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By Dr. Ludwig Watzal

22 December, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

More than twelve years have passed since 9/11 happened. Although the 9/11 Commission produced a voluminous “9/11 Commission Report”, it did not provide answers to central questions concerning the circumstances of this horrendous crime. Critical observers have noted numerous glaring omissions, contradictions, anomalies and misrepresentations in this report. Even the Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the 9/11 Commission admitted in a joint book they later published, that their report was deficient in many ways and that the Commission had been lied to by government agencies. One of the reactions to this deficient report was the emergence of a “truth movement”, which consists of experts from different scientific fields, who question the official narrative and demand a truly independent investigation of the crime.

Elias Davidsson is one of these “truthers” who challenges the official narrative on 9/11. He is also concerned about the claim made by some “truthers” that Israel was behind the attacks. He is not, by any means, a sympathizer of Israel . On the contrary, as his writings demonstrate, he not only denounces the oppressive policies of the State of Israel against the Palestinians, but considers that state as inherently dangerous for its neighbors. The fact should be mentioned that he is Jewish and has family in Israel .

Davidsson’s concern appears justified. The catchwords “9/11 and Israel ” produce over 66 million hits on Google. Immediately after the attacks some traces to an “Israeli connection” were publicized in U.S. media, including by media notoriously supportive of Israel , such as Fox News.

About this and other topics regarding 9/11, I talked to Mr. Davidsson after he presented in Bonn , Germany , in November 2013, his book “Hijacking America’s mind on 9/11”, released in May in New York .

Ludwig Watzal: A few months ago you published the book „Hijacking America’s mind on 9/11”. What made you write this book twelve years later, when all questions concerning the 9/11 attacks seem to have been answered?

Elias Davidsson: In 2002, it was pointed out to me, that the official account on 9/11 is dubious. Until then, I believed what mass media told us, namely that the mass murder had been orchestrated by Al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden and executed by 19 fanatic Muslims. At first, I doubted that the contrary evidence – published by Thierry Meyssan – was credible. Yet, my sense of curiosity led me nevertheless to check the facts. I discovered that grounds for suspicion were justified. This led me to extend my research of 9/11. I was not alone in this endeavor. One of the main focuses of such research was the puzzling demise of the Twin Towers . A consensus is gradually emerging among engineers and architects that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and building WTC No 7 had been demolished by explosives and/or more exotic means. This conclusion implies official malfeasance and complicity in mass murder. Yet the question remained nagging me, what to make of the other part of the official account, namely the alleged participation of 19 Islamic fanatics in hijacking four airliners, steering them to death and succeeding to avoid interception by the US air force. I decided, therefore, to search for evidence supporting these claims. I discovered that such evidence does not exist. Not a shred of it. This may sound unbelievable, yet despite the most exacting searches, I could not find any such evidence. I also discovered that there exists no evidence that passenger airliners crashed on 9/11: The FBI actually admitted to have failed to link the wreckage of the crashed aircraft to the airliners that were allegedly hijacked. Having made these discoveries, I found it necessary to deal with an additional puzzle, namely what to make of the telephone calls that were allegedly made from the hijacked planes and in which passengers and crew members reported hijackings. I spent a great deal of time to track and analyze all known phone calls. These analyses represent until now, to my knowledge, the most thorough examination of the 9/11 phone calls. I concluded that the callers did not report real events. They did not lie, yet did not say the truth. I won’t reveal here the solution of this paradox and its sinister sequels. Readers are invited to track my analysis and draw their own conclusions from the wealth of details provided in the book. As I finished the book, any doubt that might have lingered in my mind regarding the identity of the 9/11 plotters, dissipated: I became convinced that 9/11 was an inside job by the US military.

LW: There are still many people who believe that the alleged hijackers were able to steer an airliner onto the Pentagon.

ED: To these individuals I only say: The first step in investigating a plane crash is to determine its identity and the identities of its passengers. The next step would be to determine who among the passengers might have had a motive and the capabilities to cause the crash. In the case of 9/11, neither the identities of the debris were determined nor was the presence of the 19 suspects in the planes ever proven. For this reason, it is moot to examine their alleged flight skills. One does not examine the flight skills of ghosts. Those who nevertheless attempted to examine the flight skills of the alleged hijackers discovered that precisely the pilot of flight AA77, which allegedly crashed on the Pentagon, was a completely incompetent pilot who could not, according to his teachers, properly maintain a one-motored Cessna in the air. While even an amateur pilot might have been able to steer an aircraft onto the huge roof of the Pentagon, professional pilots doubt that any pilot could have steered a Boeing 757 horizontally at 500 mph with an altitude of 15 feet above the ground (the aircraft is said to have crashed horizontally on the side of the Pentagon between the first and second floor).

LW: Shortly after the attacks the story of Osama bin Laden and his men were aired worldwide and nobody dared to question it. Do you think that bin Laden from a cave in Afghanistan could have masterminded such an attack with dilettantes armed with box cutters?

ED: Before asking whether bin Laden could have masterminded anything, it is worthwhile to note that the U.S. government had never accused him of complicity in 9/11, as admitted by the FBI in 2006. The U.S. government did not even take seriously the conclusion of the German Upper Court of Hamburg (Oberlandesgericht), that Osama bin Laden had selected Mohamed Atta and his friends to conduct 9/11. This conclusion was not shared by the US . This leaves us with the question what role Osama bin Laden played during the years in which he was depicted as a master terrorist: Was he a willing or unwitting US agent, as some maintain, or a genuine, but pathetic, fighter against Americans and Jews, as others maintain? This question has, however, no direct bearing on 9/11. A true history of Osama bin Laden has still to be written.

LW: In a speech before the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco on October 3, 2007, General Wesley Clark mentions an accidental meeting with Paul Wolfowitz in 1991 at the Pentagon in which Wolfowitz said that the US could use its military in the Middle East without being stopped by the Russians: “We have got about 5 to 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes – Syria, Iran, Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.” And Clark continued: “This country was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup. Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld, you can name a half of dozen collaborators from the ‘Project of a New American Century’. They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East , turn it upside down, and make it under our control.” Taking this statement into account and link it to the call of this “Project” for a “new Pearl Harbor ”, what comes up to your mind regarding 9/11?

ED: It is fairly logical that after the demise of the Soviet bloc, the US had an immense window of opportunity to secure its global hegemony for decades to come. But doing so required immense resources and thus the approval of the US population. Such approval could only be secured if a traumatic event would arise, which could be ascribed to a deadly enemy. The mass-murder of 9/11 filled the bill. Such reasoning is no proof that 9/11 was an inside job. It is, however, a proof that the U.S. administration, acting on behalf of Corporate America and the military-industrial complex, possessed a huge motive to see a “new Pearl Harbor” occur. Wolfowitz was correct in assessing the window of opportunity as five to ten years. There exists evidence that the United States began “manufacturing” its new epochal enemy (Islamic terrorism), replacing the Red Menace, precisely around 1990.

LW: The circumstances surrounding 9/11 seem to be the West’s newest and greatest taboo. To question the official narrative endangers a person’s career. Even the academic community seems afraid to ask the relevant questions. You have been in direct contact with representatives of academia over 9/11. What is your experience?

ED: The overwhelming majority of academics do not wish even to discuss 9/11, let alone examine the nuts and bolts of these events. Part of this fear is that of being ostracized by peers or even endangering one’s career. Another part of the fear is that discovering the truth about 9/11 would inevitably shatter the questioner’s comfortable world view. I suspect that many academics regard 9/11 as a Pandora’s Box, best kept locked. If 9/11 was indeed an “inside job”, that would mean that political parties, media, the business community and the judiciary have been lying to us through their teeth for more than a decade and based their various policies, including wars and massive surveillance, on a monumental lie. Not many people are willing to live with such conclusions about their cherished institutions, even if such conclusions are, in my view, justified. We have here, I argue, an unprecedented case of mass denial, a pathological phenomenon that undermines the fundaments of the Age of Reason.

LW: In an recently published article by Eric Walberg on the website “dissident voice” , the author hinted at a connection between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the CIA concerning the 9/11 attacks. Does such collaboration makes more sense to you than the “official” story?

ED: It is possible that various states, including Saudi Arabia , Pakistan , Israel , Germany , have provided the United States some assistance in preparing 9/11. However – and this is an important caveat – I do not believe that the governments of these states or even their intelligence services, knew about the plans of 9/11. The U.S. planners would have been foolish to share the plans of 9/11 with other states. Thus, it is likely that the Saudi authorities helped recruit some individuals to be used as patsies in the United States and later designated as hijackers. But it is unlikely that the Saudis were advised about the ultimate role of these patsies.

LW: Shortly after the attacks there were media reports on a possible “Israeli connection”. These reports centered on Larry Silverstein, Dov Zakheim, the five “dancing Israelis” and the “Israeli art students”. Please could you unravel this tangle of guesswork for the public and give us your judgment?

ED: Larry Silverstein was and is a known real-estate mogul in New York . He is Jewish and a known friend of Israeli politicians, such as Ariel Sharon and Benyamin Netanyahu. He was for many years the owner of WTC No. 7, a 47-floor building that housed, inter alia, New York City ‘s Emergency Center , offices of the CIA, SEC, the Secret Service and other government bodies. In 2001, the City of New York decided to lease out the Twin Towers to private investors. One of the bidders was Larry Silverstein.

Larry Silverstein is suspected in some circles for the above reasons to be an accomplice to the mass murder of 9/11, in which several of his own employees died. Yet, he did not make any effort to cover his alleged tracks. He leased the WTC just six weeks before 9/11, announced this lease to the world, insured it against terrorism for a whopping $3.2 billion and “admitted” in a documentary film to have given on 9/11 the authorization to “pull” WTC 7 (that is to demolish the building). He then sued insurance companies for double damages, because each tower was hit by a separate aircraft, thus displaying what would be widely regarded as greed. He even admitted to have escaped death by canceling a meeting at the WTC on 9/11. And he has never attempted to conceal his friendship with controversial Israeli politicians, such as Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu.

We have here all the requisite elements: A greedy Jew, proximity to the crime, motive. It is precisely the high visibility of Larry Silverstein as an ideal villain that makes me hesitate to implicate him in the crime. His alleged complicity is simply too obvious. It is difficult to believe that a person implicated in planning arson would take out a lease of the building six weeks before the crime and announce his agreement publicly. It is even more difficult to believe that a smart businessman, such as Silverstein, would risk the electrical chair in a criminal enterprise whose outcome he could not foresee. It is far more probable that Silverstein was framed into leasing the World Trade Center by the real plotters, precisely because he is greedy, because he is Jewish and because his ties to Israel. More to the point: Silverstein was not in a position to manage the hijacking exercises conducted by the military on the morning of 9/11, not in a position to steer airplanes against buildings and not in a position to wire WTC 7 within hours to demolish the building. Whatever his alleged role in 9/11, if any, the coordinators of Operation 9/11 did not sit in his office, but presumably in the Pentagon, led by Donald Rumsfeld. Larry Silverstein, however, represents an ideal bogeyman.

The fact that Mr. Silverstein did not demonstrate any interest in investigating the demise of the Twin Towers he had leased, is no evidence of malfeasance: In that he acted like most Americans, who till this day do not wish to ask questions and know the truth.

Dov Zakheim is another such ideal bogeyman. He is an ordained rabbi who made it to a high position in both government and private business. He worked in the Pentagon between 1985 and 1987. From 1987-2001, Zakheim was CEO of SPC International, a high-technology firm that manufactures, inter alia, equipment to remotely control aircraft. During 2000, he served as a foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush. He was hired as a Comptroller of the Pentagon in the spring of 2001. On September 10, 2001 , Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary, announced to a stupefied internal Pentagon audience that the Pentagon could not track $2.3 trillion dollars in its books. This statement disappeared, as it were, into the memory hole the next day because of the deadly events, but continues to be widely quoted by Jew-bashers, who connect these missing funds to Zakheim. A Google search on the string “$2.3 billion Zakheim” yields no less than 150,000 hits. But is it at all true that the Pentagon could not track $2.3 trillion, as Rumsfeld claimed? And if that was the case, could Zakheim make that money disappear from Pentagon accounting within a few months? And if he could do so, why wasn’t he accused, charged and prosecuted? But probably the most important question is: Why did Rumsfeld make at all this statement, and precisely on the eve of 9/11? Wouldn’t a political leader rather attempt to conceal such apparent malfeasance? Or was there a hidden motive behind this bizarre announcement?

In order to implicate Israel in the events of 9/11, the story of the “five dancing Israelis” is often invoked. There is no dispute that five young Israelis were seen photographing the Twin Towers after they were hit and possibly making signs that were interpreted as celebration. They were arrested by the New York police after a woman, only known as Maria, called the police to report their suspicious conduct, as seen from her window. Interestingly, it was highlighted in the media that these Israelis were found in the possession of box cutters when they were arrested. The theme of box cutters was to remain attached to the alleged hijackings. A mere coincidence? The boys were, anyway, kept in detention in the United States for several weeks, and then deported to Israel . Two of them appeared in an Israeli TV show and said that they were photographing the Twin Towers to “document the event”. They implied that this had been their task but did not say who tasked them with that mission. This episode suggests Israeli foreknowledge of the events. Another case of foreknowledge, also involving Israelis, is an email message received by two employees of the Israeli company Odigo two hours before the attacks. It has not been determined who sent the message and the reason for informing Odigo. One explanation would be that the plotters wished to connect Israel somehow to the attacks.

And finally, we have the canard that 4,000 Jews, forewarned, did not come to work to the World Trade Center on 9/11. A mere glance at the names and backgrounds of the WTC victims suffices to rubbish this story. Many Jews died in the Twin Towers . While this story is false, it is actually based on an authentic news report that appeared in the Jerusalem Post on September 12, 2001 . According to that report, the Israeli Foreign Ministry expressed its concern about the fate of 4,000 Israelis (not “Jews”) believed to be present around or in the World Trade Center . It is not known from where the Ministry obtained the figure of 4,000. As it turned out, only 2-3 Israelis died at the World Trade Center . In order to assess whether this low ratio of Israeli fatalities is plausible or not, it would have been necessary to know how many Israeli nationals actually worked in the Twin Towers and on which floors they worked. I could find no such information. It is known, however, that an Israeli shipping company (ZIM) moved its offices from the WTC shortly before 9/11. It is not known where exactly these offices were located in the buildings. This move is also invoked by some observers as a sign of foreknowledge. If ZIM was forewarned, who was doing the warning and made ZIM thus a suspect?

LW: What might be the motives for linking Israel to 9/11?

ED: Presuming, as I do, that 9/11 served U.S. imperial – and more generally Western – interests and was executed by entities under the control of the U.S. military, the plotters had evidently to conceal their trail and engage in serious efforts to impute their crime to others. Until now they did so by attributing the crime to 19 Islamic hijackers, who are presumably dead (or never existed). As this initial story is being increasingly debunked, a fall-back position for the plotters would be to blame the attack on other entities. Recent attempts are made by members of the U.S. Congress, for example, to blame 9/11 on the Saudis. But who are better placed as bogeymen than Jews or Israel ? The Nazis used this method with great success. Why wouldn’t the US elite repeat this sordid game, if it fears that its days are counted? I suspect therefore that the “ Israel did it” meme in regard to 9/11 is maintained over low fire by powerful forces in the United States in reserve for the day when the American people will discover that 9/11 was an inside job. If that should happen, the US elite would suddenly “discover” evidence that Jews within the Pentagon orchestrated 9/11 in cooperation with the Mossad; that American Jews led hapless Americans to attack other countries; that Jews were responsible for the introduction of torture and extra-judicial executions and that the PATRIOT Act was a Jewish project to control Americans.

LW: After you rubbished the official narrative and the so-called Israel link, who, in your view, could have had the largest interest to commit such a horrendous crime? What geopolitical and geostrategic interests could the US have in engineering such an operation?

ED: As I already mentioned above, I consider it beyond dispute that the US military planned and executed the mass-murder of 9/11 on behalf of the US elite (which, evidently, includes also persons of Jewish descent). The operation served multiple purposes, all beneficial to the US elite: It provided justification for the occupation of Afghanistan, a strategically location in Central Asia; it provided justification for destroying and rebuilding Iraq (both of which were profitable to U.S. corporations); it provided justification for a U.S.-led global War on Terrorism; it provided justification for huge increases in military appropriations and corresponding profits of the military-industrial complex; it provided justification for the erosion of constitutional rights and international law; it provided justification for global Big Brother measures, led by the NRO and NSA; and it provided the justification for the establishment of a new and profitable security industry. All of these developments have been detrimental to human rights, individual freedoms and global peace. That is one of the reasons why I consider that challenging the official myth of 9/11 is one of the most urgent tasks facing humanity today.

LW: Mr. Davidsson thank you very much for the interview.

Elias Davidsson was born in 1941 in Palestine to Jewish parents. His parents were born in Germany but had to immigrate to Palestine due to the Nazi persecution of Jews. He lived in his youth in France , Germany and the United States until he settled finally in Iceland in 1962. After working for 20 years in the computer field, he changed to musical occupation, as a music teacher, choir master, arranger and composer. In parallel to his profession, Davidsson has for many years been involved in activism and research regarding social and global justice, peace, anti-racism and human rights. Since 1990, Davidsson has focussed on the role of international law as a tool for peace and published several scholarly articles in legal journals.

Dr. Ludwig Watzal works as a journalist and editor in Bonn, Germany .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7NsXFnzJGw

The Logic of 9/11

By Emily Sohn

22 December 2013

@ NASA

Mayan pyramid in Chichen-Itza, Mexico. Space observations provide clues as to how ancient civilizations, like that of the Mayans and the Old Kingdom of Egypt, collapsed. Credit: Shutterstock.

Mayan pyramid in Chichen-Itza , Mexico . Space observations provide clues as to how ancient civilizations, like that of the Mayans and the Old Kingdom of Egypt , collapsed. Credit: Shutterstock.

The search for the fabled city of Ubar began with a cold call to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1982.

Documentary filmmaker Nicholas Clapp had heard stories about a lost settlement in the Arabian Desert that was once teeming with riches. At some point many centuries ago, Ubar had disappeared into the sand, and Clapp wondered if he might use NASA spacecraft to look for it.

“When he called, he was obviously not part of the lunatic crowd we often get calls from,” says Dr. Ron Blom, Program Manager for Solid Earth Science and Natural Hazards at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Nick stood out because he had actually done quite a bit of homework.”

And so the search began.

Ancient outpost

Using Clapp’s historical research as a guide, Blom and his team used the space shuttle Challenger CK to take images that allowed them to detect ancient tracks in the desert. Some of the roads ran beneath modern sand dunes but all of them converged on a central point: in southern Oman in the Middle East . There, archaeological excavations showed that the team had indeed located Ubar, which it turned out had actually been an important water source and an outpost where camel caravans assembled to transport frankincense.

Once surrounded by mighty towers that eventually sunk into the sand, Ubar is just one in a growing list of ancient sites that are emerging with help from satellite imagery. Also known as “remote sensing data”, images taken from high above the surface of the Earth can show subtle signs of long-lost societies that are impossible to see from the ground.

This pair of images from space shows a portion of the southern Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula in the country of Oman. On the left is a radar image of the region around the site of the fabled Lost City of Ubar. On the right is an enhanced optical image taken by astronauts onboard the Space Shuttle. Credit: NASA/JPL.

This pair of images from space shows a portion of the southern Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula in the country of Oman . On the left is a radar image of the region around the site of the fabled Lost City of Ubar. On the right is an enhanced optical image taken by astronauts onboard the Space Shuttle. Credit: NASA/JPL.

As scientists dig in to these sites, they are turning up evidence that changes in climate – both large and small – are at least partly responsible for the rise and fall of many ancient civilizations. Even though Ubar is now located in one of the driest places on Earth, the region was once much wetter and full of underground water sources. Ubar disappeared when water levels dipped so low that a sinkhole formed and enveloped the outpost.

An Egyptian kingdom, likewise, collapsed during an extended drought 4,200 years ago. Droughts have also been linked to the fall of the Maya around 900 AD and the demise of the spectacular Cambodian city of Angkor in the early 1400s.

It’s not surprising that climate change has doomed so many populations, Blom says. After all, it was when weather patterns finally became predictable about 11,500 years ago that complex civilizations finally formed in the first place. A stable climate ensured that crops would grow year after year, and a reliable source of food freed people to settle down and develop culture.

Since then, many civilizations have blossomed into greatness and subsequently disappeared into rubble. As scientists try to piece together the history of where people lived a long time ago, they are increasingly turning to the most modern of technologies: spacecraft that offer an unprecedented view of Earth from above.

Earth from above

There are a variety of ways to spot long-buried settlements in satellite images. In the search for Ubar, Blom and colleagues used computers to enhance images taken in the visible and infrared wavelengths by Challenger CK, allowing them to peer up to 15 feet beneath the surface of the sand. As they analyzed the sizes and proportions of dust, rocks and sand grains, they could see the boundaries of ancient roads.

Modern roads and ancient tracks in Oman, as seen from space by the Landsat satellite. Credit: NASA/USGS.Modern roads and ancient tracks in Oman , as seen from space by the Landsat satellite. Credit: NASA/USGS.

In modern-day Iraq and Syria , Harvard archaeologist Jason Ur and colleagues have used NASA satellite images to identify thousands of possible locations for ancient Mesopotamian cities by looking for patches of lighter, drier soil. Those spots indicate where mud brick structures may have collapsed.

In the case of the Maya and other lost cities in Central and South America , the jungle is quick to grow over ancient buildings and other structures, but scientists look to satellite imagery for slight differences in vegetation patterns. Where once there was development, the soil is stressed enough to support plants that are different from those growing in untouched soils. Seeing those vegetation shifts from above helps archaeologists zero in on where to dig.

“Lowland Amazonia is bigger than the continental United States ,” says William Woods, a geographer and archaeologist at the University of Kansas , Lawrence . “The only way of discovering these new things is with remote sensing and on-the-ground truthing [measurement verification].”

As archaeologists continue to turn up ever more signs of collapsed civilizations, they are finding plenty of evidence that climate shifts are at least partly to blame for the decline in many cases. Those links offer the opportunity to protect the future of our own society by learning from the mistakes of our ancestors.

“When we excavate the remains of past civilizations, we very rarely find any evidence that they as a whole society made any attempts to change in the face of a drying climate, a warming atmosphere” or other changes, Ur says. “I view this inflexibility as the real reason for collapse.”

“Today we have an unbelievable ability to learn about our environment and communicate what we learn to all of society,” he adds. “We need to take better advantage of our communication technology advances in the face of a changing climate.”

A bitter colonial legacy and mismanagement of state power are key factors behind the violence in the CAR

By Abdi Ismail Samatar

21 December 2013

@ Al Jazeera

The ongoing conflict in the Central Africa Republic (CAR) should be put within its regional context first. CAR is part of a region in Africa which has witnessed some of the most brutal colonial and post-colonial atrocities than any other region in the continent. To the South of CAR is Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the epicenter of a modern hell that has consumed over three million lives during the last thirty year. Northeast of CAR is Sudan whose conflict has produced a million casualties and the displacement of untold millions.

To the southeast is Uganda where Idi Amin fed his political opponents to crocodiles and where, for thirty years, the Lord’s Resistance Army has terrorised the rural population of northern Uganda. Further southeast, is Rwanda where close to a million civilians were butchered in the 1994 genocide, and Burundi where civil war and political instability has left behind a human tragedy. The cost of this regional catastrophe has been the death of several million Africans and the devastation of livelihood of many more in a region that has some of the richest natural resources in the world.

A simplistic news coverage

Superficial academic and journalist reports have characterized many of these conflicts -including the ongoing one in CAR- as tribal in nature. The most prominent of these has been the depiction of the Rwanda genocide as the consequence of deep rooted animosity between the Tutsi and Hutu communities. Similarly, the conflict in the Sudan, before the division of the country into two, was described as a war between Muslim and Christian or Arabs against Africans. Now it is claimed that the Dinka and Neur are killing one another in South Sudan. Characterising conflicts in the continent as either tribal or religious has a long history.

Many, however, fail to realize that the causes of these conflicts are not necessarily ethnic or religious in nature but  can be better kexplained within the context of existing political and economic forces that are driven by illegitimate exploitation of state power. Such misuse of governmental authority turns the state into a sectarian force rather than an authority that accents the commonalities of the population. The sectarian exploitation of the state by those in power, and the political opposition’s use of communal relations as a means of mobilising support to seize power, produced communal conflicts where  they did not exist before.

The bitter legacy of French colonialism

African countries have been politically “independent” from European colonial powers for nearly sixty years; however, some of the legacy of European savagery still remains in the continent. For example, the idea of dividing cultural communities into separate political entities, on the basis of cultural or ethnic boundaries, was an invention of colonial powers and lives on. Unfortunately, many African leaders, and some of their political opponents, have internalised that ideology as a means to stay in power or gain political authority.

French colonialism in Central Africa was known for three fundamental qualities. First, it administered the territory as a French fiefdom where the native population was subjected to one of the most brutal authoritarian regimes. In so doing, the French established a political culture where force, rather than popular consent, was the source of authority. Second, the French authority, and its commercial allies, exploited the territory’s resources, not to advance the native population’s wellbeing but their own and that of France. By setting up  ts authoritarian administration, colonial France transformed cultural groups, ethnic or religious, into state managed political categories.As with all colonial regimes, this strategy of divide and rule was meant to undermine the common political project of the African people and to prolong French dominance.

Struggling with the past

The Central African Republic was in a sorrow shape in 1960 when it became nominally independent from France and had to overcome several inherited liabilities. Although France was no longer in charge of the territory, nevertheless, it pulled the strings from behind the scene.

France continued to have significant role in CAR military affairs and often called the shot, directly or indirectly, through its military capabilities, including local allies. Another key factor was that the local elite appeared to have no clue of their onerous national responsibilities as many of them were poorly educated and beholden to the former colonial master. Rather than transform colonial structures in order to serve the local population, the elite mismanaged the inherited system and made it even worse; while exploiting the country’s resources for their own ends.

Liberation did not bring freedom and accountability. Instead it ushered in a new form of authoritarianism whose cruelty went beyond imagination. This order was best represented by the self- proclaimed Emperor Bokassa who ruinously reined from 1965 to 1979. Bokassa was replaced by another coup which French Commandos in the country assisted. More coups followed until the last year when a rebel movement overthrew the government. France, for its part, has always acted behind the scenes. Most recently, it sent  troops to stop the conflict that is ravaging the country; a conflict whose genealogy goes back to France.

Causes versus consequences of the conflict

Much of the media and political coverage of the disaster in the CAR has been framed along sectarian lines (Muslim-Christian) or ethnic cleavages. Such characterisation of the conflict is not unique. Other conflicts in the continent have been looked at from the same prism.  But In the CAR, one can only hear whispers that Muslims and Christian communities have historically lived side by side without much sectarian acrimony. Given this harmonious historical relationships, how can we explain the origins, nature, and dynamics of the conflicts in the country?

Two factors can be considered central to the calamity. First, the horrible legacy of French colonialism left behind a devastated economy and induced a post-colonial political order which reinforced the worst forms of exploitation and authoritarian rule. Second, CAR’s post-colonial political elite have used the state not as an agent to develop the country and enhance civic commonalities among the population, but as an instrument to loot state resources, brutalise the political opposition, marginalise communities en mass, and ultimately deploy the colonial strategy of divide and rule.

Misrule and abuse of state power have led to the fragmentation of communities, polarisation of political opinion, and the de-legitimation of the core responsibility of the government. Without popular legitimacy, delivery of services, justices, and the development of  new collective shared political values, there is little chance the country can be rebuilt.

When the authoritarian state imposed violence on the population, the later has resorted to desperate measures by mobilisng communal sentiments to resist tyranny and consequently a viscous circle of tyranny and violence was created. Such is the line of causation of the tragedy in the CAR and several other countries in Africa, including Southern Sudan today: It is the political mismanagement of the state which produces religious or ethnic strife rather than the other way around.

A reversal of  this atrocious cycle requires national leadership of extra-ordinary vision (of Mandela courage, wisdom, and humility), tenacity, and an international community not driven by expedience. France does not have the moral standing to provide a guide for the international community given its very long disreputable record in CAR. This leaves the African Union (AU) to step up its efforts. Among the AU members best qualified to take the lead are South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Rwanda.

Abdi Ismail Samatar is Professor and Chair of Department of Geography, Environment & Society

University of Minnesota, Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria and former President of

African Studies Association.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

Source:

Al Jazeera

By Kate Randall

21 December, 2013

@ WSWS.org

The US Senate voted Thursday night to authorize nearly $633 billion in military spending. President Obama is expected to sign the legislation, which provides $552.1 billion for the regular military budget and $80.7 billion for the war in Afghanistan and other overseas contingency operations (OCO).

The 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) authorizes spending for the fiscal year that began October 1. It is the 52nd consecutive year that Congress has passed such legislation, and represents a minimal reduction from the $643 billion authorized for fiscal year 2013.

To put these expenditures into perspective, the budget for all of fiscal year 2013 for food stamps, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), was $76.4 billion, only 12 percent of the figure designated for the military in 2014. A Republican proposal in the Farm Bill, which Congress has yet to pass, would cut $39 billion over the next decade from this vital nutrition program.

Some 1.3 million Americans will lose their sole income at the end of this month when the federal government ends extended unemployment benefits. The $25.6 billion spent on these benefits in 2013 is dwarfed by the massive spending on the military apparatus and its destructive weaponry slated for fiscal year 2014.

The Senate voted 84-15 to pass the Pentagon spending bill, and the US House approved similar legislation last week in a 350-69 vote. The bill’s passage demonstrates the overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress for the continued US presence in Afghanistan and other acts of military aggression across the globe. The legislation covers combat pay, ships, aircraft and military bases, as well as providing a 1 percent pay raise to military personnel.

The bill also includes measures in response to the widespread instances of sexual assault in the US military and their cover-up and deliberate disregard and mishandling by the military brass. The Pentagon estimates that at least 26,000 members of the military may have been sexually assaulted last year alone, and that thousands more victims did not come forward for fear of inaction or retribution.

The legislation would strip commanders of their ability to overturn military jury convictions and would also require a civilian review if a commander declines to prosecute a case. Any individual convicted of sexual assault would also face dishonorable discharge or dismissal.

The legislation does not include a proposal by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat of New York) that would give victims of sexual assault an independent route to pursue prosecutions of their attackers outside the military chain of command.

The Congressional authorization of close to $81 billion to fund the continued occupation of Afghanistan stands in sharp contrast to deep popular opposition to the 13-year-old war, in which 2,289 US troops have died and more than have been 19,000 wounded.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll of 1,005 US adults conducted December 12-15 shows that 66 percent of Americans say the war in Afghanistan was not worth fighting, and a record 50 percent now “strongly” believe that the war has not been worth the cost.

A separate Associated Press-GfK poll released Wednesday shows that 57 percent of Americans think the US did “the wrong thing” in going to war in Afghanistan.

Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have died as a result of airstrikes, house-to-house raids, as well as a consequence of displacement, starvation and disease, and lack of medical treatment. The US government has refused to sign a security agreement with the regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai—which would keep 8,000-10,000 troops in Afghanistan after 2014—guaranteeing a halt to US military raids on civilian homes.

The NDAA not only authorizes the stationing of US troops in Afghanistan and at bases and other locations around the world, but covers the cost of weapons programs and military construction projects. The measure also authorizes $17.6 billion for nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Energy.

The Pentagon is authorized to buy this year’s installment of 29 F-35 Lightning II jets, capable of performing ground attack and reconnaissance with stealth capability. Produced by Lockheed Martin in Bethesda, Maryland, the fighter jet is the military’s costliest weapons program, with an overall projected cost of $391.2 billion for a fleet of 2,443 aircraft.

The measure authorizes $1.3 billion for multiyear procurement contracts for Northrop Grumman’s E-2D Advanced Hawkeye surveillance plane, and would also prohibit the Pentagon’s plan to retire Northrop’s Global Hawk Block 30 drone.

The bill also authorizes $90 billion to continue upgrades performed by General Dynamics in Ohio of the M1A2 tank. It also provides $178 million in funding that was not requested by the Pentagon for M-1 Abrams tanks.

The cost ceiling has been raised to $12.9 billion on the USS Gerald R. Ford, being built by Huntington Ingalls Industries in Newport News, Virginia, making the vessel the most expensive US warship in history. The NDAA will require quarterly reports from the Navy on its cost estimates for the USS John F. Kennedy, the next in the new class of aircraft carriers.

The NDAA authorizes $284 million to boost Israel, the US ally in the Middle East in its pursuit of control over the oil rich region and its targeting of Iran, Syria and other nations. This includes $33.7 million to improve the Arrow Weapon System and $117 million for the Short-Range Missile Defense Program. Another $22 million is pegged for development of the Arrow-3 upper-tier interceptor, a joint development project of Chicago-based Boeing Co. and Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd.

By Stuart Littlewood

20 December, 2013

@ Intifada-palestine.com

Creeping annexation, ethnic cleansing and ‘the politics of fragmentation’ inflicted by criminals who strut the world stage and thumb their noses at international law

As the international conspiracy to rob Palestinians of their freedom and homeland is exposed a little more each day, observers and activists still puzzle over the duplicity of the United Nations in the decades-long illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Territories, not to mention the true intent of Palestinian leaders. So when Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton and UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Occupied Palestine, visited Norwich recently, I took the opportunity to put some questions to him.

SL – Can we start with the so-called peace process, please? Does the resignation of the Palestinian negotiation team, and the reasons given, effectively end the already discredited ‘peace talks’? Should the Palestinians walk away or carry on playing a pointless game for another 6 months?

Richard Falk – It is difficult to know how to assess the current suspension of peace talks. The Palestinian Authority seems always ready to bend to pressure, although with some outer limits. In this respect, the future of this phase of ‘peace talks’ will be determined not in Ramallah, but in Washington and Tel Aviv. It should be evident 20 years after Oslo that the peace talks serve Israel’s interest in ‘creeping annexation’ of the West Bank and ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem, while diminishing Palestinian prospects, and even harming the Palestinian image by disinformation that blames the Palestinian side for the breakdown of the process when and however it occurs. It would be a welcome sign of PA independence if they come forth and denounce this peace process for what it is.

The sad reality is that this is almost certain not to happen, and more likely than not the period of negotiations will be extended beyond the nine months set aside, on the entirely false claim that the parties are on the verge of resolving all their differences, and with a little patience, the prospects for a deal are quite bright.

SL – The negotiators said they were resigning because of the ‘unprecedented escalation’ of settlement building and because the Israeli government wasn’t serious about a two-state solution and had failed to fulfill commitments given before the present talks were resumed. I now read that Erekat has already been back to Washington for more talks with Tzipi Livni (Israel’s lead negotiator), Kerry and US envoy Indyk. Far from denouncing the process they are once again endorsing it, which makes your point.

In any case, how acceptable is it for a weak, demoralised and captive people like the Palestinians to be forced to the negotiation table with their brutal occupier under the auspices of a US administration seen by many people as too dishonest to play the part of peace broker?

Richard Falk – Even if the United States was acting in good faith, for which there is no evidence, its dual role as Israel’s unconditional ally and as intermediary would subvert the credibility of a negotiating process. In fact, the US Government signals its partisanship by White House appointments of individuals overtly associated with the AIPAC lobbying group as Special Envoys to oversee the negotiations such as Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. It is hard to imagine the fury in the West that would exist if the conditions were reversed, and the UN proposed a one-sided ‘peace process’ biased in favour of the Palestinians. The unsatisfactory nature of the current framework of negotiations is further flawed by weighting the process in favour of Israel, which enjoys a position of hard power dominance.

“Palestinians’ main grievances are all reinforced by an objective interpretation of international law”

SL – There can be no peace without justice, so is it right for final status ‘negotiations’ to be held before competing claims are tested in the courts and the many outstanding rulings under international law and UN resolutions are implemented? In any case, shouldn’t a neutral UN peace commission be supervising the final settlement of this long struggle, rather than the US or the Quartet?

Richard Falk – Yes, if the priority were to attain a just and sustainable peace, a framework would be developed that had two characteristics: neutral as between the two sides and sensitive to the relevance of rights under international law. Such sensitivity would favour the Palestinians as their main grievances are all reinforced by an objective interpretation of international law, including in relation to settlements, Jerusalem, refugees, borders, water.

SL – How much legitimacy does President Abbas enjoy, having overstayed his term of office?

Richard Falk – This question of political legitimacy of President Abbas turns on the subjective mood of the Palestinian people. Because the PA is a political entity so vulnerable to pressures and manipulation, the status of its presiding leader seems to be widely seen as a secondary matter of limited significance. When President Abbas has articulated the case for Palestinian statehood during the last three years at the United Nations he gained considerable personal respect among most governments and for many Palestinians. He seems a leader caught between the realities of his compromised position and the occasional opportunities to express the national ambitions and support the rights of the Palestinian people. The division with Hamas, and the failure to find a formula to restore Palestinian unity in relation to the West is a further source of weakness for PA claims to represent the Palestinian people as a whole. The failure to hold scheduled elections highlights the insufficiency of PA and Palestinian leadership.

SL – Do you believe a two-state solution is still feasible?

Richard Falk – No. I think Oslo has been dead for some years, primarily due to Israeli policies designed to encroach upon the remnant of Palestinian territorial and symbolic rights, especially by the continuously expanding settlement archipelago, the unlawful separation wall built on occupied territory, and the demographic manipulations in East Jerusalem. The pretence that Oslo plus the Roadmap point the only way to peace serves American and Israeli purposes in quieting growing complaints about the persistence of the conflict. It represents a diplomatic attempt to deflect criticism, and to divert attention from Palestinian grievances and a growing global solidarity movement.

SL – The 1947 UN Partition was unworkable as well as immoral. Shouldn’t the whole territory (of historic Palestine) be returned to the melting pot and shared out more sensibly? Shouldn’t Jerusalem and Bethlehem become an international city, or ‘corpus separatum’, as the UN originally intended?

Richard Falk – For me the fundamental flaw with the partition proposals contained in GA Resolution 181 was the failure to consult the people resident in Palestine at the time. A secondary flaw was the unfairness of awarding 55% of the territory to the Jewish presence as represented by the Zionist movement which in 1947 accounted for only one-third of the population owning around 6% of the land . This idea of determining the future of Palestine by outsiders, even if well intentioned, which seems not to have ever been the case, is incompatible with the historical trend toward resolving the future of peoples by way of the dynamics of self-determination. In Palestine’s case, at least from the issuance of the Balfour Declaration onward, this effort to control the future of Palestine has been justly condemned as the last major example of ‘settler colonialism.’ It is a particularly acute example as the settlers have no mother country to which to return, and take a poker player’s high risk posture of ‘all in.’

“There is no authoritative explanation of ICC passivity in face of the Israeli criminal violation of fundamental Palestinian rights.”

SL – Turning to the role of the International Criminal Court, this is an organ of the UN. So why doesn’t the ICC initiate its own prosecution of Israeli crimes based on UN reports and the mountain of evidence available to it, especially in view of Palestine’s upgraded status?

Richard Falk – There is no authoritative explanation of ICC passivity in face of the Israeli criminal violation of fundamental Palestinian rights. As a matter of speculation it is plausible to assume an absence of political will on the part of the prosecutor’s office to initiate an investigation that would be deeply opposed by Israel and the United States. The ICC has been recently criticized for its Western bias, and its failure for instance to consider whether the United Kingdom and the United States violated the Rome Statute’s enumeration of international crimes by initiating and conducting the Iraq War. The African Union has complained about the seeming focus on the criminality of African leaders, and the bypassing of grievances directed at Western behaviour.

SL – We hear you and others calling for intervention to prevent humanitarian catastrophes, e.g. the Gaza water crisis. Who exactly are you calling on? What is the chain of responsibility for intervening.

Richard Falk – There has been evolving within the UN and in international society more generally a sense that there is a ‘responsibility to protect’ peoples subject to severe threats of humanitarian catastrophes or natural disasters. Such sentiments are part of a process I have described as ‘moral globalization.’

In fact, R2P diplomacy has been discredited by being used as a geopolitical instrument, most dramatically as the normative foundation for the UN endorsement of the NATO 2011 military intervention in Libya. With respect to Libya the justification was protection against a feared massacre of civilians in the city of Benghazi, but the actual military operation from its outset seemed designed to achieve regime change in Tripoli. When it comes to Gaza where the present crisis has passed into a zone of desperation, the UN and world community are silent as if stone deaf to this deepening human crisis of survival.

“So long as it is useful for Israel and Washington to treat Hamas as ‘a terrorist organization’ the UN will be limited in its role to being a provider of a subsistence existence for the Gazan people…”

SL – We have just seen the UN intervening to bring fuel into Gaza as it teetered on the brink of a full-blown public health crisis. There are many such emergencies thanks to Israel’s continuing blockade. Why doesn’t the UN take over the supply of fuel full-time? And indeed the supply of medicines, drugs, medical equipment and spares?

Richard Falk – The tragic situation in Gaza cannot be understood without taking account of the political context, above all the split between Fatah and Hamas, and the Israeli posture toward Gaza after its ‘disengagement’ in 2005 and the imposition of a punitive blockade in mid-2007 after Hamas took over the governance of Gaza. The UN has no capability to override geopolitical priorities, and so long as it is useful for Israel and Washington to treat Hamas as ‘a terrorist organization’ the UN will be limited in its role to being a provider of a subsistence existence for the Gazan people, long victims of unlawful Israel policies of ‘collective punishment’ unconditional prohibited by Article 33 of the 4th Geneva Convention.

After the Egyptian coup of July 3rd of this year, the subsistence regime evolved in Gaza is itself in jeopardy. The tunnel network has been substantially destroyed by Egyptian military action and the Rafah crossing from Gaza to Egypt has been mainly closed, isolating the people, and creating emergency conditions due to fuel shortages that have made electricity only available in very limited amounts.

The results are horrifying: sewage in the streets, insufficient power to run machines needed to keep the terminally ill alive, fuel shortages that virtually preclude economic activity, and closed borders that seal the fate of 1.6 million Gazans. Long before this dramatic further deterioration of life circumstances, observers were calling Gaza the largest open air prison in the world.

“The wrongful appropriation by Israel of Palestine’s water, land, and energy resources has been a massive crime against the Palestinian people…”

SL – What is the UN doing to protect Palestine’ s precious aquifers and offshore gas field from being plundered by the Israelis?

Richard Falk – Again, the UN has no independent capability, or ever will, to challenge Israel or to protect Palestinian rights. It is a case of geopolitical manipulation and Palestinian victimization. The wrongful appropriation by Israel of Palestine’s water, land, and energy resources has been a massive crime against the Palestinian people that has been continuous with the occupation that commenced in 1967.

“Israeli military dominance, as politically reinforced by American geopolitical muscle, overrides all of these Palestinian claims of right…. Such injustice and suffering can only be challenged by Palestinian resistance and international solidarity.”

SL – Why is the requirement, often repeated, to allow Palestinians free and unfettered movement in and out of Gaza not implemented? Gaza and the West Bank are supposed to be a contiguous territory but, for example, Palestinian students in Gaza are prevented from attending their excellent universities in the West Bank. And why are Gazan fishermen still restricted to a mere fraction of their territorial waters, despite agreements to the contrary, and regularly fired on? Why is Israel not prosecuted for acts of piracy in international waters against humanitarian traffic to Gaza?

Richard Falk – As earlier, the hard power realities of Israeli military dominance, as politically reinforced by American geopolitical muscle, overrides all of these Palestinian claims of right. In this respect, such injustice and suffering can only be challenged by Palestinian resistance and international solidarity. The specific abuses can and should be delimited to raise public awareness and contribute to the mobilization of support for the Palestinian struggle, but it is pointless to expect the UN to do more than its capabilities allow. The whole structure of the Organization, combined with the method of funding, gives geopolitical pressures great leverage in relation to specific situations. The veto power given to the permanent members of the Security Council is a major expression of this weakness that was built into the constitutional structure of the UN from the moment of its establishment.

“Nuremberg Promise has not been kept”

SL – People reading what you say here will be alarmed that US geopolitical power and Israeli military might can so easily override international and humanitarian law. After Nuremburg our legal institutions were strong enough to bring Nazi era criminals to book, but present-day war criminals walk free and thumb their noses. What hope is there for mankind and our brave new world if this is allowed to continue?

Richard Falk – The Nuremberg experience was based on ‘victors’ justice,’ holding the defeated leaders after World War II criminally accountable, while exempting the crimes of the victors from accountability. There was a promise made at Nuremberg that in the future the rules by which the Germans were judged would be applicable to all who committed state crimes in the future. This Nuremberg Promise has not been kept. The political and military leaders of the main states enjoy impunity while the leaders of defeated countries (e.g. Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic) or sub-Saharan African countries are prosecuted by international tribunals. Double standards prevail, and it is questionable whether an international criminal law that punishes the weak and exempts the strong is to be treated as legitimate even if those accused receive a fair trial and are convicted and punished only if they were guilty of grave misconduct.

The bottom line is that we live in a world in which the primacy of hard power prevails in the relationship among states. Geopolitical leverage enables Israel to defy the most basic principles of international law, and yet their leaders are not held accountable. There are only two paths available that challenge this result. National courts can be empowered by what is called ‘universal jurisdiction’ to investigate, indict, prosecute, convict, and punish anyone accused of state crime that can be personally delivered to the relevant court. In 1998 the Chilean dictator was detained in London after the Spanish Government requested that Pinochet be extradited. After lengthy litigation is was found that Pinochet could be extradited for torture committed during part of his reign, but in the end he was sent back to Chile because of health reasons, and never faced trial in Spain. Yet such a possibility exists in relation to Israeli political and military leaders, and seems to have discouraged their travel to countries whose criminal law contains the authority to invoke universal jurisdiction.

The other possibility is by convening a peoples tribunal of the sort constituted in the past by the Bertrand Russell Foundation in Brussels and the Lelio Basso Foundation in Rome. The Russell Foundation sponsored four sessions devoted to various allegations of criminality attributed to the government of Israel. It produced convincing documentation of the charges, and issued judgements that called for civil society initiatives. Such a tribunal, although acting on evidence and in accord with the relevant provisions of international criminal law, possesses no formal authority and lacks implementing capabilities. Its role is limited to documenting the case against a government, and providing symbolic support to those who contend that there have been violations of international criminal law. Such outcomes may influence public opinion, and help change the balance of political forces by undermining the legitimacy of an established order of oppression as exists with respect to Israel’s relationship to the Palestinian people and the denial of their collective right of self-determination.

“The ‘politics of fragmentation’ designed to undermine Palestinian unity… has been alarmingly successful.”

SL – What are the chances as you see them for achieving unity between Fatah and Hamas, and how should the Palestinians play their cards in future?

Richard Falk – There is a near unanimous belief among Palestinians and their supporters that unity is needed to move the struggle forward. Such unity existed throughout the early decades of the Palestinian National Movement, despite many ideological differences relating to tactics and goals, but within a shared resolve to achieve national liberation. The unifying image provided by Yasser Arafat’s uncontested leadership was also important.

Israel has pursued a policy I describe as ‘the politics of fragmentation’ designed to undermine Palestinian unity, and it has been alarmingly successful. Oslo contributed to this end by dividing up the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C, by splitting the administration of Gaza off from the rest of Palestine. The emergence of Hamas highlighted Palestinian fragmentation, a result welcomed by Israel even as it was condemned. Fatah appears to have been inhibited in reaching some kind of functional unity with Hamas by pressures to refrain from such moves mounted in Israel and the United States. So long as Hamas is treated as a terrorist organization, even in the face of its turn from armed struggle and entry into the political process back in 2006, there will be strong opposition to moves toward unity, which were attempted in the Morsi period of leadership in Egypt, and seemed on the verge of success.

SL – Finally, Richard, your robust defence of Palestinian rights has ruffled many feathers and led to demands from ‘the usual suspects’ for your dismissal. Should the people you speak up for be concerned about this?

Richard Falk – The attacks on me, and others who have tried to bear witness to the directives of international law and political justice, are part of a deliberate campaign by Israel, and its cadres in civil society, to deflect attention from the substantive grievances of the Palestinian people. It is what I have described as ‘the politics of deflection,’ go after the messenger so as to deflect attention from the message. The media has been largely compliant as have Israel’s powerful governmental friends, including the United Kingdom, US, and Canadian governments. Of course, many NGOs and elements of the public push back against such tactics. In my case the defamatory efforts of UN Watch, in particular, have been unpleasant, but have not altered my effort to do the job of witnessing to the best of my ability and in accordance with the canons of truth telling.

“Those of us living in comfort should not turn our gaze away from the children of Gaza this Christmas.”

SL – Thank you for being so generous with your time and sharing your assessment of the situation. But before you go, what sort of Christmas can the children of Gaza look forward to?

Richard Falk – We can only imagine the horror of Christmas this year in Gaza for young and old alike: from life amid raw sewage to freezing cold, scarcities, desolation, and a sense that the world is elsewhere, indifferent to such acute suffering, such sustained injustice, such blind hate.

And yet also knowing many Gazans makes me believe that even in such dire circumstances there remains space for some laughter, and much love, and that such a spirit of resistance lives on among the children of this place haunted by the evils of our world. If present these days in Gaza it would likely make me feel a mystifying blend of sadness and inspiration.

At the very least those of us living in comfort should not turn our gaze away from the children of Gaza this Christmas: we should demand empathy from our leaders and be as personally attentive as possible, whether by commentary, prayer, donations, a compassionate scream! We should not allow these days of celebration and renewal to pass this year without moments of reflection on selfish joys and cheerful carols, as contrasting with the miserable destiny bestowed upon the innocent and abused children of Gaza

Let us look the children of Gaza in the eye if we can. And if we can’t, as I could not, seize the moment to reflect on what it means to be (in)human during this holiday season.

Stuart Littlewood’s articles are published widely on the web. He is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. For further information please visit www.radiofreepalestine.org.uk “Lawlessness must have painful consequences for the lawless, not their victims.” (Stuart Littlewood)

By Tom Engelhardt

20 December, 2013

@ TomDispatch.com

We’re Number One… In Obliterating Wedding Parties

The headline — “Bride and Boom!” — was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a U.S. drone via one of those “surgical” strikes of which Washington is so proud. As one report put it, “Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.”

It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners — “terror” or “al-Qaeda suspects” — in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them. Try to imagine the equivalent for the Newtown massacre the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers. Since even the New York Post wouldn’t do such a thing, let’s posit that the Yemen Post did, that playing off the phrase “head of the class,” their headline was: “Dead of the Class!” (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege. The media would descend. The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House. You’d hear about the callousness of foreigners for days.

And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that.

But a bunch of Arabs in a country few in the U.S. had ever heard of before we started sending in the drones? No such luck, so if you’re a Murdoch tabloid, it’s open season, no consequences guaranteed. As it happens, “Bride and Boom!” isn’t even an original. It turns out to be a stock Post headline. Google it and you’ll find that, since 9/11, the paper has used it at least twice before last week, and never for the good guys: once in 2005, for “the first bomb-making husband and wife,” two Palestinian newlyweds arrested by the Israelis; and once in 2007, for a story about a “bride,” decked out in a “princess-style wedding gown,” with her “groom.” Their car was stopped at a checkpoint in Iraq by our Iraqis, and both of them turned out to be male “terrorists” in a “nutty nuptial party.” Ba-boom!

As it happened, the article by Andy Soltis accompanying the Post headline last week began quite inaccurately. “A U.S. drone strike targeting al-Qaeda militants in Yemen,” went the first line, “took out an unlikely target on Thursday — a wedding party heading to the festivities.”

Soltis can, however, be forgiven his ignorance. In this country, no one bothers to count up wedding parties wiped out by U.S. air power. If they did, Soltis would have known that the accurate line, given the history of U.S. war-making since December 2001 when the first party of Afghan wedding revelers was wiped out (only two women surviving), would have been: “A U.S. drone… took out a likely target.”

After all, by the count of TomDispatch, this is at least the eighth wedding party reported wiped out, totally or in part, since the Afghan War began and it extends the extermination of wedding celebrants from the air to a third country — six destroyed in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, and now the first in Yemen. And in all those years, reporters covering these “incidents” never seem to notice that similar events had occurred previously. Sometimes whole wedding parties were slaughtered, sometimes just the bride or groom’s parties were hit. Estimated total dead from the eight incidents: almost 300 Afghans, Iraqis, and Yemenis. And keep in mind that, in these years, weddings haven’t been the only rites hit. U.S. air power has struck gatherings ranging from funerals to a baby-naming ceremony.

The only thing that made the Yemeni incident unique was the drone. The previous strikes were reportedly by piloted aircraft.

Non-tabloid papers were far more polite in their headlines and accounts, though they did reflect utter confusion about what had happened in a distant part of distant Yemen. The wedding caravan of vehicles was going to a wedding — or coming back. Fifteen were definitively dead. Or 11. Or 13. Or 14. Or 17. The attacking plane had aimed for al-Qaeda targets and hit the wedding party “by mistake.” Or al-Qaeda “suspects” had been among the wedding party, though all reports agree that innocent wedding goers died. Accounts of what happened from Yemeni officials differed, even as that country’s parliamentarians demanded an end to the U.S. drone campaign in their country. The Obama administration refused to comment. It was generally reported that this strike, like others before it, had — strangely enough — upset Yemenis and made them more amenable to the propaganda of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.

In the end, reports on a wedding slaughter in a distant land are generally relegated to the inside pages of the paper and passing notice on the TV news, an event instantly trumped by almost anything whatsoever — a shooting in a school anywhere in the U.S., snow storms across the Northeast, you name it — and promptly buried and forgotten.

And yet, in a country that tends to value records, this represents record-making material. After all, what are the odds of knocking off all or parts of eight wedding parties in the space of a little more than a decade (assuming, of course, that the destruction of other wedding parties or the killing of other wedding goers in America’s distant war zones hasn’t gone unreported). If the Taliban or the Iranians or the North Koreans had piled up such figures — and indeed the Taliban has done wedding damage via roadside bombs and suicide bombers — we would know just what to think of them. We would classify them as barbarians, savages, evildoers.

You might imagine that such a traffic jam of death and destruction would at least merit some longer-term attention, thought, analysis, or discussion here. But with the rarest of exceptions, it’s nowhere to be found, right, left, or center, in Washington or Topeka, in everyday conversation or think-tank speak. And keep in mind that we’re talking about a country where the slaughter of innocents — in elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities, workplaces and movie theaters, parking lots and naval shipyards — is given endless attention, carefully toted up, discussed and debated until “closure” is reached.

And yet no one here even thinks to ask how so many wedding parties in foreign lands could be so repeatedly taken out. Is the U.S. simply targeting weddings purposely? Not likely. Could it reflect the fact that, despite all the discussion of the “surgical precision” of American air power, pilots have remarkably little idea what’s really going on below them or who exactly, in lands where American intelligence must be half-blind, they are aiming at? That, at least, seems likely.

Or if “they” gather in certain regions, does American intelligence just assume that the crowd must be “enemy” in nature? (As an American general said about a wedding party attacked in Western Iraq, “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?”) Or is it possible that, in our global war zones, a hint that enemy “suspects” might be among a party of celebrants means that the party itself is fair game, that it’s open season no matter who might be in the crowd?

In this same spirit, the U.S. drone campaigns are said to launch what in drone-speak are called “signature strikes” — that is, strikes not against identified individuals, but against “a pre-identified ‘signature’ of behavior that the U.S. links to militant activity.” In other words, the U.S. launches drone strikes against groups or individuals whose behavior simply fits a “suspect” category: young men of military age carrying weapons, for instance (in areas where carrying a weapon may be the norm no matter who you are). In a more general sense, however, the obliterated wedding party may be the true signature strike of the post 9/11 era of American war-making, the strike that should, but never will, remind Americans that the war on terror was and remains, for others in distant lands, a war of terror, a fearsome creation to which we are conveniently blind.

Consider it a record. For the period since September 11, 2001, we’re number one… in obliterating wedding parties! In those years, whether we care to know it or not, “till death do us part” has gained a far grimmer meaning.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

[Note on American air power and wedding parties: TomDispatch has attempted over the years to record and point out the cumulative nature of these “incidents.” Check out, for instance, “The Wedding Crashers,” or a 2012 piece, “It Couldn’t Happen Here, It Does Happen There.” What follows, gathered by TomDispatch’s Erika Eichelberger, are links to the other seven wedding massacres with brief descriptions of what is known: December 29, 2001, Paktia Province, Afghanistan (more than 100 revelers die in a village in Eastern Afghanistan after an attack by B-52 and B-1B bombers); May 17, 2002, Khost Province, Afghanistan (at least 10 Afghans in a wedding celebration die when U.S. helicopters and planes attack a village); July 1, 2002, Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan (at least 30, and possibly 40, celebrants die when attacked by a B-52 bomber and an AC-130 helicopter); May 20, 2004, Mukaradeeb, Iraq (at least 42 dead, including “27 members of the [family hosting the wedding ceremony], their wedding guests, and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony” in an attack by American jets); July 6, 2008, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan (at least 47 dead, 39 of them women and children, including the bride, among a party escorting that bride to the groom’s house — from a missile attack by jet aircraft); August 2008, Laghman Province, Afghanistan (16 killed, including 12 members of the family hosting the wedding, in an attack by “American bombers”); June 8, 2012, Logar Province, Afghanistan (18 killed, half of them children, when Taliban fighters take shelter amid a wedding party. This was perhaps the only case among the eight wedding incidents in which the U.S. offered an apology).]

Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt

By Tom Engelhardt

20 December, 2013

@ TomDispatch.com

We’re Number One… In Obliterating Wedding Parties

The headline — “Bride and Boom!” — was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a U.S. drone via one of those “surgical” strikes of which Washington is so proud. As one report put it, “Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road.”

It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners — “terror” or “al-Qaeda suspects” — in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them. Try to imagine the equivalent for the Newtown massacre the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers. Since even the New York Post wouldn’t do such a thing, let’s posit that the Yemen Post did, that playing off the phrase “head of the class,” their headline was: “Dead of the Class!” (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege. The media would descend. The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House. You’d hear about the callousness of foreigners for days.

And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that.

But a bunch of Arabs in a country few in the U.S. had ever heard of before we started sending in the drones? No such luck, so if you’re a Murdoch tabloid, it’s open season, no consequences guaranteed. As it happens, “Bride and Boom!” isn’t even an original. It turns out to be a stock Post headline. Google it and you’ll find that, since 9/11, the paper has used it at least twice before last week, and never for the good guys: once in 2005, for “the first bomb-making husband and wife,” two Palestinian newlyweds arrested by the Israelis; and once in 2007, for a story about a “bride,” decked out in a “princess-style wedding gown,” with her “groom.” Their car was stopped at a checkpoint in Iraq by our Iraqis, and both of them turned out to be male “terrorists” in a “nutty nuptial party.” Ba-boom!

As it happened, the article by Andy Soltis accompanying the Post headline last week began quite inaccurately. “A U.S. drone strike targeting al-Qaeda militants in Yemen,” went the first line, “took out an unlikely target on Thursday — a wedding party heading to the festivities.”

Soltis can, however, be forgiven his ignorance. In this country, no one bothers to count up wedding parties wiped out by U.S. air power. If they did, Soltis would have known that the accurate line, given the history of U.S. war-making since December 2001 when the first party of Afghan wedding revelers was wiped out (only two women surviving), would have been: “A U.S. drone… took out a likely target.”

After all, by the count of TomDispatch, this is at least the eighth wedding party reported wiped out, totally or in part, since the Afghan War began and it extends the extermination of wedding celebrants from the air to a third country — six destroyed in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, and now the first in Yemen. And in all those years, reporters covering these “incidents” never seem to notice that similar events had occurred previously. Sometimes whole wedding parties were slaughtered, sometimes just the bride or groom’s parties were hit. Estimated total dead from the eight incidents: almost 300 Afghans, Iraqis, and Yemenis. And keep in mind that, in these years, weddings haven’t been the only rites hit. U.S. air power has struck gatherings ranging from funerals to a baby-naming ceremony.

The only thing that made the Yemeni incident unique was the drone. The previous strikes were reportedly by piloted aircraft.

Non-tabloid papers were far more polite in their headlines and accounts, though they did reflect utter confusion about what had happened in a distant part of distant Yemen. The wedding caravan of vehicles was going to a wedding — or coming back. Fifteen were definitively dead. Or 11. Or 13. Or 14. Or 17. The attacking plane had aimed for al-Qaeda targets and hit the wedding party “by mistake.” Or al-Qaeda “suspects” had been among the wedding party, though all reports agree that innocent wedding goers died. Accounts of what happened from Yemeni officials differed, even as that country’s parliamentarians demanded an end to the U.S. drone campaign in their country. The Obama administration refused to comment. It was generally reported that this strike, like others before it, had — strangely enough — upset Yemenis and made them more amenable to the propaganda of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.

In the end, reports on a wedding slaughter in a distant land are generally relegated to the inside pages of the paper and passing notice on the TV news, an event instantly trumped by almost anything whatsoever — a shooting in a school anywhere in the U.S., snow storms across the Northeast, you name it — and promptly buried and forgotten.

And yet, in a country that tends to value records, this represents record-making material. After all, what are the odds of knocking off all or parts of eight wedding parties in the space of a little more than a decade (assuming, of course, that the destruction of other wedding parties or the killing of other wedding goers in America’s distant war zones hasn’t gone unreported). If the Taliban or the Iranians or the North Koreans had piled up such figures — and indeed the Taliban has done wedding damage via roadside bombs and suicide bombers — we would know just what to think of them. We would classify them as barbarians, savages, evildoers.

You might imagine that such a traffic jam of death and destruction would at least merit some longer-term attention, thought, analysis, or discussion here. But with the rarest of exceptions, it’s nowhere to be found, right, left, or center, in Washington or Topeka, in everyday conversation or think-tank speak. And keep in mind that we’re talking about a country where the slaughter of innocents — in elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and universities, workplaces and movie theaters, parking lots and naval shipyards — is given endless attention, carefully toted up, discussed and debated until “closure” is reached.

And yet no one here even thinks to ask how so many wedding parties in foreign lands could be so repeatedly taken out. Is the U.S. simply targeting weddings purposely? Not likely. Could it reflect the fact that, despite all the discussion of the “surgical precision” of American air power, pilots have remarkably little idea what’s really going on below them or who exactly, in lands where American intelligence must be half-blind, they are aiming at? That, at least, seems likely.

Or if “they” gather in certain regions, does American intelligence just assume that the crowd must be “enemy” in nature? (As an American general said about a wedding party attacked in Western Iraq, “How many people go to the middle of the desert… to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?”) Or is it possible that, in our global war zones, a hint that enemy “suspects” might be among a party of celebrants means that the party itself is fair game, that it’s open season no matter who might be in the crowd?

In this same spirit, the U.S. drone campaigns are said to launch what in drone-speak are called “signature strikes” — that is, strikes not against identified individuals, but against “a pre-identified ‘signature’ of behavior that the U.S. links to militant activity.” In other words, the U.S. launches drone strikes against groups or individuals whose behavior simply fits a “suspect” category: young men of military age carrying weapons, for instance (in areas where carrying a weapon may be the norm no matter who you are). In a more general sense, however, the obliterated wedding party may be the true signature strike of the post 9/11 era of American war-making, the strike that should, but never will, remind Americans that the war on terror was and remains, for others in distant lands, a war of terror, a fearsome creation to which we are conveniently blind.

Consider it a record. For the period since September 11, 2001, we’re number one… in obliterating wedding parties! In those years, whether we care to know it or not, “till death do us part” has gained a far grimmer meaning.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

[Note on American air power and wedding parties: TomDispatch has attempted over the years to record and point out the cumulative nature of these “incidents.” Check out, for instance, “The Wedding Crashers,” or a 2012 piece, “It Couldn’t Happen Here, It Does Happen There.” What follows, gathered by TomDispatch’s Erika Eichelberger, are links to the other seven wedding massacres with brief descriptions of what is known: December 29, 2001, Paktia Province, Afghanistan (more than 100 revelers die in a village in Eastern Afghanistan after an attack by B-52 and B-1B bombers); May 17, 2002, Khost Province, Afghanistan (at least 10 Afghans in a wedding celebration die when U.S. helicopters and planes attack a village); July 1, 2002, Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan (at least 30, and possibly 40, celebrants die when attacked by a B-52 bomber and an AC-130 helicopter); May 20, 2004, Mukaradeeb, Iraq (at least 42 dead, including “27 members of the [family hosting the wedding ceremony], their wedding guests, and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony” in an attack by American jets); July 6, 2008, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan (at least 47 dead, 39 of them women and children, including the bride, among a party escorting that bride to the groom’s house — from a missile attack by jet aircraft); August 2008, Laghman Province, Afghanistan (16 killed, including 12 members of the family hosting the wedding, in an attack by “American bombers”); June 8, 2012, Logar Province, Afghanistan (18 killed, half of them children, when Taliban fighters take shelter amid a wedding party. This was perhaps the only case among the eight wedding incidents in which the U.S. offered an apology).]

Copyright 2013 Tom Engelhardt

By Amnesty International

20 December, 2013

@ Amnesty International

Torture, flogging, and summary killings are rife in secret prisons run in Syria by the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).

Torture, flogging, and summary killings are rife in secret prisons run in Syria

by the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham ( ISIS ).© Ayman Alèp/Demotix

Torture, flogging, and summary killings are rife in secret prisons run by the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), an armed group that controls large areas of northern Syria , said Amnesty International in a briefing published today.

ISIS , which claims to apply strict Shari’a (Islamic law) in areas it controls, has ruthlessly flouted the rights of local people. In the 18-page briefing, Rule of fear: ISIS abuses in detention in northern Syria , Amnesty International identifies seven detention facilities that ISIS uses in al-Raqqa governorate and Aleppo .

“Those abducted and detained by ISIS include children as young as eight who are held together with adults in the same cruel and inhuman conditions,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Director for the Middle East and North Africa .

Former detainees describe a shocking catalogue of abuses in which they or others were flogged with rubber generator belts or cables, tortured with electric shocks or forced to adopt a painful stress position known as aqrab (scorpion), in which a detainee’s wrists are secured together over one shoulder.

Some of those held by ISIS are suspected of theft or other crimes; others are accused of “crimes” against Islam, such as smoking cigarettes or zina, sex outside marriage. Others were seized for challenging ISIS ‘s rule or because they belonged to rival armed groups opposed to the Syrian government. ISIS is also suspected of abducting and detaining foreign nationals, including journalists covering the fighting in Syria .

Several children were among detainees who received severe floggings, according to testimonies obtained by Amnesty International. On one occasion, an anguished father had to endure screams of pain as ISIS captors tormented his son in a nearby room. Two detainees related how they witnessed a child of about 14 receive a flogging of more than 90 lashes during interrogation at Sadd al-Ba’ath, an ISIS prison in al-Raqqa governorate. Another child of about 14 who ISIS accused of stealing a motorbike was repeatedly flogged over several days.

“Flogging anyone, let alone children, is cruel and inhuman, and a gross abuse of human rights,” said Philip Luther. “ ISIS should cease its use of flogging and other cruel punishments.”

Amnesty International is calling on ISIS to end its appalling treatment of detainees and for the group’s leaders to instruct their forces to respect human rights and abide by international humanitarian law.

Several former detainees told the organization that they were seized by masked gunmen who took them to undisclosed locations, where they were held for periods of up to 55 days. Some never learnt where they were but Amnesty International has identified ISIS prisons at seven locations: Mabna al-Mohafaza, Idarat al-Markabat and al-Mer’ab, all in al-Raqqa city; Sadd al Ba’ath and al-‘Akershi oil facility, both elsewhere in al-Raqqa governorate; and Mashfa al-Atfal and Maqar Ahmed Qaddour in Aleppo .

The Sadd al-Ba’ath prison is beside a dam on the Euphrates River at al-Mansura, where the local Shari’a court judge, who invariably appeared wearing an explosives belt, has instituted a reign of terror over its detainees.

Former detainees accuse him of presiding over grotesquely unfair “trials” lasting no more than a few minutes as other detainees look on, and handing down death penalties which are subsequently carried out. At his direction, detainees have been mercilessly flogged; on at least one occasion, he is said to have personally joined in the flogging.

At al-‘Akershi oil facility, which ISIS also appears to use as a military training ground, detainees were subjected to the aqrab as a means of torture, according to the testimonies of two men who were held there in recent months. One spent 40 days in solitary confinement, for part of which he was chained up in a tiny room full of electrical equipment with fuel on the floor.

“After years in which they were prey to the brutality of the al-Assad regime, the people of al-Raqqa and Aleppo are now suffering under a new form of tyranny imposed on them by ISIS , in which arbitrary detention, torture and executions have become the order of the day,” said Philip Luther.

Amnesty International is calling on the international community to take concrete steps to block the flow of arms and other support to ISIS and other armed groups implicated in committing war crimes and other serious human rights abuses.

“The Turkish government, in particular, should prevent its territory being used by ISIS to bring in arms and recruits to Syria ,” said Philip Luther.

“As well, Gulf states that have voiced support for the armed groups fighting against the Syrian government should take action to prevent arms flows, equipment or other support reaching ISIS in view of its appalling human rights record.”

Amnesty International also renews its call to the Syrian government to allow unfettered access to Syria by the independent international Commission of Inquiry and by international humanitarian and human rights organizations, and to end its violations of human rights and international law, including the use of torture in its own detention centers.

By Vacy Vlazna

18 December, 2013

Countercurrents.org

Your Holiness

In desperation, in December a campaign was launched appealing to you to help release the suffering people of Gaza from the genocidal strangulation of the Israeli seven year blockade.

There is no world leader other than yourself who possesses the moral strength, the political freedom and the spiritual imperative to help Gaza. There is noone of global influence to whom the Gazans can turn except Your Holiness.

Through your words and actions, we see the same star that heralded the advent of Gandhi, of Mandela, of Jesus. It’s light – the spiritual simplicity of love for the human family, for the oppressed, for the poor, is again penetrating human hearts and consciences.

It shone bright when you went to Lampedusa, the refugee purgatory, drawing world attention to the “globalization of indifference”

“We are a society that has forgotten the experience of weeping, of “suffering with”: the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep!…..We are accustomed to the suffering of others, it doesn’t concern us, it’s none of our business…..Herod sowed death in order to defend his own well-being, his own soap bubble. And this continues to repeat itself.” (Lampedusa Homile,)

Today’s Israeli Herods have systematically made Gaza a hell on earth by imposing a blockade in violation of international law that has made Gaza an open air concentration camp imprisoning 1.7 million innocent people, half of whom are children.

As the world makes merry this festive season, the people of Gaza have deliberately been deprived of fuel by Israel for two months: they suffer in freezing temperatures, with no electricity, no light, no heat, scarcity of food, no essential services, when the waste water treatment plant stopped functioning sewage flooded the streets- then kicking families while they are down so low, Israel opened dams east of Gaza drowning hope and the last vestiges of normal life.

Imagine truly if this Christmas you were were in Gaza, ‘suffering with” Gazan families, and you have no place to run, can’t get medical help for your hungry and cold children, can’t cook, clean their clothes, keep them dry, warm, safe, happy.

Meanwhile the Christian kings of the ‘free world’, Obama, Cameron, Merkel, Hollande, Abbott will attend Christmas mass under a blaze of cameras and their own cruel hypocrisy in full knowledge that the Gaza humanitarian disaster, unlike the Philippines, is man-made. Herod-made. Nor they will lift a finger to bring the gifts of justice, compassion and love to Gaza’s immiserated manger.

Speaking of ‘manger’, doesn’t it strike you as bizarre and unChristian that Christians have for decades overlooked or tolerated that Bethlehem, the birthplace of the Divine Child, is in illegal occupied territory and surrounded by the illegal Annexation/Apartheid wall enforced by the Israeli military?

And speaking of Palestine’s military occupier, unconscionably, Israeli Herods sow death to raise the profits of Israel’s armament juggernaut. In his recent shocking documentary, The Lab, Yotam Feldman exposes how Palestinians have been dehumanised as sacrificial guinea pigs:

I think the main product Israelis are selling, especially in the last decade, is experience… the testing of the products, the experience is the main thing they [customers] are coming to buy. They want the missile that was shot in the last operation in Gaza or the rifle that was used in the last West Bank incursion.

Inevitably, the profits soared in 2009/10 after surgical strikes by F16s, attack helicopters drones, and phosphorous bombs slaughtered 1400 Gazans, one third of whom were children and again in November 2012. The blood and the weeping never dries up in the Gazan soul.

The blockade of Gaza is the crime of the 21st century and is integral to Israel’s 65 years of war crimes, crimes against humanity, apartheid polices, state terrorism and illegal colonisation perpetrated against the indigenous people of Palestine. Gaza/Palestine is also the great lament in the sacred heart of humanity. It is crying out. Will you respond? Please.

In your Lampedusa homily, you pose two questions that call our spirit to live in solidarity with the poor, with the oppressed, “Adam, where are you?” “Where is the blood of your brother?”. These questions are versions of the quintessential question, Who am I?

And in this instance who is Pope Francis? Whose shoes do you step into – The Fisherman’s or caesar’s?

The signs of your papacy are hope-filled.

The 1968 film, The Shoes of the Fisherman, based on Morris West’s novel, portrays a spiritually pragmatic pope of profound compassion who sells off the Vatican treasures to alleviate the lethal poverty of Communist China.

The film also drew inspiration from the Archbishop of Venice, the beloved Albino Luciani, who later became, for a shimmer of time and light, Pope John Paul I. Over the years, Luciani had condemned “the hypocrisy of the Vatican treasures”. (White Light, Dark Night, p144, Lucien Gregoire)

Of Luciani and Wojtyla ( Pope John Paul II), Gregoire writes,

During the twenty years they served as bishop and cardinal, each of their countries suffered from an immense orphan problem – about two million in each country. During that time Wojtyla built and dedicated fifty-three churches and not a single orphanage. Luciani, on the other hand, built and dedicated forty-four orphanages and not a single church.” (p 141)

Like Luciani, you, Pope Francis, mingle with your flock and criticise the ‘idolatry of money’ and the ‘new tyranny’ of capitalism.

Unlike the ultraconservative John Paul II and Benedict, who between them destroyed Latin American liberation theology and plunged the Church into the dark ages of Opus Dei fascism, you are rebuilding the church as a ‘house of joy’ and taking a path never travelled by previous popes.

Gandhi fasted and marched with humility for justice. Mandela, with humility, sacrificed 27 years for justice. So when you see the glittering lights of the Christmas tree in St Peter’s Square, may you reflect on the wretched darkness in Gaza and know that peace on earth doesn’t exist without peace in Gaza and all of Palestine. Peace for Palestinians is your and our business.

Gaza doesn’t need Vatican treasures, it needs liberation to live fully and humanly.

We, who respect justice and human dignity, have just lost the presence of Mandela but, Inch’Allah and God Willing, we have gained you, Pope Francis.

Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 199-2001.

By Dr. Abdullah Al-Ahsan

18 December 2013

Prison authorities in Bangladesh have hurriedly carried out the execution of Abdul Qadir Mollah, an Assistant Secretary General of Jamaat-i-Islami Bangladesh (JIB), following an equally swiftly conducted hearing by a full bench of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court which upheld his death sentence. The execution was carried out at 10-01 pm Thursday, December 12. Earlier Mollah was arrested on October 14, 2010 without any charges. Six cases were filed against him on October 28, 2012 and on February 5, 2013 he was given life imprisonment for crime committed against humanity. This was followed by the demand for his death sentence by a small segment of population. A delighted government responded amending the constitution (ICT Act 2013) to facilitate death sentence for Mollah and appealed against the life imprisonment on September 17, 2013. The government secured its desired verdict and immediately announced that he would be executed at 12:01 am Tuesday, December 10. Immediately the government came under huge international pressure. Although the country’s Attorney General claimed that there was no scope for appeal in such cases, under pressure the Supreme Court Appellate Division met but without much discussion it upheld the earlier verdict and thus fulfilling the government’s desire. According to many lawyers this became a case of judicial murder.

The authorities not only have carried out the execution in a hurry, they also buried the dead body swiftly. According to one of the two sons of Mollah, some thugs belonging to the ruling party surrounded the family house in attempt to prevent them joining the funeral. The thugs turned violent when the family members tried to get out for joining the funeral. At that stage the police intervened, but only to arrest 16 members of his immediate family. Within hours Mollah was buried at his ancestral home several hours driving distance from where he was executed. His sons and other immediate family members were not allowed to join the funeral prayer.

Why were the authorities in so much rush? There is no other explanation but to accept the popular view that this and all other such cases (there are a number of other cases currently being tried) are politically motivated. The government from the very beginning of these trials has ensured that no international observer is allowed into the court, although the government called it “International War Crime Tribunal (ICT).” In fact, the expression in our title “a deplorable act by a deplorable government” was originally used by the British international lawyer Toby Cadman for this trial. Earlier Cadman’s attempts to visit Bangladesh were curbed by the government. The government also prevented Turkish lawmakers who tried to observe the trial process. The whole process is a sham.

What is Government’s Interest?

The government’s interests in ICT have been under discussion in many national and international forums. The story of Skype conversation on the subject between the trial judge and a Europe based lawyer has been exposed by the Economist (Dec 12, 2012) and a Bangladeshi daily. Also the story of a prosecution witness who decided to speak the truth and was abducted by plain-cloth police from the court is also quite well-known. The witness was found in an Indian prison three months later. India’s role in Bangladeshi politics is very important subject for discussion: the current government seems to enjoy India’s unconditional patronage.

What does the government want to achieve? Does the government want to take advantage of international media’s attention in South Africa to avoid immediate criticism? Many pundits have suggested this: Clearly the government’s desire is the total elimination of JIB from the political landscape of the country. This is because JIB’s participation in all elections since the end of the dictatorial rule of President Ershad, indicates that it holds the political balance in the country and its members can’t be bought. The authorities have already banned JIB from participating in the forthcoming election which is due within a month. And currently JIB is in coalition with the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). Abdul Qadir Mollah’s execution seems to be a part of government’s design to ensure its continuation in power. The government has India’s blessings in this design: this has been made public not only by pro-Indian think-tanks, but also by visiting Indian officials to Bangladesh. On its part, India seems to enjoy US approval and the US ambassador to Bangladesh has been visiting Delhi for consultation on Bangladeshi affairs. However, the USA seems to hold the view that JIB and its supporters are not Islamist extremists and preventing them from the political process would encourage extremism in the region. This seems to be a dilemma for both Bangladeshi and Indian governments.

Potentials for Violence

Violence has already erupted in many places in the country following the execution of Mollah. But in the context of Bangladesh where political violence is common, particularly in the wake of an election, these acts might be considered negligible. JIB has called for protest marches throughout the country but has urged supporters to restrain from violence. In fact, Mollah himself is reported to have urged his sons and his lawyer on December 10, the day he was scheduled to be executed, to convey the message to the outside world that his supporters and sympathizers should not get involved in violence. His lawyer has conveyed the message saying, “all his concern was about the Islamic Movement. All throughout the last meeting he was smiling like a normal person. But he wept several times only for the Movement and Movement only.” However, it is difficult to predict how far JIB will succeed in containing violence. Last Friday hundreds and thousands of people throughout the country attended Salatul Janaza al-Ghaib (funeral prayer without the dead body) for Mollah and little violence was reported.

However, in many cases violence in the past has erupted due to provocations by law enforcement agencies and ruling party thugs. The government has been citing the example of Egypt where the law enforcement agencies are blaming the Islamists for violence. The government is also using the media to justify execution of Mollah by conducting interviews of those whose relatives were killed in 1971 without any reference to the way Mollah’s trial has been conducted. Many observers have also suggested that the government is looking for an excuse for declaring emergency. An emergency rule would enable the government to postpone the general elections which is due in a few weeks time. Isn’t the government killing democracy in the process?

 

International community’s response to Mollah’s Execution

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has expressed his shock at the execution of Mollah. Earlier High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay had called for a stay of execution just 3 hours before the scheduled execution by an urgent press release. The UN High Commissioner urged the government to not carry out the execution of Molla because ICT “did not meet international standards for imposition of death penalty (UN News Center Dec 10, 2013).” This prompted other international leaders including John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, and the Turkish Prime Minister Erdugan to call the Bangladeshi prime minister to halt the execution. All these efforts went in vein. After the execution the Amnesty International (AI) issued a statement saying, “The execution of … Mollah should never have happened.” Quoting one of its researchers AI said “The country is on a razor’s edge… with pre-election tensions running high and almost non-stop street protests.”

It is noteworthy that the generally Islam-bashing human-right agencies and the Islamophobic media too are very critical of the Bangladeshi authorities on this issue. This is because the government of Bangladesh has crossed all limits of civilized behavior and nobody, except perhaps India, wants to be part of this heinous act. Prime Minister Hasina has cited the example of Egypt in justifying her actions against Islamists such as Mollah and other opposition parties. She appears to argue that such actions are needed for the sake of democracy and security. As for India, India has always camouflaged its hypocrisy behind its staged democracy. Its treatments of the people of Kashmir and Sikkim are blatant example of India’s double standards. But Bangladesh does not seem to have mastered this “quality” and it has to conduct an election soon. That is why Bangladesh authorities have come under criticism by human rights agencies and the international press. However, it would be hard for the country to survive long with such behavior. The government is already in trouble with its own coalition partners on the mechanism of holding forthcoming election. The government may not last too long.

Lessons from Mandela’ Legacy

When the world is engaged in saying the final farewell to Nelson Mandela one wonders whether he would have a message on Abdul Qadir Mollah’s execution. After all Mollah has been accused of collaborating with Pakistan in 1971 against the struggle for independence and self-determination of the people of Bangladesh. Mandela too championed similar cause. In a statement on the occasion of Mandela’s death Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declared Mandela a true Gandhian. Would Mandela or Gandhi have approved the kind of politics that India and the government of Bangladesh are playing?

Supporters and sympathizers of Mollah too should consider whether they have something to learn from Mandela’s legacy. No, Mandela’s struggle was not absolutely violence-free, but Mandela’s approval of violence was very limited. Mandela also was just one-term president of the country. Are the supporters and sympathizers going to learn from such an example?

Dr. Abdullah Al- Ahsan is the Vice President of International Movement for a Just World (JUST).