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By Garikai Chengu

Wednesday marked the anniversary of the death of one of the developing world’s greatest heroes: Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.

In 2002, Washington backed a failed coup against Mr. Chavez’s democratically elected government. Twelve years on, history appears to be repeating itself: the rightwing, which cannot get elected, is trying to depose the elected government with violent protests and Washington’s assistance.

What may have begun as peaceful student-driven protests in Venezuela, have now descended into a crude Washington-backed attempt at regime change.

So what makes Venezuela so important to Washington? Any real estate agent could tell you: location. Given that Venezuela sits atop the strategic intersection of the Caribbean, South and Central American worlds, control of the nation, has always been a remarkably effective way to project power into these three regions and beyond.

Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves. At the heart of Venezuela’s current turmoil is Washington’s anger that Venezuela’s oil money is going to help its people and not into American shareholders’ pockets. The issue inVenezuela is not democracy, it is oil.

Over the past half century, America has descended from popular democracy to corporate dictatorship. Enthusiasm and voter participation have declined immensely and corporate control over politics has increased markedly.

In fact, over the last few years, the top thirty American companies spent more money on lobbying politicians than they paid in federal taxes, according to a report from the non-partisan reform group Public Campaign.

The “democratic” process is slowly but surely breaking down in the United States. American voter turnout is less than 50%, this is the lowest of all countries in the entire developed world. Most Americans do not even bother to vote anymore because they realize that neither party actually represents the interest of a majority of the U.S. voters, but merely those of corporate lobby groups and, of course, Wall Street.

America has made it her mission to spread democracy around the world, often at the expense of much blood and treasure. How can a country claim to be the role model for democracies around the globe, and yet have the worst participation in one of the key elements of democratic rule, namely voting?

Elections in America, consist in presenting the population with two variants of the same pre-designed policy to vote for: free-market neoliberal capitalism. This policy benefits the elite at the expense of the majority by promoting further privatization of public services, frozen wages, job losses, and reduced social benefits.

Nobody should have any illusions. The United States essentially has a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

The narrowing gap between the policies of major political parties in America reflects a widening of an on-going decay in the liberal democratic system.

From 1958 to 1998 Venezuela also had a two-party “democracy” whereby two indistinguishable parties took turns governing the country, whilst left wing activists were persecuted.

This so-called “Punto Fijo” system suffered a legitimacy crisis in 1989 when then president Carlos Andrez Perez put in place IMF neoliberal austerity policies. These neoliberal policies put the interests of foreign capital over local labour.

This created a wave of riots and protests, which resulted in the pro-Washington government of Mr. Andres Perez killing four thousand innocent civilians.

Disgruntled by policies that favored the local elite and foreign corporations, the people stood behind Hugo Chavez, and in 1998 he was elected president and the Bolivarian Revolution was born.

One of Mr. Chavez’s first major moves was to enact arguably one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. It provided a framework for widespread bottom up democratic reform and gave Venezuelans new political, civil and social rights.

As it stands, Venezuelans are able to recall elected representatives from their posts, and directly submit laws for discussion in the National Assembly, among other rights.

Perhaps one of the most outstanding aspects of Venezuelan democratic reform is the electoral system and the technology used to record, verify, and transmit votes. Voters touch a computer screen to cast their vote and then receive a paper receipt. This system makes vote-rigging nearly impossible. Former US President Jimmy Carter won a Nobel Peace prize for election monitoring and he called Venezuela’s recent election “the most democratic in the world.”

Venezuela’s “21st-century socialism” is a unique experiment in the pages of history. It stands in stark contrast with past socialist examples, like the Soviet Union, where the state seized control of the means of production and one revolutionary party had top down control of society. What makes Venezuela’s experience original is its it’s emphasis on participatory democracy, the exercise of power from the community level. As Hugo Chávez proclaimed in 2007, “pure socialism has to be rooted in communal power, the communal councils.”

In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have been organizing tens of thousands of consejos comunales (communal councils). The councils are involved in everything from housing, education, forming cooperatives to supervising health care facilities.

Democracy is not merely about holding elections simply to choose which particular representatives of the elite class should rule over the masses. True democracy is about democratizing the economy and giving economic power to the majority.

Truth is, the West has shown that unfettered free markets and genuinely free elections simply cannot co-exist. Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. How can capitalism and democracy co-exist if one concentrates wealth and power in the hands of few, and the other seeks to spread power and wealth among many?

Venezuela’s socialist system however, seeks to spread economic power amongst the majority rather than just the privileged few. The richest 400 Americans own more wealth than the majority of 150,000,000 Americans combined.

In stark contrast, under Chavez, Venezuela has gone from being one of the most unequal countries in Latin America to the most equal one in terms of income. Mr. Chavez, has funneled Venezuela’s oil revenues into social spending such as free healthcare, education, subsidized food networks, and housing construction. In Venezuela, poverty has been reduced and pensions have expanded. In America it has been the absolute reverse.

Democracy is not merely about elections. True democracy is also about equal opportunity through education and the right to life through access to health care. In Venezuela, the masses enjoy free health care and free education.

In America, education is increasingly becoming a privilege, not a right and ultimately, a debt sentence. If a talented child in the richest nation on earth cannot afford to go to the best schools, society has failed that child. In fact, for young people the world over, education is a passport to freedom. Any nation that makes one pay exorbitant amounts for such a passport is only free for the rich, but not the poor.

In Venezuela, education is human right and it is free for all Venezuelans.

For millions of Americans, health care is also increasingly becoming a privilege not a right. A recent study by Harvard Medical School estimates that lack of health insurance causes 44,789 excess deaths annually in America. In Venezuela, health care is a human right and it is free for all Venezuelans. Thus, with regards to health care, education and economic justice, is America in any position to lecture Venezuela about democracy or should America take a leaf out of Venezuela ‘s playbook?

Nothing is perfect of course, and all of these successes of Venezuelan democracy do not mean that the system is without failure. Corruption and bureaucracy are phenomena that slow further radical democratization and erode support for the Bolivarian revolution as a whole.

With that said, while the West’s corporate-controlled media have chosen to perpetuate an Orwellian illusion whereby America and Britain are models of democracy and Venezuela is a backward country run by an “autocratic regime”, in the real world the reality is clearly otherwise.

Voter participation and trust in government in America is at an all-time low, because Americans are increasingly realizing that both political parties serve the interests of a small elite. Clearly, America can learn a great deal from Venezuela’s unique and profound democratic experience.

Garikai Chengu is a scholar at Harvard University.

06 March, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Farooque Chowdhury

With accusation of surveillance and espionage “mysterious” snipers in Kiev are coming out to light as diplomacy is unfolding over uncertain Ukraine.

The snipers were, as media from Moscow reported, hired by pro-Western predator leaders in the Kiev Independence square dubbed Maidan. Mainstream media is “missing” the information. The sniper-incident demonstrates the old formula for intervention: engineer, fabricate, manipulate, create confusion and chaos, and spill blood.

Citing a leaked phone conversation between Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign affairs chief, and Urmas Paet, the Estonian foreign minister, which has emerged online, the Russian media report said: “The snipers who shot at protesters and police in Kiev were allegedly hired by Maidan leaders”. The file was reportedly uploaded to the web by officers of Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) loyal to ousted president Yanukovich. The SBU officers hacked the conversation over phone.

According to the media reports, Paet said during conversation with Ashton: “There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new coalition.” Ashton’s response was: “I think we do want to investigate. I mean, I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh.” (“Kiev snipers hired by Maidan leaders – leaked EU’s Ashton phone tape”, March 5, 2014)

The call took place after Paet visited Kiev on February 25, following the peak of clashes between the pro-EU protesters and security forces in the Ukrainian capital.

Paet recalled his conversation with Olga Bogomolets, the main physician for the Maidan mobile clinic when protests turned violent. She treated the seriously injured and helped organize their transportation to neighboring countries that were willing to treat the critically wounded. She said that both protesters and police were shot at by the same people.

The Estonian minister stressed: “All the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and then people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides.” Ashton reaction was: “Well, yeah…that’s, that’s terrible.” Olga showed Paet a few photos. According to Paet, Olga said that as a medical doctor she can say that it is the “same type of bullets, and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened.”

Olga, the media reports said, blamed the injuries and deaths on snipers. She turned down the position of vice prime minister of Ukraine for humanitarian affairs offered by the coup-appointed regime.

The Estonian minister has described the sniper issue as “disturbing” and added, “it already discredits from the very beginning” the new Ukrainian power. His overall impressions of what he saw during his one-day trip to Kiev are “sad,” Paet said during the conversation.

He stressed that the Ukrainian people don’t trust the Maidan leaders, with all the opposition politicians slated to join the new government “having dirty past.” (ibid.)

Estonian foreign ministry has confirmed the recording of the conversation with Ashton is authentic. Paet told RIA-Novosti news agency that he talked to Ashton last week right after retiring from Kiev, but refrained from further comments, saying that he has to “listen to the tape first.” (“Estonian Foreign Ministry confirms authenticity of leaked call on Kiev snipers”, March 5, 2014)

“It’s very disappointing that such surveillance took place altogether. It’s not a coincidence that this conversation was uploaded [to the web] today,” the minister stressed. “My conversation with Ashton took place last week right after I returned from Kiev. At that time I was already in Estonia,” said Paet. In a press conference about the leaked tape on Wednesday, Paet said the Kiev incidents must become the subject of an independent investigation.

“We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition’s involvement in the violence”, said an Estonian foreign ministry statement. It added that the minister was only providing an overview of what he had heard during his Kiev visit.

Russian news outlet RT contacted Ashton’s spokesperson, Maja Kocijancic, who said “we don’t comment on leaked phone conversations.” The US government declined to comment on the leaked phone conversation. According to ITAR-TASS, the US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said she had nothing to say on the issue. However, she did accuse Russia of leaking the tape, stating that “this was another example of how the Russians work.” (ibid.)

Citing the Estonian minister’s leaked phone conversation RIA Novosti said in a report from Tallinn: Snipers who shot at protesters and police in Kiev were allegedly linked to “somebody from the new coalition”. The minister added: “Distorted versions of the record, which are intended to discredit the Ukrainian government, have also emerged. I was only speaking about versions of what was going on in Ukraine.

Observation of a US politician has added more questions after the claim on Kiev snipers.

Dennis Kucinich, former Ohio congressman and Democratic presidential candidate said the Ukraine incident was driven by covert action by the US. Kucinich made the comments only a few days ago while speaking to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, arguing US meddling in Ukraine’s affairs is what sparked the current situation in the first place and that Ukrainians were being exploited by Western powers.

Asked how he’d handle the tense standoff if he were president, Kucinich said the following: “What I’d do is not have USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy working with US taxpayers’ money to knock off an elected government in Ukraine, which is what they did. I wouldn’t try to force the people of Ukraine into a deal with NATO against their interest or into a deal with the European Union, which is against their economic interest.” “So, it’s the USA’s fault that Putin rolled in? We made them do it?” O’Reilly asked. “Bill O’Reilly, if you don’t believe in cause and effect, I don’t know what I can do for you,” Kucinich said.

The observation can’t be easily ignored.

The sniper-incident and the claimed involvement of NED and other external actors expose brutal and dirty tricks employed for preparing ground for intervention. Broadly similar tricks were visible in Iraq, Syria and Venezuela. The role of NED has been discussed by Dr. Kim Scipes, Associate Professor of Sociology at Purdue University North Central in Westville, US, in the article “National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Venezuela”. Some other countries have also experienced similar tricks and different levels of intervention in the recent past.

It should not be imagined that the nasty tricks will not be employed in other societies in future. Rather imperial powers will vigorously resort to employing similar tricks the more they face rejections in other societies. There will be destabilization campaigns in societies.

To make the incidents appear genuine, the first phase implemented by the imperial powers is to initiate a propaganda war using credible media outlets. A number of societies face the threat.

In the propaganda war, one-sided, distorted and negative picture is repeatedly presented. Writers posing as credible and organizations posing as standing for rights are employed for this purpose. The assigned writers resort to fabrication and use the tact of disinformation instead of being factual and objective. They completely hide imperialist role in respective society.

The hired writers’ attempts gain ground as the political forces opposing imperial intervention relies on bureaucratic measures instead of informing and mobilizing people. With increased competition among the major economies and people searching progressive way of life poor societies face more incidents of intervention.

Farooque Chowdhury is Dhaka-based freelancer.

06 March, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Fyodor Lukyanov

A new phase has begun between Russia and America: 25 years of assurances that the Cold War is over and that the United States and Russia are no longer enemies is ending with an open political confrontation over Ukraine. Washington’s intention to impose sanctions against Russia threatens to radically change not only the atmosphere of relations but also the nature of their cooperation. For the last year or two, this cooperation has basically been forced anyway, where it was impossible to avoid it — Syria, Afghanistan and Iran. There has been no other agenda since the New START Treaty was ratified and Russia joined the World Trade Organization (WTO).

For Russia, Ukraine is an issue of principle, and cannot be compared with any other issue. As the Russian conservative magazine Expert wrote, “It is impossible to retreat any farther. … For Russia, maintaining our presence in Ukraine means much more than holding the G-8 summit in Sochi and even more than membership in the organization itself.” In addition to the cultural-historical and strategic reasons why Ukraine is very important for Moscow, this conflict is the culmination of a quarter-century of politics.

The majority of the population and a considerable part of the Russian establishment has the perception that for all this time (or most of it), the country has regressed, and has been forced to abandon its geopolitical position. In the beginning, because of growing weakness, then because of the collapse of 1991 and the ensuing deep crisis, and then out of caution and in the hope of achieving a “great deal” with the West by diplomatic and economic methods. The widespread opinion in Russia is that it all ended in failure, because neither America nor Europe plans to amicably recognize Russia as an equal partner. Russian President Vladimir Putin is certain that they only understand severity and force, such as that which occurred in 2008. Then, despite the universal indignation about the war in the Caucasus, no real sanctions were imposed, and at the same time, the question of admission of Ukraine and Georgia for NATO membership was withdrawn from the agenda.

The fall of Viktor Yanukovich’s regime and the subsequent chaos in Kiev meant the prospect that the future Ukrainian state will be used to take revenge for previous failures of Western policy. It is no accident that everyone unanimously noted the unprecedented achievements of Russian diplomacy in 2013. Putin decided that the costs associated with intervention at this stage will be lower than the risks that Russia will face if Ukraine becomes much more nationalistic with the support of the West and, naturally, becomes a country oriented toward a Euro-Atlantic blueprint.

Nevertheless, the issue now is not Ukraine, whose prospects are extremely cloudy, but how to adjust Russian-American relations in the new context.

The sanctions are not reviving the Cold War situation: Back then, the superpowers did not use such sanctions. There was simply a parallel and barely connected coexistence with each other according to different principles, and there were limitations built into the logic of confrontation itself. Now, Washington’s warnings are shifting the relations into an entirely different framework — actions of the United States and its allies against leaders they found disagreeable in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. Moscow has always been fundamentally opposed to sanctions as an international instrument: First, they do not achieve the desired result, and second, they set in motion a mechanism of pressure, whose ultimate consequence is military intervention. The Russian leader’s position in the category of “rogue leaders” is extremely offensive and inevitably causes a severe response.

Putin is the type of politician who forgets nothing and leaves nothing unanswered. This has been observed many times and at different levels. Beginning with the activation of military-technical cooperation with Venezuela (near the United States) precisely at the moment when Washington turned Georgia (bordered by Russia) into its ally. And ending with symmetrical incidents with diplomats. At the same time, Putin has his own very precise idea about the scale of responses and about what lines should not be crossed.

In the Middle East, where Russian-American cooperation is most active, there are two types of effects — short-term and more foundational. In the short term, Russia is likely to dramatically reduce its interest in settlement of the Syrian situation, especially since official Damascus reluctantly and in response to rather strong Russian pressure agreed to continue the talks. The military-political situation in Syria allows Bashar al-Assad to have hope for victory, or at least for a long-term preservation of the current balance. Moscow will simply stop applying pressure on him, urging the need for diplomacy, but will continue to add to his arsenal when necessary to maintain the balance of power. The removal of chemical weapons will most likely not be slowed in any way, since this represents the implementation of Putin’s idea, and moreover, stalling the plan would dramatically exacerbate the whole situation.

Cooperation on Afghanistan, more precisely assistance in the withdrawal of American troops from the country via Russia — is a much more complex issue. In August 2008, when Moscow’s relations with NATO were frozen due to the war between Russia and Georgia and the political situation dramatically deteriorated, the parties deliberately did not touch upon the subject of the Afghan transit. The conversation then was about shipments into Afghanistan. In the same way, Putin completely ignored the protests within the country when the issue of providing NATO with a temporary airfield in the Russian city of Ulyanovsk was decided (it is an interesting coincidence that this is the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin). Since the beginning of the Afghan operation in 2001, which Moscow actively supported then, the Russian president has always considered this issue important for Russia. And this issue is not subject to changes in the state of affairs. Now it can turn out differently, although there are various possibilities. Everything will depend on the extent of the US sanctions, and to what degree they will be demonstrative and offensive. The Kremlin understands that as a last resort, the United States will do without the northern route, but it will be more expensive and require considerable diplomatic efforts from Washington in dealing with Pakistan.

Iran is the most interesting topic. There are plenty of opinions in Moscow now that thetentative rapprochement between Tehran and Washington is harmful to Russian interests. Russia will not interfere with the diplomatic process that began last fall, but it will try to win over Iran with offers of much greater strategic cooperation. Iran has long said that Russia is insincere when it talks about wanting friendly relations with Tehran, because ultimately it always looks back at Washington. Now there is a chance that Moscow will no longer do this and that it will chart a course toward closer and more comprehensive contacts with Iran. The promotion of military-technical cooperation is proceeding at a natural pace, which was overshadowed by the refusal to supply S-300 systems under President Dmitry Medvedev. Russian-Iranian cooperation greatly strengthened due to Syria, but the conflict between Moscow and Washington can advance an institutional development of this cooperation.

All in all, a serious confrontation between Russia and the United States promises to dramatically reshape the geopolitical balance of the Middle East. Over the past three years, Moscow scored a lot of points there — again, thanks to the consistent and uncompromising stance on Syria and the cautious attitude toward the revolution. Until recently, Russia did not really try to capitalize on these achievements and limited its efforts to expand markets. However, the clash over Ukraine may force Russia to conduct a more active anti-American course in the region, especially since many countries there are very annoyed at the strange zigzags that the United States performs.

Coordinating activities with China is also possible. Beijing cannot be considered an ally of Moscow and it views the Ukrainian conflict with great caution. However, China understands that the failure of Russia in Ukraine and the spread of Western influence there can shift the overall balance in favor of the United States and weaken the role of Russia as a counterweight. Therefore, China can seize the moment to strengthen military-political contacts with Moscow, particularly in the Middle East, where Beijing has significant interests.

The role of Turkey is a separate issue. Crimea, which has generated such passions, was historically under the dominion and influence of Turkey (until the last quarter of the 18th century). Crimean Tatars who inhabited the peninsula always maintained ties with their neighboring country (a large diaspora lives there), and when Crimea became part of independent Ukraine, Turkish influence grew rapidly. It is no accident that immediately after the crisis began in Ankara, Chairman of the Russian State Duma Sergey Naryshkin went there. It is important to Moscow that the Turkish authorities remain neutral in the conflict over Crimea. Turkey, meanwhile, may try to use the situation to its advantage, especially since things are not going well for Ankara in the Middle East and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is experiencing a severe political crisis. Diverting the public’s attention to external affairs would be very timely.

Ukraine is the most acute international crisis involving Russia since the end of the Cold War. And it’s not because of the strategic importance of this country. It’s just that a conflict in a country that is psychologically very important for Moscow is occurring at a time when the previous world order ceases to be operative and a new one is beginning to arise. So, Kiev has unwittingly become the intersection of world history.

Fyodor Lukyanov is a columnist for Al-Monitor. He is the editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs.

5 March, 2014

Al-monitor.com

 

By Joe Catron

Agricultural organizations in the Gaza Strip are working with academic and other civil society groups to prepare for Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW).

Local events, as part of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, will run from Sunday, 9 March through Thursday, 13 March in the besieged coastal enclave.

“On the last day, I can guarantee we’ll have a good activity,” said Saad Ziada, field coordinator with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees in the Gaza Strip and its representative on the local IAW preparatory committee. “I expect 600-700 people will participate, at least.”

The Union of Agricultural Work Committees will organize the last of this year’s local events, a gathering for farmers and fishermen in the Gaza seaport on 13 March.

“Why in the Gaza port?” Ziada said. “Because Palestinian fishermen are prevented from entering and using our sea for their resources. At the same time, Israelis freely use the sea, which is our sea. This is a clear example of Israel’s discrimination and apartheid policies.”

Targeting farmers, fishermen

A joint report, issued a month ago by the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva, Switzerland, found “522 documented shooting incidents targeting fishermen at sea, resulting in nine civilian deaths, 47 injuries and 422 detentions” off the Gaza coast between 1997 and 30 November 2013.

During the same reporting period, the report states, “The facts available suggest that hundreds of farmers were unarmed when they were shot at and injured” (“Under fire: Israel’s enforcement of access restricted areas in the Gaza Strip,” January 2014 [PDF]

A year ago, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees held a rally in the seaport, as well as another in the so-called “buffer zone” by the separation barrier surrounding the Gaza Strip, to support a boycott of Israeli agricultural products.

These events were part of a “Farming Injustice” campaign that included actions in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, as well as 40 European cities.

Activating the boycott

“This year, we want to activate the boycott of Israeli products in the Gaza Strip,” Ziada said. “We want farmers and fishermen to be involved in these activities, to know more about boycott and normalization.”

“The boycott movement will not be just for students and academics,” said Mohamed Abu Samra, an activist with the Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel. “It must include all sectors of Palestinian society.”

As another member of the preparatory committee, Abu Samra has helped to plan a range of talks, films and presentations in the Nuseirat municipal hall, the Palestine Red Crescent Society building and the Women’s Development Center.

He also worked with other Gaza activists to film an Israeli Apartheid Week promotional video.

“BDS gives us a wide area for the biggest part of the population to participate in a kind of resistance, and it’s succeeding,” Abu Samra said.

Workshops

The Arab Center for Agricultural Development, another organization involved in Israeli Apartheid Week has an ongoing campaign to encourage the boycott of Israeli agricultural products by Gaza Strip farmers.

“Last year, we had three workshops on BDS with farmers and other groups,” said Abeer Abu Shawish, the center’s project coordinator and the Israeli Apartheid Week preparatory committee member. “These workshops aren’t finished. We’ll keep them going, to reach all the farmers in Gaza and encourage them to support BDS.”

The center will focus its other major campaign, organizing accompaniment for olive farmers during the harvest season, on the West Bank and coordinate it with the BDS National Committee this year, Abu Shawish said.

In the Gaza Strip, the center plans to increase its boycott activities.

“ACAD will recruit a coordinator just for BDS, to be responsible for all the activities we will have in the BDS campaign,” Abu Shawish said. “We are going to do more activities in all the Gaza governorates, in cooperation with our partners in the West Bank. We are also producing posters, newsletters, social media, radio announcements and other publicity tools. It is a main program in our strategic plan this year.”

Challenge

Despite enthusiasm for BDS by civil society groups like the Arab Center for Agricultural Development and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees and their constituencies, implementing it under occupation and siege in the Gaza Strip poses a challenge.

“You cannot ask people not to buy something for which they don’t have an alternative, especially after the closure of the tunnels,” said Mohsen Abu Ramadan, ACAD’s director in Gaza and one of three representatives of the Palestinian NGO Network on the BDS National Committee. “Most of the commodities now come through Kerem Shalom [crossing from Israel].”

Abu Shawish agreed that the siege presents the biggest obstacle to boycotting Israel from Gaza.

“The main difficulty is that we don’t have alternatives to many, many products,” she said. “We can’t stop using them all. If we don’t have an alternative product, whether local, national or international, we have to use the Israeli one.”

But the local boycott has cultural value, she said, even if its economic impact is necessarily limited.

“It’s a kind of resistance. People can do it themselves, without it costing anything.”

“We try to make the boycott a culture, as part of a resistance mentality,” Abu Ramadan said.

Gaza IAW, and local BDS activities in general, contribute strength to a global effort, Abu Samra said.

“It raises the awareness of BDS among people in the Palestinian community, and support the BDS movement outside Palestine. BDS succeeded in the past, in South Africa, and we think it will succeed in ending the occupation now.”

Joe Catron is a US activist in Gaza, Palestine.

3 March 2014

The Electronic Intifada

 

By Dr. Ghoncheh Tazmini

The genesis of the Ukraine imbroglio are clear: The present regime in Kiev and its supporters, backed by North Atlantic and Western European powers have violated the fundamental principle of democratic governance by unconstitutionally ousting a democratically-elected president – Viktor Yanukovich came to power through a free and fair election in 2010.

The struggle that is taking place, however, is not over the Crimea, or the Ukraine, or Russia, but a struggle for world order. It is a struggle to perpetuate the unilateral international system – a system in which an ‘Atlantic-type polity’ has been erected at the zenith of politics, to use Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s words. The conflict is an exercise of political posturing. It is not about establishing political order and stability in the Ukraine, the return of Crimea to Russia or about saving Ukrainians and Crimeans from bloodshed or violence. The Ukraine has become a proxy battleground for the enduring geopolitical rivalry with Russia. What hangs in the balance is the perpetuation of North Atlantic and Western European hegemonic power.

Three imperatives inform Russian foreign policy: Russia as a nuclear superpower, Russia as a world power, and Russia as the central power in the post-Soviet geopolitical space. The overthrow of a legitimately elected president is perceived in Moscow as the attempt by the West to consolidate its hegemony over Ukraine and by Ukrainian nationalists over the Russophone population and to meddle in Russia’s historical backyard.

At the end of the Cold War, as agreed with the western powers, Russia disbanded the Warsaw Pact, its military alliance. However, the United States and NATO breached their word to Russia, by adding most of Eastern Europe and the Balkan states to their own military alliance, and by building military bases along Russia’s southern border. Ever since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the EU and NATO have been intent on surrounding Russia with military bases and puppet regimes sympathetic to the West, often installed by ‘colour revolutions’.

The EU Member States’ foreign ministers, and its special representative, Baroness Ashton, have worked to tie the Ukraine to the EU by an agreement of association. Since the establishment of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) in 2009, the countries to the East of the EU have been under pressure to choose between the EU and the Russian-inspired Customs Union. When this was abandoned by Yanukovich, the EU backed his removal and helped put in place a new government sympathetic to the EU’s objectives. For Russia, closer trade ties between the EU and the Ukraine are perceived as a geopolitical threat and an effort to lure Russia’s near abroad into the Western orbit.

The Ukrainian conflict and the seizure of Crimea pose a challenge to the EU and it exposes Europe’s deepest anxieties. To avoid facing up to its own inexorable decline, the EU, like the United States, has plunged ahead with a radically anti-Russian geopolitical and ideological agenda based on left-wing fantasies about resurgent nationalism in Moscow. More significantly, the Ukraine debacle exposes the failure of the EU to realise an inclusive and pan-European solution that genuinely addresses sovereignty, security and economic order on Europe’s contested borderlands.

Dr Ghoncheh is with the Iranian Heritage Foundation Visiting Fellow. She is also a Just member.

 

By Nile Bowie

A lasting peace agreement between Israel and Palestine will forever be a hypothetical as long as ethnic Arabs are forced to acquiesce to punishing structures of discrimination as part of the Obama administration’s new framework for peace talks.

In the two decades since the historic but unrealized Oslo agreement, the Palestinian leadership under the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) has consistently met Israeli demands. The promise that a permanent Palestinian settlement based on UN resolutions 242 and 338 would be founded, and that Israel would withdraw to pre-1967 borders, looks as distant today as it was in 1993. Palestinians were told to renounce violence and recognize the state of Israel, which effectively amounted to relinquishing Palestinian claims on a full 78 percent of their country, in exchange for Israel merely recognizing the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. The historic and overwhelming compromise of the Palestinian leadership has met all equitable demands that could be imposed on them with regard to recognizing Israel without being reciprocally recognized as an independent Palestine. Aside from being strong-armed into making punishing – even humiliating – diplomatic compromises, the Palestinian people have endured an occupation that displays a callous disregard for human life by killing thousands of Palestinian civilians, including children, in Gaza and the occupied West Bank with near total impunity.

Israeli leaders have come and gone since the 1967 war, and nearly every US president has unsuccessfully tried their hand at sealing a deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The political ascent of US President Barack Obama was broadly perceived to be a turning point by dispirited Palestinians; they hoped that a man who once compared the fate of the Palestinians with that of African-Americans would be able to ease their plight with some modicum of justice. Since coming to office, American aid to Israel has increased as settlement construction reached all-time highs, while Washington rejected Palestine’s successful move to upgrade its status at the United Nations to a non-member state. Obama lent his support to Israel in opposing Palestine’s application to UNESCO, the UN’s cultural and scientific body, and cut funding to the Palestinian Authority when the bid was successful. Palestinians have come to know better after six years of Obama, and there is a broad realization that the best deal he can broker entails total Palestinian submission. Washington’s support for the two-state solution comes not from a commitment to seeking a just solution for the Palestinian people, but from the mounting political liability of further condoning intransigent and blatantly illegal Israeli policies.

Stealing your homeland, and your historical narrative

Amidst the ongoing attempts by Washington to broker a new framework for peace, PM Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to capitulate on an issue with troubling legal, religious, historical and social implications: a demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state.” Netanyahu, with obsessive zeal, repeated his calls for Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and to “abandon the fantasy” of refugees returning to Israel during a speech at a recent AIPAC conference. After decades of painful compromises, the Palestinian leadership refuses to yield to Israeli demands to recognize it as a Jewish state primarily because doing so differentiates between recognition of a fact – that Israel has a Jewish majority – and the recognition of a fundamentally Zionist narrative that Israel has a right to a state for the Jewish people in historic Palestine. Palestinians cannot accept this demand for philosophical reasons, which necessitates a broad denial of Palestine’s historical annexation to ease the security concerns of Israel, an expectation that is both humiliating and demoralizing for a people who have undergone more than a half-century of ethnic cleansing.

 

 

 

The Palestinian leadership also has pragmatic concerns, as such recognition would imply Palestinian acceptance of a subordinate status of Israel’s 1.7 million Muslim, Christian, and Druze citizens. There are palpable fears that by recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, non-Jewish citizens – 20 percent of the population of Israel – would be legally regarded as second-class citizens or stripped of their citizenship and democratic rights. Palestinians have based their acceptance of an Israeli state on the condition that Palestinians retain the “right to return” to claim the property they or their forebears were forced to leave due to Israeli annexation, a principle of international law codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that would be ostensibly rejected if Israel is recognized as a Jewish state. Policies to safeguard the “Jewish character” of the state have been meted out in recent times, culminating in the deportation of tens of thousands of African asylum seekers, cases where Israel’s health ministry has admitted to subjecting Ethiopian Jewish women with forced injections of contraceptive drugs, and DNA tests to verify the Jewish ancestry of its potential residents.

What peace process?

Israel’s demand to be recognized as a Jewish state is intended to institutionalize policies that discriminate against citizens on an ethnic basis, in sharp contrast to the internationally endorsed narrative of the country as a civil, democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism, and whose majority is Jewish. There is also a lack of practical clarification from the Israeli government as to what a Jewish state would look like regarding the status of the Arab minority, non-Jews rights to land and property, and questions related to ethnic non-Jews converting to Judaism. It should be noted that pioneering Zionist thinkers avoided the “Jewish state” term in favor of a “Jewish homeland” that could be reconciled with the concept of a democratic bi-national state; the term “Jewish state” itself has become embedded in pro-Israel consciousness, gaining popularity in the Zionist lexicon in recent years. The insistence that the Palestinian side endorse the term has proven its usefulness as a spin instrument that allows the Israelis to prolong the negotiation process. Provided that Israel is perceived to be cooperating with international efforts to settle the conflict diplomatically, leaders in Tel Aviv benefit as political pressure from abroad is eased, allowing a dubious status quo to be maintained.

US Secretary of State John Kerry is soon expected to present a framework peace agreement, which is expected to propose borders along pre-1967 lines with land swaps that enable the Israelis to keep settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem; Netanyahu talks openly about his government’s intentions to annex 13% of the West Bank. Israel is reluctant to remove its forces from the Jordan Valley, so Palestinian President Abbas has agreed to an American-led NATO presence in a future Palestinian state to ease Israeli security concerns, and has agreed to a gradual reduction of Israeli military presence and settlements in the West Bank for up to five years after a peace agreement is signed, which amounts to astonishing concessions in Israel’s favor. According to diplomatic leaks, John Kerry’s proposal will call on Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state irrespective of Abbas’s staunch opposition. Palestinians are entirely justified in their rejection of formally endorsing language about Israel’s character as a Jewish state that would hinder their leverage on other final-status issues that have been crucial to the Palestinian struggle.

The occupation of Palestine is a historical anomaly that could have only taken place with the blanketing support of the United States, and as Washington attempts to pass itself off as an impartial peace broker, there is no just peace in sight, only Palestine’s surrender.

Nile Bowie is a political analyst and photographer currently residing in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is also a Just member.

6 March, 2014

 

 

By Nicola Nasser

In the Palestinian West Bank town of Birzeit early last February 27, the Israeli (IDF) Occupation Forces (IOF) acted determinedly, under the media spotlights, to feed Amnesty International with a show case study to vindicate the report it released only hours earlier, entitled “Trigger-happy: Israel’s use of excessive force in the West Bank,” and to refute the Israeli official diplomatic denial of the contents thereof.

Under the command of Col. Yossi Pinto, a Nahal infantry force of the Binyamin Territorial Brigade, joined by the Border Police’s elite Counterterrorism Unit, Yamam, according to Israeli The Jerusalem Post on the same day and “200 Israeli soldiers, dozens of jeeps, two (military) bulldozers and many Shin Bet [internal security] officers” according to Amira Hass of Haaretz on this March 3, including some 28 – more than thirty army patrol armored vehicles according to the count of Arab natives of Birzeit who spoke to this writer, were amassed in this Birzeit University town, raising a hell of explosives and gunfire and disrupting its peaceful countryside early spring morning.

Amira Hass was on the scene. Wondering what was all that military mobilization for, a former mayor of Birzeit told this writer that he heard her asking in repudiation, “Was it (the late al-Qaeda founder Osama) Bin Laden inside?!”

Their mission, according to Israeli military spokespeople, was to arrest a “wanted individual” who, according to the Shin Bet internal security agency, quoted by Hass, had “intended” to carry out an “aggressive operation” against Israeli targets. An Israeli army spokeswoman said the man was “suspected” of “terror activity.”

www.israelnationalnews.com on the same day quoted “the IDF Spokesman’s Unit” as saying that he was “a wanted man suspected of terror activity.” Gideon Levy in Haaretz on this March 2 quoted “the military correspondents” as repeating what the “IDF claimed” that the man “had the intention to carry out a terror attack in the near future.”

Hass wrote: “In the unofficial Israeli law code, unproved “terrorist intentions” are enough to be punishable by death. In Hebrew, “terror attack” is a magic phrase that exempts the Israelis from wondering why an arrest needs so many troops and fanfare, and has such a murderous end.”

Gideon Levy sarcastically repeating the self-described as “the most moral army in the world” wrote that the Israeli army “is also an army that reads intentions,” but Levy did not add that this army has had it as a rule to act accordingly as well.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said: “After the suspect was called to turn himself in, he barricaded himself inside his house, effectively resisting arrest. Under the premise that he had weapons in his possession, the forces used different means to complete the arrest, including live fire.”

The “suspect” was 24-year old Muatazz Abdul-Rahim Washaha, an unemployed Palestinian native of Birzeit.

 

Hass questioned the accuracy of this statement. Claiming that the victim had “barricaded himself” in would make people “think he built a fortress and surrounded himself with explosives. This is very inaccurate,” she wrote.

The IDF Spokesman’s Office said that the “troops forcibly entered the building and found his body.” Hass said that “this is a lie.” “The elite police unit had shot Washaha at point-blank range dozens of times, according to the pieces of brain that covered the room, not to mention his legs, arms and fingers that were nearly severed from his body,” she added. Washaha’s head was split open after being struck by a projectile, a doctor at the Palestinian Ramallah Hospital told AP on the same day.

It was left to Levy and others to specify the details of “live fire.”

Levy reported that “the most moral army in the world fired an (M72 LAW) anti-tank missile at the house in which a wanted young Palestinian was hiding … ran a bulldozer over the top of the house and destroyed it,” using “a drill it calls a ‘pressure cooker’ – a rather disgusting drill it invented for itself.”

When the tactic of “pressure cooker,” which involves shooting at the walls of the house that is surrounded, failed to persuade the suspect to come out and turn himself in, the IOF troops at around 7 AM bulldozed part of the outer wall of the house and fired projectiles into the building. Fire erupted in the house. At 11 AM, they issued an ultimatum, “giving Muatazz two minutes to surrender, without result. As the ultimatum expired, the army fired several artillery shells from close distance. They then stormed the burning house, killing Muatazz,” Jan Walraven reported in the Palestine Monitor on this March 3.

The four – apartment building was bulldozed and shelled out of use and its contents burned and vandalized. Four families suddenly found themselves on the street, waiting for charities.

Washaha did not “resist” his arrest; he simply refused to give himself in. Released from an IFO jail only a few months ago, he knew very well what being imprisoned by the IOF meant. “I will be free here. Leave and do not worry about me. I will stay here and not surrender. I will not return to prison,” he told a Palestinian civil defense worker who rushed in to extinguish the fire caused by the Israeli projectile. Those were his last words, quoted by The Electronic Intifada on last February 28.

“They could have taken him as a prisoner, but they did not want him as a prisoner they wanted to kill him,” his father Mr. Abdul – Rahim said. Similarly, his mother, Mrs. Eitzaaz Washaha, told Anadolu Agency: “Israeli forces could have arrested Washaha, but they were determined to kill him. My son wasn’t armed. He was killed after the house was bombed.”

An Israeli Shin Bet officer, who goes under the name of Alon, gave permission to kill Muatazz because he refused to appear for an interview with him, according to Hass. “This was regarded as a personal affront by Alon,” she wrote. The victim’s brother, Tha’er Washaha, told Haaretz he implored Alon for permission to go inside and convince his brother to come out; Alon refused.

However, despite the officially acknowledged “suspicion,” an official army tweet, quoted by Los Angeles Times on the same day, convicted him as a “terrorist who resisted arrest.”

Pro – Israeli media and Israeli media, the latter being subjected to well – known strict military censorship, echoed this unconfirmed conclusion; for example, www.algemeiner.com on the same day headlined its report to conclude that a “Wanted Terrorist (was) Shot Dead by Israel Defense Forces.”

Disinformation was demonstrated by Israel Hayom, reportedly close to prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office; on the same day Hayom reported that “a firefight broke out” between the holed in victim and the besieging army brigade, but the witnesses on the site confirmed the Reuters’ report that “no shots were heard from inside the home before the Israeli forces opened fire,” a fact that is confirmed by the other fact that the raiding Israeli forces did not suffer the slightest casualty, which also refutes the IOF’ claim that the man had an AK-47 rifle, another “story” that “Israel accepted … with a yawn,” according to Levy of Haaretz.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) in a statement condemned Washaha’s killing as an “assassination,” a “crime” and a “deliberate” killing. PA’s spokesman, Ihab Bsaiso, said it was an “example of the violence perpetrated on a daily basis against our population.” In a letter sent to the UN Secretary-General, the President of the UN Security Council and the President of the UN General Assembly, Palestinian Ambassador Feda Abdelhady – Nasser said Washaha’s killing indicates Israel’s “pre-meditated intention of killing him.”

Israeli journalist Hass agrees further that his killing was a “cold-blooded assassination”; “The Israeli army did this deliberately,” she wrote. “Israel’s goal” was “to embarrass the Palestinian Authority and undermine its status” among its own people and Israel was “successful” as the “Palestinian Authority officials were absent from Washaha’s funeral” the next day to avoid the angry crowds, estimated at more than five thousand, who were demanding an end to peace negotiations and to PA’s security coordination with Israel.

Gideon Levy had another interpretation for the motives of “The most moral army in the world,” which was the title of his opinion column in Haaretz; “The Israel Defense Forces has also created a heartwarming name for all this: the “Tool of Disruption” – storming a civilian community for the purpose of causing panic and fear, and to disrupt its life,” or “Sometimes these operations are conducted … as a training routine in order to preserve the readiness of the forces and a demonstration of sovereign power” toward the Palestinians living under the Israeli military occupation since 1967, he wrote.

Amnesty’s Report Vindicated

Washaha’s extrajudicial execution came on the same day the Amnesty International (AI) released its 87-page report recommending that the U.S., EU and the rest of the international community should suspend all transfers of military aid to Israel because “without pressure from the international community the situation is unlikely to change any time soon,” Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa Director Philip Luther said. “Too much civilian blood has been spilled … (and Israel’s) unlawful killings and unnecessary use of force must stop now,” he added.

The AI reported it had documented the killings of 22 Palestinian civilians in the West Bank in 2013 and in all the cases the Palestinians did not appear to have been posing a direct and immediate threat to life: “The circumstances of all their deaths point to them having been victims of unlawful killings, including — in some cases — possible willful killings.”

“Several victims were shot in the back suggesting that they were targeted as they tried to flee and posed no genuine threat to the lives of members of Israeli forces or others,” the report said. “In several cases, well-armored Israeli forces have resorted to lethal means to crack down on stone-throwing protesters causing needless loss of life” and “there is evidence that some individuals were victims of willful killings, which would amount to war crimes,” it added.

Since the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry succeeded in resuming the Palestinian – Israeli peace talks on last July 29, the IOF killed more than 42 Palestinian civilians; Washaha was among the latest.

Using “excessive force,” “arbitrary and abusive force against peaceful protesters” and displaying “callous disregard” for human life, Israeli soldiers and police officers have been operating with “near total impunity,” in a “harrowing pattern of unlawful killings and unwarranted injuries,” “as a matter of policy,” while the Israeli investigative system is “woefully inadequate,” said Luther.

The AI report accused Israel of “war crimes and other serious violations of international law.”

Israel’s Ambassador to the UK, Daniel Taub, said that Amnesty was “obsessive” with a “focus on Israel” and accused the London – based rights organization of having “an agenda that has more to do with politics than human rights.” His embassy in London told The Jewish Chronicle that the AI’s report was merely a “stunt” filled with “unverifiable and often contradictory accounts.”

In Birzeit on that sad morning of last February 27, the elite military disproportionate force which the IOF used to liquidate Washaha acted as if it was intentionally determined to undermine the credibility of Israel’s official diplomacy, represented this time by ambassador Taub, and to vindicate the contents of Amnesty’s report which he tried to deny or at least to question.

Ironically, Israeli PM Netanyahu, less than a week later, was in Washington D.C. lecturing a receptive American audience at the annual conference of AIPAC about drawing a “clear line … between life and death, between right and wrong” and about the “moral divide!”

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

05 March, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

 

By William A. Cook

“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” : Mark Twain

Mark Twain died 104 years ago, but his truth goes marching on. Witness two of our exalted Congressmen who recently launched a resolution of such ineptitude that it twists facts inside out without batting an eyelash, indeed while fluttering their eyelashes like some street harlots beckoning the innocent to join them in their frolic. Well here are two that take the facts and figures that characterize the malevolent state of Israel, erase them as though they were chalk on a black board, and then apply their crimes to those desirous of justice and equity for those destroyed by the Israeli state.

“In December 2013, the American Studies Association (ASA) became the second major educational organization to adopt an academic boycott of Israel. This measure [H.R. 4009] would block federal funding for American universities engaging in a boycott of Israeli academic institutions or scholars to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to fund bigoted attacks against Israel that undermine the fundamental principles of academic freedom,” thus spoke Congressman Peter Roskam introducer of the bill. “ Congress has a responsibility to fight back against these hateful campaigns, which contradict academic freedom and are designed to delegitimize the Jewish State of Israel,”  Roskam continued.

Obviously Roskam and his co-legislator, Congressman Dan Lipinski, have not done their homework nor have they read the ASA arguments for promoting the boycott. ASA and all academic institutions and academics who agree to cite the Zionist state as acting illegitimately do so to ensure “academic freedom” not to undermine it, to guarantee access to higher education for all not only Israelis, and to secure open universities in Palestine not to accept forced closure and destruction of laboratories by massive military power. Should Roskam and Lipinski spend some time researching the truth of ASA’s boycott statement they would find that justice can only be achieved by a resolution that would require the United States to stop providing Israel with 8 million dollars a day each year to support a regime that has, since1967, calculatedly disrupted or prevented the indigenous people from gaining access to higher education, actions decidedly contrary to international law, anti-democratic since as occupiers they are obligated to provide for the people under occupation, and destructive to the educational well-being of the Palestinian people. Wouldn’t it be better to spend taxpayers’ dollars in support of freedom and not apartheid?

Fortunately, we have an international study our Congressmen could have considered if they did their homework before submitting their resolution that conclusively demonstrates the malevolent and illegal actions of the state of Israel against the Palestinian people, done in 2009, that specifically notes the crimes committed by that state as it prevents higher education opportunities in the occupied territories. How just and ironic that it draws the following conclusion just as our two representatives of the Israeli Knesset, Roskam and Lipinski, introduce their racist resolution justifying high crimes and misdemeanors by the Israeli government:

The study warns that states providing aid to Israel can be found complicit in this international crime and implies that individuals aiding Israel may bear criminal responsibility ( by  Human Sciences Research Center of South Africa , June 2009).

These representatives are in fact encouraging their colleagues and through them their constituents to defy international law and become complicit in the crimes committed by our best “democratic” (sic) ally in the mid-east as they and this country become recognized world-wide as supportive of genocidal acts against a people that seeks only justice.

Instead of appeasing the Israeli State for its defiance of international law regarding education, the Congressmen might consider a law that would bring Israel before the International Court of Justice if it does not implement policies that allow all Palestinians to exercise their rights to higher education. Perhaps a little interscholastic reflection might illuminate the desire of all to learn and work together rather than deposit white phosphorous and fleshette bombs on defenseless civilians, which appears to be the mode of behavior by the IDF.

I offer here some references the good Congressmen might consider before they force their colleagues to vote in favor of the poor Israeli institutions that might have to rethink their silence in light of an academic boycott as their government continues its genocide against the Palestinians, references any decent student might review should he or she wish to have the facts.

Before June 5, 1967, no universities existed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Palestinian high school graduates, however, enjoyed easy and free access to university education in the Arab world. West Bank students, as Jordanian citizens, had direct access to the University of Jordan 1 and almost unrestricted admission to all universities in the Arab world – mainly Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Students in the Gaza Strip, which was under Egyptian administration, had complete access to Egyptian universities.

The Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip changed this situation. For one thing, access to Arab universities for Palestinian students became increasingly difficult, due to the stiff Israeli measures imposed on border crossing (permits, a mandatory nine-month stay abroad, harassment on reentry). Secondly, admission to Arab universities became gradually limited for Palestinians from the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Thirdly, the economic situation, both in the OPT and in the Arab countries, was not favorable.

Such circumstances, coupled with a heightened Palestinian national awareness, thrust Palestinian university education on top of the agenda.2 Private initiative, in most cases with the tacit coordination or approval of the PLO, started the ball running.

It was only natural to build on already existing structures: , Bir Zeit University, Bethlehem University followed in 1973 by expanding the Christian Brothers school campus, An-Najah National University was founded in 1977, Gaza Islamic University in 1978 and Hebron University in 1982.4 AI-Quds University started with four independent colleges: the Sharia College in Beit Hanina, 1978; the College of Nursing (later College of Medical Professions) in El-Bireh, 1979; the College of Science and Technology in Abu Dis, 1979; and the College of Arts for Women in Jerusalem, 1982. AI-Azhar University was installed in Gaza in 1992 on the same campus as the Islamic University and took, from the latter, part of the faculty and staff. 5 (“Education,” Vol.3, No. 1, Palestine-Israel Journal, 1996, Gabi Baramki ).

How did Israel react to this attempt by the Palestinian people to create their own educational system since the freedom of movement had soured access to institutions beyond their borders? Need you ask.

Throughout the period of development of the universities, the Israeli military authorities were not innocent bystanders. From the outset, they did not welcome the establishment of these institutions and placed hurdles at every point of their development. First, it was the licensing. All colleges were issued with a temporary license which needed annual renewal. In addition, the creation of a new faculty also needed approval, which was sometimes denied, as in the case of the Faculty of Agriculture at An-Najah University. Bir Zeit, in this connection, chose not to ask for approval and went ahead by establishing facts on the ground. This, however, was not always possible, especially when it came to building permits and zoning. After a protracted fight which had reached the Supreme Court, Bir Zeit won a zoning permit for a 300-dunum campus (Education, Baramki)

.But the malevolence of the Israeli government was not confined to licensing; illegal measures such as withholding tax exemption on construction, building material, laboratory equipment and books were employed, universities were forced to pay custom duties, VAT and luxury taxes were imposed on such material as kitchen equipment, on building material, both local or imported. “The conservative figure of six million dollars extorted from them in taxes on these items, constitutes a major breach of international law and UNESCO directives exempting books for educational purposes from any kind of taxation.”   Additionally, the Israeli mantra “security reasons” allowed the military to censor books and periodicals, withhold work permits deny access by international faculty, and most reprehensible of all, close universities making completion of degrees virtually impossible for many who had to drop education to grovel for any work to be had.

Closures varied in length and nature. Those of one week or less were common, but not considered “serious” as the work could be made up. However, from 1979, the closures usually lasted for a minimum of two months. With time, three- to four-month closures became the norm. The worst case was the extended closure of all universities in January 8, 1988, for periods ranging from 33 to 51 months.

Lest anyone think that these measures have been curtailed, think no more Move forward to this new century, 2002, 2003, 2009, 2012 as illustrative examples. Our Congressmen have to realize that they wish to impose sanctions against those who want the true draconian harassment employed by Israel against academic institutions under their international control to stop; and since neither the Israeli government nor its United States puppets in our Congress will not force them to stop, it becomes the responsibility of the international community to bring boycotting to bear so that true democracy and academic freedom can be provided for all. Simple to do one would think since Israel can alter its policies and let the Palestinian institutions do their job. Indeed, the government could embrace interscholastic dialogue and cooperation between the higher education units in Palestine and Israel, a peaceful and truly academic pursuit.

Israeli forces closed an administration building of a Palestinian university in Jerusalem this week, confiscating files, academic documents and computers. The order to close the building at Al-Quds University came from the minister of the interior security, Uzi Landou ( theguardian.com , Friday 12 July 2002 11.51 EDT)

Where one might ask is the voice of the Israeli universities condemning such disruption of academic freedom? Shouldn’t our Congressmen seek the answers to such a question before condemning those who seek the answer? Perhaps our main stream newspapers might carry this information instead of getting it from the UK.

Consider the following study as it details more blatant disruption and destruction of Palestinian education. Consider as well how outraged we’d be if these tactics were employed against Israeli institutions. Yet we hear nothing from the academics at Israel’s institutions, just the weeping at the discomfort they’d endure if boycotts continued against them. How hypocritical when the punishment gets meted out to those real victims of the crimes against international law.

On Friday 16 January 2009, Israeli occupation forces bombed the headquarters of the University Teachers Association-Palestine (UTA), in Gaza, during their indiscriminate, willful destruction of the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City…

Israel’s total siege on Gaza has devastated the educational sector. Students in Gaza are systematically prevented from traveling to the West Bank or abroad to attend universities. Students already abroad are unable to return home to visit their families.

During the nonviolent Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation that began in 1987, Israel ordered the closure of all Palestinian universities, schools and kindergartens, ostensibly rendering the acts of teaching and learning illegal. Between 1988-92 Palestinian education was forced underground as classes were held in homes, mosques, churches and community centers which were repeatedly raided. Even after universities were allowed to reopen in 1992, Palestinians have faced an ever more difficult struggle to reach their places of learning as a result of curfews, closures, checkpoints.

Since Israel began its violent suppression of the second Palestinian uprising starting in 2000, eight universities and over three hundred schools have been shelled, shot at or raided by the Israeli army. Since 2004, the wall Israel is building on West Bank land, illegal according to a 2004 advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice, has made the work of educational institutions even more difficult.

While various unions in England and Canada have worked to endorse and support PACBI’s initial call since 2005, since the recent siege on Gaza Canadian and Scottish academics have mobilized to support the boycott campaign. In contradistinction, American academics have remained silent (“ Why American academics must join boycott of Israel,” ( Rania Masri  and  Marcy Newman , The Electronic Intifada , 18 January 2009).

There is need, I believe, to quote sections of the South Africa Human Rights Report mentioned above. Because the United States blocks all attempts to bring Israel before the international courts, the American people know little about Israeli genocidal actions. Israel claims that Palestinians are terrorists because they live under the authority of Hamas which they label as a terrorist organization. Most countries in the world include the state of Israel as a terrorist state yet the US does nothing about those allegations. This report has international significance since it is thorough and relies on approved and agreed upon definitions and evidence. All Americans should read it; certainly all our representatives should read it so that they can judge for themselves if Israel is or is not an apartheid state. If it is it is not democratic no matter how many times we are told it is. I’ve cut the report down to basic lines; the full report must be read and it is included as a footnote for readers’ reference. I’ve taken the liberty to cut a comprehensive review (written by Francis H. Remillard in March of 2010) down to essentials because space is limited.

Summary of a legal study by  Human Sciences Research Center of South Africa .

This fifteen-month collaborative study set out to examine legally the question:

Do Israel’s practices in occupied Palestinian territory, namely the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, amount to the crimes of colonialism and apartheid under international law?

Apartheid defined under international law

Apartheid is defined as an institutionalized form of racism in which states enact laws which function as the apparatus to commit inhuman acts for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.

Apartheid regimes rely on three “Pillars of Apartheid” to maintain their domination

•  Pillar 1:  The state codifies into law a preferred identity: (See full report for evidence that supports this statement; this further exploration of the full report is advised for all statements made in this reduced version).

•  Pillar 2:  The state segregates the population into geographic areas based on their identity.

•  Pillar 3:  The state establishes security laws and policies designed to suppress any opposition to the regime.

Using these criteria, the May 2009 South African study found that “Israel, since 1967, is the belligerent Occupying Power in occupied Palestinian territory, and that its occupation of these territories has become a colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid.”

Israel’s practices, Apartheid Pillar 1: A preferred identity; separate system privileging Jews

Israel’s domestic law codifies the Jewish identity as the preferred identity and establishes that collective rights extend to Jews only. All other people lack the right to a national life anywhere in Israel proper or occupied Palestinian territory. n

•  Israel’s state resources (including land in occupied Palestinian territory which Israel has declared ‘state land’) are specified as being for the exclusive benefit of Jews, administered under the World Zionist Organization, Jewish Agency, and Jewish National Fund.

•  Since 1967, Israel supplanted existing laws governing Palestinian territory with two separate sets of law: Israeli domestic law to apply to Jewish settlers and Israeli military law to apply to Palestinians. [Note: the report provides extensive evidence on each of the above Pillars. I can only provide reference to Right to Education here and that in précis form. The reader is encouraged to read the entire report to grasp the extent of Israeli malevolence against Palestininas.]

Right to an Education

– Israel denies Palestinians the right to an education through indirect measures such as creating obstacles to movement so Palestinian students cannot get to their schools; repeated closure of Palestinian schools; military attacks on schools and students; destroying educational infrastructure; and denying Palestinian students exit permits preventing them from studying abroad.

Since we are most concerned here with the destructive efforts of Israel to curtail freedom of education to the Palestinian people, we must ask readers to go to the full report for the last two practices that establish apartheid in Israel: Pillar 2: Segregation. Exploitation of resources; and Pillar 3: Matrix of security laws to suppress opposition. These two areas of concern ensure Israeli control not only of education, but of all measures of freedom that are enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The report ends with this comment on Israeli inhumane treatment of the Palestinians.

Cruel and inhumane treatment: Gaza

– From 2000 to 2004, Israel demolished over 2500 homes in the Gaza Strip leaving 16,000 Palestinians homeless.

 

– In 2006, Israel bombed the Gaza power plant destroying all six transformers and halting electricity production, leaving Gaza almost completely dependent on Israel as the sole provider of electricity, power, desalination, pumping sewage, and pumping water.

– After years of systematic bombing and destruction, which transformed Gaza into a dependent population, Israel isolated Gaza with an encircling ‘security wall.’ Then in October 2007, Israel initiated a blockade on Gaza limiting fuel, water, and electricity and cutting basic supplies to less than 1/5 their former levels. 95% of Gaza’s industries shut down; poverty levels reached 80%; hospitals experienced power cuts of 8 to 12 hours a day; thirty to forty million liters of raw sewage poured into the Mediterranean sea every day; 1.1 million Gazans were living below the poverty line.

– Gaza’s fishing grounds extend 20 miles off shore, yet Israel enforced a three-mile limit by opening fire on Palestinian fishing vessels beyond three miles, severely damaging Palestinian fishermen’s livelihood and denying a viable food source to Gaza.

– On December 27, 2008, Israel launched “Operation Cast Lead,” a three-week military attack on Gaza, killing 1380 Palestinians and injuring 5380. During this attack Israel prevented Palestinian civilians from leaving Gaza, “subjecting the entire population to the extreme physical and psychological hazards of modern warfare.”

–Since “Operation Cast Lead,” Israel has continued the blockade, preventing Palestinians from rebuilding, thus deepening the humanitarian disaster in Gaza.

The State of Israel has the duty to:

•  Cease its unlawful activity

•  Dismantle the structures of colonialism and apartheid

•  Promote full rights and expression of the Palestinian people

•  Pay reparations and damages to the Palestinians people

Third party States are obligated to:

•  Not recognize the illegal situation as lawful

•  Not render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation

•  Cooperate to bring the illegal situation to an end

•  Not become complicit in the crimes by failing to fulfill the first three obligations

As a next step, the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa strongly recommends that states take action to meet their legal obligations under international law and urgently request the International Court of Justice render an advisory opinion on the question of Israel’s practices in occupied Palestinian territory. (End of shortened version of Remillard’s review of the full report. All of those truly interested in justice must read the full report).

Now as a full professor at an American university, as a scholar and researcher, as a mentor of a Fulbright Scholar from Morocco, as a professional academic administrator at four institutions in four different states, public and private, and as a full time tenured professor at a private university for the past 14 years, with an aggregate of 52 years of experience from Instructor to Vice President for Academic Affairs, I believe I can speak with some authority relative to academic freedom, tenure, ethics and values appropriate to this profession.

The action threatened by Roskam and Lipinski through their H.R. 4009 seeks to curtail not just freedom of expression voiced against a political entity, the state of Israel, for perceived crimes against humanity in its destructive actions against Palestinian educational institutions and its students, but presents the American people, most particularly the faculty and administrators at American institutions, with obligations to support a state that has been found guilty of apartheid actions that require international legal action and could, at some time in the future, result in a finding that convicts this nation and its people of crimes against humanity. The evidence presented in truncated form in this article damns the state of Israel for crimes that are intolerable by any intellectual measure, crimes that cannot be supported by those committed to justice, human dignity, and respect for the rights inherent in all humans under the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Accords, most especially the definition of Genocide as expressed in its charter.

Would it not be better for these two Congressmen and their peers to offer the American people a gift of peace, beginning with the withholding of the 8 million per day provided to Israel so it can maintain the horrendous conditions it imposes on those occupied, by suggesting that Israel’s institutions of higher learning demand of their government a commitment to open the gates of the walled in state of Israel to all of good will beginning with an interscholastic dialogue on equity for all, the citizens of Israel and the citizens entrusted to their care as occupiers under international law, that all may share the gifts of thoughtful interchange as citizens of the world.

After all, the purpose of higher education is to enhance the intellect, to promote the expansion of its capabilities, to recognize that all, all things both living and non-living, infuse the possibilities of life by providing richness in artistic expression, compassion in understanding of differences, creativeness in technical advancement to benefit all, to seek, in the realm of the unknown, what enriches us and lifts us beyond our limited selves because we see the joy of fulfillment in the multitude of faces among whom we live, and play, and work, and pray. The great wonder of higher education is in its freedom of thought, its openness to ideas and explorations of the mind, its quest to know, to seek answers, to thrive on speculation, to entertain paradoxes and mystery and fantasy and intuition yet know that all accept that journey of the mind and do so without threat to another, without fear of another, without anxiety or anger or hate.

There is no place in that purpose to criticize with vitriol, to lash out at perceived ignorance, to mock others, to devise weapons of destruction whether of military kind or of mental that binds some to hate, that creates ‘exceptionalism” that blossoms against another, that excludes others to enhance a few, as all of these are anathema to learning. And certainly, we might all learn from this exercise that the criminals in Congress should not be the ones responsible for how academia responds to its purpose.

William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California.

05 March, 2014

Countercurrents.org

 

By Ali Abunimah

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday launched a frontal assault on the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

“One movement that’s definitely on the wrong side of the moral divide is the movement to boycott Israel, the so-called BDS,” Netanyahu told the cheering delegates, in his keynote speech to the annual gathering of the powerful Israel lobby group AIPAC in Washington, DC.

“That movement will fail,” Netanyahu predicted.

While claiming that people were “flocking to Israel” for its technology from all over the world, Netanyahu warned, “I don’t want you to get complacent – because the fact that they’re going to fail doesn’t mean that the BDS movement shouldn’t be vigorously opposed.”

“Anti-Semites”

Netanyahu proceeded to defame supporters of Palestinian human rights in the crudest terms: “Throughout history, people believed the most outrageously absurd things about the Jews, that we were using the blood of children to bake matzos, that we were spreading the plague throughout Europe.”

Those who support BDS today are just as bad, Netanyahu asserted: “Those who wear the BDS label should be treated exactly as we treat any anti-Semite or bigot. They should be exposed and condemned. The boycotters should be boycotted.”

This speech is Netanyahu’s highest profile attack on BDS, although last summer, he put responsibility for fighting against the movement for Palestinian rights into the hands of the “Ministry of Strategic Affairs.”

Israel is also placing dedicated anti-BDS operatives in its foreign embassies.

In recent months, top ministers in Netanyahu’s government have repeatedly declared that BDS is the “greatest threat” Israel faces.

Desperate

Responding to his remarks, Rafeef Ziadah, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, the Palestinian civil society coalition that leads the BDS movement, said in an emailed statement:

“Netanyahu’s desperate attack on the BDS movement comes as European pension funds are blacklisting Israeli companies and banks, as Israeli concert organizers find it increasingly difficult to persuade artists to perform in Israel and as governments begin to take action to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law.”

“At its core, the BDS movement is a movement against Israel’s systematic discrimination and apartheid policies. The BDS movement is opposed, as a matter of principle, to all forms of discrimination, including anti-semitism and Islamophobia. The world is growing increasingly weary of Israel’s attempts to conflate criticism of its violations of international law with anti-semitism.”

Ziadah is right. It’s hard to see how people who are not already on board with Netanyahu will be swayed by his invective.

If Israel’s only answer to people all over the world who are horrified by its oppression of Palestinians and ongoing theft of their land, is to call them “bigots,” then Netanyahu should fully expect the BDS movement to grow.

Ali Abunimah is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and a fellow with the Palestine Centre in Washington, DC. Abunimah is Executive Director of The Electronic Intifada.

05 March, 2014

Electronic Intifada

 

BY LAURA PHILOMIN

SINGAPORE (Reuters) – “God is here, God is here,” croons Singapore church official Sun Ho as she struts across a neon-lit stage and thousands of people in the congregation pump their hands and sing along.

Ho Kong Hee, the church’s founding pastor and Sun Ho’s husband, then takes the stage. In keeping with the electrifying mood, he invites his followers to speak “in tongues” and a pulsing murmur echoes through the auditorium of 8,000 people.

During the service, ushers hand out envelopes for donations, which consume at least a tenth of the salaries of most church members, going to fund different ministries, mission trips and special events.

Welcome to one of Asia’s most profitable churches: Singapore’s City Harvest.

With a “prosperity gospel” that blends the spiritual and the material, City Harvest and other Pentecostal megachurches in the wealthy Asian city-state have perfected a popular and lucrative model.

Now they are working to export it to the world and turn Singapore into a hub for evangelical Christianity.

“We want to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth,” said Pastor Bobby Chaw, City Harvest’s missions director.

Evangelising missions by City Harvest, including pop concerts by Sun Ho in China, Taiwan and the United States, have helped it gather followers across Asia and set up 49 affiliate churches in Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and India.

City Harvest – whose founder faces trial, along with five others, on charges of criminal breach of trust and falsifying accounts over the use of nearly S$51 million ($40.2 million) in church funds – also has a bible college that trains church leaders from countries such as Norway, Kazakhstan and Zimbabwe.

Last year the founding pastor of another Singapore megachurch, New Creation’s Joseph Prince, toured the United States, preaching to a sell-out crowd at Long Beach Arena in Los Angeles and filling the country’s largest church, Lakewood in Texas.

Prince’s book “The Power of Right Believing” made it to number two on the New York Times’ bestseller list in the advice and “how to” category.

SUCCESS, SCANDAL AND CONTROVERSIES

Asia is a growth market for Christianity, with the religion estimated to be growing 10 times faster than in Europe, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.

While the idea of megachurches originated in the United States, some of the largest are in Asia, notably South Korea’s Yoido Full Gospel Church, with about 1 million members.

Packaging the traditional biblical message into a more dynamic format of pop-rock music, lively services and social media has lured a new generation of followers and turned the churches into major enterprises.

New Creation, which says it has a congregation of 30,000, collected S$75.5 million in tithes in 2012, while City Harvest took in S$38.6 million in 2009, accounts filed with Singapore’s Commissioner of Charities show.

“Whatever method that can most effectively convey the message to our generation, we will do it,” said Chaw, who is also the vice chairman of City Harvest’s management board.

City Harvest, which says its congregation numbered nearly 20,000 in 2012, with about 62 percent single, ventured into the entertainment industry after seeing how enthusiastically Chinese-speaking youth in Asia responded to Mandarin pop music from Taiwan.

The church’s Crossover Project led Sun Ho to collaborate with Asian stars such as Jay Chou and she broke into the U.S. market under the guidance of producer David Foster, producer-songwriter Wyclef Jean and other veterans.

With a wealth-affirming model and efforts to engage the young, fast-growing Pentecostal megachurches have helped to dilute Buddhism as Singapore’s traditionally dominant religion.

The most recent census showed the proportion of Christians rose 18.3 percent in 2010 from 14.6 percent in 2000, while the number of Buddhists fell to 33.3 percent from 42.5 percent.

Rolland Teo, 25, whose family is Buddhist, said his view of religion as “very static” changed when he joined City Harvest.

“It was something more dynamic, more relational,” Teo said. “This was something I couldn’t find in my parents’ beliefs.”

But allegations of corruption have accompanied success.

City Harvest’s Crossover Project is at the centre of charges that Ho and five other officials financed his wife’s singing career by funneling church funds of S$24 million into sham investments and then used S$26.6 million more to cover up the deals.

Ho and the others deny the charges. Ho’s wife is not on trial and has resumed her executive duties at the church.

In South Korea, David Yong-gi Cho, Ho’s spiritual mentor and founder of Yoido Full Gospel Church, was recently found guilty of embezzling $14 million in church donations to buy stocks owned by his son, at four times their market value.

PROSPERITY GOSPEL

Megachurches dismiss accusations of being wealth-obsessed, although Chaw has said that “prosperity is a byproduct of obeying God’s commandments”.

Critics say wealth is not necessarily a bad thing but they decry selfish enrichment at the expense of helping others.

“The prosperity gospel is a very big movement, a very visible movement, that doesn’t represent what I believe to be biblical Christianity,” said Paul Choo, founding pastor at Gospel Light Christian Church.

But a growing number of people in Singapore have found an affinity with the megachurch doctrine of faith entwined with wealth and personal well-being.

“That’s quite attractive to many socially mobile Singaporeans who, in going up the class strata, do look for some moral bearings,” said Terence Chong, a researcher at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Tithing – the donation of 10 percent of income to the church – is assumed by some to be a way of “buying” God’s love. But New Creation member Jared Asalli and others say it is a way of thanking God.

Either way, the practice helps swell megachurch coffers.

City Harvest raised S$22.7 million with its Building Fund Campaign, helping it to buy a stake of 39.2 percent in the venue for its services, Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre, for S$97.8 million in 2012.

New Creation’s Miracle Seed event raised S$21 million in one day, contributing to the S$348 million it spent on building the 5,000-seat Star Performing Arts Centre, one of four venues where it holds services.

“I don’t think there’s been any era as materialistic as this one,” said Choo of Gospel Light Christian Church. “If it promises wealth, it will have some ready audience.”

($1=1.2690 Singapore dollars)

(Editing by Jason Szep, John O’Callaghan and Clarence Fernandez)

6 March, 2014