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By Rene Wadlow

The Multilateral nuclear accord with Iran, the Joint Comprehension Plan of Action, needs strong, active support especially within the US administration, but also within Iran. The Accord was designed to prevent the Islamic Republic of Iran from using its civilian nuclear capacities to develop nuclear weapons.  The accord was negotiated among Iran and the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and coordinated by the European Union.  The Accord was endorsed by the unanimous vote of the United Nations Security Council and went into force in 2016.

The Accord was considered an important foreign policy achievement of Barack Obama’s presidency and owed much to the energy and persistence of the US Secretary of State John Kerry and the European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Magherini.

The Accord is structured on strict verification of Iranian nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In exchange, sanctions previously imposed on Iran by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States would be progressively lifted.  The sanctions which were an effort to force Iran to halt uranium enrichment had a crippling impact on the Iranian economy.  The sanctions were largely related to the Iranian export of oil and  petrochemical products, important elements in Iranian foreign trade. However, the partial lifting of the sanctions has not improved life for the bulk of the people. More and more Iranians are saying that the Accord is only a collection of empty promises. Thus some in Iran, including the leaders of the powerful Revolutionary Guards are vocal in their opposition to the continuation of the Accord.

In US legislation, the US President must sign every six months an “Iran sanctions waiver” so that the US does not re-impose its sanctions policies.  The next deadline is 12 May.  Although as a rule of international law, one State can not alone modify a multilateral agreement, if the US were to reapply sanctions on Iran, the Accord would be deeply weakened if not totally destroyed.

During the presidential campaign, President Trump was critical of the Iranian Accord.  John R. Bolton, the new International Security Advisor, has been in his earlier private capacity highly critical of the Iran Accord in addition to a general hostility on his part to the Iranian government and its policies. The possibility that President Trump will not renew the waiver on the Iranian sanctions has already led to heated discussions within the White House, Congress and foreign policy annalists.

While the decision of the US waiver of sanctions is a presidential decision alone, the issue has a potential impact on all the conflicts in the wider Middle East as well as a potential impact on negotiations with North Korea on nuclear issues.  Therefore, the Association of World Citizens believes that there is a need to build active support for the Iranian Accord both within the USA and among the other States party to the Accord especially Western Europe and China which fears that a weakening of the Iran Accord would have a negative impact on the Korean nuclear negotiations.   Views on the importance of the continuing validity of the Accord should be shared widely among political representatives and foreign policy specialists.

Rene Wadlow is the President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation on and problem-solving in economic and social issues.

4 April 2018

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Rim Banna passed away at the age of 51. Her death on March 24, after a decade-long battle with cancer, brought grief to Palestinians everywhere.

Rim, a Palestinian Christian from Nazareth, united the Palestinian people across political and geographic divides.

When she sang for the Homeland, nothing mattered but Palestine. Christians and Muslims, Fatah and Hamas, Gaza and Ramallah, all became one.

Through her soulful and warm voice, she imparted sorrow, yet celebrated life. Her songs ‘Fares Odeh’ and ‘Sarah’ were poetic interpretation of precious young Palestinian lives cut short by Israeli soldiers.

The butterfly will carry you to the back of a cloud

The gazelle will run with you to a hollow of sycamore

The scent of bread will take you, a martyr, to the embrace of your mother    

The star said to him, “Bring me to the courtyard of my house”

“Take me to the mattress of my slumber”

Sleepiness climbed up my sides

And settled in my head.”

Music unites Palestinians when politicians fail. In fact, while for years the collective calls for ‘Palestinian unity’ has gone unheeded, Palestinian music has continued to bring Palestinians closer.

Deep-rooted Palestinian culture is what makes Palestinians who they are, a people with a unique and lucid identity, despite 70 years of exile, ethnic cleansing, sieges, numerous borders and wanton killings.

And when Rim sang, her voice penetrated through the seemingly impregnable Apartheid walls, checkpoints, military curfews and unbridgeable distance.

It was during the First Intifada (popular uprising) of 1987 that Rim gained access to the hearts and homes of many Palestinians; initially in Palestine and, eventually, all over the world. Her voice, soft and reassuring, gave hope to those who lived under a 7-years long relentless Israeli military campaign. Israeli tactics, then, aimed at breaking the spirit of the rebelling Palestinian people.

Rim’s music offered new, modern renditions of Palestinian traditional songs, but without erasing the historical and cultural identity of that music.

Her music belongs to the Palestinian music genre of nationally-driven and culturally-centered art form, aimed at reintroducing – and, sometimes, reinventing – the past in a more relatable fashion.

While Israel is doing its utmost to deny and erase Palestinian culture, such cultural icons, as Rim Banna, but also ReemKelani, KamilyaJubran and Shadia Mansour, among others, have reasserted Palestinian culture, thus identity, around the globe.

Although a rarely publicized form of resistance, cultural resistance is at the heart of the Palestinian fight for freedom.

Italian thinker, Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by fascist Italy for much of his life specifically because of his ideas on cultural resistance, had warned of how cultural hegemony is as much the enemy as outright dictatorship.

Palestinians contend with cultural hegemony, not as an academic notion, but as a daily reality.

Israel has spent decades launching and perfecting its cultural war against Palestinians, aimed at erasing Palestinian culture, on the one hand, while imposing its own cultural alternatives on the other.

Oddly, much of what Israel brands as Israeli culture is, in fact, the very Palestinian and Arab culture spanning millennia; from food, to music, to fashion and everything in between, the ‘Israel brand’ is essentially a Palestinian, Arab brand, stolen and rebranded.

But, unlike military and political war, cultural wars are often invisible and incremental. While the Israeli government is now busy replacing Arabic street names with Hebrew ones and outlawing the commemoration of the Nakba – the destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1947-48 – it also aims at breaking the unity of Palestinian culture altogether.

Historically, early Zionists promoted the false idea that Palestine was a land with no people and that the natives of the land were nomads, passers-by with no cultural roots, no identity, thus no collective political aspirations.

Such propaganda was essential to promote the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. The supposed ‘nomads’ who existed in Palestine eventually evolved to become the ‘refugee problem.’ To this day, Zionists and their rightwing supporters still encourage the cruel idea that Palestinians are an ‘invented people’.

So, when Rim Banna, ReemKelani, Mohammed Assaf, and numerous others – joined by poets, artists, and other Palestinian cultural warriors – celebrate the traditions, music and culture of their people, they stand at the frontlines of fighting a violent Zionist discourse that has, for over a century, been committed to the total erasure of Palestine.

In her music, Rim fought against the Israeli attempts at the cultural dispossession of the Palestinian people, while humanizing the likes of Fares, Sarah and many others.

This is why many Palestinians wept when Rim died; it is also why millions wept tears of joy when Mohammad Assaf – a refugee from Gaza – won the ‘Arab Idol’ competition in 2013.

It was not merely because Mohammad had a beautiful voice and that he deserved to win, but because of the representation of that thundering, self-asserting voice, his lyrics and, of course, the singer himself.

Assaf is a Gazan refugee. His family was driven from historic Palestine during the violent Zionist ethnic cleansing campaign of 1947-48. He was born in shattat (diaspora) and eventually returned to Gaza, only to live under a hermetic Israeli siege. He broke the siege to participate in the competition.

When Assaf sang, millions watched in wonder as he skillfully demolished all the walls, erased the checkpoints and bridged all the distance. Suddenly, Gaza, Ramallah, Nazareth, Haifa were once more united. Those in diaspora returned. The homeland became one.

Rim too offered that multi-layered representation, which supersedes politics and geography into a realm in which the Palestinian nationhood was made of shared culture, grief, resistance, poetry and hope.

Rim has died, but the generation of artistes she patiently nurtured will continue to sing, to celebrate a culture and a civilization that cannot be tamed by guns or imprisoned by walls.

Rim Banna was the voice of Palestine that can never be muted.

– Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle.

3 April 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/04/03/rim-banna-and-the-cultural-war-that-palestinians-must-win/

By Dr Elias Akleh

Similar to Jesus, who was persecuted, tortured, crucified and murdered by ancient Jews, then rose up from the dead confirming his teachings, today’s Palestinians, whose parents had been robbed, persecuted, unjustly imprisoned, ethnically cleansed, and massacred by present day Jews, are rising up against Jewish Israeli terrorism, injustice, land theft, and brute murder, in peaceful mass rallies started on Friday March 31st towards their parents’ usurped homes and lands, asserting and exercising their right of return as confirmed by UN resolution 194.

These mass rallies commemorate the Palestinian Land Day, when in 1976 Yitzhak Rabin’s ministry decided to usurp more Palestinian land in the occupied Galilee but Palestinian masses in the north as well as in West Bank took to the streets in protests, that eventually and after bloody confrontations with the Israeli terrorist army and the shooting murder of 6 Palestinians, forced Rabin to cancel the decision. The current mass rallies are planned to continue daily and culminate on the 15th of May to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Nakba; Israeli occupation of Palestine, and to protest the planned transfer of the American embassy to Al-Quds on that day.

These mass rallies by young and old, male and female Palestinians brake the Zionist myth Ben Gurion once stated after the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) when almost 800,000 Palestinians were forcefully driven out of their homeland, that “the old (Palestinians) will die, and the young will forget.” Young Palestinians have never forgotten their homeland, their homes, and their heritage. The Palestinians are bringing their young children to these rallies where workshop tents had been setup to teach the young generations their Palestinian history, their rights to the land, and to pass on the keys to their usurped homes along with the Palestinian flag. The young will never forget, and they will carry the torch until complete liberation.

These mass rallies also send powerful messages to the world, to the UN member countries, to the Zionist organization, and especially to the Arab leaders, who abandoned their Palestinian Arab brothers, betrayed the Palestinian just cause, and slept in bed with the Zionist Israeli enemy in the hope to keep their ruling positions, that the Palestinian cause is still alive and well, that the Palestinian new generations will not give up their rights to their homeland, and that the Zionist Greater Israel project is doomed to failure.

These mass rallies are also a message to the American administration, especially to president Trump, that Al-Quds is Palestinian; capital of Palestine and is not Jewish Jerusalem; capital of Israeli terrorist state. The Palestinians would never give up their own capital; Al-Quds, nor would they accept what have been dubbed as the deal of the century offering Palestinians a replacement semi-homeland in Sinai or parts of Jordan, similar to what America had done to the native American Indians when they imprisoned them in collective Indian concentration camps; euphemistically called “Indian Reservations.”

As usual, and as a prominent characteristic of the Israeli terrorist state, Israel had dispatched its very well armed terrorist army onto the entrances of Palestinian towns and onto the borders of the Gaza Strip to engage and to suppress the Palestinian peaceful rallies. In the West Bank and in the 1948 occupied areas these terrorist soldiers met the peaceful demonstrators with rubber coated bullets, live bullets, tear gas and stun grenades. In the Gaza Strip Israeli tanks and snipers were dispatched to engage Palestinians demonstrators. The Israeli soldiers had also used drones to bomb the Palestinian masses with gas grenades.

On the first day; Friday, of these peaceful walks the terrorist Israeli soldiers including snipers had murdered 16 Palestinians and wounded 1416 others, while thousands others suffered from tear gas inhalations. Such attacks by well-armed soldiers against unarmed peaceful civilian demonstrators are considered war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Terrorist Israeli army routinely perpetrate such crimes against Palestinian civilians particularly against Palestinian children. The silence of the international community, the shameful unconditional American support, and the pitiful silence and cooperation of some Arab leaders, had encouraged Israel to continue perpetrating such crimes without fear of any reprisal.

Israel is scared of the Palestinian resolve and aspiration that is reflected in their children. Israel’s fear of such peaceful rallies is reflected in their cruel and harsh suppression and persecution of Palestinians especially the children. Israeli leaders had stated many times their skewed belief that violence is the only means to deal with Palestinians in order to instill fear of reprisal in the hearts of the children. Yet it is the Palestinian children who scare the Israeli leaders, for the spirit of struggle to obtain their freedom and to regain their country is alive in them and is reflected in their behavior when they unfearfully face the heavily armed and well trained Israeli soldiers with only their bare hands. Israel had failed to instill fear in the hearts of the young generations of Palestinians. Their struggle will keep on going.

The UNSC, called upon by Kuwait to protect Palestinians by condemning the Israeli crimes, had failed to issue any condemnation due to the American veto. UNSC members are apprehensive about any American “punishment” if they voted against Israel. It is still fresh in their memory what Trump and Nikki Haley had threatened against such votes. Trump had openly stated that the US gives money to the UN as bribes so that its member countries would support the American positions right or wrong. Ignoring all the well documented Israeli crimes against Palestinians in order to keep receiving American financial aid make members of the UNSC partners in these crimes. All what they could offer is their false concern about the victims, call for restraint by all parties involved, and offer their support for the unworkable unpractical two-states solution.

The Palestinians had given peace many chances. They gave up almost 80% of their homeland in order to live peacefully and to build their own state. They entered into peace negotiations with Israel, yet all these negotiations led only to more Israeli usurpation of Palestinian land and the building of more illegal Israeli colonies. After the fair election of Hamas government in 2007, as attested by international monitors, the Gaza Strip had been abandoned by Abbas Fatah organization, and besieged by Israel and Egypt to starve Palestinians there to death. Israel had conducted bloody wars against Gaza Strip using the illegal cluster and white phosphorous bombs against the civilian areas. Many Arab leaders within the Arab League had abandoned Palestinians and normalized relationship with Israel on the expense of the Palestinian cause.

Religious fundamentalist Jewish extremist colonialists increased their terror attacks against Palestinian civilians; poisoning their water wells, shooting their cattle, cutting down their trees, burning their homes, kidnapping and murdering their children, and worst of all are the guarded violations of Al-Aqsa Mosque in an attempt to claim the Islamic holy places as their own Jewish holy places. Last week Jewish extremist Rabbis had conducted rehearsals to conduct animal sacrificial ceremonies within the Al-Aqsa Mosque compounds as celebration for their Passover feast.

Abandoned, betrayed, besieged, with many of their children imprisoned, and left to die by starvation the Palestinians, who lost their country, lost their rights and freedom, found themselves isolated and have nothing else to lose. Their recognition that they could not depend on their brother Arab leaders for any real help, convince them that the only solution they have is to depend only on their own selves and that the only language Israel understands is the language of armed struggle to establish facts on the grounds.

Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab American from a Palestinian descent.

2 April 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/04/02/palestinian-land-day-massacre/

Co-Written By Dr. Suresh Khairnar & Feroze Mithiborwala

Non-Violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mighter than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian Right of Return and condemn the Israeli terror unleashed upon the peaceful unarmed marchers.

With more than 17 Palestinians dead, more than 1500 grievously injured by Israeli snipers targeting the unarmed marchers, the world must stand up as one with the Palestinian nation and condemn the Israeli regime for its inhumanity, violence and terror.

Unarmed Palestinians being attacked by Israeli Snipers.

They were not “clashes” as was being reported by certain pro-Zionist propagandist media, just Israelis firing on unarmed Palestinian Civil Resisters, peacefully marching back to their rightful land that was colonised by the Zionist occupation.

The Palestinians were only marching back to their homes and fields stolen by foreign settlers, aliens to this land, marching peacefully, resisting peacefully and despite the deadly targeted firing from the Israelis, yet not retaliating, but carrying on marching with undaunted courage.

Zionist Israel today is facing its end, an existential moral crisis, as it further loses its legitimacy within the comity of civilised nations.

It’s just a matter of time as with each passing day the Palestinian people win another moral victory, as they win the hearts, minds and conscience of the people and nations of the world.

Today hundreds of thousands have marched, braving the bullets that they knew would be fired upon them by the dehumanised Israeli army.

Yet they marched on, tomorrow when millions march, from across all of historic Palestine, when millions more will pour in from across the borders from Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, shot at, killed and maimed, yet marching to return back to their country, the cities, villages and fields, that will mark the beginning of the end of the Zionist Occupation.

When the conscience stirs within Israeli society, when Israeli soldiers refuse to shoot at unarmed civilians, when their humanity is awakened, then the tide shall change. Both the people’s will be redeemed and Palestine will be free, humanity will be free and peace shall prevail.

But till then the nations and peoples’ of the world must be prepared to march alongside the Palestinians, till Palestine is free.

March on Palestinians and its also time for the people of the world to march alongside you brave people, march for the freedom of Palestine, for of all Humanity.

Dr. Suresh Khairnar & Feroze Mithiborwala belongs to India Palestine Solidarity Forum

1 April 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/04/01/condemn-the-israeli-terror-on-land-day/

By Andrea Germanos

Israel is shooting at protesters in Gaza again on Saturday, a day after Israeli forces shot dead at least 15 Palestinians.

Over 1,400 were also injured Friday by Israeli forces in Gaza, roughly half of whom were hit by live fire, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.  Thousands of protesters are attending funerals on Saturday.

“Medical facilities in Gaza, which have already been overstrained by the longstanding shortages of medical supplies, electricity, and fuel, are struggling to cope with the overwhelming number of casualties,” the ministry says.

Over two dozen protesters have already been injured in Saturday’s protests, Haaretzreports.

Friday was the first day of the “March of Great Return,” a six-week action slated to end on the day marking the “Nakba.” Tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered at five spots along the Gaza-Israel border saying, “We are not here to fight; we are here to return to our lands.”

As the Guardian reports: “Israel said it has positioned snipers and responded to ‘rioting’ Palestinians with ‘dispersal means’ and ‘firing towards main instigators.’ It said the movement was a Hamas-orchestrated ploy and it was identifying ‘terror attacks under the camouflage of riots.’”

Israel-based human rights group B’Tselem—which noted that “Israeli forces have already been lethally shooting Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza for some time”—criticized such a characterization of the movement. Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, also noted that “Israeli allegations of violence by some protesters do not change the fact that using lethal force is banned by international law except to meet an imminent threat to life.”

Yousef Munayyer, executive director of The U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, tweeted that “The Israeli military tweeted they knew ‘where every bullet landed,’ then deleted it, probably because there is video showing their bullets landing in the backs of unarmed protesters.”

Israel’s chief army spokesman, Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, said Saturday that if violence continues, “we will not be able to continue limiting our activity to the [separation barrier] fence area and will act against these terror organizations in other places too.”

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on Friday called for an independent probe of the deadly events, while Tayé-Brook Zerihoun, the deputy UN political affairs chief, warned the UN Security Council, “There is fear the situation might deteriorate in the coming days.”

B’Tselem, meanwhile, states, “The decision where and whether and how to demonstrate in Gaza is not Israel’s to make.”

“Official Israeli statements have made no reference to the actual reason for the protest—the disastrous reality in Gaza—or to the right to free protest. Israel has the power to immediately change life in Gaza for the better,” the group added, “but has chosen not to do so. It has made Gaza a huge prison, yet forbids the prisoners even to protest against this, on pain of death.”

Originally published in CommonDreams.org

Andrea Germanos is senior editor and a staff writer at Common Dreams.

1 April 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/04/01/israeli-forces-open-fire-on-gaza-protesters-again/

By Edward Curtin

“The existent, the body, disappears.  We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks….Nobodies and no Necessity – for Necessity is the condition of the existent.  It is what makes reality real.” – John Berger, “Steps Toward a Small Theory of the Visible”

“The real body.  To be real, it must be bodily; and to be a body is to be eaten.  The humiliation in incarnation; to become bread.  To be eaten: to be consumed by sorrow, sickness, and death.  – Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

“If Marx were functioning today he would have been hard put to avoid saying that imaginary sex is the opiate of the people.”-  John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards

Why are so many Americans indifferent to the savage slaughter of millions of people around the world carried out by their own government under a long string of presidents?   Why were they stone-cold silent during eight years of Obama’s many wars and drone killings of which he boasted?  Why are they silent in the face of the Trump administration’s continuation and expansion of those wars and its push for a nuclear war with Russia?  Why this incestuous turning in and away from the bloody havoc their government keeps inflicting on the world?

And why all this denial while focusing on the pornographic media spectacles of Stormy Daniels (the porn queen turned “Adult Film Actress”), Monica Lewinsky, and a host of others paraded before the cameras to distract and entertain a population of spectators?

I, like many people, wonder why.  What follows is an attempt at an answer, with the focus of my thinking being primarily on middle to upper class Americans, for the poor and working classes have a hard enough time making ends meet and keeping alive themselves, since they are the victims of a domestic war waged by the same heartless ruling class that kills so many overseas.

For when people lose touch with the physicality of life and embrace spectral images, mediated reality, and abstractions as real, they have stepped into a totally nihilistic world.  A disembodied world.  When this is joined to a narcissistic self-preoccupation with one’s own well-being and comfort, indifference to the suffering of others becomes the norm.  This is the world of unreality populated today by so many Americans, who have grown progressively indifferent to the slaughter by their own government of people throughout the world – heaps of millions of dead bodies, blood, and body-parts everywhere.  In “Song in the Blood”the French poet Jacques Prévert says:

There are great puddles of blood on the world

where’s it going all this spilled blood….

murder’s blood…war’s blood

misery’s blood…

and the blood of men tortured in prison….

Where’s it going all this spilled blood

the earth that turns and turns and turns

with its great streams of blood.

To the bodiless bloodless insouciant ones, however,the blood of “others” is invisible. It is our lives that matter.  What is being done to these “others” is of little consequence because it is experienced as an abstraction – unreal – as if it weren’t happening, even as it is.  And in a twist of fate straight from Greek tragedy, those who embrace this delusion are in denial of the very real possibility that they too will be “disappeared” by a nuclear war being provoked in their names.  Having turned their backs on nature and the corporeal reality of all living beings, having denied the passion play that is life on earth for all people, having denied that there are limits to American hubris and the West’s clearly insane and nihilistic push for nuclear war with Russia, they will pleasure themselves “until the atom too bursts into flames,” as Albert Camus warned, “and history ends in the triumph of reason and the death agony of the species.”

In an incisive article, “It is Us,” John Steppling recently asked a series of Tolstoyan questions about the ruling class (and by extension most Americans): “What does the ruling class want?” he asked.  How much money do these people need?   Is it power they are after with their mad quest to gobble up the world and slaughter as they go?  Power for what?  For more money?  Why are they provoking a nuclear war with Russia?  Are they simply crazy?  Don’t they know they too will die?  And what about all those affluent liberals and conservatives, the narcissistic bourgeoisie, the average person, are they all suicidal?

I believe they think in their delusional way that the coachman will pass them by. They are living in the unreality that has overtakenso much of the Western world.  They believe they will pass.  No failure for them.  They won’t die.  They will “pass on.”  They are different, special, they live in a fantasy of bodiless abstractions, even as they work on their bodies to go on and on, exercise and diet, pill after pill, supplements, dreams of running marathons at 98, body parts replaced as they do yoga poses to dreamy ethereal music in the safe surround of a warless environment where bombs and missiles are for the others in bloody bodies over there far away.  The pornography of war out of sight and thought; the screening of pornographic titillation in everyone’s face.

It is generally assumed that the United States is a materialist society where the voluptuous life of bodily existence is affirmed and celebrated.  Big breasts and bigger butts, skinny jeans and streaming sex scandals to the contrary, I think this is not true.  American society has joined its Puritan tradition to instrumental reasoning and its go-go-get-it-done practicality to create a culture where the human body has become, like everything and everyone else, a thing to be manipulated – an instrument to be masturbated, a thing to be pampered, paraded, and presented in a society of looking-glass selves. Selfies in flight from others and human encounters where care and communion of consciousness lead one to love the world as one’s body and to feel compassion for others far away in other lands who are being slaughtered by our guns and bombs.  And to say No, not in my name, not over my dead body. To burst the bubble of the self.  W. H. Auden put it this way in the poem Are You There?

Whatever view we hold, it must be shown

Why every lover has a wish to make

Some other kind of otherness his own:

Perhaps, in fact, we never are alone.

Yet Americans pursue loneliness as if their mirror images were the world.  Or the things they so avidly buy reflect who they are: interior decorating for the soul.  Souls divorced from their instrumental bodies.  With packaged and commodified consciousnesses, so many “interact with products” these days, as they pursue constantly retreating phantoms; the social narcissism of images falling in love with their own images and reaching out to embrace their shadows.

This is as far from eroticism as one can get, if one grasps the true meaning of Eros, the god of love, life, joy, and becoming, whose growth was stunted until his mother Aphrodite was oracularly told that “Love cannot grow without Passion.”  And passion is a reaching out for others, not for oneself, or one’s phantom image.The brilliant psychologist Rollo May summed up our situation by saying that when “eros has lost passion,” it has become “insipid, childish, and banal.”  And when the cult of technique and technology becomes a social addiction, feeling, passion, and individual identity is blotted out and, “mirabile dictu, we discover that the myth [of Eros] proclaims exactly what we have seen happening in our own day, eros, then, even loses interest in sex.”  Except on screens.

Once the human body becomes an object of narcissistic preoccupation –its maintenance, presentation, coddling, etc. – it has become an instrument to be used, as do other people.  The body remains but the human disappears, and the remaining “instrumental” body is “disembodied.”  Once the human body is reduced to a machine and human intercourse in its multiple meanings is accepted as a “mediated reality” through so-called smart devices, we know that the era of humanoids has arrived, as Howard Beale so famously announced in the film Network over forty years ago.  Smart phones for dumb people; always in touch but never touching.

To be human is to be embodied, incarnated, to love and suffer passionately, body and soul.  Sexual passion and tenderness in the service of life, not death.  Eros, not Thanatos. Passion for a suffering world and victims everywhere.  I think one important reason why so many Americans have turned their backs as their government crucifies the rest of the world is because they have lost their bodies not their minds, and in exchanging shadows on the wall for flesh and blood they have abandoned the world and embraced the unreality of things that a capitalist, consumer society proffers in lieu of life.  And as so many great thinkers (Coleridge, Swift, Brown, et al) have pointed out, to try to rise above the body is ironically to equate the body with excrement.  Norman O. Brown writes, “Thus the morbid attempt to get away from the body can only result in a morbid fascination in the death of the body.”  From this flows the narcissistic focus on self-preservation and the spending of one’s life energies on the acquiring of dead things rather than the carefree letting go of one’s love and care into the whole world that is crying out for redemption from an orgy of violence.

Of course, the paradox of the disappearance of the living body into spectral images and things is the departure of the soul as well, the embodied soul.  And a soulless country is a place where reality no longer exists and one can, for example, view Michelangelo’s Pietà and think, “What an amazing sculpture, how did he do it?” but fail to feel heartache and rage that so many mothers across this planet are now weeping and cradling the crushed and crucified bodies of their children, victims of American weapons of war.  Our weapons.  Our wars.

When will we dead awaken?

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely.  He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

31 March 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/03/31/disembodied-americansand-the-crucifixion-of-the-world/

By Cindy Wooden

Jesus does not give up on anyone, he told them

Before washing the feet of 12 prisoners, Pope Francis told them and hundreds of inmates to remember that Jesus constantly stands before them with love, ready to cleanse their sins and forgive them.

“Jesus takes a risk on each of us. Know this: Jesus is called Jesus, not Pontius Pilate. Jesus does not know how to wash his hands of us; he only knows how to take a risk on us,” the pope said on March 29 during his homily at Rome’s Regina Coeli prison.

Pope Francis celebrated the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord’s Supper at the prison and washed the feet of a dozen inmates. Four were Italian; two were from the Philippines; two from Morocco; and one each from Moldova, Colombia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, the Vatican press office said. Eight of the 12 were Catholic; two were Muslim; one was Orthodox; and one was Buddhist.

In his brief homily before the foot-washing ritual, Pope Francis explained to the prisoners that in Jesus’ day, the job of washing feet was the task of a slave. “There wasn’t asphalt or cobblestones, there was dust and people’s feet got dirty,” so before they went into a house, the slaves would wash the person’s feet.

The Gospel recounts Jesus washing the feet of his own disciples “to give us an example of how we must serve one another,” the Pope said.

Another time, he said, Jesus explained to his disciples that kings want to be served.

“Think of the kings and emperors back then, so many were cruel, they insisted on being served by slaves,” the Pope said.

But Jesus told his followers: “Among you, it must not be like this. The one who rules must serve,” the Pope explained.

“Jesus overturns the historic and cultural attitudes of his age — and of today, too,” Pope Francis told the inmates. Jesus says that “the one who rules, in order to be a good boss, must serve. I often think — not of people today because they still are alive and can change their lives, so we cannot judge them — but think of history. If many kings, emperors, heads of state had understood this teaching of Jesus, instead of ruling, being cruel, killing people, if they would have done this, how many wars would not have been fought?”

In his earthly life and still today, the pope said, Jesus goes to “people who are thrown away by society, at least for a while,” and he says to them, “‘You are important to me,’ and Jesus comes to serve us.”

“The sign that Jesus serves us today in Regina Coeli is that he wanted to choose 12 of you today for the washing of the feet,” the pope said.

“I am a sinner like you, but I represent Jesus today. I am his ambassador,” the pope said. “When I kneel before each of you, think, ‘Jesus took a risk on this man, a sinner, to come to me and tell me he loves me.’ This is service. This is Jesus. He never abandons us. He never tires of forgiving us. He loves us so much.”

The pope celebrated the Mass of the Lord’s Supper in the rotunda of the prison, a small central area formed from the intersection of various wings of the jail.

The prison is designed to house just over 600 inmates, but currently houses more than 900 men. Some 65 percent of the inmates are non-Italians, Vatican News reported.

At the end of the Mass, a prisoner publicly thanked Pope Francis for his visit and said the inmates would try to do, at least symbolically, what he recommended at his general audience at the Vatican the day before: celebrate Easter by splashing water on their eyes to look at the world with fresh eyes.

The 81-year-old pope responded by confiding in the prisoners that, like many people his age, he is developing cataracts and will have an operation next year to fix them.

But, he said, as life goes one and people get busy or make mistakes, they can develop “cataracts of the soul” that prevent them from seeing the world with the hope that is born of Jesus’ resurrection.

“Never tire of renewing your gaze, of having that cataract operation on your soul every day,” the Pope told the prisoners.

He also insisted that jail time must be a time to prepare a person to return to society and live as good citizens and that the penalties for crime must be “open to hope.”

“There is no just penalty that is not open to hope,” Pope Francis said. “That is why the death penalty is neither Christian nor human.”

Pope Francis began his visit in the prison infirmary, meeting with prisoners there. After the Mass he was scheduled to visit the prison’s Section VIII, a protected area of the facility for inmates convicted of sexual crimes and other inmates who could be in danger in the general population.

The prison is less than two miles from the Vatican and is no stranger to hosting a pope celebrating Mass. St John XXIII visited in 1958, Blessed Paul VI in 1964 and St John Paul II went in 2000.

The Mass on March 29 marked the fourth time Pope Francis celebrated the Holy Thursday Mass in a detention facility. In 2013, for his first Holy Thursday as Pope, he celebrated in a juvenile detention facility. In 2015 he presided over the Mass and foot-washing ritual at Rebibbia, Rome’s main prison, and in 2017 he went to a prison in Paliano, some 45 miles from Rome.

Cindy Wooden’s professional career started with The Catholic Northwest Progress.

30 March 2018

Source: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2018/03/30/pope-washes-feet-of-prisoners-on-holy-thursday/

By Dr Arshad M Khan

March 20 went by nearly unnoticed.  It was the 15th anniversary of the Iraq war.  Exactly one week earlier seven marines lost their lives in western Iraq in what was reported as a helicopter crash.  The war has not ended.  The flattening of cities to recapture them from ISIS also flattens civilians.  How many dead?  Who knows?  Or, for that matter, who cares?  Yemen?  Where’s that?

A Nobel Peace Laureate destroys Libya and starts the Syrian mayhem.  According to him the war in Afghanistan is good.  Of course, he never saw a young man, legs blown off, screaming for someone to kill him.

If only our forces had stayed longer in Iraq … really?  The results of the Afghan surge are apparent on any map, and the Taliban continue to bomb the most secure section of Kabul, the green zone, with impunity.

The man at the top may espouse the highest moral principles, be a man of faith, or a lascivious bimbo chaser; the results are the same.  And the children learn their lessons well — school shootings averaging one per week this year (one in Maryland last Tuesday) as the unthinkable becomes commonplace.

What news had the ear of the American people on the anniversary of the Iraq War?  Not a  discussion of how and why, or of the neocons maneuvering behind the scenes.  No, it was another Playboy centerfold, Karen McDougal, eager to jump on the cash and media publicity bandwagon suing for the right to tell her story.  Already paid $150,000, she wants more.  To start with, the now 46-year old is selling autographed nude posters from her modeling days for $85 a copy.

Ms. McDougal had an affair with Trump in 2006 when he was married to Melania.  The story was quashed in a tabloid ‘catch and kill’ operation by American Media Inc., the owner the national Enquirer, which is headed by David Pecker, a close friend of Donald Trump.  The contract Ms. McDougal signed gave AMI exclusive rights to her story forever but did not require the company to publish it.  It simply made her shut up.  Well, she has been on CNN, and last week’s bimbo in the news, porn star Stormy Daniels’ interview is to air this Sunday on CBS 60 Minutes.  It may be a calculated gamble for both.

The sordid affair eclipsed any talk of the cost of U.S. wars — about $5 trillion according to the Watson Institute at Brown University.  Meanwhile, the infrastructure is falling apart.  Pot-holed roads, dangerous bridges occasionally collapsing, railroads a half-century behind Europe or Japan or even China in some respects, and the city of Flint, Michigan could have had potable water.  School systems, locally financed through real estate taxes, suffer in poor neighborhoods where Federal cash would not have been amiss.

Also taking a backseat was the heroine of the Iraq war vote, which gave President Bush carte blanche.  Barbara Lee, a Democrat representing California’s 13th District the sole voice in opposition as Senator and Congress members were led by the nose to precipitate a war without waiting for the UN investigators to conclude their work in Iraq and file a report on any weapons of mass destruction.  It took enormous courage on the part of Barbara Lee as she was vilified for her vote and faced numerous death threats.  A true tragedy that her voice fell on deaf ears.

Thousands of dead U.S. soldiers, tens of thousands wounded, hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and millions displaced, many streaming into Europe.  The last causing electoral upheaval and a shot in the arm for right-wing extremists whose parties are becoming an important electoral factor.  Effects of their nationalisms are evident as the UK is peeled off the EU and racism takes an ugly foothold in Europe.

In Trump’s White House junction, the comings and goings continue.  General H. R. McMaster the National Security Adviser has been replaced by John Bolton — the very same John Bolton who as George Bush’s ambassador to the UN managed to offend and enrage almost every one.  Suckled at neocon think tanks and the Muslim-baiting Gatestone Institute, he can only increase the chances for war with Iran.

Dr Arshad M Khan (http://ofthisandthat.org/index.html) is a former Professor based in the U.S. whose comments over several decades have appeared in a wide-ranging array of print and internet media.

25 March 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/03/25/trumps-past-dominates-media-displacing-iraq-war-anniversary/

By Tamara Nassar

An Israeli military court has approved a plea deal which will see Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi serve an eight-month prison sentence on top of a fine of nearly $1,500.

Ahed, who turned 17 in January, was charged with assaulting soldiers and incitement after a video recorded by her mother Nariman circulated, showing Ahed and her cousin Nour slapping and shoving two heavily armed Israeli soldiers on 15 December.

Ahed was arrested in the middle of the night at her home in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on 19 December.

Nour and Nariman were also detained by the army following the videotaped incident and have been sentencedto time served – 16 days in prison – and eight months in prison, respectively, after accepting plea deals.

“Something shameful”

The military court dropped several of its initial charges against Ahed, for which she faced up to 10 years in prison, according to the prisoners solidarity group Samidoun.

An Israeli military court ruled on Sunday that proceedings in Ahed’s case were to be held behind closed doors, rejecting her appeal for a public trial on the basis that it was for “the minor’s benefit.”

“It seems like it finally dawned on them that there’s something shameful about the proceedings against [Ahed], and that it is better to hold a secret trial rather than make public this legal farce,” Ahed’s lawyer Gaby Lasky told The Electronic Intifada prior to the ruling.

Israel’s military courts deny basic due process rights and have a near-100 percent conviction rate for Palestinians.

Concerned by these abuses, 21 members of US Congress are backing legislation to bar Israel from using American aid for the imprisonment and abuse of Palestinian children like Ahed Tamimi.

There are currently more than 300 Palestinian children in Israeli military detention.

Revenge campaign

Ahed’s viral videotaped confrontation with the soldiers occurred outside her home hours after Israeli soldiers shot in the head and seriously injured her 15-year-old cousin Muhammad Fadel Tamimi.

Muhammad was also arrested by Israeli soldiers on 26 January along with several other members of the Tamimi family, most of them children. Muhammad was released after being interrogated.

The Tamimi family is known for its unarmed resistance to Israel’s encroachment on their village of Nabi Saleh.

Ahed’s arrest made international headlines and rallied global support for her freedom, causing major embarrassment for Israel.

Israeli officials made bizarre and absurd claims about her family, with deputy minister Michael Oren positingthat the Tamimis were a group of “blond, blue-eyed and light-skinned” actors hired to “make Israel look bad.”

Yoav Mordechai, the general who oversees COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation, claimed that the injury to Muhammad Tamimi’s head was caused not by an Israeli soldier’s bullet, but by the child falling off his bike – an outlandish story soon debunked by journalists and human rights defenders.

Discrimination

While Ahed Tamimi was sentenced to eight months for slapping and shoving occupation soldiers, Israeli army medic Elor Azarya will be released from prison in May after serving only nine months for executing a prone Palestinian who lay incapacitated on a Hebron street.

Azarya’s 18-month sentence was shortened to 14 months in September. This week a military parole board ordered Azarya’s release after serving two-thirds of his sentence.
https://twitter.com/benabyad/status/976499101717225473

An Israeli military court had ruled that Azarya’s act was motivated by revenge.

The chief prosecutor in the case stated Azarya has shown no remorse and taken no responsibility for his actions but poses no danger to the public, according to Haaretz.

Meanwhile, David Muial was sentenced to community service on Wednesday after participating in the lynching of Eritrean asylum seeker Haftom Zarhum in October 2015.

Zarhum, 29, was severely beaten and shot to death by a mob of Israeli soldiers, prison officers and police after they mistook him for the gunman who had opened fire moments earlier at the central bus station in Beer Sheva, a city in southern Israel.

Israel refused to recognize Zarhum as a “terror victim” on grounds that he had entered Israel illegally, preventing his family from claiming compensation.

Tamara Nassar is an assistant editor at The Electronic Intifada.

25 March 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/03/25/israel-sentences-ahed-tamimi-to-eight-months-in-prison/

By Abdus Sattar Ghazali

China has sold Pakistan a powerful tracking system in an unprecedented deal that could speed up the Pakistani military’s development of multi-warhead missiles, South China Morning Post has reported.

News of the sale – and evidence that China is supporting Pakistan’s rapidly developing missile program  – comes two months after India tested its most advanced nuclear-ready intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with a range long enough to hit Beijing or Shanghai, the paper said.

Chinese authorities declassified information about the deal on March 21. A statement on the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) website said China was the first country to export such sensitive equipment to Pakistan. Zheng Mengwei, a researcher with the CAS Institute of Optics and Electronics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, confirmed to the South China Morning Post that Pakistan had bought a highly sophisticated, large-scale optical tracking and measurement system from China.

The Pakistani military recently deployed the Chinese-made system “at a firing range” for use in testing and developing its new missiles, he said.

India and Pakistan are in a heated race to build up their nuclear weapons capabilities.

Agni-V

India’s January 18 test of its Agni-V ICBM, with a range of more than 5,000km (3,100 miles), is seen as a message that the South Asian giant can deploy a credible nuclear deterrent against China, the Chinese paper said.

While India’s single-warhead missiles are bigger and cover longer distances, Pakistan has focused its efforts on developing multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), a type of missile carrying several nuclear warheads that can be directed towards different targets.

Beijing’s powerful missile arsenal has driven New Delhi to improve its weapons systems in recent years, with the Agni-V believed to be able to strike nearly all of China.

Tension flared last year between the two neighbors over a long-disputed section of their border high in the Himalayas. India is also increasingly concerned about Beijing’s efforts to heighten its influence in the Indian Ocean.

India is already able to strike anywhere inside neighboring Pakistan, its arch-rival.

The Agni-V launch comes one day after India announced that it was spending US$553 million on new weapons for its border guards, including those on the borders of Tibet.

Ababeel missile

The US Defense Intelligence Agency officially confirmed in March that Pakistan conducted the first test launch of its nuclear-capable Ababeel missile in January 2017, “demonstrating South Asia’s first MIRV payload”, according to South China Morning Post .

Although the Ababeel missile has a range of only 2,200km, it can deliver numerous warheads to different targets. The technology has the potential to overwhelm a missile defense system, wiping out an adversary’s nuclear arsenal in one surprise attack.

There are growing concerns that MIRV technology will tip the strategic balance between India and Pakistan and destabilize the subcontinent, the Post said adding:

“India has so far not found success in building a system that can effectively deliver more than one nuclear warhead at a time.”

It has been a long-held notion that Beijing is supporting Islamabad’s missile development program. But solid evidence can seldom be found in the public domain, making the CAS statement a rarity.

“The system’s performance surpassed the user’s expectations,” it said, adding that it was considerably more complex than Pakistan’s home-made systems. It did not reveal how much Pakistan paid for the system.

Optical system

An optical system is a critical component in missile testing. It usually comes with a pair of high-performance telescopes equipped with a laser ranger, high-speed camera, infrared detector and a centralised computer system that automatically captures and follows moving targets.

The device records high-resolution images of a missile’s departure from its launcher, stage separation, tail flame and, after the missile re-enters atmosphere, the trajectory of the warheads it releases.

The uniqueness of the Chinese-made system lay in its use of four telescope units, “more than normally required”, Zheng said.

Each telescope, with a detection range of several hundred kilometres, is positioned in a different location, with their timing synchronised precisely with atomic clocks. Together, the telescopes provide visual information of unprecedented detail and accuracy, which missile developers can use to improve designs and engine performance.

Using more telescopes allows the system to track more warheads simultaneously from different angles, reducing the risk of losing a target.

High-quality optics are essential in missile development, especially MIRVs, said Rong Jili, deputy director at the Beijing Institute of Technology’s School of Aerospace Engineering.

Other types of tracking devices, such as radar, can collect more precise data at longer distances, but the Chinese-made optical system provided the intuitive, close-up look at real-life action that missile developers craved, he said.

Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Chief Editor of the Journal of America (www.journalofamerica.net).

24 March 2018

Source: https://countercurrents.org/2018/03/24/china-provides-powerful-tracking-system-for-pakistans-icbm-program/