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Editorial: Jimmy Carter's Apartheid Charge Rings True
22 December, 2006
San Francisco Chronicle
Israel maintains two separate road networks in the West Bank: one for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers, and one for Palestinian natives. Is that not apartheid?
Palestinians are not allowed to drive their own cars in much of the West Bank; their public transportation is frequently interrupted or blocked altogether by a grid of Israeli army checkpoints -- but Jewish settlers come and go freely in their own cars, without even pausing at the roadblocks that hold up the natives. Is that not apartheid?
A system of closures and curfews has strangled the Palestinian economy in the West Bank -- but none of its provisions apply to the Jewish settlements there. Is that not apartheid?
Whole sectors of the West Bank, classified as "closed military areas" by the Israeli army, are off limits to Palestinians, including Palestinians who own land there -- but foreigners to whom Israel's Law of Return applies (that is, anyone Jewish, from anywhere in the world) can access them without hindrance. Is that not apartheid?
Persons of Palestinian origin are routinely barred from entering or residing in the West Bank -- but Israeli and non-Israeli Jews can come and go, and even live on, occupied Palestinian territory. Is that not apartheid?
Israel maintains two sets of rules and regulations in the West Bank: one for Jews, one for non-Jews. The only thing wrong with using the word "apartheid" to describe such a repugnant system is that the South African version of institutionalized discrimination was never as elaborate as its Israeli counterpart -- nor did it have such a vocal chorus of defenders among otherwise liberal Americans.
The glaring error in Carter's book, however, is his insistence that the term "apartheid" does not apply to Israel itself, where, he says, Jewish and non-Jewish citizens are given the same treatment under the law. That is simply not true.
Israeli law affords differences in privileges for Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of the state -- in matters of access to land, family unification and acquisition of citizenship. Israel's amended nationality law, for example, prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel who are married to Palestinians from the occupied territories from living together in Israel. A similar law, passed at the peak of apartheid in South Africa, was overturned by that country's supreme court as a violation of the right to a family. Israel's high court upheld its law just this year.
Israel loudly proclaims itself to be the state of the Jewish people, rather than the state of its actual citizens (one-fifth of whom are Palestinian Arabs). In fact, in registering citizens, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior assigns them a whole range of nationalities other than "Israeli." In the official registry, the nationality line for a Jewish citizen of Israel reads "Jew." For a Palestinian citizen, the same line reads "Arab." When this glaring inequity was protested all the way to Israel's high court, the justices upheld it: "There is no Israeli nation separate from the Jewish people." Obviously this leaves non-Jewish citizens of Israel in, at best, a somewhat ambiguous situation. Little wonder, then, that a solid majority of Israeli Jews regard their Arab fellow-citizens as what they call "a demographic threat," which many -- including the deputy prime minister -- would like to see eliminated altogether. What is all this, if not racism?
Many of the very individuals and institutions that are so vociferously denouncing President Jimmy Carter would not for one moment tolerate such glaring injustice in the United States. Why do they condone the naked racism that Israel practices? Why do they heap criticism on our former president for speaking his conscience about such a truly unconscionable system of ethnic segregation?
Perhaps it is because they themselves are all too aware that they are defending the indefensible; because they are all too aware that the emperor they keep trying to cover up really has no clothes. There is a limit to how long such a cover up can go on. And the main lesson of Carter's book is that we have finally reached that limit.
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and a frequent commentator on Middle East issues.
Original
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007
Project Censored
22/12/2006
>1. Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media (For full story, click
here)
The Supreme Court ruled that giant cable companies aren't required to share
their wires with other Internet service providers. The issue was misleadingly
framed as an argument over regulation, when it's really a case of the Federal
Communications Commission and Congress talking about giving cable and telephone
companies the freedom to control supply and content - a decision that could
have them playing favorites and forcing consumers to pay to get information
and services that currently are free.
Source: "Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and
Why Corporate News Censored the Story," Elliot D. Cohen, BuzzFlash.com,
July 18, 2005. (Click
here for article)
2. Halliburton Charged With Selling Nuclear Technology to Iran (For full story, click
here)
Halliburton, the notorious U.S. energy company, sold key nuclear-reactor components
to a private Iranian oil company called Oriental Oil Kish as recently as 2005,
using offshore subsidiaries to circumvent U.S. sanctions. The story is particularly
important because Vice President Dick Cheney, who now claims to want to stop
Iran from getting nukes, was president of Halliburton in the mid-1990s, at
which time he may have advocated business dealings with Iran, in violation
of U.S. law.
Source: "Halliburton Secretly Doing Business with Key Member of Iran's
Nuclear Team," Jason Leopold, GlobalResearch.ca, Aug. 5, 2005. (Click
here for article)
3. World Oceans in Extreme Danger (For full story, click
here)
Governments deny global warming is happening as they rush to map the ocean
floor in the hopes of claiming rights to oil, gas, gold, diamonds, copper,
zinc and the planet's last pristine fishing grounds. Researchers at the Scripps
Institution of Oceanography and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
in 2005 found "the first clear evidence that the world ocean is growing
warmer," including the discovery "that the top half-mile of the ocean
has warmed dramatically in the past 40 years as the result of human-induced
greenhouse gases."
Source: "The Fate of the Ocean," Julia Whitty, Mother Jones, March-April
2006. (Click
here for article)
4. Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the United States (For full story, click
here)
As hunger and homelessness rise in the United States, the Bush administration
plans to get rid of a data source that supports this embarrassing reality,
a survey that's been used to improve state and federal programs for retired
and low-income Americans. In 2003, the Bush Administration tried to whack the
Bureau of Labor Statistics report on mass layoffs and in 2004 and 2005 attempted
to drop the bureau's questions on the hiring and firing of women from its employment
data.
Sources: "New Report Shows Increase in Urban Hunger, Homelessness," Brendan
Coyne, New Standard, December 2005 (Click
here for article); "U.S. Plan to Eliminate Survey of Needy Families
Draws Fire," Abid Aslam, OneWorld.net, March 2006. (Click
here for article)
5. High-tech Genocide in Congo (For full story, click
here)
If you believe the corporate media, then the ongoing genocide in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo is all just a case of ugly tribal warfare. But that is
a superficial, simplistic explanation that fails to connect this terrible suffering
with the immense fortunes that stand to be made from manufacturing cell phones,
laptop computers and other high-tech equipment. What's really at stake in this
bloodbath is control of natural resources such as diamonds, tin, and copper,
as well as cobalt - which is essential for the nuclear, chemical, aerospace,
and defense industries - and coltan and niobium, which is most important for
the high-tech industries.
Sources: "The World's Most Neglected Emergency: Phil Taylor talks to
Keith Harmon Snow," The Taylor Report, March 28, 2005 (Click
here for article); "High-Tech Genocide," Sprocket, Earth First!
Journal, August 2005 (Click
here for article); "Behind the Numbers: Untold Suffering in the Congo," Keith
Harmon Snow and David Barouski, Z Magazine, March 1, 2006 (Click
here for article).
6. Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy (For full story, click
here)
Though record numbers of federal workers have been sounding the alarm on waste,
fraud, and other financial abuse since George W. Bush became president, the
agency charged with defending government whistleblowers has reportedly been
throwing out hundreds of cases - and advancing almost none. Statistics released
at the end of 2005 by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility led
to claims that special counsel Scott Bloch, who was appointed by Bush in 2004,
is overseeing the systematic elimination of whistleblower rights.
Sources: "Whistleblowers Get No Help from Bush Administration," Public
Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) Web site, Dec. 5, 2005 (Click
here for article); "Long-Delayed Investigation of Special Counsel
Finally Begins," PEER Web site, Oct. 18, 2005 (Click
here for article); "Back Door Rollback of Federal Whistleblower Protections," PEER
Web site, Sept. 22, 2005 (Click
here for article).
7. US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq (For full
story, click
here)
While reports of torture aren't new, the documents are evidence of using torture
as a policy, raising a whole bunch of uncomfortable questions, such as: Who
authorized such techniques? And why have the resulting deaths been covered
up? Of the 44 death reports released under ACLU's FOIA request, 21 were homicides
and eight appear to have been the result of these abusive torture techniques.
Sources: "U.S. Operatives Killed Detainees During Interrogations in Afghanistan
and Iraq, "American Civil Liberties Union Web site, Oct. 24, 2005 (Click
here for article); "Tracing the Trail of Torture: Embedding Torture
as Policy from Guantanamo to Iraq," Dahr Jamail, TomDispatch.com, March
5, 2006 (Click here for
article).
8. Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act (For full story, click
here)
In 2005, the Department of Defense pushed for and was granted exemption from
Freedom of Information Act requests, a crucial law that allows journalists
and watchdogs access to federal documents. The ruling could hamper the efforts
of groups like the ACLU, which relied on FOIA to uncover more than 30,000 documents
on the US military's torture of detainees in Afghanistan Iraq, and Guantanamo
Bay, including the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
Sources: "Pentagon Seeks Greater Immunity from Freedom of Information," Michelle
Chen, New Standard, May 6, 2005 (Click
here for article); "FOIA Exemption Granted to Federal Agency," Newspaper
Association of America Web site, posted December 2005 (Click
here for article).
9. World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall (For full story, click
here)
In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled that the wall Israel is
building deep into Palestinian territory should be torn down. Instead, construction
of this cement barrier, which annexes Israeli settlements and breaks the continuity
of Palestinian territory, has accelerated. In the interim, the World Bank has
come up with a framework for a Middle Eastern Free Trade Area, which would
be financed by the World Bank and built on Palestinian land around the wall
to encourage export-oriented economic development. But with Israel ineligible
for World Bank loans, the plan seems to translate into Palestinians paying
for the modernization of checkpoints around a wall that they've always opposed,
a wall that will help lock in and exploit their labor.
Sources: "Cementing Israeli Apartheid: The Role of World Bank," Jamal
Juma', Left Turn (Click
here for article); "U.S. Free Trade Agreements Split Arab Opinion," Linda
Heard, Aljazeera, March 9, 2005 (Click
here for article).
10. Expanded Air War in Iraq kills More Civilians (For full story, click
here)
At the end of 2005, U.S. Central Command Air Force statistics showed an increase
in American air missions, a trend that was accompanied by a rise in civilian
deaths thanks to increased bombing of Iraqi cities.
Sources: "Up in the Air," Seymour M. Hersh, New Yorker, December
2005 (Click
here for article); "An Increasingly Aerial Occupation," Dahr
Jamail, TomDispatch.com, December 2005 (Click
here for article).
11) Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed (For full story, click
here)
Several recent studies confirm fears that genetically modified (GM) foods
damage human health. These studies were released as the World Trade Organization
moved towards upholding the ruling that the EU has violated international trade
rules by stopping importation of GM foods.
12) Pentagon Plans New Land Mines (For full story, click
here)
The Bush administration plans to resume production of antipersonnel land
mine systems in a move that is at odds with both the international community
and previous US policy, says Human Rights Watch.
13) New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup/Glyphosate (For full story, click
here)
New studies from both sides of the Atlantic reveal that Roundup, the most
widely used weed-killer in the world, poses serious human health threats.
14) Homeland Security Contracts Halliburton Subsidiary KBR to Build US Detention
Centres (For full story, click
here)
Halliburton's subsidiary KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root) announced
on January 24, 2006, that it had been awarded a US$385 million contingency
contract by the US Department of Homeland Security to build detention camps
able to hold 5,000 people each.
15) Chemical Industry is EPA's Primary Research Partner (For full story, click
here)
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) research program is increasingly
relying on corporate joint ventures. The American Chemical Council is now the
EPA's leading research partner. The EPA is diverting funds from basic health
and environmental research towards research that addresses regulatory concerns
of corporate funders.
16) Ecuador and Mexico Defy USA on International Criminal Court (For full
story, click
here)
Ecuador and Mexico have refused to sign bilateral immunity agreements (BIA)
with the USA in ratification of the International Criminal Court (ICC) treaty.
Despite the Bush administration's threat to withhold economic aid, both countries
confirmed allegiance to the ICC, the international body established to try
individuals accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
17) Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda (For full story, click
here)
According to a report from journalist Greg Palast, the US invasion of Iraq
was indeed about the oil. However, the US wasn't out to destroy OPEC, as claimed
by neo-conservative writers, but to take part in it and increase US oil company
profits.
18) Physicist Challenges Official 9/11 Story (For full story, click
here)
Research into the events of 9/11 by Brigham Young University physics professor
Steven E. Jones concludes that the official explanation for the collapse of
the World Trade Center buildings is implausible according to the laws of physics.
Professor Jones is calling for an independent, international scientific investigation "guided
not by politicized notions and constraints, but rather by observations and
calculations."
19) Destruction of Rainforests Declared Worst Ever (For full story, click
here)
New developments in satellite imaging technology reveal that the Amazon rainforest
is being destroyed twice as quickly as previously estimated due to the surreptitious
practice of selective logging.
20) Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem (For full story, click
here)
Consumers spend a collective US$100 billion every year on bottled water in
the belief—often mistaken—that it is better for us than what flows
from our taps. Worldwide, bottled water consumption surged to 41 billion gallons
in 2004, up 57 per cent since 1999.
21) Gold Mining Company Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers (For full story, click
here)
Barrick Gold, a powerful multinational gold mining company, planned to melt
three Andean glaciers in order to access gold deposits through open pit mining.
The water from the glaciers would have been held for refreezing in the following
winters. Opposition to the mine because of destruction to water sources for
Andean farmers was widespread in Chile and the rest of the world. Construction
of the mine is expected to begin in 2006.
22) Billions of Dollars in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed (For full
story, click
here)
More than US$8 billion in Homeland Security funds has been doled out to States
since the 9/11 attacks, but the public has little chance of knowing how this
money is being spent.
23) US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe (For full story, click
here)
Lobbyists funded by the US oil industry have launched a campaign in Europe
aimed at derailing efforts to tackle greenhouse gas pollution and climate change.
Documents that have been obtained by Greenpeace reveal a systematic plan to
persuade European business, politicians and media that the EU should abandon
its commitments under the Kyoto protocol, the agreement that aims to reduce
emissions that lead to global warming.
24) Cheney's Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3,000% in 2005 (For full story, click
here)
US Vice-President Dick Cheney's stock options in Halliburton rose from US$241,498
in 2004 to over $8 million in 2005, an increase of more than 3,000 per cent,
as Halliburton continues to rake in billions of dollars from no-bid/no-audit
government contracts.
25) US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region (For full story, click
here)
Five hundred US troops arrived in Paraguay with planes, weapons and ammunition
in July 2005, shortly after the Paraguayan Senate granted US troops immunity
from national and International Criminal Court jurisdiction. Neighbouring countries
and human rights organisations are concerned that the massive air base at Mariscal
Estigarribia is potential real estate for the US military.
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: The Christmas Truce
David G. Stratman
It was December 25, 1914, only 5 months into World War I. German, British, and French soldiers, already sick and tired of the senseless killing, disobeyed their superiors and fraternized with "the enemy" along two-thirds of the Western Front (a crime punishable by death in times of war). German troops held Christmas trees up out of the trenches with signs, "Merry Christmas."
"You no shoot, we no shoot." Thousands of troops streamed across a no-man's land strewn with rotting corpses. They sang Christmas carols, exchanged photographs of loved ones back home, shared rations, played football, even roasted some pigs. Soldiers embraced men they had been trying to kill a few short hours before. They agreed to warn each other if the top brass forced them to fire their weapons, and to aim high.
A shudder ran through the high command on either side. Here was disaster in the making: soldiers declaring their brotherhood with each other and refusing to fight. Generals on both sides declared this spontaneous peacemaking to be treasonous and subject to court martial. By March 1915 the fraternization movement had been eradicated and the killing machine put back in full operation. By the time of the armistice in 1918, fifteen million would be slaughtered.
Not many people have heard the story of the Christmas Truce. On Christmas Day, 1988, a story in the Boston Globe mentioned that a local FM radio host played "Christmas in the Trenches," a ballad about the Christmas Truce, several times and was startled by the effect. The song became the most requested recording during the holidays in Boston on several FM stations. "Even more startling than the number of requests I get is the reaction to the ballad afterward by callers who hadn't heard it before," said the radio host. "They telephone me deeply moved, sometimes in tears, asking, 'What the hell did I just hear?'"
I think I know why the callers were in tears. The Christmas Truce story goes against most of what we have been taught about people. It gives us a glimpse of the world as we wish it could be and says, "This really happened once." It reminds us of those thoughts we keep hidden away, out of range of the TV and newspaper stories that tell us how trivial and mean human life is. It is like hearing that our deepest wishes really are true: the world really could be different.
Christmas in The Trenches - Song
This song is based on a true story from the front lines of World War I that I've heard many times. Ian Calhoun, a Scot, was the commanding officer of the British forces involved in the story. He was subsequently court-martialed for 'consorting with the enemy' and sentenced to death. Only George V spared him from that fate. -- John McCutcheon
My name is Francis Toliver, I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here,
I fought for King and country I love dear.
'Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung.
The frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung.
Our families back in England were toasting us that day,
Their brave and glorious lads so far away.
I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground,
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound.
Says I, "Now listen up, me boys!" each soldier strained to hear,
As one young German voice sang out so clear.
"He's singing bloody well, you know!" my partner says to me.
Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in harmony.
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more,
As Christmas brought us respite from the war.
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent,
"God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" struck up some lads from Kent.
The next they sang was "Stille Nacht," "'Tis 'Silent Night,'" says I,
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky.
"There's someone coming towards us!" the front line sentry cried.
All sights were fixed on one lone figure trudging from their side.
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shone on that plain so bright,
As he, bravely, strode unarmed into the night.
Soon one by one on either side walked into No Man's Land,
With neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand.
We shared some secret brandy and wished each other well,
And in a flare lit soccer game we gave 'em hell.
We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home.
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own.
Young Sanders played his squeezebox and they had a violin,
This curious and unlikely band of men.
Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more.
With sad farewells we each prepared to settle back to war.
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night:
"Whose family have I fixed within my sights?"
'Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost, so bitter hung.
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung.
For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war,
Had been crumbled and were gone forevermore.
My name is Francis Toliver, in Liverpool I dwell,
Each Christmas come since World War I, I've learned its lessons well,
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame,
And on each end of the rifle we're the same.
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: Inside Venezuela's Controversial Revolution
Brian Fitzpatrick - Political Affairs
Friday, Dec 22, 2006
Maria raised a gangster. She didn't plan on it, but Venezuela's slums tempted her son Mauricio with the drugs he needed to numb his anger. By age 14, he had fallen into a life of theft and violence, trying to pry himself out of the squalor and hopelessness in which he was trapped.
I've been a high school history and Spanish teacher, a Fulbright scholar, and a Latin American aficionado for 30 years. I've been suspicious of the media's one-sided coverage of Venezuela, so when I had an opportunity earlier this year to attend the World Social Forum in Caracas and meet people like Maria and Mauricio, I jumped at the chance. I wanted to see for myself the social, economic and political changes that are bubbling in Venezuela and causing so much controversy.
Maria told me that her priorities have never changed. She has always wanted education, health and dignity for her children. Every day she awoke in her shack, prepared breakfast, ironed laundry, kissed Mauricio and sent him off to school. Then Maria swept the sidewalk and scrubbed the laundry. Unfortunately, at the age of 12, Mauricio began playing hooky and learning lessons in the streets. He learned how to fight and wield a knife. He also learned that money made the world spin. He watched his mother slave away and scrimp on necessities. He vowed that some day he'd free her from poverty. But before that day came, Mauricio got busted for dealing drugs and was hustled off to juvenile jail. Maria cried and cried. How could she have been so blind? Kids in their neighborhood generally grew up - if they lived that long - to be dealers, addicts, pimps, prostitutes or pregnant.
So Rich Yet So Poor
Per capita, Venezuela is one of the richest countries in the world. Twice the size of California with far fewer people, Venezuela floats on a sea of oil and gas. Its mountains drip with a lucrative coffee crop. Grass sprouts faster than cattle can chew it. Exotic fruits bend boughs and litter the ground. Biodiversity explodes under the Amazonian canopy. Caribbean beaches entice tourists. Its hydroelectric potential could illuminate the continent.
With such abundant wealth, why do Venezuelan workers earn only $5 to $10 per day? Why are 80 percent of the people poor? Why are there so many broken-hearted mothers like Maria?
At the 2006 World Social Forum, I heard President Hugo Chávez and his supporters answer that question over and over. To them, Venezuela is poor because US imperialism and repression intimidate and kill union leaders and funnel national profits through an elite class to US corporations. They expand that accusation beyond Venezuela and insist that throughout the third world, rich countries use a privileged class to control the domestic population while national wealth disappears into banks in New York, London and Geneva. Chávez and his followers point to Iraq to prove their point. They insist that the US invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction but rather the installation of a regime that would pass oil profits to US and British oil companies. The populist Chávez is now drawing heat because he is implementing initiatives to keep national wealth at home and using it to mitigate the ubiquitous poverty that Venezuelans have long suffered.
Right-leaning media outlets vilify Chávez and, subsequently, the people's movement that stands behind him. The leftist press lauds him as a Bolivarian messiah. What is the truth, and what is going on in Venezuela?
At the World Social Forum, I saw red... lots of it. Parades and rallies teemed with red-shirted Venezuelans who were as fanatical about Hugo Chávez as they were about baseball. Their fervor and his mystique lured me to his rallies, which gave me a taste of the mass movement that is being embraced as a second Bolivarian revolution. Chávez and His Charisma
Born in 1954 to two school teachers, Chávez graduated from the national military academy, abandoned his baseball aspirations and began jumping out of airplanes (as a paratrooper). He made a career in the military, and in 1992 led a failed coup d'état, which landed him in prison for two years. After the coup attempt, Chávez founded the Movement for a Fifth Republic (MVR), a political party promising social transformation.
Chávez was elected president in 1998 and re-elected in 2000. His flamboyant charisma has captured a majority of Venezuelan hearts; Chavista rallies regularly throb with hundreds of thousands of red-shirted supporters. As a young man, Chávez crooned mariachi ballads, and his compelling voice continues to captivate audiences. At the World Social Forum, Chávez, wearing a blood-red shirt, took the podium and hushed the crowd. Before he took the stage, musicians had primed the audience with songs and riffs on social justice and a salsa number that sent 30,000 hips gyrating. The joint was literally jumping; I had never seen anything close to its intensity. I found myself in the midst of a frenzied group of young Afro-Venezuelan students chanting impassioned MVR slogans. I caught the Chavista fever and began making new friends left and left.
I didn't know how long-winded Chávez could be; he can and does speak for hours. After two hours, I heard him hit his stride. I was never bored. He wove history, geography, philosophy, economics, ecology, music, and humor through an extemporaneous speech that demonstrated his eclectic erudition.
In the midst of his discourse Chávez spun off on a riff vilifying "Mr. Danger," otherwise known as George W. Bush. Chávez punctuated this by quoting the grand liberator himself, Simon Bolivar, who said in 1825 that "the United States of North America is destined by providence to plague the people of the Americas with hunger and misery in the name of freedom." Chávez has elevated Bolivar's prophecy to a national mantra.
At the end of three hours, he pulled the threads taut and his words cohered into a vivid tapestry. As he left the stage, the crowd chanted "El pueblo unido jamás será vencido" (a united people will never be defeated), and I felt 30,000 hearts pulse as one.
Revolution and Its Discontents
When Chávez does something, he does it with bravado. His reforms affect every aspect of the status quo. He promises to provide universal free education and health care and eradicate malnutrition and poverty - but critics ask, "Where will the money come from?"
One of his reforms, an agrarian land-reform program, has antagonized many rich landowners. Chávez's program sets limits on the size of landholdings; taxes unused property to spur agricultural growth; redistributes unused, government-owned land to peasant families and cooperatives; and, lastly, expropriates fallow land from large, private estates for the purpose of redistribution. Landowners would be compensated for their land at market value.
At a panel discussion, I heard Chávez supporters lauding his land-reform proposals, which offer the poor life-sustaining parcels and put to use vacant plots in a nation that imports most of its food. Other reform programs offer the poor subsidized grocery markets at prices far lower than commercial outlets.
But a cabbie who drove us through downtown went ballistic when we started mentioning Chávez. "He's a fool!" he shouted and pushed the accelerator to the floor. "He wants to give away everything! They should have shot him when they had the chance. He's making a mess out of the country."
During a forum event I overheard two young men arguing. One of the men asserted that the Chávez opposition had contaminated birthing rooms so that the infant mortality rate would climb and make the government look inept. This extreme rumor made it patently clear that I was in the third world and that Venezuela was locked in a life-and-death struggle over the future of the country. I squeezed into that conversation and met Mauricio Lugo, Maria's son, a former ne'er-do-well and now a community organizer and fervent supporter of President Chávez and his populist movement.
Chávez is a lightning rod standing at the center of a political storm, both domestically and internationally. He has courted controversy by visiting Iran and inviting it to open factories in Venezuela. He wants to buy military hardware from the Russians, and he speaks openly about a US invasion of Venezuela. He reminds people of Latin American history lest they forget that the US has invaded Latin America dozens of times. And he takes every opportunity to lampoon Bush, going so far as to refer to him at the UN podium as the sulfur-scented Devil.
Even some who are convinced of Chávez's altruism are wary of the hero-worship he has cultivated. A Venezuelan psychiatrist has commented that "the love of the people is a narcotic to him. He needs it the same way he needs his coffee."
Chávez is also accused of concentrating too much power in the presidency. (A criticism levied against Bush as well.) He has packed both the military and the courts with MVR supporters, and has said that he wants to call a referendum in which people can vote to overturn presidential term limitations and retain him in office until 2031.
Opposition leaders fear the authoritarian direction they see the government taking. They allege that government contracts are assigned with favoritism and that media intimidation has decreased criticism of the administration. They also raise the concern that Chávez's policies are insufficiently focused and require constant infusions of oil money.
Yet millions of poor and disenfranchised Venezuelans are now actively participating in the political process. Academicians attentively watch Chávez's progress, hoping that he will continue to deliver on his promises. Much of the middle class is happy to accept the health care benefits and entrepreneurial incentives his administration bestows. But there are a significant number of discontents. Although a minority, these tend to be the economic elite who prefer the status quo and fear the fundamental changes Chávez endorses.
In the Trenches
After the forum ended, I tagged along with Mauricio on a bus filled with MVR activists headed to Mauricio's hometown of Guacara. Unfortunately, Mauricio hadn't cleared me with the higher-ups. On the outskirts of Caracas, when the bus stopped so that everyone on board could shower and eat, the party leaders pointed at the 60-year-old gringo and asked, "Who's he?"
Mauricio turned out to be more trusting than the higher-ranked officials. They looked me up and down and began to whisper. Why would an American want to visit tawdry Guacara? Is he a spy? While they debated, I pulled up a soft concrete bench, opened a book and slid into a siesta. I awoke to a nudge, Mauricio shouting, "Vámonos (Let's go!), to Guacara." I wasn't sure if I was dreaming or if it was really happening, but Mauricio and I wedged our way onto a dilapidated public bus amidst bundle-wielding grandmothers, screaming babies and squawking chickens and rumbled west toward Guacara.
Soon after arriving in Guacara, Mauricio and I sat in his mother's kitchen while she reminisced about the day a woman wearing a red shirt knocked on her door. The woman had said that her name was Rosa and that she was a community organizer. She asked if Maria and her son wished to return to school. Maria stared at the woman as if she were a lunatic. Maria told Rosa that she had dropped out of school in the third grade to work, and that she still has no money and therefore couldn't return to school. Rosa insisted that she'd arrange everything, so Maria accepted. Rosa filled out the forms and enrolled Maria and Mauricio in night school.
On the first night of class, Rosa arrived and whisked Maria and Mauricio off to school. Maria said that she felt like Cinderella. Free history, math, language arts and English books were distributed. Maria told me that she fingered the pages as if they were gold; finally, after 40 years, she was getting the one thing she most desired, an education. Maria and Rosa are good friends now, and Rosa guides her through the maze of federal social programs that have been instituted under Chávez's leadership.
Mauricio sheepishly admitted that he had flunked an early class in community organizing. The final exam consisted of a simulation exercise that addressed the rehabilitation of maras (gang members). He failed the exam because he insisted that all the maras should first be shot - and thereafter the community established. Aghast, his teachers suggested he modify his social strategies. Mauricio followed their advice and now works as a community organizer. His experiences as a drug dealer have enabled him to empathize with and help adolescents who are on the dead-end street of gang life.
A Well Oiled Revolution
Over the next two weeks, Mauricio and Maria took me to visit adult education classes, computer centers, health clinics, senior centers, child care facilities, primary schools, food distribution centers and government-subsidized markets in Guacara, a formerly decaying industrial town now being revitalized by community programs.
I visited several community kitchens in which women open their homes daily to serve hot lunches to up to 150 of their neighbors. When I approached one lunch kitchen, Gloria, the barrio's grandmother, dashed into the blinding sunlight and grabbed my hand. She greeted me as if I were the king of England and dragged me past seniors dining on an aromatic pork stew. In the kitchen, I met four other women who stirred, simmered and smiled over their edible art. Five days a week, Gloria, a lonely widow, opens her home to the community and, with the help of several friends, serves delicious hot lunches. Gloria no longer suffers from loneliness; far from it. She's too busy preparing government-provided food and chatting with hungry neighbors. Mauricio winked at me and whispered, "Nourishment comes in many forms."
Throughout Venezuela, hundreds of kitchens like Gloria's add meaning to life, feed friends and vivify squalid neighborhoods. I've been a teacher for over three decades, and I can't forget the primary school that I visited in Guacara. Above the entrance was emblazoned Jose Marti's dictum: "Only the educated are free." In the school, I felt a communal thread weaving together the teachers, administrators, students, janitors, parents and volunteers. The principal glowed when she spoke of the altruism of her staff. I eavesdropped on classes and was impressed with the quality of instruction and the attentiveness of the students.
The school's bonneted cafeteria cooks personified the contagious positive attitude; the cooks glowed with delight when the second graders marched off with plates full of chicken, rice, beans, cantaloupe, strawberries and juice. No longer do students dizzy and dumb with hunger languish in classrooms. With full bellies and open hearts, they devour the education deprived their parents. The federal government views education as a national priority and backs its rhetoric with cash. I couldn't help but reflect on the impasse in US education, in which public schools have to beg for adequate funding and parry a privatizing lobby.
In night schools, I saw adults who didn't finish grade school savoring the sweet taste of knowledge previously deprived to them. The students were alert and dedicated; like dry sponges, they absorbed every comment the teacher uttered. No one knows better than an uneducated adult how much she missed when circumstances denied her an education. One man close to tears told me that not having an education felt like someone had cut off his arm; he lacked something constant and vital. Now, his smile reveals involvement, purpose and dignity.
Free computer centers encourage young and old, poor or rich, to enter and surf the wonders of the Internet and learn computer technology. In the centers, I saw technology foster literacy and literacy foster technology; the intoxicating spiral glued adults to computers they could never afford to own.
Sitting with Maria in her kitchen one day, I met the nurse who came to check on her arthritis. Prior to 1999 and the Chávez presidency, health care was a luxury only the rich enjoyed; now free health care is universal. Clinics sprout out of refurbished buildings and form natural hubs for community action. Neighborhoods revolve and are organized around medical care. Doctors and nurses respond to house calls 24 hours a day and know their patients personally; in a pedestrian barrio, patients constantly bump into their medical professionals. People, not profits, are the focal point.
The physical rehab center I visited used a gamut of therapies; a spirited and inquisitive doctor proudly showed me ultrasound, electromagnetic, and electric muscle-stimulating machines. The modest but busy clinic buzzed with treadmills and limping ladies pumping iron. The doctor then guided me through rooms that offered alternative therapies such as acupuncture and therapy from the smoke of the artemisia plant.
Geriatric community centers foster mental health by offering activities that pull seniors together. At the senior center I visited, old men slapped down dominos and bantered baseball with traditional Caribbean flair. Everywhere I went community spirit embellished health care procedures.
I learned from Mauricio that Chávez's MVR party revolves around small neighborhood groups called UBE's ("Electoral Battle Units"). The UBE's are the grassroots base of Venezuelan participatory democracy; I attended a couple of meetings and was astonished by the community involvement. More and more of the marginalized, aged, apathetic and angry are joining the progressive parade. Gangs, the most vicious manifestation of alienation, are losing their allure because UBE's provide a channel for participation. Adolescents now feel more connected and empowered and less susceptible to gang violence.
I was stupefied when Mauricio told me that stay-at-home moms receive a monthly stipend of 80 percent of the minimum wage for their service to their families and subsequently to society. During my stay in Guacara, retirement benefits were increased and a boost in the minimum wage was planned. "Amigo," Mauricio said to me as he explained how things work in Venezuela under the Chávez government, "Look at the words: socialism values society, people, and capitalism values money, a thing. Don't you get it? You gringos are getting ripped off by the corporate machine." I stared deep into his eyes; I was amazed at Mauricio's personal evolution from gang member to impassionedcommunity organizer.
A New Day in Latin America?
If Venezuelans are to be successful with their reformation movement, they must overcome a formidable array of obstacles. Systemic inertia, popular apathy, endemic corruption, a consumption-blinded populace, wealthy opposition, coups d'état, assassination and even invasion threaten to derail the changes that are sweeping across the country.
These daunting obstacles challenge the movement to continually reaffirm its commitment to change. Can Chávez or anyone else navigate through the maze of obstacles? Venezuela has aggressively grabbed the role of leadership to spur systemic change in Latin America, which is drifting leftward. Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay have leftist presidents. Resurgent left-leaning popular movements in Mexico, Ecuador and Nicaragua seem poised for power. Venezuela is not an aberration nor is it treading the leftist path alone.
Proposals for transnational oil pipelines, TV stations, banking systems, a single currency, and other unifying projects would make Simon Bolivar dance in his grave. Bolivar recognized that Latin America is united by a common language and religion; Chávez recognizes that if an incredibly diverse Europe can form a union, so too can Latin America. The people know that their land is rich and that they have more than enough resources to fund prosperity for all classes of society. Real hope is emerging that Latin America may soon make great strides in economic, political and social development.
Chávez's "Bolivarian Revolution" keeps rolling along. Expectations and dignity have been raised, but the specter of foreign intervention casts a huge shadow over the future. Venezuelans expect the US press to begin a campaign to demonize President Chávez, and in fact, the campaign has already begun. Last year Pat Robertson announced that the US should assassinate Chávez, and Donald Rumsfeld has compared Chávez to Hitler. Tensions mount daily.
Opposition forces inside and outside Venezuela try to demonize Chávez and by doing so condemn the entire national movement and the great work being done by millions of Venezuelans. Apathy, the plague of all democracies, has been replaced by hope, dedication and an involved citizenry. All leaders have their personal foibles - and Hugo Chávez is brash enough to wear them on his sleeve. But before demonizing Chávez and subsequently the social movement he has inspired, we should look more closely.
Before I left Venezuela, Mauricio reminded me of his vow to liberate his mother from poverty and to see her living with dignity. He brags that next year she will graduate from high school. He again shows me around the "hood." We walk past the new clinic, computer center, senior center, improved library, and school. In the plaza, voter registration hums daily. Mauricio tells me that six years ago Guacara was totally different - depressed, apathetic, squalid - and that now the people are involved and taking the driver's seat to transform the city.
Then he changes his tone and shifts from political to personal commentary. With a soft voice and a big smile, he admits to me that his anger has been replaced by gratitude to the new Venezuelan government for providing hope and dignity to millions of families like his. With a huge grin, he tells me, "I didn't have to free my mom from poverty; the government did it for me."
Original source / relevant link:
PoliticalAffairs.net
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America - Destroyer Of Nations
Iraq sacrifices worthwhile, claims Rice
Friday December 22, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
Condoleezza Rice today said Iraq was worth the cost in US lives and dollars, rejecting accusations that the conflict is a foreign policy disaster.
With George Bush's popularity plummeting amid growing sectarian violence and US casualties rising towards 3,000, the secretary of state defended the decision to invade the country in 2003 and said the US could still win.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Ms Rice was asked whether the additional $100bn (£50.8bn) the Pentagon wants for Iraq and Afghanistan could amount to throwing good money after bad in Iraq.
"I don't think it's a matter of money," she said. "Along the way, there have been plenty of markers that show that this is a country that is worth the investment ... once it emerges as a country that is a stabilising factor, you will have a very different kind of Middle East."
Congress has already approved more than $500bn for the two conflicts, including more than $350bn for Iraq alone - far higher than estimates made prior to the US-led invasion.
Ms Rice's comments came as Mr Bush prepared to unveil his "new" strategy for Iraq in the new year. The plans could include a temporary boost to the 140,000-strong US force in the country by around 20,000.
The new US defence secretary, Robert Gates, has been in Iraq this week, talking to Iraqi leaders and soldiers on the frontline as part of a reassessment of US strategy.
Enlisted soldiers have been telling him more troops would help, but leading commanders such as General John Abizaid, who is in charge of the Middle East, are sceptical about the merits of an increase.
Speaking to reporters after meetings with the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, and other Iraqi officials, Mr Gates said the talks were "mainly on the overall approach, including the possibility of some additional assistance".
He said no troops numbers had been discussed, and Iraqi officials have not been pressing for an increase.
According to the Washington Post, Mr Maliki's advisers say he has proposed a two-pronged strategy in which US troops would target Sunni Arab insurgents in outer Baghdad neighbourhoods for four to eight weeks, while Iraqi forces would take over control of the inner area of the capital.
It was also reported that Mr Maliki would launch a political offensive, including threats of force, in an attempt to persuade the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to contain his Mahdi Army militia during the operation.
Meanwhile, Shias from parliament's largest bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance, yesterday met in the holy city of Najaf to seek approval from the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's leading Shia cleric, for a coalition crossing sectarian lines. He is said to be alarmed at the sectarian bloodshed.
The alliance could exclude Mr Sadr's 30 loyalists in the 275-member parliament and his six ministers in the 38-member cabinet. However, it is unclear whether a new coalition would be able to govern effectively without the backing of the cleric's followers.
Mr Sadr's supporters had suspended their support for Mr Maliki in protest at his recent meeting with Mr Bush, but appear to have decided to go back to parliament in order to avoid political isolation.
Comment: Yet again Condi shows her true psychopathic nature. Notice how she nonchalantly comments that the murder of 700,000 Iraqi civilians has been "worth the investment in American lives and dollars". The life of an American and a dollar being worth approximately the same to Condi.
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Flashback: Condoleezza Pregnant: Giving Birth to Monster
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
24 July 2006
Israel's leading historian on the topic, Benny Morris, although having done more than anyone else to clarify exactly what happened, nonetheless concludes that, morally, it was a good thing - just as, in his view, the "annihilation" of Native Americans was a good thing - that, legally, Palestinians have no right to return to their homes, and that, politically, Israel's big error in 1948 was that it hadn't "carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan" of Palestinians. [Norman Finkelstein]
Rice sees bombs as "birth pangs"
Condoleezza Rice has described the plight of Lebanon as a part of the "birth pangs of a new Middle East" and said that Israel should ignore calls for a ceasefire.
"This is a different Middle East. It's a new Middle East. It's hard, We're going through a very violent time," the US secretary of state said.
"A ceasefire would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo.
"Such a step would allow terrorists to launch attacks at the time and terms of their choosing and to threaten innocent people, Arab and Israeli, throughout the region."
I have to say that, as the mother of five children, these remarks stopped me cold in my tracks. Aside from the obvious question "what can Condoleezza Rice - a woman who has never given birth - know about "birth pangs"? - there is another more compelling question: what kind of human being can be so callous as to say such a thing when tens of thousands of mothers in the Middle East have suffered the unimaginable grief of seeing their beautiful babies crushed under the jackboots of rapacious Imperialism and religious fanaticism?
In Norman Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpah, he writes:
In the course of preparing the chapters of this book devoted to Israel's
human rights record in the Occupied Territories, I went through literally
thousands of pages of human rights reports, published by multiple, fiercely
independent, and highly professional organizations - Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, B'Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights
in the Occupied Territories), Public Committee Against Torture in Israel,
Physicians for Human Rights - Israel - each fielding its own autonomous
staff of monitors and investigators.
Except on one minor matter, I didn't come across a single point of law or
fact on which these human rights organizations differed.
In the case of Israel's human rights record, one can speak today not just
of a broad consensus - as on historical questions - but of an UNQUALIFIED
consensus. All these organizations agreed, for example, that Palestinian detainees have
been sytematically ill treated and tortured, the total number now probably
reaching the tens of thousands.
Yet if, as I've suggested, broad agreement has been reached on the FACTUAL
record, an obvious anomaly arises: what accounts for the impassioned
controversy that still swirls around the Israel-Palestine conflict?
To my mind, explaining this apparent paradox requires, first of all, that a
fundamental distinction be made between those controversies that are real
and those that are contrived.
To illustrate real differences of opinion, let us consider again the
Palestinian refugee question.
It is possible for interested parties to agree on the facts yet come to
diametrically opposed moral, legal, and political conclusions.
Thus, as already mentioned, the scholarly consensus is that Palestinians
were ethnically cleansed in 1948.
Israel's leading historian on the topic, Benny Morris, although having done
more than anyone else to clarify exactly what happened, nonetheless
concludes that, morally, it was a good thing - just as, in his view, the "annihilation" of Native Americans was a good thing - that, legally,
Palestinians have no right to return to their homes, and that, politically,
Israel's big error in 1948 was that it hadn't "carried out a large expulsion
and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the
Jordan" of Palestinians.
However repellant morally, these clearly can't be called FALSE conclusions.
Returning to the universe inhabited by normal human beings, it's possible
for people to concur on the facts as well as on their moral and legal
implications, yet still reach divergent POLITICAL conclusions.
Noam Chomsky agrees that, factually, Palestinians were expelled; that,
morally, this was a major crime; and that, legally, Palestinians have a
right of return. Yet, politically, he concludes that implementation of this
right is infeasible and pressing it inexpedient, indeed, that dangling this
(in his view) illusory hope before Palestinian refugees is deeply immoral.
There are those, contrariwise, who maintain that a moral and legal right is
meaningless unless it can be exercised and that implementing the right of
return is a practical possibility.
For our purposes, the point is not who's right and who's wrong but that,
even among honest and decent people, there can be a real and legitimate
differences of political judgment.
This having been said, however, it bears emphasis that - at any rate, among
those sharing ordinary moral values - the range of political disagreement is
quite narrow, while the range of agreement quite broad."
Let's run that by one more time: The scholarly consensus is that Palestinians
were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and Israel's leading historian, Benny Morris,
thinks that this was a good thing.
And now, Condoleezza Rice thinks that further ethnic cleansing of the Middle East by the psycho-bullies of Israel is just "birth pangs" of a "New Middle East."
Most Westerners have been brainwashed to think that the "Arab-Israeli Conflict" is some kind of old, historical hatred, a "cosmic clash of religions, cultures, civilizations. This is what Finkelstein refers to as a "contrived controversy." It is all bunk and mystification and it serves to blow smoke on the so-called "Two State Solution" that is the favored political gambit of most normal, decent, humane and moral people. Noam Chomsky favors this view to some extent, but I sometimes wonder how a person can have any moral fiber at all if they, on the one hand, agree that a deed is totally morally reprehensible, and on the other hand, suggest that righting the wrong is not feasible.
Nevertheless, there has been a consensus that the Two State Solution is the best one for over 25 years. In 1989, a UN Generally Assembly resolution passed nearly unanimously; it stipulated "[t]he withdrawal of Israel from the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967." The only dissenting votes were the U.S., Israel, and Dominica.
In 2004, basically the same resolution was passed again with the only dissenting votes being cast by the U.S., Israel, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Uganda.
So, why does Israel and the U.S. (and UK too), continue to blow the mystifying smoke on the problem, to continue to try to present it as a "clash of civilizations" or a "cosmic war between good and evil" and all that crap?
The answer is simple: if you look at it with all that nonsense stripped away you see the simple truth: it is a political problem that was created by politicians with Imperialist agendas.
The fact is, from the very beginning, the establishment of a National Home for the Jews involved blanket negation of the inalienable rights of the residents of that land to keep their homes.
The injustice inflicted on Palestinians by Zionism was manifest and, except on racist grounds, unanswerable: their right to self-determination, and perhaps even to their homeland, was being denied.
Several sorts of justification were supplied for the Zionist enterprise as against the rights of the indigenous population, none of which, however, withstood even cursory scrutiny. Belief in the cluster of justifications put forth by the Zionist movement presumed acceptance of very specific Zionist ideological tenets regarding Jewish "historical rights" to Palestine and Jewish "homelessness."
For example, the "historical rights" claim was based on Jews having originated in Palestine and resided there two thousand years ago. Such a claim was neither historical nor based on any accepted notion of right.
It was not historical inasmuch as it voided the two millennia of non-Jewish settlement in Palestine and the two millennia of Jewish settlement outside it. It was not a right except in mystical, Romantic nationalist ideologies, the implementation of which would wreak - and have wreaked - havoc.
Reminding fellow Zionists that Jewry's "historical right" to Palestine was a "metaphysical rather than a political category" and that, springing as it did from "the very inner depths of Judaism," this "category ... is binding on us rather than on the Arabs," even the Zionist writer Ernst Simon was emphatic that it did not confer on Jews any right to Palestine without the consent of the Arabs.
One cannot help but draw the comparison between the justifications for the creation of the National Home for the Jews with the Nazis justifications for Lebensraum.
The term Lebensraum... was coined by Friedrich Ratzel in 1897, and used as a slogan in Germany referring to the unification of the country and the acquisition of colonies, as per the English and French models. It was adapted from Darwinian and other scientific ideas of the day about how ecological niches are filled. Similar concepts are still used today in geography and biology.[1]
Ratzel believed the development of a people is primarily influenced by their geographical situation and that a people that successfully adapted to one location would proceed naturally to another. This expansion to fill available space, he claimed, was a natural and necessary feature of any healthy species.
These beliefs were furthered by scholars of the day, including Karl Haushofer and Friedrich von Bernhardi. In von Bernhardi's 1912 book Germany and the Next War, he expanded upon Ratzel's hypotheses and, for the first time, explicitly identified Eastern Europe as a source of new space.
The attempts to implement the Lebensraum happened in Zamosc County and Wartheland (see Generalplan Ost). The biggest obstacle to implement the Lebensraum further was the fact that by the end of 1942 the Sixth Army was defeated at Stalingrad. After the second big defeat in the tank battle at Kursk during July 1943 and the Allied landings in Sicily, all further Lebensraum plans came to a halt.
The Lebensraum ideology was a major factor in Hitler's launching of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. The Nazis hoped to turn large areas of Soviet territory into German settlement areas as part of Generalplan Ost.
Developing these ideas, Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, proposed that the Nazi administrative organization in lands to be conquered from the Soviets be based upon the following Reichskommissariats:
The Reichskommissariat territories would extend up to the European frontier at the Urals. These administrative entities were to have been early stages in the displacement and dispossession of Russian and other Slav peoples and their replacement with German settlers, following the Nazi "Lebensraum im Osten" plans. [Wikipedia]
That sure does sound familiar, doesn't it? And it was soundly and violently condemned by the entire world which fought a World War to end such expansionist aspirations on the part of Germany.
So, why do we tolerate it on the part of Israel? Why are we all sitting around and watching Israel doing the same things that the Nazis were doing, listening to psychopaths like Condoleezza Rice refer to it as "Birth Pangs" of a "New Middle East"? Have we taken leave of our senses? Is the universe of normal, decent and moral people so filled with smoke that we can no longer see what is right and what is wrong?
Well, as a matter of fact, that seems to be the case.
Another sort of justification conjured away the injustice inflicted on the indigenous population with the pretense that Palestine was (nearly) vacant before the Jews came. Ironically, this argument has proven to be the most compelling proof of the injustice committed: it is a back-handed admission that, had Palestine been inhabited, which it plainly was, the Zionist enterprise was morally indefensible. Those admitting to the reality of a Palestinian presence yet functioning outside the ideological ambit of Zionism couldn't adduce any justification for Zionism except a racist one: that is, in the great scheme of things, the fate of Jews was simply more important than that of Arabs. If not publicly, at any rate privately, this is how the British rationalized the Balfour Declaration. For Balfour himself, "we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination" for the "present inhabitants" of Palestine, because "the question of the Jews outside Palestine [is] one of world importance" and Zionism was "rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of a far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land." [Finkelstein]
At the time, British Cabinet Minster, Herbert Samuel, recognized that denying the Arabs majority rule was "in flat contradiction to one of the main purposes for which the Allies were fighting," but he then turned around and bought into the smokescreen belief propagated by religion, to wit "the anterior Jewish presence in Palestine "had resulted in events of spiritual and cultural value to mankind in striking contrast with the barren record of the last thousand years."
Winston Churchill testified before the Peel Commission saying that the indigenous population of Arabs had no more right to Palestine than a "dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time." He further opined that "No wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
Shades of Adolf Hitler!
Finkelstein makes a small apology for the Brits saying:
"The point is not so much that the British were racists but rather that they had no recourse except to racist justifications for denying the indigenous population its basic rights. Pressed to justify what was done, they became racists not from predilection but from circumstance: on no other grounds could so flagrant a denial be explained."
The so-called "historic necessity" of Jews being given a National State is also bunk. There was a massive exertion of the Zionists to get Jews to go to Palestine; Jews were often conscripted in a heavy-handed way to go to Palestine. Zionists vigorously opposed the settlement of any Jews anywhere else. In documented cases, many Jews were given the choice between going to concentration camps under Nazi rule or going to Palestine.
"From the outset Zionism worked towards the creation of a purely Jewish state and was glad to rid the country of its Arab inhabitants.' [Isaac Deutscher]
To say that the Israeli government is acting irrationally when it refuses to "remove or assuage the grievance" of Palestinians is missing the point. Considering that the Palestinians' chief grievance is the denial of their homeland, if the Zionists were to act "rationally" according to that standard, and remove this grievance, i.e. to give them back their homeland, then there would be no Israel.
It is equally wrong to think that Palestinians - and the wider Arab community - have been acting irrationally when they blame the Zionists for all the misery in the Middle East. They are acting quite normally.
Which brings us back to Condoleezza Rice: Few things have ever revealed the psychopathic nature of the Bush Neocon Cabal more clearly than this soulless and truly inhuman series of remarks. Rice has revealed herself to be - like Benny Morris - a morally repellant creature. And, as Finkelstein has pointed out, the universe inhabited by normal human beings - honest and decent people - is one where the majority concur on the facts and their moral and legal
implications, though they may have different ideas of how to implement a political solution. One could say that all normal people demand an immediate cease-fire. Period. You can work out the details later, but stop now before one more precious baby is lost and one more mother regrets the real birth pangs that brought her child into a world where he or she was destined to become only cannon fodder for such as the likes of Condoleezza Rice.
But let's look again at what Rice said: a "New Middle East." What could she have meant by that? Just what kind of Middle East can you have when Israel is systematically ethnically cleansing the region of - well... anybody but Israelis. And there's your answer. That is, after all, the vision of Israel.
And so we see just what kind of "New Middle East" Condoleezza Rice is talking about: she is pregnant and giving birth to a Monster.
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US Marines Charged With Massacre Of Civilians In Iraq
Times Online
22/12/2006
Eight US Marines were charged yesterday over the killing of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians, including women and children, in the town of Haditha last year.
Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, a squad leader and the alleged ringleader, was charged with 13 counts of murder. He is accused of ordering Marines under his charge to "shoot first and ask questions later" on entering a house.
Sergeant Wuterich, 26 was also charged with making a false official statement and soliciting another sergeant to make false official statements. He faces a maximum penalty of life in prison for his alleged role.
The charges did not allege premeditated murder, according to Mark Zaid, an attorney for Sergeant Wuterich. Mr Zaid said that his client would not be executed if found guilty. "The death penalty is not on the table," he said.
But they underlined the seriousness with which the Pentagon is pursuing one of the darkest episodes for the American military in Iraq. It has drawn comparisons with the notorious civilian massacre at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968.
The Haditha killings, which occurred on November 19, 2005, triggered the biggest criminal investigation of US troops in Iraq in terms of Iraqis killed. Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, has called the deaths a "terrible crime".
The highest ranking defendant, Lieutenant-Colonel Jeffrey Chessani, 42, was accused of failing to obey an order or regulation, encompassing dereliction of duty. The other officers charged were First Lieutenant Andrew Grayson, 25, Captain Lucas McConnell, 31, and Captain Randy Stone, 34, a military attorney.
At the time of the killings, the US military initially said that 15 Iraqi civilians had died after being hit by a roadside bomb, and that Marines then killed eight insurgents in an ensuing firefight.
There was no full US investigation into what happened until three months after when video footage taken by a local human rights activist was passed to Time magazine.
A parallel military investigation has examined whether officers in the Marines' chain of command tried to cover up the events. Results of that inquiry have not been made public.
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Five US troops killed in Iraq
AFP
22/12/2006
Five American troops have died from combat wounds in western Iraq and Baghdad, the military said today, pushing the US death toll since the war began close to 3,000.
Five American troops have died from combat wounds in western Iraq and Baghdad, the military said today, pushing the US death toll since the war began close to 3,000.
In December, 76 American troops have been killed; at the current rate, the number of US combat deaths this month could meet or exceed the previous monthly record for 2006.
At least 2,964 American troops have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Comment: A few more and the Bush regime will have murdered the same number of American citizens in Iraq as did American citizens in New York on 9/11.
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A New Phrase Enters Washington's War of Words Over Iraq
NY Times
December 21, 2006
WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 - First there was the "mission accomplished" banner. Then, last year, there was a "plan for victory" and, just this past October, the presidential assertion, "Absolutely, we're winning." Now that President Bush is seeking "a new way forward" in Iraq, he is embracing a new verbal construction to describe progress there: "We're not winning. We're not losing."
The latest shift in the official language of the war is begging the question: Well, which is it? A tie? A draw? Something else?
Mr. Bush essentially endorsed the not-winning-not-losing assessment in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday by way of attributing it to Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When asked if the United States was winning in Iraq, Mr. Bush said, "An interesting construct that General Pace uses is, 'We're not winning; we're not losing.' " To those who closely follow the president's rhetoric on the war, the answer was something of a dodge.
"This is pretty weak, but they have pretty weak material to work with at this point," said Christopher F. Gelpi, a political scientist at Duke University whose research on public opinion and the war has been studied by the administration. "He's in a difficult rhetorical situation because he stuck so long with the 'we're making progress' argument, yet clearly he does finally understand this is his last chance to make a major policy correction in Iraq."
At his news conference Wednesday Mr. Bush was emphatic that victory in Iraq was achievable and that winning was what he had in mind even when he referred to General Pace's remarks.
Yet, by the generally accepted David-versus-Goliath rules of counterinsurgencies, the insurgents are winning so long as the counterinsurgents are not.
"The basic theory of counterinsurgency warfare is that the defenders must demonstrate momentum towards victory or success," said Loren B. Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a military policy organization in Virginia. "If you can't prove you are making progress then by definition you are losing."
White House officials say that in this war there are insurgents attacking other insurgents as well as counterinsurgents; there are terrorists, armed gangsters and an occupying force - the United States-led coalition - all fighting each other too, and so the usual rules and definitions do not apply.
In short: a dizzying mix of forces in Iraq has resulted in a dizzying mix of definitions of winning and losing as the administration has sought to recalibrate expectations for a public that was initially promised a swift victory and now just seems to want to hear it straight.
"When they say, 'We're not winning; we're not losing,' that's being 'realistic,' " said William Safire, whose column, "On Language," appears in The New York Times Magazine. "And 'realistic' is a word that's being kicked around now," he said.
This week began with a debate over what former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell meant when he said on "Face the Nation" Sunday, partly quoting the Iraq Study Group report, "So if it's grave and deteriorating and we're not winning, we are losing." But he also said, "We haven't lost."
Addressing that comment on Monday the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said: "Look, what Colin Powell is saying, 'We're not winning, so therefore we must be losing,' and then he says, 'all is not lost.' So I'm just - I'm not going to get - what I am saying is that we will win, and we have to win."
Vexed at continued questions, he finally resorted to giving a grammar lesson: "You're trying to summarize a complex situation with a single word or gerund, or even a participle," he said. "And the fact is that what you really need to do is to take a look at the situation and understand that it is vital to win."
Comment: !!! So George is "in a difficult rhetorical situation", is he? What about the people of Iraq? There situation is somewhat more real than just rhetorical.
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Iraq: U.S. generals leary of plan for more troops
www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-21 19:50:23
BEIJING, Dec. 21 (Xinhuanet) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates met with top U.S. generals at Camp Victory Wednesday during his visit to Iraq and was told they are leary of President George W. Bush's possible proposal to deploy more troops to the war-ravaged country.
Bush has said he is considering that idea and others in his search for a fresh path in a 3 1/2-year-plus war that has no end in sight and has lost the support of much of the American public.
Gates made the surprise trip because the administration has been under intense pressure to forge a new strategy. The unannounced visit came just hours after the president conceded the United States is not winning the conflict.
After meeting with top U.S. generals, Gates acknowledged concerns that rushing thousands more American troops to the battlefront could allow the Iraqis to slow their effort take control of the country.
"It's clearly a consideration," Gates said of how adding more American troops might affect Iraqi leaders. "I think that the commanders out here have expressed a concern about that."
Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said he supports increasing troop levels only when there is a specific purpose for their deployment. Other military leaders have expressed uncertainty over the purpose and results of bringing in more troops.
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Gates Plans Report to Bush on Iraq
LOLITA C. BALDOR 12.22.06, 11:55 AM ET
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is taking what he learned during three days of meeting with military and political leaders here directly to President Bush. Gates, due back in Washington from Iraq on Friday night, was scheduled to see Bush at Camp David first thing Saturday morning, said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser Stephen Hadley and deputy national security adviser J.D. Crouch, who has been coordinating Bush's review of Iraq policy, were also to attend the discussions at the Maryland mountain retreat where Bush was spending Christmas.
As the president weighs a course correction in the increasingly unpopular war, the White House also announced that Bush would convene a meeting of his full National Security Council next Thursday during a several-day stay at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. That session was not designed to arrive at final decisions, but to continue to whittle down the options, Perino said.
Before leaving Baghdad, Gates declined to say whether he plans to recommend a short-term increase in U.S. troop levels. But he said he believes the U.S. and Iraqis have "a broad strategic agreement between the Iraqi military and Iraqi government and our military."
"There is still some work to be done," Gates said. "But I do expect to give a report to the president on what I've learned and my perceptions."
Speaking to reporters at Camp Victory, with the sounds of artillery fire and jet aircraft in the background, Gates said that "clearly there are more discussions that need to take place in Washington and more specific recommendations."
He said Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, was continuing to work with Iraqi officials, with more details expected in the days ahead.
Gates said he is "quite confident that what I've heard from the Iraqis of their plans this week, that we will be able together, and with them in the lead, we will be able to make an improvement in the security situation in Baghdad."
Gates also said that he does not believe there is a large split among Iraqi leaders about whether there should be an increase in U.S. troops. The issue, he said, is how the Iraqis assert their own leadership in taking charge of their own fate.
The new defense chief, who was sworn in on Monday, traveled to Iraq with a mandate to scope out a new war strategy, as the Bush administration continues to search for a way to bring the violence in the embattled country under control.
To that end, Gates shuttled back and forth across Baghdad over the last three days meeting with his military commanders and Iraqi government officials, and gathering input from U.S. troops.
On Iran, Gates told reporters there has been an increase in Naval forces in the Persian Gulf. But he denied that it was a direct reaction to any movements by Iran to pursue a nuclear program.
Instead, Gates said, the message to the Gulf countries is that the United States is going to be an enduring presence in the region.
"We've been here for a long time and we will be here for a long time," he said.
Gates' visit comes as Bush is reassessing U.S. policy in the war, which is widely opposed by the American public after 3 1/2 years of bloodshed. Among the president's options is whether to quickly add thousands of U.S. troops to the 140,000 already in Iraq, in hopes of staunching the escalating violence in Baghdad and elsewhere.
Flanked by Casey and Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gates said he has asked Casey to confer with Iraqi military leaders and the prime minister to make specific recommendations on how to improve the security situation.
"Clearly success will only be achieved by a joint effort with Iraqis taking the lead," he said.
Gates has said he did not talk about specific numbers of U.S. troops with the Iraqi officials. During his meetings here, Gates assured the Iraqis of "the steadfastness of American support."
Gates said he discussed with the Iraqis how their government could reverse the deteriorating security problem. Besides an unrelenting insurgency, killings and kidnappings between Sunnis and Shiites are approaching civil war dimensions with U.S. and civilian casualties rising.
Gates said there are several approaches that could be used to improve security, yet offered few details.
Gates started his day Friday having breakfast with six Army soldiers with the 10th Mountain Division to discuss their mission training Iraqi troops in southern Iraq. The group is part of Task Force 2-15, which has about 400 soldiers embedded with the 4th Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Army Division.
Lt. Col. Bob Morschauser, a soldier from Fairless Hills, Pa., said the Iraqis are improving and gaining confidence. He said the U.S. troops are hoping the Iraqis will be able to operate on their own in less than a year.
Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed
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The Ugly State Of Israel
We mustn't forget that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish [Zionists]
Ynet
12.21.06
[...] An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf."
Here's a particularly forlorn historical date: Almost 90 years ago, between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.
Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB.
We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags.
Whole population strata were eliminated: Independent farmers, ethnic minorities, members of the bourgeoisie, senior officers, intellectuals, artists, labor movement activists, "opposition members" who were defined completely randomly, and countless members of the Communist party itself.
In his new, highly praised book "The War of the World, "Historian Niall Ferguson writes that no revolution in the history of mankind devoured its children with the same unrestrained appetite as did the Soviet revolution. In his book on the Stalinist purges, Tel Aviv University's Dr. Igal Halfin writes that Stalinist violence was unique in that it was directed internally.
Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined "terror officials," cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a kosher certificate.
All these things are well-known to some extent or another, even though the former Soviet Union's archives have not yet been fully opened to the public. But who knows about this? Within Russia itself, very few people have been brought to justice for their crimes in the NKVD's and KGB's service. The Russian public discourse today completely ignores the question of "How could it have happened to us?" As opposed to Eastern European nations, the Russians did not settle the score with their Stalinist past.
And us, the Jews? An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf."
Yezhov was not Jewish but was blessed with an active Jewish wife. In his Book "Stalin: Court of the Red Star", Jewish historian Sebag Montefiore writes that during the darkest period of terror, when the Communist killing machine worked in full force, Stalin was surrounded by beautiful, young Jewish women.
Stalin's close associates and loyalists included member of the Central Committee and Politburo Lazar Kaganovich. Montefiore characterizes him as the "first Stalinist" and adds that those starving to death in Ukraine, an unparalleled tragedy in the history of human kind aside from the Nazi horrors and Mao's terror in China, did not move Kaganovich.
Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity. We'll mention just one more: Leonid Reichman, head of the NKVD's special department and the organization's chief interrogator, who was a particularly cruel sadist.
In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a "carnival of mass murder," "fantasy of purges", and "essianism of evil." Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.
The Jews active in official communist terror apparatuses (In the Soviet Union and abroad) and who at times led them, did not do this, obviously, as Jews, but rather, as Stalinists, communists, and "Soviet people." Therefore, we find it easy to ignore their origin and "play dumb": What do we have to do with them? But let's not forget them. My own view is different. I find it unacceptable that a person will be considered a member of the Jewish people when he does great things, but not considered part of our people when he does amazingly despicable things.
Even if we deny it, we cannot escape the Jewishness of "our hangmen," who served the Red Terror with loyalty and dedication from its establishment. After
Comment: An excellent, truthful and all-too-rare expose of the reality of Zionism and Zionists the central involvement they played in the worst that Communism had to offer. For the full story on who the Zionists really are and how the operate, read Douglas Reed's fascinating book "The Controversy of Zion", available for download or read on line here.
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PCHR Weekly Report on Israeli Violations in the Occupied Territories
IMEMC
22 December 2006
The Palestinian Center For Human Rights in Gaza published its weekly report on the Israeli violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. Nine Palestinians, including one child, were killed, and twelve, including seven children, were injured. The period of this report is December 14 - December 20.
The center also reported that Israel continued the construction of the illegal annexation Wall in the occupied West Bank.
The PCHR stated in its report that the army continued its "Systematic Attack" on Palestinian civilians and their property.
Summary of PCHR report:
Nine Palestinian civilians, including one child, were killed by Israeli military fire. Four of the victims were extra-judicially executed.
Israeli troops carried out 30 invasions into Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps and took prisoner of 32 residents including three children.
The Gaza Strip remained isolated by the army as the crossings remained closed, while in the West Bank, soldiers installed additional checkpoints; five residents including one child, were taken prisoner on these checkpoints.
The siege Israel is imposing on the West Bank remained in place, while Jerusalem continued to be off-limits to the Palestinian residents living in the West Bank, and around the Holy City.
The PCHR reported that as the army continued to construct the Wall inside the West Bank, more Palestinian farmland and orchards wee razed especially near Avni Hevetz settlement, east of the northern West Bank city of Tulkarem.
Troops annexed 144.6 Dunams of agricultural land for the purpose of the construction of a new section of the Wall.
The Israeli High Court of Justice also rejected on December 13 a petition against the route of the Wall in al-Rama and Dahiat al-Barid areas, north of East Jerusalem.
The court said in its ruling that the Wall "does not affect Palestinian civilians in that area".
In a step towards enhancing the Advisory Opinion issued by the International Court of Justice on 9 July 2004, which considers the Annexation Wall illegal, the UN General Assembly endorsed on Friday, 16 December 2006, by an overwhelming majority of votes, in favor a resolution to establish a UN registry to handle Palestinian claims of damages resulting from the construction of the Wall in the West Bank.
The Israeli violations since June 25, 2006 have claimed the lives of 483 residents, 306 of them were civilians including 92 children and 30 women.
At least 1628 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 345 children, 110 women, in the Gaza Strip alone. 1275 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including 345 children, 104 women, 4 paramedics and 7 journalists, have been wounded by the IOF gunfire.
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Israeli Army attacks several West Bank areas and abducts 24 Palestinian men
IMEMC & Agencies
22 December 2006
The Israeli army invaded several parts of the West Bank on Friday morning, attacked residents' homes, and abducted 24 residents.
In the northern part of the West Bank, an army convoy attacked Nablus City, Balata Refugee Camp, and Askar Refugee Camp, located in the city of Nablus, searched and ransacked scores of residents' houses, and abducted 11 men there. No names have been issued at the time of this report.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army abducted 9 Palestinian men from the southern West Bank city of Hebron in pre-dawn invasions and home raids in the city and surrounding villages.
Four Palestinian teenagers were abducted by Israeli forces during a pre-dawn invasion in the village of Taqua, south of the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem. Local sources identified the four abducted as Mohamed Subeh, 16, Hamzeh Subeh, 16, Ayoup Subeh, 15, and Omer Subeh, 17. All four were taken to unknown detention camps controlled by the army, their families reported.
Palestinian sources reported that soldiers stationed at portable and fixed checkpoints controlled by the Israeli army surrounding northern West Bank cities have partially closed those checkpoints and forced people on their way to their jobs or school to stand for many hours before being searched.
Comment: All of these men are innocent, yet all will probably be tortured by sadistic Israeli soldiers who seem Arabs as less than animals.
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Palestinians have become targets in Iraq's chaos
By Hannah Allam
McClatchy Newspapers
Thu, Dec. 21, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - For half an hour last week, mortar rounds rained down on Baghdad's largest Palestinian enclave. Neither Iraqi police at a station nearby nor U.S. troops at a base adjacent to the neighborhood responded.
At the end of the attack, the Palestinians counted their losses: six dead and 29 injured, including a repairman next to the compound's generator, two neighborhood boys with their heads and stomachs split open in the billiards hall, and the bean-seller beside his pushcart who screamed "Save me!" before he died.
Most heartbreaking, survivors said, were the corpses of 14-year-old Noura Mohamed, who was decapitated while standing in her garden, and 13-year-old A'isha Ahmed, who was hit by the last mortar of the evening as she stood on a balcony to check on her brother and father as they helped the wounded.
It was the bloodiest assault so far in what has become a long stream of attacks on Palestinians, whose community has been here since the establishment of Israel in 1948 but who've never been granted Iraqi citizenship.
The United Nations refugee agency condemned the barrage, which it blamed on Shiite Muslim militiamen of the Mahdi Army, and blasted U.S. and Iraqi troops for failing to protect the Palestinians.
Iraqi officials shrugged off the incident, saying everyone in Iraq is a target and that Palestinians should approach the Iraqi interior ministry - which is widely infiltrated by Shiite militias - instead of complaining to aid agencies.
After days of silence, the U.S. military issued a terse statement on Wednesday saying soldiers had observed mortars in the vicinity on Dec. 13 but received "no reports of attacks on the al Baladiyat neighborhood that day." The statement said the military had no information "that suggests there is a coordinated campaign or effort against this particular neighborhood."
There's little doubt, however, that Palestinians have become targets in Iraq's civil war. U.N. and Iraqi officials and Palestinian residents have documented at least 17 attacks or serious threats against Palestinians in the past three months; that figure is believed to be a fraction of the actual number of incidents.
The attacks include kidnappings, mortar barrages, drive-by shootings and Palestinians forced from their homes. Palestinians and U.N. aid officials say Shiite militias are behind most of the attacks.
"Even Israel didn't do this to us," said Thamer Asad Malhem, a Palestinian who helped to transport the dead and wounded on Dec. 13 when only two ambulances from a Sunni-run hospital showed up.
Malhem comes from an artistic family: He's an actor, his brother Amer is an accordion player, and another brother is a pianist. Together, they used to perform at weddings for Iraqis and Palestinians. The brothers were born in Iraq, the offspring of parents who arrived here after they were driven from their homes in Haifa as the state of Israel emerged.
The Malhems grew up saddled with the deep-rooted stereotype of Palestinians as the beneficiaries of Saddam Hussein, who used to offer money to the families of suicide bombers and who fired 39 missiles at Tel Aviv in the 1991 Gulf War.
But Palestinians in Iraq found little help in their host country, Malhem said.
They were promised free shelter, but got shoddy government-built tenements such as the dreary towers in Baladiyat, where at least four families share each two- or three-bedroom apartment. Palestinians were never allowed Iraqi citizenship and were banned from buying houses or apartments, registering personal vehicles, purchasing shops or opening bank accounts. University tuition for Palestinian students, Malhem said, came largely from their own pockets.
"Saddam used the Palestinian issue as propaganda for himself and his government," Malhem said.
The widespread belief that Palestinians received more privileges than ordinary Iraqis drew resentment from both Shiites and fellow Sunnis. Immediately after the fall of the former regime, Iraqis pushed Palestinians out of some districts and took over their homes. Many Shiites branded the Palestinians "terrorists" and accused them of supporting or joining the then-nascent Sunni insurgency.
The low-level intimidation mushroomed into an organized campaign after the bombing of a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad in 2005. Four Palestinian men were detained as suspects and paraded on state-run television several times a day for a week as Palestinian families shuttered themselves indoors for fear of reprisal killings.
The Palestinians were acquitted, but the damage was irreversible.
"It was a brutal campaign against the Palestinians," Malhem said. "They never showed an Iranian, a Saudi, a Yemeni or a Sudanese. Only the Palestinians."
The attacks surged again after a Shiite shrine was bombed in the northern city of Samarra in February. The bombing occurred in the morning; by noon the same day, Shiite militiamen had ransacked the Quds Mosque in the Baladiyat compound, according to Palestinian and police accounts.
Since then, violence has continued. Malhem recounted several cases, many of them included in a U.N. report and all with the full names of the victims. He also provided medical records and detailed lists of the dead.
The victims include the owner of a money-exchange kiosk who was kidnapped and killed, the owner of a sweets shop who was found with two bullet wounds in the back of his head, two Palestinian officers from the former regime who were assassinated days after applying for their pension cards, a man kidnapped from his falafel restaurant and discovered in the morgue, and a widow who was slain when she tried to prevent intruders from seizing her teenage son.
Three months ago, Malhem said, Palestinian men in Baladiyat ringed their compound with a makeshift fence and assigned sentry shifts to volunteers. The next time Shiite militiamen showed up in police vans and uniforms, he said, the Palestinians shot back. The militias then turned to pelting the compound with mortars, one of which in mid-October sent shrapnel into Malhem's brother Amer, paralyzing him.
The events of Dec. 13 exemplified the dilemma the Palestinians face in a city where the hospitals and the morgue are run by the Iraqi health ministry, which is controlled by the Mahdi Army.
The Palestinians couldn't immediately get their dead to a Sunni-run hospital, so they piled the corpses on balconies until the next morning. They opened all the windows, burned incense and sprinkled rose water to mask the stench.
"If Iraqis are subjected to any assault, they can go to their tribe or their home village in the provinces, or they can leave the country," Malhem said. "Iraqis have passports, so they can leave. Palestinians don't have anything. Palestinians are just sitting here, waiting for the mortars to come."
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Al-Manar: Plane came to Beirut from Tel Aviv on day of Gemayel assassination
Daily Star staff
Friday, December 22, 2006
BEIRUT: Hizbullah's television channel reported on Thursday that a Portuguese plane coming from Tel Aviv, Israel, landed at Beirut's Rafik Hariri International Airport and remained on the ground for seven hours on November 21, the day that Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel was assassinated.
However, conflicting reports said the plane that landed had come from Cyprus, not from the Jewish state.
Lebanese law prohibits any direct air navigation from Israel to Beirut.
But on the afternoon of November 21, Portuguese Foreign Minister Louis Amado arrived in Beirut on board a private plane on an official visit to meet the Portuguese UNIFIL troops stationed in the South.
Ministerial sources told The Daily Star that the plane had come from Cyprus.
However, Al-Manar said the plane came from Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv and landed in Beirut at 11.31 a.m. It added that the flight marked the first time "official and normal contact was made between the two airports."
Al-Manar said the "plane headed from Lisbon to Tel Aviv and then to Lebanon, leaving Beirut at around 7 p.m. toward an unknown destination."
"Eleven people were on board; 10 of them disembarked," the TV station said.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
Al-Manar added that "eight people, who were not on board originally, boarded the plane in Lebanon and headed toward an unidentified destination."
Al-Manar also said that the 10 people remained in Beirut, adding that the television station's reporters were conducting investigations to discover who they are.
Al-Manar also quoted "well-informed sources" as saying that the Civil Aviation Safety Committee had "hired four US experts who work on the airport's second floor and earn $120,000 per month in a secret mission under the slogan of airport reforms."
No official statements were made by the relevant authorities by the time The Daily Star went to press.
Sources from the Internal Security Forces told local daily An-Nahar that Al-Manar's claims "were completely false."
However, other sources in the Surete Generale were quoted by An-Nahar Thursday as saying that the plane might have arrived from Tel Aviv.
The sources added that the issue is currently under investigation. - The Daily Star
Comment: As we noted yesterday, this plane was undoubtedly a team of Mossad agents involved in overseeing the murder of Lebanese Minister Pierre Gemayel, which was an effort by Israel to destablize Lebanon in preparation for the upcoming Israeli/US assault on Lebanon, Syria and Iran
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Who is Mohammad Dahlan?
Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic Intifada, 20 December 2006
Some have called Mohammad Dahlan the Palestinian Ahmad Chalabi, because he reportedly negotiated with the US and Israel about taking control of Gaza after the August 2005 disengagement plan. In April 2002 testifying before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said he had offered control of the Gaza Strip to Dahlan. In exchange, Dahlan, who had control of the most significant military force on the Gaza Strip, would be obligated to ensure complete quiet along the border.[1] He is believed to have drawn up an early agreement at a January 1994 meeting in Rome with senior Israeli military and Shin Bet officials to contain Hamas, and was actively involved in subsequent negotiations with the Israelis.[2]
Today, Dahlan has become the face of one side of Fatah as violence increased between Hamas and Fatah. In the past week he has made his way back into Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas' inner circle. Last week, Hamas accused Dahlan of planning an attempted assassination of prime minister Ismail Haniya of the Hamas movement. Haniya was returning from a Middle East tour which raised badly needed funds for Palestinians under occupation, and obtained a promise from the Syrian government to release all Palestinians in its jails, when chaos ensued. The situation at the Egypt-Gaza border crossing was tense as it had not been open long enough for the thousands of people waiting on both sides to pass. The Israelis closed the border when Haniya first tried to enter as he was bringing in funds, prohibited under the US-led economic and political blockade imposed after Hamas won the parliamentary elections in January.
Dahlan began a tour of Palestinian towns this week to rally support for Fatah, but it was not a spectacular success. On December 17, while Dahlan toured Jenin refugee camp, gunmen fired in the air over his convoy, shouting at him until he made a hasty exit. He blamed Hamas for sparking the killing of three children in Gaza City and said that Hamas "does not have any political program, leaving the Palestinian people in the predicament they have lived through since this government took responsibility."
Meanwhile the United States has accelerated its arms transfers to Fatah, via Israel. Dahlan is now in command of the armed campaign against Hamas from presidential headquarters in Ramallah.
Dahlan was a founding member of Shabiba, the youth association of Fatah. In 1994, Dahlan headed the notorious Preventive Security Forces in Gaza. He is known to have good connections with the Egyptian leadership and the US administration, through his connections with the CIA. Dahlan built up a force of at least 20,000 men and received help from CIA officials to train them. Jibril Rajoub, another Fatah strongman, is Dahlan's sworn rival. Dahlan and Rajoub were both jailed by Israel during the first Intifada. Under Oslo they became heads of the Preventive Security Services in Gaza and the West Bank respectively. At that time they were both viewed as pragmatists, representative of a new generation of Palestinians who could live with Israel.
Both Dahlan and Rajoub were implicated in financial scandals and human rights violations. Dahlan worked together with Israeli authorities to crack down on opposition groups, most notably Hamas, arresting thousands of members. Dahlan was in command when his Preventive Security Forces arbitrary arrest hundreds of Palestinians. The first violent clashes between his forces and demonstrators erupted on November 18, 1994.The toll of at least fifteen dead and hundreds wounded raised troubling questions about his troops.
Throughout the years, Dahlan's forces were involved in acts of violence and intimidation against critics, journalists and members of opposition groups, primarily from Hamas, imprisoning them without formal charges for weeks or months at a time. A number of prisoners died under suspicious circumstances during or after interrogation by Dahlan's forces.[3]
In 1996, Dahlan's troops were involved in mass arbitrary arrests of opponents of Fatah. In the aftermath of the February-March suicide bombings in Israel, an estimated 2,000 people were rounded up, often arbitrarily. Most of those detained were never charged with a criminal offense or put on trial. Torture and ill-treatment by his forces occurred regularly during interrogation and led to a number of deaths.
In 2000, Dahlan participated in the Camp David negotiations and Israeli leaders saw him as someone they could do business with. As head of one of the main Palestinian security organisations, Mr Dahlan also negotiated with Israeli officials to try to arrange a ceasefire several times after the most recent Intifada erupted in September 2000. With the beginning of the second intifada, Dahlan claimed that he was unable to stop the activities of such militant groups as Hamas.
In 2001 he angered the late Palestinian president Yasir Arafat by expressing his dissatisfaction over the lack of a coherent policy during the current uprising. Dahlan resigned in June 2002 over disagreements with Arafat to reform the Palestinian Authority. He attempted to gather support for an electoral challenge to Arafat, but stopped, when the Bush administration demanded a change in PA leadership in July of the same year. Before his resignation from the PA in June 2002, Dahlan was a frequent member on negotiating teams for security issues.
In March and April 2002, Dahlan was one of the "Gang of Five" who lead the PA during the siege of Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. Although Arafat retained power and named Dahlan as National Security Advisor in July 2002, Dahlan resigned three months later complaining of lack of authority and organization in the Palestinian Authority. Against Arafat's wishes, Mahmoud Abbas, then serving as prime minister, appointed Dahlan as Interior Minister, but when Abbas resigned, Dahlan was left outside the newly formed cabinet.
After being left out of the new Palestinian Authority cabinet, Dahlan began gathering support from low-level Fatah officials and former Preventive Security Service officers in response to a perceived lack of democratic reforms among Fatah leaders.
In 2004, Dahlan was the driving force behind week-long unrests in Gaza following the appointment of Yasser Arafat's nephew Mousa Arafat, widely accused of corruption, as head of Gaza police forces. Some thought this appointmnt was a deliberate step to weaken Dahlan's position before the disengagement process in the Gaza Strip and sparked massive protests.
Dahlan returned to the political forefront and security arena this week. He appeared in a meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Jericho, and meetings with the European Union's Javier Solana and the German Foreign Affairs Minister. It seems that for whatever reason, world leaders think Dahlan is the right person for them to deal with.
Arjan El Fassed is a cofounder of The Electronic Intifada
Footnotes
[1] Ha'aretz, Gideon Alon (30 Apr 2002)
[2] Middle East International, 520.
[3] Annual reports of Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights (PICCR); various reports from Addameer, PCHR and LAW; Palestinian Self-Rule Areas: Human Rights under the Palestinian Authority, Human Rights Watch (September 1997); Annual reports Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (1994, 1995, 1996).
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Iran - To Bomb Or Not To Bomb
Ahmadinejad derides Bush for baseless accusations against Iran
IRNA
21/12/2006
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday derided US President George W. Bush for his accusations against Iran.
Addressing a huge crowd in the city of Eslamabad-e Gharb in this western province, he said "We would like US president to send half an hour message every day to see reaction."
President Bush had called on Iranians not to go to polls in the parliamentary election last year, but to no avail.
Referring to Bush threats on imposing sanctions and isolating the Islamic Republic of Iran on nuclear program, he said, "You have been isolated in the world and if you do not believe it you and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair could arrange a trip to other countries to see how the world nations would welcome you."
Peaceful application of nuclear technology is legitimate right of our nation, he said adding that it is not clear whether the US and Britain do not really know or do not want to recognize Iranian rights, adding that they think they can create rift among the nation through such words but they do not know that our determined nation are united to defend their legitimate rights.
"It is 27 years that the US and Britain have stood against our nation to stop national progress but they failed."
Saddam's defeat during eight years of imposed war (1980-1988) is a good example to the US hostility to Iranian nation, he pointed out.
"Big powers cannot tolerate our development and progress," the president said.
President Ahmadinejad, accompanied by members of his cabinet, arrived in Kermanshah Tuesday for a three-day visit.
His current visit is his 23rd to various provinces of the country since the start of his initiative of bringing the government closer to the people.
He and members of his cabinet will hold a session in Kermanshah city later in the day to discuss the province's problems before they return to Tehran.
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Israel: "effective, determined" action against Iran
www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-22 21:04:19
JERUSALEM, Dec. 22 (Xinhua) -- Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Snehon called Friday for an "effective, determined way" against Iran, saying serious sanctions would save the trouble for a military assault in dealing with Iran's nuclear standoff.
Sneh made the call as the United Nations are poised to discuss a resolution on sanctions against Iran later on Friday, reported Israel Radio.
Time for Israel and the rest of the world to decide what to do about Iran's pursuit of nuclear power is approaching, Sneh was quoted as saying, adding only serious sanctions would "make the Iranian regime feel painful" and preclude the necessity for a military assault.
"There will be no need to weigh other options," he stressed.
The United Nations Security Council is set to vote on Friday on a sanction resolution against Iran, which has been revised in response to Russian objections.
The latest draft includes a ban on imports and exports of dangerous materials and technology relating to uranium enrichment, reprocessing and heavy-water reactors, as well as ballistic missile delivery systems.
The proposed sanctions would also include freezing the assets of a list of companies and individuals involved in the country's nuclear and missile programs.
The draft demands Tehran end all uranium enrichment work, which can produce fuel for nuclear power plants as well as for bombs, and halt research and development that could lead to atomic weapons.
Iran has vowed to continue its nuclear program despite the resolution, calling its nuclear program a peaceful effort to develop energy.
Comment: When will serious sanctions be considered against Israel for its nuke programme, done without signing any of the international treaties on nuclear development signs by Iran? When will sanctions be considered for the war crimes and genocide against the Palestinian people?
Instead, we get these insane calls for vengeance and destruction coming from the perpetrators of the worst kinds of illegal activities, a country that considers itself too good to be bound by international accords, because they are the "Chosen People", because, according to their twisted view of history, they alone suffered during the second world war.
When will the world wake up to the insanity that is Israel?
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New political dimension looms in Iran
www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-22 06:37:37
Xu Yanyan
TEHRAN, Dec. 21 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Interior Ministry on Thursday released the final result of the third local council election held last Friday, showing a brand-new political dimension since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in 2005.
According to published figures, President Ahmadinejad's ultraconservatives have suffered a stinging defeat, while moderate conservatives and reformists grabbed most ballots in the election.
It has been reported that the president's camp just won less than 20 percent of the total seats.
At Tehran city council, moderate conservative Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf's camp won eight seats of 15, Ahmadinejad's followers two, reformers four and one for independent.
Similar results were seen in the final results of some other major city councils. Ahmadinejad's followers won no seat in Shiraz,Bandar Abbas, Sari, Zanjan and Kerman.
In the poll of the Assembly of Experts which has the power to elect, dismiss Iran's highest authority and the supreme leader, Expediency Council Chairman and centrist Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani defeated Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, who was widely recognized as Ahmadinejad's spiritual mentor.
Since the camp which controls the Tehran city council is doomed to choose the mayor, handle municipal matters in the capital, and even would be more convenient for the next presidency, local media said the election results shows Ahmadinejad would face more obstacles when he tries for re-election in 2009.
The final results were out of many observers' anticipations. Some analysts said the results showed Iranian people favor moderate domestic and foreign policies instead of hardline nationalism.
"The voice of the pragmatists will be more prominent," said Baqer Moin, a London-based Iran expert and author.
According to some Iranian observers, Ahmadinejad was defeated mostly due to his maladroit domestic policy.
When elected as the president, Ahmadinejad promised to let the poor share the country's oil wealth and improve the standards of their living. However, people found the price was sostenuto rising and unemployment rate was up.
Due to the infaust economic situation, Iranians were stewed on their future lives and decided to make a different choice in the election.
Besides, Ahmadinejad has escalated tension with the United States and its allies over several issues, including Iran's controversial nuclear program, while he sparked international outrage for his comments against Israel and for casting doubt on the Nazi Holocaust.
Though Iranian people obtained national pride through the president's hardline position, looming UN sanction pressure made them intranquil and they wanted the government to pay more attention to tackling Iran's domestic issues rather than stimulating the West.
In addition, Ahmadinejad's camp split with moderates who voted him to the presidency and reformers formed a coalition and a single slate this time after they were swept off from local councils and the parliament several years ago.
The president's dealing drew sharp criticism from centrists and detracted votes, said a local analyst.
However, it seemed that the president would be unbowed and there was few chance for him to change foreign policy.
Ahmadinejad gained support from the poor because his slamming at the West increased national pride, said a reformer who refused to give his name.
The latest proof was cheer for him when he blasted U.S. President George W. Bush and vowed to push ahead with nuclear program, he said.
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Russia urges further discussion on Iran sanctions
www.chinaview.cn 2006-12-22 11:52:17
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 21 (Xinhua) -- Russia's UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin on Thursday called for further discussion over a Europe-sponsored draft resolution seeking sanctions on Iran, brushing aside a European push for a Security Council vote on Friday.
After another round of informal talks with counterparts from five other countries -- China, the United States, Britain, France and Germany, Churkin told reporters that there might not be a vote on Friday.
"I do not think there is going to be a vote tomorrow (Friday),"the Russia envoy said. "We believe there should be a postponement to Saturday."
There were still "two or three" difficult issues unsolved, he said, calling for "further thinking and maybe further discussion of the draft resolution."
But a spokesman for the French delegation said that the plan for a Friday vote still remained valid despite the Russian's qualms.
Britain's ambassador Jones Parry also said the council's president for December, Qatar's ambassador Nassir Abdulazziz Al-Nasser, had decided to schedule a vote for Friday.
The draft, sponsored by Britain, France and Germany, would slapa ban on imports and exports of materials and technology relating to uranium enrichment, reprocessing and heavy-water reactors, as well as ballistic missile delivery systems.
To secure support from Russia, a veto-wielding permanent member of the council, the European sponsors offered a watered-down version on Wednesday that removed a travel ban and instead calling on nations to notify a council sanctions panel of Iranians on a sanctions list transiting through their countries.
In a resolution passed in July, the 15-nation council required Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment by Aug. 31. But Iran ignored the deadline.
The United States has been seeking to impose sanctions on Iran through the UN Security Council on the grounds that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon program under the cover of a civilian program. However, Iran has said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
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Iran replaces dollar with euro in foreign deals
Tehran, Dec 22, IRNA
The Iranian government prepared ground for replacement of dollar with euro and other foreign exchanges, Secretariat of the government's information dissemination council said on Friday.
The Economy Council, during its session chaired by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on December 2, approved a ratification to transform dollar-denominated forex activities into euros.
Based on the ratification, the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) is obliged to change foreign exchanges in all previous and future approvals of the Economy Council from dollar into euro or other forex while equalizing the rate of dollar with demanded forex.
The ratification was ordered to all ministries, the CBI and the Management and Planning Organization.
Use of monetary base "rial/euro" was among characteristics of budget bill for the next Iranian calendar year.
Currently, measures are being taken to use forex except dollar in transactions and oil investment.
Surveys showed an international welcome for Iran's decision to replace US dollar with euro while a number of other countries also adopted a similar measure.
The International Finance Institute (IFI), which is a representative of 335 private banks in the world, has previously announced that Arab states of the Persian Gulf intend to change their forex reserves into euro to create more opportunities for investment.
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Iran's embassy says Holocaust conference scientific
Vienna, Dec 22, IRNA
Iran's embassy in the Czech Republic on Thursday stressed that the recently international conference held in Tehran on Holocaust had a scientific and research identity.
The embassy issued a statement in reaction to a resolution adopted on Wednesday by the Czech Senate which voiced its opposition with the two-day International Conference to Review the Holocaust Global Vision, held in Tehran on December 11 in presence of 89 intellectuals and researchers from 30 countries.
The resolution regarded denial of Holocaust as a support for anti-Judaism and called on parliaments of all countries to defend rights of the Holocaust victims.
"As officials in charge of holding the Holocaust conference have repeatedly announced and the Czech press also published, the conference did not aim to deny or confirm Holocaust rather it intended to create a scientific and research opportunity to reach a better understanding of doubts over the issue," the Iranian embassy said.
It added, "The conference was held under circumstances that despite freedom of thought speaking of Holocaust is regarded as a crime. Even figures interested in outlining various aspects of the historical event were obliged to keep silent or have been sentenced to prison.
"This is while sanctities of nations and religions have been repeatedly violated by dual views, the issue which is even regarded as a matter of honor."
The statement said, "Iran during its historical existence before and after Islam has always respected divine religions including Judaism and its real ideals based on the country's religious thought and its deep cultural roots.
"Iran opposes racialism in general and anti-Judaism in particular.
"It is a matter of question for the public opinion why should the Palestinians pay cost of Holocaust and witness massacre of their sons day by day in a century known as century of peace, freedom and defending human rights?"
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Around The World
Hugo Chavez And The Rise Of Black-Indian Power
By William Lorens Katz
22 December, 2006
Black Agenda Report
Hugo Chavez has won another landslide election as President of Venezuela with more than 61% of the vote, exceeding previous vote totals, and carrying all 23 of Venezuelan states. His victory surpasses popular U.S. Presidents. Not only has he won high office twice before, but in 2004 he defeated a recall election by a whopping 59%. And during his Presidency his embattled regime has foiled efforts to overthrow him through strikes and armed conspiracies. He claims the U.S. State Department was behind these efforts, including assassination attempts. But after his current landslide even the opposition takes a different view. Chavez is not a dictator, said Teodoro Petkoff, editor of the opposition paper TalCual, and a key advisor to Manuel Rosales, the losing candidate. But he's not a Thomas Jefferson either, Petkoff hastily adds. [New York Times, December 5, 2006, A3.]
Chavez is getting stronger as an unintended consequence of war and globalization, said Harvard Professor of Latin American history Kenneth Maxwell. In the last five weeks candidates leaning more to President Chavez and Fidel Castro than President Bush were elected to head the governments of Brazil, Ecuador, and Nicaragua; and before that Chavez favorite Nestor Kirchner, twice jailed by the military dictatorship, was elected in Argentina. The political thinking of Chavez thanks to NAFTA, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is gaining adherents. Earlier this year Juan Evo Morales Ayma was elected Bolivia's first indigenous president, so the role of people of color also is rising in the Americas.
The role of people of color is rising in the Americas.
Many who approve Chavez's policies and even applaud his confrontational approach to President Bush wince at his rash rhetoric and find as ominous his description of Cuba's one-party system as a revolutionary democracy. In his September address to United Nations General Assembly, the day after Bush spoke, Chavez famously said ?the Devil came here yesterday and it smells of sulfur today.Harping on his provocative metaphor the U.S. media were able to bury his illuminating talk under acerbic headlines and dismissive comments. The mildest media criticism was he had failed to show proper deference or common courtesy to his host country's titular head. Few media sources acknowledged that his speech won occasional applause, and some delegates even smiled or laughed at his anti-Bush jibes. When asked, Rafael Correa of Ecuador called Chavez's comment an "insult to the devil." Correa had earlier called Bush a dimwit but after he was elected President of Ecuador, Bush called to congratulate him.
The mainstream media failed to mention Chavez's public assertion that through CIA agents, secret funds, and connections to rich Venezuelans, Bush sponsored plots to have him removed from office, including by assassination. Chavez has chosen to deal with this danger with increased security and brash metaphors.
The Bush administration has long reacted to Chavez with sputtering fury. Yet today the President of Venezuela sits more comfortably than ever atop a fourth of the world oil supplies equal to that of Iraq. Venezuela supplies a fifth of US oil needs, and continues to be Chavez's leading customer.
The State Department has cast Chavez as a tyrant in the class of Saddam Hussein, or a Marxist, or a ferociously anti-American clone of Castro. Lately, the characterization has been downgraded to populist intended as a sharp criticism. Actually, his Bolivarian revolution springs from multicultural grass roots that pre-date the foreign invasion of the Americas that began in 1492, centuries before Karl Marx, Castro, Hussein or populism.
The Chavez Bolivarian revolution springs from multicultural grass roots that pre-date the foreign invasion of the Americas that began in 1492.
Like four-fifths of Venezuelans today, Chavez was born of poor Black and Indian parents. Since the days of Columbus, descendants of the Spanish conquerors have claimed the privilege of governing Latin America. They have effectively barred Indigenous people from high office. Chavez stands as a direct challenge to white domination of South American governments.
Chavez is not only proud of his biracial legacy, but has been using oil revenues to help the poor of all colors improve their education and economic standing. He also has flatly rejected Bush administration efforts to isolate Cuba, counts Castro a friend, and has repeatedly accused the U.S. of meddling in his country, in Cuba and around the world. He has pointed to the history of interventions by the United State that began with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Latin Americans, particularly those of his economic and racial background, are increasingly walking to polling booths to register their view throughout Latin America.
Chavez rules a country where three percent of the population, mostly of white European descent, own 77% of the land. In recent decades millions of hungry peasants have drifted into Caracas and other cities, to live in barrios of cardboard shacks and open sewers. Chavez wants to reverse poverty, provide jobs, provide education and health care, and redistribute vacant lands. He has begun to transfer fields from giant unused or abandoned haciendas to peasant hands, and though landlords have responded with alarm, he has promised further distributions.
Chavez wants to reverse poverty, provide jobs, provide education and health care, and redistribute vacant lands.
Chavez's ?21st century socialism has repeatedly held out an olive branch to its capitalist foes, and keeps an open-market system. Though foreign oil companies continue to pull in large profits, he does insist corporations pay back taxes and higher royalties. Once they walked away with about 84% of Venezuela's oil profits, but he has demanded 30% of those profits. Banks and credit card companies report large increases in deposits and loans.
At this moment with oil prices booming and accounting for 47% of government revenues and 80% of exports everyone in the country is doing well, including his wealthy adversaries. The stock market has risen 130% this year, and the economy is soaring over 10%, the highest growth rate in the Americas. Chavez has stated, "All this stuff about Chavez and his hordes coming to sweep away the rich, it's a lie. We have no plan to hurt you. All your rights are guaranteed, you who have large properties or luxury farms or cars."
But the most dramatic beneficiaries of ?21st century socialism are the poor. Three million people have enrolled in one of the government's four free educational missions that offer [1] basic literacy, [2] primary school education, [3] high school equivalency and [4] university education. The number of households in poverty dropped from 42.8% in 1999 when Chavez came to office, to 33.9% in 2006. During the same period households that suffered extreme poverty dropped from 17.1% to 10.6%. The official unemployment figure had been more than cut in half, and the poorest 25% of people has seen their consumption rate more than double.
The poorest 25% of people have seen their consumption rate more than double.
Chavez has brought education to almost a million children who never sat in a classroom. And with 10,000 Cuban doctors, sent by Fidel Castro, he has opened 11,000 medical clinics primarily in barrios. To Venezuelans, President Chavez believes in payback.
In 1998 and 2000 Chavez won the Presidency by majorities Republicans and Democrats here dream about. In 2002 he defeated a two-day coup attempt engineered by the local elite in alliance with the US, and in the recent recall vote, 90% of voters turned out to keep him in office. Chavez's strength rests with his poorest citizens. It is also evident that many of his constituents have mobilized behind a broader agenda than his, one stressing participatory democracy and elevating the status of women. At this point, President Chavez does not see this popular movement he unleashed as a threat, and may try to lead it.
Chavez also announced a program called Petrocaribe to provide inexpensive oil to small Caribbean and Caricom countries, and the larger Antillas such as Cuba, Jamaica, and Dominican Republic. He also expanded this plan to bring affordable heating oil to the poor in U.S. cities such as Chicago, New York and Boston. When he tried to provide humanitarian relief for victims of Hurricane Katrina the White House flatly rejected his offer and called it a publicity stunt that insulted the government's ability to help its citizens.
?Simon Bolivar, Founding Father of South America's Revolution and the first elected President of Venezuela was also of African and Indian lineage.
Over the centuries South Americans have endured a crop of caudillos, or military dictators. Many began sounding a radical note only to be overthrown by the CIA or other foreign forces. Some remained in power by shifting their policies after visiting the American ambassador's residence in Caracas.
This former paratrooper seems to spring from a time when Africans and Indians armed and united to fight the first European invasion. For inspiration Chavez can reach back to the misty dawn of the foreign landings when heroic Black and African men and women rose to battle invading armies and their Christian missionaries. In 1819 Simon Bolivar, also of African and Indian lineage and the Founding Father of South America's Revolution, became the first elected President of Venezuela. Vicente Guerrero, an illiterate Black Indian guerilla General during the Mexican Revolution, took his army into the Sierra Madre mountains where he trained them to wrest their country from Spain's colonialism and also taught himself to read and write. Mexico's ruling white elite mocked his lack of education and called him a ?triple-blooded outsider.? But in 1829 after Guerrero came down from his mountain refuge, he became President of Mexico, the first Black Indian head of state. Guerrero wrote Mexico's constitution, emancipated its slaves, ended racial discrimination and abolished the death penalty.
His foes in Venezuela also consider Chavez a racial outsider, but the faces of millions of his supporters refute the charge, and his message continues to triumph at the polls. He seems to relish his role as Latin America's chief antagonist to the Bush administration. Many believe his audacity instills courage and provides cover for Latin American leaders who have the audacity to challenge the giant to the north.
Chavez's foes in Venezuela consider Chavez a racial outsider.
Time will tell if Chavez's programs and supporters can protect him from the machinations of his wealthy Venezuelan foes and their powerful U.S. allies. Ordinary Venezuelans have initiated their own revolution, and though at this point it undergirds Chavez's political and economic strength, it may take new directions.
Hugo Chavez and his people, historically poor and oppressed, are attempting to write an exciting chapter in the heroic record crafted originally by millions of unknown African and Indian people in the Americas, and continued by Simon Bolivar and Vicente Guerrero.
William Loren Katz is the author of forty books, including Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage [Atheneum, New York] now in a new edition celebrating its 20th year. His Black Indian website is: WILLIAMLKATZ.COM.
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Cuban Independence Breeds Democracy
Havana, Dec 22 (Prensa Latina)
Authentic Cuban democracy is a result of this countrys independence, Ricardo Alarcon, president of the National People s Power Assembly, said on Friday.
Speaking at the ordinary period of sessions of that legislative body, Alarcon honored 90 deputies that have been interruptedly chosen by their territories during 30 years of People s Power.
He noted that the island has a young and fully Cuban government that strives for building, defending and perfecting a new and fair society.
The official added that Cuba keeps fighting against a huge campaign of lies, subversion, armed attacks and terrorists amid the longest systematic and cruelest economic war ever known.
After his speech, the parliament plenary session approved todays agenda that includes the report on 2007 economic guidelines and the approval of the budget for the next year.
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Ecuador and Colombia Hit the Skids
Quito, Dec 22 (Prensa Latina)
Ecuadorian-Colombian relations are deteriorating on Friday due to Bogota s persistence to spray with glyphosate along a 10-kilometer buffer zone.
Such situation led Quito to reject any dialogue with Colombian authorities and president-elect Rafael Correa to cancel his trip to that nation.
Correa, who was in Venezuela Thursday evening, said that as long as Colombia stands firm on that position, it will be impossible for him visit that state.
For the president-elect, aerial glyphosate fumigations is an aggressive act against his people.
Such attitude was buttressed by incumbent Ecuadorian President Alfredo Palacio, who also refused to meet with his Colombian counterpart Alvaro Uribe in Quito while sprayings continued.
According to Palacio, there are studies confirming the harmful effects of that herbicide on humans, plants and animals.
Proposals are underway for an encounter among scientists from Colombia, Ecuador and other nations to analyze the effects of glyphosate, provided that aerial irrigations along the common border stop.
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Goldman Sachs boss gets $53.4 million bonus
WSWS.org
22 December 2006
Investment bank Goldman Sachs rewarded its chief executive Lloyd Blankfein with a bonus of $53.4 million this week. Blankfein, who became the firm's CEO in June 2006, received $27.3 million in cash and the rest in stock and options.
Aside from Blankfein, 11 other Goldman Sachs executives will be given a total of more than $150 million in bonuses this year. Co-presidents Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried were awarded $25.7 million in bonuses each. The firm's chief financial officer, David Viniar, received a $19.1 million bonus; Suzanne Nora Johnson, a vice chairman, $15.4 million; John Weinberg, also a vice chairman, $15.1 million; Chief Administrative Officer Edward Forst, $16.5 million; co-general counsels Gregory Palm and Esta Stecher, $8.96 million and $8.29 million, respectively. Three other company officials received smaller amounts.
Blankfein's compensation tops the $40 million bonus that Morgan Stanley announced last week it was paying to CEO John Mack, the previous record for a Wall Street chief executive. Lehman Brothers recently disclosed that it would pay its chairman and chief executive, Richard Fuld, $189 million over ten years; he was also awarded $11 million in options this week.
Blankfein was eligible to make $87 million, under a new compensation plan for Goldman Sachs' top 25 executives. According to the agreed-upon formula, the management committee may pay as much as 0.6 percent of pretax earnings to each of the top company officials.
Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post commented, "Add it all up, and for 25 souls that works out to 15 percent of the profits of a firm with 26,400 other employees and millions of shareholders."
Shareholders approved the plan in March 2006, which also eliminated a $35 million maximum on bonuses in cash and restricted stock.
Goldman Sachs, as previously reported, is paying out $16.5 billion in bonuses this year, another record. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns have indicated they will each pay out some $12 billion in compensation. The five largest US securities firms-Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch-are distributing $36 billion in bonuses this year. In New York City alone, the state comptroller, Alan Hevesi, forecast that the securities industry would hand out $23.9 billion in bonuses, an increase of 17 percent over last year.
That figure is greater than the 2005 Gross Domestic Product of 104 individual countries, according to International Monetary Fund figures, including Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Costa Rica, Kenya, Uruguay, Latvia, Yemen, Tanzania, Ghana, Bolivia and Senegal.
Business Day noted December 21, "As high as Blankfein's pay is, it does not come close to the compensation levels at the pinnacle of the hedge fund industry. Each of the 10 highest-paid hedge fund managers made more than $200 million last year, according to a report in May by Alpha magazine."
Numerous commentators in the business press, financial analysts and pro-"free market" web sites hailed the massive handouts.
"That is the right amount," Jeanne Branthover of Boyden Executive Search in New York told Business Day. "Clearly, these numbers are big, but they could be bigger. This is something that's record-breaking, but any more than this might be questionable."
"Because investment banking is so strong right now we're seeing very large paydays across Wall Street, and of course very large paychecks for those at the top of the firms," James Ellman, president of Seacliff Capital in San Francisco, told the press. "If the heads of the companies are generating very strong share performance, then investors really shouldn't have much to complain about."
"We work very hard here," said Peter Rose, a Goldman spokesman cited in the Boston Globe. "The reason for our success comes from our people, and we want to reward them." Rose told the newspaper an employee's earnings are "determined by the overall performance of the firm; the performance of the department an employee works for; and individual performance."
The top traders at Goldman Sachs, wrote Henry Blodgett in a New York Times op-ed piece published December 20, "reportedly made $17,000 to $33,000 an hour." (Emphasis added.)
Public outrage over the figures has prompted a number of newspaper columnists and even television broadcasters to issue words of caution. The headline of Pearlstein's article in the Post reads, "Wall Street's Season of Excess."
David Weidner at MarketWatch entitled his piece, "Make No Mistake, Pay is Out of Control: This year's bonuses cast harsh light on an inequitable system." Weidner wrote, "There is a growing sense that things have gone too far. Pay is out of control. The 'shame' factor of new disclosure rules was supposed to help curtail unseemly rewards. Now it seems to refer to the shame of having another CEO beat your bonus by a million or two . . .
"Compare the average [Wall Street] bonus to the real median US household income of $46,326. Keep in mind that's a full year's income. Between 2004 and 2005 the median income grew 1.1 percent. Even in the Northeast where wages are generally higher, the median income for a family of four was $50,992, according to the Census Bureau. To put it into more relative terms, Lloyd Blankfein could comfortably support 1,059 families of four, or 4,236 people, for a year with his bonus. The $16.5 billion Goldman Sachs investment pool could support 323,580 families, or 1.29 million people."
On the December 16 "Nightly News," NBC anchor John Seigenthaler noted: "Most US businesses-66 percent-give no bonuses at all. Those employees lucky enough to receive a cash gift will get an average of $837. Compare that to the bonuses Goldman Sachs gives out, a jackpot so big they could give every employee more than $600,000."
On the same program, correspondent Mike Taibbi, after interviewing a worker who was living "paycheck by paycheck just to pay for mortgages, gas, electric, everything," commented, "Working Americans now pay more of their pension and health care costs, and food, fuel and service costs have risen faster than most salaries. That means even those who do get small bonuses still struggle."
The handful of skeptics was more than drowned out by the sheer number of jubilant voices thick with greed and self-satisfaction. In the words of one Internet commentator, "Main Street should always be merry when Wall Street is doing well."
As for the idea that the bonuses will help "grow" the economy, an approving comment by Peter Cohan at bloggingstocks.com gives some indication of the productive uses to which the billions in bonus money are put to use. Cohan writes, "Here are some more specific examples of how those bonuses are being spent:
"A $50,000-plus ring will soon adorn a Wall Street wife's hand featuring two canary diamonds, yellow stones that are among the rarest available;
"A New York real estate magnate wants a charter for June or July off Italy's Amalfi Coast for as many as a dozen of his family and friends, at a cost of about $175,000 per week for the boat and crew;
"Marquis Jet Partners has sold more than 100 jet gift cards in the past month-at $185,000 a pop. One Wall Street executive bought six, one each for his wife and five kids. [Marquis sells 25-hour chunks of flying time on NetJets, the operator of private planes owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.];
"A New York beauty salon gets three calls daily for makeovers, at $10,000 to $20,000 each;
"A Fifth Avenue plastic surgeon says he gets about 20 requests a year for plastic surgery or Botox anti-wrinkle treatments as gifts; and
"One woman specifically asked for a $20,000 face lift as a gift from her husband this year, instead of clothing or jewelry."
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3 More Tested Positive For Polonium-210 That Killed Former Russian Agent Litvinenko
Created: 22.12.2006 12:49 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 13:24 MSK, 7 hours 44 minutes ago
MosNews
British health authorities said Tuesday three more hotel workers tested positive for low levels of the radioactive element that killed former Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko, The Associated Press news agency reports.
Tests showed two staff members at the Millennium Hotel and one at the Sheraton Hotel were exposed to polonium-210, the Health Protection Agency said. That brings to 10 the total number of people in Britain who tested positive for radiation since Litvinenko died on Nov. 23 in London.
The former spy's wife, Marina, and seven members of staff at the Millennium Hotel's bar had tested positive. However, one of the hotel workers was later found to have normal radiation levels.
On his deathbed, Litvinenko blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for involvement in his poisoning - an allegation that the Kremlin denied.
On Tuesday, British investigators completed more than two weeks of work in Russia investigating the death. Scotland Yard investigators "were shown complete and all-around assistance," the Russian Prosecutor General's office said.
The British investigators were not allowed to question witnesses themselves but observed as Russian investigators conducted questioning.
It was not immediately clear when the investigators, who arrived in Moscow on Dec. 4, would return to Britain. The British Embassy had no immediate comment.
A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, brushed aside reports that Scotland Yard investigators were unhappy with how the Russians handled the investigation and said Russian prosecutors were not aware if the British were dissatisfied.
"British investigators were provided all opportunities to meet and to interrogate those witnesses whom they wanted to interrogate connected with this," he said.
Britain is also seeking French help in questioning a Russian living in the French Alps who has been linked to the case, judicial officials said Tuesday.
Yevgeny Limarev is expected to be questioned by a French magistrate, with British officials in attendance, officials said. It was not immediately clear when the questioning would take place.
British media have described Limarev as a KGB defector, although he has disputed that, saying he works as a consultant specializing in Russian politics and security issues. Limarev has also disputed reports that he told Italian security expert Mario Scaramella that Russian security veterans were plotting to kill Litvinenko and other Kremlin critics.
Scaramella met with Litvinenko at a London sushi bar on Nov. 1, the day the former spy fell ill. Reports said Scaramella showed Litvinenko a supposed "hit list" from Limarev at that meeting.
The Russians and British have not given details on who was questioned in Moscow. But Russian news reports said the questioning focused on two Russian businessmen who had also met with Litvinenko in a London hotel on Nov. 1.
One of them was Dmitry Kovtun, who is undergoing treatment for radiation poisoning at a Moscow clinic. The Prosecutor General's office has opened a case of attempted murder in connection with his poisoning. Another who was reportedly questioned repeatedly was businessman Andrei Lugovoi.
German prosecutors are investigating whether Kovtun may have illegally handled radioactive material after authorities found traces of polonium-210 in several locations in Hamburg visited by Kovtun just before he flew to London for the Nov. 1 meeting.
Prosecutors say he may have been a victim or could have been involved in procuring the polonium.
Lugovoi, Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko, a third Russian businessman who was in London the weekend of Nov. 1, have denied involvement in Litvinenko's death.
Litvinenko once worked for the Federal Security Service, one of the main successor agencies to the KGB. He broke with the FSB in 1998 after he accused his superiors of ordering him to kill Boris Berezovsky, a tycoon who was then a significant behind-the-scenes player in Russian politics.
Litvinenko later fled to Britain, where he was granted citizenship. In 2004, he wrote a book accusing the FSB of orchestrating the bombing of Russian apartment buildings in 1999, allegedly to stir up support for Russia's second war against Chechen separatists.
Before he died, Litvinenko said he suspected he had been poisoned by Kremlin agents who were concerned about his efforts to investigate this year's murder in Moscow of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was a prominent critic of the Kremlin.
Comment on this Article
Russia Not to Deploy Weapons in Space - Russian DM
Created: 22.12.2006 16:46 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 16:46 MSK, 4 hours 22 minutes ago
MosNews
Russia's Defense Minister Serge Ivanov said Russia is opposed to deploying weapons in space, despite the fact that space could be used for military purposes, Xinhua news agency reported Friday.
"We categorically oppose the deployment of any weapons in space, but this does not mean that space cannot be used in military purposes," Ivanov said at the opening of a radar station in Russia Friday.
"We categorically oppose the deployment of any weapons in space, but this does not mean that space cannot be used in military purposes," Ivanov said at the opening of a radar station in Russia Friday.
Both the United States and Russia use space for military purposes, but it is inadmissible to deploy weapons in space, Ivanov thinks. Deploying weapons there would be fraught with the most negative and unpredictable consequences, he warned.
Russia has implemented aerospace defense strategy in recent years, Ivanov added.
Comment on this Article
Russia, Uzbekistan Sign Agreement on Military Airbase
Created: 22.12.2006 12:59 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 13:15 MSK, 7 hours 53 minutes ago
MosNews
Russia has secured permission for its military aircraft to use an air base in Uzbekistan, The Associated Press news agency reported Thursday, as part of Moscow's efforts to extend its presence in Central Asia.
The Interfax news agency quoted Lt. Gen. Aitech Bizhev, a deputy chief of the Russian air force, as saying that the two nations agreed last month that Russian military aircraft could use the Navoi air base in central Uzbekistan in emergencies.
In exchange, Russia will equip the air base in the ex-Soviet nation with modern navigation systems and air defense weapons, Bizhev said.
While falling short of a permanent military presence, the deal offers Russia an opportunity to quickly deploy its forces to the region.
Bizhev also said in the future, Uzbekistan will host the regional headquarters of a unified air defense system for Russia and several other ex-Soviet nations.
Uzbekistan evicted U.S. troops last year and signed a far-reaching alliance treaty with Moscow that opened the way for possible Russian military deployment.
In the past, Uzbekistan's authoritarian President Islam Karimov had reacted coldly to Russia's military cooperation initiatives and sought to cultivate closer ties with the United States and other Western nations, hosting U.S. troops for operations in Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
But Karimov abruptly changed course following Western criticism of the Uzbek authorities' brutal suppression of the May 2005 uprising in the city of Andijan, and forged closer ties with Russia and China.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping dominated by Moscow and Beijing that includes Uzbekistan and three other former Soviet Central Asian nations, urged the United States in 2005 to set a timetable for withdrawing from their bases in the region.
Both the United States and Russia maintain air bases in another ex-Soviet nation, Kyrgzystan. Russia also has a military base in neighboring Tajikistan.
Bizhev said Thursday that Russia was modernizing Tajikistan's air defense headquarters with state-of-the art equipment.
Comment on this Article
Unite Against The US And Israel
Victims angry as cleric is cleared of Bali bombings
December 22, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
The relatives of Australians killed in the Bali bombings today condemned the Indonesian supreme court's decision to clear the Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir of any involvement in the 2002 attack.
He was released from a Jakarta prison in June after serving nearly 26 months of a two-and-a-half year sentence for terrorist conspiracy charges. The court's ruling prompted a nationwide outpouring of anger in Australia, where the emotional wounds of the Bali terrorist attack have yet to heal. The bombing killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.
Mark Stuart, who lost his son in the bombings, said the whole world knew that Mr Bashir was responsible. "He's going to kill more people without even thinking," he said. Brian Deegan, whose son Josh was killed in the blast, said he had lost faith in the justice system in Indonesia. "This is simply part of the overall nightmare that has been set in place and continuing since October 12 2002," he told an ABC radio interviewer.
Comment: Indeed, most people do think that Bashir is responsible for the Bali bombings, but that is just evidence of the power of the media and duplicitous government officials.
The problem with carrying out terror attacks and then blaming it on Muslim patsies is that if you don't silence the patsies for good, they tend to 'sing', and in the case of Muslim Cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, keep on 'singing'...
CIA bomb used in Bali: Bashir
Sydney Morning Herald
August 30, 2006
The Indonesian Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir has claimed that the CIA was involved in the 2002 Bali bombings.
Bashir, who was convicted and jailed for having prior knowledge of the attacks which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, was released from prison in June after serving nearly two years.
On ABC TV's Foreign Correspondent last night, Bashir said the device that killed most people in the attack was a CIA "micro-nuclear" bomb.
"So the bomb that killed so many Australians, it was an American bomb. It wasn't the bomb made by Amrozi and his friends," he said. Amrozi, Ali Ghufron and Imam Samudra are awaiting execution for their part in the plot
Comment: Bashir
is not alone in making such shocking allegations. About a year ago, former Indonesian
president Abdurrahman Wahid also stated that the Bali bombing has more to do
with government than terrorists.
Police 'had role in' Bali blasts
October 12, 2005
The Australian
INDONESIAN police or military officers may have played a role in
the 2002 Bali bombing, the country's former president, Abdurrahman Wahid has
said.
Comment: To
understand the Indonesian connection we need to look at the major terror attacks
that have occured there. It began in 2002 with the now infamous Bali nightclub
bombing where over 200 people (mostly foreigners) were murdered and hundreds
more injured. This was followed in 2003 by a car bombing at the Marriott Hotel
in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta where 13 were killed and 149 injured and
finally in September 2004 when another car bomb exploded outside the Australian
embassy in Jakarta killing 9 and wounding 180.
Bashir
was intially arrested in 2002 for his alleged role in the Bali bombings and
for being the leader of the "shadowy terror group" said to be responsible
for the bombings, 'Jemaah Islamiah'. Owing to a lack of evidence against
him however, he was finally convicted on immigration charges.
When the subsequent bombings occurred, authorities sought to get value for money from Bashir and silence him for good by linking him to the Hotel and Embassy bombings also. Little evidence was forthcoming however and Bashir ended up serving just two years and was released in June this year.
Strangely enough, there is more than enough evidence, all of it carried at one time or another by the mainstream press, to close the book on Islamic terrorism in Indonesia and conclude, more or less definitively, that the terrorists are working for the terrible trio aka the American, Israeli and British governments.
Take
a gander at the following articles with commentary and then talk to us about
the "reality" of
Islamic terrorism:
Police
'had role in' Bali blasts
October 12, 2005
The Australian
INDONESIAN police or military officers may
have played a role in the 2002 Bali bombing, the country's
former president, Abdurrahman Wahid has said.
In an interview with SBS's Dateline program to be aired tonight,
on the third anniversary of the bombing that killed 202 people,
Mr Wahid says he has grave concerns about links between Indonesian
authorities and terrorist groups.
While he believed terrorists were involved in planting one
of the Kuta night club bombs, the second, which destroyed Bali's
Sari Club, had been organised by authorities.
Asked who he thought planted the second bomb, Mr Wahid said: "Maybe
the police ... or the armed forces."
"The orders to do this or that came
from within our armed forces, not from the fundamentalist people," he
says.
The program also claims a key figure behind
the formation of terror group Jemaah Islamiah was an Indonesian
spy.
Former terrorist Umar Abduh, who is now a researcher and writer,
told Dateline Indonesian authorities had a hand in many terror
groups.
"There is not a single Islamic
group either in the movement or the political groups that
is not controlled by (Indonesian) intelligence," he
said.
Abduh has written a book on Teungku Fauzi Hasbi, a key figure
in Jemaah Islamiah (JI) who had close contact with JI operations
chief Hambali and lived next door to Muslim cleric Abu Bakar
Bashir.
He says Hasbi was a secret agent for Indonesia's military
intelligence while at the same time a key player in creating
JI.
Documents cited by SBS showed the Indonesian chief of military
intelligence in 1990 authorised Hasbi to undertake a "special
job".
A 1995 internal memo from the military intelligence headquarters
in Jakarta included a request to use "Brother Fauzi Hasbi" to
spy on Acehnese separatists in Indonesia, Malaysia and Sweden.
And a 2002 document assigned Hasbi the job of special agent
for BIN, the Indonesian national intelligence agency.
Security analyst John Mempi told SBS that Hasbi, who was also
known as Abu Jihad, had played a key role in JI in its early
years.
"The first Jemaah Islamiah congress in Bogor was facilitated
by Abu Jihad, after Abu Bakar Bashir returned
from Malaysia," Mr Mempi said.
"We can see that Abu Jihad played an
important role. He was later found to be an intelligence agent.
So an intelligence agent has been facilitating
the radical Islamic movement."
Hasbi was disembowelled in a mysterious murder in 2003 after
he was exposed as a military agent and his son Lamkaruna Putra
died in a plane crash last month.
Another convicted terrorist, Timsar Zubil, who set off three
bombs in Sumatra in 1978, told the program intelligence agents
had given his group a provocative name - Komando Jihad - and
encouraged members to commit illegal acts.
"We may have deliberately been
allowed to grow," he said.
Abduh also told the program his terrorist organisation, the
Imron Movement, was incited to a range of violent action in
the 1980s when the Indonesian military told the group that
the assassination of several Muslim clerics was imminent.
Another terrorism expert, George Aditjondro,
said a bombing in May this year that killed 23 people in the
Christian village of Tentena, in central Sulawesi, had been
organised by senior military and police officers.
"This is a strategy of depopulating an area and when
an area has been depopulated - both becoming refugees
or becoming paramilitary fighters - then that is the
time when they can invest their money in major resource exploitation
there," he said.
Flashback: Claims
military involved in Jakarta blast
08/08/2003 12:50:39
ABC Radio Australia News
An advisor to
the Indonesian government claims the armed forces may have been involved
in the recent car bomb attack on the Marriott Hotel in the Indonesian capital,
Jakarta. A car bomb killed at least 10 people and injured scores more at
the luxury hotel.
The advisor,
Jawanda, has told our South East Asia correspondent Peter Lloyd that attempts
to blame Muslim extremists for the suicide bombing may be premature.
He says Indonesia's
naval intelligence has launched an informal investigation into the possibility
the attack may have been part of a campaign to undermine the president,
Megawati Sukarnoputri.
"That is
already in the works," he said. When asked if there are people who
want to undermine President Megawati, Jawanda said yes. "Undermine,
but at the same time to make a path for them taking the power, so, creating
the political tension," he said.
Comment: The
Marriott Hotel attack was an operation straight out of the CIA's "how
to overthrow a government"
manual. Perhaps the Indonesian president had not been
"playing ball" with the US interests in the
region, and this was a shot across the bow to either
get in line or have the forces of "the land of the
free" come and show the Indonesian government and
people what democracy is all about. More likely however
is that the CIA was merely providing the Indonesian government
with fuel for their "fight against terrorism"
and also providing further evidence to the world that
"Islamic terrorism" is real. At the time, the
Indonesian police said that the bombing in Jakarta bore
several similarities to the Bali attack in October 2002
which killed 202 people, which means that it
wasn't a "terrorist attack"
Of course, when
waging a phony terror war, not only do you have to carry out the terror attacks,
but you have to groom the Islamic fundamentalists on whom the blame must
fall. In the case of Indonesian Islamic terror, alleged terror group chief
Abu Bakar Bashir was the CIA's and Mossad's point man. In this case however,
it appears they made a bad choice...
Flashback: CIA
behind Jakarta, Bali blasts, alleged Islamic militant leader says
Tuesday August 12, 1:38 PM
Yahoo News
Indonesian prosecutors were due later to recommend a sentence for alleged
terror group chief Abu Bakar Bashir, as the Muslim cleric accused US intelligence
of carrying out deadly bombings in Bali and Jakarta.
Bashir, a Muslim cleric who allegedly leads the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), faces
20 years if convicted of trying to topple the government through terrorism
and to establish an Islamic state.
In a radio interview before the hearing, he said his trial has produced
no proof of his guilt. "The issue now is the extremely high likelihood that
foreigners have intervened in it," Bashir told Elshinta radio.
The 64-year-old cleric alleged that the US Central
Intelligence Agency was behind last week's car bombing of the American-run
JW Marriott hotel, which killed 11 people. [...]
Flashback: Terrorism
charges filed against Bashir
Friday 15 October 2004
Indonesian
prosecutors have filed terrorism charges against cleric Abu Bakar Bashir in
a major step towards a new trial of the accused leader of South-east Asia's
Jemaah Islamiya network.
"It has been submitted to the south Jakarta court today," Didik
Istiyanta, south Jakarta state prosecutor, said on Friday.
Asked whether the charges related to terrorism, he said,
"Something like that," adding, "but for details, wait until
the trial".
Another prosecutor, Andi Herman, confirmed the charges were related to terrorism. "Yes
they are," he said, but declined to elaborate.
Herman said normally a trial would be convened within two weeks of the charges
being submitted.
The attorney general's office had said earlier Bashir would
face charges of helping to plot the August 2003 blast at the JW Marriott hotel
in Jakarta which killed 12 people and of involvement in a conspiracy to hide
large amounts of explosives in central Java.
Charges denied
Authorities believe Bashir inspired fighters who bombed nightclubs on the
tourist island of Bali in 2002 and who carried out the Marriott bombing and
other attacks.
Bashir, who denies any connections with Jemaah Islamiya or terrorism, was
first arrested days after the Bali blasts that killed 202 people, amid suspicions
he led Jemaah Islamiya and had links to violent acts.
However, following a trial using the ordinary criminal code,
the court said there was not enough evidence to prove Bashir led the group,
and ultimately only convictions related to immigration violations were upheld
in appeals courts.
After he had served time on those convictions, Indonesian
police detained Bashir under a tough anti-terror law passed in the wake of
the Bali bombings.
Flashback: Profile:
Abu Bakar Ba'asyir
Thursday, 29 April, 2004
BBC News
Abu Bakar Ba'asyir does not cut the terrifying figure expected of a man
accused of being a leading figure in the murky world of international terrorism.
He is a frail, 65-year-old man with a wispy beard, embroidered white skull
cap and heavy glasses perched on his aquiline nose.
Before his arrest a week after the 2002 Bali bombings, Mr Ba'asyir was a
teacher at an Islamic school in Solo, central Java. He still insists he is
just a simple preacher.
But according to the Indonesian and foreign governments, Mr Ba'asyir was
also the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a shadowy group accused
of the 2002 Bali bombings.
Prosecutors accused Mr Ba'asyir of plotting to assassinate Indonesian leader
Megawati Sukarnoputri when she was vice-president in a bid to turn the country
- the world's most populous Muslim nation - into a hardline Islamic state.
He was also accused of orchestrating a series of church bombings on Christmas
Eve 2000.
The problem for the authorities is that Indonesia's courts
have not found the evidence compelling.
First the courts acquitted him of being JI's spiritual
leader, after judges said there was not enough proof. Then an appeal court
overturned a subversion conviction, cutting his original jail term from four
years to 18 months, since his only remaining offence was immigration-related.
Denial
Despite his outspoken support for Osama Bin Laden, Mr Ba'asyir denies having
personal links with him or with terrorism in general.
The cleric has repeatedly denied all the charges against him, and condemned
the Bali bombing as a "brutal act".
Most of the case against Mr Ba'asyir has been based on
statements made by a Kuwaiti man, Omar al-Faruq, who
was arrested in Indonesia last June and is now in US custody.
Flashback: Bashir
condemns embassy bombing
September 18, 2004
The jailed cleric accused of heading a militant group blamed
for last week's Australian embassy bombing condemned the attack today, while
accusing Indonesian authorities of trying to frame him.
Nine people died on September 9 when a car bomb detonated outside the Australian
mission in the Kuningan district of central Jakarta. About 180 people were
wounded in the attack blamed on Jemaah Islamiah, a South-East Asian militant
network allegedly linked to al-Qaeda.
"I personally condemn the bombing (and) I am deeply sorry and express
my condolences to the victims,"
Abu Bakar Bashir said according to his lawyer Wirawan Adnan who had visited
the cleric in his cell in Cipinang Prison.
Bashir has been in jail since 2002, when he was convicted for minor immigration
infractions. Prosecutors say they now plan to charge him with heading Jemaah
Islamiah, and for a deadly bombing last year at the JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta
that killed 12.
There has been speculation that he could also be charged over the latest embassy
attack.
Bashir has repeatedly denied any involvement in terrorism
and claimed that Jakarta buckled under pressure from Washington to arrest him
as part of a crackdown on Islamic activists in the world's most populous Muslim
nation.
"I deny all accusations that connect the bombing with
me," Bashir said. "I had nothing to do with the Kuningan bombing,
the Marriott bombing or any other bombing."
"Terrorists must be punished and eliminated for good," he said.
Adnan told reporters that Bashir was convinced that the police were trying
to make him a scapegoat to cover up their failure to prevent terrorist attacks.
"At the time of the Marriott bombing I was locked up
for eight months. How can that be?"
Bashir said, according to his attorney.
Flashback: Jakarta
hotel bombing kills 13, injures 149
Asian Political News
Aug. 5 2003
[...] Although initially only one blast had been reported,
a Japanese woman who was taking lunch at a restaurant in an adjacent building
at the time of the attack told Kyodo News there a second explosion followed
the first, and shattered the restaurant's windows.
The Jakarta Post quoted an eyewitness as describing four separate
blasts at the hotel, including two smaller explosions on the upper floors of
the hotel.
''I was going to take some pictures after the first
blast when suddenly the second blast hit after about 10 minutes. The second
was the largest of four,'' the eyewitness,
a journalist, reportedly told the daily. He said the second blast was the
one that caused a crater in the hotel's Sailendra Restaurant.
Earlier, Jakarta Gov. Sutiyoso had told reporters it appeared that a suicide
bomber drove a car to the entrance of the hotel and detonated an explosive
device. Antara quoted a source as saying the bomb or bombs were brought by
a taxi.
Flashback: US
Embassy cancelled the booking of Marriott Hotel 4.5 hours before the
explosion
Translated from:
detikcom
5/08/2003
There was something interesting happened just hours before the explosion shocked
the JW Marriott Hotel, Mega Kuningan, South
Jakarta. The US Embassy cancelled the booking of 10-20
rooms in that hotel. The cancellation was on 8.00 West Indonesian Time, Tuesday,
or only 4.5 hours before the explosion.
This information is from employee of Marriot Hotel who refused to be identified.
He explained that the booking was made several days ago.
The US Embassy's guests were planned to stay for 3 days. And the ceremony was
planned on Wednesday.
For information, when there was the explosion, the security of US Embassy
directly came to the Marriot Hotel in Mega Kuningan. JW
Marriot Hotel is known to be used frequently by US Embassy. On 4 July 2003,
the Independent Day of US was celebrated on this hotel. Last year, it was also
celebrated there.
Flashback: Jakarta
police 'knew hotel was a target'
06/08/2003
Jakarta police seized documents last month showing terrorists were planning
an attack in the area around the Marriott Hotel, where 14 people died yesterday
in suicide car bombing. [...]
Flashback: Downer
denies Marriott on hit list
news.com.au
FOREIGN Minister Alexander Downer today rejected claims that
Indonesian police had discovered a list of terrorist targets,
including the JW Marriott Hotel, in recent raids on terror
suspects.
Mr Downer said he had heard such media reports and immediately
checked with Australian authorities to see what was known.
"I understand now more recently that there wasn't information
that was so specific that would identify the Marriott Hotel," he
said on ABC radio.
"It was just more general information of possible terrorist
attacks and plans to develop terrorist operations. I have
been told that it wasn't specific to the Marriott Hotel.
"There wasn't a list which included the Marriott Hotel."
Comment: And it seems that Mr Downer is no
stranger to denials...
Downer
Denies Receiving Bali Warning
Downer
Denies Police Spying
Downer
Denies Knowledge of Indonesian Summit
Downer
Denies Butler Report Damages Case For War
Downer
Denies Intel Clash
Downer
Denies Hicks Move An Election Ploy
TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta: Former State Intelligence Coordinating
Board (BAKIN) chief A.C. Manulang has said that Kuwaitd citizen
Omar Al-Faruq, a terrorist suspect who was arrested in Bogor,
West Java, on June 5, 2002 and handed over to the US three
days later, is a CIA-recruited agent.
Al Faruq was assigned to infiltrate Islamic
radical groups and recruit local agents within these groups.
"When Al Faruq finished his assignments, the CIA created
a scenario that he had been arrested," Manulang told
Tempo News Room in Jakarta on Thursday afternoon (19/9).
Manulang made this analysis based on the pattern used by Al
Faruq, that of having Kuwait citizenship but holding a Pakistani
passport, entering Indonesia as a refugee and marrying an Indonesian
woman.
This kind of operation is aimed at starting
conflicts in Indonesia and creating the image that Indonesia
is a land of terrorists.
"After the CIA obtained complete
data on this matter, they then made Al-Faruq disappear. It's
common in intelligence world," said Manulang.
Manulang said he considered several matters in the arrest
of Al Faruq last July to be odd, such as the denial of National
Police chief Gen. Da'i Bachtiar over the police's involvement
in Al Faruq's arrest, and the lack of official documents in
Al Faruq's handing over to the US.
"In the handing over of a detainee to other country,
there should be an announcement or deportation document. Al
Faruq's case indicated a lack of coordination between the Indonesian
police and intelligence agencies,"
said Manulang.
As for Al Faruq's testimony in Time magazine
that he had masterminded the plan to murder Indonesian President
Megawati and several bombings in Indonesia, Manulang considered
this as an attempt to making Islamic groups the scapegoats
for all terrorism incidents.
"Anti-Islam intelligence agencies
committed the bombings in Indonesia. They have been trained
for this and they are very organized," said Manulang.
Therefore, he added, it was useless to arrest the bombers.
"We must arrest the mastermind of the bombings in Indonesia," stated
Manulang.
According to Manulang, it's possible that Al
Faruq recruited radical people from Islamic groups for his
plan.
In regards to the murder attempt on Megawati, Manulang did
not consider this as a serious matter.
"Megawati does not need to be worried. She's not the
real target in this matter," said Manulang.
Manulang requested the government immediately verify the CIA
report on Al Faruq.
"Such a report could only be a
dummy or false intelligence information that is aimed at
misleading the public," stated Manulang. (Sapto
Pradityo-Tempo News Room)
Omar al-Faruq, a confidant of Mr. bin
Laden and one of Al Qaeda's senior operatives in Southeast
Asia, was captured last June by Indonesian agents acting
on a tip from the C.I.A. Agents familiar with the case said
a black hood was dropped over his head and he was loaded
onto a C.I.A. aircraft. When he arrived at his destination
several hours later, the hood was removed. On the wall in
front of him were the seals of the New York City Police and
Fire Departments, a Western official said.
It was, said a former senior C.I.A. officer
who took part in similar sessions, a mind game called false
flag, intended to leave the captive disoriented, isolated
and vulnerable. Sometimes the décor is faked to make
it seem as though the suspect has been taken to a country
with a reputation for brutal interrogation.
In this case, officials said, Mr. Faruq
was in the C.I.A. interrogation center at the Bagram air
base (Afghanistan). American officials were convinced that
he knew a lot about pending attacks and the Qaeda network
in Southeast Asia, which Mr. bin Laden sent him to set up
in 1998.
The details of the interrogation are unknown,
though one intelligence official briefed on the sessions
said Mr. Faruq initially provided useless scraps of information.
What is known is that the questioning
was prolonged, extending day and night for weeks. It is
likely, experts say, that the proceedings followed a pattern,
with Mr. Faruq left naked most of the time, his hands and
feet bound. While international law requires prisoners
to be allowed eight hours' sleep a day, interrogators do
not necessarily let them sleep for eight consecutive hours.
Mr. Faruq may also have been hooked
up to sensors, then asked questions to which interrogators
knew the answers, so they could gauge his truthfulness,
officials said.
The Western intelligence official
described Mr. Faruq's interrogation as "not quite
torture, but about as close as you can get."
The official said that over a three-month period, the suspect
was fed very little, while being subjected to sleep and light
deprivation, prolonged isolation and room temperatures that
varied from 100 degrees to 10 degrees. In the end he began
to cooperate.
Comment on this Article
Vietnam, LSD and reds: US opens 25-year-old files on state secrets
Friday December 22, 2006
The Guardian
Some secrets, it turns out, are too old or too big to keep - even for the Bush administration, which has made a crusade of rooting out leaks and clamping down on information on the inner workings of government.
In the new year, the CIA, FBI, state department and more than 80 other government agencies that handle state secrets will declassify hundreds of millions of pages of documents under a new policy that institutes an automatic release of material after 25 years.
Within those documents lie the most turbulent episodes of the 20th century: the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Vietnam war, the CIA's unauthorised experiments with LSD [tip of the iceberg] and its internal thinking on a raft of investigations into coups and assassinations overseas, and the FBI's hunt for communist sympathisers on US soil.
The release, awaited by scholars and journalists, goes against the grain for the president, George Bush, and the vice-president, Dick Cheney, who has argued that the disclosure of information from the White House erodes presidential power.
The decision to release documents after 25 years was made in 1995 under President Bill Clinton, although the Bush administration managed to delay it. "I was pleasantly surprised," said Steven Aftergood, who runs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. "I could have easily imagined this administration saying: 'Oh, no we can't possibly adopt an automatic declassification policy. That will only assist the terrorists'."
Until now, material could remain secret indefinitely unless researchers lodged a specific request under freedom of information regulations. But declassification does not guarantee documents will be made public. Government agencies can withhold them on privacy grounds, to protect an intelligence source, or to avoid compromising an ongoing investigation.
The FBI has been notoriously stringent about exercising that prerogative, refusing to release documents on the assassination in Washington of the Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier by agents of the Pinochet regime on the grounds that investigators were still pursuing leads.
However, advocates of greater government accountability say an automatic release of documents remains an important step forward.
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Emanuel: Virginia congressman should meet with Muslim colleague
DEANNA BELLANDI
Associated PressThu, Dec. 21, 2006
CHICAGO - U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel said Thursday he hopes his colleague Rep. Virgil Goode meets with the first Muslim elected to Congress after Goode wrote that unless immigration is tightened "many more Muslims" will be elected and ask to use the Quran.
The comments by Goode, a Virginia Republican, came in a letter he wrote to constituents about Democratic Rep.-elect Keith Ellison of Minnesota, who has decided to use the Quran at his ceremonial swearing-in.
"If (Goode) meets with Keith," Emanuel said, "he'll see what I saw: a good American with good values of a different faith who's trying to do right by the people he represents."
In his letter, Goode wrote, "The Muslim representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."
Goode, who wants to stop illegal immigration and reduce legal immigration, has been rebuked by some for his letter. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has called on Goode to apologize.
Ellison is a Muslim convert who was born in Detroit.
Emanuel, a Chicago Democrat who is Jewish, said Ellison's election is a good reflection of America. He was asked about the flap at a news conference.
"I think one of the great things of this country was that you can have Catholics, Jews, Protestants and now a Muslim join the United States Congress," he said.
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VA Republican: Muslim Democrat A Threat
Washington, Dec 21 (Prensa Latina)
Virginia Republican Representative Virgil Goode publicly criticized the inclusion of the first Muslim in the United States Congress Thursday in a letter sent to national papers.
Calling the election of Democrat (MN) Keith Ellison, "a serious threat to the traditional values of the nation," Goode-- part of the most rabid US conservative sector -- objected to Ellison s decision to privately swear on the Koran, instead of using the Bible, for his oath to the House of Representatives, saying it was a huge mistake of the Afro-American congressman.
Ellison, an attorney was elected to the House in November and has reported numerous hostile phone calls to his family and death threats via Internet since the election.
Goode s letter provoked criticism from the Democratic party and the US Muslim community, who labeled the Republican "fanatic and intolerant."
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'Arab world should unite against US'
22/12/2006 12:00 AM (UAE)By Duraid Al Baik, Foreign Editor and Barbara Bibbo', Correspondent
Doha: Islamists and Pan-Arabists should overcome divergences and unite in countering US and Israeli ambitions in the region, participants in the Sixth Pan-Arab National and Islamic Conference said yesterday.
Qatar is the first GCC country to allow the envoys from Islamist and Pan-Arab parties from 18 Arab countries to meet outside Beirut, to discuss the situation in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and ways to enhance joint Arab efforts in fighting what they call a "new wave of imperialism".
Prominent Islamic scholar Yousuf Al Qaradawi, senior coordinator of the conference, said despite the ongoing crises in the four Arab States, he was optimistic that the gathering could strengthen the countries' abilities to determine their own future.
"I am optimistic about the future of the Arab World and have confidence in the ability of the Arab masses to defeat Israeli and American plots against our nation," he said, addressing the inaugural session.
Al Qaradawi also called on the US to stop supporting Israel and ally itself with the people of the Arab world.
Khalid Misha'al, leader of Hamas, Iraqi Sunni scholar Shaikh Hathir Al Dari and Hezbollah member Hasan Hadroug, were among the two hundred political leaders and members taking part in the event. Ayatollah Ahmad Al Baghdadi was also awaited at the gathering yesterday.
Organisers said some of the invitees could not obtain visas to Qatar including Shaikh Jawad Al Khalisi, a Shiite leader from Iraq, Palestinian Majid Azzam and Iraqi Imad Mohammad Qasim, in addition to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood member Essam Al Arian.
Founded in Lebanon in 1994, the conference aims to bridge the divide between Islamists and Pan-Arabs, the two main streams of the Arab political scene, in order to unite their efforts against what they call a "new colonial invasion".
"We meet every two years and to date we have been successful in overcoming the historic opposition existing between the two political sides," Prof Oussama Mehio, Director of the conference told Gulf News.
Participants had different ideas over the effectiveness of the gathering.
"Despite all the talk, I believe tomorrow the participants will continue to follow their own agenda," said Prof Sa'ad Jawad, an Iraqi political analyst.
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Cannon fodder in Christmas' times
Gabriele Zamparini
21/12/2006
Santa Claus Bush is preparing to deliver his special Christmas' gift: "We do need to increase our troops"
The Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon unanimously disagreed but hey, do you want to question the Clown in Chief who hid into the Texas National Guard (and even there he was an AWOL) to avoid to fight in the Vietnam war? [That's probably the only good thing this scam has done in all his life, at least he didn't kill anybody, THEN!]
Even war criminal Powell - the clown of the UN show just before the invasion - "said the U.S. Army is 'about broken' from the Iraq conflict and cast doubt on whether the military could or should boost the number of troops in the country. 'There really are no additional troops'' to send, Powell said on CBS's 'Face the Nation' program. 'The current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they are being asked to perform'."
But the propaganda machine is working full time.
On Thursday he [Defense Secretary Robert Gates] had breakfast with ordinary soldiers to sound out their views on troop levels, a timeline for training Iraqis, sectarian leanings in the Iraqi security forces and the "caliber and discipline" of Iraqi soldiers and their military leaders.
"Sir, I think we need to just keep doing what we're doing," Specialist Jason Glenn told Gates. "I really think we need more troops here. With more presence on the ground, more troops might hold them (the insurgents) off long enough to where we can get the Iraqi army trained up."
No soldier present said U.S. forces should be brought home, and none said current troop levels were adequate, as some commanders have argued.
A young US soldier's mother recently wrote: "Two weeks ago he called by satellite phone, awakening Amy and me in the dead of the night. Machine gun fire was all around him, the sound of war filling our ears and hearts with grief and fear of loss. (...) He says that this war cannot be won! He has no faith in the politicians who sent him there."
In Basra, the greatest liar since the times of Pinocchio met the young British troops he has sent to kill and torture people nothing had done to them and their country. Once again the butcher of London brainwashed the youth "Our country and countries like it are having to rediscover what it means to fight for what we believe in. All over the world the same struggle is going on and if we don't stand up and fight for the people of tolerance and moderation who want to live together, whatever their fate, then the people of hatred and sectarianism will triumph."
We must take much more care of our youth and not allow this gang of pedophiles to abuse and send them to foreign countries as cannon fodder. Those who have their sons and daughters in Iraq and Afghanistan should read A letter to an American G.I. written by an Iraqi woman. This letter would be the most important Christmas gift for your children. Send it to them!
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Life On The Edge
Asteroid hit earth during the period of the pyramids
Ciel et Espace
January 2007
French geologist Marie-Agnès Courty hypothesizes that a large asteroid or comet hit the earth about 4000 years ago near the Kerguelen Islands. The impact threw millions of fragments of the ocean crust into the air that rained down upon the globe several hours later appearing like a rainshower of meteorites.
She has been investigating for fifteen years, taking samples of the soil from around the world. Her most troubling find was of fossiles of marine life from high latitudes of the southern hemisphere in the earth from the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia.
Il y a 4000 ans, l'humanité a vécu une collision entre la Terre et un gros corps céleste. Un véritable cataclysme dont on pensait qu'il ne s'était pas produit depuis la lointaine préhistoire ! C'est la théorie que défend aujourd'hui la Française Marie-Agnès Courty. Au terme de plus de quinze ans d'enquête minutieuse, cette géologue du CNRS est parvenue à reconstituer le scénario suivant : il y a environ 4000 ans, un bolide venu de l'espace (astéroïde ou comète) d'environ 1 km de diamètre aurait percuté l'hémisphère Sud, près des îles Kerguelen. Sous la violence de l'impact, des millions de fragments de la croûte océanique ont été catapultés dans l'espace. À peine quelques heures plus tard, ils ont retraversé l'atmosphère et sont tombés sur l'ensemble de la planète en une pluie de météores incandescents. Marie-Agnès Courty a reconstitué ce scénario à mesure qu'elle a découvert, dans des échantillons de sol du monde entier datant de 4000 ans, les indices de la catastrophe. Dont le plus troublant : des fossiles d'organismes marins en provenance des hautes latitudes australes, retrouvés sur les terres émergées du Moyen-Orient, de l'Europe ou de l'Asie centrale.
À l'époque où se situent les faits, la Terre était déjà peuplée de 30 millions d'êtres humains. En Égypte, la pyramide de Gizeh venait d'être achevée, l'empire d'Akkad régnait sur la Mésopotamie, les premières grandes dynasties se succédaient en Chine et l'Europe était organisée en de nombreuses tribus. En marquant en profondeur la mémoire collective, un tel cataclysme aux accents de fin du monde est peut-être à l'origine de mythes célèbres, comme ceux de l'Apocalypse ou de Sodome et Gomorrhe.
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Floods displace thousands in Malaysia
Last Updated: Friday, December 22, 2006 | 12:14 PM ET
CBC News
Six people have died and 60,000 homes have been evacuated in southern Malaysia in the worst flooding in living memory.
But unofficial reports suggest the number of dead may be much higher, the CBC's Jonathan Kent reported Friday.
Days of heavy rains have burst river banks, isolated many communities and made helicopters and boats the only way of delivering relief supplies.
The government's Meteorological Department issued a warning that there will be heavy monsoon rains until Sunday.
Malaysia's southernmost state, Johor, has been the hardest hit, with 50,000 of the 60,000 evacuees, the government's website said. People are being housed in 300 flood-relief centres.
All six of the dead were in Johor. The website describes how a truck driver saw two people in a car being swept away.
The bodies were later recovered but "we could not launch a rescue operation earlier as the current was too swift," Fire and Rescue Department operations commander Hazmi Ali said.
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Spanish flu-type pandemic could kill 51-81 million: study
Last Updated: Friday, December 22, 2006 | 11:54 AM ET
The Canadian Press
A pandemic as severe as the 1918 Spanish flu could claim between 51 million and 81 million lives worldwide if it were to happen today, with most of those deaths occurring in the developing world, a study released Friday says.
The authors said such an event would more than double the number of deaths - from all causes - that the entire world now experiences in a single year. And based on the patterns of 1918, they said 96 per cent or more of the lives lost would be in resource-poor countries.
"The evidence from 1918 is pretty impressive that in poor communities the death rate was just extraordinary. This is a remarkable increase in mortality in just a short period of time," said lead author Dr. Chris Murray, director of Harvard University's Initiative for Global Health.
The study, funded by the U.S. National Institute of Aging, will appear in Saturday's issue of The Lancet. Murray's co-authors are from Harvard, the University of Queensland, Australia and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
The head of the World Health Organization's global influenza program admired the work, but said while it is an interesting exercise, it doesn't really change the task facing those working to prepare the world to weather a future pandemic.
"In terms of disease control and pandemic response and those sorts of thing, the bottom line is no matter what approach you take, the figures are pretty big and the steps needed to prepare for it are substantial," Dr. Keiji Fukuda said from Geneva.
Underestimating globalization
A U.S. infectious diseases expert challenged the paper's suggestion that the developed world would get off relatively lightly from a 1918-like pandemic, saying the study and an accompanying editorial underestimate the effect of globalization and overestimate the capacity of developed-world medical systems to cope with a crush of gravely ill people.
"The paper and the editorial have no sense at all of a modern global just-in-time economy, where the kind of drugs and medical services that they assume will be available in a modern world just won't be there," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
But the author of the editorial, Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College in London, supported the paper's assertion that the developing world would take a far bigger hit and contested Osterholm's prediction that supply chain disruptions would amplify the impact of a pandemic in developed countries.
"A pandemic is a relatively short-lived thing," said Ferguson, a leading mathematical modeller.
"There may be crises over a few weeks, but I would be skeptical whether we would face famine and the sort of food shortages and other problems that would lead to dramatically enhanced mortality. I just don't find it plausible."
Mortality estimates vary widely
Osterholm had earlier predicted a 1918-like pandemic could kill between 180 million and 360 million worldwide.
Those numbers, and others, are what inspired Murray and his colleagues to do this work. They had attended meetings of influenza experts where death projections were raised. The estimates varied wildly - from a low of two million to 360 million to even one billion people.
Murray said there seemed to be little scientific basis to those projections, so he and his colleagues set out to see if they could come up with an evidence-based estimate.
They hunted for death registries from the time, finding good records for 27 countries. In the case of India and the United States, they were even able to mine data from nine provinces and 24 states respectively.
In each case, they looked at nine years of deaths - the three years before 1918, the three years during the pandemic and the three after. They averaged the years before and after to come up with a standard death rate for that jurisdiction, then attributed any excess deaths that occurred in 1918-1920 to pandemic influenza.
They made exceptions for Britain and France to factor out the death toll of the First World War, and in Finland to account for a civil war that overlapped the end of the Spanish flu. Murray said similar adjustments were not made for Commonwealth countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand that also fought in the First World War.
They then used the excess mortality rates - which varied from a low of 0.2 per cent in Denmark to a high of 7.8 per cent in parts of India - to calculate what a pandemic of similar virulence would do to the current global population.
Murray admitted he and his co-authors were startled by the projection they arrived at; they were expecting something more in the range of 10 million excess deaths.
He said the research points to a need to start looking for realistic ways cash-strapped countries can try to minimize the death toll, given that expensive antiviral drugs and scarce flu vaccine are likely to be unavailable except in the richest countries.
Comment: Whether the deaths happen primarily in the "developing" countries or not, such an epidemic is a very efficient way for the pathocrats to trim the population when the need arises. And don't for a minute doubt that that is indeed their plan.
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A shock To The Ancient Rhythms Of The Natural World
By Michael McCarthy
22 December 2006
The Independent
Animals that hibernate in winter abandoning hibernation: yet another signal that something momentous is happening to the rhythms of the natural world, in the way in which we have always understood them.
Consider what a significant disruption of a life pattern this is. Hibernation has evolved for the same reason most animal behaviour has evolved: as a strategy to maximise survival. Some creatures that need a lot of energy to get around have learnt to shut themselves down in the winter months, when the food to provide that energy is simply not available (or too much energy would be expended in searching for it). Zoologists have realised in recent decades that many species have an instinctive and finely tuned way of weighing up the balance between how much effort needs to be expended to acquire a certain food item, and how much energy is available, in return, in the item acquired. The general law is: if the second is less than the first, don't do it. This has been christened "optimal foraging".
Hibernation could be seen as a version of this: if the food search is going to be hopeless, it makes sense to stop foraging altogether. Instead, fatten yourself up before the hopeless time, then sleep it out. This is a strategy that has evolved - in bears, hedgehogs, bats and other species - over millions of years and it has persisted as a piece of behaviour because it has been successful.
If some European brown bears in the Cantabrian mountains are now stopping hibernation, we can draw two conclusions. First, something quite enormous is happening in the world around them, and if you want to hazard a guess that that something is global warming, you would have as good a theory as any other.
Second, they are abandoning a survival strategy - which has been successful - for the unknown. What if they give up hibernation because of rising winter temperatures, but then when they are active in winter, are unable to find enough food?
We are already witnessing what a problem such disruption of natural cycles can cause for other creatures. In Britain, insects are hatching earlier in the spring, but migratory birds that depend on the "flush" of caterpillars to feed their young are coming back at the same time as they have always done, and thus may be starting to miss out on the feast: this may be one of the reasons why many of our woodland birds are now in sharp decline.
Climate change is perceived as a terrible problem for human society, and rightly so; but we should not lose sight of the fact that, to the natural world and its inhabitants, the warming also presents a mortal predicament.
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