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By Ali Abunimah

Qassem Talal Hamdan, 23, was killed on 13 July 2014 in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza. An engineering student, his “dream was to be a successful engineer to build and develop his country.”

Iman Khalil Abed Ammar was just nine years old. She was killed on 20 July in the Shujaiya massacre along with her brothers, four-year-old Asem and thirteen-year-old Ibrahim.

Mahmoud Abdel Hamid Elzowidi, 23, and Mohammad Khalid Jamil Elzowidi, 20, were among five members of their family killed on 19 July when Israel bombed their house in Beit Hanoun.

These are the names of just six of the more than 1,000 Palestinians known to have been killed in almost three weeks of relentless Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

On Saturday, during a twelve-hour “humanitarian truce,” the full extent of the mass destruction Israel has inflicted was revealed as people were able to re-enter neighborhoods such as Shujaiya, and dozens more bodies were pulled from under the rubble. Many people are still missing.

Afraid that the names of those slaughtered by Israel would get lost in the staggering statistics of death, two women have set up the website Humanize Palestine (humanizepalestine.com) as an online memorial to Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks.

Bayan Abusneineh and Dana Saifan are both recent graduates of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and have both been active in Students for Justice in Palestine.

I spoke with Abusneineh, who told me that she and Saifan got the idea to start the project after seeing many graphic images of the bodies of Palestinians who had died violent deaths circulating through social media.

“Initially when everything was happening it was necessary for people to see these graphic images, to know the reality of what is going in Gaza,” Abusneineh explained. “But then I started thinking about those three Israeli settler youths who were kidnapped – their faces were everywhere. Generally, when Israelis are killed, their bodies are not shown. You only see smiling faces, and that creates empathy.”

Abusneineh said that Humanize Palestine was intended to serve first and foremost “as a reminder and memorial for our own community. People were already making an effort to put names out there, and we saw them sharing some of the images of friends and relatives when they were alive, so our project is another way to bring them together.”

But she also says she hopes that people outside the Palestinian community will “see it and understand better who Palestinians are. This is how they lived. This is how their lives were ended.”

I asked Abusneineh how she and Saifan verify the images, names and other information they publish on the site, and she talked about the process: “We started just compiling images about a week ago on a Google document and we realized we could make something bigger. We started going through Twitter, Tumblr, trying to get verification. People were sharing pictures of family members and we got into contact with them as well.”
“When we find someone circulating information, we try to find multiple pictures of the person matched to a name,” she explained. “We check to see if the name is on a list of casualties on a credible website. If we can’t find a match, we don’t use the image. We also try our best to match information up with stories published in the media. There have been a lot we didn’t use.”

Still the effort is not perfect, Abusneineh acknowledges, which is why she thinks it is crucial to see Humanize Palestine as a community effort. Several people have helped to refine, correct and track down information, and there is now an email address on the site for people to send in submissions.

“We’ve had a lot of people contribute pictures saying these are my cousins, this is their picture and this is what happened to them, and we’re hoping to put those up too.” Others have even sent in art work and poetry.
The website also includes Palestinians who may have been combatants, such as brothers Mustafa Abd El Hadi Abu Mur, 20, and Khaled Abd El Hadi Abu Mur, 23 who, the site says, “died together in Rafah in defense of their nation.”

Abusneineh acknowledges that the site is a lot of work, but she sees value in it becoming a permanent memorial if the community effort can be built and maintained.

Although she agreed to speak to The Electronic Intifada in order to explain the goals of Humanize Palestine, Abusneineh says that she and Saifan have not put their own names on the website itself, “because we want the focus to be entirely on the people whose lives we write about.”

The website features not only Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza, but victims of Israeli army and settler attacks in the occupied West Bank as well.

“We don’t want it just to be when a huge massacre happens. People still die every day because of the occupation. So we hope to continue,” she says.

Ali Abunimah is Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

28 July, 2014
Electronic Intifada

By Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers

As US Empire fades, we must choose our path forward

World history is filled with empires, e.g. the Roman and Byzantine empires, the European colonial empires, various ancient Iranian empires, the Arab Caliphate and Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union to name a few. These historic empires have one thing in common: they no longer exist. As the lifecycle of empire wanes, rather than being a benefit to the home country, sustaining empire becomes more expensive than it is worth.

While the US economy and military remain the largest in the world, the economy is faltering and losing its vitality. Chalmers Johnson, a CIA analyst who became a critic of the agency and author of a series on US Empire, writes :

“Thirty-five years from now, America’s official century of being top dog (1945-2045) will have come to an end; its time may, in fact, be running out right now. We are likely to begin to look ever more like a giant version of England at the end of its imperial run, as we come face-to-face with, if not necessarily to terms with, our aging infrastructure, declining international clout, and sagging economy.”

The US began as a colony of European empires, especially of England, and then evolved into its own North American Empire. Thomas Jefferson called the United States an “empire of Liberty” when he purchased the Louisiana Territory in 1803. As “Manifest Destiny” took root, the US stole land of Indigenous peoples, appropriated Texas and Oregon and then went onto California. The Mexican War and Texas cessation took 55% of Mexico’s pre-1836 territory including lands in present day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming as well as Texas through its cession from Mexico.

The modern US Empire has its roots in the Spanish-American War when the US occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines and in the two World Wars. Since World War II, the United States has been a growing global imperial power at war—somewhere—every year. Seymour Melman wrote in March of 2003: “Now, at the start of the twenty-first century, every major aspect of American life is being shaped by our Permanent War Economy.” This has been a prime cause of the hollowing out of the domestic economy.

Rather than fixing the infrastructure, which the American Society of Civil Engineers ranks in its annual report card as a D+, the federal government’s “financing is lavished without stint to promote every kind of war industry, and foreign investing by U.S. firms.” As Seymour points out “there is no public ‘space’ for dialogue on how to improve the quality of our lives. Such topics are subordinate to ‘how to make war.’”

Economy and Empire

An empire must keep its client states happy as well as its transnational corporations profitable. This has resulted in a foreign policy designed for corporate interests and foreign oligarchs. The Wikileaks documents show US secrecy often hides crimes , abuses and unethical behavior linked to corporate interests; it also hides actions of a government that operates not for the public interest but for the profits of transnational corporations ; and that is why secrecy is often necessary. We see this most glaringly in the rigged trade agreements being negotiated in secret except for hundreds of corporate advisers who work with the US Trade Representative in writing the agreements.

The flood of migrants coming from Central America is blowback from US foreign policy in the region. Just as NAFTA undermined the Mexican economy, Central American trade agreements have done the same for that region. Further, US support for brutal governments who impoverish their people and support for coups against governments that try to create greater equity have made these nations very difficult to live in. Even US drug policy adds to the misery in these countries. People desperate to survive come North in the hopes of finding a better life. While some cities, most recently Vancouver, seek to become sanctuary cities that protect immigrants, the Obama administration takes the approach of criminalization and deportation .

Not only does Empire foreign policy undermine the federal budget, with 55% of discretionary spending going to the military, but it also undermines the US economy as jobs are shipped overseas and corporations hide trillions of dollars in assets overseas to avoid paying taxes (see, for example, this article, Boycott Walgreens: The Tax-Dodger On The Corner ) . Empire economics does not serve the workers in the US or abroad and does not serve the security of people as safety nets are shredded as austerity is needed to fund weapons and war.

The cost of war has escalated. Just one weapons system, the F-35, a fighter jet that has been grounded because it does not work, has cost $49 billion per year since the program begin in 2006. Hayes Brown of Think Progress made a list of what that money could have been spent on instead. It could have bought a mansion for every homeless person, fed every school child in the US, funded every humanitarian crisis or provided global security through the UN or provided funding to rebuild America.

The economic impact of Empire policy is going to take a new turn as nations become allies outside of US influence. This week was the beginning of an alternative to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) officially launched the BRICS Development Bank . This comes at the same time that 78 nations have called for a new era where there is respect for the sovereignty of nations and policies that seek economic, environmental and social justice. Many nations of the world are fighting back against US hegemony.

Empire Economy Causing Unrest

Not only are governments challenging US dominance, but people are fighting back as well. A wave of revolts, not only in the US but around the world, against big finance capitalism that allows transnational corporations to dominate the world economy has the power structure, including bankers , on heightened alert. The US military has been spending tens of millions since 2008 in the Minerva Project studying how protest movements develop and go viral. This week we learned the military was studying how to control emotions by manipulating social media . We also learned that spy agencies also have tools to manipulate social media in order to control people.

And, we see their fear in the harsh way they handle protests against Empire policies. Last week in Syracuse, a nonviolent protester against drones and grandmother of three, Mary Anne Grady Flores, was sentenced to one year in jail . You can see video of her moving sentencing speech here . After her sentencing, another drone protester was convicted and is also facing a year in jail. Flores was released on bail pending appeal , but 7 subsequent drone protesters were hit with heavy bail after they were arrested.

The Empire advocates should be afraid. Earlier this year a war was stopped when people united to oppose the attack on Syria. Currently, the Israelis cannot hide their war crimes, even if the media does not report them. We are developing our own media tools that can stop and expose the realities of wars

The former Assistant Secretary of Treasury Paul Craig Roberts reviews the realities of the failing US economy , piercing the veil of false media reporting on a non-existent “recovery” and tying it to the Empire economy, asking:

“In view of this reality, why is Washington pushing its puppet in Kiev toward war with Russia? Why is Washington pushing NATO to spend more money and build more bases on which to deploy more troops in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, especially when Washington’s contribution will be the largest part of the cost? Why is Washington re-entering the Middle East conflict that Washington began by inciting Sunni and Shia against one another? Why is Washington constructing new naval and air bases from the Philippines to Vietnam in order to encircle China?

“If Washington is this unaware of its budget constraints and its financial predicament, it cannot be long before Americans experience economic catastrophe.”

The Arc of US Empire Shows Decline

The last 100 years of Empire and imperialism brought the US great wealth, creating the largest economy in the world which the IMF values as $17 trillion or one-quarter of the global economy. Today, the US economy is struggling with high unemployment, record numbers of Americans dropping out of the job market, large trade deficits and declines in many measures of standard of living. At the same time, other countries, most notably China, India, Brazil and Russia, are beginning to challenge the US.

As noted earlier, these countries along with South Africa joined together to create the BRICS development bank to challenge the World Bank and IMF, which are dominated by the US and its western allies. This may be the most important challenge to US economic dominance since 1945 especially when combined with bilateral agreements between countries that omit the US dollar, weakening its position as the reserve currency of the world.

Alfred W. McCoy, author of Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State , convened a global working group of 140 historians to consider the fate of the US as an imperial power. He predicts four scenarios for the future of the United States, all leading to the end of Empire.

First on the list is economic decline. He writes that “three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar’s privileged status as the global reserve currency.” The scenario ends with:

“After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally loses its special status as the world’s reserve currency. Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls U.S. forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late.”

The second is fear of oil shock by the leadership which explains the US’ current extreme energy extraction boom even though it threatens the environment and public health. McCoy writes that the waning economic power of the United States has caused it to lose control of the world’s oil supplies. In 2010, he pointed out that while the US was still a gas guzzler, “China became the world’s number one energy consumer this summer, a position the U.S. had held for over a century.”

Further he emphasized the rising power of Iran and Russia, two countries the US is belligerent with, saying that by 2025 they will “control almost half of the world’s natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned , in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could ‘emerge as energy kingpins.’” Competing with them through extreme energy extraction, under the “all of the above” energy strategy, will come at tremendous cost to the ecology of the US and the planet.

The third scenario is what our last article on Empire examined : Military Misadventure. McCoy writes : “Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures. … These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.” He points to the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, with war threatened in Pakistan.

McCoy describes how with the US military “stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.” Since writing this, the US military is stretched even thinner with more military crisis areas, e.g. Libya, Syria, the Ukraine and Russia unfolding. Each could grow into a wider conflict.

The final scenario is World War III in the Asian Pacific which he described as having previously been “America’s Lake,” but which is now challenged by China. The US fears China as, he notes, “the Pentagon reported that Beijing now holds ‘the capability to attack… [U.S.] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean’ and target ‘nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.’”

The Wikileaks cables that were published after McCoy’s article further describe the fears of the US as a declining world power in the face of China. A March 24, 2009 State Department cable describes a meeting between Secretary of State Clinton and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd held in Washington, DC. During the meeting Clinton complained about how difficult it was to take action against China asking “How do you deal toughly with your banker?” Rudd says Australia was playing close attention to China and building up its Navy in response. He urged the US and its allies to pull China into US-dominated structure of state relations, “while also preparing to deploy force if everything goes wrong.”

No doubt this conversation was one of many that led to Obama’s Asian Pivot and the increased focus on negotiating the China-less Trans-Pacific Partnership thus encircling China militarily and economically. McCoy, writing prior to these policy changes, predicts vast resources being spent on the full “spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” He describes this including not just traditional military weapons but “a new digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance.” All of this preparation for conflict with China comes at the expense of the faltering domestic economy and indebted federal budget.

These scenarios describe the decline of US Empire and each has the potential for tremendous negative effects on the domestic economy as the decline occurs. McCoy finds that “every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.”

How quickly do empires unravel? McCoy writes a warning:

“Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, 22 years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003.” (Note: the year of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.)

Creating a Different Future

Of course, it does not have to be this way. The people of the United States can educate themselves about these realities and mobilize to force the government to take a very different course. Chalmers Johnson presents a different vision :

“If, however, we were to dismantle our empire of military bases and redirect our economy toward productive, instead of destructive, industries; if we maintained our volunteer armed forces primarily to defend our own shores (and perhaps to be used at the behest of the United Nations); if we began to invest in our infrastructure, education, health care, and savings, then we might have a chance to reinvent ourselves as a productive, normal nation.”

Melman argues that to achieve this “We must come to grips with America’s State Capitalism and its Permanent War Economy. Failing that, there is no hope for any constructive exit.” Johnson does not see this scenario as likely, but it is up to us to make it likely, to recreate the world as we want it to be. The crisis of American Empire is an opportunity for a new course of action that can save us, and the world.

There has been more than 100 years of people seeking to end war as a means of solving conflicts between nations and peoples. A new campaign, World Beyond War , is seeking to organize a global movement to end war. They are raising money for a billboard campaign that will build on the opposition to war, teach that ‘war cannot end war’ and let people know there is a movement for them to join.

While ending war and US Empire would be monumental changes, they seem reasonable when we look at the predicament of the United States: the economy is failing, the world is looking for alternatives to the US dollar, the US military has not won a major war since World War II and is stretched thin around the globe, the cost of military equipment has skyrocketed, the traditional energy supply is uncertain and risky, the people and nations around the world are revolting and public opinion in the US opposes war and militarism.

On a positive note, as we write this the US House of Representatives just voted in a bipartisan landslide 370 to 40, to require the President to come to Congress to get authorization to renew the war in Iraq. Last year a war in Syria was stopped when it became clear Congress would not support it – after citizen pressure. The people have more power than we realize.

Now is the time to build our power and use it. Let’s organize to end Empire and militarism and create an alternative democratized economy that puts the needs of people and the planet first.

This is Part II of a series on Empire. Part I: U.S. Empire Reaches A Breaking Point Time to End It

27 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Dennis Small

July 22—In mid-July, as the planet was being wracked by growing war horrors in eastern Ukraine, Iraq, and Gaza, and by economic depression caused by the death throes of the trans-Atlantic financial system, heads of state representing half of humanity gathered in Brazil and took the first steps toward creating a New World Economic Order.

The leaders of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), met on July 16 in Fortaleza for the VI BRICS Summit, and the next day they were joined by the heads of state of South America in the capital city Brasilia. The BRICS account for 43% of the world’s population and 27% of the planet’s land area; when Ibero-America is added in, they jointly represent 48% of the human race, and one third of the Earth’s land area (Figure 1).

At the summit and its numerous associated bilateral and multilateral meetings, that half of humanity adopted a project that is premised on rejecting the current casino financial system, and replacing it with one providing credit for high-technology development projects; on educating and training youth to meet the growth challenges of the future; on full respect for national sovereignty, banishing the imperial policy of regime change and wars; and on explicit promotion of the common good among nations—the Westphalian principle.

“History tells us the law of the jungle isn’t the way of human coexistence,” Chinese President Xi Jinping stated on July 16.

“Every nation should obey the principle of equality, mutual trust, learning from each other, cooperating and seeking joint benefits … for the construction of a harmonious world, sustained peace, and joint prosperity.”

The British Queen was not pleased by these developments, seeing in them an existential threat to the Empire. Lyndon LaRouche was pleased—for the same reason. For 40 years, the renowned American statesman has devised programs, and organized for them internationally, of global financial reform and great development projects—most recently his “Four New Laws To Save the U.S.A. Now!”—of precisely the sort that have now been placed on the agenda by the BRICS.

“The BRICS and allies are building a world system based on real value, not phony paper value,” LaRouche stated July 18.

“They are deciding what real value is, and they are imposing it, which is the cost of the productive powers of labor in a changing situation.”

The underlying problem that we have to deal with today, LaRouche elaborated, is the “asymmetry of value in the world,” which is coming from two distinct systems that are operating with a different logic and different metrics: They are totally incompatible.

The first system is the trans-Atlantic system. “These bastards,” LaRouche stated, “who hold pieces of paper that they say are worth quadrillions, and they’re prepared to kill for that,” as the case of Argentina’s battle against the vulture funds shows, as does the pro-vulture ruling of the Aristotelian idiot otherwise known as Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court. What these people are holding, this paper, LaRouche added, is absolutely worthless. “It’s like taking rags out of a bucket and trying to sell them”; or even worse, it’s just the promise of future delivery of derivatives on those rags, that they’re saying actually has value.

This is the dead hand of the past, trying to stop humanity from creating any future for itself.

On the other side, we have an emerging system, incompatible with the first, which is building a market based on real value. And real value, LaRouche elaborated, comes from, and is measured by, the development of the productive powers of labor—that is, through the introduction of scientifically created new technologies, implementing productive processes which increase the energy-flux density through the physical economy in such fashion as to immensely increase the productive powers of labor. That new system will create a process whereby the increase in energy-flux density will itself increase at an accelerating rate.

This role of technological progress and scientific advance, LaRouche specified, is what the human species uniquely does. Such creativity is actually the source of value in an economy, and it is the way in which our action to create the future defines present value. It is the central concept of the American System of Political Economy, on which the United States was founded.

The decisive strategic question today, LaRouche concluded, is whether the United States will join that emerging New World Economic Order, or will remain joined at the hip to the British Empire—as it is under the impeachable President Barack Obama—and bring destruction down upon itself and the rest of the world. The same existential issue faces Europe.

Building a Nuclear Future
The BRICS Summit issued a 72-point Fortaleza Declaration (see below), which announced the formation of a New Development Bank (NDB), initially capitalized at $50 billion, to fund infrastructure projects in BRICS and other countries; as well as a Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) with $100 billion to help nations deal with capital flight and other forms of financial warfare.

Most international commentators have engaged in endless contortions, dissecting sentences from the Fortaleza Declaration and speeches at the summit, to try to determine whether these new BRICS institutions are meant to merely complement the British Empire’s International Monetary Fund and other institutions, or to replace them with a new financial architecture. But the answer to that question lies not in parsing written or spoken words, but in the intent behind the creation of the new institutions, which is best reflected in two fundamental issues which were pervasive throughout the discussions: the future and youth, and nuclear energy.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was most eloquent on the first of these, emphasizing to the plenary session of the Summit “the uniqueness of BRICS as an international institution. For the first time, it brings together a group of nations on the parameter of ‘future potential,’ rather than existing prosperity or shared identities. The very idea of BRICS is thus forward-looking.” He urged the BRICS to now go beyond “being summit-centric,” proposing that the youth of the BRICS nations should take a lead in expanding people-to-people contact between their nations. He suggested establishing a BRICS Young Scientists’ Forum, setting up BRICS language schools “to offer language training in each of our languages,” and exploring the creation of a BRICS University.

Modi concluded:

“Excellencies, we have an opportunity to define the future—of not just our countries, but the world at large…. I take this as a great responsibility.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin struck a similar note in comments to the press on July 17, evaluating the results of his trip:

“The BRICS are all young states, and the future belongs to the young.”

As for the issue of nuclear energy, discussion of it and conclusion of numerous concrete deals permeated the summit and related bilateral meetings, especially those of Russia’s Putin with Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff. This, despite the fact that the Fortaleza Declaration itself—in many ways a “consensus document” typical of such international gatherings—does not mention the matter, other than to defend Iran’s right to develop peaceful nuclear energy.

The true measure of value in an economy, LaRouche has emphasized, is the impact of science and technology in continually increasing the energy-flux density of the productive processes. Although the required science-driver for the world economy is the development of thermonuclear fusion energy, the current insistence on nuclear fission among the BRICS and allied countries is highly significant, as it reflects a commitment to raising the economy’s overall energy-flux density.

Far better than any monetary or GDP-based measure, energy-flux density and other physical economic parameters best indicate the BRICS’ direction.

Figure 2 shows nuclear energy as a percentage of total electricity generation—which is an indicator of overall energy-flux density—in a number of BRICS countries (Russia, India, and Brazil), as compared to representative European countries (Germany and Spain), looking at both current and projected levels. In the case of Germany, for example, the British Empire’s criminal green policy of de-nuclearization has already led to a drastic collapse of nuclear from 28% of total electricity in 1990, to 15% today. The German government of Angela Merkel has adopted a policy of reducing that to zero by the year 2020! Spain is almost as bad.

Compare that to what Russia has done, increasing its proportion of nuclear from 11% in 1990 to 18% in 2013, with a policy of raising that proportion to some 27% by 2030. Other BRICS countries have smaller proportions of nuclear to total electricity today, but they are defiantly committed to a nuclear future. Brazil, for example, plans to increase nuclear from 3% to 15% by 2030. As President Rousseff stated just before the summit began: “Our countries are among the largest in the world, and they cannot be content, in the midst of the 21st Century, with any kind of dependency. Recent events demonstrate that it is essential that we seek for ourselves our scientific and technological autonomy.”

South Africa has also just announced that it is resuming its nuclear program, with plans to build six new nuclear plants (see article in this section).

It is of note that China has the largest nuclear construction program in the world today—a distinction which in the 1970s went to the Roosevelt-created Tennessee Valley Authority. In fact, of the 66 nuclear plants currently under construction worldwide, 50 of them are in the BRICS countries. In other words, 43% of the world’s population is constructing 75% of the world nuclear plants; or, the rate of nuclear construction is 4.3 times greater per capita in the BRICS than in the rest of the world.

The reality is, of course, much starker than those simple numbers indicate, because nuclear energy is being actively destroyed in much of the trans-Atlantic sector (and Japan), as a direct result of the British Empire’s suicidal green policies. The BRICS and allies have made it clear that will have none of it: They have taken the British Queen’s green agenda, as reflected in the Copenhagen Resolution, and thrown it in the trash can.

LaRouche put a fine point on it:

“What about Frau Merkel of Germany?” he asked July 18. She represents the worthless view of value; she’s tearing down nuclear energy, destroying her economy and making it absolutely worthless, he said. “What’s the value of her opinions? Not much.” The BRICS and Ibero-America are building a world market based on real value, and they are already far more productive than Europe and the United States, which insist on values being set by some crazy judge—Scalia in the Argentine case.

Great Infrastructure Projects
Also reflective of the BRICS’ focus on real value, was the emphasis placed on creating a credit system to fund major infrastructure investment. Two important such projects moved forward in and around the BRICS Summit.

The first was the idea of fulfilling the centuries-old dream of building a transcontinental railroad to connect the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of South America (Figure 3). This took shape in the discussion between Chinese President Xi and Peruvian President Ollanta Humala, and then with Brazil’s President Rousseff. An agreement was reached to open bidding for foreign, including Chinese, companies, to participate in the construction of one critical segment of that project: the “T”-shaped Palmas-Campinorte-Annapolis/Campinorte-Lucas route in central Brazil.

The importance of that segment within the overall project is clear from Figure 4, a schematic map first published by EIR back in 1988. The northern terminus of Palmas is a stone’s throw from the famous Carajás project in the middle of the Amazon jungle, the world’s largest (and purest) iron ore deposit, which is now connected by rail only to the Atlantic port of São Luis. Once built, the western rail terminus of Lucas would then be halfway to the Brazil-Peru border, where the projected rail line would link up with a Peruvian branch that would cross the Andes at Saramirisa—the lowest pass in that giant mountain range—and from there, to one or more Peruvian ports for shipment across the Pacific Ocean. This would drastically cut shipping time and costs from Brazil (and other Southern Cone countries like Argentina) to Eurasian powerhouses like China, India, and Russia.

Even greater efficiencies and growth and productivity can be achieved as this South American Transcontinental Railroad is able to connect directly by rail with Asia, as high-speed maglev rail lines are constructed and opened up through the Darién Gap and the Bering Strait (Figure 3).

There are various possible routes for a South American Transcontinental Railroad. (The one under discussion among China, Brazil, and Peru centers on São Paulo-Santa Fé do Sul-Cuiabá-Porto Velho-Pucallpa-Saramirisa-Bogotá-Panamá. Another viable option is São Paulo-Santa Fé do Sul-Santa Cruz-Desaguadero-Saramirisa-Bogotá-Panamá, which has long been studied.) In fact, earlier versions of precisely this project were drawn up by the Intercontinental Railway Commission, started by U.S. Secretary of State James Blaine, which employed U.S. Army engineers to survey and project lines tying the United States through to Argentina and Brazil, presenting a completed map of the intended route project to President William McKinley in 1898 (Figure 5). The strongly pro-American System McKinley commemorated Blaine’s plans as the future of humanity, speaking in 1901 at the Pan-American exposition in Buffalo—where McKinley was shot dead in a British-run operation.

Another great project, the construction of an Interoceanic Canal through Nicaragua (Figure 6), was announced on July 9 by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. The massive project will be carried out by the Chinese company HKND, but President Putin also made an unannounced stopover in Nicaragua on July 12, on his way to the BRICS Summit, to offer Russia’s support. The canal will run 173 miles from the mouth of the Brito River on the Pacific Coast in southeastern Nicaragua, to the mouth of the Punta Gorda River on the Caribbean side. It will include two locks, and 65 miles of it will pass through Lake Nicaragua, and have a projected passage time of 30 hours, coast to coast, for the 5,100 of the largest ships in the world that will be able to use this canal.

Project engineers report that over 50,000 construction workers will be required, and that once in operation it will generate 200,000 jobs, including its sub-projects (airport, two ports, tourist center, etc.).

President Ortega, in announcing the selected route, stated that the country’s entire educational system was being revamped to produce the engineers and skilled workers that the project will require, He also held up a book containing the feasibility studies for constructing such a canal produced by the United States government and adopted by the U.S. Congress 118 years ago, in 1896, detailing the benefits such a canal would bring.

The irony was lost on no one. China is actively involved in massive job-creating economic projects in Central America—the United States’ proverbial “back yard”—while the U.S. under Obama has helped destroy that area with his policy of drug legalization, on top of decades of the British Empire’s free-trade economic devastation. Today, one-third of the population of El Salvador has been forced to emigrate to the U.S., in a desperate search for the means of survival; while official unemployment in neighboring Honduras now surpasses 60%.

The broader commitment to infrastructure development was emphasized in the last of the multiple historic summits which took place in Brasilia in mid-July, that of the heads of state and special representatives of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), who met with Chinese President Xi and the Unasur heads of state on July 17. Their joint declaration (see below) emphasized the “important opportunity for mutual development” which exists, announcing

“the establishment of a broad partnership of equality, mutual benefit, and common development between China and Latin America and the Caribbean.”

The New Development Bank
There is little question that the New Development Bank (NDB) and Contingent Reserve Agreement (CRA) are the seed crystals of an entirely new, international financial architecture—although a major political battle lies ahead in order to force this policy through, over the violent objections of the City of London and Wall Street, including their agents within some of the BRICS countries. The founding document of the NDB cautiously sticks to the idea that the NDB and CRA are only meant to “complement” existing institutions like the IMF; but the principles on which they were founded not only contradict those of the IMF, but mutually exclusive.

Most significant, the NDB is clearly geared to lend money for real development, without the hated austerity conditionalities and green policies associated with the IMF and World Bank. For example, the CELAC-China joint declaration contains a radical departure from IMF/World Bank conditionalities, calling “to make good use of the concessionary loans granted by China, in accord with the necessities and priorities of the recipient countries…. We stress the importance of building and modernizing infrastructure.”

Argentine President Fernández, who was given featured billing (after host Rousseff) at the BRICS-Unasur Summit, issued the clearest call for a new world financial order: “We, sirs, are posing then, a new global financial order, one that is not just fair and equitable, but indispensable…. What we demand from the world, is precisely the creation of a new global financial order which will permit sustainable and global economic growth…. Thus, the appeal to all nations is to join forces in this real crusade for a new global political, economic and financial organization that will have positive social, political, economic, and cultural consequences for our nations.”

President Putin—who, like Argentina’s Fernández, is no stranger to being the target of economic warfare—presented a complementary proposal: “BRICS nations should cooperate more closely in commodities markets. We have a unique resource base: Our nations hold 30-50% of global reserves of various resources. Therefore, we believe it is imperative to develop cooperation in mining and processing, and organize a center for training experts in the metals industries in BRICS nations.”

Such an agreement would break the British Empire’s stranglehold on world commodities, and their ability to speculate with nations’ livelihood and their very existence.

To be viable for these purposes, the NDB and CRA would have to function with a firewall against the cancerous dollar-denominated system. It is noteworthy that the NDB is authorized to both receive additional capitalization in non-dollar currencies in the future, as well as to issue loans to BRICS and other nations in non-dollar currencies.

Once three, four, or more countries are involved in great projects receiving such non-dollar loans, a new currency will have in effect been created, in which fixed exchange rates among the national participants will also follow. That step alone would instantly bring about a return to the pre-1971 Bretton Woods system of fixed (predictable) exchange rates, wiping out, with the stroke of a pen, trillions of dollars of speculation on currency futures.

But for the NDB to be able to truly take on the tasks of global reconstruction, the United States must become a full partner in its capitalization and functioning as the centerpiece of a global Hamiltonian credit system, of the sort specified in LaRouche’s Four Laws. Today’s “dollar,” which is no longer the sovereign currency of the United States, but rather a supra-national betting instrument under the control of the British Empire, must also return to its proper role as the Treasury-issued “greenback.”

In short, the central strategic question posed by the mid-July BRICS Summit, is: When will the United States rid itself of President Obama, and return to the American System policies it was founded on, and which half of humanity, led by the BRICS, is now implementing?

Narendra Modi http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/2014_20-29/2014-29/pdf/14_4129.pdf

Vladimir Putin http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/2014_20-29/2014-29/pdf/15-16_4129.pdf

Xi Jinping http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/2014_20-29/2014-29/pdf/17_4129.pdf

Cristina Fernandez http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/2014_20-29/2014-29/pdf/18_4129.pdf

LaRouche’s record http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/2014_20-29/2014-29/pdf/19-21_4129.pdf

 

By Michael Snyder

In general, over the last several decades the world has experienced an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. The opening up of relations with China and the “end of the Cold War” resulted in an extended period of cooperation between East and West that was truly unique in the annals of history. But now things are shifting.

The civil war in Ukraine and the crash of MH17 have created an enormous amount of tension between the United States and Russia, and many analysts believe that relations between the two superpowers are now even worse than they were during the end of the Cold War era. In addition, the indictment of five PLA officers for cyber espionage and sharp disagreements over China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea (among other issues) have caused U.S. relations with China to dip to their lowest point since at least 1989.

So could the emerging division between the East and the West ultimately plunge us into a period of global chaos? And what would that mean for the world economy?

For as long as most Americans can remember, the U.S. dollar and the U.S. financial system have been overwhelmingly dominant. But now the powers of the east appear to be determined to break this monopoly.

Four of the BRICS nations (China, Russia, India and Brazil) are on the list of the top ten biggest economies on the planet, and they are starting to make moves to become much less dependent on the U.S.-centered financial system of the western world. For example, just last week the BRICS nations established two new institutions which are intended to be alternatives to the World Bank and the IMF…

So in their summit, from July 14 to 16, the five BRICS announced two major initiatives aimed squarely at increasing their power in global finance. They announced the launch of the New Development Bank, headquartered in Shanghai, that will offer financing for development projects in the emerging world. The bank will act as an alternative to the Washington, D.C.—based World Bank. The BRICS also formed what they’re calling a Contingent Reserve Arrangement, a series of currency agreements which can be utilized to help them smooth over financial imbalances with the rest of the world. That’s something the IMF does now.
Clearly, the idea is to create institutions and processes to supplement — and perhaps eventually supplant — the functions of those managed by U.S. and Europe. And they would be resources that they could control on their own, without the annoying conditions that the World Bank and the IMF always slap on their loans and assistance.
This comes at a time when both China and Russia are seeking to emphasize their own currencies and move away from using the U.S. dollar so much.

Even in the Western media, it is being admitted that China’s yuan is “a growing force in global finance”, and according to CNBC the use of Chinese currency in international trade is growing very rapidly…

Of the German companies profiled, 23 percent are using the renminbi to settle trades, up from 9 percent last year, while usage in Hong Kong rose to 58 percent from 50 percent and to 17 percent from 9 percent in the U.S.
Usage of the renminbi among French companies – a new addition to this year’s list – was high at 26 percent.
And of course Russia has been actively pursuing a “de-dollarization strategy” for months now. Each new round of economic sanctions pushes Russia even further in the direction of independence from the U.S. dollar, and Gazprom has been working hard to get large customers to switch from paying for natural gas in dollars to paying for natural gas in euros and other currencies. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “Russia Is Doing It – Russia Is Actually Abandoning The Dollar”.

At this point, it seems clear that Russia plans to permanently decouple from the U.S. economy and the U.S. financial system. Just today we learned that Vladimir Putin plans to make Russia less dependent on U.S. companies such as IBM and Microsoft, and any future rounds of sanctions are likely to cause even more damage to U.S. firms that do business in Russia.

But potentially much more troubling for the U.S. economy is the startling deterioration in the relationship between the Obama administration and China. Some analysts are even describing this as “a tipping point”…

One day, the United States indicts five PLA officers for cybercrimes; the next, the United States claims victory in WTO disputes over car tariffs and rare earth minerals. All this is happening while the United States promises enduring support for Asian allies, and it has moved openly to challenge the legitimacy of Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, China is busy creating facts on the ground and water. Last month, a $1 billion Chinese oil rig set up operations in territorial waters claimed by Vietnam. In the East China Sea, Chinese SU-27 fighter jets have come within 100 feet of Japanese surveillance aircraft.

This was all capped at the recent Shangri-La Asian Security dialogue in Singapore (Asia’s annual defense-ministers meeting): Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel bluntly described China’s behavior as “destabilizing, unilateral actions.” The PLA deputy chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Wang Guanzhong, accused the United States of “hegemonism.”

The mood has soured, more than the usual ups and downs of big-power relationships.
The question now is not whether a “new type of relationship” is in the offing, but rather, whether U.S.-Chinese relations have reached a tipping point.
Most Americans could not care less about what China is doing in the South China Sea, but to the Chinese this is a very, very big deal. In fact, China just sent a surveillance vessel to Hawaii as a bit of payback for what they regard as U.S. “provocations” in the region.

In the old days, China would have probably never have done such a thing. But China is gaining confidence as the gap between the U.S. military and the Chinese military rapidly closes…

Away from the Chinese military’s expanding capabilities in cyberspace and electronic warfare, Beijing is growing the size and reach of its naval fleet, advancing its air force and testing a host of new missiles, the Pentagon said Thursday.
An annual report to Congress on China’s evolving military capability concluded that the modernization was being driven in part by growing territorial disputes in the East and South China seas, as well as by Beijing’s desire to expand its presence and influence abroad.
In fact, the Chinese military has grown so powerful that we are now seeing headlines such as this one in The Week: “China thinks it can defeat America in battle”.

And the Russian military has made tremendous strides as well. Putin has been working hard to modernize the Russian nuclear arsenal, the Russians now have a “fifth generation” fighter jet that is supposedly far superior to the F-22 Raptor, and they have nuclear submarines that are so incredibly quiet that the U.S. Navy refers to them as “black holes”.

If Russia and China stay united, they are more than capable of providing a counterbalance to U.S. power around the globe.

But even if military conflict is not in our immediate future, the breakdown in relations between East and West could still have a dramatic impact on the global economy.

Over the years, the U.S. and China have developed a highly symbiotic relationship that fuels a tremendous amount of economic activity all over the planet. Each year, we buy hundreds of billions of dollars of products from the Chinese. Just imagine what our stores would look like if we took everything that was “made in China” out of them. And after we send them giant piles of our money, we beg the Chinese to lend it back to us at ultra-low interest rates. This arrangement has allowed China to become extremely wealthy and it has allowed Americans to enjoy a massively inflated standard of living fueled by ever increasing amounts of debt.

So what happens if this relationship starts breaking down?

Without a doubt, it could potentially lead to global chaos.

So keep a close eye on this emerging division between the East and the West. It could end up being far more important than most Americans would ever dare to imagine.

This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs

22 July 2014
http://www.activistpost.com/

Chisinau / Vienna, 26 July 2014

In a statement issued today, the President of the International Progress Organization, Dr. Hans Koechler, who is presently on a fact-finding visit to Eastern Europe, has called for the establishment of an impartial and independent investigation of the circumstances of the crash of Malaysian Airlines 17 over rebel-controlled territory in Eastern Ukraine. Between 2000 and 2002, Dr. Koechler served as international observer of the criminal trial following the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. He was nominated by the Secretary-General of the United Nations on the basis of a binding resolution of the UN Security Council.

The former UN observer explained that, because of the ongoing civil war in the eastern part of the country, the Government of Ukraine, itself a party in the conflict, is not only effectively unable to conduct an investigation, but cannot guarantee its independence and objectivity. Under these circumstances, Article 5.1 of Annex 13 (“Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation”) of the Convention on International Civil Aviation – which obliges the “State of Occurrence” to institute an investigation – is not applicable.

An investigation has to be international, Dr. Koechler explained, and it must be ensured that no party to the conflict in Ukraine is in a position to influence its outcome. This is also implied in Security Council resolution 2166 (2014), which in Par. 3 expresses support for “efforts to establish a full, thorough and independent international investigation.” Since, in this case, the Security Council has not acted on the basis of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, and has not mandated – but merely “supported” – an investigation, it is up to the countries directly affected by the tragedy to take the necessary measures. This relates to the country of registration of the aircraft, Malaysia, and to the countries whose citizens were killed in this tragedy. For the integrity and credibility of the investigation it will be absolutely essential that it is not politicized, and that officials or experts from countries involved in the political dispute in Ukraine, including from the United States, have no influence, whether direct or indirect, on its conduct. The investigation should be conducted in close co-ordination with the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) whose experts are already on site.

As regards the question of criminal responsibility, Dr. Koechler explained that the Convention for the suppression of unlawful acts against the safety of civil aviation (“Montreal Convention” of 1971) is applicable. According to Article 5(b) of the Convention, Malaysia has jurisdiction in the case. Dr. Koechler expressed his concern over the information war that is waged in the international media. As long as the facts are not fully ascertained and the collection of forensic evidence has not been completed, commentators should not jump to conclusions. Only a duly constituted court of law will be authorized to attribute guilt. The former UN observer in particular referred to the deletion, by the BBC, of a video report of BBC Russian correspondent Olga Ivshina, on 23 July 2014. In addition to statements about Russian missile launchers, the report included observations of witnesses from the crash site who said that they saw another (military) plane in the vicinity of the Malaysian airliner. The British Broadcasting Corporation will have to explain why it decided to remove that report, which was balanced and did not attribute guilt, from its Russian web site.

In a news release of 23 July 2014 from Glasgow (UK), published in many German newspapers, the German News Agency DPA has warned of the risk of politicization of the investigation into the crash of MH 17 and referred to Hans Koechler’s earlier reports on the circumstances surrounding the investigation of the crash of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In that tragedy, 270 people perished after a midair explosion of the plane en route from London to New York on 20 December 1988. On their web sites, most German newspapers also published links to Dr. Koechler’s critical reports on the investigation and criminal prosecution after the Pan Am tragedy.

Sources:
• “Die Ukraine erlebt gerade ihr Lockerbie”: DIE WELT, Berlin, 23 July2014:
http://www.welt.de/newsticker/dpa_nt/infoline_nt/thema_nt/article130487805/Die-Ukraine-erlebt-gerade-ihr-Lockerbie.html

• Hans Koechler’s Lockerbie Trial Observer Mission:
http://i-p-o.org/lockerbie_observer_mission.htm

 

By Richard Falk

That is, don’t answer, if you are a certified critic of Israeli policies and practices.

The siren lure of big time media is partly a romancing of the ego, partly a rare moment to intrude a moment or two of truthfulness into the endless spinning of the Israel’s narrative that stresses its extravagantly humane response to Hamas flurries of rockets and alleged human shield tactics.

Four times in the past week I have received invitations to be a guest on BBC programs dealing with Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Each time the female producer, with charming British intonation, expressed her strong interest in arranging my participation at such and such a time. And each time I agreed, although my presence in a Turkish village with limited Internet access made

it logistically awkward to do so, yet far from impossible to make the necessary arrangements, usually with the kind cooperation of a neighbor with superior digital facilities.

Each time I was ready at the appointed hour, and each time I was given a last minute explanation for why my appearance was cancelled—a couple of times I was told that I was a casualty of ‘breaking news,’ and the other two times, there was no embellishment, merely “we apologize, but we have to cancel today’s appearance.” And on each occasion, as if part of how producers are trained, I was told that those in charge of planning the program were eager to have me appear as soon as possible, and that I would hear in a day or so. On the basis of my past experience on the few occasions when such last minute news altered programming, I was shifted to later in the program or rescheduled for the next day. My BBC experience in this respect was ‘terminal’ as in disease.

Needless to say, the phone lines have been quiet since each of these ‘dumping’ incidents. I wonder why this pattern of invitation and cancellation. I am quite sure that these were quite separate programming for each of the invitations with no coordination among them. Was there some master censor at the BBC that reviewed the guest list just prior to the scheduled broadcast, somewhat in the manner that the way an ethical submarine commander might review the manifest of an enemy passenger ship in time of war? Perhaps, BBC was rightly concerned that there might be a faint and ugly stain of balance that would tarnish their unsullied reputation of pro-Israeli partisanship. I will probably be forever reliant on such conjectures.

I feel self-conscious relating this little saga at a time when so many in Gaza are dying and bleeding, and all are grieving. As I write I feel humble, not arrogant. It seems that somewhere buried in these trivial rejections there is occasion for concern that the media claim of objectivity in liberal societies is above all else a sham. That even powerful players such as BBC are secretly captive, and its reportage and commentary qualifies less as news than as Hasbara, at least when it comes to Israel-Palestine.

In any event, my advice to the media savvy, is that if you have caller ID, and you can tell that it is BBC calling, don’t bother answering. I hope I have the good sense to follow my own advice should the phone ever ring again!

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years.

26 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

Petition By Israeli soldiers and reservists

We were soldiers in a wide variety of units and positions in the Israeli military—a fact we now regret, because, in our service, we found that troops who operate in the occupied territories aren’t the only ones enforcing the mechanisms of control over Palestinian lives. In truth, the entire military is implicated. For that reason, we now refuse to participate in our reserve duties, and we support all those who resist being called to service.

The Israeli Army, a fundamental part of Israelis’ lives, is also the power that rules over the Palestinians living in the territories occupied in 1967. As long as it exists in its current structure, its language and mindset control us: We divide the world into good and evil according to the military’s categories; the military serves as the leading authority on who is valued more and who less in society—who is more responsible for the occupation, who is allowed to vocalize their resistance to it and who isn’t, and how they are allowed to do it. The military plays a central role in every action plan and proposal discussed in the national conversation, which explains the absence of any real argument about non-military solutions to the conflicts Israel has been locked in with its neighbors.

The Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are deprived of civil rights and human rights. They live under a different legal system from their Jewish neighbors. This is not exclusively the fault of soldiers who operate in these territories. Those troops are, therefore, not the only ones obligated to refuse. Many of us served in logistical and bureaucratic support roles; there, we found that the entire military helps implement the oppression of the Palestinians.

Many soldiers who serve in non-combat roles decline to resist because they believe their actions, often routine and banal, are remote from the violent results elsewhere. And actions that aren’t banal—for example, decisions about the life or death of Palestinians made in offices many kilometers away from the West Bank—are classified, and so it’s difficult to have a public debate about them. Unfortunately, we did not always refuse to perform the tasks we were charged with, and in that way we, too, contributed to the violent actions of the military.

During our time in the army, we witnessed (or participated in) the military’s discriminatory behavior: the structural discrimination against women, which begins with the initial screening and assignment of roles; the sexual harassment that was a daily reality for some of us; the immigration absorption centers that depend on uniformed military assistance. Some of us also saw firsthand how the bureaucracy deliberately funnels technical students into technical positions, without giving them the opportunity to serve in other roles. We were placed into training courses among people who looked and sounded like us, rather than the mixing and socializing that the army claims to do.

The military tries to present itself as an institution that enables social mobility—a stepping-stone into Israeli society. In reality, it perpetuates segregation. We believe it is not accidental that those who come from middle- and high- income families land in elite intelligence units, and from there often go to work for high-paying technology companies. We think it is not accidental that when soldiers from a firearm maintenance or quartermaster unit desert or leave the military, often driven by the need to financially support their families, they are called “draft-dodgers.” The military enshrines an image of the “good Israeli,” who in reality derives his power by subjugating others. The central place of the military in Israeli society, and this ideal image it creates, work together to erase the cultures and struggles of the Mizrachi, Ethiopians, Palestinians, Russians, Druze, the Ultra-Orthodox, Bedouins, and women.

We all participated, on one level or another, in this ideology and took part in the game of the “good Israeli” that serves the military loyally. Mostly our service did advance our positions in universities and the labor market. We made connections and benefited from the warm embrace of the Israeli consensus. But for the above reasons, these benefits were not worth the costs.

By law, some of us are still registered as part of the reserved forces (others have managed to win exemptions or have been granted them upon their release), and the military keeps our names and personal information, as well as the legal option to order us to “service.” But we will not participate—in any way.

There are many reasons people refuse to serve in the Israeli Army. Even we have differences in background and motivation about why we’ve written this letter. Nevertheless, against attacks on those who resist conscription, we support the resisters: the high school students who wrote a refusal declaration letter, the Ultra orthodox protesting the new conscription law, the Druze refusers, and all those whose conscience, personal situation, or economic well-being do not allow them to serve. Under the guise of a conversation about equality, these people are forced to pay the price. No more.

Yael Even Or

Efrat Even Tzur

Tal Aberman

Klil Agassi

Ofri Ilany

Eran Efrati

Dalit Baum

Roi Basha

Liat Bolzman

Lior Ben-Eliahu

Peleg Bar-Sapir

Moran Barir

Yotam Gidron

Maya Guttman

Gal Gvili

Namer Golan

Nirith Ben Horin

Uri Gordon

Yonatan N. Gez

Bosmat Gal

Or Glicklich

Erez Garnai

Diana Dolev

Sharon Dolev

Ariel Handel

Shira Hertzanu

Erez Wohl

Imri Havivi

Gal Chen

Shir Cohen

Gal Katz

Menachem Livne

Amir Livne Bar-on

Gilad Liberman

Dafna Lichtman

Yael Meiry

Amit Meyer

Maya Michaeli

Orian Michaeli

Shira Makin

Chen Misgav

Naama Nagar

Inbal Sinai

Kela Sappir

Shachaf Polakow

Avner Fitterman

Tom Pessah

Nadav Frankovitz

Tamar Kedem

Amnon Keren

Eyal Rozenberg

Guy Ron-Gilboa

Noa Shauer

Avi Shavit

Jen Shuka

Chen Tamir

The petition for Israeli soldiers and reservists is located at Lo-Meshartot.org

26 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Ali Abunimah

Ten years ago, as Israel was planning its unilateral “disengagement” or “separation” from the Gaza Strip, the so-called international community and the then-thriving peace process industry indulged in fantasies that the small territory might become a prosperous “Singapore on the Mediterranean.”

Israeli strategists had no such illusions. Although they did withdraw their 7,000 settlers from Gaza in 2005, they never intended to set Gaza free.

Israeli forces were merely moved from the interior to the perimeter, replacing direct occupation with what eventually became a hermetic siege.

One of the key advisers to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister who took the decision to “disengage,” was Arnon Soffer, the Haifa University demographer – known as Arnon the Arab Counter for his obsession with the “demographic threat” supposedly posed by the births of Palestinians. (His last name, soffer, means “someone who counts” in Hebrew.)

In a notorious interview in The Jerusalem Post a decade ago, Soffer set out a nightmarish vision of Gaza’s future, but one that was horrifyingly prescient (“It’s the demography, stupid,” 21 May 2004 – note the original interview is not online but a 2007 follow up which recounts his 2004 statements can be found here).

In my 2006 book One Country (85-86), this is how I explained Soffer’s vision, quoting his words from the interview:

[Then deputy prime minister Ehud] Olmert called the unilateral solution Israel’s “great hope,” but Arnon Soffer … offered a less optimistic prognosis. “Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee ‘peace,’” he warned, “it guarantees a Jewish-Zionist state with an overwhelming majority of Jews.” What will be the price of this achievement? The “day after unilateral separation,” Soffer said, “the Palestinians will bombard us with artillery fire – and we will have to retaliate. But at least the war will be at the fence – not in the kindergartens of Tel Aviv and Haifa.” Soffer was unambiguous about Israel’s response: “We will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire ten in response. And women and children will be killed and houses will be destroyed.” Further down the line, “when 2.5 million people live in a closed off Gaza,” Soffer predicted, “it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will be even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”

I quoted Soffer in a piece I wrote after the 2008-2009 Gaza massacre and do so again now because his words still serve as the most accurate, chilling explanation of the present reality.

But there is an even more horrifying sentence in Soffer’s interview that I didn’t include in my book or earlier piece. “If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist,” he said. “The only thing that concerns me is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.”

“Kill and kill and kill”

A decade later, we can say with certainty that Israel is not a “normal” society. It is clear that in order to “kill and kill and kill,” Israeli society has had to dehumanize Palestinians to an unprecedented extent.

This is perhaps what explains the pervasive cry of “death to the Arabs,” the relentless incitement by politicians and public figures, and the intolerance for any dissent from the crushing consensus in favor of the Gaza slaughter. There is a level of dehumanization that allows lawmaker Ayelet Shaked, a rising star, to call for the slaughter of mothers in Gaza because they give birth to “little snakes” and face no negative repercussions.

And so now there have been three major Gaza massacres (and many smaller ones) since the disengagement: 2008-2009’s “Operation Cast Lead,” the November 2012 massacre, and the ongoing horror that has claimed more than 825 lives in 18 days of relentless bombardment.

Much of Israeli society has decided that this is a price worth paying to maintain a “Jewish state.” And the major US pro-Israel Jewish groups have made the same choice.

“Liberal” Zionist Peter Beinart recently lamented that the leaders of the “organized American Jewish community” were ready to defend Israel no matter what they did.

“The more ghastly the photos from Gaza become, the more adamantly they insist that Israel bears no responsibility for them,” he recently wrote on his Facebook page. “Can anyone say, with confidence, that there is any action the Israeli government could take that American Jewish leaders would not seek to justify? I can’t, and that terrifies me.”

Regular massacres

It is time for everyone to understand what Soffer and the American Jewish leaders Beinart takes aim at have understood and embraced: the price of a “Jewish state” is the permanent and irrevocable violation of Palestinians’ rights, and if that means regular massacres, then so be it.

As I explain in my recent book The Battle for Justice in Palestine, Israel cannot exist “as a Jewish state” without violating the rights of all Palestinians to varying degrees (read the relevant excerpt).

The massacre in Gaza is at the extreme end of the spectrum of abuses necessary to maintain Jewish sectarian rule in Palestine, but it is part of the same policy that requires employment and housing discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and outright land theft and ethnic cleansing in the Naqab (Negev) and the occupied West Bank.

If you support Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state” in a country whose indigenous Palestinian people today form half the population, then you, like Soffer, must come to terms with the inevitability of massacres.

If you oppose the horrific, repeated massacres in Gaza, then join the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), a movement that aims to decolonize Palestine and restore to all the people all their legitimate and inalienable rights.

Ali Abunimah is Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

26 July, 2014
Electronicintifada.net

 

By Paul Craig Roberts

Despite the conclusion by US intelligence that there is no evidence of Russian involvement in the destruction of the Malaysian airliner and all lives onboard, Washington is escalating the crisis and shepherding it toward war.

Twenty-two US senators have introduced into the 113th Congress, Second Session, a bill, S.2277, “To prevent further Russian aggression toward Ukraine and other sovereign states in Europe and Eurasia, and for other purposes.” https://beta.congress.gov/113/bills/s2277/BILLS-113s2277is.pdf The bill is before the Committee on Foreign Relations.

Note that prior to any evidence of any Russian aggression, there are already 22 senators lined up in behalf of preventing further Russian aggression.

Accompanying this preparatory propaganda move to create a framework for war, hot or cold with Russia, NATO commander General Philip Breedlove announced his plan for a deployment of massive military means in Eastern Europe that would permit lightening responses against Russia in order to protect Europe from Russian aggression.

There we have it again: Russian Aggression. Repeat it enough and it becomes real.

The existence of “Russian aggression” is assumed, not demonstrated. Neither Breedlove nor the senators make any reference to Russian war plans for an attack on Europe or any other countries. There are no references to Russian position papers and documents setting forth a Russian expansionist ideology or a belief declared by Moscow that Russians are “exceptional, indispensable people” with the right to exercise hegemony over the world. No evidence is presented that Russia has infiltrated the communication systems of the entire world for spy purposes. There is no evidence that Putin has Obama’s or Obama’s daughters’ private cell phone conversations or that Russia downloads US corporate secrets for the benefit of Russian businesses.

Nevertheless, the NATO commander and US senators see an urgent need to create blitzkrieg capability for NATO on Russia’s borders.

Senate bill 2277 consists of three titles: “Reinvigorating the Nato Alliance,” “Deterring Further Russian Aggression in Europe,” and “Hardening Ukraine and other European and Eurasian States Against Russian Aggression.” Who do you think wrote this bill? Hint: it wasn’t the senators or their staffs.

Title I deals with strengthening US force posture in Europe and Eurasia and strengthening the NATO alliance, with accelerating the construction of ABM (anti-ballistic missile) bases on Russia’s borders so as to degrade the Russian strategic nuclear deterrent, and to provide more money for Poland and the Baltic states and strengthen US-German cooperation on global security issues, that is, to make certain that the German military is incorporated as part of the US empire military force.

Title II is about confronting “Russian aggression in Europe” with sanctions and with financial and diplomatic “support for Russian democracy and civil society organizations,” which means to pump billions of dollars into NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that can be used to destabilize Russia in the way that Washington used the NGOs it funded in Ukraine to overthrow the elected government. For 20 years Russian government negligence permitted Washington to organize fifth columns inside Russia that pose as human rights organizations, etc.

Title III deals with military and intelligence assistance for Ukraine, putting Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova on a NATO track, expediting US natural gas exports in order to erase European and Eurasian energy dependence on Russia, preventing recognition of Crimea as again a part of Russia, expanding broadcasting (propaganda) into Russian areas, and again “support for democracy and civil society organizations in countries of the former Soviet Union,” which means to use money to subvert the Russian federation.

However you look at this, it comprises a declaration of war. Moreover, these provocative and expensive moves are presented as necessary to counter Russian aggression for which there is no evidence.

How do we characterize a bill that is not merely thoughtless, unnecessary, and dangerous, but also more Orwellian than Orwell? I am open to suggestions.

Ukraine as it currently exists is an ahistorical state with artificial boundaries. Ukraine presently consists of part of what was once a larger entity plus former Russian provinces added to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by Soviet leaders. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia permitted Ukraine’s independence, under US pressure Russia mistakenly permitted Ukraine to take with it the former Russian provinces.

When Washington executed its coup in Kiev last year, the Russophobes who grabbed power began threatening in word and deed the Russian populations in eastern and southern Ukraine. The Crimeans voted to reunite with Russia and were accepted. This reunification was grossly misrepresented by Western propaganda. When other former Russian provinces voted likewise, the Russian government, kowtowing to Western propaganda, did not grant their requests. Instead, Russian president Putin called for Kiev and the former Russian provinces to work out an agreement that would keep the provinces within Ukraine.

Kiev and its Washington master did not listen. Instead, Kiev launched military attacks on the provinces and was conducting bombing attacks on the provinces at the moment the Malaysian airliner was downed.

Washington and its European vassals have consistently misrepresented the situation in Ukraine and denied their responsibility for the violence, instead placing all blame on Russia. But it is not Russia that is conducting bombing raids and attacking provinces with troops, tanks, and artillery. Just as Israel’s current military assault against Palestinian civilians fails to evoke criticism from Washington, European governments, and the Western media, Kiev’s assault on the former Russian provinces goes unreported and uncriticized. Indeed, it appears that few Americans are even aware that Kiev is attacking civilian areas of the provinces that wish to return to their mother country.

Sanctions should be imposed on Kiev, from which the military violence originates. Instead, Kiev is receiving financial and military support, and sanctions are placed on Russia which is not militarily involved in the situation.

When the outbreak of violence against the former Russian provinces began, the Russian Duma voted Putin the power to intervene militarily. Instead of using this power, Putin requested that the Duma rescind the power, which the Duma did. Putin preferred to deal with the problem diplomatically in a reasonable and unprovocative manner.

Putin has received neither respect nor appreciation for encouraging a non-violent resolution of the unfortunate Ukrainian situation created by Washington’s coup against a democratically elected government that was only months away from a chance to elect a different government.

The sanctions that Washington has applied and that Washington is pressuring its European puppets to join send the wrong information to Kiev. It tells Kiev that the West approves and encourages Kiev’s determination to resolve its differences with the former Russian provinces with violence rather than with negotiation.

This means war will continue, and that is clearly Washington’s intent. The latest reports are that US military advisors will soon be in Ukraine to aid the conquest of the former Russian provinces that are in revolt.

The presstitute nature of the Western media ensures that the bulk of the American and European populations will remain in the grip of Washington’s anti-Russian propaganda.

At some point the Russian government will have to face the fact that it doesn’t have “Western partners.” Russia has Western enemies who are being organized to isolate Russia, to injure Russia economically and diplomatically, to surround Russia militarily, to destabilize Russia by calling the American-funded NGOs into the streets, and in the absence of a coup that installs an American puppet in Moscow to attack Russia with nuclear weapons.

I respect Putin’s reliance on diplomacy and good will in the place of force. The problem with Putin’s approach is that Washington has no good will, so there is no reciprocity.

Washington has an agenda. Europe consists of captive nations, and these nations are without leaders capable of breaking free of Washington’s agenda.

I hope that I am wrong, but I think Putin has miscalculated. If Putin had accepted the former Russian provinces requests to reunite with Russia, the conflict in Ukraine would be over. I am certain that Europe would not have joined Washington in any invasion with the purpose of recovering for Ukraine former provinces of Russia herself. When Washington says that Putin is responsible for downing the Malaysian airliner, Washington is correct in a way that Washington doesn’t suspect. Had Putin completed the task begun with Crimea and reunited the Russian provinces with Russia, there would have been no war during which an airliner could have been downed, whether by accident or as a plot to demonize Russia. Ukraine has no capability of confronting Russia militarily and had no alternative to accepting the reunification of the Russian territories.

Europe would have witnessed a decisive Russian decision and would have put a great distance between itself and Washington’s provocative agenda. This European response would have precluded Washington’s ability to gradually escalate the crisis by gradually turning the temperature higher without the European frog jumping out of the pot.

In its dealings with Washington Europe has grown accustomed to the efficacy of bribes, threats, and coercion. Captive nations are inured to diplomacy’s impotence. Europeans see diplomacy as the weak card played by the weak party. And, of course, all the Europeans want money, which Washington prints with abandon.

Russia and China are disadvantaged in their conflict with Washington. Russia and China have emerged from tyranny. People in both countries were influenced by American cold war propaganda. Both countries have educated people who think that America has freedom, democracy, justice, civil liberty, economic wellbeing and is a welcoming friend of other countries that want the same thing.

This is a dangerous delusion. Washington has an agenda. Washington has put in place a police state to suppress its own population, and Washington believes that history has conveyed the right to Washington to exercise hegemony over the world. Last year President Obama declared to the world that he sincerely believes that America is the exceptional nation on whose leadership the world depends.

In other words, all other countries and peoples are unexceptional. Their voices are unimportant. Their aspirations are best served by Washington’s leadership. Those who disagree–Russia, China, Iran, and the new entity ISIL–are regarded by Washington as obstacles to history’s purpose. Anything, whether an idea or a country, that is in the way of Washington is in the way of History’s Purpose and must be run over.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries Europe faced the determination of the French Revolution to impose Liberty, Equality, Fraternity upon Europe. Today Washington’s ambition is larger. The ambition is to impose Washington’s hegemony on the entire world.

Unless Russia and China submit, this means war.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.

25 July, 2014
Paulcraigroberts.org

 

By Robert Barsocchini

European colonizers invaded the North American continent, surrounded Native Americans, herded them into ghettos, tortured and exterminated them – men, women, children, and babies alike – stole their land, and took it over for themselves . Under now-binding international law, those were war crimes.

It was, indeed, also war crimes for Native Americans in the ghettos to shoot arrows (or anything else) out from the ghettos and towards the populations of the colonizers that had them surrounded and were massacring them out of existence.

However, only people who support the colonization and extermination of Natives spend as much time condemning the arrow-shooting as they do the instigating and obviously much worse, more important crimes: those of the self-proclaimed “superior” invading people, who herd Natives into ghettos, torture and exterminate them, steal their land for themselves, and cover their cancer-like campaign of murderous expansion by calling it self-defense against “savages” who should be supplanted by the superior beings.

Because Israel is committing these crimes, Israeli propagandists and their supporters crucially need our attention off of them and on “Hamas” and “rockets”, the contemporary versions of Native “savages” and their pathetic, near-worthless arrows, which the savages shoot from their ghettos and towards the people and the populations of the people terrorizing, torturing and exterminating them and stealing their land, the Israeli government .

The world has endured many campaigns of extermination of “savage” indigenous peoples by “superior” races, from the USA to Canada to Australia.

One such campaign is being carried out by Israeli colonizers against the indigenous Palestinian peoples. The campaign is being illegally funded , indeed, made possible , by US taxpayers.

Israeli historian Dr. Ilan Pape here confirms that the parallel between European crimes against Native populations and Israel’s crimes against the native Palestinians is apt. Leading scholar on the conflict Dr. Norman Finkelstein, whose grandparents were exterminated in the Holocaust and whose work has been highly praised by the preeminent Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg, also makes the comparison.

The world, its people and legal institutions, do not accept I srael’s campaign against the Natives, and demand that it stops immediately.

The only reason it does not: the USA keeps it going and uses threat of force to block the legal requirement, by the International Court of Justice , that states do all they can do end Israel’s brutal campaign.

In From Dictatorship to Democracy, Gene Sharp instructs that to stop a dictatorial regime, its power sources must be severed. In the case of Israeli dictatorship over Palestine, the power source is the USA.

Do what Amnesty International urges ( sign their petition ) and stop the USA’s illegal arming of Israel, and we will end Israeli state terrorism against, and Israeli colonization and blockading of, Palestine.

Free Palestine.

“Hamas”

The title of this section is in quotation marks because Israeli propagandists intentionally label as “Hamas” any person or group in Palestine that suits their propaganda purposes, whether the people they are referring to are civilians, are part of Hamas, or are militants totally unaffiliated with Hamas or even acting in open defiance of it.

Israelis want us to believe that Hamas is responsible for all rocket fire into Israel. This is false. Israel wants us to believe this because Hamas is, as Jimmy Carter, Noam Chomsky, and many others have noted , the freely democratically elected government of Gaza. If the government carries out an attack, that is reason, in Israel’s self-serving and dishonest interpretation of international law, to invade Gaza and kill “Hamas”, which means Hamas and anyone else, including thousands of children.

Let us look at an example of how this works, and is currently working:

Before the massacre Israel carried out in Gaza in 2008/09 , it said it was launching a major invasion of Gaza to stop “Hamas” rocket attacks.

However, problems with this claim immediately arise when the truth is taken into account:

Israel had already broken the ceasefire and invaded Gaza.

Hamas did fire rockets into Israel before Israel’s planned Gaza massacre operation started, but, as BBC documents, those rockets were in response to an illegal, unprovoked, lethal attack against Hamas members by Israel, which violated the ceasefire. This was, to use Bibi Netanyahu’s phrasing, a “triple war crime” by Israel, as it 1) added to Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza, 2) was unprovoked aggression, the supreme crime, as well as outright mass murder, and 3) violated a specific ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas that Hamas was, as documented by Amnesty International and others, “ very careful to observe “:

BBC’s Robin Lustig :

Israeli forces crossed into the Gaza Strip and killed six Hamas fighters.

Hamas responded by launching rockets and mortar shells into Israel.

It is true that, as documented in the above BBC article, groups unaffiliated with and acting in direct defiance of Hamas had fired projectiles into Israel before Israel’s triple war crime violated the ceasefire with Hamas.

But, in addition to Amnesty International and other human rights groups, Western and Israeli media also documented that Hamas itself, the government of Gaza, was both carefully observing the ceasefire and doing “ everything it could ” (Amnesty) to prevent non-governmental groups from carrying out those attacks:

Reuters: “ Hamas arrests militants after rocket fire ” (July 10, 2008)

Haaretz: “ Hamas: Continued rocket fire by Fatah armed group harms Palestinian interests ” (June 27, 2008)

Israel Killing Hamas members (which it then did) for attacks by non-governmental groups that Hamas was doing everything it could to prevent, would be like Israel killing members of the US, British, Canadian, or French governments because citizens of each of those countries, independent of their governments and in total defiance of them, have joined lethal Islamic jihads in the Middle East, which they have:

Daily Beast: “ Americans Join Syrian Jihad, Sparking U.S. Intelligence Fears “
Daily Mail: “ More Brits signing up to fight with jihadist militants in Iraq and Syria than for the UK Army Reserve “
CBC News: “ Canada’s young men joining foreign jihad: Are we doing enough to stop it? “
Daily Mail: “ France unveils plan to stop youths joining jihad “
If Israel were to invade any or all of those countries, say the USA, and kill Obama, Biden, Kerry, Clinton, and others, and claim it was because citizens discussed in the above report were US government officials or were being sponsored by the US government, that would be both false and ridiculous, and would be accepted by no one. It should likewise be accepted by no one when Israel does this to Hamas, the government of Gaza.

Israel Murdered Hamas Members Knowing How They Would Respond – With Rockets

We should note that when Israel broke that ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and murdered Hamas members, Israel knew Hamas would use the best technology it had, unguided projectiles, to respond.

This is revealing of what the Israeli government is willing to sacrifice – namely, one or two Israeli civilians – to obtain a pretext for its larger, planned invasion of Gaza intended to, in Richard Goldstone’s words , “terrorize the civilian population” and “diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”

Racism as a Tool

Israel encourages the racist grouping-together of all Palestinian resistance organizations.

Dr. Finkelstein notes this issue, remarking that Hamas is simply “used… as short-hand for all Palestinian armed groups”.

The way Israel groups vigilantes in with the government of Gaza is the equivalent of saying that the Israeli terrorists who recently burned a Palestinian boy to death are part of the Israeli government, and using that as a justification to invade Israel and kill members of the Israeli government. It is a false claim and thus a false justification, but by Israel’s logic, Hamas could use it, invade Israel, and kill members of the Israeli government.

Even the argument that Hamas members should be killed because they have committed human rights violations (they have) is also ridiculous. So have Israeli government members, to a far greater extent (the European Union views nuclear Israel as the greatest threat to world peace), as have US government members and many, many others, also, obviously, to far greater extents than Hamas.

To say that because government members have committed human rights violations means that their countries can be invaded and they can be killed is to declare open season for every country to invade every other country and start slaughtering government officials. Since Israel knows only it can do that to Hamas and not the other way around – because Israel is the fourth largest military in the world and Hamas has next to nothing – Israel is simply asserting the right of the strong to dominate and repress the weak, a theme espoused by the strong once or twice before in human history.

Dr. Norman Finkelstein on the contemporary equivalent of Native Americans shooting arrows out from European-imposed concentration camps:

“Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel appear to be indiscriminate or targeted at civilian population centers,” Human Rights Watch’s first press release stated, “which are war crimes.” On this point, Amnesty concurred. But are projectile attacks by Hamas (used here as short-hand for all Palestinian armed groups) war crimes or even illegal? In fact, the law is more ambiguous than often allowed.

International law prohibits an occupying power from using force to suppress a struggle for self-determination, whereas it does not prohibit a people struggling for self-determination from using force. [1]

Human Rights Watch has argued that, even if its [Palestine’s] civilians are being relentlessly targeted [by Israel], a people does not have a legal right to carry out “belligerent reprisals”—that is, to deliberately target the civilians of the opposing state until it desists. “Regardless of who started this latest round, attacks targeting civilians violate basic humanitarian norms,” HRW’s Deputy Middle East and North Africa director stated in the first press release. “All attacks, including reprisal attacks, that target or indiscriminately harm civilians are prohibited under the laws of war, period.” Not so. International law does not—at any rate, not yet—prohibit belligerent reprisals. [4] The United States and Britain, among others, have staunchly defended the right of a state to use nuclear weapons by way of belligerent reprisal. [5] By this standard, the people of Gaza surely have the right to use makeshift projectiles to end an illegal, merciless seven-year-long Israeli blockade or to end Israel’s criminal bombardment of Gaza’s civilian population. Indeed, in its landmark 1996 advisory opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons, the ICJ ruled that international law is not settled on the right of a state to use nuclear weapons when its “survival” is at stake. But, if a state might have the right to use nuclear weapons when its survival is at stake, then surely a people struggling for self-determination has the right to use makeshift projectiles when it has been subjected to slow death by a protracted blockade and recurrent massacres by a state determined to maintain its occupation.

One might legitimately question the political prudence of Hamas’s strategy. But the law is not unambiguously against it, while the scales of morality weigh in its favor. Israel has imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza. Fully 95 percent of the water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption. By all accounts , the Palestinian people now stand behind those engaging in belligerent reprisals against Israel. In the Gaza Strip, they prefer to die resisting than to continue living under an inhuman blockade. Their resistance is mostly notional, as makeshift projectiles cause little damage. So, the ultimate question is, Do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres, or must they [as all colonizers want their victims to do] lie down and die?

When we look back on what was done to Native Americans, we don’t focus all of our attention on how horrible the natives were for brutally resisting dispossession and extinction and exhibiting racism against the white colonizers. We mainly focus on the horror of what the invading colonizers did, and virtually universally accept that it was very wrong.

Israeli massacres against Palestinians are now, and will continue to be, studied with horror and revulsion, as are the European massacres of Native Americans such as Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears .

Nat Turner’s slave uprising killed many white civilians who were part of the slave-owning society. Though this was horrible and probably hurt the slaves’ cause, we don’t look back and focus as much condemnation on slave rebellions as we do on the far greater violence and repression committed by the slave-owners, for obvious reasons.

When Israel complains about the “rockets”, it is like slave plantation owners crying about slave uprisings. Israel, embarrassingly, creates self-sympathy campaigns such as this one to show the world how ruthlessly the savages fire the rockets at poor Israel . The plantation owners wallow in self-pity and lament their plight and victimization by keeping a log, in front of the plantation, to track how long it has been since the last traumatizing slave uprising, and publish pieces in newspapers to tell everyone how hard it is to have slaves who don’t passively accept their lot in life.

As son of an Israeli General Miko Peled has suggested, when we hear Israelis moaning about the horrible “rockets”, we should ask them what they are doing to pressure their government to decolonize and de-occupy Palestine and end its macabre blockade of Gaza, a blockade Amnesty International refers to as a “flagrant violation of international law.”

Indiscriminate Weapons

Dr. Finkelstein:

It might be said that, even if Israel cannot use force to suppress the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, Hamas’s use of indiscriminate projectiles and its targeting of Israeli civilians still constitute war crimes. Here, it is useful to first recall another instance of HRW’s [Human Rights Watch’s] egregious double standard. In 2008, HRW issued a report entitled Flooding South Lebanon: Israel’s use of cluster munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006 . The report found that Israel dropped as many as 4.6 million cluster munitions on south Lebanon during the 2006 war. It was, in HRW’s words, “the most extensive use of cluster munitions anywhere in the world since the [US use of cluster bombs in the] 1991 Gulf war,” while relative to the size of the targeted area the density of the attack was historically unprecedented. Some 90 percent of these cluster munitions were dropped during the final three days “when Israel knew a settlement was imminent” (HRW), the UN ceasefire resolution having already been passed but not yet gone into effect. But, although finding that Israel committed “extensive violations” of the laws of war, HRW did not go beyond stating that Israel’s massive resort to cluster munitions was “in some locations possibly a war crime.” Yet, the evidence HRW itself assembled showed that cluster munitions are indiscriminate weapons; the cluster munitions carriers used by Israel were, on HRW’s own terms, indiscriminate; and the cluster munitions were fired indiscriminately and deliberately targeted civilian population centers.

Israel is also currently firing flechette dart explosives in Gaza , which is illegal to do there, according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, because of the dense population and the indiscriminate nature of the weapon.

Palestinians do not have the technology of discriminate weapons, for an alternative to rudimentary projectiles, that they can shoot out from their ghettos to resist Israeli occupation, colonization, and terror, and Israel is not going to give them to them, nor is Israel or the US going to give Palestinians a multi-billion dollar “Iron Dome” system like Israel has to help protect Palestinians from Israeli rockets.

What Israel wants for the Palestinians is the same thing European colonizers wanted for the Native Americans: for them to be helpless, hopeless, and unable to resist, so that they will accept being conquered and dispossessed, or will simply go away, i.e., assist in their own ethnic cleansing.

Statements by Hamas and other groups are used to conclude that Hamas uses the unguided projectiles to intentionally target civilians.

But statements (and actions) from Israelis illustrate directly that this is what Israel does.

Examples:

Israeli Reserve Major General Oren Shachor : “If we kill their [Palestinian] families, that will frighten them.”
Israelis refer to their attacks against Gaza as “mowing the lawn”. Since when you mow a lawn you cut every blade of grass, not individual blades, this is another clear call for terrorism against a civilian population, and possibly genocide .
In 2009, Israel sprayed UN humanitarian relief centers with lethal white phosphorous. They did this after the UN provided the Israeli army with the GPS coordinates of the center, and while the UN was on the phone with the Israeli army telling them not to bomb the center because civilians were sheltering there and there were no militants present. Human Rights Watch confirmed that there were no militants present. For details on this, see “ Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorous in Gaza “, by Human Rights Watch.
Israel also sprayed several other civilian shelters, including hospitals and schools, with white phosphorous, and Human Rights Watch likewise confirmed that no militants were present.
White phosphorus burns at 1,500 degree Fahrenheit. Imagine turning an oven to five hundred degrees, then increasing that threefold to 1,500, and gripping the red-hot coil.
This was part of what Richard Goldstone described as Israel’s operation to “terrorize the civilian population” of Gaza.
Israel also says that civilian homes of Hamas members and members of the families of Hamas are legitimate targets. But every Israeli has to serve in the military. By Israel’s admission, then, all Israeli homes and all Israelis are legitimate targets, thus there are no civilians for Hamas to target, if that is their goal. That is, unless Israel simply intends its statements as a double standard that only applies to the savages.

More on Racism

While Israeli propagandists and their supporters want all of our attention on racist rhetoric issued by their victims, Israeli society is virulently racist.

Few US citizens realize that Israeli youth are imbued with , and exhibit , vicious racism, all of them are required to serve in the military, and many are sent into Gaza to slay Gazans, including civilians. Israeli Reserve Major General Oren Shachor : “If we kill their [Palestinian] families, that will frighten them.”

This boiling racism by Israelis helps explain such highly frequent occurrences as when, the other day, Israelis looked through their top-of-the-line, US-provided optical gear, saw four fleeing Palestinian ten year-olds alone on a beach, and blew them away with giant guns, chasing the kids with multiple shots until they were all dead.

It also explains why Israelis enjoy watching footage of Gaza being indiscriminately bombed , and why Israelis want to use white phosphorus chemical explosives to target UN shelters for Palestinian civilians.

These are the type of terrorist massacres that were perpetrated by European colonizers against savage native babies, whose skulls the colonizers split open with axes and hatchets.

Oh, but the colonizers, the poor things, could barely go a day without the savages harassing them unmercifully, for what reason, god only knew.

The Israelis, as did the Europeans colonizers, indoctrinate themselves into self-perception as victims, while the occupied Arabs are viewed as inhuman monsters.

Israelis, also like the European colonizers, sometimes delude themselves into believing that what they are doing is good for, or desired by, the savages.

This delusion is nothing new. Japanese imperialists, who killed about 20 million people in China, including in the Rape of Nanking, said , in internal Japanese documents, that they were bringing “Earthly paradise” to China.

European colonizers created a seal of a Native American saying “ Come Over and Help Us “. Here is how they helped them – the same way the Israelis are helping the Palestinians.

…

Although both sides in the conflict exhibit racism, only one side is being illegally occupied and colonized . Although both sides endure terrible violence, it is overwhelmingly and disproportionately endured by the Palestinians, at the hands of Israeli state terrorists and occupiers.

Who Uses Human Shields?

Remember, Israel lies about Hamas using human shields. In Israel’s 2008/09 massacre in Gaza, Israel said Hamas used human shields, but the human rights organizations and missions found that Israel, not Hamas, used human shields .

Using Palestinian civilians, including children , as human shields is a regular practice for Israel that continues.

Dr. Finkelstein (at 6:20) on Israel’s 08/09 Gaza massacre:

As everybody knows, the main claim that Israel is making in defense of its attacks in Gaza… was the claim that Hamas was using human shields. And that became almost an accepted wisdom of what happened in Gaza. So, just allow me to quote from Amnesty International that addressed in great detail this question of the human shields. It says: “Contrary to repeated allegations by Israeli officials of the use of human shields, Amnesty International found no evidence that Hamas or other Palestinian fighters directed the movement of civilians to shield military objectives from attacks. It found no evidence that Hamas or other armed groups forced residents to stay in or around buildings used by fighters, or that fighters prevented residents from leaving buildings or areas which have been commandeered by militants. Amnesty International delegates interviewed many Palestinians who complained about Hamas’s conduct, and especially about Hamas’s repression and attacks against their opponents, including killings, torture, and arbitrary detentions, but did not receive any accounts of Hamas fighters having used them as human shields. In the cases investigated by Amnesty International of civilians killed by Israeli attacks, the deaths could not be explained as resulting from the presence of fighters shielding among civilians as the Israeli army generally contends.” And it goes on at some length.

Finkelstein then notes that the Amnesty report is remarkable because, just a few years ago, Amnesty International refused to utter “one critical word about Israel”, even though everybody knew what it was doing.

The Amnesty quote is from Amnesty’s report, 22 Days of Death and Destruction , on Israel’s massacre in Gaza, page 11.

In the report, Amnesty condemns Hamas for putting civilians at risk by operating out of cities. However, the Israeli army also keeps installments and headquarters in populated Israeli areas such as Tel Aviv, thereby, by Israel’s own admission, using its civilian population as human shields for legitimate military targets.

If Palestinians had the ability to target those military installments with multiple-thousand pound bombs and flechette explosives, as Israel uses in densely populated Gaza, then Amnesty could likewise condemn Israel for putting civilians at risk by operating out of densely populated civilian areas in Israel.

And also remember, it is Israel, not Palestine, that far more often breaks the ceasefires and starts rounds of violence , often with the intention of trying to create a pretext for a broader operation of terrorism.

Balanced Reporting

Virtually the entire world , including all major human rights organizations and the highest court in the world, demands that Israel immediately and completely withdraws from and ends its illegal blockade of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which is:

Amnesty International:

The area compromising the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories] is made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip – areas that Israel occupied in 1967 and has continued to control during the more than four decades since then.
Source: “ Trigger Happy – Israel’s Use of Excessive Force in the West Bank “, by Amnesty International, February, 2014, page 6
The UN vote affirming all of this every year usually goes about 165 to 2, the world against the US and Israel.

We must keep in mind that shows such as this one on RT that offer one or two voices defending Palestine and counter it with one or two voices defending Israel’s presence in the OPT are imbalanced, and present a false depiction of reality. To correctly portray the actual balance on the issue, one would have to have 165 defenders of the world consensus for every two defenders of Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestine.

This is similar to the issue of reporting on climate change. Since 1991, there have been about 13,950 peer-reviewed articles published that affirmed human-caused climate change, and only about 24 that tried to deny it.

Thus, the BBC was recently criticized by British MPs for presenting a fifty-fifty balance on the issue, which is, as in the case of the Israel/Palestine conflict, an incorrect portrayal of reality, both in terms of the global consensus on resolving the Israel/Palestine issue and the amount of violence perpetrated, which is disproportionately and overwhelmingly carried out against Palestine by Israel.

…

All of the above having been said, please sign this petition to help Amnesty International bring about a UN-imposed, comprehensive arms embargo on Israel and Palestine. Dr. Finkelstein also supports the comprehensive embargo against both sides.

The way our society treated Native Americans was wrong and horrid. Let’s stop repeating our mistake by enabling Israel to do the same thing to the Palestinians. Another disproportionate, horrific, Wounded Knee -like massacre is being committed by Israel in Gaza at this very moment, with 608 Palestinians, mostly civilians, killed, as well as 27 Israelis killed , all but two of them soldiers.

For more information on this issue, see:

Israel v. Gaza: The Big Picture – by Washington’s Blog

Confused About Hamas, ‘rockets’, war in Gaza? Those plus: Israeli occupation, lawful versus unlawful war, Israel illegal weapons, targeting hospitals – by Carl Herman

Knowing war law exposes ALL US/UK/Israel war ‘reasons’ as BS propaganda; Oaths require leaders’ arrests – by Carl Herman

Facts All US Citizens Need to Know About Israel and Palestine

Robert Barsocchini is an investigative journalist, historical researcher, and writer for the film industry.

25 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org