Why Do 5 Former Secretaries of State Say Close Gitmo?

This just came in from truthout: Former Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Henry A. Kissinger, James A. Baker III, Warren Christopher and Madeleine K. Albright all agreed that Guantanamo should be closed.

James Baker went on to say:

"It gives us a very, very bad name, not just internationally," he said. "I have
a great deal of difficulty understanding how we can hold someone, pick someone
up, particularly someone who might be an American citizen - even if they were
caught somewhere abroad, acting against American interests - and hold them
without ever giving them an opportunity to appear before a
magistrate."
The former secretaries of State also urged that the U.S. open a line of dialogue with Iran, each saying it was important to maintain contact with adversaries and allies alike.

Iran? And what about Iran? Do you mean we shouldn't take McCain's word and "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran"?

Baker suggested the dialogue (with Iran) could center on a common dilemma,
saying a "dysfunctional Iraq, a chaotic Iraq, is not something that's in the
interest to Iran. There's every incentive on their part to help us, the same way
they did in Afghanistan."
Kissinger urged an open - if delicate - line of communication with
Iran. "One has to talk with adversaries," said Kissinger, who served the Nixon and Ford administrations.

Didn't think the old guy had it in him. Does that mean talk to .... terrorists, too? They are "adversaries", so "one has to talk" with them. So where were they when Gitmo was put in place as Our Torture Chamber?

War on Terror Fuels Itself; Economy, Democratic Values Pay

Tom Engelhardt's intro to Mark Danner's great article on "Taking Stock of the War on Terror" brings this eloquent take on the war on terror:

The announcement (not declaration) of "war" was, in fact, a necessity for this administration, the only lever available with which to pry a commander-in-chief presidency out of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Without the President's self-proclaimed War on Terror, there would have been no "war" at all, and so no "wartime" atmosphere or "wartime" presidency to be invoked to cow Congress into backing Bush's future war of choice in Iraq. Without "war" and "wartime," it would have been impossible to bring the American people along so readily and difficult to apply "war rules" from the Guantanamo prison complex in Cuba and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Otherwise, as Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris recently pointed out in the New Yorker, how could American officials and commanders have designated those prisoners seized by the U.S. military in Iraq as "'security detainees,' a label that had gained currency in the war on terror, to describe 'unlawful combatants' and other prisoners who had been denied P.O.W. status and could be held indefinitely, in isolation and secrecy, without judicial recourse."

In the meantime, consider with Mark Danner, author most recently of The Secret Way to War, the fate of that global Pax Americana which the War on Terror was intended to bring about, as he gave this clear, painfully true picture of the War on Terror:

How indeed to "take stock" of the War on Terror? Such a strange beast it
is, like one of those mythological creatures that is part goat, part lion, part
man. Let us take a moment and identify each of these parts. For if we look
closely at its misshapen contours, we can see in the War on Terror:
Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;
Part shooting-war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;
Part intelligence, spy v. spy covert struggle, fought quietly -- "on the dark side,"
as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 -- in a vast territory
stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and the Straits of
Gibraltar;
And finally the War on Terror is part, perhaps its largest part,
Virtual War -- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political
utility not wholly unlike Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia,
and Oceania that is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always
expanding.

Read more of this brilliant expose, of which this is another excerpt defining the GWOT:

... declaring war on "terrorism" -- a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target -- was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, "Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power."

That's it! It's the war against "evil", against "terrorism", against something that is neither a nation nor a people, but rather an amorphous idea. Why not declare war instead on, say, the number 13?

And the impressive result? According to the National Intelligence Estimate of 2006, the Iraq War, what was to be the "clincher" against terrorism, has become its biggest promoter.

In fact, that NIE cites the "Iraq jihad" as the second of four factors "fueling
the jihadist movement," along with "entrenched grievances, such as corruption,
injustice, and fear of Western domination, leading to anger, humiliation, and a
sense of powerlessness"; "the slow pace of real and sustained economic, social,
and political reforms in many Muslim majority nations"; and "pervasive anti-US
sentiment among most Muslims." ...
Which means that telling the story of the War on Terror, a half dozen years on -- and "taking stock" of that War -- merges inevitably with the sad tale of how that so-called war, strange and multiform beast that it is, became subsumed in a bold and utterly incompetent attempt to occupy and remake a major Arab country.

Basically, the War on Terror is "an ideological crusade", and considering that bin Laden deliberately provoked the U.S. into attacking the Islamic world in order, as he envisioned it, to weaken America's military and economic power in a hopeless quagmire, it seems that Bush jumped right in. Into Iraq, that is, worse in so many ways than Afghanistan. And look at our military and economy now, going downhill fast.

The original idea was to shape up the Middle East and create a "Democracy domino effect. But as Mr. Danner points out:

The problem the administration faced, or rather didn't want to face, was
that the calcified order that lay at the root of the problem was the very order
that, for nearly six decades, had been shaped, shepherded, and sustained by the
United States.

Instead of dealing with the dictatorships that create instability and public resentment, we chose to invade an autonomous nation, causing already-existing potential rifts to morph into deadly civil war, further exacerbated by al-Qaeda who deliberately foment such violence.

... the Sunni-Shia divide running through Iraq in effect runs through
the entire Middle East. The United States, in choosing this place to stage its
Democratic Revolution, could hardly have done al-Qaeda a better favor.

Now we are hardly in a position to walk away. The moral victory is a distant fantasy. The terrorists have decentralized. They've become "viral al-Qaeda":

"viral al-Qaeda" -- "spontaneous groups of friends," in the words of former
CIA analyst and psychiatrist Marc Sageman, "as in [the] Madrid and Casablanca
[bombings], who have few links to any central leadership, [who] are generating
sometimes very dangerous terrorist operations, notwithstanding their frequent
errors and poor training."

And as Mr. Danner sums it up, we have passed into the "era of the amateurs",

...self-organized, Internet reliant, and decentralized, dependent not on
armies, training, or even technology but on desire and political will.

We keep feeding that desire and starving our own moral vision by refusing creative nonviolent options. It's time to use our minds in something other than creating enemies and hitting them with clubs. It's time to reassess our purpose on this earth. When you insist on fear, emotions get in the way of reason. A war on terror is self-destruction, and humankind deserves better.

Blaming Muslims for Terrorism: Blood Sport for the Cheesecake Crowd

Columnist Walter Williams wrote a piece entitled "Peaceful Muslims," blaming the peaceful majority of Muslims for the actions of terrorists, in response to which I wrote the following, addressed to Mr. Williams:

This column reflects a very common theme coming from all sides, left and right, of the non-Muslim world. Such a piece is an easy one to write, to be sure, as it seems so obvious and there is such a broad consensus in the West on this point. (One point important to interject here is that the article referred to in this piece is this one found on the acrimoniously anti-Islam site where Mr. Islamofascism Week, David Horowitz, holds court, Frontpage. Their bias is that all things Islamic are bad, all things Western Christian are good. End of story.)

This point of view also strongly supports the idea of a Global War on Terror, another point regarding which there is broad consensus, almost to the point where it's become a given, like the assumptions that the universe started with nothing more than a Big Bang, or that socialism in itself is what caused the USSR to become repressive, or that the way to deal with Climate Change is to switch to biofuels and Primuses, join a commune and bring the entire world back not to 1968, but to 1768, when carbon emissions were presumably a tiny fraction of what they are today. It all sounds good on paper, but on the ground it ain't necessarily so.

First, we presume "Islam" and "Muslim" to be one vast, coherent force, one gigantic religious bloc, acting on some level in a manner expressive of what Islam is. "Muslims" are usually, as in your column, seen as and compared with citizens of a nation or, in their case, a huge empire, as if the dreaded/fantasized "caliphate" were a reality and this massive public voice is an expression of unconscionable apathy in the face of evil.

In reality on the ground, the one true thread in all this is the "unconscionable apathy in the face of evil" part. Or you can forget the divisive word "evil" and say "oppression." Even the Qur'an warns against following corrupt and oppressive leaders, emphasizing the responsibility of the "little people", those who use their oppression as an excuse for inaction, abandoning their responsibility to take action to change their situation. The Qur'an refers to them as "corrupt." So does this jive with your point?

Absolutely not. The oppression or "evil" here is oppression. It is the dictatorships that govern almost every Muslim population on the planet, such as Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Sudan, Libya, now Pakistan, and even Indonesia. Note I did not mention Iran. They do have parties and some degree of representative government and Ahmedinejad did not get there by a yes-no referendum, but by multi-party popular vote. Lebanon is another nation with representative government and multi-party elections that also has a sizeable and powerful Muslim population. Notably, we don't approve of either, despite their democratic bent, mainly due to their nasty predilection for pro-Palestinian views. Oooh, those nasty Palestinians! But I digress...

The point is that Muslims are citizens in repressive regimes. They are, for the most part, passive recipients of repression/oppression. They know it is wrong to take this lying down, and nobody likes it. But one look at Tibet and the former Soviet Union and you can see that a little people power can backlash into even more repression. It's like the torture at Gitmo: a "suspect" tries to tell the truth and it doesn't work, so he tells the lies his tormenters want to hear to stop the pain, but it seems they only want to take collective revenge on him.

To most Muslims living under dictatorships, they see the West feeding and caring for their oppressors, and making it impossible for them to get out of their hunger, poverty or misery. "Terrorists" are, to many of them, merely "freedom fighters" with an agenda they understand as taking extreme action under extreme circumstances - people, in some cases, with no truly functioning government, no economy, no infrastructure, no social support, no hope. Or people who feel that the West is catering to a wealthy elite at their expense, plundering the people's resources, using their lands as military bases for adventures that seem only to harm their world. The so-called "liberation" of Iraq was a sham, to them a blatant oil-grab upon which was clumsily tacked-on a promise of "democracy". Word on the street is that "democracy" means "kiss Uncle Sam's feet" and adopt so-called "Western" culture. It means submit to Western dominance. It means obliteration of their culture, their religion, even their pride. It means sinking deeper into poverty. Is that not what happened to Iraq? To Egypt? To other so-called "Western-friendly" nations?

This is not how we see it, of course - this view seems absurd, nonsensical to us. But to them it is obvious fact. In the face of this, the only ones apparently standing for their pride, their culture and religion, their self-determination against the monolithic Western powerbrokers, are the "terrorists". At least they are, in their own deadly way, standing for their Muslim brothers' and sisters' pride. Just as to you, the whole population of Islamic countries is fair game:

"Because those millions of peace-loving Muslims do not speak out and expose
terrorists and don't more fully cooperate with domestic and international
authorities trying to stop terrorists, they become enemies of the West just as
the peace-loving people in Germany, Italy and Japan became enemies of the Allied
powers during World War II. Like them, Muslims should be prepared to suffer the
full might of the West in its efforts to fight terrorism. I'm hoping that the
millions of peaceful Muslims take the proper action to avoid such an outcome.
I'm not that optimistic. We're involved in a clash with a culture that has
little regard for the Western values that hold the sanctity of human life and
liberty dear."

Can you imagine for a moment that Muslims on the street say that the West is a culture that has little regard for the Islamic values that hold the sanctity of human life and liberty dear? They are telling us that our Western civilians should be prepared to suffer the full might of the Islamic world in its efforts to fight oppression. Of course, whether in fact terrorism fights oppression, or is even Islamic in any way, is another issue, to which I would answer a resounding "No!" But the West makes it extremely difficult to take a stand in that way. You’re demanding, on pain of eradication, that Muslims do the West’s bidding for the West’s own interests, preferably in a state of prostration. Somehow, the sanctity of human life and its liberty don’t come off as the value being promoted.

We are, to them, a nation of 21st Century Marie Antoinettes who can't even conceive of what it's like to be poor or powerless. Marie Antoinette is certainly beautiful, respectable, and knows her little world well, but she sure as hell shouldn't be making all these blind, self-assured, self-righteous remarks about people she does not understand in the least. And when a bomb causes tea to spill on her perfect silk designer dress, not a tear is shed in the land of the perennial underdog. When she falls in a swoon, Muslims have a hard time working up a state of mourning. Just as, I suppose, we don’t get bleary-eyed over the wives and children of Guantanamo detainees.

When I heard about the London bombings, I was sick to my stomach. How could these people do this?? Why?? It only makes things worse ... for Muslims! As a Muslim, I am one of the many victims of terrorism and its counterpart, the Global War on Terror. I wanted to reach out and stop this. A large number of Muslims in the UK did just that, protesting the bombings and voicing their anger. But who listens, who hears? Those protests can‘t compete with the spectacular terror events. And again, the West is about as attractive an ally for the Muslim downtrodden as Ms. Antoinette was for the French poor. Being cheerleaders for the West's GWOT, one of history's most unimaginably vast examples of overkill, doesn’t play as a self-respecting option.

The West tends to put Muslims in the untenable position of either A) cheering on people who see their only option to fight oppression is to attack innocents, vulnerable civilians, the easy targets in often-horrific macho “Events“… or B) embracing the islamophobic, Marie Antoinette-impersonating, self-serving, fat cats of the West as the proper representatives of their collective soul.

Given this ugly, banal choice, and they go with their gut. And gut-decisions tend to be xenophobic. Oops! We’re the outsiders. It doesn't help that the word "terrorist" is variously applied to virtually any group that attacks Western targets, even military targets. Al-Qaeda in Iraq, for example, commits atrocities that would be unthinkable to, say, Hezbollah or even Hamas. Many suspect AQI is a Western-backed front organization to foment sectarian violence in Iraq. It's obviously not true, but, hey, after the Hamas-Fatah rift turned out to be a US covert action, causing unbearable human turmoil and agony among an already oppressed and occupied society ... well, what do you expect them to think? That we're all about cooperation and democracy? It's a hell of a hard sell, man.

The news to you is that neither terrorists nor the West represent the Muslim people, a non-homogeneous collection of homo sapiens from many countries, most of whom are barely on speaking terms with each other, if that, and agree on virtually nothing, not even agreeing to disagree, except in a few exceptional moments of triumph. For the most part, they survive psychologically and spiritually by either fantasy, religion, or both. Neither is conducive to calm, logic-based political action. We should cut them some slack, give them some understanding and nuance, try to get off our high horse and stop feeding the man-eating tigers that rule their lands, and stop invading them. After all, the terrorists also work on PR in the Muslim world. And we’re stepping all over our toes to show them how much we don’t give a damn about them, about democracy, or about the earth itself, for that matter, choosing always the capitalistically attractive direction du jour.

And you should stop these easy, careless platitudes that only shift responsibility away from those who can afford it and on to those who can't - whose poverty and powerlessness we support by our taxdollar-fed invasive foreign policies. We put al-Qaeda in Iraq for three trillion bucks. Osama bin Laden's son (and a few like-minded guys) stopped further al-Qaeda action in the US by showing him the Qur'an specifically prohibits this type of terrorist action, and that 9-11-style shows could actually incur God‘s wrath. (I know you want us to take the credit for this, but really - not even a bona fide attempt?? DHS has to manufacture internal terrorist threats to keep its budget up, for God's sake.) But of course, we don't talk to terrorists, as if they were a species of primate cyborg. Only when terrorists are seen by the society as an instrument of oppression, not a fight against oppressors, will there be a stronger movement against it - if they‘re not mowed down in the process, that is.

Guns are expensive and impressive. But talk - and I mean thoughtful, considerate discourse - is cheap and more effective. Sadly, it is something we can't do any more, having sold that ability to the loudest bidders. Yeah, man, it's all about pride, and being treated with a little respect, not a pawn to be mowed down in front of the self-styled "Masters of the Universe." And you, of all people, should know better.

Banned Cartoon in "First Amendment"-gutted US

Here's the cartoon (actually one of 4) banned by the US Army, drawn by Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman held in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, according to his lawyer.

Other than freedom of expression, what threat does it pose?

"The Endlessness Justifies the Meaninglessness" - Free Speech Leads to Arrests

Over 200 people were arrested across America in protests against the war in Iraq. Is this Naomi Wolf's predicted scenario where ordinary citizens are criminalized for voicing their free speech rights against the Executive Powers? Well, not quite, but...

In San Francisco, for example, according to this Reuters report:

Sgt. Steve Maninna said officers had arrested 143 people on charges including trespassing, resisting arrest and obstructing traffic. Four women were also detained for hanging a large banner off the city's famous Golden Gate Bridge and
then released, said bridge spokeswoman Mary Currie.
On Washington's National Mall, about 100 protesters carried signs that read: "The Endlessness Justifies the Meaninglessness" and waved upside-down U.S. flags, a
traditional sign of distress.
"Bush and Cheney, leaders failed, Bush and Cheney belong in jail," they chanted, referring to U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

More power to them.

The War on Terror is Civil War: and Civilians Pay

Think "accidental killing", think air strikes. The sudden, searing, mindlessly penetrating plunge of "smart bombs", ripping apart walls, flesh, blood vessels, skulls, upholstery, plastics. "Precision strikes" guided by "intelligence" that right here where a family shares dinner lurk terror agents of the dreaded al-Qaeda. The explosion detonates as commanded, oblivious to the objects, arsenals, food, children, mothers, photos, clothing. The "smart bomb" knows nothing - not the slightest thing, yet more such weapons shine like trophies in American armories, the crown jewels of weapons technology, applied physics, the culmination of decades, even centuries, of development. Would that such development and focus had been applied to the human landscape, to resolving conflicts, to negotiation, even to the consequences of such weapons! Could we then avoid killing the innocent?

But no, our sophisticated weapons only plunge us deeper into the grotesque, self-replicating, bloody polyphony of war, growing ever more complex, each battlefront knotting on itself like a long rope shaken in a large box over and over again. We never designed or planned the knots. It's those laws of physics acting out again. So why don't we study those laws that apply to the rigors of human conflict?

Where's the logic? It's touted as pro-democracy, but an invasion is not a "liberation". Freedom cannot be achieved by force. It's sold as pro-security, but the war on terror is necessarily a guerilla war - one without borders - whose battlefield is the streets where children play, the homes where families sleep and eat. What security can be found in such a war? It's not a fire, not cleansing the world of a scourge. It's cancer, creating more of the scourge as it grows, feeding on itself.

Wars must run their course, as if on inertia, until they run into an obstacle: a mountain range, an ocean, a more powerful enemy. Then finally, they stop. Triage. The bleeding recedes, and life re-emerges... But the Superpower's war, the "Global War on Terror" has no visible barriers. The Kush Mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan shelter Osama bin Laden, the godfather of al-Qaeda, the mastermind of 9/11. But the Kush Mountains do not stop the Global War on Terror. As if opening a giant quantum puzzle-turned-Pandora's box, we opened the war on terror, called it global, and so it was. Wherever we send our troops, it follows.

Iraq was a sovereign state. We invaded, and al-Qaeda cells sprung up where they never set foot before, like cancerous lesions. Iraq is now an international malignancy. Civilian deaths mean the people will hate and blame us. To them, we are the invaders, seeking oil and empire.

We didn't like Saddam Hussein, so we replaced him with chaos and a breeding ground for al-Qaeda. One wonders, to fill Guantanamo with someone? To justify having a war on terror, must we then create terrorists?

Wherever we see Islamic government, we see terrorism. Somalia claimed to have an Islamic government, many calling it another Taliban. We then saw it as a threat. Pandora's box again. So we opened it up as a "new front" in the war on terror. Our "precision air strikes" struck a Somali village on "intelligence" that three al-Qaeda operatives were there, and instead we killed innocent civilians and livestock. The operatives had been there - approximately - but managed to escape - to this very day. Meanwhile, this battlefront has degenerated into a killing field between Ethiopians, al-Qaeda inspired insurgents, and other Somali troops and warlords, so horrific that the humanitarian disaster ensuing is being described by those who know, such as David Case here, as "another Darfur." Even Ethiopia can hardly afford this war, but it was largely their "starring role" in aiding the United States in its Global War on Terror that embroiled them for the whole of 2007 - and counting. Another international malignancy.

Iran is an Islamic republic. The Bush administration sees them as a threat, constantly nagging the nation and the world to see them as a source and sponsor of terrorism. Half the point of President Bush's trip to the Middle East was to convince Arab governments that Iran is a threat and to mobilize them against it. Public threats against Iran have been a source of scandal by their unsubstantiated claims, yet many still insist we must attack Iran. With, of course, "precision air strikes." Any hit, of course, will hit civilians - who then, no doubt, will become justifiably enraged against - who else? That crazy Superpower, of course. This feeds right into President Ahmedinejad's propaganda. Where the country doesn't go malignant, the rhetoric does.

Afghanistan was supposed to be the grand success story of the War on Terror. But the Taliban is back, stronger than ever. The civilian population is bearing the brunt of the bloodshed. Their initial positive response to the United States is dwindling. Is this how we win the war on terror?

No one argues that civilian deaths are not tragic, or even that they are really avoidable. Many argue that the end - a high-minded and philosophical concept of security and even democracy - justifies the means - brute force, bloodshed. But that's the wrong point.

The question is not "does the end justify the means?" The question is, do the means have any rational, cause-effect relationship with the end? Absolutely not.

War in itself does not cause or create security for the powerful. In fact, it usually exacerbates any lack of security, may even destroy security. War does not create or cause democracy certainly. By defeating an undemocratic foe, one does not leave democracy as the natural consequence. In the case of the war on terror, chaos and violence have been the consequence. And in most cases, more terror. Score more wins for al-Qaeda, which has now morphed into something even Osama bin Laden doesn't really control.

The War on Terror is essentially a kind of "civil war". It is a war of man against man within the "civil" boundaries not of his nationhood, but his very humanity. It is touted as a war of the "humane" vs. the "inhumane", of the "innocent" vs. the "terrorist." But do these definitions hold water in the face of reality on the ground? Our terrorists are to others "liberators", "freedom fighters", defenders of their respective homelands against foreign invaders. By conducting wars of invasion, we give them cause to defend their definitions, to engage their civilian populations in such definitions, to gain sympathy. Like all civil wars, the War on Terror is essentially a war for the civil societies in which they are waged. It is a war against two conflicting ideologies within a civil society, tearing them apart. This kind of war can never achieve security so much as it achieves devastation of the entire civilian population.

So even as the U.S. military machine hides or downplays its air strikes on targets that unavoidably achieve "collateral damage", the goal such air strikes supposedly achieves is not foiled so much by the sweeping targets of the weapons or even of the intelligence, but rather by the very nature of the war that is being fought.

Is it not a shame that we put the great minds of our nation to use in developing the formidable technologies of war, rather than the even more formidable science and understanding of negotiation and discourse as a means of achieving peaceful coexistence? The mind is too wonderful to waste centuries on in pursuit of continuously-generating enemies. Is the suicide bomber in fact a symbol of what we are doing - collective suicide?

Nakba Denial Is As Much a Crime as Holocaust Denial

Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany, and many other countries. The logic is that such a great humanitarian disaster should be remembered, and in remembering never repeated. Yet another humanitarian disaster, different, but certainly involving the population of an entire nation, still hanging over them with the spectre of obliteration from the face of the earth, in the name of race. And this disaster was caused by the very people who collectively were victims of the Holocaust. So certainly it is of great significance, something to be remembered, something to make them strive to avoid victimizing others as they were victimized. Yet almost the opposite has occurred. And so Israel denies the Palestinian Nakba ... but brave and powerful voices are speaking the unspeakable, telling the whole painful truth. And what peace or freedom can there be without truth?

In seeking understanding between Palestinians and Israelis, there are some Israelis, like Norma Musih, featured in this article, and Eitan Bronstein, founder of Zochrot ("remembering" in Hebrew), who have made it their mission to present the often-lost/denied part of Israel's formation, in particular "the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948", known as the Nakba, also described here:

In 1948 more than 60 percent of the total Palestinian population was expelled.
More than 530 Palestinian villages were depopulated and completely destroyed. To date, Israel has prevented the return of approximately six million Palestinian refugees, who have either been expelled or displaced. Approximately 250,000 internally displaced Palestinian second-class citizens of Israel are prevented from returning to their homes and villages.

Norma Musih, a young teacher from Jaffa and Assistant Director and one of the founders of Zochrot, helped New Yorkers commemorate "Nakba Day" last May 15, 2007, during which she opened a dialogue about the meaning of the Nakba, reconciliation, justice, and the work of Zochrot.

In spite of death threats and other attacks and resistence, she and other members of the group are devoted to "commemorating, understanding and teaching about a subject that in Israel is plainly subversive: the Palestinian Nakba."

“At first, the Nakba was something I couldn’t understand,” Musih said. “But I felt there was something there I must face. I had to explore what that was. Now I see that the Nakba belongs to us as well as to the Palestinians. It is part of our healing process.”
In one of her exercises with children, she hands each child a card on which are the names of Palestinian villages that were destroyed, or from which Arabs were driven out. The children are to put their cards in their proper places on the map.
“One Israeli girl put back on the map the village her father had destroyed,” Musih recalled.

Here one can read about Eitan Bronstein, an Argentinian-born Israeli educator and activist, who, as Director of Zokhrot, says,

"When it comes to the Nakba and what was there before Israel was created, it's a big hole, a black hole and people don't know how to deal with it," he said. "It's perhaps the most important period of our life in this region and it's not really known."

As stated on their website:

"The Zionist collective memory exists in both our cultural and physical landscape, yet the heavy price paid by the Palestinians -- in lives, in the destruction of hundreds of villages, and in the continuing plight of the Palestinian refugees -- receives little public recognition. Zochrot works to make the history of the Nakba accessible to the Israeli public so as to engage Jews and Palestinians in an open recounting of our painful common history.

"We hope that by bringing the Nakba into Hebrew, the language spoken by the Jewish majority in Israel, we can make a qualitative change in the political discourse of this region. Acknowledging the past is the first step in taking responsibility for its consequences. This must include equal rights for all the peoples of this land, including the right of Palestinians to return to their homes."

The group's compassionate and honest willingness to view the situation from the Palestinian side is crucial to achieving a lasting peace, realistically.

For Bronstein it is critical for Israelis to understand and acknowledge what happened to the Palestinians in 1948.

"1948 was the year that constructed relations between Jews and Arabs, that made it okay for Israelis to shoot Arabs in 2000," he said referring to the 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel who were shot and killed by Israeli police during a protest against Israeli practices in the Occupied Territories. "You can't understand what happened in 2000 without understanding the Nakba. Anyone who understands what happened in 1948 cannot continue to be blind."

The keyword is reconciliation, far preferable to war, even though more difficult to get people to do, especially in light of such painful historical events as Plan Dalet, the strategy Israel acted upon in which Palestinians were forcibly removed and sometimes massacred in order to form Israel as a Jewish homeland. Two-thirds of Palestinians became refugees, numbering about 700,000 or more, and "more than 100 civilians (were) killed in the village of Deir Yassin on April 9 and 200 in Tantura between May 22nd and 23rd, (1948)."

To deny this reality, and continue to attempt to bulldoze and kill their way to "victory", will surely not bring true success to Israel. Unfortunately, the easy route is the right-wing militant route, the route people always seem to fall back on, the reason people - and I'm referring to all people, since the dawn of time - always seem to end up fighting endless wars, destroying their own resources, constantly creating enemies.

Now it seems the Israelis in power want to make Gaza a killing field, label all Palestinians as "terrorists", bulldoze whole neighborhoods to make way for Jews, ethnically cleanse their new "homeland" and erase the memory of how it got there. Zokhrot keeps alive the notion that Jews are not all about decimating non-Jews, and Israel's future does not need to rely on creating an island of racially pure Judaic prosperity in a sea of Arab enmity and poverty, or forced subservience and its consequence, seething resentment.

And not all the shared Palestinian-Israeli memories are bad. As Ali Abunimah of The Christian Science Monitor, 14 May 2007, says,

My mother remembers her early childhood and the Jewish neighbors who rented the apartment her father owned. She recalls helping them on the Sabbath and playing with their daughter after school. A life such as this is no more than a distant memory for most Palestinian refugees, who, with their descendants, now number
more than 5 million.

Israel could benefit from generating neighborliness instead of enmity. In fact, they would be well-advised to erect a Nakba memorial near the Holocaust memorial. Start the healing, start being neighbors. I noticed even normally hostile Palestinian sites responding very positively to the work of Zokhrot, and the concept of being good neighbors. Want them to be less like terrorists? Try being more of a mensch.

Thanks to US Invasion, Iraqi Women Lose Rights, Gain Abuse

One of the unintended consequences of the US Invasion of Iraq is the entrenchment of powerful Islamist forces that have permeated Iraqi society and turned it inside out, gutting advances in women's rights that were achieved during Saddam Hussein's secular regime. As usual, bumbling US interventionist, blind, and ultimately anti-democratic international policies have struck again. And as usual, women and children, and of course, civilians, bear the brunt of the resulting debacle.

According to this report by Dahr Jamail, the results are devastating. Whereas under Saddam, women had a higher level of education than in most of the Arab world, and could obtain well-compensated and respected jobs in medicine, law, government, and universities, and of course, there was no dress code, now women are turning up in garbage dumps, after having been raped, tortured and murdered ... accused of having been "bad" for not adhering to strict so-called "Islamic" dress codes and other restrictions.

The militias dominated by the Shia Badr Organisation and the Mehdi Army are leading imposition of strict Islamist rules. The Shia-dominated Iraqi government
is seen as providing tacit and sometimes direct support to them.

Women are being harrassed, threatened, kidnapped, tortured and killed for "offenses" ranging from lack of hijab (in this case, stricter head-to-toe covering) and wearing makeup to having respectable jobs outside the home or even attending a university or school. This situation extends to all major cities in Iraq, from Basra to Baghdad to Baquba and beyond. It is beyond unimaginable, beyond horrifying. Women are being reduced, along with the whole of Iraq generally, to rubble. They are often out of fear forced to live confined like prisoners in their own homes.

And Iraq itself suffers from the lack of their valuable input as doctors, government employees, lawyers and teachers/professors. Not to mention the fact that many of them are widows with children, thanks to the war, and therefore, under this horrific siege of so-called "Islamic" - what I consider the absolute antithesis of "Islamic" - militias enforcing their own weird, right-wing agenda that totally undermines the very thing they profess to be defending: the family, the social structure, even religion. How can these women feed their own children if they cannot work outside the so-called "home", which consists of God only knows what bombed-out shelter or lack thereof?

If these so-called "Muslims" are so allegedly religous, why do they forcibly prevent their own children's mothers to struggle to survive, even though this affects their children's survival? Who are they to label these wives, mothers, and daughters "bad" when they spend much of their own time marauding, raping, killing and threatening others?

It's gotten so bad that all the achievements in women's education are basically bombed out.

In early 2007 Iraq's Ministry of Education found that more than 70 percent of girls and young women no longer attend school or college.

It's not lack of desire for knowledge. It's only the pervasive atmosphere of fear, caused by the abductions and killings that have become prevalent. In Basra where red graffiti warns women to cover from head to toe, at least 40 women have been abducted in the last five months alone, according to the police chief. And in Baghdad,

Several women victims have been accused of being "bad" before they were
abducted, residents have told IPS in Baghdad. Most women who are abducted are
later found dead.
The bodies of several have been found in garbage dumps, showing signs of rape and torture. Many bodies had a note attached saying the woman was "bad", according to residents who did not give their names to IPS.
Similar problems exist for women in Baquba, the capital city of Diyala province, 40 km northeast of Baghdad.
"My neighbour was killed because she was accused of working in the directorate-general of police of Diyala," resident Um Haider told IPS in January. "This woman worked as a receptionist in the governor's office, and not in the police. She was in charge of checking women who work in the governor's office."
Killings like this have led countless women to quit jobs, or to change them.

Thus the Iraqi women must spend their time virtually imprisoned at home, never daring to venture out unless escorted, into streets which by themselves are extremely dangerous war zones.

"Women bear great pain and risks when militants control the streets," Um Basim, a mother of three, told IPS in Baquba recently. "No man can move here or there. When a man is killed, the body is taken to the morgue. The body has to be received by the family, so women often go alone to the morgue to escort the body home. Some are targeted by militants when they do this."

As if this is not bad enough, women are also being detained in US and Iraqi prisons, and their situation is unknown.

According to Nadira Habib, deputy head of the parliamentary committee, there are around 200 women detained in the Iraqi run al-Adala prison in Baghdad. Habibi says there are presumably women in U.S.-run prisons too. "But no one knows how
many female detainees are now in prisons run by U.S. forces as they always
refuse requests from our committee to visit them."

On top of this are the so-called "honor killings", especially common in the Kurdish north, where women are slaughtered on suspicion of having affairs or even contact with someone, often false allegations. So where is the US and where are the so-called Western democracies? Busy "fighting terrorists" - read "planting them" - all over the world.

If instead of taking a militaristic approach, the US and West had taken the approach of dialogue and "detente" - oooh, radical! - maybe democracy would have had a chance. But when you go the military route, taking what the rest of the world views as an extreme interventionist position, what do you expect of the others, your supposed "enemies"? They will be militant, extremist, right-wing jerks. Islam is far away and unlike all that these so-called "Islamists" are doing, just as other hijacked religions are in their essence unlike what extremist zealots act out, from extremist Jews to extremist fundamentalist Christians to extremist (think USSR & Maoist China) atheists, all imposing their narrow views on societies by force. The invasion of Iraq is in essence an invasion, forcing a whole society to kowtow to our own needs, ideas, etc, by force of arms. It is a path doomed to failure and will drag down all that get caught in it.

Hamas-Fatah Split and Violence a US-Israeli Plot - Gazan Children Pay Price

The much-maligned Hamas-Fatah split is actually thanks to the "successful" engineering of US and Israeli conspirators, in their covert efforts to get rid of Hamas, Palestine's democratically-elected government. They pushed Abbas to sell out his own people and fight Hamas, a war which Hamas essentially won, throwing off all plans. Now the US-Israel conspirators are enacting Plan B: starve 'em down. And children and infants in Gaza, of course, as usual, are paying the price.

It makes one ask the question seriously: What exactly does Israel want? Do they want a cessation of violence? Or an annexation of Gaza in toto? Why else would they choose a course which apparently leads to the annihilation of an entire population, or at least its complete suppression, occupation, oppression, dehumanization, near-extermination?

If one Israeli dies, does this mean you kill civilians en masse on the other side? This reminds me of Lebanon, where the kidnapping of 2 Israeli soldiers - I repeat, soldiers - was sufficient justification to decimate the civilian population of Lebanon, including significant portions of their infrastructure. This is Olmert's mentality, and the mentality of the militant wing of the Israeli government that currently holds the strings, or shall I say, holds the trigger. And that trigger-finger is mighty active, loose, and jumpy. If this is a temper tantrum, why doesn't anyone care about the babies and children caught in the crossfire?

While I attempt to maintain some semblance of calm here, if not the impossible thing of being "objective" or "dispassionate" - to the right-wing, it seems "objectivity" means including their lies as a part of any report, regardless to how outrageous - at least one fact-laden yet empathetic blogger presents the picture in a clear and truly fair way. We need to hear about the Palestinian side of the equation, the side that always gets bulldozed by the media, by Superpower policy, by the pro-Israeli bipolar reporting bloc.

This from Heathlander, that inveterate source of calm, but fair, analysis - please check the original Heathlander post on the link below for invaluable graphics, too:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Engineering a coup in Gaza
04Mar08
The latest escalation of violence in Gaza, sparked by the assassination of five Hamas militants, saw some of the fiercest fighting in the Occupied Territories for years. Between 27 February and 3 March, at least 106 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more were wounded. According to B’Tselem, over half of those killed (including 25 children) were civilians who did not take part in the hostilities.

During the same period, one Israeli civilian and two Israeli soldiers were killed by Palestinians.
Israel’s atrocities were so extreme that even the UN Secretary-General, the EU and this clown felt compelled to condemn them as “excessive” and illegal. The British government produced a pathetic statement effectively backing the violence of the Israeli occupation while condemning the “terrorist acts” of the resistance. Israel’s operation (”Warm Winter”) did nothing to stop the Qassams, which are themselves primarily a response to Israeli attacks. This is no surprise: Israel carried out a similar offensive in late 2006, killing hundreds of Palestinians, most of whom were civilians, which failed to halt the rocket fire. Israel now faces a dilemma, reflected succinctly by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who recently told a parliamentary committee that,
“[w]hat happened in recent days was not a one-time event … The objective is reducing the rocket fire and weakening Hamas.”
The problem is that these two objectives - halting the rocket attacks on the one hand and weakening Hamas on the other - are mutually incompatible. In the short-term, the only way to end the rocket attacks short of genocide is to accept Hamas’ overtures and negotiate a ceasefire. This option is supported by a majority of the Israeli public, but is rejected by the U.S. and Israeli governments because it undermines their second objective: “weakening Hamas.”

Indeed, as recently leaked confidential documents show, Israel and the U.S. were bent on toppling Hamas from the moment it entered office in early 2006. In an important article for Vanity Fair, from which I’ll be quoting extensively (apologies for that!), David Rose shows how the U.S. and Israel systematically worked to undermine and destroy the elected Hamas government throughout 2006 and 2007. He further demonstrates that, to quote the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the Hamas takeover in Gaza was “a direct result of the policies advocated by Fatah’s ‘old guard’ … [and] US officials in charge of Palestine policy: the neo-conservative Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch.”
After Hamas’ electoral victory, the U.S. response was unequivocal. According to a senior State Department official quoted by Rose,
“[t]he administration spoke with one voice: ‘We have to squeeze these guys.’ With Hamas’s election victory, the freedom agenda was dead.”
And so the U.S. and Israel resolved to topple the elected Palestinian government. The plan was two-fold. Firstly, “possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions … in modern times” was imposed on the Palestinians to paralyse the government and destroy the economy. In parallel, Israel drastically extended its control over the West Bank, kidnapped 64 Hamas legislators and launched a brutal military assault which extensively destroyed government and civilian infrastructure and killed over 600 people, mostly civilians. The sanctions were designed to undermine public support for Hamas and forment internal Palestinian violence.
As Ha’aretz reported in October 2006,
‘Israeli sources say that the United States is interested in the fall of the Hamas government currently in power in the Palestinian Authority.
During the Quartet meeting in London, the Americans expressed their satisfaction with the results of the boycott of Hamas’ government, which has undermined its standing among the Palestinians.
However, the U.S. administration is also certain that the sanctions against Hamas will inevitably result in a violent confrontation between Hamas and Fatah, and in such a scenario, they would prefer to strengthen the “good guys” headed by Abbas.’
Support for the “good guys” involved arming, financing and training an elite Fatah militia with the goal of destroying Hamas. This force would be under the control of Muhammad Dahlan, a Fatah warlord described by President Bush in 2003 as “our guy”. According to three U.S. officials cited by Rose, this assessment was shared by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Assistant Secretary David Welch, among others:
“[Welch] cared about results, and [he supported] whatever son of a bitch you had to support. Dahlan was the son of a bitch we happened to know best. He was a can-do kind of person. Dahlan was our guy.”
Lieutenant General Keith Dayton was put in charge of the operation. In November 2006 Dayton met with Dahlan to discuss the new “security plan”. According to the notes of the meeting made by an official, Dayton said:
“We need to reform the Palestinian security apparatus … But we also need to build up your forces in order to take on Hamas.”
Rose comments:
“The idea was to simplify the confusing web of Palestinian security forces and have Dahlan assume responsibility for all of them in the newly created role of Palestinian national-security adviser. The Americans would help supply weapons and training.”
Dayton promised Dahlan an immediate package worth $86.4 million, but failed to win approval from a Congress nervous about the possibility that military aid may end up being used against Israel. To get round this, a reduced $59 million package of “non-lethal” aid was approved by Congress in April 2007, while other, covert means were arranged provide the weapons and training. According to a State Department official cited by Rose,
“Those in charge of implementing the policy were saying, ‘Do whatever it takes. We have to be in a position for Fatah to defeat Hamas militarily, and only Muhammad Dahlan has the guile and the muscle to do this.’ The expectation was that this was where it would end up - with a military showdown.”
Throughout the second half of 2006, the violence between Hamas and Fatah increased, as predicted by U.S. planners. According to outgoing UN Middle East envoy Alvaro de Soto, a U.S. official said of this conflict: “I like this violence … It means that other Palestinians are resisting Hamas.” Dahlan boasts that he waged “very clever warfare” against the government for months. Indeed, he announced his intentions regarding Hamas quite clearly as early as June 2006:
“Hamas is now the weakest Palestinian faction. They are whining and complaining. Well, they will have to suffer yet more until they are damned to the seventh ancestor. I will haunt them from now till the end of their term in four years. And I swear, whoever within Fatah says ‘we should join the government,” I will humiliate them.”
This “clever warfare” involved kidnappings and torture, among other atrocities that were reciprocated by Hamas. Frustratingly for U.S. officials, despite the sanctions, the Israeli bombing and the increasingly internal conflict, the Hamas government remained steadfast. In late 2006, an impatient Condoleeza Rice met with Abbas and stated, according to an official who witnessed the meeting:
“So we’re agreed? You’ll dissolve the government within two weeks?”
Abbas responded:
“Maybe not two weeks. Give me a month. Let’s wait until after the Eid.”
Rose continues:
‘Rice got into her armored S.U.V., where, the official claims, she told an American colleague, “That damned … [meeting] has cost us another two weeks of Hamas government.’
After weeks passed without any action from Abbas, Jake Walles, the consul general in Jerusalem, was sent to (in Rose’s words) ‘deliver a barely varnished ultimatum to the Palestinian president.’ According to a copy of the “talking points” memo prepared for him by the State Department (and authenticated by U.S. and Palestinian officials), Walles told Abbas:
“We need to understand your plans regarding a new [Palestinian Authority] government,” Walles’s script said. “You told Secretary Rice you would be prepared to move ahead within two to four weeks of your meeting. We believe that the time has come for you to move forward quickly and decisively…
Hamas should be given a clear choice, with a clear deadline: … they either accept a new government that meets the Quartet principles, or they reject it The consequences of Hamas’ decision should also be clear: If Hamas does not agree within the prescribed time, you should make clear your intention to declare a state of emergency and form an emergency government explicitly committed to that platform…
If you act along these lines, we will support you both materially and politically…We will be there to support you.”
In other words, the U.S. was pushing Abbas to overthrow the Hamas government. Recognising the potential for violence, it promised to support Fatah “materially and politically” in the event of a conflict.
However, as the violence continued to deteriorate, Abbas departed from the American script and agreed to a national unity government in February 2007 (the ‘Mecca Agreement’). This agreement, which had real potential to end the inter-Palestinian violence, was supported by an overwhelming majority of the Palestinian population. It received a rather different welcome from the U.S. According to a State Department official quoted by Rose, “Condi was apoplectic.”
The International Crisis Group reported in August 2007 that:
“[I]t would be disingenuous in the extreme to minimise the role of outside players [in the collapse of the national unity government], the U.S. and the European Union in particular.
By refusing to deal with the national unity government and only selectively engaging some of its non-Hamas members, by maintaining economic sanctions and providing security assistance to one of the parties in order to outmanoeuvre the other, they contributed mightily to the outcome they now publicly lament.
The obvious conclusion, though not drawn explicitly by the ICG, is that the U.S. (supported by the EU) wanted the national unity government to fail, so that it could continue with its plans to overthrow Hamas. The documents revealed by David Rose show that, in his words, the U.S. responded to the Mecca Agreement by ‘redoubling the pressure on its Palestinian allies’ to confront Hamas.
This pressure took the form of “Plan B”, which aimed to “enable [Abbas] and his supporters to … produce a [Palestinian Authority] government through democratic means that accepts Quartet principles” by the end of 2007 (quoting a State Department memo). It called for Abbas to “collapse the government” if Hamas continued to reject the (absurd) Quartet “principles” and demanded that Fatah maintain control of the security forces, in violation of the Palestinian constitution, and “avoid Hamas integration with these services, while eliminating the Executive Force or mitigating the challenges posed by its continued existence.” The memo continued:
“Dahlan oversees effort in coordination with General Dayton and Arab [nations] to train and equip 15,000-man force under President Abbas’s control to establish internal law and order, stop terrorism and deter extralegal forces.”
The objective, again, was clear: to give Abbas “the capability to take the required strategic political decisions … such as dismissing the cabinet, establishing an emergency cabinet.” That is, to enable Abbas to overthrow the Hamas government.

(Thinkbridge note: add "against Abbas' will and the will of the Palestinian people". So much for "democracy".)
The plan went through several draft stages, detailing U.S. proposals to expand Fatah forces and provide them with “highly specialized training abroad”, in total amounting to $1.27 billion in “lethal and non-lethal” military aid over five years. The final draft confirmed that Abbas had “approved” the plan, and presented it as if it were a Palestinian idea as opposed to an American one.
On 30 April, an earlier draft of the plan was leaked to a Jordanian newspaper. In mid-May a regiment of 500 newly-trained Fatah militiamen entered the Gaza Strip from Egypt, while Dahlan was appointed national-security advisor, as stipulated by Dayton back in November 2006. On 7 June, Ha’aretz reported that Abbas and Dayton had asked Israel to permit the transport of the biggest arms shipment to Fatah forces to date, including ‘dozens of armored cars, hundreds of armor-piercing rockets, thousands of hand grenades, and millions of rounds of ammunition.’ All these events led Hamas to conclude, quite correctly, that Fatah was preparing to launch a U.S.-backed coup against it.
As Rose writes, ‘[a] few days later, just before the next batch of Fatah recruits was due to leave for training in Egypt, the [Hamas] coup began in earnest.’
Thus David Wurmser, a staunch neo-conservative who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007 and is hardly a pro-Palestinian radical, accused the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He continued,
“It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen”.

Of course, the plan went awry when Hamas took the initiative and soundly defeated Fatah forces in June 2007, taking control of Gaza in the process. Since then the U.S. and Israel have continued their efforts to depose Hamas, specifically by treating the 1.4 million residents of Gaza like vermin, progressively reducing their supply of food, water, electricity and fuel until they learn to follow orders. Aid agencies reported yesterday that Gaza’s medical system is at breaking point. “Children constitute more than half the population of Gaza and are bearing the brunt of the crisis”, said UNICEF in a statement.
The Israeli government appears to be preparing a large-scale invasion in the near future, possibly with a view to re-establishing a permanent military presence in the Strip. Naturally, this will be justified by the claim that “we have no other option“.
In fact, since January 2006 there have been numerous opportunities to make diplomatic progress with Hamas. The organisation entered office in the middle of an 18-month long unilateral ceasefire on a platform that was far closer to the standard two-state settlement (which is explicitly rejected by both Israel and the U.S.) than it was to the movement’s 1988 Charter. It repeatedly called for a power-sharing arrangement with Fatah, as it continues to do, and supported the Prisoner’s Document, which agreed to concentrate resistance in the West Bank and Gaza and called for “an independent Palestinian state with full sovereignty on all land occupied in 1967.” It agreed to abide by any settlement reached by Abbas with Israel provided it be submitted to a Palestinian referendum, and in February 2007 agreed to a government of national unity on a platform that “respected” previous Palestinian agreements signed with Israel. Without exception, Israel and the U.S. reacted to these significant opportunities with violent rejectionism, flatly refusing to engage even superficially in a political process.

This approach continues today - despite almost universal recognition that some basic level of cooperation between Hamas and Fatah is a necessary pre-requisite for any serious attempt at peace, Israel and the U.S. have explicitly conditioned aid and diplomatic engagement with Abbas on his refusal to negotiate with Hamas. This in itself reveals a lot about the sincerity of Israel’s professed intentions.
Those who systematically undermine all alternatives to violence make violence inevitable. As long as Israel and the U.S. view a Palestinian ‘peace offensive’ as something to be feared rather than welcomed, the conflict will continue, and you’ll know just who to blame.
Further reading:
‘Elliot Abrams’ uncivil war‘, Conflicts Forum
‘Victory for Hamas in Gaza‘, The Heathlander
‘The Stage Is Being Set For A U.S.-backed Coup In Gaza‘, The Heathlander

What the World Thinks of Israel's Gaza Slaughter

This editorial from The Star so clearly points out the ruthlessness of Israel's treatment of Gaza that what I began as an idea to collect quotes from various world sources and personalities on this issue has ended with an urge to quote this in its entirety.

From Indonesia:

"Gaza a Stain on the World's Conscience" by Martin Khor

THE merciless Israeli air and ground assault on Gaza over the last few days has re-focused world attention on the massive suffering of the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza.
On Saturday alone, at least 52 Palestinians died in the Israeli helicopter and tank attacks in northern Gaza. An even bigger ground assault is expected this week.

Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened last Friday that the Palestinians “will pay for it, I’m sorry for their population” and said the Palestinians are facing a “shoah”, the Hebrew word for a big disaster as well as for the Nazi holocaust.

The Israeli justification for this latest round of assaults is that the Hamas-led resistance in Gaza are firing rockets into Israel. Last Wednesday one Israeli was killed, and the next day the Israeli attacks on Gaza intensified. More than 80 Palestinians have been killed since then.

(Note: The count is now at 116 and presumably the Israelis are shooting for a higher goal.)

This latest Israeli military assault on Gaza comes on top of months of intensifying economic and social strangling of the occupied Palestinian territories, especially Gaza, where electricity is switched off, and supplies of essential goods are blocked.
The breaking of many international laws by Israel and the pitiable situation of the Palestinians are highlighted in a news report by John Dugard, the UN’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian occupied territories.

It says that judged by international law, Israel is in serious violation of its legal obligations. The collective punishment of Gaza by Israel is expressly prohibited by international humanitarian law and has resulted in a serious humanitarian crisis.
The report adds that the human rights situation in the West Bank has worsened. Settlements expand, the construction of the security wall continues, and checkpoints increase in number.
On the issue of terrorism, the special rapporteur distinguishes between “mindless terror” and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation.
History is replete with examples of military occupation that have been resisted by violence, for example, the resistance in European countries to the German occupation in the Second World War, and how SWAPO resisted South Africa.
Acts of terror against military occupation must be seen in the historical context. This is why every effort should be made to bring the occupation to a speedy end. Until this is done peace cannot be expected.

The report says that Israel exploits the present international fear of terrorism to the fullest. But this will not solve the Palestinian problem.

Israel must address the occupation and the violation of human rights and international humanitarian law it engenders, and not invoke the justification of terrorism as a distraction, as a pretext for failure to confront the root cause of Palestinian violence – the occupation.

On Gaza, the special rapporteur said in the past two years 668 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces in Gaza. During the same period, four Israeli civilians were killed by rockets fired by Palestinians, and four Israeli soldiers killed by attacks from Gaza.
The report details the difficulties faced by the Palestinians living in Gaza.

> Israel has closed most crossings from Gaza to Egypt and elsewhere. Trucks bringing goods into Gaza have dropped alarmingly – from 253 a day in April 2007 to 74 a day in November.

> Since September, Israel has reduced the supply of fuel and electricity to Gaza.

> The only two Israeli commercial banks dealing with financial institutions in Gaza announced that they would cut ties with Gaza.

> Over 80% of the people in Gaza are dependent on international food aid. Fruit and vegetables are no longer available to supplement the food aid. Few can afford meat, and fish is virtually unobtainable.

> The closure of crossings prevents Gaza from exporting its goods, while also preventing materials from entering Gaza, resulting in the end of most construction works and the closure of factories.

> Farmers are without income and some 65,000 factory employees are unemployed, as 95% of Gaza’s industrial operations have been suspended as a result of restrictions. Fishermen are likewise unemployed as a result of the Israeli ban on fishing along the Gaza coast.

> The United Nations announced that it has halted all its building projects in Gaza because it has run out of building materials. This affected 121,000 jobs.

> Those working in the public sector remain unpaid. Municipal employees in Gaza City have not been paid since March 2007.

> Over 80% of the population live below the official poverty line.

> Healthcare clinics are in short supply of paediatric antibiotics, and 91 key drugs are no longer available.

> There are frequent power outages as a result of Israel’s destruction of the main Gaza power plant in 2006. The supply of water is also affected, and 210,000 people are able to access drinking water supplies for only one to two hours a day. At present there is a real danger that sewage plants could overflow.

> Cutting off fuel and electricity will endanger the functioning of hospitals, water services and sewage, as well as deprive residents of electricity for refrigerators and household appliances. A humanitarian catastrophe is imminent if Israel continues to reduce fuel and carries out its threat to reduce electricity supplies.

Israel has largely justified its attacks and incursions as defensive operations aimed at preventing the launching of Qassam rockets into Israel.
But serious questions arise over the proportionality of Israel’s military response and its failure to distinguish between military and civilian targets.

It is highly arguable that Israel has violated the most fundamental rules of international humanitarian law, which constitute war crimes, said the rappporteur.
These crimes include direct attacks against civilians and civilian objects, and attacks which fail to distinguish between military targets and civilians and civilian objects, the excessive use of force arising from disproportionate attacks on civilians and civilian objects and the spreading of terror among the civilian population.

The Special Rapporteur has done a great service not only to the Palestinians but also to everyone else, for providing such graphic and up-to-date information. In other parts of his report he also argues why it was the responsibility of the UN Secretary-General as well as all states to act to end the Israelis’ violations of international law.

But the rapporteur’s call will not lead to Security Council action, due to the power of the United States. This will again open the United Nations to criticism that it practices double standards, in that the countries the United States dislikes are punished while its allies are protected from actions.

Before signing off, here's another article from medialens, a progressive UK site, on the subject, that also refers to John Dugard's work and his opinion that, as the article put it:

The report, authored by UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, concludes that
Palestinian terrorism is the "inevitable consequence" of Israeli occupation.
While Palestinian terrorist acts are deplorable, "they must be understood as
being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or
occupation." Dugard, a South African professor of law, accuses the Israeli state
of acts and policies consistent with all three.

...

(Quoting from Dugard's report:)

“Above all, the Government of Israel has violated the prohibition on collective
punishment of an occupied people contained in article 33 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention.”
In the days that followed, as killings and injuries rapidly rose under a massive Israeli assault, we could find not a single mention in any UK national newspaper of this important assessment by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories.

Let alone US media, which is notorious for leaving out points of view inconsistent with the current Administration or "mainstream" (a misnomer that means "acceptable to those in power") opinion, policies, or views.

Who in "mainstream" US condemned the slaughter for what it is?

Nader's Motives: Help McCain? Yeah, Really

An article in Salon points out the real possibility that Nader is running for president of the U.S. to help out John McCain's candidacy.

...the evidence suggests another possible motive for Nader to run this year -- namely, that he hopes to help his longtime ally John McCain, to whom he owes at least one big favor. Nader is already focusing his fire on the Democrats, with his Web site featuring dozens of press releases attacking Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while none voice the slightest criticism of McCain. In his latest round of television appearances, Nader trained his fire directly on Obama.

And that "big favor" is the big help McCain gave to Nader back in his 2004 campaign, basically putting Nader on the ballot in Florida where he otherwise did not even qualify. But of course, it's more than just returning the favor...

Nader may actually be on the same page with McCain in more ways than one.

...as the New York Times reported on Sept. 17, 2004, there was a political back story behind McCain's assistance to Nader. According to the Times, "Mr. Potter said that the Nader campaign first sought Mr. McCain's backing in the case last week and that subsequently the Bush campaign also asked him to get involved." (Candidate Nader and his running mate, Peter Camejo, issued a statement thanking McCain and the Reform Institute that is for some reason no longer available on the Nader campaign Web site.)

And the connections go way back:

The Naderite connections with McCain go back many years to the era when the Arizona senator displayed real maverick tendencies in jousting with corporate interests in the tobacco, telecommunications and automobile lobbies, as well as his strong support for campaign finance reform. Nostalgia for the old McCain may explain why Joan Claybrook, who directs the Nader-founded Public Citizen organization, stepped forward to defend him against the Times exposé of his relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman. Meanwhile Claybrook, Nader and other reformers have said little or nothing about McCain's gaming of the public campaign finance system while voicing sharp criticism of Obama for waffling recently on his commitment to accept public financing.

Even some green groups feel that McCain, oddly enough, would be a better "environmental president" than either Clinton or Obama. That is, of course, ignoring the environmental impact of escalating wars... and the ever-impending ax of Armageddon that McCain likes to flirt with. After all, part of the Corporate Machine is the war machine and the prison machine, both of which McCain doesn't seem ready to "joust with" quite yet. But if Nader knows he can't win, why would he run, except to help McCain beat the Dems? It's the only answer that fits the data.