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By Sanen Marshall

15 March, 2013

It is worrying sign that as Myanmar begins to open up, the Government continues to persevere with armed aggression against ethnic minorities seeking autonomy within, or independence from, the Myanmar state. While it is true that few governments have traditionally interpreted the human rights principle of ‘self-determination’ as referring to the right to secede, in the case of Myanmar it is the repressive nature of the State that continues to fuel ethnic nationalism. It is also regrettable that while Aung San Suu Kyi remains an important force for political change, the treatment of her person  by the Government is now viewed internationally as the key indicator of liberalisation. She has been free from house arrest for more than two years now.

There have also been several processes and laws that have been enacted that make Myanmar look like it is on the road to democratisation. Sadly, this is not reflected in on-the-ground realities for the Kachin, Karen, Shan and other ethnic minorities in the State. Ceasefires have been contracted and broken, mainly through the wanton actions of Myanmar military operating in the remote regions where some of these ethnic minorities live. The situation is therefore desperate. Some segments of these populations have persevered in the path of armed resistance against the Myanmar State. But their capabilities are largely defensive and, even then, not very effective against the power of a conventional army.

An estimated 100,000 Kachin have been displaced since the collapse of a 17-year old truce between the Kachin Independence Army and Government forces in 2011. Many Kachin refugees have been holed up in the mountains for over a year now, waiting for peace, so that they can return home. Refugee camps suffered from the cold, the squalor of dilapidated housing and poor sanitation. In the Arakan state, it is reported that 100,000 people have been displaced by inter-ethnic violence between the Arakan and Rohingya. This has been partially fuelled by repressive Government policies. All this has passed under the radar of the international community which is more intent on watching developments at the centre of the Myanmar state than at its periphery. Tourist arrivals are also up, with many believing that Myanmar has taken the road to democracy at last.

These two realities of a democratising centre and a militarised periphery do not match. But it is only the former that tourists see. It is therefore incumbent on the international community to selectively withhold their engagement with the state of Myanmar until Myanmar’s ethnic minorities are allowed to return to their homelands and the Government returns to the negotiating table. This selective disengagement would go a long way to refocussing global attention to the militarised periphery of Myanmar and not just its touristy centre. Since the international community holds Aung San Suu Kyi in high regard, it should pay heed to her calls for an end to the aggression. In January this year, she declared ‘we, as well as the government, have to ask ourselves whether we understand the goals of the ethnic people and whether we can help them fulfil their goals.’

Sanen Marshallis a Member of JUST.

By Mariam Karouny

14 March, 2013

@ Reuters.com

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Most of the first contingent of Syrian rebels taught by U.S. army and intelligence officers in Jordan to use anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry have finished their training and are now returning to Syria to fight, a senior rebel said on Thursday.

Western officials and Syrian rebel commanders declined to comment on reports in the German weekly Der Spiegel and other media outlets last week that said Americans were training anti-government Syrian forces in Jordan.

But a senior rebel commander close to the process said U.S. army and intelligence officers were training Syrian rebels and said most of the first batch of 300 fighters picked from southern Syria had finished their courses.

“This is a sensitive matter as you know, but yes the American army and intelligence are training some of the rebels,” he told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The United States has said it would provide medical supplies and food directly to opposition fighters, but has ruled out sending arms for fear they may find their way to Islamist hardliners who might then use them against Western targets.

But, the commander said, Washington had taken the decision to train the rebels “under the table”.

The commander said U.S. officials contacted the opposition General Command and offered to help some months ago. The General Command then asked brigades operating under its leadership to nominate “good fighters” to be trained to use advanced weapons such as anti-tank and anti-aircraft rockets, in addition to learning intelligence-gathering techniques.

Most of the first contingent of 300 fighters came from Damascus, the surrounding countryside, and Deraa, close to the border, because it was easier for them to reach Jordan.

“The courses vary, it takes between 15 days to one month and the fighters are divided into groups of 50 each. Each group travels to Jordan independently, not the 300 together,” he said. “It is defensive training.”

Most of the first group of 300 had now returned to fight in Syria, he said, but more were arriving to be trained.

Some 70,000 people have been killed since largely peaceful protests that began nearly two years ago against President Bashar al-Assad were met by live ammunition and morphed into an armed insurgency.

For security and logistical reason fighters from northern Syria could not join the training in Jordan, the commander said. But the rebel command is trying to convince the Turkish government to allow them to open a training camp in Turkey.

“We are hopeful that the Turks will allow us to have this camp where American officers train us,” he said.

(Editing by Jon Hemming)

By Maryam Sakeenah

11 March, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Following the reprehensible attack on Christian homes in Lahore, a spine-chilling, grotesque image of an arsonist cheering over the burning flames went viral. One wonders what sort of man thumps his chest over destroying innocent lives and how human beings can become capable of such naked, audacious sadism that seeks justification in a faith that decrees ‘Whosoever harms a non Muslim citizen of a Muslim state, I shall be the complainant against him on the Day of Judgement.’ (Sahih Bukhari)

Throughout history human beings have shown themselves to be capable of wreaking terrible destruction and causing great suffering- from burning ‘witches’ at the stake, crucifying God’s noble messengers, butchering refugees in sacred precincts, gassing Jews at Auschwitz, to the nationalistic wars of the twentieth century, the liquidation of millions in nuclear destruction and poisoning of the biosphere through relentless commercial-industrial activity.

Yet Jeremy Rifkins in his phenomenal book ‘The Empathic Civilization’ insists that human beings are ‘Homo Empathica’, that is, defined and distinguished for the ability to empathize. He writes, ‘Human beings are soft-wired to experience others’ plight as if we were experiencing it ourselves.’

Empathy allows us to stretch our sensibility to another so we can cohere into larger social groups. It is curbed and limited by defining these social groups through narrow, parochial banners of ethnicity, nationalism, race and creed so that the empathic drive does not extend to the out-group . The Prophet (SAW) said: “He is not one us who calls for `Asabiyah’, (prejudiced, parochial association” (Abu Daud.) The out-group is then ‘otherized’, made out of the reach of our empathy. This creates indifference and apathy towards the suffering of people belonging to a different classification. However, a more severe form of limiting and deflecting the empathic impulse is dehumanization of the other ‘as flies to the wanton boys’, often institutionalized by the social superstructure: state and government, media, education, religion. Through stereotyping, essentialism, ethnocentrism, prejudice and propaganda as well as censorship and selective relaying of information to the public, minority groups and those whose interests clash with or threaten one’s own are systemtically dehumanized  and even demonized to appear less than human despicable, lower-order bestial ‘others’ whose eradication may not be of any great loss to human civilization. In the process we forget that as members of the human family, we all share a common, precarious existential predicament- our ‘little lives rounded with a sleep’- on a little finite planet in the mystifying universe.

Der Spiegel carried a report last year on the psychology of American drone operators whose button-clicking while reclining in plush chairs in air-conditioned offices decrees death to anonymous distant targets. The method of modern technological warfare seems to be designed to keep empathy at bay- the victim is invisible and remote, represented by a red dot on a laser screen, annihilated by a light, single click. Drone pilot Vanessa Meyer said, “ When the decision had been made, and they saw that this was an enemy, a hostile person, a legal target that was worthy of being destroyed, I had no problem with taking the shot.” (Nicola Abe: ‘Dreams in Infrared’) Gitta Sereny writes of Fratz Stangl, the annihilator of thousands at a Nazi camp: “ Prisoners were simply objects. Goods. “That was my profession,” he said. “I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won’t deny it.” When Sereny asked Stangl how as a father he could kill children, he answered, “I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. … [T]hey were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. …” (Chris Hedges: The Careerist)

Few and far between, there may be those whose empathy grows militant and unkillable. Brandon Bryant was able to humanize his victims in his drone operations_ he noticed the details of their lives and patterns of behaviour akin to his own. “I got to know them. Until someone higher up in the chain of command gave me the order to shoot.” He felt remorse because of the children, whose fathers he was taking away. “They were good daddies,” he says . He felt ‘disconnected from humanity’ while at his job, going through terrible unease and remorse. Having quit his job, he wrote in his diary, “On the battlefield there are no sides, just bloodshed. Total war. Every horror witnessed. I wish my eyes would rot.” (Nicola Abe: ‘Dreams in Infrared’)

Perhaps the most integral parts of this institutionalized dehumanization embedded in the superstructure of modern industrial society are the ‘Careerists’- the good men and women efficient at their jobs that make the system function. Chris Hedges describes them as ‘… armies of bureaucrats serving a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected… They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic… They feel nothing. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.’

In Pakistan religion is increasingly used as one of the most powerful means of deflecting empathy from those outside the faith and sectarian affiliation. Religious intolerance in a culture of violence and anger is a fatal mix and has gone on a bloody rampage.  While the causes, factors and agents responsible for the ongoing madness are complexly intertwined, the resistance, rejection, counternarrative and healing that ought to have come from the representatives of religion in this part of the world has been inadequate, half-hearted, ambiguous and equivocal. The voice of condemnation from the pulpit is faltering, and this has been extremely damaging in a number of ways. The contemporary discourse of political Islam in Pakistan is heavily lopsided, selectively highlighting the plight of victims of American, Israeli and Indian misdemeanours (which certainly are important human rights issues), while keeping mum or issuing periodic enfeebled and rhetorical statements of condemnation over the plight of minorities and other innocent victims of those committing violence in the name of religion.

For Islamist groups, the cost of this silence has been and will be crushingly enormous. The disappointment felt by members of the civil society and educated youth over a criminal silence and inability of the religious leaders and scholars to rise to the occasion and give clarity to the public with a single voice has been shattering. This has not only alienated scores of good, intelligent people belonging to Pakistan’s educated urban middle and upper classes from Islamic groups and organizations but in many cases from the faith itself.  A colleague posted the picture of the gleeful arsonist with the comment, ‘ Happy mob rightfully burns down Christian homes. Another great day for Islam. Another victory against the forces of evil.’ While this is an extreme reaction showing inability to draw a line between despicable, crazed fanatical elements and the faith itself, but it increases the onus on spokespeople of religion to address the burning issues that blur the lines.

Going to college in Pakistan shortly after the U.S declared all-out ‘war on terror’ and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, I witnessed scores of young people around me turning to Islam, primarily out of empathy for the Muslim victim, the underdog. In this country, the Islamist persona has now understandably metamorphosed into a perpetrator devoid of compassion, rationality and empathy, and this has alienated and repelled hundreds of thousands, resulting in a completely opposite trend that I, now an educator, see around me: a clear de-Islamization of Pakistan’s urban educated youth. While there also is a swing in the opposite direction, but the de-Islamization trend is clearly on the rise, understandably fuelled by the aforementioned.

Islamists in Pakistan are not cognizant of this terrible loss as they perceive themselves to be locked up in a crusade against the onslaught of the West, the secularists, the Zionists et all. Any voice calling for the need to provide clarity, answers and solutions is dismissed as ‘Westernized’, ‘secularized’, ‘liberalized,’ hence misguided and insincere, unworthy of serious consideration.

The narrative in Pakistan needs a rethink: the ethos of the Quran is the extension of identity to embrace the human race as fellow sojourners held together by a common human nature and destiny: ‘Mankind is but a single nation, yet they disagree.’ (2:213) Secondarily, we are taught to understand our responsibility towards those outside the faith fraternity not merely through divine directive but lived example and established paradigm.

In 628 C.E. Prophet Muhammad (s) granted a Charter of Privileges to the monks of St. Catherine Monastery in Mt. Sinai:

“This  is a message from Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them.

Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by Allah! I hold out against anything that displeases them.

No compulsion is to be on them.

Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries.

No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims’ houses.

Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God’s covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate.

No one is to force them to travel or to oblige them to fight.

The Muslims are to fight for them.

If a female Christian is married to a Muslim it is not to take place without her approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray.

Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants.

No one of the nation (Muslims) is to disobey the covenant till the Last Day (end of the world).”

Empathy humanizes and civilizes. Its suppression intensifies secondary drives like narcissism, materialism, violence and aggression. The task of religion, education and the media must be to bring out the empathic sociability stretching out to all of humanity and prepare the groundwork for what Rifkins has called an ‘empathic civilization.’

Mercy and gentleness, said the Prophet (SAW), are defining traits of believers: ‘ Allah is gentle, and He loves those who are gentle.’ (Sahih Muslim)   Mercy and gentleness beautify the spirit: “Whenever kindness is in a thing it adorns it, and whenever it is removed from anything, it disfigures it.” [Muslim]

Empathy is engraved into the core of our consciousness as human beings- that softest part inspired from the Divine Ruh (Spirit). Those who confine or deflect it are on the wrong side of humanity and history. In the long run, their narrative will lose out and history’s merciless verdict against them shall be ineradicable.

Maryam Sakeenah is a Pakistan-based independent researcher and freelance writer on International politics, human rights and Islam. She divides her time between teaching high school, writing, research and voluntary social work. She also authored a book ‘Us versus Them and Beyond’ analyzing the Clash of Civilization theory and the role of Islam in facilitating intercultural communication.

By Mazin Qumsiyeh

11 March, 2013

@ Popular Resistance

Below is a talk (“sermon”) I gave Sunday 11 March at the Saint George’s Cathedral in Cape Town. This is an old and famous Cathedral well known for its struggle against apartheid; Nobel winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu one of its most famous leaders.

Thank you Dean Weeder and all of you for inviting me to your historic church, a church I knew about for over 20 years but have never before had the chance to visit. I am grateful to be for the first time in South Africa. It is also named after the patron saint of Palestinian Christians whom we call in Arabic Alkhader. I also thank Terry and Lavinia for your kind hospitality. I came to Johanesburg invited by church leaders to attend the Oikotree conference which links ecology, economics, and ecumenical issues. So I am delighted to also have been invited to Cape Town for the launch of the Israel Apartheid Week and to this lovely church.

I was born in Beit Sahour, literally the house of those who stay up at night. This is the Shepherd’s field, where the shepherds were called to go up to Bethlehem to see the new born prince of peace. In Luke we read: ” And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord…..” We then read that they told the world. We joke that God must have been wise to select the Shepherds in this area because had he selected another area, the message would not have spread since we talk a lot and words spread quickly.

I speak today to tell you that we Palestinian Christians challenge notions of chosennes whether in South Africa or Palestine. God is not a real estate agent parceling out lands or privileges; we are told that God so loved the world (not that God so loved men, whites, even humans, he loved the whole world) God so loved the world that he sent his only son …..

We were also told to act on information. We are told a lamp is not placed under furniture but a stand and we are told to be the salt of this earth. Jesus acted by challenging systems of oppression. Two thousand years ago he turned the tables of the profiteers at the temple, he challenged oppressors, and he became a Palestinian martyr. Yes Palestinian because he lived in a country known then as Palestine and he spoke Aramaic which my Canaanitic ancestors spoke (Arabic is a derivative of Aramaic). Since he was crucified, we have lost untold number of people who spoke the truth to power. I lost several friends in non violent resistance. For example in 2009 we lost our friend Bassem Aburahma who was shot with a tear gas canister that crushed his chest as he was talking to the Israeli soldiers. I paid condolences to his family and met his kind young sister Jawaher who was killed a year later when she was overcome by Israeli tear gas. Many others were lost or suffered. I myself was arrested several times for nonviolent resistance.

But the family which we visited recently still offers us coffee with a smile. It is joy born of faith while suffering. It is the definition of Love. Mother Teresa said in helping with a smile that “this is where love comes in – when it is demanding, and yet we can give it with joy”. As the Buddhists say “Have joyful participation in the sorrows of this world.”

In 1985 there was a Kairos South Africa document that asked churches around the world to take up direct action to bring about an end to apartheid. Kairos is a moment of truth. We in Palestine then looked to your leadership including that of Archbishop Desmond Tutu in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. Archbishop Tutu spoke at the launch of the Kairos Palestine document in December 2009 where he spoke of the joint struggle and why it matters. It is the Christian Palestinians’ word to the world about what is happening in Palestine. It is written at this time when we wanted to see the Glory of the grace of God in this land and in the sufferings of its people. In this spirit the document requests the international community to stand by the Palestinian people who have faced oppression, displacement, suffering and clear apartheid for more than six decades. The suffering continues while the international community silently looks on at the occupying State, Israel. Our word is a cry of hope, with love, prayer and faith in God. We address it first of all to ourselves and then to all the churches and Christians in the world, asking them to stand against injustice and apartheid, urging them to work for a just peace in our region, calling on them to revisit theologies that justify crimes perpetrated against our people and the dispossession of the land.

We Palestinian Christians following in the footsteps of Jesus say this is a moment of truth, a Kairos moment. The truth is that the Birth place of Jesus, Bethlehem has 180,000 native Christians and Muslims squeezed into only 13% of the land of the district of Bethlehem. 87% of the land of Bethlehem is now off-limits to our development and open for expansion of 23 colonial settlements built on our land. And this canton of Bethlehem is increasingly surrounded by a wall and I as a Palestinian Christian am not allowed into Jerusalem, my Church of the Sepulcher. Even with my American Passport I am not allowed into Jerusalem as are 99% of our people. The truth is that Jerusalemites are being driven from their land to be replaced by Jews including converts to Judaism brought from around the world. Jerusalem is the heart of our reality. It is, at the same time, symbol of peace and sign of conflict. While the separation wall divides Palestinian neighbourhoods, Jerusalem continues to be emptied of its Palestinian citizens, Christians and Muslims. Their identity cards are confiscated, which means the loss of their right to reside in Jerusalem. Their homes are demolished or expropriated. Jerusalem, city of reconciliation, has become a city of discrimination and exclusion, a source of struggle rather than peace .

The truth is that Zionists have worked hard to methodically transform our country from a multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural society to a Jewish state. By necessity this entailed ethnic cleansing so that 530 villages and towns were destroyed and today 7 million of our people are refugees and displaced people. Refugees are still living in camps under very difficult circumstances waiting for implementation of their internationally recognized right of return, generation after generation. What will be their fate? And the prisoners? The thousands of prisoners languishing in Israeli prisons are part of our reality. The Israelis move heaven and earth to gain the release of one prisoner, and those thousands of Palestinian prisoners, when will they have their freedom?

So we call on you and all our brothers and sisters in humanity to come and see for yourself. We would love to host you and show you around. But we also ask you to act on your conscience and help those in need in Palestine and elsewhere. I end with the words of the Bible: “Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was an hungry, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in. Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches and does research at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities in occupied Palestine. He serves as chairman of the board of the Palestinian Center for Rapprochement Between People and coordinator of the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in Beit Sahour He is author of “Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human rights and the Israeli/Palestinian Struggle” and “Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of Hope and Empowerment”

By Alan Hart

11 March, 2013

@ Alanhart.net

I find myself wondering how many of our present day leaders, President Obama in particular, are aware of what happened in Palestine on 10 March 65 years ago.

On that day in 1948, two months before Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence in defiance of the will of the organized international community as it then was at the UN, Zionism’s in-Palestine political and military leaders met in Tel Aviv to formally adopt PLAN DALET, the blueprint with operational military orders for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

They did not and never would refer to the crime they authorised as ethnic cleansing. Their euphemism for it was “transfer”.

As noted in an excellent anniversary briefing paper by IMEU (the American-founded Institute for Middle East Understanding), from the earliest days of modern political Zionism its advocates grappled with the problem of creating a Jewish majority state in a part of the world where Palestinian Arabs were the overwhelming majority of the population.

The earliest insider information we have on Zionism’s thinking is from the diary of Theodor Herzl, the founding father of Zionism’s colonial-like enterprise. He wrote:

“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country… expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

Those words were committed to paper by Herzl in 1895 but they were not published (in other words they were suppressed) until 1962.

By August 1937 “transfer” was a discreet but hot topic for discussion at the 20th Zionist Congress in Zurich, Switzerland. All in attendance were aware that the process of dispossessing the Palestinian peasants (the fellahin) mainly by purchasing land from absentee owners had been underway for years. Referring to this David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister, said:

“You are no doubt aware of the (Jewish National Fund’s) activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin…Jewish power (in Palestine), which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale.”

A year later Ben-Gurion told a meeting of the Jewish Agency that he supported compulsory transfer. He added:

“I don’t see anything immoral in it.”

In my view that’s a most revealing statement. It tells us – does it not? – that Ben-Gurion, the Zionist state’s founding father, was a man with no sense of what was morally right and wrong.

Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Fund’s Lands Department which was responsible for acquiring the land for Zionism’s enterprise in Palestine. One of his diary entries for December 1940 reads as follows:

“There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for (the Arabs of) Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one (Bedouin) tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.”

Plan Dalet called for:

“Mounting operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

“Destruction of villages – setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris – especially those population centres which are difficult to control continuously.

“Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Before the Zionist state declared itself to be in existence on 14 May 1948, more than 200 Palestinian villages had already been emptied and about 175,000 Palestinians were already refugees. Some had fled in fear; others were expelled by Zionist forces.

The prime fear factor was the slaughter by Zionist terrorists of more than 100 Palestinian men, women and children at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem. As Arthur Koestler was to write, the “bloodbath” at Deir Yassin was “the psychologically decisive factor in the spectacular exodus of the Arabs from the Holy Land and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.”

It was, however, Menachem Begin, Zionism’s terror master and subsequently prime minister, who provided the most vivid description of how well the slaughter at Deir Yassin served Zionism’s cause. In his book The Revolt, he wrote:

“Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel. Kolonia village, which had previously repulsed every attack of the Haganah (the underground Jewish military organization that became the Israeli Army), was evacuated overnight and fell without further fighting. Beit-Iksa was also evacuated. These two places overlooked the road and their fall, together with the capture of Kastel by the Haganah, made it possible to keep open the road to Jerusalem. In the rest of the country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces… The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in particular in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa… All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yassin!’”

Three decades later, in an article for The American Zionist, Mordechai Nisan of the Truman Research Centre of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem expressed his concern about the failure to understand the major significance of terrorism in the struggle for Jewish sovereignty. He wrote: “Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when it was.”

After the Zionist state declared itself to be in existence, its government set up an unofficial body known as the “Transfer Committee”. Its job was to oversee the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages and/or their repopulation with Jews. The purpose of this Zionist strategy was to prevent dispossessed Palestinians returning to their homes.

By 1949 more than 400 Palestinian towns and villages had been systematically destroyed or taken over by Israeli Jews; and at least 750,000 Palestinians were refugees, dispossessed of their land, their homes and their rights.

In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe, Israel’s leading “revisionist” (meaning honest) historian, documents in detail Zionism’s systematic reign of terror which, from December 1947 to January 1949, included 31 massacres. (Deir Yassin was only the first). In a videoed conversation with me in 2008, which can be viewed in the Hart of the Matter series on my site (www.alanhart.net), Ilan said this:

“Probably more surprising than anything else was not the silence of the world as Zionist ethnic cleansing was taking place in Palestine, but the silence of the Jews in Palestine. They knew what had happened to Jews in Nazi Europe, and some might even have seen it for themselves, yet they had no scruples in doing almost the same thing to the Palestinians.”

On this 65th anniversary of the authorization of the ethnic cleaning of Palestine, the questions I would like to see put to our leaders today, President Obama in particular, are the following:

Are you aware of Plan Dalet?

If not, why not?

If you are aware of it, could it not said be said that your refusal to call and hold Zionism to account for its crimes makes you (and your predecessors) complicit in those crimes by default?

Alan Hart has been engaged with events in the Middle East and their global consequences and terrifying implications – the possibility of a Clash of Civilisations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic, and, along the way, another great turning against the Jews – for nearly 40 years… Alan is author of “Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews” – http://www.alanhart.net

By Uri Avnery

11 March, 2013

@ Gush Shalom

This does not happen every day: a Minister of Culture publicly rejoices because a film from her country has not been awarded an Oscar. And not just one film, but two.

It happened this week. Limor Livnat, still Minister of Culture in the outgoing government, told Israeli TV she was happy that Israel’s two entries for Oscars in the category of documentary films, which made it to the final four, did lose in the end.

Livnat, one of the most extreme Likud members, has little chance of being included in the diminishing number of Likud ministers in the next government. Perhaps her outburst was meant to improve her prospects.

Not only did she attack the two films, but she advised the semi-official foundations which finance Israeli films to exercise “voluntary self-censorship and deprive such unpatriotic films of support, thus making sure that they will not be produced at all.

The documentaries in question are very different in character.

One, The Gatekeepers, is a collection of testimonies by six successive chiefs of the General Security Service, Israel’s internal intelligence agency, variously known by its Hebrew initials Shin Bet or Shabak. In the US its functions are performed by the FBI. (The Mossad is the equivalent of the CIA.)

All six service chiefs are harshly critical of the Israeli prime ministers and cabinet ministers of the last decades. They accuse them of incompetence, stupidity and worse.

The other film, 5 Broken Cameras, tells the story of the weekly protest demonstrations against the “separation” fence in the village of Bil’in, as viewed through the cameras of one of the villagers.

One may wonder how two films like these made it to the top of the Academy awards in the first place. My own (completely unproven) conjecture is that the Jewish academy members voted for their selection without actually seeing them, assuming that an Israeli film could not be un-kosher. But when the pro-Israeli lobby started a ruckus, the members actually viewed the films, shuddered, and gave the top award to Searching for Sugar Man.

I have not yet had a chance to see The Gatekeepers. Because of that, I am not going to write about it.

However, I have seen 5 Broken Cameras several times – both in the cinema and on the ground.

Limor Livnat treated it as an “Israeli” film. But that designation is rather problematical.

First of all, unlike other categories, documentaries are not listed according to nationality. So it was not, officially, “Israeli”.

Second, one of its two co-producers protested vehemently against this designation. For him, this is a Palestinian film.

As a matter of fact, any national designation is problematical. All the material was filmed by a Palestinian, Emad Burnat. But the co-editor, Guy Davidi, who put the filmed material into its final shape, is Israeli. Much of the financing came from Israeli foundations. So it would be fair to say that it is a Palestinian-Israeli co-production.

This is also true for the “actors”: the demonstrators are both Palestinians and Israelis. The soldiers are, of course, Israelis. Some of members of the Border Police are Druze (Arabs belonging to a marginal Islamic sect.)

When the last of Emad Burnat’s sons was born, he decided to buy a simple camera in order to document the stages of the boy’s growing up. He did not yet dream of documenting history. But he took his camera with him when he joined the weekly demonstrations in his village. And from then on, every week.

Bil’in is a small village west of Ramallah, near the Green Line. Few people had ever heard of it before the battle.

I heard of it for the first time some eight years ago, when Gush Shalom, the peace organization to which I belong, was asked to participate in a demonstration against the expropriation of some of its lands for a new settlement, Kiryat Sefer (“Town of the Book”).

When we arrived there, only a few new houses were already standing. Most of the land was still covered with olive trees. In following protests, we saw the settlement grow into a large town, totally reserved for ultra-orthodox Jews, called Haredim, “those who fear (God)”. I passed through it several times, when there was no other way to reach Bil’in, and never saw a single man there who was not wearing the black attire and black hat of this community.

The Haredim are not settlers per se. They do not go there for ideological reasons, but just because they need space for their huge number of offspring. The government pushes them there.

What made this first demonstration memorable for me was that the village elders emphasized, in their summing-up, the importance of non-violence. At the time, non-violence was not often heard about in Palestinian parlance.

Non-violence was and remains one of the outstanding qualities of the Bil’in struggle. From the first demonstration on, week after week, year after year, non-violence has been the hallmark of the protests.

Another mark was the incredible inventiveness. The elders have long ago given way to the younger generation. For years, these youngsters strived to fill every single demonstration with a specific symbolic content. On one occasion, protesters were carried along in iron cages. On another, we all wore masks of Mahatma Gandhi. Once we brought with us a well-known Dutch pianist, who played Schubert on a truck in the midst of the melee. On yet another protest, the demonstrators chained themselves to the fence. At another time, a football match was played in view of the settlement. Once a year, guests are invited from all over the world for a symposium about the Palestinian struggle.

The fight is mainly directed at the “Separation” Fence, which is supposed to separate between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. In built-up areas it is a wall, in open spaces it is a fence, protected on both sides by a broad stretch of land for patrol roads and barbed wire. The official purpose is to prevent terrorists from infiltrating into Israel and blowing themselves up here.

If this were the real purpose, and were the wall built on the border, nobody could fairly object. Every state has the right to protect itself. But that is only part of the truth. In many regions, the wall/fence cuts deeply into Palestinian territory, ostensibly to protect settlements, in reality to annex land. This is the case in Bil’in.

The original fence cut the village off from most of its lands, which were earmarked for the enlargement of the settlement now called Modi’in Illit (“Upper Modi’in”). The real Modi’in is an adjacent township within the Green Line.

In the course of the struggle, the villagers appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court, which finally accepted part of their claim. The government was ordered to move the fence some distance nearer to the Green Line. This still leaves a lot of land for the settlement.

In practice, the complete wall/fence annexes almost 10% of the West Bank to Israel. (Altogether, the West Bank constitutes a mere 22% of the country of Palestine is [is as] it was before 1948.)

Once Emad Burnat started to take pictures, he could not stop. Week after week he “shot” the protests, while the soldiers shot (without quotation marks) at the protesters.

Tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets were used by the military every week. Sometimes, live ammunition was deployed. Yet in all the demonstrations I witnessed, there was not a single act of violence by the protesters themselves – Palestinians, Israelis or international activists. The demonstrations usually start in the center of the village, near the mosque. When the Friday prayers end (Friday is the Muslim holy day), some of the devout join the young people waiting outside, and a march to the fence, a few kilometers away, commences.

At the fence, the clash happens. The protesters push forward and shout, the soldiers launch tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets. The gas canisters hit people (Rachel, my wife, had a big bruise on her thigh for months, where a canister had hit her. Rachel was already carrying a fatal liver disease and was strictly warned by her doctor not to come near tear gas. But she could not resist taking photos close up.)

Once the melee starts, boys and youngsters – not the demonstrators themselves – on the fringes usually start to throw stones at the soldiers. It is a kind of ritual, a test of courage and manhood. For the soldiers this is a pretext for increasing the violence, hitting people and gassing them.

Emad shows it all. The film shows his son grow up, from baby to schoolboy, in between the protests. It also shows Emad’s wife begging him to stop. Emad was arrested and seriously injured. One of his relatives was killed. All the organizers in the village were imprisoned again and again. So were their Israeli comrades. I testified at several of the trials in the military court, located in a large military prison camp.

The Israeli protesters are barely seen in the film. But right from the beginning, Jews played an important part in the protests. The main Israeli participants are the “Anarchists against the Wall”, a very courageous and creative group. (Gush Shalom activist Adam Keller is shown in a close-up, trying out a passive resistance technique he had learned in Germany. Somehow it did not work. Perhaps you need German police for it.)

If the film does not do full justice to the Israeli and international protesters, that is quite understandable. The aim was to showcase the Palestinian non-violent resistance.

In the course of the struggle, one of Emad’s cameras after another was broken. He is now wielding camera No. 6.

This is a story of heroism, the heroic struggle of simple villagers for their lands and their country.

Long after Limor Livnat will be forgotten, people will remember the Battle of Bil’in.

President Barack Obama would be well advised to see this film before his forthcoming visit to Israel and Palestine.

Some years ago, I was asked to make the laudatory speech at a Berlin ceremony, in which the village of Bil’in and the “Anarchists against the Wall” were decorated for their courage.

Slightly paraphrasing President John Kennedy’s famous speech in Berlin, I proposed that every decent person in the world should proudly proclaim: “Ich bin ein Bil’iner!”

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom.

By Dr Gideon Polya

09 March, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Dual Israeli and  Australian citizen and Jewish Australian father of 2, Ben Zygier, was secretly imprisoned for 11 months in solitary confinement  by the Israelis in 2010 until  he was either killed by the Israelis or, as alleged by the Israelis,  committed suicide in a suicide-proof cell. Solitary confinement for more than several weeks is regarded by experts as torture. Whether Australian citizen and father of 2 Ben Zygier was murdered by the Israelis or suicided in a suicide-proof cell, it is clear that he was secretly tortured to death by the Israelis over 11 months while the pro-Zionist Australian Labor Government did nothing.

Decent Australians want to know  what happened to their fellow Australian, but the response from the Australian Jewish community, public servants  and politicians  has been substantial and appalling silence. The Israelis imposed a news blackout on the matter for over 3 years but this scandal was eventually exposed in 2013 by the ABC ( Australia ‘s equivalent of the BBC) and Fairfax media (the most liberal of Australia ‘s mainstream media).

Ben Zygier was secretly arrested by the Israelis immediately  after the Dubai police revealed in February 2010 that the Israelis had murdered a Palestinian Hamas official in a terrorist  operation involving 20 Israeli terrorists using forged Australian, British, Irish, French and German passports. The Dubai atrocity resulted in both the British and Australian governments expelling an Israeli diplomat (spy?), albeit with craven apologies to the Israelis, both governments declaring that the passport forgeries were very disappointing  actions from such a good friend. The Israelis had forged Australian passports before, were told  to desist by the slavishly pro-Zionist Howard Government (1996-2007),  but evidently just kept on doing it and no doubt are still doing it (an appropriate anagram for ISRAEL is e-LIARS). .

The Israelis had forged New Zealand passports but New Zealand – that had callously refused entry to Jewish refugees from Nazism and which accordingly had much less Zionist subversion than Australia – responded vigorously , imposing diplomatic sanctions against Israel in 2004, and suspending high-level contacts between the two countries in 2005, after two Israeli citizens, Uriel Kelman and Eli Cara, were accused of passport fraud .

The passport forgery scandal in February 2010 was followed by the violent  Israeli kidnapping of 5 Australians in international waters after the criminal Israeli attack on a Gaza peace flotilla in which they killed 9 Turkish citizens, one of them a dual American Turkish citizen. . One Australian was tasered, one was shot, and all were robbed and illegally imprisoned in Apartheid Israel . The mild protest by the pro-Zionist Rudd Labor Government had no effect on Israeli state terrorism because they kidnapped another Australia on a subsequent Gaza flotilla  in international waters.

However these cases of Israeli state terrorism impacting Australia ultimately had a huge impact in Australia . As set out by outstanding, anti-racist Jewish Australian writer Antony Loewenstein (author of “My Israel Question”), the Australian Zionist Lobby was extremely upset by even the mild rebuke to Apartheid Israel by the Rudd Labor Government. PM Kevin Rudd subsequently went to great lengths to keep them happy but evidently to no avail. Kevin Rudd, one of Australia’s most popular PMs, was deposed in an overnight Coup in June 2010 that was approved of by the US (and no doubt by Apartheid Israel and its Zionist supporters) , backed by the foreign mining corporations (who had launched a $23 million advertising blitz to oppose Rudd’s proposed Mining Tax)  and led by a gang of extreme pro-Zionist plotters (see Antony Loewenstein, “Does the Zionist Lobby have blood on its hands in Australia?” : http://antonyloewenstein.com/2010/07/02/does-the-zionist-lobby-have-blood-on-its-hands-in-australia/ ; Gideon Polya, “Pro-Zionist-led coup ousts Australian PM Rudd”, MWC News, 29 June 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/politics/3488-pro-zionist-led-coup.html ; Gideon Polya, “50 ways racist Zionists (RZs) and Israeli state terrorism (IST) threaten Australia and your country too”, Bellaciao: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article19618 ; and  “I’ve been to Israel too”, Middle East Reality Check: http://middleeastrealitycheck.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/ive-been-to-israel-too.html ).

Ben Zygier had betrayed Australia and contributed to the Dubai and other  terrorist atrocities by obtaining several fake Australian passports by repeatedly changing his name. This game was rapidly flagged by Australia ‘s intelligence agencies ASIO (the Australian Security and Intelligence Organization, involved in domestic spying) and ASIS (the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, involved in spying overseas). The Israelis having kept it all a secret for over 3 years, now admit that they informed Australian Intelligence about the arrest of Ben Zygier, and these Australian officials  in turn informed certain officials in the Australian Department of Foreign  Affairs and Trade (DFAT). However the only Australian politician to have apparently been informed about the arrest of Ben Zygier was the pre-Coup  Attorney General Robert McClelland (replaced after the Coup by Jewish-origin  Australian Nicola Roxon who in turn was replaced recently by Jewish Zionist Mark Dreyfus). PM Kevin Rudd and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith (now Defence Minister) both deny knowing anything about the affair, a circumstance that has upset the Liberal Party-National Party Coalition Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop. Current Australian Attorney General, Jewish Zionist Mark Dreyfus, has refused to  have an investigation in his department (that includes oversight of Australian Intelligence). Australia ‘s present Foreign Minister Bob Carr has asked the Israelis for further information and declares that he is disturbed by the lack of information to politicians in the Labor Government from its public servants.

Antony Loewenstein has exposed the extraordinary silence from the Jewish Community (including Ben Zygier’s family) , the Zionist Lobby and politicians over the Ben Zygier affair. Writing in the excellent, middle of the road,  Australian web magazine New Matilda Loewenstein says: “”New Matilda spoke to a former senior Australian ambassador who says that ASIO and ASIS work hand in glove with the Israeli government, including the assistance of grooming potential spies on Australian soil at universities such as Monash in Melbourne and military academies like Duntroon. Australia long ago outsourced much of its military and intelligence, as well as foreign affairs sovereignty, to Israel and America . “There’s little we [ Australia ] would not do to please them”, my source says…  What the Zionist lobby and its political and media courtiers don’t want to discuss is their complicity in this affair. They all believe that young Jews have the right to move, fight or spy for Israel , including during wars against Lebanon and Gaza , while Muslims who want to join their brethren in Syria , Lebanon or Palestine are labelled terrorists for doing the same thing. From a young age, the Zionist schooling system and its associated entities indoctrinate Jews to slavishly back Israel and demonise Arabs. Blindly supporting Israel may seem like a good idea to them but in reality has created a monster from which the insecure Jewish community is unlikely to recover any time soon; growing numbers of young Jews are disillusioned with an occupying Israel and no longer tolerate an Israel lobby that acts as propagandists for Zionism. The death or murder of Ben Zygier should be a wake-up call to Australian Jewry that even its own can be treated shabbily by  Israel .” (Antony Loewenstein, “ Israel ‘s public image takes another hit”, New Matilda, 18 February 2013: http://newmatilda.com/2013/02/18/israels-public-image-takes-another-hit ).

Antony Loewenstein accurately exposes the unacceptable influence of Apartheid Israel and its Zionist Lobby in Australia .  This Zionist subversion is also apparent from the analysis below.

A useful summary of Jews in Australia is provided by the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education and Training 2010 in its “Racism No Way” teaching material (see: http://www.racismnoway.com.au/index.html ): “According to the 2006 census, over 86,000 (0.4 per cent) Australians identify as being Jewish. 90% of Australian Jews live in Sydney and Melbourne. The majority of Jews in Australia are native born, being either second or third generation, but in more recent years there has been migration from South Africa, the former Soviet Union and Israel. Jews have always valued the democracy and acceptance which Australia offers, and have usually sought citizenship as soon as possible. Unlike many other migrant groups, they have not usually considered the possibility of returning to their countries of birth. Over 80% of Jewish Australians have visited Israel , with 74% having relatives living there. Approximately 10,000 Jewish Australians have immigrated to Israel since 1945… Today, less [sic] than 10% of Jews live in Europe and very few in the Arab/Muslim world. Almost 50% now live in Israel and 40% in the United States . Less [sic] than 1% of the world’s Jews live in Australia .”

Wikipedia “Islam in Australia ” (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Australia ) reports:  “According to the 2011 census, 476,300 people, or 2.25% of the total Australian population were Muslims. This made Islam the fourth largest religious grouping, after all forms of Christianity (64%), no religion (22.9%) and Buddhism (2.5%)”.

According to Wikipedia, “Australia’s Anti-terrorism Act 2005” (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_organisations_outlawed_in_Australia ): “ It becomes a crime, punishable by life imprisonment, to recklessly provide funds to a potential terrorist: funds include money and equivalents and also assets; it is not necessary that the culprit know the receiver is a terrorist, only that they are reckless about the possibility; it is not even necessary that the receiver is a terrorist, only that the first person is reckless about the possibility that they might be. ”

Under Australian anti-terrorism laws it is an offense to materially support or be supported by proscribed terrorist organizations of which there are  currently 17 listed, all of them Muslim (see Australian Government, “Listing of terrorist organizations”: . http://www.nationalsecurity.gov.au/agd/WWW/NationalSecurity.nsf/

Page/What_Governments_are_doingListing_of_Terrorism_Organisations ).  The Jewish terrorist organizations like Irgun, which murdered Allied servicemen before,  during and after WW2 and was associated with genocidal atrocities against Palestinians, is not on the list. Thus an Australian innocently making a donation to an orphanage in the Gaza Concentration Camp might conceivably be subject to life imprisonment.  Conversely, donations to the Jewish National Fund that is intimately associated with the ongoing Zionist-run Palestinian Genocide are generously encouraged by being  tax deductible under Australian law.

Anti-Semitism is the verbal or physical damage to Semites for being  Semites per se, and occurs in 2 equally repugnant forms, anti-Arab anti-Semitism directed against 300 million ethnically  and culturally Semitic Arabs and 1,500 mostly culturally Semitic Muslims, and   anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against 13 million overwhelmingly culturally Semitic Jews.  Anti-Jewish anti-Semitism  is rightly condemned and indeed punished in Australia. However virulent anti-Arab anti-Semitism is entrenched in Australia, particularly since the 9-11 atrocity, and is remorselessly  promoted by racist Zionists,  notwithstanding  the irony that numerous science, engineering, architecture, aviation, military and intelligence experts say that the US did 9-11 and  quite likely with Israeli and Zionist  assistance (see “Experts: US did 9-11”: . https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ ). Indeed  the deaths of 9 million Muslims since 9-11 (half of them children)  from violence or war-imposed deprivation in the Zionist-promoted  US War on Terror has been an utterly disproportionate  response to the killing of about 3,000 Americans on 9-11 (see “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ ) but is resolutely not reported in the Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist-beholden Mainstream media (MSM) of Australia and indeed the MSM of the West in general (see “Mainstream  media lying”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/ ).

For anti-racist Jews and indeed all anti-racist humanitarians the core moral messages from the Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) and from the more general WW2 European Holocaust (30 million Slav, Jewish and Gypsy dead) are “zero tolerance for racism”, “never again to anyone”, “bear witness” and “zero tolerance for lying”. However these sacred injunctions are grossly violated by the anti-Arab anti-Semitic racist Zionists running Apartheid Israel and dominating their Western backers, most obviously the USA .

Decent anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish Australians and all decent folk around the world reject the racism, genocide, warmongering, kidnapping, torture, killing, mass murder, war crimes, and treason of the Zionists (for numerous eminent opinions see “Jews Against Racist Zionism”: https://sites.google.com/site/jewsagainstracistzionism/ and “Non-Jews Against Racist Zionism”: https://sites.google.com/site/nonjewsagainstracistzionism/  ). Indeed John Kennedy (JFK) and his brother Robert Kennedy both tried unsuccessfully to get the traitorous racist Zionist Lobby registered as agents of a foreign power but were both assassinated, the latter by a Palestinian whose family members were held hostage by war criminal Apartheid Israel.

It is reported in Israel and Australia that Ben Zygier had been traumatized by having had to kill Arab children in a covert Israeli operation Lebanon (see “Zygier “bragged out killings”, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 February 2013: http://www.smh.com.au/world/zygier-bragged-about-killings-20130218-2em4k.html ). Thinking the best of Ben Zygier, one would like to believe that having betrayed Australia by becoming a child-killing  IDF war criminal and a Mossad spy, he eventually was repelled by complicity in IDF war crimes and his betrayal of Australia . Australians will not give up wanting to know everything about the Ben Zygier scandal and especially whether Ben Zygier was a spy who “came in from the cold” and  confessed his war crimes and his treason against Australia to Australian Intelligence.

In addition to endangering Australia and Australians, those traitorous, criminal Zionists and their supporters and fellow travelers who are complicit in the Palestinian Genocide endanger decent, patriotic, anti-racist Jewish Australians who, like all decent Australians, utterly reject such vile crimes against Australia and Humanity (see Gideon Polya, “Australian Labor’s new anti-Semitism”, MWC News, 15 March 2012: http://mwcnews.org/focus/politics/17530-new-anti-semitism.html ).

Australians will not tolerate the reality that an Australian- indeed a  Zionist Jewish Australian – could be tortured  death in secret by Israeli terrorists over 11 months while Australian public servants kept the horrible reality from Australian politicians and the Australian public for over 2 years. The best way for decent, loyal,  anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish Australians to help stop racist Zionist subversion and perversion of Australia and indeed the World is to put Labor last in the coming Federal elections and maintain this position until the  presently neoliberal,  pro-Zionist, pro-Apartheid Israel , US lackey Labor Party decides to revert to decent values. Zionism is criminal, genocidal racism and the racist Zionists and their supporters (most Lib-Lab politicians in Australia ) should be sidelined from public life as have been like racists such as the Nazis, neo-Nazis, Apartheiders and KKK.

Dr Gideon Polya has been teaching science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open2.net/thingsweforgot/ bengalfamine_programme.html ). When words fail one can say it in pictures – for images of Gideon Polya’s huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .

By Franklin Lamb

09 March, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Damascus: Students everywhere are special people and this observer has discovered that Syrian students are among the very best.

Meeting and interviewing students again this past week, before and following, a frank and enlightening discussion with Dr. Mohammad Amer Al-Mardini, the indefatigable President of Damascus University, about the situation of the students and current instruction at the University, one cannot ,even as a foreigner, fail to feel pride in Syrian students.

Good meeting places, among others on campus, include “outdoor cafes” – a ‘street student union’ of sorts- consisting of a few chairs and portable tables. They are scattered among the dozens of vendor stalls that line “DU Boulevard” outside the main DU campus in central Damascus. Here students can buy everything from school supplies to mobile phones, to snacks, and it’s a perfect place to meet and chat with students.

One learns from them about the many effects on the education system in Syria of the US-led sanctions. Some argue that the Obama administration actually fuels the current crisis with its sanctions and achieves the opposite result of what the White House and its allies claim they are seeking. These freewheeling discussions leave a foreigner with a reminder why this university and its student body ranks among the best in the World.

More than 200,000 full-time and ‘open-learning’ students at Damascus University, the 6th largest in the World and founded in 1901, are feeling some effects of the harsh Obama Administration’s civilian targeting sanctions. Iran’s millions of students are also increasingly in the cross-hairs of the “humanitarian sanctions which Washington and Brussels claim “exempt food, medicines and medical supplies” and therefore “should be considered humane.”

Among DU Faculties most severely affected by the US-led sanctions are the Science Departments and the Medical and Nursing schools according to administration and student sources. Chemicals used in various science classes, medicines and medical equipment cannot be found as before and if some are brought in from Europe or elsewhere, the University often has to pay four times the normal price.

Utah’s Brigham Young University gained the respect and appreciation of many in Syria for its shipments to DU’s nursing school of medicines and equipment and even “model doll babies” which in Syria use in baby care classes. All are now banned by the US sanctions which claim to exempt medical equipment and medicines.

Damascus University, with its 43 specialized faculties is no banking-hours institution and its proven commitment is to give the highest quality education to as many students as possible. Syria’s largest university, it is now open for classes 365 days a year minus a few holidays—partly due to increased number of students arriving from across Syria, as the Administration and faculty work with colleges in war zones to guarantee students can continue their studies without missing key exams required for semester advancement. Still, about 18% of college level students are unable to attend due to transportation and displacement problems.

One direct and predictable severe impact of the US-led civilian targeting sanctions in Syria is that the sanctions have essentially stranded approximately 700 Syrian students in Europe and half a dozen in the US, forcing some to drop out and find a job to survive. This is because, as well known among the US Treasury Department “craftsmen” who devise the sanctions, these students are no longer able to receive funds to pay for their foreign tuition or living expenses because the banking system has been essentially shut down.

If families can scrape together some money for their children studying abroad and do manage to send it via Western Union, for example, a new “sanctions surcharge” of 7 euros for every 1,000 euros sent, is demanded by WU and other money transfer agencies, suggesting another form of war profiteering. To make things even more difficult for the students, foreign Universities who might consider lending their stranded Syrian students tuition money or might even consider aiding them with scholarships or a grant have been “chilled” and are backing-off because these institutions do not want to be accused of ‘sanction-busting’ by the US Treasury hound dogs.

Few food or medicine suppliers, given the sanction regulations language and uncertain legal meanings-even for their lawyers, some of whom have declared that the language is incomprehensible, want to risk the wrath of the US Treasury Department and be slapped with severe penalties including, but not limited to, very expensive fines by dealing with anyone in Syria concerning food and medicine.

One of the US Treasury ‘hound dogs’ noted above, is David Cohen, Under -Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. Mr. Cohen made a trip to the region late last month to brief allies and businesses as well as NGO’s, including discussions in Israel, “to be sure the sanctions were biting hard” to use a favorite phase of UN Ambassador Susan Rice. The Obama administration, reportedly frustrated by the fact that its multi-tiered sanctions have failed to topple the governments of Syria and Iran, has been attempting to find and plug sanction loopholes and are intensifying warnings to the international community, in no uncertain terms, not to mess with the US Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) or the Office of Financial Assets Control (OFAC) by getting all wobbly-kneed and going soft on full sanction and complete enforcement.

Meanwhile, Syria’s Department of Education is joining the struggle to shield Syria’s education institutions and is being joined by various student associations. To date, the Ministry has not cut its substantial disbursements to colleges. Tuition remains among the lowest in the world at Damascus University, which also provides housing for 15,000 students. The DU administration is currently under pressure to find more dormitory space for those needing housing. Still, despite the conflict, even in Deraa near the Jordanian border where the current crisis started, DU’s campus continues to function.

Many DU students are also volunteering with assisting Syrian primary schools which urgently need their help. According to a December 2012 UNICEF education assessment of primary schools in Syria– at least 2,400 schools have been damaged or destroyed, including 772 in Idlib (50 per cent of the total), 300 in Aleppo and another 300 in Deraa. Over 1,500 schools are being used as shelters for displaced persons. The Damascus University community has also taken on the humanitarian challenge of assisting sister educational institutions that have been affected by the current crisis including campuses in Homs and Aleppo, among others. This observer has met several Damascus University students among the 9,000 volunteers, including Palestinian refugees, who are donating their time working with the Syria Red Crescent Society (SARCS). Many DU students are also volunteering with assisting primary schools.

The grim reality of Syrian families, hospitals and health care facilities across the country, and now its Universities, students and educational institutions, experiencing the claimed “humanitarian sanctions” which emphasize” exemptions for food, medicine and medical equipment exemptions, once again exposes Obama administration claimed humanitarian values to ridicule here and around the world.

Rather than target Syria’s future leaders, the White House would do well to cancel its student targeting sanctions and send Secretary Kerrey to Damascus to meet face-to-face with the Syrian people and government and demonstrate a real American interest in stopping the bloodshed. Armored vehicles and assorted “non-lethal aid” to one side in this conflict will only prolong the killing, as any student here will attest.

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Syria and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com

By Robert J. Burrowes

08 March, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Perpetrators of violence learn their craft in childhood. If you inflict violence on a child, it learns to inflict violence on others. The terrorist suffered violence as a child. The political leader who wages war suffered violence as a child. The man who inflicts violence on women suffered violence as a child. The corporate executive who exploits working class people or those who live in Africa, Asia or Central/South America suffered violence as a child. The individual who perpetrates violence in the home, in the schoolyard or on the street suffered violence as a child.

If we want to end violence, war and exploitation then we must finally end our longest and greatest war: the adult war on children. And here’s an incentive: if we don’t tackle the fundamental cause of violence, then our combined and unrelenting efforts to tackle all of its other symptoms must ultimately fail. And extinction at our own hand is inevitable.

How can I claim that violence against children is the fundamental cause of all other violence? Consider this. There is universal acceptance that behaviour is shaped by childhood experience. If it was not, we would not put such effort into education and other efforts to socialize children to fit into society. And this is why many psychologists have argued that exposure to war toys and violent video games shapes attitudes and behaviours in relation to violence.

But it is far more complex than this and, strange though it may seem, it is not just the ‘visible’ violence (such as hitting, screaming at and sexually abusing) that we normally label ‘violence’ that causes the main damage, although this is extremely damaging. The largest component of damage arises from the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children during the ordinary course of the day. Tragically, the bulk of this violence occurs in the family home and at school. See ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence

So what is ‘invisible’ violence? It is the ‘little things’ we do every day, partly because we are just ‘too busy’. For example, when we do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and feelings, the child learns to not listen to itSelf thus destroying its internal communication system. When we do not let a child say what it wants (or ignore it when it does), the child develops communication and behavioral dysfunctionalities as it keeps trying to meet its own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, it is genetically programmed to do).

When we blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize with and/or judge a child, we both undermine its sense of Self-worth and teach it to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail, moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout its childhood by this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However, parents and other adults also actively interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioral responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioral outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when it expresses its feelings, by comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when it expresses its feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing its feelings, by terrorizing a child into not expressing its feelings (e.g. by screaming at it when it cries or gets angry), and/or by violently controlling a behavior that is generated by its feelings (e.g. by hitting it, restraining it or locking it into a room), the child has no choice but to unconsciously suppress its awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing its awareness of its feelings (rather than being allowed to have its feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed its awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. This has many outcomes that are disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the individual will now easily suppress its awareness of the feelings that would tell it how to act most functionally in any given circumstance and it will progressively acquire a phenomenal variety of dysfunctional behaviors, including some that are violent towards itself, others and/or the Earth.

From the above, it should also now be apparent that punishment should never be used. ‘Punishment’, of course, is one of the words we use to obscure our awareness of the fact that we are using violence. Violence, even when we label it ‘punishment’, scares children and adults alike and cannot elicit a functional behavioural response. If someone behaves dysfunctionally, they need to be listened to, deeply, so that they can start to become consciously aware of the feelings (which will always include fear and, often, terror) that drove the dysfunctional behaviour in the first place. They then need to feel and express these feelings (including any anger) in a safe way. Only then will behavioural change in the direction of functionality be possible.

‘But these adult behaviors you have described don’t seem that bad. Can the outcome be as disastrous as you claim?’ you might ask. The problem is that there are hundreds of these ‘ordinary’, everyday behaviors that destroy the Selfhood of the child. It is ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and most children simply do not survive as Self-aware individuals. And why do we do this? We do it so that each child will fit into our model of ‘the perfect citizen’: that is, obedient and hardworking student, reliable and pliant employee/soldier, and submissive law-abiding citizen.

Moreover, once we destroy the Selfhood of a child, it has many flow-on effects. For example, once you terrorise a child into accepting certain information about itself, other people or the state of the world, the child becomes unconsciously fearful of dealing with new information, especially if this information is contradictory to what it has been terrorised into believing. As a result, the child will unconsciously dismiss new information out of hand. In short, the child has been terrorised in such a way that it is no longer capable of learning (or its learning capacity is seriously diminished by excluding any information that is not a simple extension of what it already ‘knows’). If you imagine any of the bigots you know, you are imagining someone who is utterly terrified. But it’s not just the bigots; virtually all people are affected in this manner making them incapable of responding adequately to new information. This is one explanation why some people are ‘climate deniers’.

So if we want to end human violence, we must tackle all of its symptoms simultaneously but, as part of our strategy, we must also tackle the cause. Primarily, this means giving everyone, child and adult alike, all of the space they need to feel, deeply, what they want to do, and to then let them do it (or to have the feelings they naturally have if they are prevented from doing so). In the short term, this will have some dysfunctional outcomes. But it will lead to an infinitely better overall outcome than the system of emotional suppression, control and punishment which has generated the incredibly violent world in which we now find ourselves.

This all sounds pretty unpalatable doesn’t it? So each of us has a choice. We can suppress our awareness of what is unpalatable, as we have been terrorised into doing as a child, or we can feel the various feelings that we have in response to this information and then ponder ways forward. If feelings are felt and expressed then our responses can be shaped by the conscious and integrated functioning of thoughts and feelings, as evolution intended, and we can plan intelligently. The alternative is to have our unconscious fear controlling our thinking and deluding us that we are acting rationally.

It is time to end the adult war on children so that all of the other violence that emerges from this cause can end too.

‘This isn’t going to happen’, you might say. And you are probably right. Nevertheless, some of us are committed to working on this most critical of issues. You are welcome to join us. If you like, you can sign online ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com

Robert has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘The Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach’, State University of New York Press, 1996. His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his personal website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

By Robert Reich, Robert Reich’s Blog

06 March 13

@ readersupportednews.org

Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose above 14,270 – completely erasing its 54 percent loss between 2007 and 2009.

The stock market is basically back to where it was in 2000, while corporate earnings have doubled since then.

Yet the real median wage is now 8 percent below what it was in 2000, and unemployment remains sky-high.

Why is the stock market doing so well, while most Americans are doing so poorly? Four reasons:

First, productivity gains. Corporations have been investing in technology rather than their workers. They get tax credits and deductions for such investments; they get no such tax benefits for improving the skills of  their employees. As a result, corporations can now do more with fewer people on their payrolls. That means higher profits.

Second, high unemployment itself. Joblessness all but eliminates the bargaining power of most workers – allowing corporations to keep wages low. Public policies that might otherwise reduce unemployment – a new WPA or CCC to hire the long-term unemployed, major investments in the nation’s crumbling infrastructure – have been rejected in favor of austerity economics. This also means higher profits, at least in the short run.

Third, globalization. Big American-based corporations have been expanding and hiring around the globe where markets are growing fastest – even while the U.S. market is lackluster. Tax policies and trade policies have encouraged them.

Finally, the Fed’s easy-money policies. They’ve pushed investors into the stock market because bond yields are so low. On Tuesday, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note was just 1.9%.

All of this spells widening inequality in America, because the people who invest the most in the stock market have high incomes. Those who rely most on wages have lower incomes.

Corporate profits are claiming a larger share of national income than at any time in 60 years, while the portion of total income going to employees is near its lowest since 1966.

As my colleague Immanuel Saez recently found, all the economic gains between 2009 and 2011 (the last year for which data were available) went to the richest 1 percent of Americans. The bottom 99 percent has continued to lose ground.

And yet the tax code continues to give preference to capital gains over ordinary income – a huge boon to investors.

The sequestration is likely to make all this worse, since it will slow the U.S. economy and keep unemployment higher than otherwise.

It will also hurt the most vulnerable. Some $1.9 billion in low-income rental subsidies are being eliminated, affecting 125,000 people. Cuts to the Department of Agriculture will eliminate rental assistance for another 10,000 low-income rural people. Meanwhile, 100,000 formerly homeless Americans are likely to be removed from their current emergency shelters.

More than 3.8 million Americans receiving long-term unemployment benefits will have their monthly payments reduced by as much as 9.4 percent, and lose an average of $400 in benefits over their period of joblessness.

The Department of Education’s Title I program, which helps schools serving more than a million disadvantaged students, will be cut $715 million, and $400 million will be cut from Head Start, the preschool program for poor children. And major cuts will be made in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, which provides nutrition assistance and education.

The health of an economy is not measured by the profits of corporations headquartered within it or the value of its stock market. It depends, rather, on how many of people have jobs and whether those jobs pay decent wages.

By this measure, we are a long way from economic health. Rarely before in American history have public policies so blatantly helped the most fortunate among us, so cruelly harmed the least fortunate, and exposed so many average working Americans to such widespread insecurity.