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Tripoli, Libya.: The quality of life continues to degrade in certain areas of western Libya while public anxiety noticeably rises over missing Libyan children as the first week of an unusually stressful Ramadan passes.

The shortage of gasoline has become acute and despite government efforts to curtail price gouging, one taxi driver told this observer yesterday that while the usual price of ‘benzene’ was 3.75 liters (one gallon) for $.40 (forty US cents) he is now having to pay as much as ” 4 dinars for one liter of petrol!” That is roughly the equivalent of 13 US dollars for a gallon of gasoline, a huge price surge in a country long accustomed to cheap, heavily subsidized fuel. “Informal economy” (black market) fuel arrives in car trunks from the Tunisian border and its increasingly common to see fellows with a make shift funnel trying to get more benzene into their vehicle tanks than they splash and spill on neighborhood streets.

NATO’s war on Libya’s civilian population includes its targeting of electric power producing turbines, preventing the international banking system from accepting Libyan letters of credit for payment of petroleum products, and interdicting ships destined for Western Libyan ports. As if in coordination with NATO, Eastern Libyan rebel militias regularly sabotage fuel lines and depots.

Walking around the “medina” off Omar Muktar Street near my hotel yesterday afternoon, the angst over deteriorating conditions is apparent. Shops, like homes, are now subject to rolling blackouts and quickly become hot and stuffy, discouraging would be customers from entering. Some food stores have to discard milk and other perishable items given the up to 11 hour power cuts that send temperatures above 100F. One gentleman on Rashid Street in downtown Tripoli said his family had not had power for five days and the pump that supplies water to his apartment building stopped working so they lack two essential utilities.

NATO’s arguable act of piracy earlier this week in commandeering the fuel tanker ship Cartagena off the coast of Malta that was bringing gasoline to Tripoli and sending it instead to rebel militia based close to Benghazi is yet again explained from NATO HQ as necessary for “protecting the civilian population of Libya.”

According to Libya’s Deputy Foreign Minister Khaled Kaim, “The age of piracy is coming back to the Mediterranean because of NATO.”

Some frustrated shop keepers just shutter their shops and seek relief at the beach or take a nap waiting for sundown and their Ramadan Iftar (feast) to begin. But lack of electricity even affects its preparation. (note: 15 minutes ago NATO bombed the public beach near my hotel as three other bombs landed nearby—targets unknown)

Every time a bomb blast is heard, a chorus of passersby and kids invariably point toward the bomb site and watch the rising white or black smoke (the color depending on the type of bomb or missile) and some shout, “F— NATO! F—Obama!” Etc.

If a foreigner is confronted by angry citizens who may blame Americans for NATO’s bombing, a sure fire way to quickly reduce crowd tension is for the foreigner to make the peace sign and make a fist with his other hand and chant a few times: “Allah! Mohammad! Muammar! Libye! Abass!” (God!, Mohammad!, Qadaffi!, Libya!, that’s all we need!”) The locals appreciate the sentiment and pre-teens often join the popular chant and dance.

As of the morning of 8/7/11 NATO statistics show that since 3/31/11, NATO forces have launched 18,270 sorties, mainly against Western Libya, including 6,932 bomb/missile strike sorties. Last night (8/6/11) there were 115 sorties including 45 bombings of which 12 were in central Tripoli starting a 10 p.m.

To their great credit, some Congressional staffers on the US Senate Armed Services Committee who liaise with the Pentagon, have acted on constituent complaints and have criticized NATO’s incomplete description of its bombing of Libyan civilians.

For example earlier this week NATO reported its bombing of the village on Zlitan, about 160 miles east of Tripoli in the Western Mountains as follows: “In the vicinity of Zlitan:1 Ammunition Storage Facility, 1 Military Facility, 2 Multiple Rocket Launchers.”

However, still absent from this particular NATO report on its website is the fact that its bombing attack killed the wife and two children of Mustafa Naji, a local Zlitan physics teacher. Mustafa’s wife Ibtisam, and their two children, Mohammad 5 and Muttasim, were pulverized. Once again, NATO said it could not confirm the “accidental killings” but would investigate.

Where are the children?

Also of growing public and government concern in Western Libya is the whereabouts of 53 female and 52 male children aged one to 12 years and another group ranging from 12 to 18 years, both part of a government-run home for orphans and abused children that until February was operating in Misrata, now under rebel control. According to several reports over the past three months and testimony presented last Thursday evening to the international media gathered at the Tripoli Rexis Hotel, by the General Union for Civil Society Organizations:

The 105 children, part of more than 1000 missing, were “kidnapped” by rebel forces as they entered Misrata and went on a killing spree, some of which has been documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International among other groups. There is no question that the children are no longer in their sheltered facility. But from there what became of them remains a mystery.

The Libyan government claims the youngsters were kidnapped by rebels who went on a rampage in late February. Several reports from eyewitnesses claim that the children were last seen being put onto either a Turkish, Italian, or French boat. More than one witness claimed to have witnessed some of the children being sold in Tunisia. On his tweeter page, the local Russian Telesur reporter said that “several sources have affirmed that the 105 children were taken out of the country in a ship that could be Turkish, French or Italian.”

Libyan Social Affairs Minister Ibrahim Sharif told reporters in Tripoli this week that, “We want the truth and we hold those countries responsible for the well-being of these children who are neither soldiers nor combatants.” Sharif added that a rebel doctor captured by government troops testified that some of the orphans had been taken to France and Italy.
Given Misrata’s history as a main North African slave trading port, a fact that today partially explains tensions among the one third of Libya’s population that is black and who are descendants of slaves and many of whom live in western Libya in villages now fighting the Misrata and Benghazi based rebels, concern is acute.

While Libya has had perhaps the most strictly enforced child protection laws in the Middle East and Africa, people here remember clearly that France was at the center of a scandal in 2007 when aid workers from the Zoe’s Ark charity attempted to fly 103 children out of Chad, to the south of Libya, who they said were orphans from neighboring Sudan. International aid staff later found that the children were in fact Chadian and had at least one living parent. People here fear a similar fate for the Libyan youngsters.

Also on people’s minds in Libya is what happened two years ago in Haiti when “orphans,” according to local authorities, were kidnapped. Given the epidemic of human trafficking in this region, especially of children, fears are well founded.

NATO has not replied to inquiries demanding information about the disappeared children nor has UNICEF, Save the Children or Secretary of State Clinton’s office. Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich has agreed to demand that the White House order an immediate investigation and of course any human rights advocate could raise this issue in the West and demand an urgent inquiry from her/his government.

The Libyan government as well as both the Roman Catholic Papal representative Bishop Giovanni Martinelli, and Father Daoud of the Anglican Church of Christ the King, in Tripoli have demanded that the UN investigate and find the children.

As for the National Transition Council, its spokesman denied charges that they have sold the children and claim that the Libyan government in Tripoli have all the children and that they are using them as human shields at the now five times bombed Bab al Azizya complex in central Tripoli. No known human rights organization or journalist who has investigated this claim has reported seeing any sign of the children at Bab al Azizya. The General Union, noted above, has photos and names and ages of all the missing children and have widely publicized them.

More than a dozen social welfare organizations, women’s groups and Libya’s Lawyer syndicates have launched an intensive media and public involvement campaign to find the children who have now been missing for nearly six months.

8 August 2011

Countercurrents.org

Speaking to CNN en Espanol on July 27, Bolivian President Evo Morales said “When presidents do not submit to the United States government, to its policies, there are coups.”

His comments are backed by attempts by the US and Bolivia’s right wing to bring down his government.

Recently released WikiLeaks cables prove the US embassy was in close contact with dissident military officers only months before a coup attempt was carried out in September 2008.

But the close relationship between the US and Bolivia’s military has a long history.

War on drugs

In recent years, the “war on drugs” provided the US with cover to extend its control over Bolivia’s armed forces.

As a coca grower union leader from the Chapare region, Morales faced the direct and brutal consequences of the US “war on drugs”.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the Chapare region, nestled in the heart of Bolivia, became the site of bloody massacres carried out by US and Bolivian anti-narcotic forces.

As part of its attempts to destroy coca, seen by indigenous Bolivians as a “sacred leaf” and part of their traditional way of life, the US established and funded the Mobile Units for Rural Patrolling (UMOPAR) in the Chapare.

Under the command of US soldiers and working closely with US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents, UMOPAR was responsible for massacres of local peasants.

This included the gunning down of 12 cocaleros (coca farmers) during a peaceful protest in June 1988.

One year later, Morales was brutally beaten by UMOPAR troops, who tried to drag his body into the mountains, believing he was dead.

Protests by fellow cocaleros ensured soldiers left his unconscious body behind.

Morales told Telesur on July 27 that the DEA never operated in Bolivia to “fight against drug trafficking, [but] for political ends”.

In late 2008, his government expelled the DEA from the country.

The cocaleros, whoses organisations were forged in the struggle against US militarisation, became the backbone of the anti-imperialist Movement Towards Socialism (MAS).

Morales narrowly lost the 2002 presidential elections, during which the US ambassador threatened retaliation if he won. Morales went on to win the December 2005 poll.

Morales concluded his election night speech with: “Long live coca, death to the Yankees!”

Divided military

One of the biggest challenges the Morales government has faced is its attempt to reassert sovereignty over Bolivia’s military while ensuring it did not turn against the president as so often had happened to leftist governments in Latin America.

The government was aided by two important factors.

Rising anti-neoliberal and anti-imperialist sentiment at the start of the century found its reflection among nationalist sectors within the military.

In the February 2006 Le Monde Diplomatique , Maurice Lemoine said that during a May-June 2005 uprising, nationalist officers asked the MAS to support a civic-military coup that would nationalise gas and organise a constituent assembly two key demands of the rising.

The MAS rejected the proposed coup.

Instead, popular mobilisation forced then-president Carlos Mesa to step down.

After Mesa’s resignation, there were two options: either a constitutional handing over of power to the hated right-wing president of the Senate or the calling of early elections.

Lemoine said that when a group of generals met to decide which option to support, “a colonel entered the room, clicked his heels and announced: ‘I think you should know that many officers regard the MAS as the only fit representative of our nation’s dignity.’”

Differences within the military over how to relate to a possible Morales government, and direct US intervention, led to a second important event.

During his election campaign, Morales revealed the depth of control that the US exercised over the Bolivian military.

Young soldiers supplied him with evidence that the US had successfully decommissioned Bolivia’s entire anti-aircraft arsenal without government knowledge or consent.

The evidence came from soldiers who made up part of the Joint Counterterrorism Force (FCTC), set up and funded by the US.

They revealed how US military and embassy officials had ordered the replacement of various heads of battalions, withheld the true nature of the operation to soldiers involved and provided US embassy vehicles to transport the anti-aircraft missiles.

Commenting on the incident in November 2005, shortly before being named Morales’ first energy minister, Andres Soliz Rada wrote: “This operation of control over the Bolivian military also included the cleansing and marginalisation of soldiers who demonstrated sympathy to the [call for] nationalisation of hydrocarbons and the anti-imperialist struggle.”

Soliz Rada said in the months leading up to the incident, at least a dozen high ranking military officers had either retired, been relieved of duties or relocated.

A January 18, 2006 online BBC article said that Army Commander Marcel Antezana Ruiz admitted Washington had requested the repatriation of the missiles to destroy them because the US feared Morales would win the elections.

Transforming the military

Once in power, Morales moved quickly to try to turn this situation around. Within a few months, almost 60 generals and admirals, many of them either directly involved in the missile crisis or aligned with US interests, were forced into retirement.

In their place, newer commanders were promoted, bypassing the traditional promotions system.

The notorious FCTC was restructured and a new commander appointed.

This caused a stir within the military and in Washington.

Addressing a peasant congress in March 2006, Morales said “some generals were upset” and had put up “resistance” to the government’s attempts to name new military authorities.

He also said the US Military Group in Bolivia sent a letter to his government requesting it replace a military commander.

The letter was later released. It said that in response to government moves to restructure the FCTC, the US military had “decertified” the unit and demanded the return of all military hardware it had provided to it.

Morales said the Bolivian military had an obligation to not hand over any arms to the US. He told the peasant gathering: “We will never change a minister or a commander due to US demands.”

“Neoliberalism used the Armed Forces at the service of the transnationals, at the service of external interests,” Morales said.

“Now, in this process of change, our Armed Forces is willing to guarantee the Constituent Assembly and above all, to support and help us with the nationalisation of hydrocarbons.”

On May 1, 2006, as part of a secret plan involving Morales, the military high command, FCTC and select government ministers, the army occupied Bolivia’s gas fields and the offices of transnationals involved in their exploitation.

Morales announced the return of state control over gas.

On February 9, 2007, these scenes were repeated as the military took over the newly nationalised Vinto tin smelter in Oruro.

The Morales government also put the military in charge of 25 technical centers to train future technicians for the mining industry. It also involved the institution in social programs such as tackling illiteracy, providing health care and building infrastructure.

In 2006, the military academy was also opened to indigenous and female cadets for the first time in its history.

Having already announced that Bolivia would stop sending troops to the US Schools of the Americas training camp, in June 2011 Morales inaugurated a new military training school in Bolivia for soldiers from countries such as Cuba and Venezuela that make up the Bolivarian Alliance of Our Americas (ALBA).

Through such actions, the government has tried to “knitting together a military-campesino alliance”, as Argentine journalist Pablo Stefanoni put it.

It is an attempt to forge closer relations between the military and the people, while strengthening the nationalist sectors within the military.

This growing bond was critical to overcoming internal resistance within the military and defeating a coup attempt in September 2008.

The combined mobilisation of the people and the military crushed the fascist uprising and dealt the opposition a blow from which they are yet to recover.

A socialist army?

This process of internal restructuring and transformation was reflected in the Bolivian military’s adoption in March 2010 of the slogan: “Fatherland or death, we shall overcome!”

Later that year, the commanding general of the army declared the military to be “socialist”, “anti-capitalist” and “anti-imperialist”. More recently, he stated the need for closer military ties with Cuba.

For a military whose only victorious war was that waged against Che Guevara and his band of left-wing guerrillas, such statements, while symbolic, represent a stark change from the days of right-wing dictatorships.

However, there is also little doubt that there is still much to do to deepen this process within the military.

Among other things, the military is still part of United Nations forces occupying Haiti, despite official government concerns of US interests behind the mission.

A big factor why this continues is the important financial contribution the military receives from the UN for its services something it does not want to lose.

The military also used its weight to ensure that the section dedicated to the armed forces in the new constitution, adopted in 2009, remained the same.

The military has also been slow to open up its archives to help investigations into the cases of disappeared activists during past dictatorships.

Activists involved in these cases have criticised the government for siding with the military on this issue.

Many social movements who support and defend the government have taken an approach to the government of pushing their sectoral interests. The military seems to have followed this route.

Given its weight and influence, in many cases it has been in a privileged position to ensure its demands are met.

There is little doubt that changes have occurred. These have been vital to ensuring the survival of the process of change led by the Morales government.

At the same time, there is evidence that there is a long path ahead in the process of transforming the army into one that truly represents the people.

8 August 2011

Greenleft.org.au

WASHINGTON—More than 90 U.S. senators signed a letter to President Barack Obama pressing him to sanction Iran’s central bank, with some threatening legislation to force the move, an outcome that would represent a stark escalation in tensions between the two countries.

Such a measure, if effectively implemented, could potentially freeze Iran out of the global financial system and make it nearly impossible for Tehran to clear billions of dollars in oil sales every month, said current and former U.S. officials.

Many American officials view the blacklisting of Bank Markazi as the “nuclear option” in Washington’s financial war against Tehran. Some Iranian leaders have said they would view such a move by the Obama administration as an act of war.

The letter was co-sponsored by Sens. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) and Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) in a sign of the bipartisan support for tougher financial measures against Iran. The U.S. fears Iran is developing nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran denies.

“In our view, the United States should embark on a comprehensive strategy to pressure Iran’s financial system by imposing sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran,” said the letter that was viewed by The Wall Street Journal and will be delivered to the White House on Tuesday. “If our allies are willing to join, we believe this step can be even more effective.”

A senior U.S. official said the Obama administration is studying all measures to increase pressure on Iran, including potential moves against Bank Markazi.

“We are working really hard on the Iran challenge and have made unprecedented progress in mobilizing international pressure and sanctions,” the official said.

Last year, Congress passed legislation barring from the U.S. financial system any foreign firm doing business with sanctioned Iranian banks, Iran’s energy sector, or the businesses of Tehran’s elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The law also has a provision allowing the White House to sanction Bank Markazi, a step that President Obama has so far decided not to take.

In an interview, Mr. Kirk said he would introduce a law by year’s end to enforce sanctions on Bank Markazi if the White House doesn’t move independently.

“The administration will face a choice of whether it wants to lead this effort or be forced to act,” Mr. Kirk said.

Mr. Schumer said the White House needed to utilize current legislation.

“It’s time for the administration to use the tools Congress has provided and choke off the money spigot,” he said in a statement.

Both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations have discussed the merits of targeting Iran’s central bank going back at least four years, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The U.S. and European governments believe Bank Markazi has facilitated trade for sanctioned Iranian banks and businesses by masking the names of the parties involved in international transactions.

U.S. officials also worry Iran’s central bank has provided funds to organizations designated as terrorist groups by Washington, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

Iranian officials have said in recent interviews that they view all U.S. and United Nations sanctions as illegal and that their country is entitled to conduct international trade.

Current and former U.S. officials who have taken part in the sanctions debate said that targeting Bank Markazi presents significant hurdles.

In recent years, American allies in Europe and Asia have worried that any blacklisting of Iran’s central bank will inhibit their ability to purchase Iranian oil and potentially lead to higher global energy prices. Iran is the third-largest oil exporter among the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Nations including China, South Korea and India have experienced trouble purchasing Iranian oil.

New Delhi alone has been unable to pay Iran $5 billion for oil purchases, according to Indian officials.

U.S. officials have worried that unilateral Americans sanctions against Bank Markazi might not be respected by even some American allies. This could place Washington into the difficult position of either backing down or theoretically trying to ban important foreign companies and governments from using the U.S. financial system.

An American official involved in the discussions said any U.S. decision would require months of prior discussions with countries such as South Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia in order to get their buy-in.

Congress and the Obama administration have tussled over the issue of Bank Markazi for a number of months. Senators placed holds on the confirmation of two key U.S. officials—Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Under Secretary of Treasury David Cohen—seeking assurances the White House would take steps to sanction the bank.

Mr. Kirk said in the interview these holds were eventually lifted because both Messrs. Burns and Cohen offered assurances the issue was being seriously studied. “They cited an August to September point of action,” Mr. Kirk said, acknowledging there were no promises made.

Officials at the State Department and Treasury Department said they couldn’t comment on private conversations held with members of Congress.

Write to Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com

Senators’ Letter to President Obama

August 9, 2011

President Barack Obama
The White House
Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. President:

Following the latest report of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear program and recent Iranian missile tests, we remain seriously concerned that Iran continues to accelerate its uranium enrichment and ballistic missile programs. Meanwhile, the regime refuses to answer questions posed by the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog regarding evidence Iran is working toward the development of nuclear weapons.

We must do more to increase the economic pressure on the regime. In our view, the United States should embark on a comprehensive strategy to pressure Iran’s financial system by imposing sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), or Bank Markazi. If our key allies are willing to join, we believe this step can be even more effective.

As you know, the Iranian regime continues to pursue avenues to circumvent both U.S. and multilateral sanctions. In the banking sector, the Central Bank of Iran lies at the center of Iran’s circumvention strategy. In May, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen stated that “the activities of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI) have been, and continue to be, a focus of the Treasury Department. Treasury has noted previously that the CBI and Iranian commercial banks have requested that their names be removed from international payment messages to make it more difficult for intermediary financial institutions to determine the true parties to the transaction, and we remain concerned that the CBI may be facilitating transactions for sanctioned Iranian banks.”

The time has come to impose crippling sanctions on Iran’s financial system by cutting off the CBI. There is strong bipartisan support in Congress for the imposition of sanctions on the CBI. As recently as consideration of the FY10 National Defense Authorization Act, the Senate unanimously supported an amendment urging you to impose such sanctions. We urge you to strongly consider imposing U.S. sanctions against the CBI and to encourage key allies to join us in this important action.

8 August 2011

The Wall Street Journal

April, 16, 2011

THE OTHER day, the almighty General Security Service (Shabak, formerly Shin Bet) needed a new boss. It is a hugely important job, because no minister ever dares to contradict the advice of the Shabak chief in cabinet meetings.

There was an obvious candidate, known only as J.  But at the last moment, the settlers’ lobby was mobilized. As director of the “Jewish department”  J. had put some Jewish terrorists in prison. So his candidature was rejected and Yoram Cohen, a kippah-wearing darling of the settlers was appointed instead.

That happened last month. Just before that, The National Security Council also needed a new chief. Under pressure from the settlers, General Yaakov Amidror, formerly the highest kippah-wearing officer in the army, a man of openly ultra-ultra nationalist views, got the job.

The Deputy Chief of Staff of the army is a kippah-wearing officer dear to the settlers, a former head of Central Command, which includes the West Bank.

Some weeks ago I wrote that the problem may not be the annexation of the West Bank by Israel, but the annexation of Israel by the West Bank settlers.

Some readers reacted with a chuckle. It looked like a humorous aside.

It was not.

The time has come to examine this process seriously: Is Israel falling victim to a hostile takeover by the settlers?

FIRST OF all, the term “settlers” itself must be examined.

Formally, there is no question. The settlers are Israelis living beyond the 1967 border, the Green Line. (“Green” in this case has no ideological connotation. This just happened to be the color chosen to distinguish the line on the maps.

Numbers are inflated or deflated according to propaganda needs. But it is can be assumed that there are about 300,000 settlers in the West Bank, and an additional 200,000 or so in East Jerusalem. Israelis usually don’t call the Jerusalemites “settlers”, putting them into a different category. But of course, settlers they are.

But when we speak of Settlers in the political context, we speak of a much bigger community.

True, not all settlers are Settlers. Many people in the West Bank settlements went there without any ideological motive, just because they could build their dream villas for practically nothing, with a picturesque view of Arab minarets to boot. It is these the Settler Council chairman, Danny Dayan, meant, when, in a (recently leaked) secret conversation with a US diplomat, he conceded that they could easily be persuaded to return to Israel if the money was right.

However, all these people have an interest in the status quo, and therefore will support the real Settlers in the political fight. As the Jewish proverb goes, if you start fulfilling a commandment for the wrong reasons, you will end up fulfilling it for the right ones.

BUT THE camp of the “settlers” is much, much bigger.

The entire so-called “national religious” movement is in total support of the settlers, their ideology and their aims. And no wonder – the settlement enterprise sprung from its loins.

This must be explained. The “national religious” were originally a tiny splinter of religious Jewry. The big Orthodox camp saw in Zionism an aberration and heinous sin. Since God had exiled the Jews from His land because of their sins, only He – through His Messiah – had the right to bring them back. The Zionists thus position themselves above God and prevent the coming of the Messiah. For the Orthodox, the Zionist idea of a secular Jewish “nation” still is an abomination.

However, a few religious Jews did join the nascent Zionist movement. They remained a curiosity. The Zionists held the Jewish religion in contempt, like everything else belonging to the Jewish Diaspora (“Galut” – exile, a derogatory term in Zionist parlance). Children who (like myself) were brought up in Zionist schools in Palestine before the Holocaust were taught to look down with pity on people who were “still” religious.

This also colored our attitude towards the religious Zionists. The real work of building our future “Hebrew State” (we never spoke about a “Jewish State”) was done by socialist atheists. The kibbutzim and moshavim, communal and cooperative villages, as well as the “pioneer” youth movements, which were the foundation of the whole enterprise, were mostly Tolstoyan socialist, some of them even Marxist. The few that were religious were considered marginal.

At that time, in the 30s and 40s, few young people wore a kippah in public. I don’t remember a single member of the Irgun, the clandestine military (“terrorist”) organization to which I belonged, wearing a kippah – though there were quite a number of religious members. They preferred a less conspicuous cap or beret.

The national-religious party (originally called Mizrahi – Eastern) played a minor role in Zionist politics. It was decidedly moderate in national affairs. In the historic confrontations between the “activist” David Ben-Gurion and the “moderate” Moshe Sharett in the 50s, they almost always sided with Sharett, driving Ben Gurion up the wall.

Nobody paid much attention, however, to what was happening under the surface – in the national-religious youth movement, Bnei Akiva, and their Yeshivot. There, out of sight of the general public, a dangerous cocktail of ultra-nationalist Zionism and an aggressive tribal “messianic” religion was being brewed.

THE ASTOUNDING victory of the Israeli army in the 1967 Six-day War, after three weeks of extreme anxiety, marked a turning point for this movement.

Here was everything they had dreamed of: a God-given miracle, the heartland of historical Eretz Israel (alias the West Bank) occupied, “The Temple Mount Is In Our Hands!” as a one general breathlessly reported.

As if somebody had drawn a cork, the national-religious youth movement escaped its bottle and became a national force. They created Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”), the center of the dynamic settlement enterprise in the newly “liberated territories”.

This must be well understood: for the national-religious camp, 1967 was also a moment of liberation within the Zionist camp. As the Bible (Psalm 117) prophesied: “The stone the builders despised has become the cornerstone”. The despised national-religious youth movement and kibbutzim suddenly jumped to center stage.

While the old socialist kibbutz movement was dying of ideological exhaustion, its members becoming rich by selling agricultural land to real estate sharks, the national religious sprang up in full ideological vigor, imbued with spiritual and national fervor, preaching a pagan Jewish creed of holy places, holy stones and holy tombs, mixed with the conviction that the whole country belongs to the Jews and that “foreigners” (meaning the Palestinians, who have lived here for at least 1300, if not 5000 years) should be kicked out.

MOST OF today’s Israelis were born or have immigrated after 1967. The occupation-state is the only reality they know. The settlers’ creed looks to them like self-evident truth. Polls show a growing number of young Israelis for whom democracy and human rights are empty phrases. A Jewish State means a state that belongs to the Jews and to the Jews only, nobody else has any business to be here.

This climate has created a political scene dominated by a set of right-wing parties, from Avigdor Lieberman’s racists to the outright fascist followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane – all of them totally subservient to the settlers.

If it is true that the US Congress is controlled by the Israel lobby, then this lobby is controlled by the Israeli government, which is controlled by the settlers. (Like the joke about the dictator who said: The world is afraid of our country, the country is afraid of me, I am afraid of my wife, my wife is afraid of a mouse. So who rules the world?)

So the settlers can do whatever they want: build new settlements and enlarge existing ones, ignore the Supreme Court, give orders to the Knesset and the government, attack their “neighbors” whenever they like, kill Arab children who throw stones, uproot olive groves, burn mosques. And their power is growing by leaps and bounds.

THE TAKEOVER of a civilized country by hardier border fighters is by no means extraordinary. On the contrary, it is a frequent historical phenomenon. The historian Arnold Toynbee provided a long list.

Germany was for a long time dominated by the Ostmark (“Eastern marches”), which became Austria. The culturally advanced German heartland fell under the sway of the more primitive but hardier Prussians, whose homeland was not a part of Germany at all. The Russian Empire was formed by Moscow, originally a primitive town on the fringes.

The rule seems to be that when the people of a civilized country become spoiled by culture and riches, a hardier, less pampered and more primitive race on the fringes takes over, as Greece was taken over by the  Romans, and Rome by the barbarians.

This can happen to us. But it need not. Israeli secular democracy still has a lot of strength in it. The settlements can still be removed. (In a future article, I shall try to show how.) The religious right can still be repulsed. The occupation, which is the mother of all evil, can still be terminated.

But for that we have to recognize the danger – and do something about it.

Memo to politicians: Stop promising to grow GDP and start targeting social benefits you can actually deliver—or prepare to face angry mobs. Nothing grows forever on a finite planet, not even the US economy.

It’s not surprising that everyone from President Obama to Michele Bachmann is assuring the electorate that he or she can deliver more GDP growth. When GDP numbers are up, more jobs appear and investments reap higher returns. When GDP is down, economic mayhem ensues.

Yet there are signs that more GDP growth may not be in the cards, regardless whose economic remedy is chosen. In fact, the day may have arrived when GDP itself has outlived whatever usefulness it ever had.

GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is a number indicating the total spending occurring in a national economy annually. Since WWII, policy makers have used GDP as their primary index of national economic health. During the late 20th century, with the world awash in cheap energy to fuel ever more industrial output and transport-driven trade, the numbers kept going up—and most economists concluded they’d continue doing so forever.

A few contrarians (including Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968) suggested that relying on GDP wasn’t a good idea. Although soaring numbers lead to financial euphoria, they can hide social ills like growing inequality; moreover, GDP fails to distinguish between waste, luxury, and the satisfaction of basic human needs. Perversely, GDP often rises during wars or after environmental disasters, due to increased government spending.

Despite criticisms, economists and policy makers have stuck with GDP—perhaps because tracking a single number makes their jobs easier.

But now, the US may have reached its practical GDP limit. The bursting of a once-in-a-lifetime credit bubble, the maxing out of consumer borrowing and spending capacity, and tightening global resource constraints (showing up as stubbornly high oil prices) have caught national economic output in an undertow. Much of the rest of the world is being drawn in, with Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy swirling ever closer to the drain. During the past two years, Americans bought an anemic recovery—a few hundred billion dollars’ worth of GDP growth—but at the cost of trillions in added government debt.

Now, as Washington descends deeper into partisan acrimony, efforts to generate further growth with yet more debt have become political orphans that no Republican and few Democrats will claim as their own. If the “recovery” was all smoke and mirrors, we’ve just run out of mirrors.

Trapped in a failed paradigm

That means hard times lie ahead. People instinctively know what to do in hard times: consume less and save more. But these sensible responses will—guess what?—hammer down GDP even further.

There’s no way out of this dilemma if we stay trapped in our current economic paradigm. More government debt and spending give only temporary symptomatic relief, while slashing government spending greases the chute to economic hell for millions of poor and middle-class families. We have arrived at a historic moment when none of the solutions we are familiar with works, and we are forced to examine our basic premises. Premises like these:

>> The notion that we can run an economy sustainably by perpetually increasing the rate at which we extract and burn non-renewable resources such as petroleum;

>> The notion that we can use debt as money—a practice founded on our assumption that the economy will always grow, enabling us to repay both debt and its accrued interest; and

>> The notion that we should chart our progress as a nation just by totaling up how much money we are spending annually.

That last premise is important because what we as a society choose to measure influences what we aim for and what we value. If what we care about most is increasing spending and consumption, then we are setting ourselves up for two big failures—the failure to solve real human problems that have nothing to do with consumption, or that may be worsened by certain kinds of consumption; and the failure to accomplish what we are trying to do (perpetually grow GDP and consumption) because it can’t be done. Again, nothing grows forever on a finite planet.

Indicators and targets help us set our agenda and tell us how we are doing at fulfilling it. With GDP, we get both a warped agenda and misleading feedback.

After GDP—happiness?

Proposals for a broader-based economic metric date back at least to 1972, when economists William Nordhaus and James Tobin suggested the Measure of Economic Welfare (MEW)—which Herman Daly, John Cobb, and Clifford Cobb refined in 1989 as the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). The aim of these early alternative indicators was to deduct defense spending and the costs of environmental degradation from GDP, and add the unpaid services of domestic labor.

In 1995 the think tank Redefining Progress took MEW and ISEW a step further with its Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which adjusts not only for environmental damage and resource depletion, but also for income distribution, volunteering, crime, changes in leisure time, and the lifespan of consumer durables and public infrastructures. GPI gained more traction than either MEW or ISEW, and is now used by the scientific community and many governmental organizations globally (for example, the state of Maryland is now using GPI for planning and assessment).

Coincidentally, 1972—the year MEW was proposed—also marked the date when the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan started moving to build an economy based on what King Jigme Singye Wangchuck called “Gross National Happiness.” Seeking to preserve traditional Buddhist values in an increasingly globalized world, this tiny country set out to develop a survey instrument to measure its people’s general sense of well-being.

Until recently the subject of happiness was avoided by social scientists, who lacked good ways to measure it; however, “happiness economists” inspired by Bhutan’s experiment have found ways to combine subjective surveys with objective data on lifespan, income, and education, making a national happiness index a practical option.

Though Bhutan’s economy is still based on subsistence agriculture and has a relatively low GDP, the Bhutanese people rank among the top 20 happiest in the world. This contrasts with the US, which delivers much less happiness per unit of GDP. In his book The Politics of Happiness, former Harvard University president Derek Bok traced the history of the relationship between economic growth and happiness in America. During the past 35 years, per capita income has grown almost 60 percent, the average new home has become 50 percent larger, the number of cars has ballooned by 120 million, and the proportion of families owning personal computers has gone from zero to 80 percent. But the percentage of Americans describing themselves as either “very happy” or “pretty happy” has remained virtually constant, having peaked in the 1950s. Our economic treadmill is continually speeding up due to GDP growth and we have to push ourselves ever harder to keep up, yet we’re no happier as a result.

The thinking behind Gross National Happiness is catching on. Harvard Medical School has released a series of happiness studies, while British Prime Minister David Cameron has announced the UK’s intention to begin tracking well-being along with GDP. Sustainable Seattle has launched a Happiness Initiative and intends to conduct a city-wide well-being survey. Thailand has instituted a happiness index and releases monthly GNH data. Britain’s New Economics Foundation publishes a “Happy Planet Index,” which “shows that it’s possible for a nation to have high well-being with a low ecological footprint.” And a new documentary film called “The Economics of Happiness” argues that GNH is best served by localizing economics, politics, and culture.

Whatever index is settled upon to replace GDP, it will be more complicated than the current one-dimensional metric. But simplicity isn’t always an advantage, and the additional effort required to track factors like collective psychological well-being, quality of governance, and environmental integrity may be well spent.

This is what we must do

Milton Friedman once wrote: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change.” Absent a crisis, politicians and economists will cling to GDP even if it is flawed and superior alternatives exist. It’s familiar, it’s simple, and it is embedded in all our existing economic institutions.

But crisis is upon us. For the past two decades, GDP growth in the US has mostly been captured by the financial industry. Today, unemployment is stubbornly high, while household net worth is plummeting. Further growth appears obtainable only through huge government deficits and ballooning debt. Government spending has been the only thing keeping the economy on life support, but governments across Europe and in the US have hit a crisis of confidence, both with the financial markets and constituents. We’re at an economic dead end. We seem to be on track for a political and social train wreck of dashed expectations and seething public rage. Think Tahrir Square times a thousand. The only way to manage this situation will be to change the goals and rules of our national game.

Here’s what might happen. Following widespread outbreaks of public dismay over austerity packages designed to reduce government deficits, world leaders issue an announcement that GDP is being phased out. There’s plenty of political cover for this: in 2008, French president Nicholas Sarkozy convened “The Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress,” chaired by American economist Joseph Stiglitz, which enumerated the failings of GDP. Leaders can point to the Commission’s conclusions, and tell their people that the goal of the new economic indicator will be to track and obtain broader social and environmental benefits without expanding government debt.

A direct suggestion to President Obama: Convene economists of all stripes now to come up with that alternative indicator. They could start by surveying work already done, then make adjustments as necessary. We need an agreed-upon metric that’s ready to go when crisis strikes—and crisis is just around the bend.

After the announcement would come the work of re-aligning incentives, regulations, taxes, and spending to deliver improvements in happiness and sustainability. That will mean, among other things, changing financial rules to stop enriching banks and speculators preferentially (which increases GDP but often ends up just hiking economic inequality while failing to deliver any general benefit). One strategy to accomplish this might be to charge a small tax on all purely financial transactions, with the proceeds used to reduce income taxes.

We know from numerous studies that people are happiest when they feel in control of their lives, when they have opportunities to help shape the rules they must follow, and when they feel that those rules are fair. This means that policy makers must find ways to step aside and let the shift away from GDP be driven by people acting within their local communities where their voices can be heard.

No doubt a period of experimentation will be required. That’s why it’s important to start a general economic reform by changing our primary economic indicator: as the numbers come in, we’ll see which policies make us happier and which ones don’t. Altogether, this economic transition is likely to take two or three decades. It may be hard at first, but society will have set itself on a different trajectory—increasing human satisfaction, health, and well-being, while reducing humanity’s impact on the environment.

If our current crisis is being driven by limits both to debt and natural resources, then one might wonder whether there are limits also to progress in the social and cultural spheres. Could we eventually reach the limits of human happiness?

Maybe. But that would be an interesting problem to have.

Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow-in-Residence at Post Carbon Institute.

I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?

In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder ‘mindless, mindless’. Nick Clegg denounced it as ‘needless, opportunistic theft and violence’. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge – declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was “utterly unacceptable.” The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

“Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.

Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.

I’m stuck in the house, now, with rioting going on just down the road in Chalk Farm. Ealing and Clapham and Dalston are being trashed. Journalists are being mugged and beaten in the streets, and the riot cops are in retreat where they have appeared at all. Police stations are being set alight all over the country. This morning, as the smoke begins to clear, those of us who can sleep will wake up to a country in chaos. We will wake up to fear, and to racism, and to condemnation on left and right, none of which will stop this happening again, as the prospect of a second stock market clash teeters terrifyingly at the bottom of the news reports. Now is the time when we make our choices. Now is the time when we decide whether to descend into hate, or to put prejudice aside and work together. Now is the time when we decide what sort of country it is that we want to live in. Follow the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. And take care of one another.

By Laurie Penny

9 August 2011

Pennyred.blogspot.com

Laurie Penny is a journalist, author, feminist, reprobate.

Panic On The Streets Of London

I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?

In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder ‘mindless, mindless’. Nick Clegg denounced it as ‘needless, opportunistic theft and violence’. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge – declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was “utterly unacceptable.” The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

“Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.

Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.

I’m stuck in the house, now, with rioting going on just down the road in Chalk Farm. Ealing and Clapham and Dalston are being trashed. Journalists are being mugged and beaten in the streets, and the riot cops are in retreat where they have appeared at all. Police stations are being set alight all over the country. This morning, as the smoke begins to clear, those of us who can sleep will wake up to a country in chaos. We will wake up to fear, and to racism, and to condemnation on left and right, none of which will stop this happening again, as the prospect of a second stock market clash teeters terrifyingly at the bottom of the news reports. Now is the time when we make our choices. Now is the time when we decide whether to descend into hate, or to put prejudice aside and work together. Now is the time when we decide what sort of country it is that we want to live in. Follow the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. And take care of one another.

By Laurie Penny

9 August 2011

Pennyred.blogspot.com

Laurie Penny is a journalist, author, feminist, reprobate.

Panic On The Streets Of London

I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?

In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder ‘mindless, mindless’. Nick Clegg denounced it as ‘needless, opportunistic theft and violence’. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge – declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was “utterly unacceptable.” The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.

Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

“Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere.

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.

Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.

I’m stuck in the house, now, with rioting going on just down the road in Chalk Farm. Ealing and Clapham and Dalston are being trashed. Journalists are being mugged and beaten in the streets, and the riot cops are in retreat where they have appeared at all. Police stations are being set alight all over the country. This morning, as the smoke begins to clear, those of us who can sleep will wake up to a country in chaos. We will wake up to fear, and to racism, and to condemnation on left and right, none of which will stop this happening again, as the prospect of a second stock market clash teeters terrifyingly at the bottom of the news reports. Now is the time when we make our choices. Now is the time when we decide whether to descend into hate, or to put prejudice aside and work together. Now is the time when we decide what sort of country it is that we want to live in. Follow the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. And take care of one another.

Laurie Penny is a journalist, author, feminist, reprobate.

Today the British papers not owned by Rupert Murdoch “rumored” that he might be jailed.  Americans, even Brits, have little or no idea  what is at risk here.  There is simply no one who can report it when the individual who, not only controls the world’s largest news organization turns out to be, well, what?

Who is Rupert Murdoch?

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has played a significant role in the elections of three U.S. presidents, as well as some of the events that have happened during their administrations including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the economic meltdown, Gordon Duff, senior editor and writer for Veterans Today told Press TV.

What he is not is an Australian “right wing” billionaire.  Murdoch, though born in Australia is an Israeli citizen and Jewish.  Why is this important?

Murdoch is now admitted to have controlled the political systems in Britain and America for two decades.  He has had the power to choose national leaders, make policy, pass laws at will.  Where did the power come from?

We now know it came from spying, blackmail, bribery and propaganda.

What is his agenda?  Ah, there’s the rub.

Was it about selling newspapers using scandals or spying in the name of Israel to push Britain and the United States into wars for Israel?  There is a simple answer.

Murdoch’s primary motivation isn’t even that he is “for Israel.”  Murdoch is, perhaps, the most influential Israeli, more powerful than Netanyahu.  The problem with that is that his beliefs are what we call “ultra-nationalist.”

This makes him a threat.  Ultra-nationalists are known to support wars, plan terrorist acts, manipulate populations into strife and racism, foster fear and panic, even financial ruin.

What are we describing here?

If you aren’t totally brain dead, you realize I am describing Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.

Murdoch owns Fox News and so much else you may not have a time to look at the list.  If he doesn’t own it he doesn’t want it.

Fox is a network and Murdoch, owning so many newspapers across America and being a foreigner shouldn’t be able to control such a thing.  How did he do it?

Reagan “appointed” Murdoch an American citizen.  Murdoch promised to have Fox News support Republicans and say whatever was needed, no matter how false, how stupid or, as we  have seen now for decades, how genuinely evil.

What he really did, however, was use Fox as a base to allow Israel to run spy operations.These went two ways:

1.  Israel got lots of military technology and secrets they could sell to America’s enemies for money.  This is good “Murdoch” business sense, as we all see now.

2.  Murdoch helped Israel gain control of congress.  They literally run the United States.  The tools?  As in Britain, bribery and blackmail, police, military and congress.

No surprises for anyone.

Murdoch has, in fact, engineered the last 20 plus years of American history, picking politicians, throwing elections, establishing policies.  Were the decisions his own?

I don’t think so.  I think Murdoch represents a group, mostly financial, making up the Rothschild family, the Federal Reserve Banks and organized crime.

There is an Israeli or Jewish aspect to some of this but not in the sense of being “pro” or “anti” Semitic.  The Murdoch empire, married to the “lily white” “no Jews allowed” Republican Party simply put their own very powerful spin on the good old “New World Order,” pushing it into drug running, arms and human trafficking, manipulated international currencies and debt on a massive scale, ran America and the European Union into economic collapse, worked with oil companies to set up price fixing schemes…

This is what Murdoch and his friends have done, all the while pointing their fingers at Osama bin Laden and the evil “liberals.”

They divided Britain, starting at first as “conservatives” and then changed to “liberals.”  What they did in Britain is undermine legal government, destroy the nation and the public’s trust in the government, Blair, Cameron, it doesn’t matter, Murdoch chose both and ran and runs both like hand puppets as he did with Bush and his friends.

The ideas are simple.  Bilk the countries out of every last cent, use a portion to bribe or blackmail politicians, buy police and get even more money.

Then you lie to the people, give them enemies to hate, arrange wars for them to fight and stand back and watch them destroy themselves.

Are there people really this evil?

Yes there are, Murdoch, the gang at his companies, the gang at Fox News, the folks in the US called “neocons,” the Israeli lobby in the US, the ADL, AIPAC and the Likudist faction in Israel run by Netanyahu.

These folks hate the United States.

A similar group hate Britain.  Australia has their own, he runs that place entirely, right into the ground.  He also runs Germany, Canada, he runs much of what was once the “free world.”

Am I describing Satan?

Pretty much.

His strongest advocates, those who have stood with his thieves and liars against all that is decent, all that is good, all that is right is the Evangelical and “Zionist” communities in the United States.  They were and are the “fertile ground” for his message of hate and deceit.

Who does Murdoch claim to hate?

Muslims for sure, they are all bad.  Everything he touches in his hundreds of publications and TV shows or the phony news his gang of cutthroats create, hate of Muslims is always on top.  This pleases his Israeli friends.  If things keep going as they are, he may need to hide out there and Israel will always protect him, maybe plow down a few Palestinian homes to give him a grand estate.  After all, Muslims are an easy target, living in petty dictatorships run by thieves who we have now learned have always run to Washington and Tel Aviv for orders.

Take out a second.  Think the word “Palestinian.”  Do you also think “terrorist?”  Do you see a child being killed by an Israeli helicopter or innocent people killed by a TV villain, almost invariably played by Jewish actors, perhaps a sick “inside joke” of Murdoch’s.

Even the “revolutionary types” did the same.  The Islamic people of the world have been played, exploited and crushed since 1919.  History will show it carefully planned and financed by a certain European banking family, one that 6 years earlier had established an illegal banking system in the US.

Learn about the real Balfour Declaration and how it was gotten through blackmail, learn who wrote it and to whom it was sent.

The story reads exactly like the things that are coming out in Britain day after day.

Murdoch tells his followers to hate “smart people.”  There has to be fear of the educated, the “elites.”  You can’t have rampant racism and blind ignorance until you destroy public trust in the natural leaders, until you destroy real culture and replace it with mechanized music, scandal mongering, dirty sex and endless conspiracies.

Murdoch is the real king of conspiracy theories.

Look at the endless list of wild accusations that came from Fox alone.  Then look at the others, the accusations, the wild and insane things that were written into history but likely planned by Murdoch.

9/11 probably had Murdoch’s hand in it as did the London bombings on 7/7.

There could be no great conspiracy without control of the news.

Now we find the news itself controlled the governments and may well have written the scripts to the wars, the rigged elections, the acts of terror and the misdirection that sent America into a decade of cruel and useless bloodletting after terror groups that never existed in the first place.

Now, today, as our British cousins are reeling in the revelations that their government for decades has not been their own, a diseased hybrid of crazy old man, Israeli spies and the paid stooges that the people thought were serving them….

And it goes on in America, full blast, Murdoch and his creatures, planning the future of America.

One of his creatures is Boehner.

Another is Palin.

Then there is Gingrich.

There was the entire Bush administration.

But, to get to the dark heart of evil, first you look at Fox News.

Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran.  A 100% disabled vet.  He has been a featured commentator on TV and radio including Al Jazeera and his articles have been carried by news services around the world. He has been a UN Diplomat, defense contractor and is a widely published expert on military and defense issues.  Duff is Senior Editor at one of the most widely read Veterans Online publications Veterans Today.

History may be a contested terrain and it is certainly among the most contested of the Humanities. But nonetheless we need to return to history time and again, simply to remind us of where we are in the present; and that the road from the past to the present and into the future is never a linear, simple, teleological one. Contingency and chance are always the bedfellows of history, and we need to remember that. My concern, however, as someone who looks at the politics of history-writing, stems from those instances where we discover selective appropriations and readings of history that are meant to serve other instrumental purposes: be they the furthering of other unrelated agendas or interests.

One recent case comes to mind, when the Makkal Sakti leader P Waythamoorthy revealed that in the lead-up to Malaya’s independence in 1957 a letter was sent to the Reid Commission by Lau Pak Kuan, leader of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Chinese Associations PMFCA. Lau’s letter addressed his concern about the special status given to the Malays in the proposed Constitution of the Federation of Malaya then. While Lau Pak Kuan’s concerns were relevant and timely then in the 1950s, my concern is how this historical note is being brought to play today, when some activists are demanding that the British government of today pay compensation to ethnic minorities in Malaysia who, they argue, have been ‘let down by the British’.

Now frankly the logic of this argument baffles me entirely. For a start I cannot see how the British government of today is in any way indebted to citizens of another independent country, notwithstanding the colonial relations between Britain and Malaya in the past. If we were to entertain this premise at all, then we might as well push it to its logical extreme – and on that note Britain will have to fork over billions, if not trillions, of dollars or pounds to not only Malaya but also Singapore, Burma, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and a dozens of other colonies and protectorates in Africa and the Arab world. ( I can imagine how this would go down in No. 10 Downing Street today, under the current economic climate of Western Europe.)

And why should we stop at Britain? Perhaps France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal should also pay billions of dollars to people all over the world for what happened half a century ago, as a result of actions done by their ancestors who are already dead. Should the American government pay millions of dollars to all the Afro-Americans whose ancestors were brought there as slaves as well?

In our historical assessment of things past, we need to be cold in our analysis: Colonial capitalism from the 19th to mid-20th centuries was founded on the logic of racialised capitalism, and it was the logic of racialised capitalism that rationalised and necessitated the mass migration of native Asian, African and other native races across the colonies: Britain facilitated the migration of millions of South Asians to Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Africa and elsewhere to serve the interests of colonial investors who needed cheap, domesticated and politically submissive labour at low costs to maximise their profits. The same applies to the migration of East Asians from China to the colonies of Southeast Asia, that was likewise done to increase profits. The added bonus to the Empire was the introduction of racial differences and the creation of ethnic-racial enclaves that were kept apart by the apparatus of the colonial police state, and then the creation of a racial hierarchy that kept native Asians apart and the colonial masters above everyone. Period. There is no happy ending to this, anymore than there is a happy ending to slavery or patriarchy.

Living as we do in post-colonial states that remain blighted by the legacy of racialised capitalism and racial differences, we ought to take the first step in the process of mental decolonisation, by consciously questioning and rejecting the logic of compartmentalised racial difference. The problem is ours, now, whether we like it or not. Selective appropriations of historical data to serve other unrelated causes does nothing to improve our conditions, and certainly does not end the problem of racial stereotyping.

And as a related question, I am still curious as to why this campaign seems directed primarily at addressing the status of ethnic minorities in Malaysia? Do these activists not realise that among the other results of colonial-enforced migration to Malaya was the marginalization of the then native Malay entrepreneurial class? Following the announcement of the Selangor Tin Mining concession in 1873, which came at the end of the Selangor Civil War of 1866-1873, native Malay tin mining activities in Selangor gradually decreased. By 1891, Chinese migrants were in the majority in Perak and Selangor. British intervention in the Sultanates did not end to stem the tide of migration from China, it merely regulated it instead. The colonial authorities sought to use the Chinese Protectorate system which was first introduced in Singapore in 1877 as a means of monitoring the Chinese, whom they used as a source of cheap labour to: 1. increase their own British companies’ profits, and 2. marginalise native Malay tin producers as well. By the 1890s there were still around 350 privately-owned Malay tin mines in the Kinta valley of Perak alone, but these were soon to be eclipsed by British and Chinese-owned mining operations.

So let us be frank and blunt about all this: Racialised colonial capitalism victimised practically all the Asian communities of the colonies, and it led to the crippling of native industry in places like British Malaya and British Burma. The saddest thing about this whole sick and sordid episode is how Asians were used by the colonialists to replace and marginalise other Asians. Whatever bad blood or distrust that emerged then, and which persists now, can be dated back to this period of colonial intervention that could be described as one of the lowest points in humanity’s development: How ethnicities and races were pit against each other, for the sake of capital gains and material profit.

But dont waste your time going to Downing Street today to demand compensation please: Our problems today need present-day solutions, and not injections of selective reconstructed history to weave a nice narrative. We cannot avoid realpolitik, and we ought to come back to the real world.

End.

Dr Farish Ahmad- Noor is the Senior Fellow for the Contemporary Islam Programme; S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

In refusing to allow Ashraf Hafiz Abdul Aziz to change his name, the courts may have adhered to the letter of the law but did they lack the compassion for transgenders, asks MOHAMMAD HASHIM KAMALI.

THE untimely death of Ashraf Hafiz Abdul Aziz at 26 and the difficulties he faced put many in a reflective mood as to what could have been done better to address his suffering when he was alive. By refusing to grant Ashraf his plea to change and register his name as Aleesha Farhana, the courts may have adhered to the letter of the law but it is questionable whether they were compassionate enough.

If one were to learn a lesson, it would be to find better answers through suitable legislation and grant of flexibility in the adjudication of intensely humanitarian cases such as Ashraf’s. The Birth and Deaths Registration Act 1957 only allows amendment in personal identity if an error had been made in the first place. The gender reassignment surgery Ashraf had two years ago apparently did not warrant

such an amendment.

There are an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 transgenders in the country, most of whom are grappling with stigma and prejudice. They get little comfort from the authorities, and even religious leaders tend to lecture them on how they should reform themselves. They have low self-esteem and often get involved in the vice trade.

Ashraf’s case evidently invoked voices of compassion in the media and elsewhere, although the media coverage on him seemed more interested in the colour and make-up of his clothes rather than his emotional trauma and pain.

Islam is cognizant of the predicament of transgender individuals, and even though the fiqh tradition provides a certain amount of detail, it is the general guidelines of the Quran and Hadith that need to be looked at first.

Islam identifies itself as din al-fitrah, a religion that manifests harmony with human nature, which implies that Islam seeks to respond positively to the legitimate needs of people. Our natural need and reason, informed by the available guidelines in Islam and scientific evidence, should guide us in our quest to provide fair responses to issues.

Justice is a cardinal principle of Islam, yet it is to be tempered with fairness (ihsan) — as in the Quranic verse “God commands justice and fairness” (al-Nahl, 16:90).

God’s affirmation that “We have bestowed dignity on the children of Adam” (17:70) is unqualified and absolute in that human dignity is divinely ordained and inheres in all individuals by virtue of their humanity. This should be duly reflected in our social and family relations, business transactions, laws and governance.

All of this is to be further moderated by the principle that “God makes no soul responsible for what is beyond its capacity” (2:233). Prophet Muhammad also said that “people are God’s children and the most beloved of them to God is the most compassionate of them to His children”. There is acknowledgement in the Quran also of “men who have no wiles with women”, side by side with minors and elderly persons with whom women can behave more freely within the home environment (24:31 and 24:60).

The fiqh discourse on transgenders draws a certain distinction between two categories of persons, namely the khuntha and the mukhannath. The former is a male person who resembles a female in speech, movement and appearance due to an inherent condition that is beyond his ability to control, and there is, therefore, no sin, shame or blame attached to it.

Juristic discourse concerning the khuntha is almost entirely focused on their rights in respect of privacy, clothing, burial ceremonies, inheritance rights and others. This is a language not of denial but affirmation that such persons do exist among us and that society should allow space for them to lead a life of dignity.

The mukhannath is, on the other hand, a person who conceals his masculinity and much of his feminine behaviour is deemed to be of his own making. There is blame attached to this and the case is treated differently to that of the khuntha.

To differentiate one from the other may admittedly not be self-evident, in which case scientific evidence plays a crucial role, although the fiqh tradition, too, has moved beyond simplistic categories to discern shades of differences between them.

Fiqh and science both confirm that sexual orientation is latent within each individual, emerging in complex interactions between one’s biological make-up and early childhood. Current research is pushing slowly but steadily towards the conclusion that sexual orientation is largely inherent.

Khuntha is further divided into two types: easy to discern (khuntha ghayr mushkil), as opposed to khuntha mushkil, whose condition is difficult to determine.

The former is a person who exhibits both masculine and feminine traits, but one of these is predominant. This is basically a man with feminine tendencies, or a woman with masculine tendencies, and it is possible to determine the application of fiqh rules pertaining to their rights.

The khunsa mushkil, or transgender in the full sense, is a person who may have both male and female sexual organs, or has neither but whose urinary tract ends with an aperture. If the former, an attempt is made to determine the manner of urination. If this proves reliable, and natural inclinations, whether towards men or women, also fail to provide a clue, the case is treated as one of indeterminable hermaphrodite.

Jurists and schools of law have differed as to details in the application of fiqh rules pertaining, for example, to inheritance, by taking an average of two separate distributions for a male and a female respectively, or the lower of the two, depending on which school of fiqh one follows, to be assigned to the hermaphrodite.

Some of these questions can now be better determined perhaps in light of advances in science, in which case the rules of ijtihad would suggest recourse to scientific evidence, general guidelines of the Quran and Hadith, as well as the enlightened aspirations and insights of our society and our quest to finding more refined answers.

Prof Mohammad Hashim Kamali is founding chairman and CEO of the International Institute of Advanced Islamic Studies Malaysia.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has identified credible reports of 168 children killed in seven years of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These children would account for 44% of the minimum figure of 385 civilians reported killed by the attacks.

Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency, said in response to the findings: ‘Even one child death from drone missiles or suicide bombings is one child death too many.’

Child deaths

Children have been killed throughout the seven years of CIA strikes.

Pakistani father Din Mohammad had the misfortune to live next door to militants in Danda Darpakhel, North Waziristan. His neighbours were reportedly part of the Haqqani Network, a group fighting US forces in nearby Afghanistan.

On September 8 2010, the CIA’s Reaper drones paid a visit. Hellfire missiles tore into the compound killing six alleged militants.

One of the Hellfires missed its target, and Din Mohammad’s house was hit. He survived. But his son, his two daughters and his nephew all died. His eldest boy had been a student at a Waziristan military cadet college. The other three children were all below school age.

Although the Bureau’s field researchers have verified the details of this strike, the US continues to deny civilians are being killed in Pakistan strikes.

Those who died that day are just four of some 168 children credibly reported as killed and identified by the Bureau.

‘One in three’

The highest number of child deaths occurred during the Bush presidency, with 112 children reportedly killed. More than a third of all Bush drone strikes appear to have resulted in the deaths of children.

On only one occasion during Bush’s time in office did a single child die in a strike. Multiple deaths occurred every other time. On July 28 2008 for example, CIA drones struck a seminary in South Waziristan, killing al Qaeda’s chemical weapons expert Abu Khabab al Masri along with his team (see B18) . Publicly the attack was hailed a success.

But the Agency’s strike also killed three young boys and a woman. Despite the secrecy surrounding the drones campaign, details emerged in May of this year that not only was the US aware of this ‘collateral damage’, but that the then-CIA chief Michael Hayden personally apologised to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Gilani for the error.

Religious school attacked

It is one of the worst incidents of the entire drones campaign, yet one of the least reported. A CIA strike on a madrassa or religious school in 2006 killed up to 69 children, among 80 civilians.

The attack was on a religious seminary in Chenegai, in Bajaur Agency.

CIA drones attacked on October 30, flattening much of the school. Their target was reportedly the headmaster, a known militant. According to some reports, there was also a token late contribution to the assault by Pakistani military helicopters. But dozens of children were also killed, the youngest aged seven.

Veteran BBC Urdu journalist Rahimullah Yousufzai, speaking from Peshawr, recalls visiting the village just after the strike: ‘People were devastated. I met with a father who had lost two children. He was very patient, talking of how God must have willed this, but he was clearly traumatised.’

Initially the Pakistan Army claimed that it had carried out the bombardment, even as shops and offices closed across the region and protests spread. But as the scale of the attack unfolded, the story changed. The Sunday Times carried a report from a key aide to Pakistan’s then-President Musharraf stating:

We thought it would be less damaging if we said we did it rather than the US. But there was a lot of collateral damage and we’ve requested the Americans not to do it again.

A week after the attack, The News published the names and home villages of 80 victims. 69 were reported as children aged 17 or under. According to the paper’s sources:

It was claimed that one of the deceased was only seven-year old, three were eight, three nine, one was 10, four were 11, four were 12, eight were 13, six were 14, nine were 15, 19 were 16, 12 were 17, three were 18, three were 19 and only two were 21-years-old.

Yousufzai is adamant that the attack was the work of the CIA: ‘I am absolutely confident, 100 per cent, that this was carried out by US drones, based on witnesses at the time and the subsequent comments of [Pakistani] government officials.’

Escalating War

President Obama, too, has been as Commander-in-Chief responsible for many child deaths in Pakistan. The Bureau has identified 56 children reported killed in drone strikes during his presidency – although child deaths have dropped significantly in recent months.

On February 14 2009 the 8-year-old son of Maezol Khan lost his life. More than 25 alleged militants were killed in a massive strike on a nearby house. But flying shrapnel killed the young boy as he slept next door. His grandfather later asked asked: ‘How can the US invade our homes while we are sleeping, and target our children?’

But one 2009 incident in which children died gives a chilling insight into the tactics of those the CIA are hunting. On August 11 of that year drones attacked an alleged Pakistan Taliban compound, killing up to 25 people. At the time there were reports of women and children killed (see Ob31).

Two years later, young survivor Arshad Khan, now in Pakistani police custody, told reporters that the compound was a training camp for teenage suicide bombers. He named four young victims. Arshad says he was recruited without realising he was to be a suicide bomber.

Commenting on children killed by drone strikes, Unicef’s South Asia regional spokesperson Sarah Crowe told the Bureau:

Even one child death from drone missiles or suicide bombings is one child death too many. Children have no place in war and all parties should do their utmost to protect children from violent attacks at all times.

Reducing deaths 

There are indications that the Obama administration is making efforts to reduce the number of children being killed. Following the incident in September 2010 that killed Din Mohammad’s children, and another strike just weeks earlier in which a further three children died, there has been an apparent steep fall in the number of child fatalities reported by media.

That is partially in line with claims by some US intelligence officials that drone targeting strategies have been altered to reduce civilian casualties. Although the Bureau has demonstrated that CIA claims of ‘zero casualties’ are false, there are fewer reports of child casualties since August 2010.

Along with two undefined reports of ‘children killed’, a 17-year-old student was killed in November last year. And on April 22 2011 two drones destroyed a house and guesthouse in Spinwan, North Waziristan. A 12-year-old boy, Atif, was killed in that strike, according to researchers working with the Bureau in Waziristan.

Mirza Shahzad Akbar, an Islamabad-based lawyer representing a number of families caught up in drone strikes said:

All these children are a big recruitment agent for militants in the area. When you can show people that children are being killed in the drone strikes, all those who are so far non-aligned, that gets them onto the other side. That is what most worries me as a Pakistani.

A US counter-terrorism official, commenting generally on the Bureau’s findings, denied that civilians were being killed in the numbers suggested and said: ‘Nobody is arguing perfection over the life of the program, but this remains the most precise system we’ve ever had in our arsenal.’

* For this research, we have adopted the UN’s definition of a child as being someone aged between 0 and 17. The majority of those we have come across have been significantly younger than 17.