First, the government responds to the September 11th attack by passing the Patriot Act, which is purportedly designed to protect us from foreign terrorists. Most of America cheers it on, never realizing that within the act is a broad definition for something categorized as domestic terrorism, or "activities that appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, or to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion."
Second, they pass the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows them, under the definitions for domestic terrorism set forth by the Patriot Act, to detain someone without trial and forever if they appear to be subverting the newly established status quo.
Third, they declare all federal property, or property being used for political events where Secret Service protection is present, as "events of national significance" through the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act. Undesirable demonstrators operating counter to the official narrative in these areas are herded into court approved free speech zones.
Puppet Masters
Right-wing politician Naftali Bennett's plan to annex Israeli-controlled parts of the West Bank is just the logical next step in Israel's historic effort to ghettoize the Palestinians.
When Habayit Hayehudi party leader and rising political star Naftali Bennett calls for annexing Area C, the part of the West Bank under full Israeli security and civil control, he is following the logic of every single Israeli government: maximize the territory, minimize the Arabs.
Some may even interpret this as elections propaganda in favor of Habayit Hayehudi and endorse it warmly.
Bennett can propose annexation because every governing coalition since the Six-Day War - whether it was led by the Likud or Labor (or its precursor, Alignment) party, and whether its partners were Mafdal, Shas or Meretz - laid the spiritual and policy groundwork for him.
According to Bennett, about 60 percent of the West Bank - a.k.a. Area C - is annexable. What's important about Area C is not whether 50,000 Palestinians live there, as democratic, benevolent Bennett claims, while suggesting to naturalize them and grant them Israeli citizenship, or whether the number is around 150,000 (as my colleague Chaim Levinson reminded us earlier this week).
© Tomer Appelbaum
Habaiyt Hayehudi's Naftali Bennett.
Habaiyt Hayehudi's Naftali Bennett.
Some may even interpret this as elections propaganda in favor of Habayit Hayehudi and endorse it warmly.
Bennett can propose annexation because every governing coalition since the Six-Day War - whether it was led by the Likud or Labor (or its precursor, Alignment) party, and whether its partners were Mafdal, Shas or Meretz - laid the spiritual and policy groundwork for him.
According to Bennett, about 60 percent of the West Bank - a.k.a. Area C - is annexable. What's important about Area C is not whether 50,000 Palestinians live there, as democratic, benevolent Bennett claims, while suggesting to naturalize them and grant them Israeli citizenship, or whether the number is around 150,000 (as my colleague Chaim Levinson reminded us earlier this week).
© Gali Eytan
Shlomi Eldar
Shlomi Eldar
Let's say that for a time I was a person whom people liked not liking. It's very easy to be a well-liked commentator: you simply tell the public what it wants to hear. But I always chose to tell the truth. And regrettably, I was never wrong. Both in Operation Cast Lead [the 2008-09 campaign in Gaza] and [last November's follow-up] Operation Pillar of Defense, people were furious at me. People cursed me, sent messages, found me on Facebook and called me a Hamas man. But I saw where it was all going, and said so.
Not as a provocation.
No. I just say what I think. I read the situation, I don't go by gut feelings or political beliefs. I thought it was wrong to assassinate Ahmed Jabari [the head of Hamas' military wing]. Not because he didn't deserve to die. He deserved to die. But the method of eliminating some top person and thinking someone better will replace him is wrong. All you do is heighten the problem. A top figure in the defense establishment told me, "Israel built up Hamas, not by its deeds but by its failures."
Because we are always putting out fires.
All the decisions of the political leadership are made ad hoc, and aimed at putting out fires.
A staggering, doom-laden interview published by Haaretz with an Israeli television journalist suggests that the full truth of what happened in Gaza 4 years ago was suppressed not only when the United States and its author stomped the Goldstone Report-- which alleged deliberate targeting of civilians-- but suppressed by Israelis too. Shlomi Eldar was Gaza correspondent for Channel 10 news. Here is what he saw and could not live with but put in "an envelope" and has never published, awaiting a commission of inquiry that never has come:
"I came into possession of shocking material. The kind of material that sends you to a psychologist. I have never shown it. Children who were shot. Piles of bodies of civilians... I came into possession of material about very grim events relating to the idea that Israel was deliberately 'going crazy.' Testimonies, images and much more. So many people were killed there."Reflect that this was a slaughter initiated by a centrist government now perceived as center-left in Israeli politics. Reflect that a story that Eldar did report, a documentary called Precious Life about Israelis working to treat a Gaza infant born with an immune deficiency, was written up at great length by Tom Friedman in the New York Times, with a lecture to his readers that if they were going to criticize Israel, they should watch this video about the "real Middle East" so as to be "constructive."
Lloyd Blankfein made $21 million last year, including a $2 million salary and a $19 million bonus, CNN/Money reports. That bonus includes $5.6 million in cash. Bloomberg pegs the total pay at $19 million, but what's a couple of million dollars, really?
Blankfein's haul represents a 75 percent pay increase from the year before, CNN/Money notes. It is also nearly double the paltry $11.5 million that Jamie Dimon, CEO of the nation's biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase, took home.
An American assasination drone
Yemeni military officials said that the attacks were carried out by two American unmanned aerial vehicles in Abieda valley in the central province late on Saturday.
Local residents also said that two Saudi nationals were among the victims of the drone strikes.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the local residents said that three of the bodies were burnt beyond recognition.
The US has increased the number of its drone attacks in Yemen.
© Peter Muhly/Agence France-Presse — Getty Image
Police officers in Belfast, Northern Ireland, remained with their armored vehicles as a car burned after violence between unionists and loyalists on Jan. 12.
Police officers in Belfast, Northern Ireland, remained with their armored vehicles as a car burned after violence between unionists and loyalists on Jan. 12.
The scenes recall the sectarian bitterness that infused the 30 years of virtual civil war known as the Troubles: night after night of street protests marshaled by balaclava-wearing militants, who have updated their tactics by using social media to rally mobs; death threats to prominent politicians, some of whom have fled their homes and hidden under police guard; firebombs, flagstones and rocks hurled at churches, police cars and lawmakers' offices; protesters joined by rock-throwing boys of 8 and 9; neighborhoods sealed off for hours by the police or protesters' barricades.
Many had hoped that the old hatreds between Northern Ireland's two main groups - the mainly Protestant, pro-British unionists, and the mainly Roman Catholic republicans, with their commitment to a united Ireland - would recede permanently under the auspices of the Good Friday agreement. That accord was reached 15 years ago as a blueprint for the power-sharing government that now rules the province.
© Photograph: Noah Berger/Reuters
Aaron Swartz, the US hacker and internet activist who killed himself earlier this month.
Aaron Swartz, the US hacker and internet activist who killed himself earlier this month.
On 11 January, a young American geek named Aaron Swartz killed himself, and most of the world paid no attention. In the ordinary run of things, "it was not an important failure", as Auden put it in Musée des Beaux Arts.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
But Swartz's death came like a thunderbolt in cyberspace, because this insanely talented, idealistic, complex, diminutive lad was a poster boy for everything that we value about the networked world. He was 26 when he died, but from the age of 14 he had been astonishing those of us who followed him on the internet. In 10 years he had accomplished more than most people do in a lifetime.
In the days following his death, the blogosphere resounded with expressions of grief, sadness and loss not just from people who had worked with him, but also from those who only knew him from afar - the users of the things he helped to create (the RSS web feed, social news website Reddit, the Creative Commons copyright licences, for example), or those who had followed his scarily open and thoughtful blogging.
© Photograph: Thibault Camus/AP
Malian soldiers on manoeuvres. Asked if troops were guilty of war crimes, justice minister Malick Coulibaly said: ‘No army is perfect.’
Malian soldiers on manoeuvres. Asked if troops were guilty of war crimes, justice minister Malick Coulibaly said: ‘No army is perfect.’
Residents of Mopti, in the centre of the country, told the Observer of arrests, interrogations and the torture of innocents by the Malian army of those mistakenly suspected of involvement in rebel activity. "One day my son just disappeared," said a woman from the Fulani ethnic group, who asked not to be named. "We looked for him there for two or three days, but couldn't find him. Then some people told us that on the day he left, the army shot two people and put them in a pit inside the military base."
The victim's cousin, who also asked to remain anonymous for fears of reprisals, said: "We are Fulani people, the soldiers can tell from our dress that we come from the north.
"Because of that, the army suspects us - if we look like Fulani and don't have an identity card, they kill us. But many people are born in the small villages and it's very difficult to have identification.
"We are all afraid," the cousin continued. "There are some households where Fulanis or others who are fair-skinned don't go out any more. We have stopped wearing our traditional clothes - we are being forced to abandon our culture, and to stay indoors."
© Photograph: John Coletti
The National Theatre in San José, Costa Rica. Even this tourist-friendly Central American country has become tangled in the drugs trade
The National Theatre in San José, Costa Rica. Even this tourist-friendly Central American country has become tangled in the drugs trade
For while Colombia, which has all but neutralised the major cartels, and Mexico, which fights all-out war against them, are strong societies with significant economies, the same cannot be said of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, which have become the passageway for the drugs to which the North American "gringo" is so determinedly addicted.
They are poor, hospitable and breathtakingly beautiful countries but frail, largely agrarian societies just recovering from decades of ideological "dirty wars" - on to which the narco cartels' battles now superimpose themselves.
There was, therefore, a bitter echo in the arrival of the US Marines' Operation Martillo in Guatemala last year, after 36 years of US-backed "dirty war" that left 200,000 dead, mostly indigenous Mayan peasant farmers.
