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

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

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

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

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

Looking at this by fuel, in order of importance:

Peak oil

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

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

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

Peak coal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peak natural gas

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

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

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

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

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

Peak uranium

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuclear power is clearly not the answer to peak oil.

Conclusions

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

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

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

(Abridged from the page Global hydrocarbons peak.)

By Matthew Wild

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By George Monbiot

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

11^th May 2010

© 2010 Guardian News and Media Limited

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Farooque Chowdhury

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

Hugo Chavez Interviewed by Cindy Sheehan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Cindy Sheehan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD

6^th May 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noted Previous False Flags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other False Flag Examples

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Comments

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

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

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

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

Posted by Steve Lendman @ 3:03 AM

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Soldier Committed Violence against Palestinian Detainees

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ill Treatment in Arrests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use of Dogs

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

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

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

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

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

Mistreating Children

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

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

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

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

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

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

Systematic Detainee Abuse and Mistreatment

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

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

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

— sleep deprivation and inadequate and poor food;

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

— Other forms of torture, including severe beatings;

— Threats and intimidation, including against family members;

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

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

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

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

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

Ill Treatment after Arrest under Israeli Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crime and Punishment

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

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

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

Failure to Enforce – Military Investigatory Bodies

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

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

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

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

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

Troublesome Forms of Investigation

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

According to Law Professor Mordechai Kremnitzer:

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

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

Prosecutions, Convictions, and Punishment – Soldiers and Commanders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PACTI concluded saying:

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

A Final Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Stephen Lendman

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

05 May, 2010

Countercurrents.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 10^th May 2010

1.         The concept of original sin, in traditional Christian theology, is said to be a sin communicated by propagation to the whole of humanity by the first parents Adam and Eve.  The progeny of Adam and Eve are not responsible for their original sin, but bear some of its consequences as the human inclination to sinfulness such as greed, selfishness and violence.  Original sin was reflected in the individual behavior. The Church teaching had a solution for this alienation from the will of God in the reception of the Sacrament of Baptism.

Medieval Christian theology developed the concept of Jesus offering a redemptive sacrifice of his life, making amends for human sinfulness. (cf. St. Anselm: Cur Deus Homo?)  This interpretation of Jesus life and death as atonement to the Father was a distortion of the life story and core teaching of Jesus of God as love, and His chief commandment of love of neighbor. This was an alienation of Christology that has come down to our times as the main leitmotif of a spirituality emphasizing charity and neglecting social justice.

2.         Since the 1960’s more attention has been given in theology for a reinterpretation of original sin, related to the structural problems and situations in which all are born and part of as victims and actors. We see interpretations of original sin as the structural sins of domination and oppression, and the unwillingness to deal with these structures.

I have myself developed a reinterpretation of original sin, referring to the sin of capitalism, colonialism and of the imperialism of modern times. This “sin” was mainly the conquest of weaker peoples by the more advanced (European) powers after 1492.  Thereafter the colonial powers set up the world order that prevailed from 1492 to at least 1945. Some of its characteristics continue even after the independence of the former colonies.  The present inheritors of the advantages of the colonial system of the past centuries- many European peoples- are not responsible for the situation of colonial exploitation, even though they benefit from it and must work for its reform.

As the colonized countries developed as part of the modern world system, there grew up a local elite that collaborated with the exploiting colonizers. There were also internal problems within the colonies such as of ethnic relations of majority and minority communities as in Sri Lanka specially after Independence in 1948 and three decades of internal civil conflict till March 2009.

There is no direct responsibility of the beneficiaries for the inequity of the prevailing social system or world order.  But there is an advantage for the Christians and Western peoples in the present situation. The Euro-American peoples benefit from  migration to open land spaces, and hence land ownership of colonies, called “terra nullius” like a gift of creation.  Correspondingly they had access to valuable natural resources, even when these were limited and not renewable.  There were positive aspects of Western colonialism such as development of the modern education and health services and the introduction of democratic forms of government.

The Afro Asian peoples were subject to the imperialist systems set up by the European, North American and Japanese empires.

3.        A third type of original sin can be seen in the present Climate warming and its consequences mainly on the poorer peoples of the world. The main human agents who helped to bring about the warming of the earth’s climate in the past two to three centuries are the industrializing countries, the modern colonizer countries using the energy derived from fossil fuels. They have developed technologies of mechanized production, motor transportation, domestic warming and cooking that depend on burning oils that generate CO2 and related emissions called green house gases. The developed peoples, including third world elites, have adopted a life style that cannot be spread to the whole world due to limitation of resources.

Scientists note that the Western industrial powers have been polluting the space in the atmosphere while building up their wealth during the past centuries. “Developed nations already occupy73% of the carbon space … which is the space available for the emission of carbon dioxide and other green houses, without serious negative impact on the earth.” (cf Nobel Laureate  K.K.Pachauri and K..M.George SJ.  (Threat to Human Survival, Indian Currents  no 50 December 2009).  India has only 2.5 %  of carbon space, compared to a due share of 17%. The USA with 5% of the world’s population occupies 29% of the carbon space. This situation poses grave questions of present and ongoing future global equity.

Some of the consequences of climate warming have been described by James Pender, a climate change expert writing in the USPG, Anglicans in World Mission Autumn 2009:“There will be less rainfall for crops, heavier monsoons, flooding due to rising sea levels and more cyclones. This will have a serious impact on health.  Insects will thrive, which means more disease; drinking water will become salty, and there will be smaller harvests, which means malnutrition.”

Dr Ahsan Uddin Ahmed, executive director of the Centre for Global Change, said: “We have evidence of climate change. Records of rainfall and temperature of 50 years showed that night temperature in winter rose and the duration of winter shrunk.”   “An estimated 800 million people in developing Asia currently have no access to basic electricity services and some 1.8 billion people must rely on traditional biomass fuels to meet their cooking and heating needs.” (Daily Mirror, 17th April, 2010 p.B 3.)

China and India are nations that cause considerably high emissions of green house gases as their total contribution to climate warming due to their high population. But their per capita  impact on climate warming is relatively very low due to the poverty of their populations.  To improve their standard of living they have to modernize their economies. The rich developed countries want China and India to reduce their impact on global warming, but these insist on an equitable standard of living for their poor peoples.

On the other hand the highly developed countries want to maintain their standard of living and place in the global economy.  Thus North Americans generally have a private motor car for each adult, and travel very long distances by private car.  They want to keep up their industrial production and ensure a future supply of petroleum, if need be by armed invasions.

The impact of climate warming is already being felt in the occurrence of earthslides, floods and melting of glaciers. Earthquakes occurred in Haiti this year killing about 200,000 persons, the same happened in Indonesia and  China.  Volcanoes erupting as in the Artic 16th and 17th  April 2010 are said to have impact on growing pollution. Is the earth taking revenge for the way we exploit her?

The present distribution of population to land as in China and India will, if continued as at present, lead to widespread deaths due to malnutrition. Recently 200,000 farmers in India committed suicide due to frustration with crop failures. Here we experience the connection between the second and third types of original sin inflicting further harm on the poorest peoples.

4.        Need for a World authority

The two original sins of colonizing capitalism and iniquitous climate warming pose problems the world as a whole must solve.  But there is no world authority that can bring the 200 or so sovereign states together to agree to a solution for the common good of all peoples. As independent nations they tend to act in their self interest, without due regard for the common good of the whole planet.  International negotiations on climate change did not arrive at an agreement among them concerning a solution that all accept and benefit all. Different meetings as at Bali, Kyoto, and Copenhagen lead to no legally binding agreement among all the nations.

There has to be a radical reform of United Nations Organization if it is to bring about justice in global climate policy.  The problems of climate change are a new phenomenon in human consciousness in international relations.  The factors which give rise to climate warming (or cooling) cannot be controlled by warfare or mere military power. The industrially and economically developed countries have been the main contributors to climate warming due to their methods of industrial production which imply more emission of green house gases that cause the climate warming and pollution of the atmosphere  of land, water and air. Global policies concerning climate warming have to help poor countries to develop economically without adding to climate warming.  Maintaining standard of living of developed countries can no longer be the priority.

Positive Global Remedies to climate warming need to be taken.

Humanity has reached a new stage in its journey on planet Earth.  Climate warming poses new and serious problems that demand global action by the world’s peoples together.

1) Poor countries can be helped  to mitigate climate warming by technologies  that reduce emission of green house gases.

2) Reforestation of the earth can be developed by agreed international policies as in the more open spaces in South America.

3) adopting simple life styles and eating habits such as consumption of more vegetables, fruits and green leaves by all peoples.

4) overcoming the pan- epidemic of HIV/AIDS, especially in Africa.

5) better urban planning, reducing slums.

6) providing cheap public transportation country wise

7) planned population migration of the landless to more open spaces as in the Americas and Oceania

8) Maintaining the standard of living of developed countries adapting better technologies such as organic farming.

9) care of nature, animals, fish

10) public health care, indigenous medicines, sharing state pharmaceutical products

Could we therefore suggest the setting up of an International  UNO Commission that works on two levels:  a)   on impact of colonialism globally from 1492 – 1945  and seeks for a redistribution of land and population in order to deal with the big gap between rich and poor. b) on impact of climate warming since the industrial revolution and on the advantages for different countries and cost to others.

5.        Can the religions inspire the required changes to meet the oncoming global emergency?  The religions together have a core of spiritual values that can inspire the care for neighbor and nature that the religions advocate. The World’s Religions can work together for the common good of humanity, to save human lives, and planet earth.  They can inspire the required changes to meet the oncoming global emergency

Christianity  has a special responsibility due to encouraging the spread of Empire from Roman times, and the colonial empires since 1492. Christian peoples must be prepared to share their lands with the peoples of Asia and Africa, who will face the heaviest pressure for migration. The old laws of citizenship can no longer serve human needs. What would be the meaning of “sharing bread so that no one is in need” as in the Acts of the Apostles.  How is the weekly Eucharist to be understood in the face of climate warming and the future challenges as of droughts, cyclones, sea level rising, shortage of water?

What would the Christian catechesis, pastorate in the coming decades be? How would formation of leadership be?

Religions may have an impact on acceptance of new migrants, by encouraging just population planning and fair use of arable land and resources for industry.

Religions can work together for the common good of humanity, to save human lives, and planet earth.

To counteract human action that generates undesirable climate warming in different parts of the world.

Tissa Balasuriya OMI

20th April 2010

Do modern day empires exist? A group of Global South activists seems to think so.

Philippines-based interfaith movement Peace for Life (PfL) has been challenging modern day empires, state terrorism, and militarized globalization since September 2002, a year after former U.S. President George W. Bush declared a war against terror and named the Philippines as the “second front of the war on terror.”

Since then, the group’s network has expanded to include representatives from over 20 countries, including the United States, Canada, Germany, and Australia. PfL meetings have convened in Bogota, Colombia; Seoul, Korea; Davao City, Philippines; and a host of other venues, the list of which now includes “the belly of the beast” itself, New York City.

Hosted from April 23-24 at Union Theological Seminary (UTS) in Manhattan, PfL’s “World Without Empire” conference attracted an international delegation of students, activists, academics and leaders to discuss how to respond to the military, economic, and cultural dominance of the United States.

Topics at the conference, which was co-sponsored by the United Methodist Church, Drew University, and the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF), included The Empire Strikes: In Women’s Voices, New Voices of Resistance, and The United States of Exception. The summit concluded with a Peace Festival featuring various cultural performances.

“When we talk about empire, the U.S. is really somehow at the center of it,” Carmencita Karagdag, coordinator for PfL, told the Ecumenical Press.

According to Karagdag, there is a “concentration of political, economic, cultural, military power in one state, the United States, [which is]…assisted by satellite states, or lesser empires, and their allies among elites in subordinated countries, which work to advance the interest of the U.S.”

Eunice Santana, the group’s moderator and former president of the World Council of Churches (WCC), spoke of the effects of American military expansionism, which includes nearly 1,000 bases in over 60 countries, saying that the U.S. has “made the world a battlefield.”

“The wars themselves, the interventions, prevention of people’s sovereignty, and the justifications that go along with it that are not necessarily understood or looked at closely by people in the United States,” Santana said, adding that such activities have a negative impact on the U.S. economy, as well as the country’s presentation to the rest of the world.

“Military is institutionalized hatred,” said Hyun Kung Chung, a professor at UTS and one of the event’s organizers. “And the U.S.A is making money out of this militarism with a perpetual war to make their economy full, but not helpful. It never works.”

Beyond its use of military power, the U.S. is also engaged in “economic exploitation, economic plunder of resources, and the plunder of the earth,” Karagdag says.

“And it’s not just economy, it’s not just military, it’s really people who want to have their sense of identity, their cultural heritage,” she adds. “And people will fight to death to maintain that.”

For Santana, such “domination” is a “contradiction to Christianity and the message of Christ, which is not to dominate but to love one another…and to consider everyone as children of God, created in the image of God.”

“We cannot uphold such domination, we cannot remain aloof,” she says. “We must criticize and we must act against what goes against what we understand to be God’s will for humanity.”

But while foreign policy has soiled the U.S.’s reputation in the sight of PfL, the group maintains a compassionate response towards Americans, with an understanding that many of them have also been victimized through the nation’s dominating practices.

Karagdag said she found conference participants to be “very receptive” to the topics discussed, and that the event had “resonance with quite a number of people.”

Santana said she felt that many of the conference’s participants were examining themselves to see to what extent they were in complicity with empire themselves.

“There was some soul searching of some of the participants…in understanding about what empire is and at the same time how then they place themselves within that,” Santana shared.

“I think many people in the U.S. are not of the empire. They are also victims of empire,” Chung shared, noting that a world without empire is only possible “when there are people without empire.”

We need “people who live in the empire but not of the empire,” she said. “And people who are influenced under empire, but resist, and with tremendous resilience always choose life….rather than logic of the empire which is endless competition, endless domination over other people and endless greed.”

According to Chung, those who have created empire can also dismantle it.

Using the metaphor of an ant, Chung said that “Within this big pyramid, if we make small, small holes, one day it will collapse.”

Chung also likened PfL’s solidarity network to a group of “spiders – we make connections among people who really believe in truth and the value of human life.”

“Our goal is to make the whole value of humanity alive,” she said. Bringing out “what is most important in human life. Really valuing human life and mother earth.”

“When we really develop this kind of humanity and system, everybody benefits from it, including mother earth,” Chung said. “So very simply – we want to be truly human, beautiful humans, truthful humans, happy humans, and we want to give this legacy to next generation.”

Apr. 27, 2010

Dear Chandra,

I have been an activist since I was a teenager, and yet, the night of April 28 in the Pauley Ballroom of UC Berkeley will surely stand out as one of the most remarkable activist achievements I have ever witnessed.

And I am grateful that you were there, represented by thousand of green stickers: each with a name, a place, an identity.

While the senate at UC San Diego sent a similar proposal to a committee for further study, divestment proponents at Berkeley failed by just one vote to reverse a presidential veto of their original overwhelming vote to divest. The members of Berkeley’s Students for Justice in Palestine wanted UC to divest from 2 companies that profit from killing and harming of civilians as part of Israel’s occupation. Yes, companies that make money from death. From control. From destruction. They needed 14 votes out of 20 to overturn the veto. Despite truly heroic efforts on the part of countless students, including such impressive student senators, in the end they had 13 votes. The 14th abstained.

And yet, if you ask the question, after weeks of multiple hearings and votes, Who really won here?, the numbers speak for themselves:

Nearly 30 hours of hearings and testimony with standing room only audiences and in some cases, people flying in from other parts of the country to testify, others sending video or being Skyped in from Palestine and Gaza.

The support of some 100 professors, over 40 student groups, 5 Nobel Laureates, 9 Israeli peace groups, 263 community Jews in one ad plus 40 pages and growing of notable Jewish endorsements, some 8,000 JVP supporters like you from around the globe who in just 5 days created a sea of visible support.

At this last and final hearing alone, there were 500 people, standing room only.

A speaker asked the supporters of divestment to stand up: nearly 80% stood.

A senator announced that 62% of that night’s registered speakers were pro-divest, while 38% were against.

After everything, 13 of 20 senators at one of the United States’ leading academic institutions stood clearly on the side of divestment.

And that’s why so many left with a feeling of both anger and jubilation. But more than anything, determination.

If the theme of the all-night hearing in mid April-at which a final vote was tabled- was that there was every bit as much, if not more Jewish support for divestment as against it on the UC campus, the narrative running through April 28th’s all-night session was that this is about the Palestinian story, Palestinian resilience, Palestinian humanity and one day, in their quest for justice and full equality, Palestinian victory.

Imagine hours and hours of testimony from Palestinian and Arab student after student, each standing in front of a microphone and hundreds to tell their story- stories of broken bones, destroyed homes, arbitrary imprisonment and torture. Stories of bombs through living room windows, and strips searches at checkpoints. Stories of not being able to learn because schools are closed down for years at a time.  Stories that until now seemed to have been banished from the public square because the mere fact of their telling, and in so doing asserting the full beauty and humanity of the teller, has been taken as a threat.

But not on this night. Not for these hours. Not in this room.

Unless they physically plugged their ears and closed their eyes, there was not one person in that room who was not forever changed by hearing those students. Not the 80% who supported divestment. And not the 20% who didn’t.

Many of you personally helped make the room a sea of green of support.  In just 5 days, over 8,000 people from all over the country, many from all over the world, said, “we stand with you.” We printed out thousands of stickers and they became like trading cards as people poured over your names and statements. “Oh look, David is a rabbinical student from Philadelphia. Dina is a Muslim teacher from New York. Let me wear Izak, a Quaker from Boston. No, wait, I’m wearing the Zeyde (grandfather) from Atlanta.” I saw more than one Palestinian student wearing a green sticker on her heart as she stood at the microphone, showing the most remarkable kind of courage. The kind required to tell your most painful family story, a story of death and heartbreak, without knowing it would actually be heard by those in front of you. But I know she was supported in telling her story by the massive visible support you showed her. We all felt it.

There are so many lessons to be learned from these past weeks, from what started as a nonviolent call for Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) from Palestinians in 2005, moved to US campuses like Hampshire and University of Michigan at Dearborn, and is now just beginning to spread across the country.

Divestment is a tactic meant to build a movement for justice and equality, not an end unto itself. The outcome of the vote became far less important than the way the fight for the bill electrified the campus, the community, and thousands of people all over the world. It’s impossible to convey the life changing and movement-building impact of this experience.

Take Emily Carlton, an ASUC senator who sponsored the bill. She spoke eloquently of starting out as a “privileged white, mainstream” sorority member who first became educated about the issue when SJP students came to lobby her, but who then found an entirely new community of friends in a world she never before knew existed. One in which Muslim, Arab, Jewish, Christian, and other students blend easily as classmates, as friends, as activists. Her life, she said, will never be the same- and she is just one person.

In the coming weeks, we will share the lessons learned, some in our own words, many in the words of UC students, staff and alum.

But first let me tell you how the night ended.

By the final vote, it was close to 5am. Still dark out.

When the vote was announced, the room silently received the news. Supporters placed the green stickers on our mouths to protest the fact that in the end, just a few votes had blocked the will of the majority of students. A student senator stood up and told everyone to put one hand on their heart on the other in the air, symbolically holding seeds in their fist with which we would all spread the movement outside and across the community, the country, the world.

So here is one seed.

The supporters silently filed out to Sproul Plaza, where the original Free Speech movement began.

Hundred remained outside, talking, chanting, singing, laughing, hugging, crying.

Yes, students were angry, but they were exhilarated. They understood they had done something remarkable. That in so many ways, life would never be the same.

It was the end of a long year, but the beginning of a new stage of the movement.

And I am so grateful that you were all there in the room with us.

It’s clear now. It is only a matter of time until we are all able to recognize each other’s full humanity, and thereby reclaim our own.

Cecilie Surasky,

Jewish Voice for Peace