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Israel: “94% voted for the attack on Gaza” – Jerusalem Post

(LONDON) – Talking about anti-Semitism, and the accusation of anti-Semitism, is to many people a very sensitive issue. Nevertheless, I feel the need to highlight some points: As a Palestinian and as a Muslim, with firsthand experience of racism, whether here in UK or in occupied Palestine.

I do understand what it means to be subjugated to it; thus, I deeply empathise with those who suffer from the menace of racism and discrimination, those who are abused verbally, physically, emotionally, or otherwise for no other reason than the fact that they are “different”.

And I also do understand the awful feeling and dreadful sensation of being subjugated to subtle racist looks or remarks, only felt by you and not the people around you.

However, I do see a huge difference between a racist remark directed at a person or a group for their beliefs, race, or whatever that which makes them different, and between a snarl, a sneer or sarcasm against an occupying criminal entity called “Israel” and its people, for their CRIMES.

One must not fail to distinguish between the rage and fury caused by watching helplessly for decades the grim unstoppable crimes go unpunished year after year, and the racist blind hatred that might still exist among a tiny minority who, by nature, would be hating anything and anyone who is different anyway.

Furthermore, this occupying entity called “Israel” (a word that I myself detest to even pronounce and generally avoid to use) is not a theoretical being, nor does it operate in a vacuum; it’s neither an abstract concept nor a conjectural void it’s an entity run by PEOPLE.

It is an entity of PEOPLE, 94% of whom voted for the attack on Gaza – Overwhelming Israeli support of Gaza op – Jerusalem Post

It is an entity of PEOPLE, 71% of whom want U.S. to strike Iran – Haaretz Poll: 71% of Israelis want U.S. to strike Iran if talks fail

It is an entity of PEOPLE who violated and assaulted ALL neighbouring countries.

It is an entity of PEOPLE who live on a STOLEN land for over six decades, with no signs of shame, remorse, awakening of conscience, or willingness to neither admit nor right the wrongs they’ve committed.

Every normal person with some compassion would make a grimace of disgust and revulsion when hearing about such an entity or such a people who commit such despicable horrors…

Now, I find it difficult to be persuaded that such a reaction to such horrific crimes -when hearing the name “Israel” or “Israeli”- is an act of racism (anti-Semitism). On another note; we – Palestinians- do not have any responsibility whatsoever for the crime of the holocaust, nor do we carry the burden of European racism against Jewish people.

Furthermore, I do not see a difference between any kinds of racism including racism directed against Jewish people known as anti-Semitism. If we accept racism against Jewish people as being different, then it implies that we accept the racist absurdity of “Jewish exceptionalism”.

Racism is racism, many causes same consequences.

Thus, I do not see the suffering of Jewish people (horrible as it was) as a unique kind of suffering which must be revered and viewed as essentially and fundamentally different from other human suffering; the same way that I do not see our suffering as Palestinians as unique or different from any other.

Questions come pounding: Why is it that we –Palestinians- are constantly reminded of the horrors of the holocaust, when we had nothing to do with it?

Why is it that we Palestinians, are to suffer the same fate as the victims of the holocaust by the hands of those who brag worldwide to act for “never again”?

Why would the UN want to enforce the study of the history of our oppressors and occupiers -holocaust- upon our children who are languishing in refugee camps –who themselves along with their parents, and grandparents were victims of ethnic cleansing, planned and executed by those whom they are supposed to feel sympathy with?

Why is it that we are persistently bogged down by the fixation on anti-Semitism, while for sixty years (a century rather), we are the ones who are relentlessly suffering from a most vile evil racism (ethnic cleansing gradually becoming a form of “final solution”) perpetrated by a whole population of racist Zionists? (with all honesty, I must tell you that sometimes I imagine it would’ve been easier and less painful to us to be gassed and killed immediately rather than this policy of excruciating slow death that we have been going through for over a century).

How could the world keep asking us to recognize the “humanity” of a settler, who comes with his wife and children armed to his teeth, and at gun point evicts a Palestinian family, throws their entire belongings out, and moves in? What kind of “humanity” is this?

And most importantly, why is it that we are continuously been asked to feel compassion towards our tormentors who relentlessly murder and humiliate us, who attempt to annihilate us and our history and why, to what purpose, are we asked to feel their “humanity”, while their knife still piercing deep in our hearts?

Finally, I cannot speak on behalf of all the Palestinians, but as for myself, I must admit, the recent assault on Gaza was the last straw that broke the camel’s back; before that, I used to think that there is hope, those PEOPLE would wake up to their “humanity” one day, and regret the evil that they’ve done, unfortunately, the more I see of them, the more I realize that this hope and dream was an illusion.

Over the past few years, I have been reading and debating with many of those “soft” Zionists in the so called “peace camps”, all I found is an extremely arrogant groups of people, who are incapable of recognising, admitting, or willing to rectify the crimes they’ve done.

They are only interested in “peace” to protect their interests and to further secure their grip hold on the stolen land.

Moreover, very recently, and by sheer accident, I stumbled upon some honorific information that reveals the severity of decay of morality and lack of humanity amongst those RACIST Zionists – whose ideological bigotry and chauvinism surpasses all other- that left me in a state of shock for days; crying, shaking, suffocating with palpitations and suffering from severe panic attacks.

Undoubtedly, the world community should leave it to the victims to decide how to deal with those criminals in the future. Only the victims can investigate the fragile alleys of forgiveness or punishment. The victims should have the last say irrespective of what their judgment might be, they should not be vilified, indicted or moralized with, for they have suffered more than enough the emergence of forgiveness and reconciliation requires certain conditions:

None of these conditions are ever considered as an option amongst that mighty sick racist Zionist society.

As for me, I have no authority to talk in the name of all Palestinians, but I can state with all honesty, I DO NOT wish the Zionist murderers, those of whom were directly or indirectly involved in massacres, theft of land, subjugation and oppression, to remain in Palestine after its liberation from the occupier.

–except of course for the very few good people amongst them, as no soul should carry the liability of another-

I do not wish the invader, occupier and criminal racists to stay in Palestine, the land that they incessantly raped, destroyed and disfigured, nor do I desire them to be my neighbours.

They have shown no respect, no appreciation, and no love to this land or to her people They do not deserve to live there But these are only my own feelings, and I know that the decision is not mine.

More on anti Semitism

There are some more points that I would like to draw attention to:

1. “Israel” calls itself a Jewish state, and claims to be acting for all Jewish people, by Jewish people. It is still enjoying the moral and financial support of the majority of Jewish communities worldwide. The absence of a huge uproar of denunciation and disassociation by the majority of world Jewry, makes it hard for people not to blame Zionist Jews who live outside occupied Palestine for their guilt of complicity, active alliance or passive complacency by either silence or aiding and sustaining the criminals

2. “Israel” still enjoys the protection of the “Security Council” with its US vetoes on any UN resolution sanctioning “Israel’s” endless list of ongoing crimes and infractions of international law, and the “Israeli” criminals still roam with impunity, free from prosecution by any jurisdiction. This intolerable situation inevitably foments further rage and fury against the double standard and special treatment granted to the “Jewish” state

So, a sincere advice from a heart that cares, to all my Jewish friends who are really interested in preventing the re-emergence of real “anti Semitism”, and to those “Israelis” with some humanity left; I would say:

1. Instead of wasting time searching for the “humanity” within “Israeli” criminals, focus your energy on fighting and revealing “Israeli” crimes and exposing its inhumanity

2. Disassociate your selves completely from such an entity and proclaim this annulment loud and clear

3. Let go of the idea that anti Semitism is a “special” case of racism; treat all racism with the same degree of unambiguous condemnation

4. Try to look at the situation from the standpoint of non Jewish people, who will not accept or understand the insistence on the uniqueness of the Jewish suffering, whereas the world has seen since the end of WW2 the massacres of millions and millions of non Jews. The world is now inflamed by hatred against Muslims, not against Jews.

5. With love in my heart, with sincere and pure feelings, I would appeal to you to look inwards and search for reasons, as to why you feel that the world should accept racism against you as somehow worse or different, and as to why you feel that your suffering is unique and unlike others’, because this is not how the world sees it. All suffering has the same value to those who go through it, and all racism has the same consequences and must be ostracized with the same ferociousness

6. Those of us who are involved in the support of Palestinian cause are inevitably going to be accused of anti Semitism, that does not make us in any shape or form anti-Semites, for we know very well that we are not; hence, false labels, and bogus allegations should not frighten or deter us, distract us or hinder our determination of doing what we think is right

7. And finally, please, do not freak out when people point out to certain aspects of Judaism and the Jewish culture that they might not like or find incompatible with humanity, equality, or fairness, after all assessment and criticism have always been accepted by other religions, belief-systems and cultures, and this is what freedom of thought and freedom of speech are all about, people have the right to look at different ideologies, scrutinize them, criticize them and sieve out what appears to be hindering the human moral development, as long as all this is done in a non offensive manner, without slander or abuse, but rather in a respectful, academic, genuine and good-intentional search for truth2

PS:

I know that what I have said might appear too strong, unfamiliar, or painful to hear, but I can only speak of what’s in my heart, as I believe that only through openness and honesty that trust can be built

We have a saying in Arabic; “sadeequka man sadaqak, wassaddaqak”

صديقك من صدَقك و صدّقك

“Your true friend is that who is honest with you and who believes you”

Arabic word for honesty: sidq

And for friend: sadeeq

Both friend and honesty share the same root: sa-da-qa= told the truth

I am a Jerusalem-born Palestinian refugee living in exile for over 42 years. I was forced to leave my homeland, Palestine at the age of seven during the six-day war. I am a mathematician by profession. I started writing about three years ago when my friends insisted I should write about my memories, experiences, and feelings as a Palestinian. I did… but it all came out -for some strange reason- sounding -as I am told- like poetry! So I self published two books (I Believe in Miracles, and Palestine, The True Story. Write to me at :nahidaexiledpalestinian@gmail.com

By Nahida Izzat

Chris Hedges is one of the best, one of the most morally useful, writers we have. He’s free of loyalty to political party or dogma. He knows war first hand and describes it without flinching. He’s an almost ideal gadfly to our corporatocracy. But he has a hangup on religion that holds him back.

Hedges will tell you that he has no use for fantasies about life after death. He’ll profess no interest in gods or prayer or a divine plan or anything of the sort. He’s perfectly aware of what lies on the negative side of the balance sheet for religion (or what he would call institutional religion), how it trains blind obedience, how it diminishes the value of life before death, how it shifts responsibility from people to imaginary beings, how it divides groups of people who kill in its name. But when you ask what, then, lies on the positive side of the account for religion that justifies supporting it, Hedges’ answers range from slim to silly.

One answer he gave me was that there are mysteries in the world, including emotions like love. Well, of course there are. But, I told him, I make no claim to having plumbed the depths of every emotion and having perfectly understood it, I just have no use for god or heaven. Does one have to claim omniscience to be an atheist? I thought only God claimed that!

But Hedges will tell you that it’s wiser to be an agnostic than an atheist because you just don’t know. But, of course, no one who says this means it quite that simply. If I were to be “agnostic” on whether the world is secretly run by demons dwelling in the livers of antelopes and every other imaginable lunacy, I wouldn’t have time to do any substantive being of an agnostic. I could just say “I’m an agnostic on all fantastical BS” and leave it at that. But when it comes to whatever it is that Hedges and others reluctant to fully part with religion mean by “religion,” they want to see some agnostical activity going on, specifically lamentation of the passing of religion. I don’t think engaging in such activity tends to make one more or less arrogant or humble.

Hedges’ latest article is called “After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck with Nietzsche.” He opens with five good paragraphs on damage done, both by major religious institutions and by religiosity in general. Then he writes:

“But I cannot rejoice in the collapse of these institutions. We are not going to be saved by faith in reason, science and technology, which the dead zone of oil forming in the Gulf of Mexico and our production of costly and redundant weapons systems illustrate. Frederick Nietzsche’s Übermensch or “Superman” — our secular religion — is as fantasy-driven as religious magical thinking.”

Setting aside the dubious idea that U.S. culture today is driven by anything resembling Nietzsche’s Übermensch, how in the world did we leap from the collapse of religion to “faith in reason, science, and technology”? Of course, we have too much of that as well, but it’s not all we have or all we could have. We aren’t limited to religion or THAT. And it’s not the central explanation of the oil spill or the wars, given that a majority of us oppose the policies that have led to both. We have allowed our “leaders” to act against our interests, as if they knew best, a habit encouraged by religion, not science.

Of course, we need to be respectful of nature. Of course, we need to be humble in the face of ecosystems (and emotions) that we do not begin to understand. Of course, we need to stop trying to conquer the world and behaving as if we were its gods. We need to outgrow “faith in reason, science, and technology” just as we need to outgrow faith in religion. And we are doing so. Suggesting that we must choose one catastrophic course or the other, religion or scientific domination, does not help our progress. I’m not making an argument about whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic — I think either, in so far as it distracts from action, is morally inexcusable. I’m suggesting that if we want to progress or even survive it will be through overcoming both religion and faith in technology.

In his final address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr., said:

“There is nothing wrong with power, if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

I imagine Hedges agrees with that. But he should notice that King is suggesting a choice other than science or religion, one just as available to an atheist as to an agnostic or to a religious believer like King. All being agreed on the wisdom of such a course, the question of whether or not to keep dragging the vestiges of religion down through the centuries becomes a separate question, to be decided based on whether religion does more harm or good.

Hedges goes on to say that there are “religiously motivated people toiling in the inner city and the slums of the developing world” and that they “remain true to the core religious and moral values ignored by [religious] institutions.” What values? Hedges lists “individual responsibility” and “compassion, especially for the weak, the impoverished, the sick and the outcast.” But, of course, most people who have been responsible and compassionate have been religious for the same reason that most people who have been servile and cruel have been religious: most people, period, have been religious. In fact, polling on political questions at least begins to suggest that the most responsible and compassionate Americans today, on average, are atheists. We’re less likely to support injustices like wars and torture. Whether we’re more responsible and compassionate through all aspects of our lives, I do not know, but I haven’t seen any evidence that we’re less so — just antiquated fear mongering about how morality will disappear if religion does.

Hedges continues his effort to equate the loss of religion with moral decline:

“We are rapidly losing the capacity for the moral life. We reject the anxiety of individual responsibility that laid the foundations for the open society. . . . The great religions set free the critical powers of humankind. . . . [R]eligious thinkers were our first ethicists. . . . These religious institutions are in irreversible decline. . . . But don’t think the world will be a better place for their demise. As we devolve into a commodity culture, in which celebrity, power and money reign, the older, dimming values of another era are being replaced. . . . We live in the age of the Übermensch who rejects the sentimental tenets of traditional religion. The Übermensch creates his own morality based on human instincts, drive and will. We worship the ‘will to power’ and think we have gone ‘beyond good and evil.’ We spurn virtue. We think we have the moral fortitude and wisdom to create our own moral code.”

And here is where religion holds Hedges back. We must, of course, find the moral fortitude and wisdom to create our own moral code to address our own moral circumstances. We will find most of that wisdom in lessons from the past, of course, and most of it from past religious observers. But we will be hindered by keeping alive almost anything we meaningfully refer to as religion, anything suggesting deference to a greater authority than the accumulated wisdom of humanity. We must be free of that if we are to envision what we need to become. For all of his failings, this is what Nietzsche attempted to do, and to some degree succeeded in doing. Hedges knows that Nietzsche condemned all the undesirable traits of modern culture that Hedges himself laments. But Hedges lays the blame, nonetheless, at Nietzsche’s doorstep as an enemy of religion.

And there’s something wrong with the timing of Hedges’ tale of woe. The cultural damage he describes is all current, while the loss of religion that he fears will cause it is substantially in the future. The vast majority of Americans today are more religious than Hedges himself is. We can’t fix their shortcomings by making them religious. Instead, we have to make them — and ourselves — more responsible and compassionate in a way that, indeed, moves beyond existing ways of thinking.

Without religious beliefs, we might still have violence, but Germans would not have made the worst of Nietzsche in Nazism. Without religious beliefs we might still have oil drilling, but we wouldn’t have senators telling us they don’t care because it is the next life that matters. And if Afghans and Iraqis did not belong to a different religion than most Americans, we wouldn’t bomb them and burn their babies with fire bombs and white phosphorous. Whether you agree with the views of the religious “extremists” or not, you have a moral choice: will you condemn the basis of their thinking or provide respectable cover for it?

By David Swanson

Does it have to be that an entire country and it’s innocent civilians have to be punished after the failed New York Times Square bomb attempt by one person? It seems to be that way. Maybe another false flag operation was planned to issue stern warnings to Pakistan that should there be a successful attack next, there might even be a “boots-on-the ground” US presence on Pakistan as reported by the New York Times, a Zionist mouthpiece, on Saturday May 9, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/world/asia/09pstan.html. After the unsuccessful bomb attack by US citizen Faisal Shehzad who was captured by US authorities on board a flight to Pakistan via Dubai, the US administration has started issuing threats to Pakistan.

The first threat came on May 5, 2010 from Fareed Zakaria, author and host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” in which he reported that “Pakistan is the epicentre of Islamic terrorism” and that “..It’s worth noting that even the terrorism that’s often attributed to the war in Afghanistan tends to come out of Pakistan, to be planned by Pakistanis, to be funded from Pakistan or in some other way to be traced to Pakistan…”. Zakaria was a favored student of Dr. Huntington the celebrated author of “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order”. Zakaria has also been noted to be involved with George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz in pushing for the war on Iraq.

Why would Zakaria use the words “Islamic Terrorism” rather than Muslim terrorism? In my article, The Winds of Change, published by Countercurrents on May 4, 2010 I’d written that since the war cannot be waged on Islam, the next best is to wage it on its adherents to weaken them. The strategy is working. The affluent group of Muslims are being weakened as they pursue materialistic objectives whereas the poorer Muslims are being intimidated through wars waged on them. One group fears the loss of wealth and the other fears loss of lives, not their own maybe but of their families.

On May 7, 2010, US military commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal met with Pakistan’s military commander General Ashfaq Kiyani in Islamabad to clearly issue a stern warning that Pakistan must immediately begin a military offensive against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in North Waziristan. US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson also met with Pakistani president Asif Zardari and used “forceful” language to convey the American point that the Pakistanis had to move more assertively against the militants threaded through the society. As if that is not enough, pressure mounted from Hillary Clinton on May 7, 2010 that it faced “very severe consequences” if a terror plot like Times Square bombing were traced to Pakistan. US officials have even admitted that if there is a successful attack, the US will have to act. Maybe there is a successful attack being planned by the US either on its soil or on some European, Indian or Israeli soils. If the unsuccessful bomb attack is so politically successful, one would wonder how successful will be a successful bomb attack.

The answers to the question why US has urged Pakistan to launch a military offensive in the northern areas is very clear. It is to create more fear and terrorism, more suicide bombings, ensure more terrorists are bred, continue and further increase drone attacks and, demoralize and weaken the military through exhausting the hardware in its arsenal such that if a joint US-Indian-NATO attack is launched on Pakistan in the near future, it’ll not be able to sustain the war. Nuclear deterrence against an enemy already on its soil is pointless.

The one thing that most Muslim leaders severely lack is diplomacy and negotiation skills, more so a nuclear state like Pakistan than any of the others who’ve no strong and viable defences. Pakistan could easily retaliate to threats from US or India but being an indebted nation whose leaders are corrupt to the nth degree and who have families overseas, they’re unable to demonstrate diplomacy or use language that would remove threats so they submit to threats. Zardari is a known state criminal and the US has all the scoops on him to blackmail him should he not relent to US demands.

It is now obvious that the US has military intentions towards Pakistan. India and Israel but more so the latter would like to see Pakistan denuclearized. Pakistan is also of significant geo-political importance as it would serve as a corridor for land-locked Afghanistan and the former Soviet satellites. 9/11 led to the occupation of Afghanistan, WMDs led to the occupation of Iraq and its becoming obvious that the relentless pressure of terrorism might lead to Pakistan’s occupation and subsequent denuclearization. The Zionists have mastered the art of fabrication without being challenged. They’ve not only fabricated 9/11, WMDs and other false flag operations but they’ve also fabricated an economic culture leading to rewards for the obedient servants and slavery for the masses throughout the world.

Much as the US, France, Germany and UK would like to bomb Iran to the rubble because of its oil and gas, Russia and China have not been supportive of actions against Iran in the United Nations. The next best target is therefore Pakistan as the US needs not secure UN, Russian or Chinese support for actions against it. The excuse of containing the epicentre of “Islamic terrorism” is sufficient. Pakistan is in the pressure cooker with the lid on and the stove flame on high.

By Gulam A. Mitha

More than 90 per cent of the world’s energy comes from non-renewable sources – and its decline can be projected on a Hubbert bell curve.

It’s just that we are more familiar with the concept of peak oil. After all, oil is the world’s largest source of energy, and the size and immediacy of the problem tends to overshadow debate on the remaining energy sources. But Hubbert’s model proves versatile, as the exploitation of any non-renewable resource – from oil to uranium – follows similar patterns.

Experts in the fields of coal, natural gas and nuclear power are beginning to talk of vastly inflated reserves figures and pointing to resource depletion within the next two decades. This, if it comes about, would involve all our main sources of energy declining drastically, all within a relatively short timeframe.

But first, some background. Using heavily rounded figures, global energy supply can be broken down as follows: oil supplies 36 per cent of our needs, coal 28 per cent, natural gas 24 per cent, nuclear 6 per cent and hydroelectric 6 per cent. (Solar and wind are less than one per cent so don’t figure in this kind of broad-brush approach – the aim here is to establish the ratios.)

Meanwhile, global demand for all energy sources is growing. Rising energy use is inextricably linked to rising GDP, which is essential both for developing nations to improve their quality of life and for our debt-based economies to function. According to the US Energy Administration Information’s (EIA) International Energy Outlook 2009, “total world consumption of marketed energy is projected to increase by 44 percent from 2006 to 2030.” (From 472 quadrillion Btu in 2006 to 678 quadrillion Btu in 2030.)

Looking at this by fuel, in order of importance:

Peak oil

The beginning of 2010 has seen a slew of reports pointing to the immediacy of peak oil. It saw the British government meeting to discuss the predicted energy crunch that’s five years away, and the US Joint Forces command report suggesting that the military needs contingency plans as surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years, with serious shortages by 2015. Meanwhile, the “massive reserves” of unconventional oil are not living up to their hype. Reports are indicating that the Canadian oil sands are falling well behind projected outputs, and deepwater drilling is emerging as the risky, expensive venture we’ve always suspected, following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The fact that we are so desperate to find reserves itself speaks volumes about the reality of peak oil (Al Gore likened the oil sands to the last vein the junkie finds in his big toe).

Even a rogue slide from a 2009 US Energy Information Administration PowerPoint presentation has recently become an internet sensation. The diagram, World’s Liquid Fuels Supply, projects oil output peaking in 2012 and immediately declining sharply – falling away from a line showing rising demand. The distance between the two is marked ‘unidentified projects.’

According to the projection, by 2016 there will be a gap between supply and demand of 10 million barrels per day. And the EIA has absolutely no idea how that shortfall will be met.

Peak coal

A 2008 New Scientist article, The Great Coal Hole, written by David Strahan tackles the commonly held belief that “coal is generally seen as our safety net in a world of dwindling oil.” Unfortunately, like oil, coal reserves seem to have been routinely inflated, he finds. However, global coal consumption “rose 35 per cent between 2000 and 2006,” particularly in China and India. He observes: “China is by far the world’s largest producer of coal, but such is its appetite for the fuel that in 2007 it became a net importer.”

Energy Watch, a group of scientists led by the German renewable energy consultancy Ludwig Bölkow Systemtechnik (LBST) produced a 2007 report stating commonly accepted coal reserves are unreliable, notes Strahan:

“As scientists we were surprised to find that so-called proven reserves were anything but proven,” says lead author Werner Zittel. “It is a clear sign that something is seriously wrong.”

Since it is widely accepted that major new discoveries of coal are unlikely, Energy Watch forecast that global coal output will peak as early as 2025 and then fall into terminal decline. That’s a lot earlier than is generally assumed by policy-makers, who look to the much higher forecasts of the International Energy Agency, which are based on official reserves. “The perception that coal is the fossil resource of last resort that you can come back to when you run into problems with all the other is probably an illusion,” says Jörg Schindler of LBST.

We constantly read that the world has enough coal for centuries of “dirty power,” with environmentalists warning that more and more carbon will be released into the atmosphere as the world struggles to come to terms with declining oil supplies. This may not be the case. An item in Walrus magazine, an inconvenient talk, written by Chris Turner states:

A Caltech engineer named David Rutledge, meanwhile, applied the same methods used in peak oil prediction to the coal question, and he discovered a paucity of supply so great that he now argues it will be impossible to create the worst-case scenarios in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports, because there are simply not enough economically viable coal reserves left on earth to cloud the atmosphere with more than 460 parts per million of carbon dioxide.

Research in 2009 from the University of Newcastle in Australia concluded that global coal production “may well peak as soon as 2010.” Overall, it concludes, production will most likely peak “between 2010 and 2048.”

Peak natural gas

In an article titled The Future of the Oil and Gas Industry: Past Approaches, New Challenges, Exxon Mobil director and executive vice president Harry J. Longwell writes that most global natural gas resources were discovered “between roughly 1960 to about 1980,” and that discovery rates have subsequently been declining. He continues:

In the recent past, we have seen increasing demand for oil and gas, but generally decreasing discovery volumes. . .

It’s getting harder and harder to find new oil and gas. Industry has made significant new discoveries in the last few years. But they are increasingly being made at greater depths on land, in deeper water at sea, and at more substantial distances from consuming markets.

According to an interview in Walrus magazine, Canadian hydrocarbon geologist David Hughes predicts a global peak of natural gas reserves by 2027. Hughes, an expert in calculating how natural gas might someday be mined from coal bed methane deposits, includes “unconventional” gas reserves in his calculations:

Gas is looking unlikely to be the “bridge fuel” that saves us from declining oil.

Peak uranium

Like the hydrocarbons mentioned above, uranium is a finite resource. A 2006 report by the Energy Watch Group, Uranium Resources and Nuclear Energy, suggested that proved uranium reserves will be “exhausted within the next 30 years at current annual demand.” It states:

Eleven countries have already exhausted their uranium reserves. In total, about 2.3 Mt of uranium have already been produced. At present only one country (Canada) is left having uranium deposits containing uranium with an ore grade of more than 1%, most of the remaining reserves in other countries have ore grades below 0.1% and two thirds of reserves have ore grades below 0.06%. This is important as the energy requirement for uranium mining is at best indirect proportional to the ore concentration and with concentrations below 0.01-0.02% the energy needed for uranium processing – over the whole fuel cycle – increases substantially.

The proved reserves (=reasonably assured below 40 $/kgU extraction cost) and stocks will be exhausted within the next 30 years at current annual demand. Likewise, possible resources – which contain all estimated discovered resources with extraction costs of up to 130 $/kg – will be exhausted within 70 years.

It concludes that “In the long term beyond 2030 uranium shortages will limit the expansion of nuclear power plants.”

This is currently being reflected in the market. A March 2010 report in Bloomberg Businessweek, with the straight-talking headline Uranium May Have ‘Hyper’ Price Run, Uranium Energy Corp Says, interviews key personnel at Uranium Energy Corp:

Prices may jump to $100 a pound from about $40 a pound now, Amir Adnani, president and chief executive officer of the U.S. – based company, said today in interview in Hong Kong, without giving a timeframe for the target price. Prices may average about $75 a pound in the next 5 to 10 years, he said.

Nuclear power is clearly not the answer to peak oil.

Conclusions

Many peak oil proponents suggest oil either is about to peak, or has already, and that production will fall below demand sometime before 2020.

In addition, many independent researchers believe the world’s natural gas, coal and uranium are likely to peak during the following decade. This is based on current usage, and does not consider what will happen to demand once we hit peak oil, and the price of oil goes high enough to push the market to find alternatives.

When oil peaks, and the price rises, it may well cause our fragile, debt-ridden economies to collapse. But the worst will be yet to come. When other energy sources subsequently peak, we will be left with no affordable “bridge fuel” to carry us to a sustainable, renewable future. In addition, whereas oil is mainly used in transportation, natural gas and coal together account for the generation of 60 per cent of our electricity, according to EIA figures. If the grid goes down, modern life is over.

(Abridged from the page Global hydrocarbons peak.)

By Matthew Wild

Those who defend economic growth often argue that only rich countries can afford to protect the environment. The bigger the economy, the more money will be available for stopping pollution, investing in new forms of energy, preserving wilderness. Only the wealthy can live sustainably.

Anyone who has watched the emerging horror in the Gulf of Mexico in the past few days has cause to doubt this. The world’s richest country decided not to impose the rules that might have prevented the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, arguing that these would impede the pursuit of greater wealth. Economic growth, and the demand for oil that it propelled, drove companies to drill in difficult and risky places.

But we needn’t rely on this event to dismiss the cornucopias’’ thesis as self-serving nonsense. A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculates deforestation rates between 2000 and 2005 in the countries with the largest areas of forest cover. The nation with the lowest rate was the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The nation with the highest, caused by a combination of logging and fire, was the United States. Loss of forest cover there (6% of its own forests in five years) was almost twice as fast as in Indonesia and 10 times as fast as in the DRC. Why? Because those poorer countries have less money to invest in opening up remote places and felling trees.

The wealthy nations are plundering not only their own resources. The environmental disasters caused by the oil industry in Ecuador and Nigeria are not driven by Ecuadorian or Nigerian demand, but by the thirst for oil in richer nations. Deforestation in Indonesia is driven by the rich world’s demand for palm oil and timber, in Brazil by our hunger for timber and animal feed.

The Guardian’s carbon calculator reveals that the UK has greatly underestimated the climate impacts of our consumption. The reason is that official figures don’t count outsourced emissions: the greenhouse gases produced by other countries manufacturing goods for our markets. Another recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the UK imports a net 253m tonnes of carbon dioxide, embodied in the goods it buys. When this is taken into account, we find that far from cutting emissions since 1990, as the last government claimed, we have increased them. Wealth wrecks the environment.

So the Dark Mountain Project, whose ideas are spreading rapidly through the environment movement, is worth examining. It contends that “capitalism has absorbed the greens”. Instead of seeking to protect the natural world from the impact of humans, the project claims that environmentalists now work on “sustaining human civilization at the comfort level which the world’s rich people – us – feel is their right”.

Today’s greens, it charges, seek to sustain the culture that knackers the planet, demanding only that we replace old, polluting technologies with new ones – wind farms, solar arrays, wave machines – that wreck even more of the world’s wild places. They have lost their feelings for nature, reducing the problem to an engineering challenge. They’ve forgotten that they are supposed to be defending the biosphere: instead they are trying to save industrial civilization.

That task, Paul Kingsnorth – a co-founder of Dark Mountain – believes, is futile: “The civilization we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is too late to stop it.” Nor can we bargain with it, as “the economic system we rely upon cannot be tamed without collapsing, for it relies upon … growth in order to function”. Instead of trying to reduce the impacts of our civilization, we should “start thinking about how we are going to live through its fall, and what we can learn from its collapse … Our task is to negotiate the coming descent as best we can, whilst creating new myths which put humanity in its proper place”.

Though a fair bit of this takes aim at my writing and the ideas I champion, I recognize the truth in it. Something has been lost along the way. Among the charts and tables and technofixes, in the desperate search for green solutions that can work politically and economically, we have tended to forget the love of nature that drew us into all this.

But I cannot make the leap that Dark Mountain demands. The first problem with its vision is that industrial civilization is much more resilient than it proposes. In the opening essay of the movement’s first book, to be published this week, John Michael Greer proposes that conventional oil supplies peaked in 2005, that gas will peak by 2030, and that coal will do so by 2040.

While I’m prepared to believe that oil supplies might decline in the next few years, his coal prediction is hogwash. Energy companies in the UK, as the latest ENDS report shows, are now beginning to deploy a technology that will greatly increase available reserves. Government figures suggest that underground coal gasification – injecting oxygen into coal seams and extracting the hydrogen and methane they release – can boost the UK’s land-based coal reserves 70-fold; and it opens up even more under the seabed. There are vast untapped reserves of other fossil fuels – bitumen, oil shale, methane clathrates – that energy companies will turn to if the price is right.

Like all cultures, industrial civilization will collapse at some point. Resource depletion and climate change are likely causes. But I don’t believe it will happen soon: not in this century, perhaps not even in the next. If it continues to rely on economic growth, if it doesn’t reduce its reliance on primary resources, our civilization will tank the biosphere before it goes down. To sit back and wait for what the Dark Mountain people believe will be civilization’s imminent collapse, without trying to change the way it operates, is to conspire in the destruction of everything greens are supposed to value.

Nor do I accept their undiscriminating attack on industrial technologies. There is a world of difference between the impact of windfarms and the impact of mining tar sands or drilling for oil: the turbines might spoil the view but, as the latest disaster shows, the effects of oil seep into the planet’s every pore. And unless environmentalists also seek to sustain the achievements of industrial civilization – health, education, sanitation, nutrition – the field will be left to those who rightly wish to preserve them, but don’t give a stuff about the impacts.

We can accept these benefits while rejecting perpetual growth. We can embrace engineering while rejecting many of the uses to which it is put. We can defend healthcare while attacking useless consumption. This approach is boring, unromantic, uncertain of success, but a lot less ugly than the alternatives.

For all that, the debate this project has begun is worth having, which is why I’ll be going to the Dark Mountain festival this month. There are no easy answers to the fix we’re in. But there are no easy non-answers either.

By George Monbiot

George Monbiot is the author of the bestselling books The Age of Consent: a manifesto for a new world order and Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. Visit his website at www.monbiot.com

11^th May 2010

© 2010 Guardian News and Media Limited

The nuke-powers and the would-be-nuke-powers searched ways for nabbing would-be-nuke-arms-thieves. As if a naughty rat is disturbing a mighty lion. Was the lion sleeping? Or, was the rat the lion’s friend? Who the villain and who the hero are in this tragicomedy?

States, and as a whole the present world system, now being haunted by the specter of forces it patronized, thus showed inner-weakness, limitations in handling contradictions, the contradictions generated by self-actions, and the contradictions within itself. This contradiction is not with the forces aiming change in the property relationship the states safeguard. The forces aiming change in property relationship do not aim at stealing nuke arms as science teaches them that terror is not a social force, terror does not bring in socioeconomic changes, it not even facilitates or accelerates or heralds the changes, and social forces, not terror, are capable to make changes in property relationship.

The US sponsored nuclear security summit was also part of geopolitics of the metropolis of the present world system.

The conference, offered few specifics other than the US, Canada and Mexico agreed to work together to convert the fuel in Mexico’s research reactor from highly enriched uranium to a lower-enriched fuel that would be much harder to use in the manufacturing of a nuclear weapon. Mexico further agreed to get rid of all its highly enriched uranium (HEU) once the fuel is converted. Ukraine announced that it would ship all its HEU to protected storage either to Russia or the US by 2012. Canada announced plans to ship spent nuclear fuel to the US for safe keeping. Chile recently shipped about 40 pounds of enriched uranium to the US. A White House spokesperson said that the American people would “feel far more secure knowing that that material is under safe lock and key and guarded in this country…” In India, the invading British army, as Marx commented, degraded itself to police after completing the conquest. Now, the superpower has turned the keeper of nuclear safe.

The summit addressed the problem that Obama framed as a “‘cruel irony of history’ — nuclear dangers on the rise, even after the end of the Cold War and decades of fear stoked by a US-Soviet arms race”. “The single biggest threat to US security … would be the possibility of a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon,” Obama said. Nuclear weapons smuggling is a more than 60-years old issue in the Cold War context. Now, the non-state-actors are creating possibility of nuclear blackmailing! So, the conference was an attempt to halt the theft, etc. of nuclear bomb ingredients – “nuclear terrorism”, as Hillary Clinton told ABC television. “We don’t believe the threat from nuclear terrorism comes from states. Our biggest concern is that terrorists will get nuclear material. The threat of nuclear war … has diminished. The threat of nuclear terrorism has increased,” she said.

It seems an evolution of possible-nuclear-mushroom-cloud. Non-state-actors now threaten the all powerful imperialism, their past-patron, in terms of nuclear arms. The relationship, it seems, has evolved: persons armed to bleed a foe – the former Soviet Union – and to counter the forces for progressive change have now turned against former friend. The world has not forgotten the CIA-supplied shoulder held anti-aircraft missiles aiming Soviet helicopter gunships on the Afghan sky and a photograph – dangling dead body of a vanquished regime’s leader swaying with wind for days from a pole in a Kabul crossroad who was hanged but was assured international protection – one of the many epitaphs imperialist civility has erected in countries conquered. Now, those operatives are threatening the sole superpower. Does it echo Mao’s assertion made in 1946 during discussions with the American journalist Ms. Strong, and in 1958: Imperialism is paper-tiger? Mao had a different logic behind the assertion. The non-state-actors with shadowy state backing, it seems, are following the dictum of their class enemy, Mao, and are in duel with their former master. It is not evolution, despite the appearance, but a manifestation of the path – vi et armis, by force of arms – imperialism has embarked on, and it tells: incedis per ignis suppositos cineri doloso, you walk on fires covered with treacherous ash (Horace, Odes).

By Farooque Chowdhury

[Farooque Chowdhury, a freelancer from Dhaka, contributes on socio-economic and geopolitical issues. He edited the book Micro Credit, myth manufactured. The Age of Crisis is his latest book.]

Hugo Chavez Interviewed by Cindy Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan: President Chavez, thank you for allowing the truth to be told about Venezuela, and about you and your revolution. Before the revolution, Venezuela was a nation ruled and used by the oligarchy. How did the revolution begin and how has it remained relatively peaceful?

President Hugo Chavez (HC): Thank you Cindy, for your efforts to find out our truth, we wish you luck in your struggles, which we share, against war, for peace, for justice, for freedom and equality, against imperialism. We accompany you in those struggles, you and the people of the US. The bourgeoisie of Venezuela dominated the country for more than 100 years, with force, with violence, through persecution, assassination, forced disappearances. Unfortunately the history of Venezuela is a history with a lot of violence. Violence of the strong against the weak. In the 20th century in Venezuela, dominated by the oligarchy and the bourgeois state, a reverse miracle happened. Venezuela was the top exporter of oil from the 1920s until the 1970s, and one of the largest producers of oil in the world throughout all of the 20th century. But when the century ended, Venezuela had more than 70% poverty and 40% extreme poverty, misery. That generated a violent explosion — all explosions are violent. An explosion of the poor to liberate themselves. We were just remembering the anniversary of Caracazo a few days ago, on February 27; you were there with us, with our people. Twenty-one years ago the people awoke and arose in a big explosion. And us in the military were used by the bourgeois state to massacre the people — women and children — and that awoke a consciousness and a pain in the military, and led us to join with the people. We later led two rebellions. Our revolution isn’t exactly peaceful. It’s relatively peaceful.

The violence of the revolution appears to have come from the counterrevolution. The Bolivarian Revolution has transferred power and wealth to the people and has been an inspiration and at the same time has been relatively peaceful.

HC: Yes, we got to power in a peaceful way. And we have been able to maintain it, relatively. We’ve never used violence; the counterrevolution has used it against us. So the central strategy of our peaceful, socialist revolution is to transfer power to the people. I’m sure you’ve been able to see some of it with your own eyes in the neighborhoods of Caracas. We are engaging in immense efforts to help the people be sovereign. When we talk about power, what are we talking about, Cindy? The first power that we all have is knowledge, so we’ve made efforts in education, against illiteracy, to promote the development of thought, study, analysis, in a way that has never happened before. Today, all of Venezuela is a giant school. Children and senior citizens, all of us are studying and learning. Then there is political power, the capacity to make decisions — Community Councils, Communes, People’s Power, grassroots movements. We have economic power, transferring economic power to the people, distributing the wealth to the people. That is the principal force that guarantees the Bolivarian Revolution will continue to be peaceful.

Why do you think the Empire makes such a concerted effort to demonize you?

HC: There are several reasons, but I have come to the conclusion that there is one major reason. The Empire is afraid. The Empire is afraid that the people of the US will find out the truth and something could erupt in their own territory — a Bolivarian movement, a Lincoln-esque movement. A movement of citizens, conscious citizens that seek to transform the system. Imperial fear killed Martin Luther King, Jr. The only way to stop him was to kill him. Then, they repressed the citizens of the US. So, why do they demonize us? They know the truth, but they fear the truth. They fear the contagious effect. They fear a revolution in the US. They fear an awakening in the US.

One of the biggest names they call you in the US is dictator. Can you explain why you are not a dictator?

HC: I am against dictatorships. I’m an anti-dictator. From a political point of view, I’ve been elected four times by popular vote. In Venezuela, we have elections all the time. Once, Lula, the President of Brazil, said that in Venezuela there is an excess of democracy! Every year there are elections, referendums, popular consultations, elections for governors, mayors — right now we are starting campaigns for elections in the National Assembly. In 2012, there will be presidential elections. What dictator is elected so many times? What dictator calls for elections all the time? I’m an anti-dictator. I’m a revolutionary. A democratic revolutionary.

You’ve announced your candidacy for the 2012 elections. You’ve come a long way but there’s still a long way to go. What do you think still needs to be accomplished in Venezuela?

HC: To tell you in a mathematical way, with everything we’ve done in education, healthcare, infrastructure, housing, employment, social security, etc., and in the context of everything we want to do, we’ve achieved about 10%. It’s been 200 years of abandonment. The people have been abandoned. And all the wealth of the country was in the hands of the oligarchy. So, we have to work really hard. There is still a lot to do to achieve Bolivar’s dream. Simon Bolivar taught us that the best government is one which gives the people the largest amount of happiness. That is our goal.

A couple of weeks ago in the US, a man flew his airplane into a tax building in Austin, Texas. Did you hear about that? There’s a lot of that frustration in the US, but instead of flying planes into buildings we should find each other and organize. The US is a system for the elite, ruled by the elite, a coporacracy. Can you give us some words of inspiration to help us have the courage to make true revolutionary change?

HC: We were the same, dominated, persecuted, and there was a lot of desperation, just like that man who flew the plane into the building. There was a lot of that, a lot of suicidal tendencies, but that’s not the path, the path is consciousness, an awakening of consciousness. We had our own experiences, a lot of us died as well, and went to prison. That’s why what you are doing is the right thing. The path is not to fly a plane into a building, it’s to create consciousness, and then the rest will come on its own.

I’d like to take this moment to say hello to the people of the US. We in the South have a lot of faith that the people of the North are going to wake up, just like you have awoken. We can do great things in the US, make great changes, and in a peaceful way, I hope. Because the future of the world depends on what happens in the US.

I think that despite everything, the people of the US, in the depth of their hearts, know how to appreciate the difference between truth and lies. They call us anti-US leaders, but we’re not! We’re anti-imperialist. We love the people of the US, we love humanity.

Translation and transcription by Eva Golinger. This interview was first published in the 19 March 2010 issue of Orinoco International; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.

 Cindy Sheehan

We live in an era of psychological warfare and mass hysteria generated by mass communication that already led us to the catastrophic first and second world wars.  And after the US dropped nuclear bombs on civilian cities in Japan, all gloves were off instead of people being horrified enough to forsake war all together.  Over 100 major conflicts in the last 60 years costing tens of millions of lives.  It is even getting worse as wars are started by a few special interest groups, a few rich media owners can push for them, and a few soldiers can execute them via remote control and pilot-less planes that butcher thousands at the push of a button. The maddening era where sanctions on Iraq were introduced to satisfy a special lobby caused the death of over a million Iraqi civilians and then a war and occupation in which a million more have been killed.  Many claim a clash of religions or of ‘civilizations’ to justify these abominations when excess greed can explain it better.  But humans also fail to learn the lessons of history or to reexamine our own dogmatic beliefs that allow greedy people to exploit us and take us into wars in the name of ‘nation’ or ‘religion’ or ‘ideology’.  Here in Palestine, at every turn we are inundated with messages about conflicting religious and/or political beliefs; group think that seems hard to dispel.

When religion enters into it, it becomes extremely volatile.  By religion, I do not mean the original teachings of the prophets, but that which has been hijacked by the greedy for profits.  Mohammed and Jesus had far simpler messages of truth mostly dealing with personal behavior towards God and the needy people in society.   Here in these hills of Palestine Jesus told the truth to the many different groups of people that inhabited this multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.  His message of reform and logic was not directed only to the tribalistic Hebrew Judeans but to all people.  Some rejected the message precisely because they could not claim it for their tribe or advance their social status using the message.  He spoke plainly to both tribalistic Judeans who believed that they are better than the goyim and to the Roman officials who believed they were civilized superior democrats.  He spoke to Idumeans, Jebusites, Hebrews, Ammonites, Samaritans, and others and taught that all are equal before God.  He advocated a truly universal brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity. The same can be said of the original teachings of Mohammed as inspired by his God.   The five Pillars of Islam are rather simple and include profession of faith, prayers, fasting, giving of alms to the needy, and pilgrimage to Mecca if possible. No more and no less. Shi’ Islam recognizes similar things and adds things like leadership of the 12 imams and Adl (justice).  If one is to follow the basics of the monotheistic traditions and not all the literal (mis)interpretations, politicians would never be able to use religion in their endless wars.

Jesus prayed to get strength from his God (the father of us all) on the Mount of Olives in Ur-Salem (Jerusalem), the Jebusite Canaanitic town that remained a small town highly fought over by greedy people who used religion to justify conquest.  He prayed in the Aramaic language, a beautiful language that predated Hebrew and Arabic (and whose alphabet gave rise to both alphabets).  This language is still spoken by a Christian community in Palestine and other parts of Bilad Al-Sham.  He spoke truth to entrenched power of Pharisees and Romans who are in the same kind of allegiance that Israel and the US are today.  He told them that they are deluded, they are hypocrites.  He did not mince words.

Those with different agendas watched as his original message spread among disenfranchised communities even during massive repression and persecution for over 300 years.  Finally, unable to destroy it, and to fill an ideological vacuum, the Roman Empire decided to re-brand itself as the “Holy Christian Roman Empire.”  Powerful Popes were created and the story of Jesus was changed to suit an agenda that is in many aspects the opposite of what he really said (1).  How else can one reconcile the idea of Jesus ‘give to God what is to God and to Rome what is to Rome’ (separation of religion from politics) with the welding of religious and political power in Europe for hundreds of years? The ‘Christian’ cross was thus changed from a symbol of a persecuted people of principles to a symbol for crusaders and colonizers.  In parallel, the Pharisees went on to also change the ancient Hebrew religion.   Rabbinical Judaism was concretized in a Talmud written 300 years after Christ and was in many ways a reaction to the success of Christianity among Jews and non-Jews alike.  The Safad and Babylonian texts of Rabbinical Judaism have negative things to say about Jesus and about ‘goyim’ while emphasizing the notion of Jews as a “people” separate, unique, and chosen.  It was an understandable (over) reaction to maintain the old ways in the face of a changing world.  The history of ideas always pits conservative versus more liberal ideas.  For example, we saw a retrenchment and strengthening of catholic doctrine as the more liberal Protestant traditions developed.

The new religions under the names of ‘Christianity’ and ‘Judaism’ became varied and many.  Large segments of Berbers in North Africa and much of the population of Khazaria converted to the Pharisee traditions of Judaism resulting in large Ashkenazi and Sephardi “Jewish” communities (2). Beautiful cultures unfortunately destroyed in the frenzy of Zionism. Most of the rest of Europe had converted to the form of Christianity preached by Paul (himself a converted Judean) which was later adopted by the Roman Empire.  Other forms spread in Western Asia and North Africa.  But even the Roman church split into Western and Eastern branches as the empire it was wedded to also split (Rome and Byzantium).   The orthodox and the catholic branches had to then contend with the new protestant evolution.  In the 7th century, the daughter religion of Islam spread, shedding many of the rituals and authority vested in Rabbis and Priests but also having to adapt to existing cultures and norms in different countries.  Its success was largely due to the way in which entrenched authoritarian rulers bickered and fought among themselves ignoring the needs of the people.  Millions took up Islam willingly as a liberating religion.  As Europe descended into the abyss in the Middle Ages, the Islamic civilization rose and prospered developing sciences, laws, forms of government, philosophy and much more.  The secret to its success was the liberal traditions and openness that allowed Muslim scholars to collaborate with other scholars and to write books that question just about everything.  Unlike today, reading and writing books was a key feature of our world.  Islam itself was to undergo reformation and transformation becoming different sects and communities (Sunni, Shi’ a, Druze, Sufi, Baha’i, Alawaites etc).

Evolution of these monotheistic religions and their connections to each other should not blind us to their connections to earlier traditions.  The stories of slavery and redemption, floods and revival, death and resurrection and many more are stories found in earlier pagan traditions (3). Today’s Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and other traditions are all connected in similar ways (4).

So here we are today.  Last week, a psychologist who lived in Israeli society for 27 years, Avigail Abarnable described it as follows: ‘I think Israel is like a cult that happened to get its own country. It really is bizarre. It took a long time for me to free myself from the strange belief system I grew up with and the way I used to see the world’ (5). But Zionist Jews are not the only ones living in a make-belief world of group think and thus acting in highly destructive ways (to others and to self). As noted above, this has happened before and we who followed other religious traditions were not immune.  The shameful history stretches from crusaders to ‘manifest destiny’ colonization of the ‘new world’ to Afrikaners creating an apartheid regime as ‘ordained by God’.   But it all starts at the individual level.  How many of us are able to free our minds from self-imposed shackles?  What percentage of the human population drops the beliefs that parents and a childhood education burn into malleable minds. My father’s side of the family followed the traditions of the Eastern Church (Greek Orthodox). With paternalistic and hierarchical structures that are hard to reconcile with the ministry of Jesus.  It was the mixed marriage in our family that thankfully gave me a bit of leeway.  So I actually admire more those who do not have that and are still able to break free.  This includes the Catholic Workers movement and liberation theology advocates who went back to live and work among the poor and disenfranchised people. This includes Jews who are anti- or post-Zionist who connect with fellow human beings to work for equality instead of racism.  This includes the Muslims I see here every day linking hands with other human beings to resist colonial oppression in their villages (Al-Ma’sara, Al-Walaja, Bil’in, Ni’lin etc.).

In the past few days, the deluge of Orwellian news continued.  Settlements continue to be built even as the US, Israel, and the Palestinian elite leaders and the media spinners claim otherwise.  The apartheid wall is being built around Palestinian towns (it was deemed illegal by the International court of Justice and described as part of the illegal settlement activities).  Settlers driven by the mythologies of Zionism regularly harass Palestinians and destroy agricultural lands and property.  Arab rulers who long ago sold Palestine for assurances about their thrones give a green light for more negotiations that are divorced from International law and human rights.  1.5 million people (most of them refugees) get a trickle of food and supplies in their open air prison through tunnels. Israeli leaders openly brag that this inhuman act to an entire people is a collective punishment (6). By International law, this is actually defined as state terrorism and crimes against humanity. And Jerusalem remains under attack (7). Yet the International community only utters feeble voices while continuing to shield and protect the apartheid state. Europeans give funds which they know go to aid the occupation but they hope by designating it as Palestinian humanitarian aid, it would be good public relations.

And what are Palestinians doing?  With very few exceptions, we are not rising to the existential challenge facing us when we know that in the 1920s and 1930s our grandparents did rise to the challenge. The cheap and easy roads are taken today. Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) both in Palestine and abroad are now run by single individuals (usually males) who worked to drive out any serious challenge to their ‘leadership’ (even when those they drove out were the most productive individuals). The situation also extends to political leadership whether in the many factions or in the Palestinian ‘authority’ (both in Gaza and the West Bank). A tradition strengthened by a history of authoritarian rule and cronyism. But of course this discourse is also true of Israeli NGOs and political leaders.  Corruption there is rampant and the amount of money laundered is many folds that among Palestinians. Bribes in the millions were paid just for one housing project in West Jerusalem called ‘Holy Land.’ Israeli NGOs are run by those who scare Jews around the world to keep donating so that these self-appointed “leaders” can continue their life style of ‘leadership’ and self-import (e.g. the racist Nadia Matar of ‘Women in Green’).  Any act of hatred to Jews big or small, fake or real, is used to keep the cash flowing.  The victimization cash machine never stops. Business is business.

Gilad Shalit, who is a soldier in a terrorist colonial army, is described as ‘victim’, ‘kidnapped’ and ‘held illegally’ while 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners whose rights are denied daily remain nameless and faceless in Israeli and Western media.  Millions were raised to support residents of ‘Sderot’ in the name of victimhood.  But this Israeli town was built on the land of Najd, one of hundreds of destroyed Palestinian villages ethnically cleansed to create the ‘Jewish state’. The individuals who shot these home-made projectiles come from a community of refugees ethnically cleansed and looking over the fence at their empty lands.  They were left to rot in refugee camps and then bombed and besieged to starvation.   Would you expect them to toss flowers at the usurpers?

British candidates regurgitate notions of Jewish victimization and need to support Israel to court the elite rich self-appointed British Zionists.  The latter represent less than half of the British Jewish population, itself less than 0.5% of the population; there are 3% Muslims.  Instead of welcoming Elie Wiesel, a racist tribalist, President Obama should receive real ethical Jews (8).  Ben Gurion’s cult credo of “better feared than loved” is reaching a dead end especially since lies can no longer be covered by taking advantage of the suffering during WWII (9). The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is forcing people to rethink and reflect on how their governments were hijacked and their people’s interests were sacrificed at the altar of the new idol of Zionism.  Zionists will continue to try to stoke anti-Jewish feelings (misnamed ‘anti-Semitism’), chauvinism (of and against Jews or gentiles), fear, conflict, and war around the world to serve their self-perceived interests.  Iran, like Iraq before it, is now in the cross hairs. But the world is finally beginning to wake-up.

Here we are 2000 years later still awaiting miracles from outside instead of believing that we can effect change as Jesus taught.  The 1960s civil rights movement had a saying: ‘free your mind and your ass will follow’.  Time will tell how many people (Westerners and Arabs, Christians, Muslims, or Jews) will run like scared lemmings over the cliff and into the abyss before enough people finally stand-up and free their minds. How many can speak truth to power without worrying about offending (new) Pharisees or (new) Roman authorities or worrying about material riches?  As Jesus taught ‘What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?’ (Matthew 16:26). In the Qur’an it is stated: ‘God does not change what is within a people until they change what is within themselves’.  The savior is not coming back on a cloud this year and the answer lies within us not with the sermons of Rabbis, Priests, or Imams.  The choices are clear.

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” Arundhati Roy

By Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD

6^th May 2010

On May 1, New York Times writers Al Baker and William Rashbaum headlined, “Police Find Car Bomb in Times Square,” say:

“A crude car bomb of propane, gasoline and fireworks was discovered in a ‘smoking’ Nissan Pathfinder in the heart of Times Square on Saturday evening, prompting the evacuation of thousands of tourists and theatergoers on a warm and busy night.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed “We were very lucky. We avoided what could have been a very deadly event.”

For much of the evening, Midtown New York, from 43rd – 48th streets, was closed, heightening fear reported for hours on cable news shows, including statements by Bloomberg, Governor David Paterson, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, saying the bomb “appeared (to be) in the process of detonating, but it malfunctioned.”

Good luck or something else? We’ve seen this too often not to be suspicious. This one, like others, has all the earmarks of a false flag, more likely given its coverage and location in Times Square on Saturday night, followed by a May 2 video saying the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility.

Who could imagine they had a branch office in New York, and no one even noticed. At least that’s the impression from media disinformation, hyped to spread fear and prepare the public for what’s to come, perhaps something much worse.

In addition, like previous times, a suspect is already in custody, a Muslim, of course, as part of the anti-Islamic post-9/11 rage, and given how abusively he may be treated (including frightening threats of life in prison or the death penalty), perhaps will confess to anything or make it appear that he did so headlines can blare it.

According to Reuters, a statement on an Islamic web site (http://www.muslm.net/vb/showthread.php?t=387309) said: “The Pakistani Taliban announces its responsibility for the New York attack in revenge for the two leaders’ al-Baghdadi and al-Muhajir and Muslim martyrs.”

Videos are easy to fake, including strategically timed bin Laden ones, exposed by digital experts as fakes, aside from convincing evidence he died in 2001.

See David Ray Griffin’s important book titled, “Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?” In his latest April 30 article, “Did Osama Bin Laden Confess to the 9/11 Attacks, and Did He Die in 2001,” Griffin notes his book’s convincing evidence of his death, that if so, proves all subsequent video and audio tapes attributed to him are fakes.

According to Hactor Factor’s Neal Krawetz, bogus ones are characterized by low quality visual and audio splices and more. His analysis of a September 2007 video showed bin Laden’s beard black when in earlier images it’s gray. It also had him dressed in a white hat, shirt and yellow sweater, precisely the same attire as in October 2004. In addition, the background, lighting, desk and camera angle were the same.

Most obvious were the edits, showing obvious splices, at least six video ones and even more for audio that appeared to be words and phrases spliced together.

Videos like these are easy to make as are special effects clever enough to make anyone look like bin Laden, convincingly enough to fool the public, especially when media reports hype them.

Post-9/11, it’s vital to remind the public by strategically timed “Enemy Number One” bin Laden incidents and the “security threat” he represents. If he didn’t exist, he’d have to be invented so why not perpetuate the myth, omitting that he was a CIA asset and likely remained one until his death.

Noteworthy is that CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported that he was admitted to a Rawalpindi, Pakistan hospital on September 10, 2001, and France’s Le Figaro said:

“Dubai….was the backdrop of a secret meeting between Osama bin Laden and the local CIA agent in July (2001). A partner of the administration of the American Hospital….claims that (bin Laden) stayed (there) between the 4th and 14th of July (and) received visits from many members of his family as well as prominent Saudis and Emiratis. (During the same period), the local CIA agent, known to many in Dubai, was seen taking (the hospital’s) main elevator (to) bin Laden’s room.” Why not if he was a valued asset”.

On May 2, the Israeli news website Debka.com featured an “Exclusive Report” saying:

“On April 30, twenty-four hours before a smoking SUV Nissan containing an improvised bomb was defused (in) Times Square….the Pakistani Taliban’s top bomb-maker, Qari Hussain Mehsud, took ‘full responsibility for the recent attack in the USA’ in an audiotape with images on a You Tube website.”

Saying no proof of overseas involvement was forensically found; “DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources” noted similarities between the New York bomb and earlier 2005 and 2007 ones in London and Glasgow, Scotland respectively. In each case, they used propane and failed to detonate – the Glasgow one, in fact, causing the car used to burn but not cause a major catastrophe.

DEBKA also quoted Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud saying on an April 4 nine minute tape that “The time is very near when our fedayeen will attack the American states in the major cities.” Earlier, Qari Hussein Mehsud “warned NATO governments to denounce the US and apologize for the ‘massacres in Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistani tribal areas – otherwise be prepared for the worst destruction and devastation in their own countries.’ “

A mid-April Debka report had Iran threatening to retaliate against US cities with nuclear weapons if they’re used against Iranian cities or sites.

“For the first time, DEBKAfile’s military sources (IDF and/or Mossad ones stoking fear) report, Tehran indicated the possibility of passing nuclear devices to terrorists capable of striking inside the United States….Although Iran has yet to attain operational nuclear arms, our military sources believe it does possess the makings of primitive nuclear devices or ‘dirty bombs.’ “

With no supportive evidence, these type reports hype fear to prepare the public for what’s to come, so if a planned major terrorist event in a Western city, there’s a ready suspect to blame and popular approval to act.

Noted Previous False Flags

The historic record is full of false flags, some especially noteworthy. Below are a few examples:

•             1898, America falsely accused Spain of blowing up the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba harbor. The Spanish-American war followed;

•             1933, Germany, a week before general elections, the strategically timed Reichstag fire (home of the German parliament) was blamed on communists. It got President Paul von Hindenburg to sign an emergency decree. Civil liberties were suspended. Weimar Republic democracy ended, and Hitler assumed fascist powers after enough Nazis were elected to assure it;

•             on August 31, 1939, Nazis impersonating Polish terrorists attacked the Gleiwitz radio station on the border between the two countries, starting WW II;

•             on December 7, 1941, the Roosevelt administration succeeded in manipulating Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, giving FDR the war he wanted from the early 1930s, but had to convince a pacifist public of the threat; the fleet was also tracked across the Pacific, but Admiral HE Kimmel wasn’t warned or given known intelligence to assure enough mass casualties for congressional and public support;

•             1962, a US Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed false flag attack never happened because President Jack Kennedy rejected it; called Operation Northwoods (a part of Operation Mongoose), the scheme included sinking US ships, shooting down US commercial airliners, blowing up buildings in US cities, attacking America’s Guantanamo base, other incidents, and blaming it on Cuba as a reason for war;

•             The fake August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident initiating full-scale retaliation against North Vietnam after Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing war without declaring it; and the seminal event of our time.

•             September 11, 2001, clear evidence showing it was a false flag, the Afghan and Iraq wars made possible by fear-mongering blame on the Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

On February 16, 2010, a Washington’s blog web site (georgewashington2.blogspot.com) article titled, “Governments ADMIT That They Carry Out False Flag Terror” listed some examples, including:

•             the CIA admitting its 1950s role in toppling Iran’s democratically government in 1953;

•             Israel admitting a 1954 attack in Egypt, including planting bombs in US diplomatic facilities, leaving “evidence” of Arab involvement;

•             Indonesia’s former president, Abdurrahman Wahid, saying the nation’s police or military most likely were involved in the 2002 Bali bombing, killing over 200 people;

•             a former Italian prime minister, judge, and military counterintelligence head, General Gianadelio Maletti, saying America’s CIA instigated and abetted right wing terrorist groups in the 1970s and earlier, including bombing a Milan bank in 1969, to rally popular anti-communist support in Italy and other European countries; and

•             many others, including former Carter administration National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, telling a Senate committee that a false flag terror attack on US soil might occur to blame Iran and justify war.

In his 1997 book, “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives,” he said:

“Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat,” the kind 9/11 created – predicted, planned, orchestrated, and carried out to further new world order dominance globally

Other False Flag Examples

1.            The March 2004 Madrid train bombings occurred three days before Spain’s general elections. With no supportive evidence, they were blamed on Al Qaeda, yet they stoked public fear and were used to warn that other Western cities were threatened, including in America.

Nearly always, Muslims are blamed and arrested, the DEBKAfile citing advance bin Laden tapes threatening to punish Spain for supporting the Bush administration. This time, Basque separatists were also named, again without evidence, and the bin Laden tapes were fakes.

2.            The July 7, 2005 London underground bombings (called 7/7) were a series of attacks on the city’s public transport system during the morning rush hour for maximum disruption and casualties. At precisely the same time, an anti-terror drill occurred, simulating real attacks. It was no coincidence this time or ever, others in America and Britain coming on the same day as a real event, other notable ones covered below.

AP reported that the London Israeli embassy warned Scotland Yard about the 7/7 one in advance, and Israeli Army Radio reported that “Scotland Yard had intelligence warnings of the attacks a short time before they occurred,” but didn’t act or issue warnings. In addition, Israel’s finance minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, was told not to attend an economic conference in the city where he was scheduled to deliver an address.

Other dignitaries were also warned, but not the public. Even without smoking gun proof, the 7/7 attack was a false flag operation to heighten fear and keep Britain and the West embroiled in war.

3.            On the morning of the 9/11 attack, the CIA ran a “pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building.” Held at the Agency’s Chantilly, Virginia Reconnaissance Office, AP reported (on August 22, 2002) that it simulated “a small corporate jet (hitting) one of the four towers….after experiencing a mechanical failure.”

Unmentioned at the time was a later revealed (but unreported) Homeland Security conference announcement a year later to commemorate the 9/11 event. Held under the auspices of the National Law Enforcement and Security Institute, one of its speakers was John Fulton, CIA Chief of the Strategic War Gaming Division of the National Reconnaissance office in charge of the operation. Another coincidence, or was something more sinister afoot?

The previous year in October, the Pentagon simulated a commercial plane striking the Pentagon, coordinated by its Command Emergency Response Team and the Defense Protective Services Police. This and the 9/11 exercises are more than coincidental, given what’s now known and the fallout.

4.            On June 30, 2007, a Jeep Cherokee with propane canisters crashed into Glasgow International Airport’s glass doors, the BBC reporting that it “was in the middle of the doorway burning….The car didn’t actually explode. There were a few pops and bangs which presumably was the petrol.”

The usual suspects were blamed, Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorists, Prime Minister Gordon Brown saying:

“We are dealing, in general terms, with people who are associated with Al Qaeda,” followed by his initiating draconian security measures, hyped by the UK Telegraph saying:

An “unknown Al Qaeda terrorist cell (was) thought to be preparing to launch a series of Baghdad-style car bombings.” Another Telegraph article mentioned Washington’s involvement with UK authorities in hyping the threat, and an ABC News report suggested foreknowledge of the incident based on advance warnings (by unnamed intelligence officials) of Al Qaeda “target(ing) nightclubs and other soft targets….All of this comes just three weeks after what was described as an Al Qaeda graduation ceremony for suicide bombers at a training camp in Pakistan.”

Fear mongering and false flags? Draw your own conclusions; understanding the need to stoke fear to keep public support for the “war on terror,” the loss of civil liberties for “security,” the Afghan and Iraq wars, and whatever else may be planned.

5.            The Christmas 2009 airliner incident involving Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian citizen on an Amsterdam – Detroit bound flight. US officials claimed he was trained in Yemen by Al Qaeda, obtained explosive chemicals (PETN), and tried to detonate them on board.

In a December 29 Russia Today interview, Webster Tarpley called him a “protected (CIA) patsy (for a) provocation designed to facilitate US meddling in (Yemen’s) civil war (pitting) the Saudi-backed central government against the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels,” being bombed by US and Saudi air strikes.

Abdulmutallab was denied a UK entrance visa, wasn’t on a No Fly List, paid cash for a one-way ticket to Detroit, checked no luggage, had a US visa but no passport, and was helped on board by a “well-dressed Indian” to facilitate the likely false flag plot using him as a convenient dupe.

The Wayne Madsen Report called the incident a false flag operation “carried out by (the) intelligence tripartite grouping of CIA, Mossad, and India’s Research Analysis Wing (RAW).” Earlier they conspired with “former Afghan KHAD intelligence agents to assassinate former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto….to destabilize Pakistan” for planned balkanization, the same scheme planned for Afghanistan and already implemented in Iraq.

Madsen explained that Abdulmutallab’s PETN was “weak, technically deficient,” failed to go off properly, and if so would have had the impact of an exploding fire cracker.

Madsen also reported that the same tripartite CIA, Mossad, and RAW alliance was behind the November 2008 Mumbai, India attacks, killing nearly 200 and wounding hundreds more. Webster Tarpley said almost for certain Pakistan’s ISI radical wing was involved, and that Indian and Mossad operatives conduct regular cross-border missions into Pakistan from India and Afghanistan.

6.            Make of it what you will, but in Miami on January 11, 2010 (one day before Haiti’s earthquake), the Pentagon’s US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) simulated a hurricane striking Haiti in preparation for subsequent measures to be implemented, that, in fact, would be a carefully planned military operation for occupation, control, and planned plunder.

Also, Deputy SOUTHCOM head, General PK Keen, was in Haiti when the quake struck, ready to assume command when it did and use a communication tool called the Transnational Information Sharing Cooperation project (TISC), linking other nations and NGOs with the Pentagon and US government to facilitate measures to be implemented, none to help Haitians.

Final Comments

As long as imperial ambitions and rogue agencies like CIA and their foreign counterparts exist, false flag operations will be commonplace, the May 1 New York one the latest example, and maybe a forerunner of what’s to come – another 9/11 some believe, far worse than the first one, perhaps involving a nuclear incident in a US city. Then using it as a pretext for more war and to divert attention from America’s deepening economic crisis, likely to erupt in protests because of Washington’s indifference to millions affected.

Whether or not the direst predictions occur will only be known in the fullness of time. In the meantime, stay tuned for more updates as events unfold, and be prepared for the worst.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

Posted by Steve Lendman @ 3:03 AM

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Soldier Committed Violence against Palestinian Detainees

Soldier Committed Violence and Abuse against Palestinian Detainees – by Stephen Lendman

The Public Committee against Torture in Israel (PACTI – stoptorture.org) calls “torture and ill treatment of any kind….incompatible with” moral democratic values. It “advocates for all persons” in Israel and Occupied Palestine to protect them from abusive treatment of all kinds.

In June 2008, its report titled, “No Defense: Soldier Violence against Palestinian Detainees” is just as relevant today, perhaps more so given Israel’s intensified violence and abuse in Gaza and the West Bank in the past year.

PACTI interviewed detainees and participating soldiers, included media reports, IDF provided information, and comments of political figures regarding these practices.

Observed was a phenomenon dating back decades, and, of course, remains ongoing today. Hence, the report’s relevance and need to discuss it. Especially since September 2000 (the beginning of the second Intifada), “the number of arrests has been unprecedented. Thousands of Palestinians are arrested each year….and are executed by a large number of combat units in the Israeli military.”

Violent arrests followed by torture and ill treatment are commonplace. For decades, Israeli soldiers have abused Palestinian detainees “on a routine basis.” Recognizing and exposing it is key to stopping it.

Ill Treatment in Arrests

Force is routinely used even for those posing no threat. It begins during and after arrests, in transit, and at military bases and installations, prior to being transferred to a detention facility.

Detainees are beaten, blindfolded, and painfully shackled for hours, a practice often causing permanent injury. In response to PACTI requests, an IDF spokesperson cited no regulations, guidelines, procedures, or orders relating to the process. Order 9810, not applicable to all arrest stages, merely says:

“Only metal shackles are to be used (and) tightening (them) should be undertaken in such a manner as to prevent injury to the detainee (particularly to blood vessels).”

As a result, abuses occur routinely, including violence and threats. Typical are severe beatings while shackled and blindfolded, enough to cause serious injuries. They begin at arrest and continue during transport with detainees forced to sit, lie, or be thrown on vehicle floors.

Soldiers commonly put their feet on detainee bodies and/or heads, creating enough friction to cause abrasions and injuries. Commanders are there to observe it.

Before imprisonment, detainees are often held in makeshift detention facilities on military bases where abuse continues. One prisoner said he was taken to a concrete yard, handcuffed to a concrete pole, made to sit on the ground, and be beaten on the face every 30 or 60 minutes.

Abuse, ill treatment, and humiliation continue through each stage of the process. For Nidal Shataya, it was especially egregious as he explained:

“….After the soldiers searched the house and the entire building, they arrested me and my brothers….They put us into a military jeep using force and violence and shoves. They shouted at us and cursed us….They put us on the floor of the jeep, handcuffed and blindfolded. (They) were taking us to Hawara base to the south of Nablus, where we were interrogated by Intelligence officers….The soldiers beat us while we were waiting in the outer yard. Every soldier that walked past would beat and curse us. We were not allowed to lean or to sleep.

At the Hawara military checkpoint….they put us on the floor in a small, dirty room next to the checkpoint. The soldiers handcuffed us very tightly and blindfolded us. My hands and eyes hurt a lot and we could not…stand this situation any longer….

Then the soldiers came and started to beat us with their army boots and their weapons. The beatings were repeated three times,” at first for about 15 minutes, the second the same time, and the third for over 10 minutes, “continuously and without any interruption….Then the Israeli soldiers dragged and pulled us along the road to the other side of the checkpoint….and threw us on the road there. There were taxi drivers there who called for an ambulance and they took us to the hospital, almost unconscious….”

Use of Dogs

After September 2000, their use increased – at checkpoints, on military bases, and accompanying soldiers, especially during arrests. According to one soldier:

“Today, the dogs in the unit are trained for one of five capabilities: Assault, identification of explosives, scouting, weapons and ammunitions searches, or rescue and release.”

PACTI attorney Yaara Kalmanovich wrote Israel’s Judge Advocate General saying:

“The….graver aspect is the phenomenon of deliberate ill treatment with the means of dogs. These cases….are shocking and they must be quickly and effectively eliminated. (In addition), the mere contact with the dogs may be terrifying and humiliating. According to Islam, the dog is an impure animal, and accordingly many Muslims feel humiliated and dishonored whenever a dog is close to their person or touches them….The soldiers should be required to keep the dogs in such a manner that they will not come into contact with the detainees whenever there is no tangible operational need for this.”

In response, the military denied the allegation, stonewalled, and lied, claiming the opposite of what, in fact, happens. Soldier testimonies confirm it, saying dogs are trained and used specifically for assault and do it – not for a potential threat, but on the assumption that Palestinian detainees are offenders, whether or not true. As a result, highly aggressive dogs cause serious injuries. Unless muzzled, they present a clear and present danger, even to their handlers, and detainees report being terrified and bitten.

Mistreating Children

Soldiers treat them like adults, the Israeli penal code allowing it in defiance of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, other international laws, and Israeli law (nominally) affording minors special protection. It prohibits injuring or psychologically harming them, and obligates anyone witnessing mistreatment to report it.

International law protects all civilians from violence and threats thereof, and requires occupiers to treat them humanely, especially children.

According to Protocol I to Fourth Geneva: “Children shall be the object of special respect and shall be protected against any form of indecent assault. The Parties to the conflict shall provide them with the care and aid they require, whether because of their age or for any other reason.”

However, soldiers exploit children’s weaknesses and regularly abuse them, at times seriously enough to require hospitalization. Like adults, they’re handcuffed, blindfolded and beaten, including with rifle butts and boots.

“Accordingly, the ill treatment of minor Palestinian detainees constitutes the most extreme manifestation of a broader phenomenon whereby the various state authorities that implement the occupation routinely treat minor detainees as adults, ignoring the legal and human obligations to ensure special safeguarding and protection for those who have not yet reached the age of eighteen.”

Military procedures make no distinction between adults and children, some as young as 12 or younger. Grave consequences thus happen regularly as part of Israel’s systematic pattern of ill treatment and abuse.

Systematic Detainee Abuse and Mistreatment

A 2007 joint B’Tselem-Hamoked Center for the Defence of the Individual report titled, “Absolute Prohibition: The Torture and Ill-Treatment of Palestinian Detainees” confirmed PACTI’s findings through victim testimonies. It said Israel disregards international law and its own throughout the arrest, transport, interrogation, and imprisonment process. Abuses range from “softening up” to torture. Common ones include:

— “Isolation from the outside world – prohibition on meetings between detainees and their attorneys or ICRC representatives;”

— Psychological pressure, including in “putrid, stifling” solitary confinement;

— sleep deprivation and inadequate and poor food;

— Painfully binding hands and feet to a chair in the “shabah” position;

— Other forms of torture, including severe beatings;

— Threats and intimidation, including against family members;

— Use of informants to extract information, whether or not true; and

— Routine “cover up and whitewashing” of grievous crimes; rarely are abusive practices investigated; most are dismissed, and almost never are abusers punished.

Further, Israel’s arrest-interrogation-imprisonment process “is significantly aided by the HCJ (High Court of Justice), which serves as a rubber stamp on orders which regulate isolation” and subsequent abuse, half or more of the time causing one or more injuries, at times serious.

According to (retired) Col. Gadi Amir, part of the process is “the dehumanization of the enemy, (that he, or she, is regarded as) an object” to be treated any way we wish. As a result, “we have become jaded and phenomena that we once considered horrifying we now seem to have become accustomed to….”

Yet the IDF won’t acknowledge it, and by so doing “encourages and reinforces” abuse and degrading treatment, despite clear international and Israeli law prohibitions, binding at all times, under all circumstances, with no allowed exceptions.

Ill Treatment after Arrest under Israeli Law

Under Israeli military law, “ill treatment” is an offense, prohibiting beating and other forms of abuse with offenders liable to three years imprisonment if charged and convicted. Under “aggravating circumstances,” it’s seven years.

Soldiers are legally responsible for detainees in their custody, and according to Israel’s Military Court of Appeals:

“The discrepancy of powers and status between the person wielding control and authority and the person lacking the ability to resist leaves the victim defenseless against the abuse of the power held by the person in authority.”

Yet the court has yet to address the minimum threshold beyond which ill treatment occurs as distinguished from the lesser offense of assault. In fact, however, abusive ill treatment happens whenever soldiers use violence or humiliating tactics against defenseless shackled, blindfolded detainees.

In all cases PACTI examined, ill treatment, assault or “assault in aggravating circumstances” occurred, in violation of articles 378 – 382 in Israel’s penal code. Other offenses are also common, including injury, battery, forcible extortion, and ill treatment of a minor. Some violate military law, others civil or both.

“In any case, however, violence by soldiers against shackled detainees is a criminal phenomenon penalized under an entire system of offenses in Israeli criminal law.”

Crime and Punishment

Despite Israeli law, military judges rarely act or go easy on offending soldiers, and compared to civil courts they’re lax, regardless of how serious the offense. Yet the Military Court of Appeals ruled that commanders are responsible for preventing detainee ill treatment, especially if he ordered the abuse.

Yet, like US military law, a soldier who disobeys an illegal order isn’t culpable. In fact, under paragraph 498 of the US Army Field Manual (FM) 27-10, any person, military or civilian, who commits a crime (even if ordered by a superior) under US or international law, is responsible for it and may be punished. It’s the same under Israeli law, but enforced under neither, except in America to charge low level recruits to absolve their commanders.

In Israel, there is “no disagreement as to the clear illegality of an order to harm persons not involved in combat, or removed, and the obligation not to obey such an order.” The standard for commanders is even higher, given their position of authority and reluctance of subordinates to disobey fearing punishment.

Failure to Enforce – Military Investigatory Bodies

Israel’s Military Justice Code establishes three interrogation authorities – an examining officer, the Military Police Investigation Unit (MIU), and an investigative judge.

They’re explicitly separate from debriefings by those involved in investigating incidents, including by commanders. Material from them is to go only to the military advocate general (MAG) or his representative. The latter then decides whether a debriefing offense was committed and if an investigation is warranted. If so, a summary of findings “shall not be transferred to a person undertaking a criminal investigation in accordance with the law.” Nor “shall it indicate suspicion against any person involved in the incident.”

An examining officer or investigative judge is charged with handling the case, the latter only if deaths are involved. The former may be a senior adjudicating military officer, another one appointed by him, or a MAG-designated military police person.

The examining officer may then hear witnesses, review evidence, and arrest suspects. He only decides whether to recommend prosecution, not order it himself. The MAG decides whether or not to proceed further. In practice, however, MIU army officers handle most ill treatment examinations, not trained lawyers familiar with the law.

The process of soldiers judging others in the ranks taints the whole process, especially the way Israel goes about it, taking care of its own. A clear conflict of interest delivers injustice.

Troublesome Forms of Investigation

They rarely happen, and when they do is effectively whitewashed, given that examining officers rely on operational debriefings supplied by the offending forces or their commanders. As a result, they’re tainted and wholly unreliable. It shows up in how few are charged, let alone convicted of serious offenses, including torture and killings.

According to Law Professor Mordechai Kremnitzer:

“….There are two problems with the operational debriefing. Firstly, the person who undertakes it is not a professional investigator, with all due respect to the military commander. (In addition), when people have acted unlawfully, they have a natural motivation not to admit this, to deny it, to tell incorrect stories, and to back up each other’s incorrect stories.”

As a result, cases are closed for “lack of evidence,” suppressed, and to absolve offenders, and it happens regularly.

Prosecutions, Convictions, and Punishment – Soldiers and Commanders

Based on IDF Spokesperson supplied figures, investigations of ill treatment rarely happen and almost never lead to prosecutions or convictions. Out of hundreds of them launched, a mere handful of indictments followed, amounting to about two per year since September 2000. Of those, acquittals were common, and hand slaps (like 10 days imprisonment) followed convictions most often.

Also, practically never are commanders charged or prosecuted even when they issued direct orders. In rare instances, they face disciplinary hearings, in others, demotion. No senior commanders have been prosecuted for the offenses of their subordinates. In these cases, command responsibility “is an extremely restricted concept,” an alien one.

B’Tselem explained that many complaints are closed “due to various defects during the processing of the case. (For example), months pass between the submission of the complaint and the transfer of the case to the MIU for investigation….The conclusion from all this is that the system does not attach the necessary importance to investigating cases of violence by security force personnel against Palestinian residents and ensuring that justice is meted out to those responsible. This conveys a lenient message to those in the field that such actions are not regarded as severe.”

Even after beginning, investigations can drag out for months, so long, in fact, that those involved often complete their military service and leave.

Further, as long as the IDF investigates and prosecutes its own, justice is virtually impossible, unlike in civil courts. A possible solution is ending military involvement, so far not considered. Yet Human Rights Watch suggested that:

“A consensus is emerging in international law that military personnel should not be tried in military courts in cases when the victims are civilians, and that military jurisdiction systems should relate solely to offenses of a clearly military nature.”

In December 2007, Yediot Ahronoth, Israel’s most widely circulated newspaper published a survey showing widespread soldier abuse during inspections at checkpoints alone. According to one soldier interviewed:

“When you deny thousands of people a day freedom of movement, it is impossible to do it in a nice way.”

Yet the security establishment denies it and claims abuses there are exceptions, localized, and unusual, and military courts often quote a ruling declaring that “the basic rules of human morality and human dignity guide the Israel Defense Force,” despite clear evidence of the opposite – “inconsistent with the testimonies and reports from the field, which leave no doubt that the phenomenon (is) widespread.”

Steps for change include ending denial, exposing falsified evidence, obeying the law, and holding abusers accountable. Yet “the military does not make proper preparations for arrest operations; refrains from imposing responsibility on commanders for the ill treatment of detainees; and is extremely disinclined to launch investigations (to) indict soldiers suspected of abusing Palestinian detainees.”

Civilian authorities are part of the cover-up and denial, the Defense Ministry ignoring abuse and holding no one accountable. Crimes against Palestinians “are not considered worthy of….attention.” The topic is unaddressed in the Knesset.

“Reviews of Knesset Protocols (from) January 2006 through April 2008 reveal(ed) that no discussions took place in the plenum of the Knesset regarding the ill treatment by soldiers of Palestinians in general, or Palestinians in particular.”

In addition, no legislative action occurred, and the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, in charge of supervising the defense system, “failed abysmally to protect the public interest when it comes to ensuring the rule of law in the actions of the executive branch in the Territories.” They deliberately ignored the issue, even during the height of the Intifada.

PACTI concluded saying:

“We hope that this report will encourage the Knesset Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee to address the phenomenon of ill treatment of Palestinian detainees by soldiers as part of the responsibility the committee has accepted for scrutinizing, inspecting, and encouraging change on behalf of the public in matters relating to human rights violations in the Occupied Territories.”

A Final Comment

To date, the Knesset hasn’t acted, and, in fact, performed worse, the Mossawa Advocacy Center and Coalition Against Racism calling the current body the most racist in Israeli history in a 2010 report – Mossawa saying “almost every day” another Israeli Arab is victimized by racist acts, 100s in various categories confirmed by media and police reports.

In the Territories, Gaza remains under siege, and West Bank and East Jerusalem Palestinians endure daily neighborhood incursions, loss of homes, frequent arrests, killings, various other assaults, and violations of their dignity, civil and human rights on streets, at work, in their homes, and in detention.

On April 27, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) reported the killing of Ali Isma’el Ali Swaiti in Beit ‘Awwa, his home demolished on top of him. PCHR condemned the crime, calling it an extrajudicial execution in charging politicians and commanders with war crimes.

On April 28, PCHR condemned Fatah’s General Intelligence Service (working collaboratively with Israel) for harassing and arresting Palestinian writers Muhannad Salahat and Walid al-Hodali to prevent their free expression right to document West Bank crimes against innocent civilians.

Outlandish abuses happen daily, endorsed by IDF commanders, MKs, and the fascist Netanyahu government, as extremist and morally decadent as any in Israeli history. As a result, Palestinians suffer grievously, including in detention where torture remains official Israeli policy.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

By Stephen Lendman

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

05 May, 2010

Countercurrents.org

 In responding to the tiny number of grievances about the ubiquitous coverage of the 2008 US presidential election, we were assured of its importance with analogies of “If America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold”. On reflection, the analogy is actually quite good, for not only does it suggest the global influence of the United States, but also associates it with disease.

 So what then of the United States’ partner in crime, or ‘ally’, as the corporate media prefer to call it? No, not Israel – although you can award yourself marks for that particular answer, but rather, the United Kingdom.

In this case it seems, we are not ‘fortunate’ enough to be treated with saturation coverage of the recent British general election. There are no talking heads analysing the dresses that the wives of Brown, Clegg and Cameron were wearing, nor even what kind of dresses Brown, Clegg and Cameron themselves wore! A thoroughly bland election one feels.

 Supposed spice for the election came in the form of “leaders’ debates” – the first time ever to be held in Britain. I couldn’t stomach to watch them, besides, I had managed to hunt out some wet paint in need of watching. After a short period of time however, I abandoned the paint when analysis of the ‘debate’ began to appear on the internet.

 Apparently Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats, the UK’s ‘third’ party, had done rather well and therefore, with full immaturity as to the actual significance and meaning of the debate, Nick Clegg was suddenly going to be our next Prime Minister while Cameron’s Murdock backed cavalry did what it could to produce thunder stealing polls to the benefit of Mr Cameron – naughtiness uncovered by Britain’s ex-ambassador to Uzbekistan, Mr Craig Murray (http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/).

 As the three ‘debates’ unfurled, the focus given to Britain’s current wars, one of them clearly illegal, caused much discontent amongst a number of distinguished analysts and journalists, for example, UK based journalism and political analysis website, ‘Media Lens’, wrote: “By the end of the second debate on April 22, the word ‘Iraq’ had been mentioned a total of five times over the course of the three hours of discussion.”

 They continued: “One day later, April 23, a wave of bombings in Baghdad were reported to have killed 58 people and wounded more than 100. Seven people also died that day in a series of bombings in the western town of Khalidya… By the end of the following day, the death toll had risen to 85 with hundreds seriously wounded from a total of 16 bomb attacks.”

 It is right to be angry that these wars, and the necessity to stop them, were essentially ignored by Brown, Clegg and Cameron each aided and abetted by the corporate media’s now consistent soft-balling on these matters. However, the apparent near triviality of the 8.5 and 7 year old killing fields in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively, as applied to a leader’s debate, was actually fully understandable, because all the politicians have the same war-sustaining policy! So what’s to debate?

 Such a situation is truly shocking; that in the UK there is no major political force one can support in order to bring and end to these hellish wars. It is interesting to note that perhaps the most well known (however small) anti-war party, lead by Mr. George Galloway, lost its parliamentary voice.

 This is made all the more distasteful given that in the recent election, the old canards of “democracy is in action” or “the voice of the people is being heard” were being articulated without so much as a hint of irony, and now that we have a hung-parliament (a tantalizing prospect), we hear even more allegations of ‘democracy’ in which logic warps and each party claims it’s plan for forming the next government is more democratic than the others. 

It is also very sad to see, but has already become established tradition, that faith-based core values got even less prominence than the war, or perhaps, maybe there is a connection?

 I personally did NOT vote, was utterly proud in doing so and I appealed for others to do likewise. I refuse to endorse or legitimize a system that will cause mass death. With regard to those who did vote for the main parties, I wonder what they will feel (if anything) once a government finally does form, and news starts to come in of the next massacred family or wedding party, or farmers, teachers, charity workers or peasants What justification will they conjure up to prevent the image of screaming children exploding before their minds eye?

 I think here we have a powerful demonstration that the mirror is in fact, well and truly broken. Broken mirrors are never fixed, they totally discarded and news ones brought in to take their place. Will this happen vis-à-vis the British political system? I very much doubt it.

 10^th May 2010