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By Tom Mcnamara

19 December 2012

@ Sabbah Report: http://sabbah.biz/mt/?p=16130

Once more tragedy befalls America. But this time the tragedy is even more bitter due to the fact that such a large number of young children were involved. A gunman, identified as Adam Lanza, shot and killed 26 people, 20 of them children – all between the ages of 5 and 10 – at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on the 14th of December. The attack ended with the gunman committing suicide. It was the Nation’s second deadliest school shooting.

Most people can’t imagine the evil and insanity needed to drive a person to commit such a heinous act. The murder of innocent people is reprehensible, but it is even more so when carried out on the most vulnerable elements of our society, children. Most disturbing of all is the well planned, deliberate and determined manner in which the murders appear to have been carried out. Early reports state that the gunman was highly accurate, leaving only one wounded survivor alive at the school.

President Obama, reading a prepared statement, was overcome with emotion. “Our hearts are broken,” he said. The victims were “beautiful little kids. They had their entire lives ahead of them: birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.” It was at this moment that the President reached up to the corner of one eye, touching an apparent tear.

On April 3rd, 1991, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 687, imposing sanctions on Iraq as a result of its invasion of Kuwait. This resulted in Iraq being economically isolated from the rest of the world community. But by the end of 1995 there were reports that the sanctions were having a devastating effect on the populace. A study in The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association, reported that up to 576,000 Iraqi children may have died since the end of the first Gulf War as a result of the sanctions imposed by the Security Council. UNICEF, in 1999, estimated that at least 500,000 children died who would have otherwise normally lived had it not been for the sanctions in place. The Security Council, led by the United States, rejected numerous appeals by Iraq to lift the sanctions.

Bottom of Form 1

In 2003 the US invaded Iraq for a second time. The second Gulf War was a bloody and brutal affair, costing the lives of over 4,400 US soldiers, with almost 32,000 wounded. But these figures pale in comparison to the suffering experienced (once more) by the Iraqi people. A study released in 2006 found that there were 655,000 more deaths in Iraq than normally would have been expected had coalition forces not invaded in March 2003. This figure was more than 20 times higher than a figure that then President George Bush was using. The study found that most victims were between the ages of 15 and 44.

Nowhere was the fighting more intense in Iraq than at the battle of Fallujah (I & II). The American attack was in response to the murder of 4 Blackwater contractors, who also happened to be ex-special forces. The first battle lasted from April 5 to April 30, 2004, and was primarily a Marine operation. It was some of the most intense fighting that US soldiers had seen since the battle of Hue City in Vietnam. A local Iraqi official reported that at least 600 civilians were killed, with 1,250 more wounded.

The second attack on Fallujah involved seven Marine battalions, plus two Army battalions, and was a multi-phased affair. Combat operations started on November 7, 2004, with fighting lasting until the end of December that same year. An estimated 3,000 insurgents were killed or captured, with 70 US soldiers killed in action (a total of 151 US soldiers died in both battles).

But disturbing revelations came out after the fact. There were reports that the US had used chemical weapons, a war crime. A documentary by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, entitled “Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre” provided troubling evidence to support these claims. Photographs, videos and interviews with US soldiers who were part of the attack on Fallujah purported to show that phosphorus bombs were used on the city. There were also accusations that incendiary bombs known as Mark 77, a type of napalm, were also used. One US soldier is quoted as saying, “I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone … I saw the burned bodies of women and children.”

More damning was an article in the March – April 2005 edition of Field Artillery Magazine. In it, officers of the 2nd Infantry’s fire support team reported that “White phosphorous [WP] proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE [high explosive]. We fired ‘shake and bake’ missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out.” A reporter with California’s North County Times, who was embedded with the Marines during the Battle of Fallujah in April 2004, reported seeing the same thing.

There were also reports that Coalition forces relied heavily on rounds comprised of depleted uranium (DU). DU is a by-product of the process used to manufacture enriched uranium for nuclear reactors and weapons. DU has 40 percent less radioactivity than natural uranium, but it has the same chemical toxicity and contains ionising radiation.

A medical study conducted on Fallujah after the battles (Busby et al 2010) confirmed anecdotal reports of an increase in infant mortality, birth defects and childhood cancer rates. It found that Fallujah had almost 11 times as many major birth defects in newborns than world averages. A prime suspect in all of this is what the report calls “the use of novel weapons,” possibly those containing “depleted uranium.” The increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in Fallujah are greater than those reported in the survivors of the US atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

The US has now been fighting in Afghanistan for over 11 years (longer than the Soviet Union). A key component of US strategy in the Afghanistan / Pakistan theatre, or “AfPak” as the region is commonly known, is targeted drone strikes. America’s drone policy has reportedly killed between 474 and 881 civilians in the region, including 176 children. But apparently the targeted killing of children is now accepted military practice.

 

Army Lt. Col. Marion Carrington of 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and who is assisting the Afghan police, is quoted as saying, “It kind of opens our aperture. In addition to looking for military-age males, it’s looking for children with potential hostile intent.”

We watch the horrible images of pain and suffering coming out of a small town in Connecticut where 20 children were murdered less than 2 weeks before Christmas. We have no choice but to collectively mourn and take part in the families’ grief. That someone would engage in the systematic and premeditated murder of children is unfathomable and an abomination against everything it means to be human.

But the misery and torment that befell Newton can be multiplied a thousand fold across the Arab world. American policy and actions have resulted in the deaths (i.e. murder) of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent children. The deaths of these children can be considered as war crimes and a crime against humanity of the highest order. They should shock and outrage us, compelling us to demand an immediate change in American foreign policy.

But in order for that to happen one must first believe that Arabs cry for their children too.

Tom McNamara is an Assistant Professor at the ESC Rennes School of Business, France, and a Visiting Lecturer at the French National Military Academy at Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan, France.

By Richard Falk

19 December 2012

 

Once again, perhaps in the most anguishing manner ever, the deadly shooting of 20 children (and 8 adults) between the ages of 5 and 10 at the Newton, Connecticut Sandy Hook Elementary School, has left America in a stunned posture of tragic bemusement. Why should such incidents be happening here, especially in such a peaceful and affluent town? The shock is accompanied by spontaneous outpourings of grief, bewilderment, empathy, communal espirit, and a sense of national tragedy. Such an unavoidably dark mood is officially confirmed by the well-crafted emotional message of the president, Barack Obama.

 

The template of response has become a national liturgy in light of the dismal pattern of public response: media sensationalism of a totalizing kind, at once enveloping, sentimental, and tasteless (endless interviewing of surviving children and teachers, and even family members of victims), but dutifully avoiding deeper questions relating to guns, violence, and cultural stimulants and conditioning. What are called ‘difficult issues’ in the media reduce to what some refer to as ‘reasonable gun control’ (that is, a ban on assault weapons, large magazine clips, and somewhat stiffer gun registration rules) and to improved procedures for identifying those suffering the kind of mental disorders that could erupt in violent sociopathic behavior. These are sensible steps to take, but so far below the level of credible diagnosis as to promote collective denial rather than constituting a responsible effort to restore a semblance of security to our most cherished institutions (schools, churches, family dwellings). It is ironically relevant that almost simultaneous with the massacre at Newtown there occurred an attack on children in an elementary school in the Chinese city of Xinyang in the province of Henan, approximately 300 miles south of Beijing. The attacker slashed 22 children with a knife, and significantly there were no fatalities, suggesting the important differences in outcome that reflect the weapons deployed by an assailant. Although this is an anecdotal bit of evidence, it is suggestive that strict gun control is the least

that should be done in light of recent experience, with seven instances of mass violence reported in the United States during 2012. It should be noted that Connecticut was one of the few states in the country that had enacted ‘reasonable’ gun control laws, but clearly without a sufficient impact.

 

If what is being proposed by politicians and pundits is so far below what seems prudent there is fostered a societal illusion of problem-solving while sidestepping the deeper causes, and the truly ‘difficult issues.’ It would be a mistake to attribute the overall concerns entirely to the violent texture of the American public imagination, but surely inquiry must address this atrocity-inducing cultural environment. America leads the world in per capita gun possession, violent crime, and prison population, and is among the few developed countries that continues to impose capital punishment. Beyond this, America vindicates torture and glamorizes violence in films, video games, and popular culture. Political leaders support ‘enhanced interrogation’ of terror suspects, and claim an authority to order the execution of alleged terrorist advocates in foreign countries by drone strikes oblivious to the sovereign rights of foreign states, a practice that if attempted against American targets would produce a massive retaliatory response preceded by an outburst of self-righteous outrage. At work, here, is American exceptionalism when it comes to lethal violence, with a claimed right to do unto others what others are forbidden to do unto us, a defiance of that most fundamental norm of civilized peoples an inversion of ‘the golden rule’ and basic biblical commandments.

 

There are other features of American political culture that are disturbing, including the uncritical celebration of American soldiers as ‘the finest young Americans,’ ‘true heroes,’ and the like. Or of America as the greatest country that ever existed, such a claim especially in light of recent history, is a rather pure form of hubris long understood as the fallibility that comes with excessive individual or collective inability to recognize and correct one’s own faults. It is certainly true that the government is asking American servicemen to risk their lives and mental health in ambiguous circumstances that produce aberrant behavior. To undertake counterinsurgency missions in distant countries at a lesser stage of development and much different cultural standards invites deep confusion, incites national resistance and hatred in the combat zones, and prompts responses driven by fear and rage. Recall such incidents in Afghanistan as American servicemen urinating on dead Afghan corpses, burning the Koran, and random shootings of Afghan unarmed villagers. In effect, this ethos of violence against others, constrained by the most minimal standards of accountability has to be part of the violence inducing behavior that is these days haunting civic life here in America.

 

In effect, until we as Americans look in the mirror with a critical eye we will not begin to comprehend the violence of Newtown, Portland, Aurora, Oak Creek, Tucson, Columbine, Virginia Tech. No amount of tears, however genuine, can make our children and citizens safer in the future, and even gestures of gun control seem likely, if treated as solutions rather than palliatives, are likely to be no more than a spit in a national ocean of sanctioned violence. What may be most depressing is that it seems ‘utopian,’ that is, beyond the horizon of possibility, to advocate the repeal of the Second Amendment on the right to bear arms or to renounce the kill doctrines associated with drone warfare or counterinsurgency rules of engagement.  Only moves of such magnitude would exhibit the political will to take measures commensurate with this disruptive and horrifying pattern of violence that has been an increasing source of national torment.

 

President Obama has called, as he has on prior occasions, for “meaningful action,” which is too vague to be of much encouragement. Almost certainly the main effort in American public space will be to explore the individuality of this shocking crime by way of mental disorder or tensions at home rather than to address its systemic character, which remains a taboo inquiry.

 

By Alexander Smoltczyk

18 December 2012

@ Spiegelonline

The guns have been silent in Iraq for years, but in Basra and Fallujah the number of birth defects and cancer cases is on the rise. Locals believe that American uranium-tipped munitions are to blame and some researchers think they might be right.

It sounds at first as if the old man were drunk. Or perhaps as though he had been reading Greek myths. But Askar Bin Said doesn’t read anything, especially not books, and there is no alcohol in Basra. In fact, he says, he saw the creatures he describes with his own eyes: “Some had only one eye in the forehead. Or two heads. One had a tail like a skinned lamb. Another one looked like a perfectly normal child, but with a monkey’s face. Or the girl whose legs had grown together, half fish, half human.”

The babies Askar Bin Said describes were brought to him. He washed them and wrapped them in shrouds, and then he buried them in the dry soil, littered with bits of plastic and can lids, of his own cemetery, which has been in his family for five generations. It’s a cemetery only for children.

Though they are small, the graves are crowded so tightly together that they are almost on top of one another. They look as if someone had overturned toy wheelbarrows full of cement and then scratched the names and dates of death into it before it hardened. In many cases, there isn’t even room for the birth date. But it doesn’t really matter, because in most cases the two dates are the same.

There are several thousand graves in the cemetery, and another five to 10 are added every day. The large number of graves is certainly conspicuous, says Bin Said. But, he adds, there “really isn’t an explanation” for why there are so many dead and deformed newborn babies in Basra.

Others, though, do have an idea why. According to a study published in September in the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology, a professional journal based in the southwestern German city of Heidelberg, there was a sevenfold increase in the number of birth defects in Basra between 1994 and 2003. Of 1,000 live births, 23 had birth defects.

Double and Triple Cancers

Similarly high values are reported from Fallujah, a city that was fiercely contested in the 2003 war. According to the Heidelberg study, the concentration of lead in the milk teeth of sick children from Basra was almost three times as high as comparable values in areas where there was no fighting.

Never before has such a high rate of neural tube defects (“open back”) been recorded in babies as in Basra, and the rate continues to rise. The number of hydrocephalus (“water on the brain”) cases among newborns is six times as high in Basra as it is in the United States, the study concludes.

Jawad al-Ali has worked as a cancer specialist at the Sadr Teaching Hospital (formerly the Saddam Hospital), housed in a sinister-looking building in Basra, since 1991. He remembers the period after the first Gulf war over Kuwait. “It isn’t just that the number of cancer cases suddenly increased. We also had double and triple cancers, that is, patients with tumors on both kidneys and in the stomach. And there were also familial clusters, that is, entire families that were affected.” He is convinced that this relates to the use of uranium ammunition. “There is a connection between cancer and radiation. Sometimes it takes 10 or 20 years before the consequences manifest themselves.”

The term uranium ammunition refers to projectiles whose alloys or cores are made with “depleted,” or weakly radioactive uranium, also known as DU. When German soldiers are deployed overseas, they are given the following information: “Uranium munitions are armor-piercing projectiles with a core of depleted uranium. Because of its high density, this core provides the projectile with very high momentum and enables it to pierce the armor of combat tanks.”

When DU explodes, it produces a very fine uranium dust. When children play near wrecked tanks, they can absorb this dust through their skin, their mouths and their airways. A 2002 study at the University of Bremen in northern Germany found that chromosomal changes had occurred in Gulf war veterans who had come into contact with uranium ammunition.

The German Defense Ministry counters that it isn’t the radiation that constitutes a health threat, but the “chemical toxicity of uranium.”

Living in a Garbage Dump

London’s Royal Society presented one of the most comprehensive studies on the issue in 2002, but it only addressed the potential threat to soldiers. It concluded that the risk of radiation damage is “very low,” as is the risk of chronic kidney toxicity from uranium dust.

This may reassure soldiers, but not Mohammed Haidar. He lives in Kibla, a district in Basra which, like others in the city, resembles nothing so much as a garbage dump. Kibla is a neighborhood of squalid, make-shift shops and shacks — with shimmering, greenish liquid flowing through open sewers and plastic containers filled with rotting material.

Haidar, who teaches mathematics at a high school, could afford to live in a better neighborhood. But he spends every spare dinar on treatment for his daughter Rukya. The three-year-old is sitting on his lap, resembling a ventriloquist’s doll. She is an adorable little girl with pigtails and ribbons in her hair. But she can’t walk or speak properly.

When Haidar turns his daughter around, two openings in her back become visible. She has a cleft spine, the externally visible sign of hydrocephalus, as well as an implanted drainage tube to remove excess cerebrospinal fluid. In Germany, children with cases like hers are often treated with prenatal surgery, but not in Basra. In fact, Haidar and his wife are glad that Rukya is even alive. She is their first and only child. “We both grew up in Basra. I hold the United States responsible. They used DU. My child isn’t an isolated case,” Haidar says.

The term “DU” seems to be just as widespread in Basra as birth defects are.

DU ammunition was used twice in the Basra district: outside the city in the 1991 war, and in the city proper in 2003, when British troops were advancing toward the airport. West Basra is the urban district with the highest incidence of leukemia among infants.

“Those who were children in the first war are adults today,” says Khairiya Abu Yassin of the city’s environmental agency. She estimates that 200 tons of DU ammunition were used in Basra. The Defense Ministry in London claims that British troops used only about two tons of DU ammunition during the war. Either way, the remains of tanks destroyed in the war with the help of DU ammunition littered the streets until 2008.

Propaganda Fodder

It was impossible to keep children and salvagers away from the wrecks, says Abu Yassin. “We installed signs that read: Caution — Radiation. But people don’t take a threat seriously when it doesn’t act like the bullet from a gun.”

DU is a sensitive issue, and not every doctor in Basra is willing to go on record commenting on it. The reasons for the reticence have to do with the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein: The alleged radiation threat coming from remnants of armor-piercing ammunition provided popular propaganda fodder.

In the United States, no major newspaper has yet published a story on the genetic disorders in Fallujah. Britain’s Guardian, on the other hand, criticized the silence of “the West,” calling it a moral failure, and cited chemist Chris Busby, who said that the Fallujah health crisis represented “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied.” Busby is the co-author of two studies on the subject.

Still, it is difficult to precisely pinpoint the cause of the defects. Spinal chord abnormality can also be triggered by a folic acid deficiency at the beginning of pregnancy, for example. Furthermore, very few Iraqis can afford regular pregnancy exams. As a result, many defective embryos are carried to full term, in contrast to what normally happens in Europe or the US.

Wolfgang Hoffmann, an epidemiologist at the University of Greifswald in northeastern Germany, has been collaborating with fellow scientists in Basra for years. “Birth defects often look very disturbing in photos,” he says. “But they are always isolated cases and are not necessarily useful for identifying trends.”

Hoffmann cites the lack of comprehensive data and questions the epidemiological reliability of reports. He does believe, however, that indications of increasing rates of cancer in Basra should be taken very seriously, partly because the data for Basra is more reliable.

Searching for the Truth

The “plausible risk factors” for childhood leukemia, says Hoffmann, “undoubtedly include the contaminated environment, but also the lack of prevention, the trauma suffered by parents and the devastated medical infrastructure.” The statistical increase in the number of children with leukemia since 1993 is also a function of cases not having been fully documented before 2003.

Janan Hassan, an oncologist with the Basra Children’s Hospital, participated in a study that was just published in the Medical Journal of the Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. It states that although the rate of childhood leukemia in Basra remained stable between 2004 and 2009, compared with other countries in the region, there is a trend toward very young children contracting the disease.

As such, she believes that objections are only partially applicable. There is a “strong increase” of genetic defects as a cause of leukemia, she notes. “And the cases are coming from precisely the areas where there was heavy fighting. How do you explain that? By saying that reporting requirements have changed?”

Sabria Salman named her son Muslim, but it didn’t protect him. Muslim, now 10, recently underwent surgery to remove a 500-gram tumor on his upper arm. He doesn’t scream in pain anymore. Instead, the boy has a permanent grin on his face, as if he no longer had the strength to change his expression. He perspires heavily and has trouble breathing. There is a drain tube protruding from his left arm, and the right arm is wrapped in a dressing that’s stained red along the edges.

Salman calls it “cancer in the muscles.” The boy broke his shoulder two years ago, and since then his body has made little progress towards healing.

‘Bombs in Our Neighborhood’

The hospital pays for the chemotherapy, although radiation therapy would be more effective for his tumor. But radiation is only available abroad or in Baghdad, where there is a five-month waiting list — and the family doesn’t have that much time anymore. The mother prays to Allah, and when the interpreter asks her who is to blame for her son’s affliction, she says: “The war is to blame. The pollution. There were many bombs in our neighborhood.”

Uranium may be a factor, but other substances used in the production of ammunition and bombs are also implicated, toxic heavy metals like lead and mercury. “The bombardment of Basra and Fallujah may have increased the population’s exposure to metals, possibly resulting in the current increase in birth defects,” states the Heidelberg study.

Furthermore, when the Rumaila oil field near Basra was set on fire in 2003, a cloud of soot full of carcinogenic particles drifted across the city. And another factor could also be at play. Since Saddam was overthrown, Iraq’s neighbors, Iran, Syria and Turkey, have diverted substantially more water from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. The current in the Shatt-al-Arab, formed by the confluence of the two rivers, is now so weak that salt water penetrates inland from the Persian Gulf all the way to Basra.

This means that wastewater from industrial facilities downstream from Basra, like the Iranian oil refinery in Abadan, are no longer being adequately diluted, increasing the concentration of heavy metals in groundwater.

Abu Ammar lives with his family on the grounds of Saddam’s former navy command center. The quarters are cramped, with 10 people in a room, and the situation of several other families on the grounds is no better. It is yet another impoverished Basra neighborhood — the riches of the Basra oil wells, omnipresent in the neighborhood in the shape of stinking fumes, have yet to trickle down to the people.

Three Eyes for Three Children

Ammar has spread out a plastic rug on the floor and placed a can of 7-Up and a pastry for each of his visitors on the rug. The family — or what is left of it — squats around the rug. Saddam’s thugs executed two of Ammar’s brothers. The cousin sitting next to him still has a piece of shrapnel from an attack wedged behind his eye, the mother died of grief, his wife no longer goes outside — “and these are our children…,” he says.

He points to a 21-year-old woman, a seven-year-old girl and a little boy, sitting next to each other. They don’t have the same parents, but all three have the same narrow faces, and together they have only three eyes.

The sockets of their missing eyes look like the inside of an oyster, milky and shapeless. The young woman, Madia, attends the local college. She doesn’t like going there, she says, even though she covers half of her face with her veil. “What caused this? I think my mother inhaled something chemical when I was inside of her,” says Madia.

It’s easy to assign the blame for these eerie birth defects to something called “DU ammunition,” made in the USA. It’s easier than thinking about the deleterious effects of lead and mercury in the soil and the tomatoes, or of the soot in the air and the toxic materials in the water. But that doesn’t relieve those involved in the war from responsibility. It isn’t enough to declare a war to be over. Even though Iraq now has elections and the tyrant has been hanged, the war is still in the soil, in the air and in the children.

Omran Habib heads the Basra Cancer Research Group. He earned his Ph.D. in London and now works as an epidemiologist at the University of Basra Hospital. “The war did an enormous amount of damage here,” he says. “DU is certainly not good for our health. Nevertheless, even the presence of uranium in the urine of patients doesn’t imply causation.”

A Bundle in White

The World Health Organization (WHO) is currently assembling a report on DU ammunition. It will reflect the current state of research on the issue, but it will hardly provide any new insights. With the help of the University of Greifswald, a cancer registry has been developed for the Basra region and will serve as the basis for all future study. Still, even as further research is needed, if only for the children’s sake, it will come too late for many.

It’s certainly too late for the body lying inside a little white bundle of material, tied together at both ends like a piece of candy, lying on a pile of dirt along the edge of the children’s cemetery in Basra. It was supposed to be his first son, says the father, standing next to the body. Yesterday the child was still moving inside the mother’s stomach. Today the father was simply handed a bundle.

The body-washer on duty sighs loudly while digging the grave, hoping to increase his baksheesh. Then he places the bundle into the hole, says a few words of prayer, makes some adjustments to the bundle and covers it with earth. Off to the side, a chicken is pecking at a piece of a “Capri Sun” container sticking out of the soil.

Afterwards the men smoke. The father is given a piece of cardboard and writes down the name of his son, copying it from the combined birth and death certificate they gave him at the hospital. The gravedigger will scratch the name into the cement. The boy was going to be named Hussein Ali. The father writes the name of his dead child for the first and last time.

The man remains motionless. Who wonders about blame at such a moment? He seems empty, completely at a loss and robbed of a tiny life.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

URL:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/researchers-studying-high-rates-of-cancer-and-birth-defects-in-iraq-a-873225.html

By Liza Long

17 December 12

@ The Blue Review

Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants.

“I can wear these pants,” he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises.

“They are navy blue,” I told him. “Your school’s dress code says black or khaki pants only.”

“They told me I could wear these,” he insisted. “You’re a stupid bitch. I can wear whatever pants I want to. This is America. I have rights!”

“You can’t wear whatever pants you want to,” I said, my tone affable, reasonable. “And you definitely cannot call me a stupid bitch. You’re grounded from electronics for the rest of the day. Now get in the car, and I will take you to school.”

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan-they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn’t have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don’t know what’s wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He’s been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

At the start of seventh grade, Michael was accepted to an accelerated program for highly gifted math and science students. His IQ is off the charts. When he’s in a good mood, he will gladly bend your ear on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to the differences between Einsteinian and Newtonian physics to Doctor Who. He’s in a good mood most of the time. But when he’s not, watch out. And it’s impossible to predict what will set him off.

Several weeks into his new junior high school, Michael began exhibiting increasingly odd and threatening behaviors at school. We decided to transfer him to the district’s most restrictive behavioral program, a contained school environment where children who can’t function in normal classrooms can access their right to free public babysitting from 7:30-1:50 Monday through Friday until they turn 18.

The morning of the pants incident, Michael continued to argue with me on the drive. He would occasionally apologize and seem remorseful. Right before we turned into his school parking lot, he said, “Look, Mom, I’m really sorry. Can I have video games back today?”

“No way,” I told him. “You cannot act the way you acted this morning and think you can get your electronic privileges back that quickly.”

His face turned cold, and his eyes were full of calculated rage. “Then I’m going to kill myself,” he said. “I’m going to jump out of this car right now and kill myself.”

That was it. After the knife incident, I told him that if he ever said those words again, I would take him straight to the mental hospital, no ifs, ands, or buts. I did not respond, except to pull the car into the opposite lane, turning left instead of right.

“Where are you taking me?” he said, suddenly worried. “Where are we going?”

“You know where we are going,” I replied.

“No! You can’t do that to me! You’re sending me to hell! You’re sending me straight to hell!”

I pulled up in front of the hospital, frantically waiving for one of the clinicians who happened to be standing outside. “Call the police,” I said. “Hurry.”

Michael was in a full-blown fit by then, screaming and hitting. I hugged him close so he couldn’t escape from the car. He bit me several times and repeatedly jabbed his elbows into my rib cage. I’m still stronger than he is, but I won’t be for much longer.

The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes as I filled out the paperwork-“Were there any difficulties with… at what age did your child… were there any problems with.. has your child ever experienced.. does your child have…”

At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.

 

For days, my son insisted that I was lying-that I made the whole thing up so that I could get rid of him. The first day, when I called to check up on him, he said, “I hate you. And I’m going to get my revenge as soon as I get out of here.”

By day three, he was my calm, sweet boy again, all apologies and promises to get better. I’ve heard those promises for years. I don’t believe them anymore.

On the intake form, under the question, “What are your expectations for treatment?” I wrote, “I need help.”

And I do. This problem is too big for me to handle on my own. Sometimes there are no good options. So you just pray for grace and trust that in hindsight, it will all make sense.

I am sharing this story because I am Adam Lanza’s mother. I am Dylan Klebold’s and Eric Harris’s mother. I am James Holmes’s mother. I am Jared Loughner’s mother. I am Seung-Hui Cho’s mother. And these boys-and their mothers-need help. In the wake of another horrific national tragedy, it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

According to Mother Jones, since 1982, 61 mass murders involving firearms have occurred throughout the country. Of these, 43 of the killers were white males, and only one was a woman. Mother Jones focused on whether the killers obtained their guns legally (most did). But this highly visible sign of mental illness should lead us to consider how many people in the U.S. live in fear, like I do.

When I asked my son’s social worker about my options, he said that the only thing I could do was to get Michael charged with a crime. “If he’s back in the system, they’ll create a paper trail,” he said. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done. No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”

I don’t believe my son belongs in jail. The chaotic environment exacerbates Michael’s sensitivity to sensory stimuli and doesn’t deal with the underlying pathology. But it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people. According to Human Rights Watch, the number of mentally ill inmates in U.S. prisons quadrupled from 2000 to 2006, and it continues to rise-in fact, the rate of inmate mental illness is five times greater (56 percent) than in the non-incarcerated population.

With state-run treatment centers and hospitals shuttered, prison is now the last resort for the mentally ill-Rikers Island, the LA County Jail and Cook County Jail in Illinois housed the nation’s largest treatment centers in 2011 .

No one wants to send a 13-year old genius who loves Harry Potter and his snuggle animal collection to jail. But our society, with its stigma on mental illness and its broken healthcare system, does not provide us with other options. Then another tortured soul shoots up a fast food restaurant. A mall. A kindergarten classroom. And we wring our hands and say, “Something must be done.”

I agree that something must be done. It’s time for a meaningful, nation-wide conversation about mental health. That’s the only way our nation can ever truly heal.

God help me. God help Michael. God help us all.

By Michael. C. Bender

Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) — Magazines that fed bullets into the primary firearm used to kill 26 children and adults at a Connecticut school would have been banned under state legislation that the National Rifle Association and gunmakers successfully fought.

The shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Adam Lanza, 20, used a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle with magazines containing 30 rounds as his main weapon, said Connecticut State Police Lieutenant Paul Vance at a news conference yesterday.

A proposal in March 2011 would have made it a felony to possess magazines with more than 10 bullets and required owners to surrender them to law enforcement or remove them from the state. Opponents sent more than 30,000 e-mails and letters to state lawmakers as part of a campaign organized by the NRA and other gun advocates, said Robert Crook, head of the Hartford- based Coalition of Connecticut Sportsmen, which opposed the legislation.

“The legislators got swamped by NRA emails,” said Betty Gallo, who lobbied on behalf of the legislation for Southport- based Connecticut Against Gun Violence. “They were scared of the NRA and the political backlash.”

Proponents abandoned the legislation, which drew opposition from gunmakers including Sturm, Ruger & Co. In addition to the e-mails and letters, more than 300 pro-gun activists, including many NRA members, attended a committee hearing to oppose it, said Gallo, a Hartford-based lobbyist for more than 35 years.

Permissive Laws

The Fairfax, Virginia-based NRA, which describes itself as the nation’s foremost defender of Second Amendment rights, works to defeat gun limits nationally and in states, and has successfully championed permissive firearms laws.

Since a 1994 federal assault-weapon ban expired in 2004, Congress hasn’t enacted major firearms regulations other than a law aimed at improving state reporting for federal background checks. The gun lobby’s power was illustrated during the 2012 presidential campaign when, after mass shootings, neither President Barack Obama nor his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, called for restrictions on gun ownership.

In Newtown, Lanza also had two handguns, a Glock and a Sig Sauer, and fired hundreds of bullets, said Vance. Authorities also took a shotgun from the car he drove, Vance said. The guns belonged to Nancy Lanza, Adam’s mother, according to a law- enforcement official who asked for anonymity because of a continuing investigation.

Magazines’ Role

Both sides in the debate disputed the role of high-capacity magazines in the Dec. 14 school shooting.

Crook said state legislation “wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“We already have a lot of good gun laws on the books,” Crook said. “You can’t control people who have never done anything wrong before and then just go off the deep end.”

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said in an interview that high-capacity magazines “made the crime all the more deadly” and called for limits.

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy told reporters today that he supports a ban on high-capacity magazines.

“That is a common-sense piece of legislation that could be taken up in the next legislative session,” said Malloy, a Democrat, at a news conference at the state Capitol.

The media office of the NRA didn’t respond to e-mails seeking comment about the shooting or the law, or return phone messages left with an answering service.

Mass Murder

The Connecticut shooting is the latest mass murder in which the gunman’s arsenal included a high-capacity magazine. Connecticut’s bill was written in response to an attack last year in Tuscon, Arizona, that killed six and injured U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, said Gallo. Jared Lee Loughner was sentenced to life in prison for the shootings in which he used a 33-round magazine in a Glock 19.

In July, James Holmes clipped a 100-round drum magazine into the Smith & Wesson semi-automatic rifle police say he fired into a Colorado theater, killing 12 and wounding 58.

“It’s the large capacity weaponry that’s the problem when it comes to mass murder, because of the ability to kill lots of people in a short time without even reloading,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “Prohibitions against assault weapons, especially high-capacity magazines, can help.”

Last year, Andrew Jennison, an NRA lobbyist at the time, told Connecticut lawmakers there was “no correlation” between crime and magazine capacity, pointing to the 2007 massacre at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, in which 33 people died. In that shooting, the deadliest in U.S. history, Seung-Hui Cho used 10- and 15- round magazines.

Rapid Loaders

“Even pistols with rapid loaders could have been about as deadly in this situation,” Jennison said, according to a transcript of the committee hearing. “It is the criminal use of firearms, not mere possession of a magazine with an arbitrary number of rounds.”

Connecticut’s gun laws are fifth-strictest among states, according to a 2011 scorecard from the Washington-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which describes itself as the country’s largest gun-control lobby.

Connecticut is among six states that require background checks on all handgun sales, according to the San Francisco- based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Gun Seizure

Connecticut has a measure, sometimes referred to as the “turn in your neighbor” law, that lets state police obtain a warrant to confiscate firearms from anyone posing an imminent risk of harming someone. Police obtained nearly 300 warrants and seized more than 2,000 guns in 10 years after the law was passed in 1999, according to a state Office of Legislative Research report.

Still, gun-control advocates couldn’t pass the ban on high- capacity magazines.

Gallo said she counted a majority of the 45-member Judiciary Committee in favor of the bill. After the meeting, Gallo said she could get a commitment from just seven lawmakers to support it. She said she asked the co-chairmen, Senator Eric Coleman and Representative Gerald Fox, not to put the bill up for a vote. Coleman and Fox didn’t return calls seeking comment.

“If we know we’re going to lose, we’re not going to take it to a vote,” said Ron Pinciaro, director of the Connecticut Coalition Against Gun Violence.

James Debney, chief executive office of Smith & Wesson Holding Corp., wrote to Fox before the hearing that the proposal would “drastically impact the numerous firearms companies in Connecticut and across New England.”

Job Loss

“Connecticut cannot afford to lose these jobs,” Debney wrote, adding that 10 of the Springfield, Massachusetts, company’s top 30 suppliers were based in Connecticut.

Jake McGuigan, government-relations director for the Newtown-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, opposed the bill, pointing to more than 622,000 firearms in the state that could accept high-capacity magazines.

If gun owners weren’t reimbursed, at a cost to the state of at least $29 million, he warned lawmakers of “a class action lawsuit on the taking of that.”

McGuigan also said there would be costs for the state’s $1.3 billion firearms industry. Home to gunmakers Sturm, Ruger & Co., Mossberg Corp. and Colt Defense LLC, Connecticut’s gun industry supports 5,400 jobs and pays $81 million in state taxes, he said.

The bill would restrict the commercial market for those companies, McGuigan said.

Self Defense

“I’m not sure that’s something that we want to do in this economic environment,” he told lawmakers. “I don’t think we want to lose any business, whether it’s five employees or 30 employees or Colt Firearms, which has 1,000 union jobs.”

Michael Fifer, Ruger’s president and chief executive officer, told the committee that high-capacity magazines are needed for self defense.

A third of aggravated assault and robbery victims were attacked by multiple offenders, he said. High-capacity magazines provided more protection to citizens prone to miss their intended target in stressful situations, he said.

“The regulation of magazine capacity will not deter crime, but will instead put law-abiding citizens at risk of harm,” Fifer wrote in a letter to committee members. “The bill, if enacted, also would expose law-abiding citizens to criminal prosecution for unintentionally possessing prohibited magazines — magazines that were legally acquired and that are largely the norm in new firearms manufacturing.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael C. Bender in Tallahassee at mbender10@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Merelman at smerelman@bloomberg.net

“The temptation is to speak in muffled tones about an issue such as the right of the people of Palestine … yet we would be less than human if we did so.”

– NELSON R. MANDELA

As Jews, with our own painful history of oppression, we are compelled to speak out against human rights violations being committed by the State of Israel – in our name – against the Palestinian people.

We note that the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) together with the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF), recently met with the South African Presidency and other politicians. We also note, with great concern, the SAJBD and SAZF’s assertion that they represent and speak on behalf of all Jewish South Africans, particularly when it comes to Palestine-Israel.

Let us be clear, the SAJBD and SAZF’s position of supporting Israel at all costs does not represent us. We also appeal to the SAJBD and SAZF to respect one of the hallmarks of Judaism: respectful debate amongst those who hold divergent viewpoints. The SAJBD and SAZF’s position on Israel, and attempts to stifle opposing voices that speak out against Israel, is morally untenable.

The Jewish community is neither homogeneous nor monolithic.  There is a growing number of Jews, in South Africa and around the world, who are organising to form alternative spaces and who unconditionally oppose Israeli policies and practices that shamefully privilege Jews over the indigenous Palestinian people.  In this vein, we support the non-violent campaign of applying Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it abides by international law and respects basic human rights [see www.bdsmovement.net].

We are encouraged that our South African government is joining those countries that are taking a clear stance against Israel’s violations of international law and its acts of violence against the Palestinian people [ see this City Press newspaper article: http://tinyurl.com/buyflps]. We also welcome and support our Department of Trade and Industry’s initiative to prevent the false labelling of Israeli settlement products [see this Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper article: http://tinyurl.com/8ujzk42]. We hope that the ANC and the SA Government goes further and completely bans Israeli settlement products. Israeli settlements are in clear violation of international law and seriously undermine any chance of negotiations and a just peace.

Such positions as those recently taken by our government against Israeli violence and violations of international law, in fact, serve to affirm a proud Jewish tradition of respect for justice and human rights; regardless of race, religion or creed. Such positions connect us to our fellow humanity.

We humbly – and sadly – acknowledge that our voices may not be the dominant ones in our community, but neither were Dietrich Bonnhoefer’s in Nazi Germany nor Beyers Naude’s, Antjie Krog’s, Braam Fischer’s and Joe Slovo’s in Apartheid South Africa.

Our individual consciences, our Jewish tradition and our painful history compel us to declare to the SAJBD, SAZF and to the Israeli government that we will continue to speak out and take a stand for justice and human rights.  Taking such a stand is in the very interests of being Jewish. For when we proclaim “Never Again”, we should mean “Never Again”, unconditionally, and to any human being – including the Palestinians.

Issued by Alan Horwitz for StopTheJNF, a campaign initiated by a group of Jewish South Africans committed to justice and rights for the Palestinian people and Jewish Israelis. Find the original statement and more information here: www.stopthejnfsa.org

Mentioned in the above statement is Joe Slovo: the well-known South African Treason Trialist, founding member of the South African Congress of Democrats, the former South African Communist Party General-Secretary, the Chief of Staff  during the 1980s of the African National Congress’ armed wing (Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK)) and a leading NEC member of South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC). Slovo, who was born Jewish, was an outspoken critic of Apartheid South Africa as well as a consistent critic of the Israeli regime – which he also considered an Apartheid state.

In fact, Slovo publicly exposed and highlighted the shameful military collaborations during the 1970s and 1980s between Israel and apartheid-era South Africa (see this UK Guardian newspaper article: http://tinyurl.com/27et2hy). In an unfinished autobiography, Joe Slovo wrote: “Ironically enough, the horrors of the Holocaust became the rationalization [by Israeli supporters] for … acts of genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine. Those of us who, in the years that were to follow, raised our voices publicly against the violent apartheid of the Israeli state were vilified…”.

By Juan Cole

17 December 12

@ Informed Comment

The American obsession with guns and violence is not unique, but it is distinctive. The US ranks 12th in the world for rate of firearm-related deaths. El Salvador, Colombia, Swaziland, Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines and some others are worse. But that is the company the US is in- not, say, relatively peaceful places like Japan, Singapore and the Netherlands.

It turns out that the Newtown shooter used a semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle and he had lots of thirty-round high-capacity clips for it. Authorities have revealed that each of the 20 children and six adults he killed was shot multiple times, but given the number of clips Lanza brought with him, the number of victims could have been much, much higher. The Federal ban on weapons such as the Bushmaster, in place 1994-2004, was allowed to lapse by the George W. Bush administration and his Republican Congress, all of whom received massive campaign donations from the gun lobby. There is a Connecticut ban, but the maker of the Bushmaster used a loophole in the poorly written state law to continue to sell the gun in the state. The Bushmaster is manufactured by a subsidiary of the Wall Street hedge fund, Cerberus Capital Management, called the “Freedom Group”- which also owns Remington and DPMS Firearms. It is the largest single maker of semi-automatic rifles in the US, and they are expected to be a major growing profit center in the coming years. The Freedom Group was sued over the Washington, DC, sniper attacks, and paid $500,000 without admitting culpability.

So, the hedge funds are doing us in every which way.

But the weird idea of letting people buy military weaponry at will, with less trouble than you would have to buy a car, is only one manifestation of America’s cult of high-powered weaponry.

In 2011, US corporations sold 75% of all the arms sold in the international weapons market, some $66 billion of the $85 billion trade. Russia was the runner-up with only $4 billion in sales.

Saudi Arabia bought F-15s and Apache and Blackhawk helicopters. Oman bought F-16s. The UAE got a missile shield. And, of course, Israel gets very sophisticated weapons from the US, as well.

The US share of the arms trade to the Middle East has burgeoned so much in the past decade that it now dwarfs the other suppliers, as this chart [pdf] from a Congressional study makes clear.

Graph

The University of Michigan “Correlates of War” project, run by my late colleague David Singer, tried to crunch numbers on potential causes of the wars of the past two centuries. Getting a statistically valid correlation for a cause was almost impossible. But there was one promising lead, as it was explained to me. When countries made large arms purchases, they seemed more likely to go to war in the aftermath. It may be that if you have invested in state of the art weapons, you want to use them before they become antiquated or before your enemies get them too.

So the very worst thing the US could do for Middle East peace is to sell the region billions in new, sophisticated weapons.

Moreover if you give sophisticated conventional weapons to some countries but deny them to their rivals, the rivals will try to level the playing field with unconventional weapons. The US is creating an artificial and unnecessary impetus to nuclear proliferation by this policy.

I first went to Pakistan in 1981. At that time it was not a society with either drugs or guns. But President Ronald Reagan decided to use private Afghan militias to foment a guerrilla war against the Soviets, who sent troops into Afghanistan in late 1979. Reagan ended up sending billions of dollars worth of arms to the Mujahidin annually, and twisting Saudi Arabia’s arm to match what the US sent. The Mujahidin were also encouraged by the US to grow poppies for heroin production so that they could buy even more weapons.

Over the decade of the 1980s, I saw the weapons begin to show up in the markets of Pakistan, and began hearing for the first time about drug addicts (there came to be a million of them by 1990). I had seen the arms market expand in Lebanon in the 1970s, and was alarmed that now it was happening in Pakistan, at that time a relatively peaceful and secure society. The US filled Pakistan up with guns to get at the Soviets, creating a gun culture where such a thing had been rare (with the exception of some Pashtuns who made home-made knock-offs of Western rifles). Ultimately the gun culture promoted by Reagan came back to bite the US on the ass (not to mention Afghanistan and Pakistan!) And not to mention the drugs.

Now the US views Pakistan as peculiarly violent, and pundits often blame it on Islamism. But no, it is just garden-variety Americanism. You’re welcome.

By Patrick Cockburn

16 December 2012

@ The Independent

It is one of the most horrifying videos of the war in Syria. It shows two men being beheaded by Syrian rebels, one of them by a child. He hacks with a machete at the neck of a middle-aged man who has been forced to lie in the street with his head on a concrete block. At the end of the film, a soldier, apparently from the Free Syrian Army, holds up the severed heads by their hair in triumph.

The film is being widely watched on YouTube by Syrians, reinforcing their fears that Syria is imitating Iraq’s descent into murderous warfare in the years after the US invasion in 2003. It fosters a belief among Syria’s non-Sunni Muslim minorities, and Sunnis associated with the government as soldiers or civil servants, that there will be no safe future for them in Syria if the rebels win. In one version of the video, several of which are circulating, the men who are beheaded are identified as officers belonging to the 2.5 million-strong Alawite community. This is the Shia sect to which President Bashar al-Assad and core members of his regime belong. The beheadings, so proudly filmed by the perpetrators, may well convince them that they have no alternative but to fight to the end.

The video underlines a startling contradiction in the policy of the US and its allies. In the past week, 130 countries have recognised the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people. But, at the same time, the US has denounced the al-Nusra Front, the most effective fighting force of the rebels, as being terrorists and an al-Qa’ida affiliate. Paradoxically, the US makes almost exactly same allegations of terrorism against al-Nusra as does the Syrian government. Even more bizarrely, though so many states now recognise the National Coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, it is unclear if the rebels inside Syria do so. Angry crowds in rebel-held areas of northern Syria on Friday chanted “we are all al-Nusra” as they demonstrated against the US decision.

Videos posted on YouTube play such a central role in the propaganda war in Syria that questions always have to be asked about their authenticity and origin. In the case of the beheading video, the details look all too convincing. Nadim Houry, the deputy director for Human Rights Watch in the Middle East and North Africa, has watched the video many times to identify the circumstances, perpetrators and location where the killings took place. He has no doubts about its overall authenticity, but says that mention of one district suggests it might be in Deir el-Zhor (in eastern Syria). But people in the area immediately north of Homs are adamant the beheadings took place there. The victims have not been identified. The first time a version of the film was shown was on pro-government Sama TV on 26 November, but it has been widely viewed on YouTube in Syria only over the past week.

The film begins by showing two middle-aged men handcuffed together sitting on a settee in a house, surrounded by their captors who sometimes slap and beat them. They are taken outside into the street. A man in a black shirt is manhandled and kicked into lying down with his head on a concrete block. A boy, who looks to be about 11 or 12 years old, cuts at his neck with a machete, but does not quite sever it. Later a man finishes the job and cuts the head off. The second man in a blue shirt is also forced to lie with his head on a block and is beheaded. The heads are brandished in front of the camera and later laid on top of the bodies. The boy smiles as he poses with a rifle beside a headless corpse.

The execution video is very similar to those once made by al-Qa’ida in Iraq to demonstrate their mercilessness towards their enemies. This is scarcely surprising since many of the most experienced al-Nusra fighters boast that they have until recently been fighting the predominantly Shia government of Iraq as part of the local franchise of al-Qa’ida franchise. Their agenda is wholly sectarian, and they have shown greater enthusiasm for slaughtering Shias, often with bombs detonated in the middle of crowds in markets or outside mosques, than for fighting Americans.

The Syrian uprising, which began in March 2011, was not always so bloodthirsty or so dominated by the Sunnis who make up 70 per cent of the 23 million-strong Syrian population. At first, demonstrations were peaceful and the central demands of the protesters were for democratic rule and human rights as opposed to a violent, arbitrary and autocratic government. There are Syrians who claim that the people against the regime remains to this day the central feature of the uprising, but there is compelling evidence that the movement has slid towards sectarian Islamic fundamentalism intent on waging holy war.

The execution video is the most graphic illustration of deepening religious bigotry on the part of the rebels, but it is not the only one. Another recent video shows Free Syrian Army fighters burning and desecrating a Shia husseiniyah (a religious meeting house similar to a mosque) in Idlib in northern Syria. They chant prayers of victory as they set fire to the building, set fire to flags used in Shia religious processions and stamp on religious pictures. If the FSA were to repeat this assault on a revered Shia shrine such as the Sayyida Zeinab mosque in Damascus, to which Iranian and Iraqi pilgrims have flooded in the past and which is now almost encircled by rebels, then there could be an explosion of religious hatred and strife between Sunni and Shia across the Middle East. Iraqi observers warn that it was the destruction of the Shia shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, by an al-Qa’ida bomb in 2006 that detonated a sectarian war in which tens of thousands died.

The analogy with Iraq is troubling for the US and British governments. They and their allies are eager for Syria to avoid repeating the disastrous mistakes they made during the Iraqi occupation. Ideally, they would like to remove the regime, getting rid of Bashar al-Assad and the present leadership, but not dissolving the government machinery or introducing revolutionary change as they did in Baghdad by transferring power from the Sunnis to the Shia and the Kurds. This provoked a furious counter-reaction from Baathists and Sunnis who found themselves marginalised and economically impoverished.

Washington wants Assad out, but is having difficulty riding the Sunni revolutionary tiger. The Western powers have long hoped for a split in the Syrian elite, but so far there is little sign of this happening. “If you take defections as a measure of political cohesion, then there haven’t been any serious ones,” said a diplomat in Damascus.

Syria today resembles Iraq nine years ago in another disturbing respect. I have now been in Damascus for 10 days, and every day I am struck by the fact that the situation in areas of Syria I have visited is wholly different from the picture given to the world both by foreign leaders and by the foreign media. The last time I felt like this was in Baghdad in late 2003, when every Iraqi knew the US-led occupation was proving a disaster just as George W Bush, Tony Blair and much of the foreign media were painting a picture of progress towards stability and democracy under the wise tutelage of Washington and its carefully chosen Iraqi acolytes.

The picture of Syria most common believed abroad is of the rebels closing in on the capital as the Assad government faces defeat in weeks or, at most, a few months. The Secretary General of Nato, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said last week that the regime is “approaching collapse”. The foreign media consensus is that the rebels are making sweeping gains on all fronts and the end may be nigh. But when one reaches Damascus, it is to discover that the best informed Syrians and foreign diplomats say, on the contrary, that the most recent rebel attacks in the capital had been thrown back by a government counteroffensive. They say that the rebel territorial advances, which fuelled speculation abroad that the Syrian government might implode, are partly explained by a new Syrian army strategy to pull back from indefensible outposts and bases and concentrate troops in cities and towns.

At times, Damascus resounds with the boom of artillery fire and the occasional car bomb, but it is not besieged. I drove 160 kilometres north to Homs, Syria’s third largest city with a population of 2.3 million, without difficulty. Homs, once the heart of the uprising, is in the hands of the government, aside from the Old City, which is held by the FSA. Strongholds of the FSA in Damascus have been battered by shellfire and most of their inhabitants have fled to other parts of the capital. The director of the 1,000-bed Tishreen military hospital covering much of southern Syria told me that he received 15 to 20 soldiers wounded every day, of whom about 20 per cent died. This casualty rate indicates sniping, assassinations and small-scale ambushes, but not a fight to the finish.

This does not mean that the government is in a happy position. It has been unable to recapture southern Aleppo or the Old City in Homs. It does not have the troops to garrison permanently parts of Damascus it has retaken. Its overall diplomatic and military position is slowly eroding and the odds against it are lengthening, but it is a long way from total defeat, unless there is direct military intervention by foreign powers, as in Libya or Iraq, and this does not seem likely.

This misperception of the reality on the ground in Syria is fuelled in part by propaganda, but more especially by inaccurate and misleading reporting by the media where bias towards the rebels and against the government is unsurpassed since the height of the Cold War. Exaggerated notions are given of rebel strength and popularity. The Syrian government is partially responsible for this. By excluding all but a few foreign journalists, the regime has created a vacuum of information that is naturally filled by its enemies. In the event, a basically false and propagandistic account of events in Syria has been created by a foreign media credulous in using pro-opposition sources as if they were objective reporting.

The execution video is a case in point. I have not met a Syrian in Damascus who has not seen it. It is having great influence on how Syrians judge their future, but the mainstream media outside Syria has scarcely mentioned it. Some may be repulsed by its casual savagery, but more probably it is not shown because it contradicts so much of what foreign leaders and reporters claim is happening here.

 

The tragic shootings in Connecticut again raise the perennial question ‘Why are human beings violent?’ Are we genetically programmed to be violent? Is violence socially learned? Or are some individuals just ‘psychotic’?

Perhaps the most important question is this: Can we do anything to end human violence?

Because of the death of my two uncles in World War 11, I have been researching the question ‘Why are human beings violent?’ since 1966, including spending 14 years living in seclusion from 1996 to 2010 with Anita McKone, undertaking a deep psychological examination of our own minds.

I have summarized our learning in the document ‘Why Violence?’ – http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence

In essence, human beings are violent because of the ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence that we adults unconsciously inflict on children. And this is in addition to the ‘visible’ violence that we inflict on them consciously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tragic reality of human life is that few people value the awesome power of the individual Self with an integrated mind (that is, a mind in which memory, thoughts, feelings, sensing, conscience and other functions work together in an integrated way) because this individual will be decisive in choosing life-enhancing behavioral options (including those at variance with social laws and norms) and will fearlessly resist all efforts to control it or coerce it with violence.

So how do we end up with people like Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot and all those other perpetrators of violence, including political leaders who conduct wars and those who perpetrate their violence in our homes and on our streets? We create them.

And can we do anything to end human violence? Yes we can. Each one of us. Here is the formula, briefly stated:

If you want a child who is nonviolent, truthful, compassionate, considerate, patient, thoughtful, respectful, generous, loving of itself and others, trustworthy, honest, dignified, determined, courageous and powerful, then the child must be treated with – and experience – nonviolence, truth, compassion, consideration, patience, thoughtfulness, respect, generosity, love, trust, honesty, dignity, determination, courage and power.

And if you need an incentive, ask yourself this: Do you think it is possible to successfully tackle the many manifestations of violence – war, terrorism, street violence, the ongoing climate catastrophe, the ongoing exploitation of Africa, Asia and Central/South America … – without addressing its fundamental cause?

It’s a big task. But we have a world to save. Literally.

By Robert J. Burrowes

15 December, 2012

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

 

 

By Finian Cunningham

15 December, 2012

@ PressTV

Barack Obama, America’s Conjurer-in-Chief, is trying to entertain the world with a new smoke-and-mirrors trick, with the announcement that his government is recognizing the Syrian National Coalition as “the sole representative of the Syrian people”.

The chemical weapons trick seems to have fizzled like a damp squib. So, now it’s time for another illusion – the “worthy Syrian opposition”.

This motley crew of treasonous exiles – who mysteriously somehow have bags of money to trot all over the globe from Doha to Cairo, Tokyo to Marrakech – are all of sudden anointed by the American President as the next government of Syria.

Anyone who has read the Doha Protocol that the SNC willingly signed up to while seduced in a luxury hotel last month by their Qatari sponsors should be under no misapprehension. This group of self-serving opportunists has been cobbled together with the sole purpose of selling Syria’s sovereignty to the highest, or even lowest, bidder. The people of Syria have been spared no treachery low enough in the imperialists’ manifesto of regime change, including surrender of wealth, natural resources and all of Syria’s independent foreign policy principles.

Under the regime of the SNC, if it ever gets into power, Syria will become a shell of a once-proud nation, in hock to Western and Persian Gulf investors and schemers, betraying its people and its regional neighbours.

Yet, hey presto, with the panache of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat, Obama declares: “We’ve made a decision that the Syrian Opposition Coalition is now inclusive enough, is reflective and representative enough of the Syrian population, that we consider them the legitimate representative of the Syrian people in opposition to the Assad regime.”

Cue the arms sales and military logistics floodgates – as already worked out by British General Sir David Richards in secret talks last month in London with his American, French, Turk and Qatari counterparts.

The latest Obama stunt follows the dress rehearsals in previous weeks by Britain, France, Turkey and the Persian Gulf Arab dictators who had already appointed the SNC as the de facto government-in-waiting on behalf of the 25 million Syrians.

The White House joker tried to give his “recognition” wheeze some credibility by demarcating an illusory line between “legitimate” and “renegade” Syrian opposition, by proscribing certain militant groups within Syria as “terrorists”. The Jabhat Al Nusra front, which is said to be linked to Al Qaeda, is henceforth ostracized, at least officially, by Washington.

Of course, Washington had to crank out some rhetorical fog to cover up the glaring contradiction between its decade-long “war on terror” mantra and the fact that Islamic extremists are central to the Western-backed campaign of subversion in Syria.

But this chicanery is fooling no-one who has been accurately following the state terrorist war of aggression in Syria over the past 22 months. No-one, that is, except those perhaps who have been brainwashed by the Western mainstream media echo chambers, which call this campaign of terror afflicting Syria a “pro-democracy uprising”.

Obama’s cynical charade of isolating extremists from supposed worthy opposition belies the fact that Syrian society is being assailed by a gargantuan criminal conspiracy authored, fomented and fuelled by Western governments and their regional proxies. The so-called Syrian rebels are terrorist foot-soldiers of foreign masters.

Think about it. What group claiming to liberate Syria would murder their own compatriots – men, women and children – with such fiendish, unrelenting barbarity?

For Obama to try to make out that the opposition has now been cleansed from extremists – on the basis of his say-so – is transparent nonsense.

Are we expected to believe that the litany of atrocities perpetrated against the Syrian people are all down to “rogue Jihadists”?

Let’s review just some of the low-lights of the putative Syrian liberators:

1. Massacres of whole villages. Just as Obama was sanitizing the opposition, news was coming in of yet another massacre this week in the village of Aqrab. Reports put the number of killed at over 125. Typically, the Western media lie machine was vague in ascribing blame, but past record shows that such atrocities are stock-in-trade of the anti-government foreign militants. On 25 May, the village of Houla, also in Hama Province, was massacred, including 49 children. After initial media misinformation, it turned out that the mass murders were carried out by the Western and Arab-backed mercenaries.

2. No-warning car bombs across Syria in urban areas of Damascus, Aleppo, Idlib, Daraa, Homs. The newly American-sanctioned Al Nusra front is said to be based in Aleppo. Are we to believe its operatives can whisk around the entire country of Syria carrying out suicide bombings? Again, as Obama was pronouncing the validity of Syrian opposition, the suburb of Jaramana outside Damascus was attacked with no-warning bombs, killing two and injuring several. Last month, the mainly Christian and Druze community of Jaramana was targeted for the fourth time in as many months with multiple explosions that claimed over 34 lives.

3. Video evidence emerges this week showing Saudi mercenaries recruiting a child to behead what appears to be a captured Syrian soldier as he lay on the street, his neck propped on a concrete block and his hands tied behind his back.

4. Other footage shows foreign militants taking unarmed men out on to a street and executing them one-by-one. In other horrific scenes, Syrian soldiers lying on the ground are seen begging for mercy as gun-toting captors spray them with bullets.

5. Victims of cold-blooded executions are thrown off multi-storey buildings on to the pavement below, their mangled corpses lined up in the gutter for gruesome public display.

6. Mosques and churches are desecrated by being turned into sniper posts by Western-backed mercenaries, from where they shoot randomly at civilians in the streets.

7. Family members are kidnapped for ransom only to find that their loved ones have been slain in the most heinous way.

8. Mortar shells are fired deliberately at civilian apartment blocks by mercenaries who then film the aftermath fabricating that the crimes were committed by the Syrian Army, fabrications which the Western mainstream media peddle in line with their governments’ propaganda.

9. Journalists who are trying to give an accurate account of all of the above and more are targeted and assassinated, including Press TV’s Maya Naser and at least 15 other Syrian media workers.

10. In yet another crime against humanity, it is revealed this week that Saudi Arabia has forced inmates from its seething jails to go and wage “holy war” on the Syrian people.

This is the kind of replete, systematic terrorism that Western, Arab and Turk-backed militants have been engaging in to destroy Syria and to impose a regime that will have nothing to offer the Syrian people except more internecine killing.

This is the kind of mayhem that America’s Conjurer-in-Chief and his band of Western terrorist allies are now trying to dissimulate as being the work of rogue extremists, whom they allegedly do not support.

The deception being engineered here is to create an illusion under the cover of which the Western governments can now proceed “legitimately” with direct military supply to Syrian terrorist “freedom fighters” – as opposed to their erstwhile covert supply of weapons which has so far not succeeded in their criminal plan for regime change.

In the Season of Goodwill, that’s like expecting us to believe that Obama is Santa Claus and Cameron and Hollande are his angelic little helpers.

Finian Cunningham is a frequent contributor to PressTV where this article appeared. Read other articles by Finian.