General using the term “shooter” to allay the cognitive dissonance associated with his soldier’s behavior is perhaps understandable. The corporate-crafted-elite-friendly news coverage provided a nefarious distraction from the more obvious and likely motives, context, and factual circumstances of the event. The media projected the collective guilt and ramifications of this nation’s larger war ethos and bloodlust onto this “shooter” in an attempt to further ameliorate the discontent of the citizenry brought on by a duplicitous permanent war economy.

The Media

Last Thursday’s media spectacle unfolded as a disgusting montage of avoidance and denial. Prior to General Cole’s initial address to the media, TV news outlets focused on the more improbable and far-fetched scenario that outside actors penetrated the base to carry out an attack — stories and questions abound about lax and inadequate security measures, permeable gates, etc. The focus was traditional “terrorists”, like the ones we’re supposedly fighting overseas, or homegrown “domestic terrorists”. Though not impossible causes, given the type, breadth, and scope of operations of Fort Hood (soldier returning and debarking centers, psychological services, etc.), the media conveniently discounted the likely scenario that a soldier(s) instigated the attacks and instead focused on terrorist perpetrators working from the outside-in. Even after the General’s announcement that this was soldier-on-soldier violence, the language of the media did not embrace the basic facts — we continued to see “suspect”, “shooter”, the very convenient and oft-used “lone gunman”, and more problematic “Muslim” splash across our screens. Hasan was no longer a soldier — perhaps a justified, if not trite and childish redaction of a murderer’s factual stature – but now was part of a possible “sleeper cell” or domestic terrorist conspiracy. No evidence abound to substantiate these theories, but reiterating the factual scenario that this was an apparently stable, accomplished, and respected American soldier turned murderer had to be avoided — it begged the larger questions and challenged America’s narcissistic mores. Any factual and empirical analysis of context, one that could actually occur in the absence of the more tactical facts of that day, was avoided in deference to further innuendo and speculation. The potential spectacle of terrorism would be much more useful to state-corporate power than a humiliating analysis of America’s global military folly coming home to roost with devastating consequences.

The real story was not broached in deference to the morbid advertisement of the body count, a sadistic drive to understand the killer’s exact path through the buildings, how he managed to fire so many rounds, trite detail about where his handguns originated from, etc. The true thrust of the story should have been that the act was committed by a soldier, and why? Predictably, the only suitable means for the media to address this fact was not on the public policy level, but exclusively on the private level of neoliberal tenets: personal responsibility and individual pathology: What, literally, was wrong with Hasan’s brain? What about his personal life and religion? Why didn’t he have a wife? Why did he require psychological counseling? Did he not relate well to others? Was he exposed to interpersonal discrimination because he was a Muslim? Etc.

The media conveniently ignored the prescient questions and relevant policy issues that could have been informed by military experience and empirical fact. A more appropriate and probative line of questioning and investigation might have gone as follows: What is the prevalence of violence, murder, and/or other antisocial/self-destructive behavior among soldiers and veterans to our recent wars? Under what conditions and why have similar acts occurred — how have we addressed them? What drives other soldiers to resist deployment? What is fueling the soldiers’ and veterans’ record levels of domestic abuse, divorce, suicide, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty, bankruptcy, homelessness etc? What do the difficulties of our enlisted soldiers and veterans tell us about our war efforts? What ramifications of our wars could inspire such violent behavior? Does military violence overseas beget violence at home — how? Do civilian casualties of war inspire soldiers and others to commit crimes? Are soldiers empowered with a constructive way to stop civilian casualties within their work scope and operating procedures? Are objecting soldiers encouraged to leave active duty? Can soldiers object or opt-out of war and still maintain their military livelihood? Are soldiers helpless, powerless, disempowered, and driven to violence because they have no means to prevent their duplicity in unjust wars? Are foreign soldiers and civilians respected by our military? Are war crimes prosecuted adequately? Are appropriate reparations consistently granted to innocent civilians affected by our wars? Can soldiers be heard and bring charges against military personnel without retribution? Are military strategies coherent, defensive in nature, and do they have a moral and ethical foundation? Is military strategy and justification understood along the chain of command — is soldier input considered and valued? Is conscientious objector status too onerous? The military knows the wars are unpopular at home, abroad, and with soldiers — why weren’t they prepared? Shouldn’t this act have been expected? What does this say about our war efforts? Some of these questions seem naive, even after the killings, given the nature of the military and our pernicious appetite for invading; however, if they were seriously considered in the past, maybe we wouldn’t be counting the dead at Fort Hood.

The vile and cruel nature of the media was further evidenced by the impugning of Hasan’s reported history of psychological counseling. A simple sound bite in the news let viewers know what the proper cultural attitude should be: seeking psychological help is a sign of weakness; worst yet, by implication, it is a precursor to murderous rage. Major Hasan became a double-whammy of weakness: not only did he seek psychological counseling, but he inflicted it on other soldiers and thereby facilitated the weakness and stigmatization of his fellow soldiers. The hypocrisy of this media teaching is overwhelming. How many of the media-dubbed “heroes” killed by Hasan had sought psychological counseling due to their exposure to warfare? This malignant labeling by the media is akin to calling a soldier who seeks mental health support a “ticking time bomb” or “sleeper cell agent”. More importantly, it devalued the ongoing importance of mental health services in the military and diminished the level of cultural caring for those who suffer psychologically.

Similar correlations (i.e., not causality) were mangled in a prejudiced attempt to impugn Muslims. When soldier-on-soldier violence is between Caucasian parties of strong Christian faith, we don’t start investigating the perpetrator’s church and reverend as a source of motive. America’s imperialist wars disproportionately affect followers of Islam. It is common sense that many Muslims are resistors to our empire; however, the implication by the media that there is something inherent to being a Muslim that drives anti-American and antiwar sentiment is false. This assertion is only useful in a propaganda system designed to demean and devalue our enemies, to make those affected by aggression more disposable and invisible, and divert attention from the human toll of state terrorism.

The inconvenient truth is the deplorable act committed by Major Hasan cannot be a shock because we knew it was coming; in fact, it was foreseeable, unavoidable, and inevitable to a moral certitude. It takes no leap of imagination to understand this act as a predictable outcome of criminal wars of aggression, torture, and indifference to the slaughter and displacement of foreign peoples under the guise of freedom, democracy, and the market. The tragedy at Fort Hood represents a failure of the ubiquitous rotten soul shared by our major political parties — a soul that throws taxpayer capital and the weight of corporate campaign contributions behind the projection of American power and empire. Contrary to the current state of our nation’s maniacal foreign policy denial, the “liberated” foreign recipients of American interventionism are not disposable or invisible — Major Hasan’s mass murder was a simple violent inversion of our military expansionism. Last Thursday, in the absence of the more or less trivial, private, and logistical facts surrounding Major Hasan’s actions, our country’s blatant criminal indifference to the ramifications of expansive foreign policy is what truly informed the events of the day. If we disregard the media delving further into the sadistic and titillating spectacle of details — along with its use of discriminatory deflection masquerading as informed speculation — our focus could have been narrowed to the scant but significant known facts at the time: an apparently successful and otherwise stable American soldier had turned on his fellow soldiers in cold blood. The context in which to evaluate such an act is painfully obvious, empirical support abounds, and analogous events involving soldiers were readily available to use as a lens to understand Major Hasan’s actions. They were all discarded because of their common thread: what they tell us about war and how it affects people.

Scribd

The mangling of language surrounding Hasan was best evidenced by the yet unproven attribution of a Scribd comment to him regarding suicide bombings. Whether Hasan is the author is beside the point because the quote was used in a very real way by the media as disinformation, propaganda, and distraction. The quote was never addressed or explained in its full context; additionally, selective text and interpretation of the full post was leveraged by the media to create a false impression of equivalency. Omissions played on our nation’s larger cultural pedagogy of fear. Here is text of the full post:

NidalHasan scribbled: There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that “IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE” and Allah (SWT) knows best.

What is immediately clear is that this is not in any sense a direct, first person equivocation of suicide bombing with a soldier sacrificing his own life to save his comrades. This is clearly a man using metaphor and real life examples to explain another man’s writing and interpretation of Islam relative to suicide and what are contemporaneously called suicide bombers. At any rate, this is hardly a direct endorsement of suicide bombing; additionally, neither example used in the post reference the killing of civilians.

Let’s take what the media intended to construe after they mangled, circumscribed, quoted out of context, and generally reshaped the meaning of this post: an American soldier throwing oneself on a grenade to save fellow soldiers is equivalent to a suicide bomber. We all know “suicide bomber” in western-corporate-media parlance means killing civilians. The media’s assertion is obviously true: throwing oneself on a grenade to save your fellow soldiers is in no way morally equivalent to preemptively killing civilians.

However, consider the following quote given that the civilian “kill ratio” of American drone bombings inside Pakistan have been reported by the Brookings Institution to be 90% (9 civilians are killed for every 1 “terrorist”) and perhaps much higher according to other sources:

      They tellin’ you to never worry about the future
      They tellin’ you to never worry about the torture
      They tellin’ you that you’ll never see the horror
      Spend it all today and we will bill you tomorrow
      Three piece suits and bank accounts in Bahamas
      Wall Street crime will never send you to the slammer
      Tell all the children in the arms of their mammas
      The F-15 is a homicide bomber

– “Yell Fire!,” Michael Franti & Spearhead, 2006

So, how is our “homicide bomber” different from Hasan’s purportedly righteous suicide bomber? They aren’t — they are both the same: morally repugnant and based on the vacuous logic of preventive killing. This kind of preemptive, criminal murder is sanctioned and largely unquestioned US policy — the kind committed by our enemies is condemned. Moral equivocations that do not justify American empire are outside the spectrum of what is considered polite, acceptable political discourse. Perhaps our version is just more cowardly, as the bomber is not eviscerated in the cause and doesn’t become a martyr. Our bomber sits behind a computer, maybe flies a plane hopped-up on amphetamines, and is always in some manner detached enough (physically and psychically) from the act to confer continued legitimacy on the act’s criminal planners. The inevitable “collateral damage”, as it is repeated over time, is not aptly designated as state terrorism — it becomes an Orwellian “accident”. This is the policy of our President; a man Libertarian Christopher Dowd has called a “criminal sociopath” for labeling our misadventures in Iraq as an “extraordinary achievement”, among other things. Obama is the “Teflon Don” behind the uniquely American version of the suicide bomber: he is instant judge, jury, and executioner. He is a recidivist homicide bomber who will remain legally infallible until the civic imagination and courage of his countrymen put an end to his run.

Leadership

A cogent and fact-based analysis of the effects of unjust war on the health and attitudes of soldiers was lost on our “leadership” as well. It is indeed shocking to have to digest the mind-numbing hypocrisy of a President decrying “a horrific outburst of violence”, while he is on the verge of sending tens of thousands more “troops” to a bottomless pit of US-sponsored death and despair in the Middle East. Obama’s impending “surge” of violence and manpower in his “war of necessity” is of course acceptable when conducted by our corporate-imperial state. The results of this brand of leadership are as predictable as the events of last Thursday: more acts of criminal violence justified as legitimate resistance by the powerless, more budding jihadists overseas, and hundreds of thousands more innocent women and children slaughtered on foreign soil. Shocking is the deviousness of a leader willing to minimize the ramifications of bankrupt imperial hubris — his logic of preventive war and empire, through its own weight and internal logic, collapsing inward and consuming itself along with the victims at Fort Hood.

Our leaders are well aware of the bubbling undercurrent of rage and resistance regarding our unjust wars and the disproportionate-to-rank physical, mental, and moral toll it places on soldiers; they know all the reasons for the discontent of their “troops”; and they know that soldiers are disempowered, discouraged, punished, and stigmatized for speaking-out or seeking help. In doing absolutely nothing of significance to rein in our criminal wars, they are responsible to forestall the foreseeable violence that will be enlisted by soldiers who feels powerless, overwhelmed, and boxed-in, a la Major Hasan. They abrogated this responsibility and have yet to offer anything but puffery and palliative solutions when it comes to soldier discontent and preventing inevitable soldier-on-soldier violence.

Our President, oft dubbed a brilliant orator, didn’t manage to mention soldier-on-soldier violence during his initial remarks last Thursday at a Tribal Nations Conference. Instead, he opened with several minutes of inane rambling that included a mislabeled “shout out” to “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow before vaguely addressing the situation at Fort Hood (Crow was award the civilian Medal of Freedom). Obama’s performance was eerily reminiscent of George Bush Jr.’s Booker Elementary fiasco on the morning of 9/11.

The President’s weekly radio address on Saturday was another dilatory exercise that reeked of distraction: Hasan, not mentioned directly, remained a “shooter”. Obama let us know that any painful exploration and reexamination of the unintended consequences of our war machine was off-the-table — preemptively. Obama divined: “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.” No — but we are obligated to explore all causes, including the ones that lie beyond the waters-edge of personal responsibility, deviance, and unintelligible rage and murder. We also can’t brush aside the unpleasant, blatant, and searing facts staring us in the face — the ones that blind us from reality and conveniently remain outside the acceptable spectrum of American political discourse.

The suicidal and Pyrrhic forces unleashed as a result of 9/11 need to be addressed in the light of day, as part of a broader, civic self-examination of our nation. This seems to be a moral and ethical exploration that Obama is unwilling or incapable of leading. Obama’s real constituents, like campaign benefactor turned government-sponsored enterprise Morgan Stanley, announced in a report published that day after his election that “…Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend…” Indeed, the opportunity costs of the daily outbursts of violence, suffered by citizens of all corners of the globe where US forces are deployed, could never be enumerated by a financial-sector sycophant such as Obama. Fort Hood is just another “no peace dividend” event to Barack. Torture, rendition, indefinite detention, criminal indifference to the suffering of civilians overseas — all these are a slap in the face to soldiers. Sending soldiers to unjust wars and letting them reap the whirlwind of consequences is an abrogation of leadership. Kowtowing to corporate leaches whose single-minded pursuit of profits, no matter the cost to the earth and mankind, does not instill hope. Change is accomplished by addressing the real twin deficits of our supposedly participatory democracy: corporate power and empire.

The second casualty of war: imagination

The events at Fort Hood were a massive security breakdown, not on scale but of type with 9/11; in fact, it was a double failure that we couldn’t protect the soldiers from harm at home, nor ensure the mental “security” of the very people entrusted to maintain the psychological well-being of soldiers. This fact represents a complete abject failure of military and civilian leadership at the highest levels: they know the havoc and despair we (as an imperialist nation) are heaping-on foreigners overseas; they know we are indiscriminately killing, displacing, or impoverishing millions in the Middle East; they know that our “accidents” and apologies do not justify criminal murder and fail to meet the standards of international law; they know that US military might is destroying any real hope and opportunities for change available to generations of Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani youth; they know that we are torturing, rendering, and denying basic human rights; they know we treat global justice and the sovereignty of nations with scorn; they know all these things — but most importantly — they know we know. Only arrogant denial and lack of caring on behalf of our leaders explain this security failure; that is the shock. This double failure of security merely informs a larger double failure and interdependency of our foreign and domestic policies: our imperial devastation overseas (killing civilians, spurring more budding jihadist, etc.) can only be driven by domestic degradation (police states, inadequate care for soldiers and veterans, civic disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, etc.)

We, as a society, can’t continue to pervert language and sideline the public-private linkages that drive the human cost of war to incalculable levels. We can’t continue to deny Hasan is an American Soldier, a Major, and our native son, just because he turned against our “wars of necessity”. He chose a deplorable and bankrupt path that mimics his own country’s policy of preventive executions and homicide bombings. Apparently we can’t handle this truth; it has to be terrorism and radical Islam; we’re unable to pray for his soul or our own. We can’t imagine the asymmetrical moral horror and evil that is our “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq, our continuously rebranded “Af/Pak” policy, and all our other malevolent “overseas contingency operations”. We can’t continue to avert our eyes from the private suffering of human beings due to these public policy failures.

Much needed and accessible democratic outlets don’t seem to exist in Obama’s corporatized worldview. As Chris Hedges has noted, moral autonomy and political agency are under attack; the results of which are docility and pacification, but also bouts of unfocused, unproductive, and abnormal rage, violence and desperation. Our morbid government-corporate alliance can’t continue to kill with impunity overseas, unleash a police state on the homeland, enslave the majority of Americans to neoliberal scraps from the economic table, and feign shock when homegrown resistance occurs in a radicalized form. Our leaders can’t ignore sane advice and expect peace — consider the following from a Rand Corporation report published last year titled “How Terrorist Groups End — Lessons for Countering al Qaida”:

Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups… and military force led to the end of terrorist groups in 7 percent of the cases… The evidence by 2008 suggested that the U.S. strategy was not successful in undermining al Qa’ida’s capabilities… Al Qa’ida has been involved in more terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001, than it was during its prior history.

In terms of recommendations, here is some of the language:

First, policing and intelligence should be the backbone of U.S. efforts… This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all. The U.S. military can play a critical role in building indigenous capacity but should generally resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment.

As far as the thrust of last Thursday’s events, Nidal Hasan was a soldier who turned on his comrades with whom he spent years trying to ensure their psychological wellbeing given the theaters of war in which they operated. Why? Perhaps time will tell, but the private travails and motives of Hasan can’t be decoupled from the larger public policy issues and context that inform his actions.

Our myopic cultural obsession with terrorism forestalls antiwar debate and consideration of the trauma of war; it blinds us from recognizing that peace should be considered, weighed, and debated as an alternative. Peace has become devoid of value, delegitimized, and undeserving of human caring and championing. It has been stripped of cultural fit in a society constantly under the siege of fear; it has lost credibility in the neoliberal-friendly “emergency time” posited by Henry Giroux. Collectively, citizens must find a way to discuss Major Hasan’s action not only as a possible stress response, but as a misguided antiwar statement of a powerless man, in a hallowed-out democracy, that is increasingly devoid of personal political agency and power sharing. Explanation, understand, and cause should not be trumped by the fear of “justification” when a legitimate concern is expressed inappropriately. Murder is the desperate flight to fantasy of a “shooter” — why it became the only instrumentality left for a US citizen and soldier requires a pragmatic and realistic investigation of motive, not one moored in a fantasyland of “freedom-hating” Muslims and terrorists.

As a country, we can’t deny our self-destruction masked in the pride of nationalist glory and “justifiable” vengeance. Every soldier sent, every civilian killed, and every dollar spent is just another step in our own ruination, in service of a corporate-military agenda, against a much ballyhooed “evil” enemy. We don’t understand our real enemies, and we do not dare, lest we approach “justification” of their “terrorist” resistance to US military might. We disregard the legitimate concerns of Hasan and our enemies abroad, and they need do nothing but sit back and watch us self destruct as we “spread freedom” around the globe. “Preventive”, “preemptive”: both words mean pre-fact and pre-cause, and result in unjustified criminal violence and aggression. Our military’s self-ascribed omniscient, predictive, and existential abilities do not jive with the realities of the world.

The needs of capital are a critical player in the circle of violence that enveloped the life of Major Hasan and Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate capital has become the means to its own ends via a publicly subsidized-for-profit-private militia that operates in tandem with the US military overseas. Opening markets by bringing “democracy” to unwilling foreign recipients dovetails perfectly with the needs of capital. In this sense, our county’s wanton, international excesses are inextricably linked to our domestic moral deficits. Our recent historical transfer of wealth upward, regressive tax cuts, corporate bailouts, a business paradigm of growth (profits) at any extrinsic cost, etc. –the preconditions and funding of these capital-friendly events can only be achieved by the exploitation and gutting of the welfare state, the social contract, and any social safety net.

For us citizens, this neoliberal umbrellas means more Hasan-like events, police states, privatization, crushing military expenditures, debt peonage, media consolidation, etc. and a blind eye to the suffering of our youth, soldiers, veterans, children, and all those that can’t survive in America’s high-stakes game of state capitalism. The constitution is shred and we are left to cleanup the carnage at Fort Hood. The circle is completed with the debasement of representative government via “regulatory capture”, the “revolving door” between the government and private sectors, and a complete debasement of the electoral process by corporate campaign contributions. Politicians are corrupted and left to engage in what Ralph Nader has called “the politics of avoidance” when explaining events like those that took place at Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate-imperial leaders, the needs of capital, and overflowing campaign coffers demand continuous war at the reciprocal expense of social justice and real political, economic, and cultural “safety”.

How much more debased and perverted can our war language become? It isn’t just convenient that our enemies lack state affiliation and sponsorship — our culture has embraced and internalized the impersonal language that denies the human dignity of our enemies: “combatants”, “insurgents”, “detainees”, “terrorists”, “extremists”, etc. None of this misdirection changes the fact that our disrespect for them and de-legitimization of their resistance is evidenced in the same lack of care and security we afford our soldiers — both our “terrorists” and theirs are caught up in the same dehumanizing and destructive US imperial drive.

Three Ohio Men Convicted of Being Muslims at the Wrong Time in America

Stephen Lendman — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 15:59:48 +0000

In an October 22 press release, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced another victory in its Global War on Terrorism, renamed the Overseas Contingency Operation to continue its jihad on Muslims, abroad and at home.

By now the charges are familiar, always bogus, and announced earlier about three Ohio men in a Justice Department February 2006 press release as follows:

“Three (Toledo, Ohio men) have been charged with conspiring to commit acts of terrorism against persons overseas, including US military personnel serving in Iraq, and with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists….”

On February 16, 2006, a Cleveland federal grand jury returned a five-count indictment against Mohammad Zaki Amawi, Marwan Othman El-Hindi, and Wassim I. Mazloum alleging they conspired, together and with others, “to kill or maim persons outside of the United States, including US military personnel serving in Iraq, and with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. Amawi is also charged, individually, with distributing information regarding explosives and two counts of making verbal threats against the President of the United States.”

Amawi holds both US and Jordanian citizenship. El-Hindi is also a US citizen, and Mazloum is a permanent legal resident.

The indictment further alleges that these men “engaged in activities in furtherance of their common goal to wage violent jihad, or ‘holy war,’ against American soldiers and Coalition allies serving in Iraq. Such activities included training and target shooting, receiving instructions in the construction and use of explosives — including improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and ’suicide bomb vests,’ — recruiting others to participate in jihad training, attempting to raise funds to finance the training and to support violent jihad activities, and attempting to acquire and deliver materials – including explosives and computers – to others engaged in violent jihad in the Middle East. The indictment alleges that the conspiracy began sometime prior to November 2004.”

Amawi was accused of traveling to Jordan on August 22, 2005 to deliver five laptop computers to the “co-conspirators.” They were never delivered. No explanation was given why. Perhaps there were none in the first place, but, no matter. Carrying, transporting, or delivering computers isn’t a crime.

Amani also “allegedly downloaded a video from a ‘mujahideen website’ which depicted the step-by-step construction and use of a bomb vest, and then copied it on a disk and distributed (it) to an individual who was going to be providing jihad training to the defendants. That individual — identified in the indictment as ‘the Trainer’ — has been cooperating since the beginning of this investigation (as a paid informant) and acting on behalf of the government” to entrap innocent men with no plans to commit terrorism. More on him below.

Other charges alleged “that in October 2004 and again in March 2005, Amawi made verbal threats to kill or inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States. The maximum sentence… of conspiring to kill or maim persons in a foreign country is 35 years in prison, or life in prison if the conspiracy is to kill.”

The maximum sentence for conspiring to provide material support to terrorists is 15 years; for distributing information on explosives, 20 years, and for making verbal threats against the President, five years.

In a prepared statement, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said: “This case stands as a reminder of the need for continued vigilance. We are committed to protecting Americans – here and overseas, particularly the brave men and women of the US Armed Forces who are serving our country by striving valiantly to preserve democracy and the rule of law in Iraq.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller added: “These arrests in indictments are examples of how, through close cooperation with our partners and enhanced intelligence capabilities, we are able to detect terrorist planning and prevent acts of terrorism before they occur.”

Members of Toledo’s Muslim community were shocked, saddened, and angered over the arrests. They also feared growing anti-Muslim sentiment against its 6,000 members that once included former mayor Michael Damas (1912-2003), perhaps the first Arab-American elected (in 1959) to high office in a large US city.

After their arrest, Amawi’s (unnamed) brother told CNN he had nothing against the president, just the war. Mazloum’s brother, Bilal, said his brother didn’t own a gun or know how to use one. “He liked to help people. He never tried to hurt (anyone). I mean, he never (did) anything bad.”

El-Hindi’s lawyer at the time, Stephen Hartman, said: “Let’s face it. The atmosphere in America now, if there is an allegation of terrorism, and you are Middle Eastern, (or) Muslim, people are going to assume you’re guilty” because prosecution charges and media reports imply the worst.

On February 23, 2006, the Toledo Blade reported that a year before his arrest, El-Hindi “offered spiritual nourishment to Muslim prisoners at the Toledo Correctional Institution as an ‘imam,’ or religious leader.” Yet according to FBI Director Mueller: “Prisons continue to be fertile ground for extremists who exploit both a prisoner’s conversion to Islam while still in prison, as well as their socioeconomic status and placement in the community upon their release.”

That said, warden Khelleh Konteh, explained that federal agents never asked him about El-Hindi’s work, and expressed surprise about his arrest. Before his appointment was approved, a routine background check showed no prior arrests and a clean record.

On June 13, 2008, a jury convicted the defendants on all counts:

– Amawi and El-Hindi on conspiring to kill or maim persons outside the United States, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, and two counts of distributing information on explosives; and

– Mazloum on conspiring to kill or maim persons outside the United States and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

At the time, the DOJ claimed these “convictions represented the nation’s first successful trial of a ‘homegrown terror cell’ for terrorism related crimes.”

On October 22, a DOJ press released announced: the “Three (men were) Sentenced for Conspiring to Commit Terrorist Acts Against Americans Overseas:”

for Amawi, 20 years in prison, followed by life on supervised release;
for El-Hindi, 13 years, including 12 years for “terror violation(s)” and 18 months on fraud; and
for Mazloum, 100 months or 8.3 years, followed by life on supervised release.

At trial, Amawi’s lawyer, Edward Bryan, said his client hated the Iraq war, cheered US soldier deaths, admired suicide bombers’ courage, but isn’t a terrorist and talk of going to Iraq was just talk.

“He doesn’t have the courage to be like them,” said Bryan. “It’s fantasy. It’s stuff going on in (his and other) people’s minds, but not what they’re really going to do. (He had no) plan to go out and murder American soldiers.” He wanted to learn how to defend himself because he feared he and his family were threatened like other Muslims. “This is defensive Islam. Do they not have the right to defend themselves” without being charged with terrorism or conspiracy to commit it?

El-Hindi’s lawyer, Charles Boss, said despite the “quantity” of evidence, its “quality… wasn’t there.” In other words, for his client and the others, it was the usual circumstantial claptrap, most gotten from the paid informant who egged on the three men, gave them money and gifts, including a cell phone and laptop, and got them to vent the way millions of Americans do about an illegal war and the millions of lives it cost.

Lawyers for all three said, over a two year period, the undercover informant manipulated their clients by suggesting jihadi tactics and entrapped them in recorded conversations.

According to Amawi, he took them to a shooting range and encouraged them to act violently. He’s “the one (who) put a real gun in my hand,” he said in his first public comment since his 2006 arrest. The informant lied, he said, about his wanting to travel to Iraq to become a martyr. “I’m against suicide bombing. I made this very clear.”

Former Army Special Forces soldier Darren Griffin was the paid informant (referred to above as “Trainer”) and key prosecution witness. He testified that by posing as a disgruntled Islam convert, he won their trust, then manipulated them through holy war training talk, secretly recorded on conversations to entrap them. However, he admitted that the men were only together once during his involvement, and he never saw emails from them about wanting to kill soldiers.

Defense attorneys said the men never bought weapons or terrorist supplies, never planned an attack, and never carried one out. They merely expressed anger, not terror plans or conspiracy to commit them. But clever prosecutors can intimidate juries to believe it, so innocent Muslims, like the defendants, are easily entrapped, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms, even though there’s no plot, no weapons, no crime, nor intention to commit one.

Talk is talk, not a crime, and, in this case and others like it, manipulated to sound incendiary, but that’s not proof of intent. No matter, if juries believe it, innocent victims are punished for being Muslims at the wrong time in America.

Bumper Sticker Wisdom

James Hunter — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:00:53 +0000

On the October 16 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Alec Baldwin said, “If we spent the money we spend in Afghanistan or a fraction of the money we spend in Iraq on alternative energy policy in this country, we wouldn’t even have to bother fighting wars for oil in the Middle East in the first place.” His statement was met with rousing applause by the predominantly progressive/liberal audience, and even though I think that Baldwin is one of the more well-spoken Hollywood liberals who have appeared on Maher’s show, I nevertheless don’t think his assertion should remain unchallenged. It’s not that I think alternative energy is a bad thing. I drive a hybrid. I love alternative energy because our current energy sources are turning the planet into a George Foreman grill, not because they will “free” the United States from the Middle East.

I have heard Baldwin’s reasoning before in both my personal political conversations and even in other public forums. For example, President Obama made “ending our addiction to foreign oil” a primary issue in his campaign. The argument – which is rarely made specifically – basically follows that energy independence would end U.S. commerce in the Middle East, and if the U.S. no longer buys Arab oil, then the U.S. no longer has any interest in the Middle East. In essence – and this is the part Baldwin and others didn’t include – we could leave the Arabs to their own devices, their own problems, their own religious extremism, their own violent tendencies. And eventually they won’t have any reason to attack us again.

Clearly, this is myopic, reductive reasoning that fails to consider the complexities of global economics or the extent of our political involvement in the Middle East. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we get some magic mineral or our scientists are able to perfect safe, reliable nuclear fusion, effectively ending our oil consumption. Would Obama immediately remove all our soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan? Not in the face of conservative commentators who still maintain that we have to fight “them over there” so we don’t have to fight them here. The more serious argument against immediate troop withdrawal suggests that things are too unstable for U.S. troops to leave. This argument seems to suggest that we are the glue holding Afghanistan together.

Most importantly, I doubt our reliance on oil prevents Obama from calling up Benjamin Netanyahu and simply saying, “Israel is officially on its own, buddy.” In fact, the Middle Eastern nations’ single greatest complaint about U.S. foreign policy is our consistent, uncritical support of Israel. And this support is increasing, or at least under pressure to increase. Mitt Romney, in what is doubtlessly a preparation for a 2012 run at the White House, spoke at the AIPAC (“America’s Pro Israel Lobby” according to its website) summit on October 19.¹ Before stating that Iran, a country of over 65 million people, is “unalloyed evil,” (para. 30), Romney wondered at “how little we ask of the Arab world” (para. 14) and proclaimed his personal and political affection for Israel. What is more, President Obama’s government has voted against endorsing the Goldstone Report, a U.N. investigation accusing both Israel and Hamas of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 2008 war in Gaza. From both sides of the political spectrum, Israel enjoys remarkable latitude and political support.

But Baldwin’s statement is indicative of an even larger discursive problem. As a nation, we’ve failed to put our uncritical support for Israel up for question. Our national conversation has paid more attention to the Balloon Boy. Baldwin can present the argument that the U.S. is only tied to Middle East through oil because on the Sunday morning talk shows, the Goldstone Report got no play. As a nation, we don’t talk about whether or not we should support Israel, so it is understandable that Baldwin would elide this when he speaks of U.S.-Middle East relations.

What troubles me most is this: a focus only on oil also ignores the vast cultural advantages the U.S. has gained from Arab countries. The food, music, literature, architecture – and if none of those impress you, how about numbers? Yes, we got our numbers from Arabs! But in our discourse, isn’t it more than a little stereotypical that the only thing we can remember is oil? Doesn’t this deploy a repeating image in our cultural lexicon: the Arab gas station attendant? Is this to what our foreign policy reduces this vast region – the so-called cradle of civilization? My contention is that anti-Arab racism pervades our political discussion about the Middle East if we choose to restrict that conversation to oil and terrorism. And Baldwin’s idea – that if we free ourselves of our “addiction to foreign oil,” then the world will be a better place – underhandedly suggests that the ultimate goal for Middle East peace is to leave “them” alone, separate “them” from “us.” After all, so goes this argument, they are not fit for modernity. Essentially, this argument forces the Middle East endgame to be more about isolation than unity and more about fearing the radical differences between our cultures than the glaring sameness of our humanity. It seems to me that the hope of a lasting Middle East peace rests upon a common commitment to avoiding stereotypes and, possibly most of all, to treating Arab interests with respect and legitimacy.

About two weeks ago, I saw a bumper sticker that said, “Kick their ass. Take their gas.” After a brief surge of anger, during which I wanted to chase down the car and aggressively invite the driver for a cup of coffee and a picture show of Palestinian refugee camps, I comforted myself with one small hope. I hoped that the driver’s view was the minority. Sadly, I can’t say that I was right.

Romney, Mitt. “Address by Mitt Romney at AIPAC National Summit.” Real Clear Politics. 19 October 2009. 20 October 2009.

Illegal Alien Costume a Teaching, not a Laughing Matter

Amalia Pallares — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:00:25 +0000

I have found the silver lining in a very dark cloud. The illegal alien costume sold online by Target and Walgreens has, in its profound despicability, provided me with an opportunity to teach my children about the value of truth and human dignity.

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.

The Polemics of Carrying Capacity

Frank Joseph Smecker — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:59:42 +0000

We are often told that we’ve exceeded our carrying capacity here on Earth (or are arriving at that calamitous denouement of the story of civilization in no time soon). It is very true that we’ve reached our carrying capacity, this planet cannot healthily sustain so many people living in current arrangements, but anyone who has closely studied the conflation of civilization, production, and capitalism understand well that human population booms are endemic to the aforementioned social formula. If the dominant economic mode were to shift gears, to one that wasn’t defined globally, and predicated upon the funneling of resources to the producer rather than the community; if community-scale projects and strict environmental protection policies were implemented to define our economic behavior, then I’m pretty sure overpopulation would not be as large of a problem as it is today. If overall social arrangements were to manifest Indigenism and parochial isolation, tribal anarchy, small-scale handicraft production and technics, and subsistence economics, then overpopulation would be an obsolete term, hands down.

With regard to a contemporary program, for instance (neo)-Malthusian measures, to solve the “population problem,” such propositional theory put into wholesale praxis would essentially expand and accelerate the genocidal effects of the civilizing process. Sure that sounds like a loaded allegation and indictment upon an archaic Western archetype and his immoral conjectures, but it is true. Not only did Malthus believe that inequality was natural and good, or “at least necessary for avoiding the problem of massive overpopulation and hence starvation;” he also “denounced soup kitchens and early marriages while defending smallpox, slavery, and child murder [sic].”¹

Malthus believed that social inequality and poverty was natural, expunging from the historical record centuries, if not millennia, of social engineering, construction and stratification of a system that manifests inequality and penury by virtue of its own design. In other words, abject poverty, famine and, social stratification that unjustly engenders inequality, are tangents of social arrangements configured by sovereign powers themselves.

These same sovereign powers set up and normalized the city-state lifestyle/culture (i.e., civilization) as a way to enhance and, make more efficient, production at the expense of human and nonhuman resources in order to enhance the luxuries of those positioned at the top of the hierarchy. Surfeit resources, profits and assets, enjoyed by few, are commensurate with expanded efficiency in production and, in turn, so will a population that is organized around growing and perpetuating said social arrangements grow geometrically. In other words, “population growth correlates with economic prosperity.”² Therefore, overpopulation of humans on this planet is not necessarily a natural phenomenon as much as it is a direct result of the dominant social construct, i.e., overpopulation is moreso anthropogenic than it is organic. So, for starters, Malthus had conveniently designed the theoretical framework for the dominant culture so to fix a problem induced by the dominant culture.

Second on the list of excoriations directed toward Thomas Malthus and his legacy of villainous schemes and those who propound and argue in defense of such machinations, is the hunger fallacy. Despite the fact that the world population is, at the very least, six fold from what it was in 1800, there is still more than enough food produced the world over to support the population.³ Africa alone produces 25 percent of the world’s cereals, but yet it is the most immiserated continent on the planet. This is a direct result of global trade, orchestrated by the world’s richest coterie of individuals (i.e., the WTO, World Bank and IMF, et al.). Africa grows enough food to feed itself, but because its countries have been co-opted, if not coerced at the barrel of a gun by Western trade agents over the centuries, it has to export its very own solution to famine. Those countries who spurn compliance with Western trade agreements are subject to reprehensible sanctions that Arundhati Roy refers to as “New Genocide,” meaning the creation of “conditions [through economic sanctions] that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people.”⁴ Digression aside, what is transpiring in Africa is not an isolated occurrence. In India, where millions are the victims of starvation and malnutrition, there have been incidences, time and again, in which the government allows immorally imbalanced disbursement of food. One example that Arundhati Roy presents in her book, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, reports the Indian government allowing 63 million tons of grain to rot in its granaries.⁵ Meanwhile, twelve million tons were exported and put on sale at a subsidized price the Indian government refused to offer its country’s impoverished peoples.⁶ There is more than enough food to feed people – bottom line.

When exploring the implications of a (neo)-Malthusian program, one must ask, as Richard Robbins advises, “what social interests or purposes might be advanced by their acceptances?” Clearly, Malthus envisioned a world where the elite and upper class decide and act upon population control by advancing measures that materialized from within the very former and latter statuses. It should also be noted that Malthus was not concerned with population growth, he was concerned with the rising number of poor in England at the time and, why they should or should not exist and, “what should be done about them.”⁷ Malthus erroneously, and egregiously – might I add, saw poverty not as a consequence of “expanding industrialism, enclosure laws… or the need of manufacturers for a source of inexpensive labor…” but rather as a phenomenon that emerged from “the laws of nature…”⁷

The Malthusian premise is one that presumes poverty exists by virtue of overpopulation, which is often postulated as the fault of fundamentally flawed human beings – which is dehumanizing to say the least. And, his theory (and any other theoretical fledglings of similarity) exempts the privileged elite from any accountability for fomenting and perpetuating the framing conditions and social arrangements that engender overpopulation and poverty in the first place.

If there really were something inherently poor and laggard in large populations, then affluent places like London or Manhattan would elicit fear of overpopulation. But the truth is, such sentiment is not directed internally toward ‘civilized’ regions of high densities of people, but rather it is directed externally toward areas and regions that are sought after for resources – areas that need to be ‘managed’ and ‘civilized.’ These are areas that, unlike densely populated areas of developed countries, are impoverished and immiserated on account of sanctions, development projects, foreign debt, illicit purloining of resources, and more, perpetrated and/or effected by foreign institutions – the very institutions that not only wreak tremendous social and ecological havoc, but also castigate such ‘victim’ countries as being ‘poor’ and ‘problematic’ and as ‘jeopardizing’ the globe with overpopulation. This is pathologically depraved behavior.

Furthermore, in today’s economic climate, one who recognizes the limits of economics within an ecological context of invariable finite materials is often referred to as a ‘neo–Malthusian.’ But because one recognizes the intrinsic limits to growth does not also mean that such a realization is concomitant with Malthusian theory, or rather: Just because one recognizes the limits to growth does not mean they are a neo-Malthusian.

The crux is, there are limits to growth. The planet is comprised of finite resources. Any intelligent creature is aware of this unalterable truth. However, these facts do not warrant one group of people to assume a higher positioning over another as a means to decide who lives, who is ‘useful,’ who gets what and when and where. The truth is, as many maintain, the whole carrying capacity discussion is either a.) not discussed honestly, or at all, or b.) it is approached with a narrow set of ‘solutions,’ all of which intend to perpetuate the status quo – which translates into either not solving shit or, solving the problem in a way that keeps those in power in power to enjoy their luxuries and privileges.

More importantly, owing to the fact that overpopulation is commensurate with economic growth (which confers tremendous power and wealth upon economic architects and directors i.e., the state and financial and corporate institutions) – we should, as Derrick Jensen suggests, honestly acknowledge how different our discourse and theoretical solutions would be if we changed the language from ‘overpopulation’ problems to ‘overconsumption’ problems? Here is where we find the fundamental flaws inhered within the ‘panaceas’ that are prescribed to fix this entire conundrum. We can’t address this issue as an ‘overconsumption’ problem because mitigating consumption growth would destroy the capitalist economy. So, unforgivably, we go with ‘overpopulation.’ Does anyone see the fundamental flaw yet? Does anyone else see what’s wrong here?

According to Jensen, “The United States constitutes less than 5 percent of the world’s population yet uses more than one-fourth of the world’s resources and produces one-fourth of the world’s pollution and waste.” And, if you “compare the average U.S. citizen to the average citizen of India, you find that the American uses fifty times more steel, fifty-six times more energy, one hundred and seventy times more synthetic rubber, two hundred and fifty times more motor fuel, and three hundred times more plastic.” Nonetheless, our concepts of overpopulation are usually not comprised of “those who do the most damage, the primary perpetrators (there can’t be too many [middle-class] Americans, can there?), but instead their primary (human) victims.”⁸

There is much absurdity and arrogance, as Jensen asserts, in the call for the poor to stop having children but not minding the rich driving around in SUVs, watching plasma-screen TVs while living sedentary lives in 3500 square foot homes, etc. ad nauseam. Also, to quote Jensen in depth:

…there are those who claim—equally absurdly, and equally arrogantly—that all talk of carrying capacity is racist and classist. To even use the phrase carrying capacity in this crowd is to invite hisses and catcalls, as well as spat epithets of Neo-Malthusian. I suppose the argument is that because some of those who want to protect this exploitative way of living use carrying capacity as a means of social control against the poor—as an American Indian activist friend said to me, “The only problem I have with population control is that you and I both know who is going to do the controlling”—then the notion of carrying capacity itself must be racist and classist. This seems similar to me to suggesting that because Hitler claimed (falsely) that Germany was being attacked by Poland, and that therefore the Germans needed to attack, and that because this same argument has routinely been used (just as falsely) by the United States as well as other imperial powers, that anyone who claims self-defense is lying. These people seem to forget that the misuse of an argument does not invalidate the argument itself. Worse, this argument, that the very concept of carrying capacity is a fabrication designed for social control, as opposed to a simple statement of limits, serves those in power as effectively as does ignoring or de-emphasizing resource consumption when speaking of overshooting carrying capacity, because it goes along with the refusal to acknowledge physical limits (and limits to exploitation) that characterize this culture. What would it take, I’ve heard peace and social justice activists ask, to bring the poor of the world to the fiscal standard of living of the rich? Well, another thirty planets, for one thing. It’s a dangerous—and stupid— question. Within this culture wealth is measured by one’s ability to consume and destroy. This means that attempts to industrialize the poor will further harm the planet. Because industrial production requires the exploitation of resources, the wealth of one group is always based on the impoverishment of another’s landbase, meaning that on a finite planet, the creation of one person’s (fiscal) wealth always comes at the cost of many others’ poverty. Those reasons are why the question is stupid. It’s dangerous because it serves as propaganda to keep both activists and the poor playing a game that doesn’t serve them well, and which they can never win, instead of quitting this game and working to take down the system.”⁹

There is a term called lactational amenorrhea, which is the absence of menstruation due to lactation. As long as a mother is nursing her neonate (i.e., infant) each and every time the child wants to feed, fertility is postponed. Basically, the female body temporarily shuts off its procreational facilities because the body is taxed to its limits regarding nutrient allocation for not only the infant but the mother as well. In other words, “If you continue with exclusive breast feeding for your baby’s first six months, your risk of becoming pregnant is less then 2 percent.”¹⁰

Many indigenous mothers would sleep with their infants through the night so that their child would be able to nurse even during sleep. This beautiful communion between mother and child was practiced nightly for upwards of six months, if not more.¹¹ This practice, which is being forever lost in the dominant culture, in tandem with sustainable living practices, conduced to a natural, safe, sane and non-exploitative program of population control.

One must ask, what sort of culture would replace such population control measures with something like the Malthusian model. The answers tell us that only an exploitative culture, hell-bent on production by means of degradation of another’s landbase, thence elevating one’s luxuries on account of another’s impoverishment, would discard sane and sustainable ways of living to achieve prosperous ends.

R.L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
Richard H. Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism (4th Ed.), (Boston: Pearson, 2008), p. 153
Robbins, p. 150.
Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, (Cambridge: South End Press, 2004), p. 88.
N.A. Mujumdar, “Eliminate hunger now, poverty later,” Business Line, 8 January 2003.
“Foodgrain exports may slow down this fiscal [year],” India Business Insight, 2 June 2003; “India: Agriculture sector: Paradox of plenty,” Business Line, 26 June 2001; Ranjit Devraj, “Farmers protest against globalization,” Inter Press Service, 25 January 2001.
R.H. Robbins, p. 156.
Derrick Jensen, Endgame Volume I: The Problem of Civilization, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006), p. 115.
D. Jensen, p. 115-116.
Katie Singer, The Garden of Fertility: A Guide to Charting Your Fertility Signals to Prevent or Achieve Pregnancy – Naturally – and to Gauge Your Reproductive Health, (New York: Avery, 2004), p.68.
K. Singer, p. 67-70.

Glenn Beck’s Demagoguery, Right Wing Extremism, and Racism

Stephen Lendman — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:00:23 +0000

At a time of 24-hour news and a proliferation of television and radio talk shows featuring hatemongers and demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck may stand out as the most unhinged and extremist of all as evidenced by his jihad against anyone to the left of his views, disadvantaged minorities, Muslims, Latino immigrants, and progressive change in some of his most outlandish comments, including:

– calling Barack Obama a “racist (who) has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture; I don’t know what it is….This guy is, I believe, a racist;”

– calling Van Jones “an avowed, radical, revolutionary communist,” then saying “Jones is the tip of the iceberg” as part of his over-the-top campaign against anyone less extremist than himself;

– stating “The most used phrase in my administration if I were to be President would be ‘What the hell do you mean we’re out of missiles;’ ”

– saying “We need to be the first ones in the recruitment office lining up to shoot the bad Muslims in the head…. In 10 years, Muslims and Arabs will be looking through a razor wire fence at the West;”

– telling Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies;”

– advocating disposing of Guantanamo detainees by shooting them in the head;

– accusing Al Gore of creating a new “Hitler youth” by promoting environmental awareness, and called for kicking California out of the union;

– in 2003, telling listeners he was praying for a gruesome death for Democrat presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, and in 2005 saying he fantasized about strangling filmmaker Michael Moore;

– characterizing Obama’s new regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, as a crazed animal rights activist who believes that rats matter more than people; and

– in September 2005, expressing open “hate” toward Katrina victims, calling them “scumbags” for not waiting patiently for emergency aid at a time their lives were devastated, and the Bush administration was forcibly removing them to distant locations, then preventing them from returning so predatory developers could exploit their neighborhoods for profit.

In May 2008, a Media Matters Action Network report titled, “Fear & Loathing in Prime Time: Immigration Myths and Cable News” highlighted undocumented Latino immigrant hatemongering by Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, each making outlandish claims, including:

an alleged connection between undocumented Latinos and crime;
how they exploit social services and don’t pay taxes;
the “reconquista” myth about a supposed Mexican plot to take over the US Southwest; and
an epidemic of Latino voter fraud.

According to Beck, “It’s time to wake up in this country. We are dealing with an illegal alien (read Latino) crime wave, and drug smuggling is just the beginning.” He opened a special 2008 “Border Crisis” program saying: “America’s border crisis. Rape, drugs, kidnapping, even murder. It is beginning to look a lot more like a border war…. Every single illegal immigrant is guilty of a crime, every single one…. Every undocumented worker (read Latino) is an illegal immigrant, a criminal and a drain on our dwindling resources.”

He added:

– “I’ve got a quick message for illegal aliens if you happen to be watching; you better start packing your bags; and to the politicians in Washington who are soft on illegal immigration, start packing up your office, because when the terrorists strike, which they will, and when we find out that they’re here illegally from some other country, we will be telling all of you to get the hell out;”

– earlier he said “I told you about the five-part plan that I believe may lead to the end of the West as we know it; I called it my ‘Perfect Storm;’ one of the elements….is illegal immigration; it is still a great way for terrorists to come here and mess with us; but even if that doesn’t happen….at the very least (they’re) attacking our culture, and our way of life; they are not melting into our melting pot; they’re here for the cash;” and

– “I also know our country is on fire, and the fuel is illegal immigration; they (threaten) our national security;” they come for “three reasons: one, they’re terrorists; two, they’re escaping the law; or three, they’re hungry (because) they can’t make a living in their own dirtbag country.”

This is what passes for American mainstream “journalism” that’s in no worse form than from Glenn Beck – on Fox News, the radio outlets that give him a platform, and the sponsors that make his kind of programming possible. More on them below.

Joe McCarthy’s Earlier Jihad Against the Left

In the 1950s, Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts against alleged communists, those on the left, and Democrat administration and other “subversives” included Secretary of State Dean Acheson whom he called “a pompous diplomat in striped pants,” General George Marshall when he was Secretary of State for being “soft on communism” and being “a man steeped in falsehood,” and many others on his so-called “blacklist.”

In 1950, with no proof, he said he had a list of 205 known communists in the State Department, later reduced the number to 57, but said they were passing secret information to the Soviets. He claimed:

The reason why we find ourselves in a position of impotency is not because the enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer — the finest homes, the finest college educations, and the finest jobs in Government (and the private sector) we can give.

He characterized enemies as “card-carrying communists.” Others as “loyalty risks” or being “soft on communism.” For political gain, he vilified patriotic Americans, created years of hysteria, targeted anti-American books in libraries and got them removed, then overstepped enough to be hung on his own petard with publications like the Louisville Courier-Journal reporting that:

“In this long, degrading travesty of the democratic process, McCarthy has shown himself to be evil and unmatched in malice.” On December 2, 1954 the Senate censured him and took away his power base. Later ill with cirrhosis of the liver from years of abusive alcoholism, he died a broken man on May 2, 1957.

Today, the term “McCarthyism” is synonymous with baseless malicious slander, unscrupulous fear-mongering, vilifying the innocent, accusing them of disloyalty, and calling them terrorists, Islamofascists, illegal immigrants, and unpatriotic for supporting progressive change and ideas to the left of right wing views.

McCarthysim Redux Through the Right Wing Media

Nightly on Fox News, Glenn Beck delivers some of the worst of it to his estimated 2.3 million faithful and millions more on The Glenn Beck Program, a nationally syndicated talk-radio show aired by Premiere Radio Networks (a Clear Channel Communications subsidiary) throughout the country on over 300 stations, according to a Premiere Speakers Bureau promo about him stating that his program “is presently the third highest-rated national radio talk show among adults ages 25-54.”

It said that he debuted on CNN’s Headline News in May 2006 “with his self-styled topical talk show and quickly soared in popularity.” CNN at the time called it “an unconventional look at the news of the day featuring (Beck’s) often amusing perspective on the top stories from world events and politics to pop culture and everyday hassles.”

In early January 2007, he also joined ABC News’ Good Morning America as a regular contributor with its senior executive producer, Jim Murphy, saying:

“Glenn is a leading commentator with a distinct voice. At times, he is the perfect guest for many of the talk topics we cover on morning news programs.”

In 2008, Beck won the Marconi Radio Award for Network Syndicated Personality of the Year from the National Association of Broadcasters. Previous winners included Rush Limbaugh and Fox News’ Sean Hannity. After his award, Premiere Radio Networks president, Charlie Rahilly, said:

“Glenn’s conversation with millions of Americans weekly on The Glenn Beck Program….makes him a familiar voice in our culture. We salute his work, creativity, and humor, and congratulate him on his genuine recognition by our industry.”

He regularly features guests like Karl Rove, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, Rick Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, and an array of the most extremist Republican members of Congress, others from right wing think tanks, and former Bush administration officials.

His syndicator, Premiere Radio, is a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications, the world’s largest radio broadcaster, concert promoter, and billboard advertising firm. It’s also a major player in US television and Spanish language broadcasting, and very much to the right of center in ideology. As one of America’s most powerful media companies, it’s played a leading role in destroying media diversity by airing the same content on many dozens of its stations simultaneously, suppressing everything not supportive of its views.

In 2002, Clear Channel attracted the attention of Senator Russ Feingold and several other members of Congress over its anti-competitive behavior and alleged shady business practices. In 2009, the company remains a powerful force, ranking ninth among the top 20 US media companies ahead of The New York Times Co., the Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp., and McGraw-Hill.

More on Beck’s Background

He’s written three New York Times-listed bestsellers, publishes the entertainment Fusion Magazine, and tours the country twice yearly in his own one-man show to promote himself as a national institution.

Instead of condemning his extremism, on December 4, 2006, the New York Times described him as a “tearful rising star” in calling him “brash (and) opinionated (with an) unfiltered approach (in) saying what others are feeling but are afraid to say.” Writers Brian Stelter and Bill Carter said he “has a gift for touching the passion nerve (by) tapping into fear about the future.”

They quoted Old Dominion University’s Jeffrey Jones saying Beck engages in “inciting rhetoric. People hear their values are under attack and they get worried. It becomes an opportunity for them to stand up and do something” without realizing how destructive Beck’s extremism is to their own well-being. Even Beck once said about himself: “I say on the air all the time, if you take what I say as gospel, you’re an idiot.”

His Premiere’s Speakers Bureau bio says he debuted in radio at age 13 in Seattle, and grew up in nearby Mount Vernon. After high school, he got jobs “as a Top 40 DJ” in Baltimore, Houston, and New Haven, CT.

It also explained that at age 30, he became consumed by alcoholism and drug addiction, then regained sobriety and “found a new direction.” He remarried, became a baptized Mormon, and decided to pursue talk radio after being offered his own show on Tampa, Florida station WFLA-AM. In his first year, it became number-one rated, and within 18 months, Premiere Radio Networks offered him national syndication.

In January 2002, the Glenn Beck Program debuted on 47 stations. Today, he’s on over 300 as well as XM satellite radio.

LDS Living Magazine (for Latter Day Saint Mormon families) provides more details about Beck’s background. It said he was fired from his first three radio jobs in Washington State. Six months later, he returned on WPGC in Washington, DC. Was again fired. Then he became program director and “morning guy” on a small Corpus Christi, TX station. After two years of “moving around from city to city, he ended up in Baltimore.” He also worked at WRKA in Louisville, KY and WKCI-FM in Hamden, CT.

Three days after converting to Mormonism, he was offered his first radio talk show in Tampa. It propelled him to national prominence and his current positions at Fox News, his syndicated radio program (first from Philadelphia in January 2002, now in New York), and as a hot topic on other programs, including MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann’s war of words with Beck.

He posted a September 6 request on The Daily Kos to “Send Me Everything You Can Find About Glenn Beck.” He added that he’ll “expand this to the television audience and have a dedicated email address to accept leads, tips, contacts, on Beck, his radio producer Burguiere, and the chief of his tv enables, Ailes (head of Fox News)….”

It may simply be a PR stunt to boost ratings and get added revenue for General Electric, MSNBC’s owner, that certainly can stop this if it wishes.

Sponsors Bailing Out on Beck

To date, over five dozen decided they’ll no longer be associated with his kind of antics, fearing, of course, it may harm their image and hurt sales and profits.

In 2005, Van Jones (now inactive) and James Rucker co-founded ColorOfChange.org “to strengthen Black America’s political voice” toward the goal of making “government more responsive to the concerns of Black Americans and to bring about positive political and social change for everyone.”

In the wake of Beck calling Obama a “racist” and attacking Van Jones, it sent a letter to his sponsors urging them to boycott “the kinds of views and tactics” he espouses and cease all advertising on his program.

FoxNewsBoycott.com joined in as part of its campaign “to help people realize that Fox News Channel and its personalities are a detriment to journalism and journalistic integrity.” It urges supporters “to boycott, not only Fox News Channel, but Fox News sponsors and companies that air Fox News in their places of business.”

To date, over 60 companies no longer advertise on Glenn Beck, including:

AT & T
Bank of America
Bell & Howell
Best Buy
Campbell Soup
Capital One
Clorox
Berkshire Hathaway’s GEICO Insurance
General Mills
HSBC
Johnson & Johnson
Kraft Foods
Mercedes-Benz
Procter & Gamble
Sanofi-Aventis
Sprint
Travelers Insurance
UPS
Verizon Wireless, and
Wal-Mart

Many others still advertise, but more keep pulling out, showing the effectiveness of the national campaign, backed by many tens of thousands of signatures from Color of Change and Fox News Boycott supporters.

The Internet’s power is real and proves when enough committed people back progressive issues, constructive change follows. If if works against Glenn Beck and Fox News, why not in a campaign to reclaim the kind of America people deserve and can have if they work hard enough for it.

If not now, when? If not us, who? If not soon, maybe never? If that’s not incentive enough, what is?

Canadian Government’s Fig Leaf of Anti-Semitism

Yves Engler — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:00:30 +0000

Which Canadians suffer more discrimination: Those of African descent, Muslims, Latin Americans, South Asians, East Asians, Arabs, First Nations or Jews?

If you answer the latter, take your place alongside the Harper government and other sectors of the political elite that attack a largely historic form of oppression to advance a present day pro-imperial foreign-policy and anti-immigrant/anti-aboriginal domestic agenda.

Despite a loud chorus claiming otherwise, anti-Semitism is a mere fig leaf of its former oppressive character. Six decades ago “none is too many” was the order of the day in Ottawa, which rejected Jewish refugees escaping Nazi concentration camps. This hostile anti-semitic climate continued into the 1950s with institutions such as McGill University in Montreal imposing quotas on Jewish students. But Christianity’s decline, combined with a rise in antiracist politics has significantly undercut anti-Semitism as a social force in Canada.

Today, Jews are largely seen as white people. Canada’s Jewish community is well represented among institutions of influence in this country and there is very little in terms of structural racism against Jews (which is not to say there isn’t significant cultural stereotyping, which must be challenged). But in an inversion of reality, the more anti-Semitism declines as a social force the more it concerns the political elite.

Why?

As a way to silence critics of Israel, of course. More generally, the Conservatives, supported by the Jewish establishment, allege anti-Semitism to advance a broadly pro-empire foreign-policy.

In April 2009, Harper explained: “we are very concerned that, around the world, anti-Semitism is growing in volume and acceptance.” A month later, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister (formerly Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity) Jason Kenney told a European audience, “peaceful and pluralistic Canada sees signs that this evil [anti-Semitism] is newly resurgent.” Then, in a statement bordering on Holocaust denial, he added, “I also very acutely understand the nature of the new anti-Semitism, and I think it’s even more dangerous than the old European anti-Semitism.”

There have been few similar proclamations about racism directed towards First Nations, Blacks or any other group in Canada. A Canadian Newsstand search for Jason Kenney Islamophobia; Jason Kenney racism against Blacks; Jason Kenney missing Native/Aboriginal women brings up nothing of substance. On the other hand, a search of Jason Kenney and anti-Semitism elicited dozens of articles, including many strong comments from the Minister.

The Conservatives, which get few Jewish votes but are close with its right-wing establishment, have used the politics of anti-Semitism to crowd out action regarding more oppressive forms of bigotry. Despite the fact that Muslims and Blacks are more likely to be targeted, “Jewish organizations have received 84 per cent of the funding announcements under a federal program that provides security for groups at risk of being attacked in hate crimes,” reported the Canadian Press three weeks ago. “Forty-six of the 55 projects funded by Ottawa since February 2008 belonged to Jewish community groups.”

At the level of international diplomacy the Harper government’s cries of anti-Semitism are a transparent attempt to silence critics of Israeli crimes. But there is more to it. The accusations of anti-Semitism are a way to advance a broader right-wing foreign-policy agenda.

Beyond defending Israel, there are a number of recent instances where anti-Semitism has been used by Canadian politicians to advance ‘white’ or imperial policies. Last April, Virginie Levesque, a spokesperson for the Canadian Embassy in Venezuela, accused socialist oriented president Hugo Chavez of anti-Semitism. “The Canadian Embassy has encouraged and continues to encourage the Venezuelan government to follow through on its commitment to reject and combat anti-Semitism and to do its utmost to ensure the security of the Jewish community and its religious and cultural centers.”

That same month, two Liberal MPs presented a petition to the House of Commons claiming an increase in state-backed anti-Semitism in Venezuela. Former Liberal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler said Venezuela has seen a “delegitimization from the president on down of the Jewish people and Israel.” These unsubstantiated accusations of anti-Semitism are designed to further demonize a government that threatens North American capitalist/geopolitical interests.

Additionally, Canada was the first country to withdraw from last April’s World Conference against Racism in Geneva. Defending Israel was part of the Harper government’s motivation for pulling out of the conference; they also had little interest in discussing the dispossession of First Nations, colonialism or the African slave trade. An “anti-Semitic anti-West hate fest dressed up as anti-racism conference” is how one unnamed Canadian official described the meeting.

Claiming the conference was anti-Semitic was the only politically palatable justification for withdrawing. In fact, Israel was barely on the agenda as Naomi Klein describes in this month’s Harper’s magazine. She points out how pro-Israel groups effectively undermined extensive efforts by (largely) black activists to force the international community to define colonialism and the slave trade as crimes against humanity. “Perhaps the best way to describe the convergence of interests in Geneva is to say that pro Israel groups succeeded in convincing 10 governments to boycott a conference that they never wanted to come to anyway.”

It’s particularly ironic that the Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister has been the most fervent proponent of anti-Semitism politics. Claims of anti-Semitism do not in any way challenge white supremacy, something a multiculturalism minister should take on.

Harper gave Jason Kenney, the most right wing member of his cabinet, the immigration and multiculturalism portfolio. Is that because the Conservative party’s (anti-Aboriginal, anti-immigrant) base opposes multiculturalism? Does the focus on claims of “racism” against white Jews simply offer a convenient cover for continued white supremacy?

Israeli Ads Warn against Marrying Non-Jews

Jonathan Cook — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:59:25 +0000

The Israeli government has launched a television and internet advertising campaign urging Israelis to inform on Jewish friends and relatives abroad who may be in danger of marrying non-Jews.

The advertisements, employing what the Israeli media described as “scare tactics”, are designed to stop assimilation through intermarriage among young diaspora Jews by encouraging their move to Israel.

The campaign, which cost $800,000, was created in response to reports that half of all Jews outside Israel marry non-Jews. It is just one of several initiatives by the Israeli state and private organisations to try to increase the size of Israel’s Jewish population.

According to one ad, voiced over by one of the country’s leading news anchors, assimilation is “a strategic national threat”, warning: “More than 50 per cent of diaspora youth assimilate and are lost to us.”

Adam Keller, of Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group, said this was a reference both to a general fear in Israel that the Jewish people may one day disappear through assimilation and to a more specific concern that, if it is to survive, Israel must recruit more Jews to its “demographic war” against Palestinians.

The issue of assimilation has been thrust into the limelight by a series of surveys over several years carried out by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, a think-tank established in Jerusalem in 2002 comprising leading Israeli and diaspora officials.

The institute’s research has shown that Israel is the only country in the world with a significant Jewish population not decreasing in size. The decline elsewhere is ascribed both to low birth rates and to widespread intermarriage.

According to the institute, about half of all Jews in western Europe and the United States assimilate by intermarrying, while the figure for the former Soviet Jewry is reported to reach 80 per cent.

Israel, whose Jewish population of 5.6 million accounts for 41 per cent of worldwide Jewry, has obstructed intermarriage between its Jewish and Arab citizens by refusing to recognise such marriages unless they are performed abroad.

The advertising campaign is directed particularly at Jews in the United States and Canada, whose combined 5.7 million Jews constitute the world’s largest Jewish population. Most belong to the liberal Reform stream of Judaism that, unlike Orthodoxy, does not oppose intermarriage.

One-third of Jews in the diaspora are believed to have relatives in Israel.

According to the campaign’s organisers, more than 200 Israelis rang a hotline to report names of Jews living abroad after the first TV advertisement was run on Wednesday. Callers left details of email addresses and Facebook and Twitter accounts.

The 30-second clip featured a series of missing-person posters on street corners, in subways and on telephone boxes showing images of Jewish youths above the word “Lost” in different languages. A voiceover asks anyone who “knows a young Jew living abroad” to call the hotline. “Together, we will strengthen their connection to Israel, so that we don’t lose them.”

The campaign supports a government-backed programme, Masa, that subsidises stays and courses in Israel of up to one year in a bid to persuade Jews to immigrate and become citizens. About 8,000 diaspora Jews attend its programme each year.

The government has been trying to develop Masa alongside a rival programme, Birthright Israel, which brings nearly 20,000 diaspora youngsters to Israel each year on sponsored 10-day trips to meet Israeli soldiers and visit sites in Israel and the West Bank promoted as important to the Jewish people.

Although Birthright is regarded as useful in encouraging a positive image of Israel, officials fear it has only a limited effect on attracting its mainly North American participants to move to Israel. Many regard it as an all-paid holiday.

Differences in the approach of the two programmes were underlined in July when a Birthright director, Shlomo Lifshittz, resigned and moved to Masa after telling the Israeli media he had been forbidden from urging Birthright participants to migrate to Israel and shun intermarriage.

In launching the campaign, Masa’s chief executive, Ayelet Shilo-Tamir, warned that assimilation worldwide was putting Jews “on the verge of negative growth”.

Masa officials said young Jews who participate in their projects strengthened their Jewish identity and were more likely to become politically and socially active on behalf of Israel-related issues.

The campaign quickly provoked a storm of debate on Jewish blog sites, especially in the United States, with some terming it “divisive” and an insult to Jewish offspring of intermarriage. A link to Masa’s “Lost” campaign had been dropped from the front page of its website yesterday, possibly in response to the backlash.

The campaign will probably strike a chord in Israel, however, where a poll in 2007 found that 46 per cent of Israeli Jews believed all Jews should live in Israel because it was “the only way Israel and the Jewish people will be strengthened”.

That position has been echoed by Israel’s leaders, though most have been careful not to upset the delicate balance of relations with diaspora communities.

Former prime minister Ariel Sharon was widely regarded as having overstepped those bounds in 2004 during a visit to France when he urged French Jews to come to Israel because France was experiencing “the spread of the wildest anti-semitism”.

Sharon had been outspoken in wanting one million Jews to immigrate to Israel to counter a “demographic threat” from the rapid growth of the Palestinian populations in both Israel and the occupied territories. Numerical parity between Jews and Palestinians living in the region is expected to be reached within a decade.

That theme has been picked up by his successors, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu.

There is growing concern in Israel that immigration rates have steadily declined since a large wave of one million Jews arrived from the former Soviet Union through the 1990s. The absorption figure for last year – at 16,500 – was the lowest since the 1980s. It is also believed that there is a growing trend of better-off Jews leaving Israel to live abroad, though figures are not publicised.

Mr Keller, of Gush Shalom, said few Jews in the United States or Europe, the main target of the campaign, needed to come to Israel for material reasons. “They come from ideological motives, and many of them are right-wing nationalists who can be encouraged to settle in the West Bank.”

The Israeli government and various organisations subsidise the immigration of diaspora Jews to Israel.

Last year the Jewish Agency handed over responsibility for locating new immigrants to Nefesh B’Nefesh, a private organisation that promotes a dozen settlements in the West Bank on its website, including hardline communities such as Kedumim, near Nablus, and Efrat, near Bethlehem.

“Last week Israeli TV showed a group of immigrants arriving in Israel to go to Efrat,” said Mr Keller. “They were shown being greeted at the airport by a large clapping crowds of Israelis waving flags in support.”

The Organ Theft Affair

Kristoffer Larsson — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:00:55 +0000

Swedish photojournalist Donald Boström has really infuriated the Israelis and its supporters. On August 17, Sweden’s most widely circulated newspaper, Aftonbaldet, carried an article by Boström entitled “Our sons plundered for their organs.”¹

The usual suspects immediately cried “anti-Semitism,” claiming that the old blood libel accusation has been brought to life again.² The Israelis have even threatened to sue him. Such reactions were anticipated, however. Innumerable hate mails have found their way into Mr Boström’s inbox since the publication, including death threats. More surprising is that Sweden’s ambassador to Israel, Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier, issued a condemnation of the article. It was “as shocking and appalling to us Swedes as to Israelis,” the ambassador claimed in a press release that was later withdrawn, having attracted criticism from the Swedish foreign ministry as well as from the government.

On top of that, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded that the Swedish government renounce the article, something which would be unconstitutional in Sweden. A statement from Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman managed to tacitly draw the attention to—you guessed it!—the Holocaust: “It is regrettable that the Swedish foreign ministry does not intervene when it comes to a blood libel against Jews, which reminds one of Sweden’s conduct during World War II when it also did not intervene.” (I would urge Lieberman, himself a hard-core racist, to read Lenni Brenner’s excellent 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis.)

Lieberman’s Swedish counterpart Carl Bildt blatantly refuses to cave in: “As a member of the Swedish government, acting on the Swedish constitution I have to respect freedom of speech, irrespective of the personal views that I might have.” His boss, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, also rejects commenting on the article. Bildt is expected in Israel in about a week’s time, but Israelis are threatening to cancel his trip.

Despite all the fuss, this isn’t the first time Donald Boström publicly vents suspicions about Israelis stealing organs from Palestinians. One chapter of the book Inshallah: konflikten mellan Israel och Palestina (“Inshallah: the Conflict between Israel and Palestine”), edited by Boström and first published in 2001, was an account of what happened to a 19-year-old Palestinian boy. It includes the photo now published in Aftonbladet. Donald Boström decided to shed new light on the affair following the mass arrest in New Jersey of people involved in illegal organ trade that included a shockingly high number of Rabbis.

This affair originates from a visit to the village of Imatin in 1992. Boström was witness to how 19-year-old Bilal was shot dead, his body abducted and five days later returned. The young man had been cut open – stitches were running from his abdomen up to his chin. The account below is quoted from Boström’s article:

I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Achmed Ghanan. (…)

When Bilal was close enough they needed only to pull the triggers. The first shot hit him in the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair. Villagers say that people from both the UN and the Red Crescent were close by, heard the discharge and came to look for wounded people in need of care. Some arguing took place as to who should take care of the victim. Discussions ended with Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family. Five days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.

A villager recognized Captain Yahya, the leader of the military column who had transported Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir, outside of Tel Aviv, to the place for his final rest. “Captain Yahya is the worst of them all,” the villager whispered in my ear. After Yahya had unloaded the body and changed the green fabric for a light cotton one, some male relatives of the victim were chosen by the soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing cement.

Together with the sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter from the soldiers who, as they waited to go home, exchanged some jokes. As Bilal was put in the grave his chest was uncovered. Suddenly it became clear to the few people present just what kind of abuse the boy had been exposed to. Bilal was not by far the first young Palestinian to be buried with a slit from his abdomen up to his chin.

The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what had happened: “Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors,” relatives of Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied.

Boström took a picture of Bilal’s lifeless body. He was buried without being cut open a second time. Hence, there is no certain evidence that Bilal’s organs were stolen. So, are the Palestinians merely spreading baseless, anti-Semitic rumours? Circumstances suggest otherwise. In 1992, 133 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army. Bilal was one of dozens of Palestinian victims to be cut open. The Israelis claim they are merely carrying out postmortem examinations in order to conclude how they died. But why, Boström asks, would autopsies be necessary when the cause of death is already known? After all, Bilal was shot dead by the Israelis just before they snatched his body. So why go through the trouble of a postmortem? The Israeli explanation doesn’t add up. Boström is perfectly right in calling for an investigation. Illegal organ trade is a highly lucrative business. It is not unthinkable that people in “the most moral army in the world,” as the Israelis like to call their army, were involved at some level in this trafficking.

Donald Boström has spoken to about 20 of the Palestinian families who had a loved one that ended up in the same conditions as Bilal. They have their suspicions as to what happened. It is hardly surprising then that Boström is not the only one to have come across suspicions of organ theft. Dr. A. Clare Brandabur, teaching at the Department of American Culture and Literature at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey, has lived and travelled extensively in Palestine. Upon reading about the affair, Dr. Brandabur commented:

This information resonates with reports from Palestinians in Gaza which I heard during the first Intifada. When I interviewed Dr. Haidar Abdul Shafi, head of the Red Crescent in Gaza, I mentioned to him reports of shootings of Palestinian children at times when there were no “clashes” going on — a solitary 6 year old entering his school-yard in the morning with his book-bag on his back. The soldiers abducted the wounded child at gunpoint, then his body would be returned a few days later having undergone an “autopsy at Abu Kabir Hospital.” I asked Dr. Shafi if he had considered the possibility that these killings were being done for organ transplant, since (as Israel Shahak notes in Jewish History, Jewish Religion, it is not allowed to take Jewish organs to save a Jewish life, but it is allowed to take the organs of non-Jews to save Jewish lives. Dr. Shafi said he had suspected such things but since they had no access to the records of Abu Kabi Hospital, there was no way to verify these suspicions.³

And there’s more. Palestinian journalist Kawther Salam, living in exile in Vienna, says she is volunteering to testify on Boström’s behalf if the Israelis go through with their threats to sue. “The issue of stealing the Palestinian organs is known to everybody in Palestine,” she writes. Having worked as a journalist under Israeli occupation for 22 years, she has seen a lot. Salam continues:

I personally was witness of the Israeli soldiers and military vehicles kidnapping the bodies of dead Palestinians from the emergency rooms of hospitals, in some other cases I saw the soldiers following the Palestinians to the cemetery, to steal the body from the family before the burial. This vile practice became so widespread that many people started carrying the bodies of the murdered to be buried at home, in the garden, under the house or under trees, instead of waiting for the ambulance to take them to the hospital.⁴

Palestinian sources now claim they have solid evidence of organ theft.⁵ Whether their claims are accurate remains to be seen. However, these suspicions are far from new; they have been voiced for decades. When Boström wrote about Bilal and the suspicions as to what had happened to him in his book eight years ago, it was met with silence. Further, he doesn’t say there’s a direct link between the murdered Palestinians and the wicked New Jersey Rabbis (there probably isn’t one, given the time line). However, following the mass arrest, people were more open to the idea that Israelis might be stealing organs from Palestinians after all. Boström was hoping Bilal might get some justice even after all this time.

Ostensibly, Israel is using the article to get a message across: Sweden is an anti-Semitic country. They are set to pressure the Swedish government until it condemns the ‘blood libel accusation’. All of a sudden everyone is discussing good old anti-Semitism instead of Israel’s state terrorism and its apartheid policies towards the Palestinian people.

An online petition is now circulating in Israel, calling for a boycott of IKEA. 10,000 Israelis have signed it so far. Needless to say, IKEA has nothing to do with this. But what can possibly be more Swedish then IKEA? In the short term, Israel might be able to divert attention from the more serious issues. In the long term, Israel is only making enemies. There was a time when the entire Western World supported Israel. Those days are long gone.

English version available here.
Don’t forget the old anti-Semitic accusation that Jews poison wells, which is now reality in Palestine.
Some of Dr. Brandabur’s articles are available here.
”The Body Snatchers of Israel.”
“Palestinian news agency ‘confirms’ organ snatching story,” Jerusalem Post online, August 23, 2009.

“Civility Project”: Style Over Substance?

Bill Berkowitz — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:00:19 +0000

Every year during August recess, many members of the U.S. Congress go back to their districts and hold town hall meetings to get a sense of what their constituents are thinking about, and to apprise them of upcoming legislation.

This year, instead of the usual sparsely attended events, town hall meetings across the United States have turned into raucous free-for-alls as opponents of President Barack Obama’s health care reform proposals have taken to shouting down a host of senators and congresspersons.

Over the years, one could slice and dice just about any period of U.S. history and determine that a “civility” project might have been useful. During the past few decades, however, churlish and bombastic invective has often prevailed over carefully calibrated discourse.

When former Republican Party vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin recently commented about Obama’s health care reform initiatives, she claimed that his “death panels” would decide who would live and who would die.

Palin was not only playing to the Republican Party’s wired up base, she was clearly displaying a lack of civility (she later reversed course and came out in favour of civility).

Mark DeMoss, a long-time Christian Right/Republican-oriented public relations expert who believes that today’s political landscape is completely out of whack, has launched “The Civility Project,” an attempt to provide guidelines so that political opponents can disagree without being disagreeable.

So if you were DeMoss, and you were starting up something as high-minded as “The Civility Project,” would you start off by bashing gays and lesbians?

Recognising society’s division and polarisation, and concerned “about the hate and animosity being aimed at men and women with whom we may disagree on one issue or another”, DeMoss, a conservative Southern Baptist whose clients have included the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, recently “reached out to some people from various political, racial and religious backgrounds to see if we could join our hearts and minds together in calling others to civility”, he wrote in a statement titled “Welcome to the Civility Project.”

Unfortunately, DeMoss started out by attacking gays and lesbians. “I had spent about two years volunteering for Mitt Romney, and I saw a lot of ugly rhetoric and behaviour aimed at Mormons and then at me,” DeMoss said.

“And then the results of the Proposition 8 vote in California [the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that passed last November'] contributed to my thinking – when you saw gay activists responding to the… vote by vandalizing churches and temples,” he claimed.

DeMoss’s comments were an odd way to get started in the civility business. Over the past several decades, the Religious Right’s fortunes have in part been built on demonising gays and lesbians. By recognising that history, DeMoss might have started out on better footing.

DeMoss is the president of a public relations outfit called The DeMoss Group, which, on its website claims that it is “the largest PR firm specializing in faith-based organizations and causes.” The DeMoss Group focuses on communications, media relations, marketing, non-profit management, and crisis management.

According to its website, “The Civility Project [is] a collection of liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, and people of various faiths – or no faith – who agree that even in sharp disagreement we should not be disagreeable.”

“I decided to launch a project where I would talk not about unity, not about tolerance, not about getting along, not about compromise, but just about civility,” DeMoss said.

Participants are invited to “Take the Civility Pledge”, in which signatories agree to: “Be civil in my public discourse and behavior; be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them; stand against incivility when I see it.”

The key Democrat supporting The Civility Project is Lanny Davis, a tough political combatant who has been a longtime adviser to the Clintons, and who has served three terms on the Democratic National Committee.

According to CitizenLink, a news service of the conservative group Focus on the Family, “DeMoss was so impressed with Davis’s civil tone [while he was involved in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign] that he wrote him a letter:

“I suspect that politically you and I may have nothing in common,” DeMoss wrote. “But as I’ve watched you conduct yourself in the public arena, I’ve always appreciated how you handled yourself, how you handle your adversaries, how you show respect for those who disagree with you, and for modeling civility in an increasingly uncivil town.”

Davis said the letter came as a surprise: “I’m getting all this hate mail, and I get this amazing letter from a perfect stranger who identifies himself as an evangelical Christian. I always try to give deference to somebody who disagrees with me. That is the point Mark made in his letter, that he noticed that about me, that I always try to be respectful of people who are of a different opinion.”

Writing about the Civility Project at Religion Dispatches, Candace Chellew-Hodge pointed out that perhaps the religious right was “taking its cue from George Barna’s book UnChristian, which calls for conservative Christians to be kinder [and] … soften their rough and often hateful rhetoric, especially toward gays and lesbians.”

“DeMoss has no intention of learning about the person on the other side of the issue,” Chellew-Hodge maintained. “He’s not interested in tolerating them, or finding a place of common ground where there can be unity, or compromising on his principles, or even getting along — it’s simply about being polite to one another — to not yell at one another, but to still push our own agendas.”

“In short, DeMoss has no interest in dialogue. He has no interest in learning about what those who oppose him think or believe, or even how they arrived at that thought or belief. He just wants them to smile, slap him on the back, and get out of his way while he pursues his agenda,” she asserted. “If they don’t, then he can paint them as the ‘uncivil’ person or group who is obstructing his progress.”

Many questions remain as to the efficacy of The Civility Project.

How will the third point in the civility pledge, the one about “standing against incivility when I see it”, manifest itself?

Does it mean that when former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gives a speech, Ann Coulter writes a column, Rush Limbaugh broadcasts, and Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs take to the air, Civility Project folk will be monitoring their speech?

Thus far, the project has not issued any statements condemning the current Republican/insurance lobby-sponsored tactic of aggressively breaking up town hall meetings in districts of Democratic Party Congressional representatives.

Is DeMoss sincere with his plea for civility, or is he reading the political tea leaves (the Republicans and the Christian Right have hit low points in public opinion polls)?

Candace Chellew-Hodge characterised DeMoss having started out by gay-bashing as an example of “bigotry with manners.”

The Idiocy of Sex Testing

Dave Zirin and Sherry Wolf — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:31:41 +0000

World-class South African athlete Caster Semenya, age 18, won the 800 meters in the International Association of Athletics Federations World Championships on August 19. But her victory was all the more remarkable in that she was forced to run amid a controversy that reveals the twisted way international track and field views gender.

The sports world has been buzzing for some time over the rumor that Semenya may be a man, or more specifically, not “entirely female.” According to the newspaper The Age, her “physique and powerful style have sparked speculation in recent months that she may not be entirely female.” From all accounts an arduous process of “gender testing” on Semenya has already begun. The idea that an 18-year-old who has just experienced the greatest athletic victory of her life is being subjecting to this very public humiliation is shameful to say the least.

Her own coach Michael Seme contributed to the disgrace when he said, “We understand that people will ask questions because she looks like a man. It’s a natural reaction and it’s only human to be curious. People probably have the right to ask such questions if they are in doubt. But I can give you the telephone numbers of her roommates in Berlin. They have already seen her naked in the showers and she has nothing to hide.”

The people with something to hide are the powers that be in track and field, as well as in international sport. As long as there have been womens’ sports, the characterization of the best female athletes as “looking like men” or “mannish” has consistently been used to degrade them. When Martina Navratilova dominated women’s tennis and proudly exposed her chiseled biceps years before Hollywood gave its imprimatur to gals with “guns,” players complained that she “must have a chromosome loose somewhere.”

This minefield of sexism and homophobia has long pushed female athletes into magazines like Maxim to prove their “hotness”–and implicitly their heterosexuality. Track and field in particular has always had this preoccupation with gender, particularly when it crosses paths with racism. Fifty years ago, Olympic official Norman Cox proposed that in the case of black women, “the International Olympic Committee should create a special category of competition for them–the unfairly advantaged ‘hermaphrodites.’”

For years, women athletes had to parade naked in front of Olympic officials. This has now given way to more “sophisticated” “gender testing” to determine if athletes like Semenya have what officials still perceive as the ultimate advantage–being a man. Let’s leave aside that being male is not the be-all, end-all of athletic success. A country’s wealth, coaching facilities, nutrition and opportunity determine the creation of a world-class athlete far more than a Y chromosome or a penis ever could.

What these officials still don’t understand, or will not confront, is that gender–that is, how we comport and conceive of ourselves–is a remarkably fluid social construction. Even our physical sex is far more ambiguous and fluid than is often imagined or taught. Medical science has long acknowledged the existence of millions of people whose bodies combine anatomical features that are conventionally associated with either men or women and/or have chromosomal variations from the XX or XY of women or men. Many of these “intersex” individuals, estimated at one birth in every 1,666 in the United States alone, are legally operated on by surgeons who force traditional norms of genitalia on newborn infants. In what some doctors consider a psychosocial emergency, thousands of healthy babies are effectively subject to clitorectomies if a clitoris is “too large” or castrations if a penis is “too small” (evidently penises are never considered “too big”).

The physical reality of intersex people calls into question the fixed notions we are taught to accept about men and women in general, and men and women athletes in sex-segregated sports like track and field in particular. The heretical bodies of intersex people challenge the traditional understanding of gender as a strict male/female phenomenon. While we are never encouraged to conceive of bodies this way, male and female bodies are more similar than they are distinguishable from each other. When training and nutrition are equal, it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between some of the best-trained male and female Olympic swimmers wearing state-of-the-art one-piece speed suits. Title IX, the 1972 law imposing equal funding for girls’ and boys’ sports in schools, has radically altered not only women’s fitness and emotional well-being, but their bodies as well. Obviously, there are some physical differences between men and women, but it is largely our culture and not biology that gives them their meaning.

In 1986, Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño was stripped of her first-place winnings when discovered to have an XY chromosome, instead of the female’s XX, which shattered her athletic career and upended her personal life. “I lost friends, my fiancé, hope and energy,” said Martínez-Patiño in a 2005 editorial in the journal The Lancet.

Whatever track and field tells us Caster Semenya’s gender is–and as of this writing there is zero evidence she is intersex–it’s time we all break free from the notion that you are either “one or the other.” It’s antiquated, stigmatizing and says far more about those doing the testing than about the athletes tested. The only thing suspicious is the gender and sex bias in professional sports. We should continue to debate the pros and cons of gender segregation in sport. But right here, right now, we must end sex testing and acknowledge the fluidity of gender and sex in sports and beyond.

First published at The Nation.

Prisoners of Gaza

Jordan Flaherty and Lily Keber — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:30:11 +0000

In the midst of a devastating military bombardment and continuing economic blockade, the people of Gaza are still demanding freedom. Palestinians complain that media attention has focused disproportionately on Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006, while US media and politicians rarely speak out about the more than 11,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, almost half of them without charges.

The prisoners come from all walks of life, from children and the elderly to members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, the democratically elected government.

Prisoners of Gaza features family members of prisoners, government representatives, and street protests, all of it shot from May-June in Gaza.

Producers: Jordan Flaherty and Lily Keber
Translation: Maher Salem and Shereen Naser

The First Israeli Jew in Fatah’s Parliament

Jonathan Cook — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:30:38 +0000

If a single person deserves the title of serial thorn in the side of the Israeli state, Uri Davis, a professor of critical Israel studies at al Quds University on the outskirts of East Jerusalem, might be the one to claim it.

The crowning moment for Dr Davis arrived last weekend when he became the first Israeli Jew to be elected to one of Fatah’s governing bodies, the Revolutionary Council.

It is a public relations breakthrough for Fatah – which held its sixth congress last week, this time under occupation in the West Bank city of Bethlehem – in which Dr Davis clearly takes some pride.

His presence on the 120-member council, sometimes referred to as the Palestinian parliament, is unlikely to make a significant difference to Fatah’s policies, which will continue to be largely dictated by Mahmoud Abbas, the president, and his inner circle. But it does have huge symbolic significance.

His polling in the 31st place for one of 80 seats contested by more than 600 Fatah members, he said in an interview, challenged Israel’s suggestion that the Palestinian people and its leaders regard the Jews as their enemies.

Or as one local Palestinian pundit noted of the vote’s message: “It is not Judaism that Palestinians are fighting, it is Zionism.”

It also finally puts Dr Davis in a position from which he hopes to shake up the complacency that has bedevilled the Fatah leadership and the PLO in their neglect of supporters outside the Palestinian fold.

“In my view [Fatah] is conducting a struggle with one hand tied behind its back,” he said, sipping Arabic coffee in the garden of St George’s cathedral in East Jerusalem.

“The PLO represents a democratic alternative for all, including the current coloniser people, the current perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity,” he said in reference to Israel and its Jewish population. “In the 25 years since my joining the Fatah and PLO, this message has been marginalised. The mainstream went another direction, the Oslo accords direction.”

He is loath to discuss the current tensions between Fatah and Hamas, claiming it is “not my area of competence”. However, he denounces Hamas for fanning the threat of civil war.

His chief task, he said, will be to push Fatah to become a broad-based resistance movement modelling itself on the African National Congress, which brought down apartheid in South Africa.

The reference to South Africa is not unexpected. Dr Davis started describing Israel as an apartheid state in the early 1980s, long before it had become fashionable even on the far left.

His most recent book is Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, published in 2003, in which he argues that discrimination against Palestinians is embedded in Israeli law and sets out what he regards as the four classes of citizenship established by Israel’s parliament.

The country’s six million Jews, he said, occupied the most privileged place in this hierarchy, followed by the country’s 1m-strong Palestinian minority with its second-class citizenship. Lagging behind both are a quarter of a million refugees living inside Israel, who are stripped of their right to inherit property, and in final place come a further 5m refugees who had their and their descendants’ citizenship nullified after the 1948 war.

Over the years, Dr Davis has experienced life in each of these categories.

He was raised an Ashkenazi Jew in Jerusalem and schooled in Kfar Shemaryahu, a wealthy suburb of Tel Aviv. He then spent a decade in exile from Israel starting in 1984, after his recruitment to Fatah by one of the founders of the PLO, Khalil al Wazir, known as Abu Jihad.

He ran the party’s London bureau until the mid-1990s, when he was allowed to return under the Oslo accords. He surprised friends by choosing to move to Sakhnin, a Palestinian community in northern Israel, from which he led a campaign against laws and practices that force Jewish and Palestinian citizens to live almost entirely apart.

He is more circumspect about discussing his current circumstances. His marriage to a Palestinian woman from Ramallah a year ago, his fourth, violated yet another Israeli taboo.

Before the ceremony he converted to Islam, though he continues to describe himself as a “Palestinian Hebrew of Jewish origin.”

While he admits to no longer living in Israel, he is wary of saying more, possibly for good reason: it is against Israeli law for an Israeli citizen to be living in an area under the Palestinian Authority control. Equally, his wife, Miyassar, has been denied a permit to live in Israel, as is the case for almost all Palestinians in the occupied territories. A perfect illustration of the apartheid nature of the Israeli state, he said.

The plight of the Palestinians under occupation has come into much sharper focus since his marriage.

Last month, he had to watch the indignities heaped on his wife after her brother, suffering from cancer, was transferred to a hospital in East Jerusalem, which is illegally annexed to Israel. She was denied a visitor’s permit and could only hear about her brother’s slow demise from Dr Davis and friends.

“This situation is not unique to my family, of course. It is part of the cruelty perpetrated by the occupation authorities against the mass of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Dr Davis has yet to find out how Israel will respond to his regular attendance at Revolutionary Council meetings in Ramallah.

He said his election had been greeted with an outpouring of support both internationally and from the broader Jewish community that has surprised him. The main hostility has come during interviews with the Israeli media, which have taken offence at “my language referring to Israel as an apartheid state, to Zionism as a settler colonial project, to the criminality of the Israeli leadership.”

His unpopularity among the majority of Israeli Jews is likely to grow as he uses his new platform at the Revolutionary Council to push for a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

The ultimate goal, he said, was the enforcement of United Nations resolutions that would in practice bring about a one-state solution.

Dr Davis concluded the interview with a story about the defining moment in his disillusionment with Israel and Zionism. He was doing alternative civilian service in the early 1960s guarding the perimeter fence of a kibbutz, one of Israel’s collective agricultural communities, on the edge of Gaza. As a pacifist at that time, he refused to carry a gun.

After one of many shouting matches, an exasperated kibbutz member led him into a eucalyptus grove inside the fence and pointed to piles of stones. “Those aren’t stones, they’re the ruins of a village called Dimra. Our kibbutz is cultivating the lands of Dimra,” he told the teenage Davis. “The families are refugees on the other side of this fence [in Gaza]. Now do you understand why all the Arabs must hate Jews and want to throw us into the sea?”

Dr Davis says he understood better the look he was shot by the man when he replied that the kibbutz members should invite the refugees back to share the agricultural land.

That way, the young Davis suggested, the kibbutz could “turn an enemy into a friend.”

The IDF: Israel’s Organ Grinder

Gilad Atzmon — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:30:25 +0000

There is an old Jewish joke that tells the story of a dying Jewish merchant who calls his son to his sickbed just before he perishes. He tells him, “Listen to me Moisha’le, life is not just about money… you can also do gold and diamonds.”

Monitoring Israeli and Jewish news reveals a devastating fact, it is not “just” about money. It may also be about human organs. A few weeks ago we learned about a ring of American Rabbis who had been arrested in New Jersey upon suspicion of human organs trafficking (amongst many other crimes). Rabbi Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, we read, enticed “vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000.” Not too bad, I thought to myself then. We are living in hard times, financial melt down, credit crunch, Wall Street is licking its wounds, the car industry is evaporating. Seemingly, kidney trafficking is still booming.

In fact, the ring of the Rabbi in New Jersey didn’t take me by complete surprise. For years we have been hearing about Palestinians claiming that Israel is “deep into organ trafficking.” We also learned that the family of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who hanged himself in an Israeli jail, “was forced to bring suit for his return withmissing body parts.”

In 2002, the Tehran Times reported: “The Zionist state has tacitly admitted that doctors at the Israeli forensic institute at Abu Kabir had extracted the vital organs of three Palestinian teenage children killed by the Israeli Army nearly ten days ago. Zionist Minister of Health Nessim Dahhan said in response to a question by Arab member of the Zionist Parliament ‘Knesset,’ Ahmed Teibi, on Tuesday that he couldn’t deny that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli forces were taken out for transplants or scientific research.”

But now the news about Israeli trafficking of human organ is spreading to Western mainstream media. Ynet, the biggest Israeli online newspaper, reported today that “Leading Swedish daily Aftonbladet claimed in one of its articles that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians in order to trade in their organs.”

A few weeks ago we had a debate here on PTT whether Zionism is a colonial apparatus or not. One of the Materialist arguments against the perception of Zionism as a colonial practice was that Palestine has never been too attractive economically; it lacks oil, gold or minerals. However, this may change now. People who specialise in organ theft may find Palestine to be heaven on earth. In the light of the latest vastly spreading accusations, the Jewish national project maybe is colonial after all.

Though the Israeli government denies the accusation, and I myself far from being qualified to know what the truth of the matter is, one cannot deny that we are facing here a shift of consciousness within the Western discourse. At the end of the day, after watching the Israeli army dumping great quantities of white phosphorous on a civilian population in broad daylight, after seeing Israelis gathering gleefully en masse on the hills around Gaza just to watch their military spreading death and physical suffering in a genocidal manner, after reading that 94% of the Israelis supported the IDF military campaign against the elderly, women and children, most of whom were refugees with nowhere to escape and seek further refuge, organ theft seems to be a ‘light crime’.

Whether or not the Swedish paper’s accusations are genuine is yet to be revealed. However, one fact has already been established: after so many years of Western inclination to dance to the relentless crying violin of the Jewish melancholic victim serenade, the Western media is now changing its appetite, it is willing to confront Jewish institutional crime.

Rather than talking about the rise of anti-Semitism, we better discuss the growth of Jewish institutional crime.

Whose Acre?

Uri Avnery — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:00:18 +0000

The ancient port of Acre is now the object of a fierce battle. The Arab inhabitants of the town want the port to bear the name of an Arab hero, Issa al Awam, a general under Saladin, the Muslim leader who defeated the Crusaders. The municipality of Acre, which of course is dominated by the Jewish inhabitants, has decided to give the port the name of an Israeli functionary.

The Arab citizens set up a monument for their hero. The municipality declared it to be an “illegal structure” and decided to destroy it.

This could have been a small local conflict, one of many in this mixed and quarrelsome town, if it did not have such profound ideological and political implications.

I love old Acre. For me, it is the most beautiful and interesting town in the country, after East Jerusalem.

It is one of the most ancient towns in the country, perhaps in the whole world. It is mentioned in the Bible In the first chapter of Judges (which, by the way, completely contradicts the genocidal Book of Joshua.) The chapter enumerates the Canaanite towns which were not conquered by the Children of Israel. It remained a Phoenician town, one of the port towns from which intrepid Hebrew-speaking sailors went forth and colonized the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, from Tyre to Carthage.

The fortunes of Acre reached their zenith during the times of the Crusaders. It was then the only port in the country that could be used during all the seasons of the year. The Crusaders succeeded in taking it after a stubborn defense. A hundred years later, when the great Salah-ad-Din (Saladin) put an end to the Crusaders’ rule in Jerusalem, he drove them out of Acre, too. The Knights of the Cross recaptured it, and for another hundred years it served as the capital of the reduced Crusader state. In 1291, when the remnants of the Crusader kingdom were wiped out, Acre was the last Crusader town to fall to the Muslims. The image of the last Crusaders and their women jumping from the quays of Acre has been engraved in the memory of the age and has given birth to the expression still current: “to throw into the sea”.

Later, too, the town had a checkered history. A Bedouin chieftain, Daher al-Omar, took it over and created a kind of independent semi-state of Galilee. Even Napoleon, one of the Great Captains of history, came from Egypt in 1799 and laid siege to it, but was roundly defeated by the Arabs, with the help of British sailors.

When the British became the lords of the land in 1917, they turned the imposing Crusader fortress of Acre into a prison, in which the leaders of the Hebrew underground organizations, among others, were incarcerated. In one of its most daring exploits, the Irgun broke into the fortress and freed its prisoners. In 1947, the Israeli army conquered the town, which was until then entirely Arab.

The ancient part of the town, with its beautiful minarets and Crusader fortifications, continued to be Arab. So did the port, which now serves fishermen. But around this quarter, Jewish neighborhoods have sprung up, faceless like many hundreds of such neighborhoods throughout Israel, and their inhabitants now constitute the majority. They do not like their Arab neighbors very much.

From time to time, quarrels break out between the two populations. The Arab inhabitants believe that Acre has been their town since ancient times and consider the Jews intruders. The Jews are convinced that the town belongs to them and that the Arabs are, at best, a tolerated minority that should shut up.

The current dispute can well turn violent.

In every conflict between Jews and Arabs in this country, the rather childish question arises: Who was here first?

The Arabs conquered the country, which they then called Jund Filistin (military district Palestine) in 635 AD, and since then it has been under Muslim rule (apart from the Crusader period) until the arrival of the British. They claim “We were first”.

The Zionist version is different. In Biblical times, most of the country belonged to the kingdoms of Judea and Israel, even though the coast belonged to the Phoenicians in the North and the Philistines in the South. (In spite of all the frantic efforts of a hundred years, no archaeological evidence has been found that there ever was an exodus from Egypt, a conquest of Canaan by the Children of Israel or a kingdom of David and Solomon.) Since the kingdom of Ahab, around 870 BC, Israel has been on the well-attested historical map. After the Babylonian exile, the Jews dominated parts of the country, with constantly changing borders, until Roman times. Ergo: “We were first”.

If the Israelites were here before the Muslims, who was here before the Israelites? The Canaanites, of course. “They were first”. But who represents them?

I once wrote a satirical piece about the “First Canaanite Congress” which takes place somewhere in the world. The participants declare that they are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the country and claim it for themselves.

That is not entirely a joke. In the first years of the last century Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who was to become the second president of Israel, tried to harness the Canaanites to Zionism. He researched and found that the population of this country has not really changed from the earliest times. The Canaanites mixed with the Israelites, became Jews and Hellenists, and when the Byzantine empire, which then ruled this country, adopted Christianity, they too became Christians. After the Muslim conquest, they gradually became Arabs.

In other words, the same village was Canaanite, became Israelite, passed through all the stages and in the end, became Arab. Nowadays it is Palestinian, unless it was wiped out in 1948 and replaced by an Israeli settlement. Throughout, the population did not really change. Many of the place names did not change either. Every new conqueror brought with him a new set of beliefs and a new elite, but the population itself did not change much. No conqueror was interested in driving out the inhabitants, who provided him with food and revenue. In the opinion of Ben-Zvi, the Palestinian Arabs are really the descendents of the ancient Israelites. But when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict gathered momentum, this theory was forgotten.

Recently, some Palestinians adopted a rather similar theory. By the same historical logic, they claim that the Palestinian Arabs are the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, and therefore “they were first”, even before the Children of Israel of Biblical times. It was only the Zionist conquest that, for the first time in history, radically changed the composition of the population.

The Canaanites and the ancient Israelites spoke different dialects of the same Semitic language, which is nowadays called Hebrew. Later on, Aramaic became the language of the country, and later on Arabic. Last week, new research was published, showing that the vernacular Syrian-Palestinian Arabic dialect includes many words that have their origin in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, and which do not appear in the dialect of other Arab countries. Clearly, they were absorbed by the native Arab dialect many centuries ago. They are mainly day-to-day agricultural words, and it is logical to assume that they entered the Arabic language from the Aramaic that it replaced.

Why is that important? How does it affect the Acre dispute?

Many years ago I read a book by the late American-Arab scholar, Philip Hitti, a Maronite Christian from Lebanon, entitled History of Syria. According to the Arab historical view, Syria (a-Sham in classical Arabic) includes today’s Syria as well as well as present-day Lebanon. Jordan, Israel, West Bank and Gaza.

The book made a lasting impression on me. It recounts the history of this country from prehistoric times to the present, with all its stages, as one continuous story, which includes Canaanites and Israelites, Phoenicians and Philistines, Aramaeans and Arabs, Crusaders and Mamluks, Turks and Britons, Muslims, Christians and Jews. They all belong to the history of the country, all of them contributed to its culture, language and architecture, palaces and fortresses, synagogues and churches, mosques and cemeteries.

Anyone thinking about peace and reconciliation should absorb this picture.

What kind of history is taught now in the schools of the two peoples? Both have a mobile history which is wandering about the landscape.

Jewish history starts with “Abraham Our Father” in present-day Iraq and the exodus from Egypt, the receiving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai in present-day Egypt, the Conquest of Canaan, King David and the other legends of the Bible, which are taught as actual history. It continues in the country until the destruction of the Temple by Titus and the Bar Kokhba rebellion against the Romans, when it goes into “exile”, concentrating on the chain of expulsions and persecutions, only returning to the country with the early Zionist settlers.

This history ignores not only all that happened in the country before the Israelite era, but also everything that happened during the 1747 years between the Bar Kokhba uprising in 135 AD and the start of the pre-Zionist settlement in 1882. An alumnus of the Israeli education system knows next to nothing about the country during these eras.

On the Arab side, things are no better. The Palestinian-Arab historical picture starts in the Arab peninsula with the advent of the Prophet Mohammad, mentioning the era of Jahiliyah (“ignorance”) before that, and comes to Palestine with the Muslim conquerors. What happened here before 635 AD does not interest it.

The pupils of these two education systems – the Jewish-Israeli and the Palestinian-Arab – grow up with two entirely different historical narratives.

I dream of the day when in every school in this country, in Israel and in Palestine, Jews and Arabs will learn not only these two histories, but also the complete history of the country which includes all the periods and cultures.

They will learn, for example, that when the crusaders invaded the country, Muslims and Jews stood together against the cruel invader and were massacred together. They will learn that in Haifa, the local Jews led the defense and were admired for their heroism, until they were slaughtered side by side with the Muslims. Such identification with the history of the country can serve as a solid basis for a reconciliation between the peoples.

A dozen years ago, inspired by the unforgettable Feisal al-Husseini, I drew up a Manifesto on Jerusalem for Gush Shalom. One of its paragraphs reads: “Our Jerusalem is a mosaic of all the cultures, all the religions and all the periods that enriched the city, from earliest antiquity to this very day – Canaanites and Jebusites and Israelites, Jews and Hellenes, Romans and Byzantines, Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Mamluks, Ottomans and Britons, Palestinians and Israelis. They and all the others who made their contribution to the city have a place in the spiritual and physical landscape of Jerusalem.”

In this list, the Crusaders are missing, and not by mistake. They were in our original text. But when I asked the renowned Arab-Israeli writer Emil Habibi to be the first to sign, he exclaimed: “I shall not sign any document that mentions these abominable murderers!”

Almost everything that can be said about Jerusalem is true for Acre, too. Its history is also continuous from prehistoric times until today, and the Arab general Issa al Awam belongs to it as much as the English Crusader Richard the Lionheart and the Etzel fighters who broke the prison walls.

Israel Begins Sell-off of Refugees’ Land

Jonathan Cook — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:00:09 +0000

TZIPORI — Amin Muhammad Ali, a 74-year-old refugee from a destroyed Palestinian village in northern Israel, says he only feels truly at peace when he stands among his ancestors’ graves.

The cemetery, surrounded on all sides by Jewish homes and farms, is a small time capsule, transporting Mr Muhammad Ali — known to everyone as Abu Arab — back to the days when this place was known by an Arabic name, Saffuriya, rather than its current Hebrew name, Tzipori.

Unlike most of the Palestinian refugees forced outside Israel’s borders by the 1948 war that led to the creation of the Jewish state, Abu Arab and his family fled nearby, to a neighbourhood of Nazareth.

Refused the right to return to his childhood home, which was razed along with the rest of Saffuriya, he watched as the fields once owned by his parents were slowly taken over by Jewish immigrants, mostly from eastern Europe. Today only Saffuriya’s cemetery remains untouched.

Despite the loss of their village, the 4,500 refugees from Saffuriya and their descendants have clung to one hope: that the Jewish newcomers could not buy their land, only lease it temporarily from the state.

According to international law, Israel holds the property of more than four million Palestinian refugees in custodianship, until a final peace deal determines whether some or all of them will be allowed back to their 400-plus destroyed Palestinian villages or are compensated for their loss.

But last week, in a violation of international law and the refugees’ property rights that went unnoticed both inside Israel and abroad, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, forced through a revolutionary land reform.

The new law begins a process of creeping privatisation of much of Israel’s developed land, including refugee property, said Oren Yiftachel, a geographer at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva.

Mr Netanyahu and the bill’s supporters argue that the law will cut out a whole level of state bureaucracy, make land transactions simpler and more efficient, and cut house prices.

In practice, it will mean that the 200 Jewish families of Tzipori will be able to buy their homes, including a new cluster of bungalows that is being completed on land next to the cemetery that belonged to Abu Arab’s parents.

The privatisation of Tzipori’s refugee land will remove it from the control of an official known as the Custodian of Absentee Property, who is supposed to safeguard it for the refugees.

“Now the refugees will no longer have a single address — Israel — for our claims,” said Abu Arab. “We will have to make our case individually against many hundreds of thousands of private homeowners.”

He added: “Israel is like a thief who wants to hide his loot. Instead of putting the stolen goods in one box, he moves it to 700 different boxes so it cannot be found.”

Mr Netanyahu was given a rough ride by Israeli legislators over the reform, though concern about the refugees’ rights was not among the reasons for their protests.

Last month, he had to pull the bill at the last minute as its defeat threatened to bring down the government. He forced it through on a second attempt last week but only after he had warned his coalition partners that they would be dismissed if they voted against it.

A broad coalition of opposition had formed to what was seen as a reversal of a central tenet of Zionism: that the territory Israel acquired in 1948 exists for the benefit not of Israelis but of Jews around the world.

In that spirit, Israel’s founders nationalised not only the refugees’ property but also vast swathes of land they confiscated from the remaining Palestinian minority who gained citizenship and now comprise a fifth of the population. By the 1970s, 93 per cent of Israel’s territory was in the hands of the state.

The disquiet provoked by Mr Netanyahu’s privatisation came from a variety of sources: the religious right believes the law contravenes a Biblical injunction not to sell land promised by God; environmentalists are concerned that developers will tear apart the Israeli countryside; and Zionists publicly fear that oil-rich sheikhs from the Gulf will buy up the country.

Arguments from the Palestinian minority’s leaders against the reform, meanwhile, were ignored — until Hizbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, added his voice at the weekend. In a statement, he warned that the law “validates and perpetuates the crime of land and property theft from the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Nakba”.

Suhad Bishara, a lawyer from the Adalah legal centre for Israel’s Palestinian minority, said the law had been carefully drafted to ensure that foreigners, including wealthy sheikhs, cannot buy land inside Israel.

“Only Israeli citizens and anyone who can come to Israel under the Law of Return — that is, any Jew — can buy the lands on offer, so no ‘foreigner’ will be eligible.”

Another provision in the law means that even internal refugees like Abu Arab, who has Israeli citizenship, will be prevented from buying back land that rightfully belongs to them, Ms Bishara said.

“As is the case now in terms of leasing land,” she explained, “admissibility to buy land in rural communities like Tzipori will be determined by a selection committee whose job it will be to frustrate applications from Arab citizens.”

Supporters of the law have still had to allay the Jewish opposition’s concerns. Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that only a tiny proportion of Israeli territory — about four per cent — is up for privatisation.

But, according to Mr Yiftachel, who lobbied against the reform, that means about half of Israel’s developed land will be available for purchase over the next few years. And he suspects privatisation will not stop there.

“Once this red line has been crossed, there is nothing to stop the government passing another law next year approving the privatisation of the rest of the developed areas,” he said.

Ms Bishara said among the first refugee properties that would be put on the market were those in Israel’s cities, such as Jaffa, Acre, Tiberias, Haifa and Lod, followed by homes in many of the destroyed villages like Saffuriya.

She said Adalah was already preparing an appeal to the Supreme Court on behalf of the refugees, and if unsuccessful would then take the matter to international courts.

Adalah has received inquiries from hundreds of Palestinian refugees from around the world asking what they can do to stop Israel selling their properties.

“Many of them expressed an interest in suing Israel,” she said.

No Letup In Political Witch-Hunts Under Obama

Stephen Lendman — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:00:49 +0000

For eight years, the Bush administration relentlessly targeted Muslim, environmental, and animal rights activists as national security or terrorist threats. Shamefully, Obama continues the same practice.

On May 20, the FBI arrested four New York men, claiming they planned to bomb a Bronx synagogue and community center and shoot down Newburgh, New York-based Air National Guard jets with stinger missiles.

The same day Justice Department press release said:

The charges against James Cromite (aka Abdul Rahman and Abdul Rehman), David Williams (aka Daoud and DL), Onta Williams (aka Hamza), and Laguerre Payen (aka Amin and Almondo) include “plot(ting) to detonate explosives near a synagogue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, New York, and to shoot military planes….with Stinger surface-to-air missiles. In their efforts to obtain weapons, the defendants dealt with an informant acting under law enforcement supervision, and the FBI and other agencies monitor(ing) the defendants’ actions up to the time of arrest, including providing an inactive missile and inert explosives to the informant for the defendants.”

It’s a familiar scheme involving an FBI sting using an informant to entrap unwitting victims, in this case four poor black Newburgh, New York men who’d converted to Islam, two while in prison for unrelated charges. Cromite was called the ringleader. A Pakistani man named Shahed Hussain (aka Malik) was a paid FBI informant facing prison and/or deportation on dozens of fraud counts. He was enlisted to cooperate in return for leniency.

He’s the same man used earlier for four separate stings, Yassin Aref among them, an innocent man, entrapped and victimized, now serving a 15 year prison term, and a valued friend of this writer. In post-9/11 America, he’s one of many Muslim victims of police state justice. They’ve been targeted, persecuted, arrested, imprisoned, kept in isolation, denied bail, tried on secret evidence on trumped-up charges, convicted by juries too intimidated to acquit, and sentenced to long prison terms for being Muslims at the wrong time in America. Others for being environmental and/or animal rights activists. It went on under George Bush and continues under Obama. When the Newburgh 4 are tried in late 2009, they’ll face 25 year to life sentences if convicted on one or more charges.

They’re petty felons, not terrorists, with criminal records on drug-related charges, assault, and Payen’s unrelated weapons charge for firing a BB gun hitting two people in the head, then snatching purses from two women the same day. He’s a Haitian citizen. The others are Americans, and both Williams men aren’t related. They apparently met in prison where two of them were introduced to Islam.

Background on Informant Malik

On FBI instructions, he looked for targets at a Newburgh mosque and found them in four convicted felons, prime candidates to be framed on bogus charges if he could lure them into the trap. He befriended them with offers to pay medical bills but never did because arrests came first after months of entrapment. His victims were poor, in need of cash, and induced to go along by small gifts and offers of more.

The Justice Department called them “radicalized Muslims,” acting out of hatred for Jews and wanting revenge on behalf of Muslims against America.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) uses anti-Semitism for moral cover, but is notoriously Islamophobic in its ideology. Its web site highlighted “Muslim extremists motivated by hatred for Jews and Israel have targeted Jews in the US for many years, an alarming number of post-9/11 plots and conspiracies have involved or been led by” American Muslims “arrested on various terror-related charges (related to) ideologies of extreme intolerance propagated by terrorist movements overseas (and in some cases) jihadist materials on the Internet.” The ADL cited alleged quotes about wanting “to get a synagogue” and willingness to die and go to “paradise” as a martyr.

New York police commissioner Raymond Kelly said the men planned to bomb two Bronx synagogues by detonating explosives from a cell phone. After supposedly planting phony devices, given Malik by the FBI, police surrounded their car and arrested them in a carefully planned operation. It involved an 18-wheel police vehicle and armored personnel carrier using NYPD Emergency Service Unit personnel. It came off with military precision and why not. It was a setup.

“It’s hard to envision a more chilling plot,” said Assistant US Attorney Eric Snyder. “These are extremely violent men.” In fact, they’re innocent victims of police state justice facing an uphill struggle for vindication against a Justice Department determined to convict with dozens of easily manipulated and/or doctored audio and video DVD recordings of supposedly terror-plotting meetings and conversations.

On June 2, a federal grand jury indicted the four men on eight bogus counts:

“Conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction within the United States”
Three counts of “Attempt to use weapons of mass destruction within the United States
Conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles
Attempt to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles
Conspiracy to kill officers and employees of the United States (and)
Attempt to kill officers and employees of the United States”

On May 20, the New York Times described “a painstaking investigation that began in June 2008 involving an FBI agent who had been told by a federal informant of the men’s desire to attack targets in America.” No explanation was given about entrapment. Instead The Times highlighted “some of the most significant allegations of domestic terrorism in some time” and expressions of relief by local political leaders, including Charles Schumer, the senator from AIPAC, saying:

If there can be any good news from this terror scare it’s that this group was relatively unsophisticated, infiltrated early, and not connected to another terrorist group. This incident shows that we must always be vigilant against terrorism – foreign or domestic.

The senator said nothing about four innocent men, targeted and framed for a supposed terror plot.

If convicted on all charges, the men face possible life sentences. No trial date so far has been set. All four are in Westchester County Jail without bail.

The North Carolina 7

On July 27, dozens of heavily armed Swat and hostage rescue team members arrested seven North Carolina men on terrorist-related charges, six US citizens and one permanent resident.

The same day Justice Department press release cited Daniel Patrick Boyd, his two sons, Zakariya and Dylan, Hysen Sherifi, Anes Subasic, Mohammad Omar Aly Hassan, and Ziyad Yaghi on charges of “conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to murder, kidnap, main and injure persons abroad.” Allegations only were provided. Precise details were omitted.

Earlier on July 22, the federal grand jury indictment listed seven counts:

“conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists;
conspiracy to murder, kidnap, main, and injure persons in a foreign country;
receiving a firearm through interstate commerce;
possession of a firearm to be used for a crime of violence;
selling or otherwise disposing of a firearm and ammunition to a person knowing and having reasonable cause to believe was convicted of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;” and
two counts of false statements.

The DOJ also alleged that “Daniel Boyd is a veteran of terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan who, over the past three years, has conspired with others in this country to recruit and help young men travel overseas in order to kill.” Again, no evidence was cited, just supposition-based accusations.

The indictment claimed that from 1989-1992, Boyd got “violent jihad” training abroad and “allegedly fought in Afghanistan” against the Soviets. Then from November 2006 through July 2009, he and the other defendants “conspired to provide material support and resources to terrorists, including currency, training, transportation and personnel” along with the other charges in the indictment. As part of the “conspiracy,” they “believe(d) that violent jihad was a personal religious obligation,” and they “were willing to die as martyrs.” An eighth unnamed suspect is also being sought, a man believed to have traveled to Pakistan last year, for what purpose wasn’t indicated.

According to US Attorney George EB Holding:

These charges hammer home the point that terrorists and their supporters are not confined to the remote regions of some far away land but can grow and fester right her at home. Terrorists and their supporters are relentless and constant in their efforts to hurt and kill innocent people across the globe. We must be equally relentless and constant in our efforts to stop them.

Six of the seven men are being held at a Farmville, VA detention facility. When brought to trial, they’ll face life sentences if convicted on the most serious charges. Yet according to The New York Times:

DOJ officials “said that the men charged on (July 22) were not seen as serious terrorist threats to the United States or American interests abroad, and that there were no indications of ties to Al Qaeda or other militant groups.”

The claimed evidence relates solely to concern that they were “amassing a sizable number of automatic weapons, (the fact that Boyd had) foreign fighter experience, (and has) a network of contacts overseas, intending to recruit others who were on the fence.”

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano cited the arrests as proof of increased “homegrown terrorism.”

On August 5, AP reported that:

Federal authorities said Tuesday (August 4) the accused ringleader of a group of North Carolina terrorism suspects talked about loving jihad, fighting for Allah and loathing a US military presence at Muslim holy sites.

Writer Mike Baker said FBI Special Agent Michael Sutton claimed Boyd wanted the defendants “to engage in jihad, train on firearms and travel overseas. Sutton said Boyd repeatedly spoke of armor-piercing ammunition and a year ago told a witness about his dislike of the US military in some Middle Eastern lands.” According to Boyd, “They’re over there killing our brothers.”

In an August 5 Jewish World Review article, self-styled anti-terrorism expert and notorious Islamophobe Steven Emerson played up the prosecution charges of another homegrown terrorist plot using secretly (and perhaps illegally) FBI taped conversations and comments “reported by witnesses,” including a voice identified as Boyd saying:

“If I don’t leave this country soon, I am going to make jihad right here in America (and) Allah knows I love jihad.”

Emerson said the FBI “found a fatwa, or religious edict, in Boyd’s house saying Muslims have ‘an individual duty to kill Americans and their allies.”

Both Emerson and the Justice Department are notorious for manipulating, doctoring, or inventing evidence to incite fear and intimidate juries to convict.

Yet this entire case appears as bogus as others, and this one is even stranger. Throughout the 1980s, the CIA and Pakistani ISI spent billions recruiting and training Afghan mujahedeen (including Osama bin Laden) to wage jihad against the Soviets. Ronald Reagan called them “freedom fighters.” Today, they’re “homegrown terrorists” with no apparent proof they plan crimes, just suspicions based on the flimsiest suppositions.

As for Daniel Patrick Boyd, the so-called ringleader, he arrived in Pakistan after the Soviets’ February 1989 withdrawal. Yet the CIA continued to support a civil war against the Kabul government, and beginning in 1977 began working with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a man “responsible for murdering hundreds of dedicated resistance fighters, political workers, and intellectuals (as well as being) a leading figure in the heroin trade,” according to Ralph McGehee, a former CIA veteran (from 1952 – 1977) and critic.

In 1977, Hekmatyar founded the Hezb-e-Islami Party of Islam. The CIA backed it with material support and weapons. Boyd arrived in Peshwar, Pakistan in 1989, apparently to work for a Muslim relief organization connected to the movement, not to train and fight as a mujahedeen. But in any event, Washington and the CIA backed the party and his activities.

Now he and the others are called jihadists, the DOJ citing Boyd, his son Zakariya, Yaghi, and Sherifi’s overseas travels as more proof. In March 2006, Boyd and his sons went to Gaza, then to Israel in June 2007 to visit Muslim holy sites. The DOJ claims the first trip was to meet with Palestinians who “believed that violent jihad was a personal religious obligation,” and the second to wage “violent jihad,” yet no evidence of specific crimes were mentioned or intent to commit them.

In October 2006, Yaghi, it was alleged, went to Jordan for the same reason, and so did Sherifi in July 2008 on a trip to Kosovo after which he “returned to North Carolina in April 2009, for the purpose of soliciting funds and personnel to support the mujahedeen” – the same fighters America backed in Afghanistan, then did again with KLA extremists in NATO/America’s war against Milovesic and Serbia.

Overall, the indictment is as bogus as others. It’s based on suppositions and unfounded claims but no clear evidence of intent to commit or support violent crimes. The defendants are being used to instill fear, justify the Iraq occupation, the escalated offensive in Afghanistan and spillover into Pakistan, and expanded US military presence globally, including on US streets if ordered. It’s happening at a time when we’re all as vulnerable as the Newburgh 4 and North Carolina 7.

Disinformation in The Economist

Francisco Domínguez — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:00:53 +0000

In its July 18, 2009 edition, The Economist article on Bolivia (”Bolivia’s divisive president. The Permanent Campaign,” July 18) asserted, “Venezuelan troops helped quell a rebellion centred on the airport at Santa Cruz in the east in 2007.” The article did not bother to substantiate such a serious charge against Venezuela and is buried as one of several unjustified and unsubstantiated allegations against the president and government of Bolivia,

The piece “Bolivia’s divisive president. The Permanent Campaign” does not even pretend to be ‘even-handed’ or ‘balanced.’ Some of the statements in it are simply unalloyed anti-Morales propaganda. Putting the blame squarely on Evo Morales, for example, for the diplomatic difficulties Bolivia has been having with the US (without informing the readers that Bush unilaterally had ended Bolivia’s export preferential treatment on some exports or that Bolivia expelled US ambassador Mr Phillip Goldberg because he had been actively supporting secessionist efforts in Santa Cruz), and with Peru (without telling readers that Peru gave asylum to Bolivian Cabinet minister indicted for civilian deaths resulting from military repression of protests six years ago during the government of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada), but explaining them as a deliberate Morales drive to isolate Bolivia because, according to The Economist, “Many in the government dream of an economic autarky, powered by gas.” The article goes even further by quoting government’s opponents in Santa Cruz, who describe Morales as an “indigenous fascist” with The Economist accepting such a highly inflammatory label with no qualification whatsoever. And, if there was any doubt as to where The Economist stands on the Morales government, the piece ends by sympathetically paraphrasing one pundit who says “Bolivia is suffering a classic bout of Latin American populism: personalised politics, mild paranoia, bad economic policy and a weak opposition.” No journalistic objectivity or even the pretension of it.

Venezuelan Ambassador to the United Kingdom, HE Samuel Moncada, responded to the allegation regarding the participation of Venezuelan troops in the suppression of a rebellion in Santa Cruz in 2007, with letter to Michael Reid, The Economist’s Latin American editor, in which he stated that “Unfortunately, dangerous and negative consequences in the region may arise due to this blunder published in your magazine. I would therefore demand a correction of such fallacy”. (The Ambassador’s letter can be found in full here).

Subsequently Ambassador Moncada wrote again to Michael Reid who had responded to the first letter by saying that The Economist stood by their story. In his second letter Ambassador Moncada wrote: “As we believe that the videos in your possession are absolutely false, this matter can only be settled with evidence. Therefore, either you publish your data in order to prove your point, or our request in the first letter stands. Then, you will have no choice but to correct the statement in your article issued on the 18th of July.”

A campaign of letter writing to Michael Reid was initiated so that he published the video material in his possession and proved his story or correct the false statement made about Venezuelan troops having participated in quelling a rebellion in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

On its July 25, 2009, edition, The Economist did publish a ‘correction’ on its story “Clarification: Bolivia and Venezuela.”

See also the video footage on which the allegation was based.

The full text of the ‘correction’ is:

Clarification: Bolivia and Venezuela
Jul 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition
In our recent story on Bolivia (“The permanent campaign”, July 18th), we stated that “Venezuelan troops helped quell a rebellion centred on the airport at Santa Cruz in the east in 2007”. Both the Venezuelan and Bolivian governments deny this (see Letters), and Venezuela’s government has publicly asked us to retract this assertion. We based our statement on television footage aired at the time which shows a Venezuelan air force plane and uniformed Venezuelan personnel at Santa Cruz airport shortly after it had been seized by the Bolivian government from the local authorities. No official explanation has been given for their presence. However, we are happy to clarify that this footage does not prove Venezuelan troops played an active role in quelling the rebellion. We have placed the television footage on our website.

The explanation, “we are happy to clarify that this footage does not prove Venezuelan troops played an active role in quelling the rebellion”, not only TOTALLY contradicts the assertion made in the July 18 story — defended by Latin American editor, Michael Reid in correspondence with Venezuela’s ambassador — but also shows the type of bias The Economist tends engage in when it comes to covering developments in Venezuela in particular but also in Latin America in general.

The fact is that the assertion “Venezuelan troops helped quell a rebellion centred on the airport at Santa Cruz in the east in 2007” was based on the flimsiest of ‘evidences’ which no serious editor should use to make such a grave assertion. Furthermore, the facts themselves, as presented by The Economist ‘correction’ speak for themselves. The footage which Latin American editor Michael Reid was forced to made public NOWHERE shows anything of any kind whatsoever that could be construed as “Venezuelan troops [having] helped quell a rebellion” in Bolivia in 2007 as affirmed in the July 18 article.

The footage comes from a TV channel which is clearly opposed to President Evo Morales, at a time when the Bolivian government faced a serious destabilisation threat from a radical opposition to the Bolivian government whose epicentre was/is the Department of Santa Cruz and the capital city of the same name. The Half Moon ‘autonomist’ movement in Bolivia has strenuously tried to demonstrate in its propaganda that Morales is a puppet of Hugo Chavez and falsely claim that it is Venezuelan ‘domination’ they have been fighting against.

The Economist ‘explanation’ as to why it had asserted that there had been Venezuelan military participation in the quelling of an anti-government rebellion at the Santa Cruz airport is that the TV “footage aired at the time [...] shows a Venezuelan air force plane and uniformed Venezuelan personnel at Santa Cruz airport shortly after it had been seized by the Bolivian government from the local authorities,” adding, “No official explanation has been given for their presence.” None was asked. Mr Reid, as the Latin American editor, ought to have corroborated the story by requesting confirmation or otherwise from the Bolivian and Venezuelan authorities as to the alleged participation of Venezuelan troops in repressive activities against Bolivian citizens on Bolivian soil. It is just incredible that such grave assertion could have been made on the bases of the video footage published in The Economist and without this elementary safeguard of sound journalism.