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THE ELECTION CRISIS THAT UNFOLDED after June 12 has exposed the vulnerability of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), a vulnerability that has been driving its ongoing confrontation with the U.S. and Europe, for instance on the question of acquiring nuclear technology and its weapons applications.

While the prior U.S. administration under Bush had called for “regime change” in Iran, President Obama has been more conciliatory, offering direct negotiations with Tehran. This opening met with ambivalence from the Islamic Republic establishment; some favored while others opposed accepting this olive branch offered by the newly elected American president. Like the recent coup in Honduras, the dispute in Iran has been conditioned, on both sides, by the “regime change” that has taken place in the United States. A certain testing of possibilities in the post-Bush II world order is being mounted by allies and opponents alike. One dangerous aspect of the mounting crisis in Iran has been the uncertainty over how the Obama administration might address it.

The U.S. Republican Party and neoconservatives, now in the opposition, and recently elected Israeli right-wing politicians have demanded that the U.S. keep up the pressure on the IRI and have expressed skepticism regarding Iranian “reform” candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. European statesmen on both Right and Left have, for their part, made strident appeals for “democracy” in Iran. But Obama has tried to avoid the pitfalls of either exacerbating the confrontation with the IRI or undermining whatever hopes might be found with the Iranian dissidents, whether of the dominant institutions of the Islamic Republic such as Mousavi or of the more politically indeterminate mass protests. Obama is seeking to keep his options open, however events end up resolving in Iran. While to some this appears as an equivocation or even a betrayal of Iranian democratic aspirations, it is simply typical Obama realpolitik. A curious result of the Obama administration’s relatively taciturn response has been the IRI’s reciprocal reticence about any U.S. role in the present crisis, preferring instead, bizarrely, to demonize the British as somehow instigating the massive street protests.

The good faith or wisdom of the new realpolitik is not to be doubted, however, especially given that Obama wants neither retrenchment nor the unraveling of the Islamic Republic in Iran. As chief executive of what Marx called the “central committee” of the American and indeed global ruling class, Obama might not have much reasonable choice for alternative action. The truth is that the U.S. and European states can deal quite well with the IRI so long as it does not engage in particularly undesirable behaviors. Their problem is not with the IRI as such — but the Left’s ought to be.

The reigning confusion around the crisis in Iran has been expressed, on the one hand, in statements defending Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim to electoral victory by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and by individual writers in the supposedly leftist Monthly Review and its MRZine web publication (which also has republished without comment official Iranian statements on the crisis), and on the other hand by supporters of Iranian dissidents and election protesters such as Danny Postel, Fred Halliday, and the various Marxist-Humanist publications in the U.S.1

Slavoj Žižek has weighed in on the question with an interesting and sophisticated take of his own, questioning prevailing understandings of the nature of the Iranian regime and its Islamist character.2 Meanwhile, the indefatigable Christopher Hitchens has pursued his idiosyncratic brand of a quasi-neoconservative “anti-fascist” denunciation of the Islamic Republic, pointing out how the Islamic Republic itself is predicated on Khomeini’s “theological” finding of Velayat-e Faqui, that the entire Iranian population, as victims of Western “cultural imperialism,” needed to be treated as minority wards of the mullahs.3

Halliday addresses the current protests as if they are the result of a “return of the repressed” of the supposedly more revolutionary aspirations of the 1978–79 toppling of the Shah, characterizing the Islamic Republic as the result of a “counter-revolution.” In the interview published in this issue of the Platypus Review, historian of the Iranian Left Ervand Abrahamian characterizes the present crisis in terms of demands for greater freedoms that necessarily supersede the accomplished tasks of the 1979 revolution, which, according to Abrahamian, overthrew the tyranny of the Pahlavi ancien régime and established Iranian “independence” (from the U.S. and U.K.).

All told, this constellation of responses to the crisis has recapitulated problems on the Left in understanding the Islamic Revolution that took place in Iran from 1978–83, and the character and trajectory of the Islamic Republic of Iran since then. All share in the fallacy of attributing to Iran an autonomous historical rhythm or logic of its own. Iran is treated more or less as an entity, rather than as it might be, as a symptomatic effect of a greater history.4 Of all, Žižek has come closest to addressing this issue of greater context, but even he has failed to address the history of the Left.

Two issues bedevil the Left’s approach to the Islamic Republic and the present crisis in Iran: the general character of the recent historical phenomenon of Islamist politics, and the larger question of “revolution.” Among the responses to the present crisis one finds longstanding analytic and conceptual problems that are condensed in ways useful for critical consideration. It is precisely in its lack of potential emancipatory or even beneficial outcome that the present electoral crisis in Iran proves most instructive. So, what are the actual possibilities for the current crisis in Iran?

Perhaps perversely, it is helpful to begin with the well-reported statements of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, who warned of the danger of a “velvet revolution” akin to those that toppled the Communist Party-dominated Democratic Republics of Eastern Europe in 1989. The Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev sought to reform but only ended up undoing the Soviet Union. So it is not merely a matter of the intentions of the street protesters or establishment institutional dissidents such as Mousavi that will determine outcomes — as the Right, from Obama to the grim beards of the Revolutionary Guards and Basiji, do not hesitate to point out. By comparison with such eminently realistic practical perspectives of the powers-that-be, the Left reveals itself to be comprised of daydreams and wishful thinking. The Revolutionary Guards might be correct that the present crisis of protests against the election results can only end badly.

Perhaps Ahmadinejad and those behind him, along with the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, will prevail, and the protests against the election outcome will dissipate and those involved be punished, repressed, or eliminated. Or, perhaps, the protests will escalate, precipitating the demise of the Islamic Republic. But, were that to happen, maybe all that will be destroyed is the “republic” and not its Islamist politics, resulting in a rule of the mullahs without the accoutrements of “democracy.” Perhaps the protests will provoke a dictatorship by the Revolutionary Guards and Basiji militias. Or perhaps even these forces will weaken and dissolve under the pressure of the protesters. Perhaps a civil war will issue from the deepened splitting of the extant forces in Iran. In that case, it is difficult to imagine that the present backers of the protests among the Islamic Republic establishment would press to undermine the state or precipitate a civil war or a coup (one way or the other). Perhaps the present crisis will pressure a reconsolidated regime under Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to continue the confrontation with the U.S. and Europe, only more hysterically, in order to try to bolster their support in Iran. If so, this could easily result in military conflict. These are the potential practical stakes of the present crisis.

Žižek has balanced the merits of the protests against the drive to neo-liberalize Iran, in which not only American neoconservatives but also Ahmadinejad himself as well as the “reformers” such as Mousavi and his patron, the “pistachio king” and former president of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Rafsanjani, have all taken part. In so doing, however, Žižek rehearses illusions on the Left respecting the 1979 Islamic Revolution, as, for instance, when he points to the traditional Shia slogans of the protesters, “Death to the tyrant!” and “God is great!,” as evidence of the “emancipatory potential” of “good Islam,” as an alternative to the apparent inevitability of neoliberalism. But this concession to Islamist politics is gratuitous to the extent that it does not recognize the ideological limitations and practical constraints of the protest movement and its potential trajectory, especially in global context. The protests are treated as nothing more than an “event.”

But if the protests were to succeed, what would this mean? It could mean calling a new election in which Mousavi would win and begin reforming the IRI, curtailing the power of the Revolutionary Guards and Basiji, and perhaps even that of the clerical establishment. Or, if a more radical transformation were possible, perhaps a revolution would take place in which the IRI would be overthrown in favor of a newly constituted Iranian state. The most likely political outcome of such a scenario can be seen in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq, a “soft” Islamist state more “open” to the rest of the world, i.e., more directly in-sync with the neoliberal norms prevailing in global capital, without the Revolutionary Guards, Inc., taking its cut (like the military in neighboring Pakistan, through its extensive holdings, the Revolutionary Guards comprise perhaps the largest capitalist entity in Iran). But how much better would such an outcome really be, from the perspective of the Left — for instance, in terms of individual and collective freedoms, such as women’s and sexual liberties, labor union organizing, etc.? Not much, if at all. Hence, even a less virulent or differently directed political Islamism needs to be seen as a core part of the problem confronted by people in Iran, rather than as an aspect of any potential solution.

Žižek has at least recognized that Islamism is not incompatible with, but rather shares in the essential historical moment of neoliberal capital. More than simply being two sides of the same coin, as Afghanistan and Iraq show, there is no discontinuity between neoliberalism and Islamism, despite what apologists for either may think.

Beyond Žižek, others on the Left have sought to capture for the election protests the historical mantle of the 1979 Revolution, as well as the precedents of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the “Left”-nationalist politics of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq, overthrown in a U.S.- and British-supported coup in 1953. For instance, the Tudeh (“Masses”) Party (Iranian Communist Party), the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK, “People’s Mujahedin of Iran”) and its associated National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCORI), and the Worker-Communist Party of Iran (WPI, sister organization of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, the organizers of the largest labor union federation in post-U.S. invasion and occupation Iraq) have all issued statements claiming and thus simplifying, in national-celebratory terms, this complex and paradoxical historical legacy for the current protests. But some true democratic character of Iranian tradition should not be so demagogically posed.

The MEK, who were the greatest organizational participants on the Left in the Islamic Revolution of 1978–79 (helping to organize the massive street protests that brought down the Shah, and participating in the U.S. embassy takeover), were originally inspired by New Left Islamist Ali Shariati and developed a particular Islamo-Marxist approach that became more avowedly and self-consciously “Marxist” as they slipped into opposition with the rise to supremacy of Khomeini.5 Shariati considered himself a follower of Frantz Fanon; Jean-Paul Sartre once said, famously, “I have no religion, but if I were to choose one, it would be that of Shariati.” The 44-year-old Shariati died under mysterious circumstances in 1977 while in exile in London, perhaps murdered by Khomeini’s agents. Opposition presidential candidate Mousavi, and especially his wife Zahra Rahnavard, despite eventually having joined the Khomeini faction by 1979, were students of Shariati who worked closely with him politically in the 1960s–70s.

A Mujahidin-i-khalq demonstration in Tehran during the Revolution. To the left, the figure of Dr. Ali Shariati; to the right, Khomeini.

However disoriented and hence limited the MEK’s inspiration, Shariati’s critique of modern capitalism, from the supposed perspective of Islam, was, it had the virtue of questioning capitalist modernity’s fundamental assumptions more deeply than is typically attempted today, for instance by Žižek, whose take on the “emancipatory potential” of “good Islam” is limited to the rather narrow question of “democracy.” So the question of how adequate let alone well-advised the “democratic” demands such as those of the present Iranian election protesters cannot even be posed, let alone properly addressed. 2009 is not a reprise of 1979, having much less radical potential, and this is both for good and ill.

On the Left, the MEK has been among the more noisy opposition groups against the Islamic Republic, for instance using its deep-cover operatives within Iran to expose the regime’s nuclear weapons program. Most on the Left have shunned the MEK, however. For instance, Postel calls it a “Stalinist death cult.” But the MEK’s New Left Third Worldist and cultural-nationalist (Islamist) perspective, however colored by Marxism, and no matter how subsequently modified, remains incoherent, as does the ostensibly more orthodox Marxism of the Tudeh and WCPI, for instance in their politics of “anti-imperialism,” and thus also remains blind to how their political outlook, from the 1970s to today, is bound to (and hence responsible for) the regressive dynamic of the “revolution” — really, just the collapse of the Shah’s regime — that resulted in the present theocracy. All these groups on the Iranian Left are but faint shadows of their former selves.

Despite their otherwise vociferous opposition to the present Islamist regime, the position of the Left in the present crisis, for instance hanging on every utterance by this or that “progressive” mullah in Iran, reminds one of the unbecoming position of Maoists throughout the world enthralled by the purge of the Gang of Four after Mao’s death in the late 1970s. Except, of course, for those who seek to legitimize Ahmadinejad, everyone is eager if not desperate to find in the present crisis an “opening” to a potential “progressive” outcome. The present search for an “emancipatory” Islamist politics is a sad repetition of the Left’s take on the 1979 Revolution. This position of contemplative spectatorship avoids the tasks of what any purported Left can, should, and indeed must do. From opportunist wishful thinking and tailing after forces it accepts ahead of time as beyond its control, the so-called Left resembles the Monday quarterbacking that rationalizes a course of events for which it abdicates any true responsibility. The Left thus participates in and contributes to affirming the confused muddle from which phenomena such as the Iranian election protests suffer — and hence inevitably becomes part of the Right.

This is the irony. Since those such as Žižek, Halliday, Postel, the Marxist-Humanists, liberals, and others on the Left seem anxious to prove that the U.S. neoconservatives and others are wrong in their hawkish attitude towards the Islamic Republic, to prove that any U.S. intervention will only backfire and prevent the possibility of a progressive outcome, especially to the present crisis, they tacitly support the Obama approach, no matter how supposedly differently and less cynically motivated theirs is compared to official U.S. policy.

Like the Obama administration, the Left seems more afraid to queer the play of the election protesters than it is eager to weigh in against the Islamic Republic. This craven anxiety at all-too-evident powerlessness over events considers itself to be balancing the need to oppose the greater power and danger, “U.S. imperialism,” producing a strange emphasis in all this discourse. Only Hitchens, in the mania of his “anti-fascism,” has freed himself from this obsequious attitude of those on the Left that sounds so awkward in the context of the present unraveling of what former U.S. National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice once, rightly, called a “loathsome regime” — a sentiment about the Islamic Republic that any purported Left should share, and more loudly and proudly than any U.S. official could.

Indeed, the supporters of the election protesters have trumpeted the rejection of any and all help that might be impugned as showing the nefarious hand of the U.S. government and its agencies.6 Instead, they focus on a supposed endemic dynamic for progressive-emancipatory change in Iranian history, eschewing how the present crisis of the Islamic Republic is related to greater global historical dynamics in which Iran is no less caught up than any other place. They thus repeat the mistake familiar from the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the reactionary dynamics of which were obscured behind supposed “anti-imperialism.” The problems facing the Left in Iran are the very same ones faced anywhere else. “Their” problems are precisely ours.

With the present crisis in Iran and its grim outlook we pay the price for the historical failures — really, the crimes — of the Left, going back at least to the period of the 1960s–70s New Left of which the Islamic Revolution was a product. The prospects for any positive, let alone progressive, outcome to the present crisis are quite dim. This is why it should be shocking that the Left so unthinkingly repeats today, if in a much attenuated form, precisely those mistakes that brought us to this point. The inescapable lesson of several generations of history is that only an entirely theoretically reformulated and practically reconstituted Left in places such as the U.S. and Europe would have any hope of giving even remotely adequate, let alone effective, form to the discontents that erupt from time to time anywhere in the world. Far from being able to take encouragement from phenomena such as the present election crisis and protests in Iran, the disturbing realization needs to be had, and at the deepest levels of conscious reflection, about just how much “they” need us.

A reformulated Left for the present and future must do better than the Left has done up to now in addressing — and opposing — problems such as political Islamism. The present manifest failure and unraveling of the Islamic Revolution in Iran is a good occasion for thinking through what it might mean to settle this more than thirty year old score of the betrayed and betraying Left. |P

Notes:

1. In particular, see Danny Postel’s Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, 2006; Fred Halliday’s “Iran’s Tide of History: Counterrevolution and After,” OpenDemocracy.net, July 17; and the Marxist-Humanist periodical News & Letters, as well as the web sites of the U.S. Marxist-Humanists and the Marxist-Humanist Initiative.

2. See Žižek’s “Will the Cat above the Precipice Fall Down?,” June 24 (available at http://supportiran.blogspot.com), based on a June 18 lecture at Birkbeck College, London, on “Populism and Democracy,” and followed by the more extended treatment in “Berlusconi in Tehran,” London Review of Books, July 23.

3. See Hitchens, “Don’t Call What Happened in Iran Last Week an Election,” Slate, June 14.

4. For excellent historical treatments of the Islamic Revolution and its local and global context, please see: Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982) and The Iranian Mojahedin (1992); Maziar Behrooz, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (2000); Fred Halliday, “The Iranian Revolution: Uneven Development and Religious Populism” (Journal of International Affairs 36.2 Fall/Winter 1982/83); and David Greason, “Embracing Death: The Western Left and the Iranian Revolution, 1979–83” (Economy and Society 34.1, February 2005). The critically important insights of these works have been largely neglected, including subsequently by their own authors.

5. The MEK have been widely described as “cult-like,” but perhaps this is because, as former participants in the Islamic Revolution, in their state of betrayal they focus so much animus on the cult-like character of the Islamic Republic itself; the official term used by the Khomeiniite state for the MEK is “Hypocrites” (Monafeqin), expressing their shared Islamist roots in the 1979 Revolution. But the success of the MEK over Khomeini would have hardly been better, and might have indeed been much worse. Khomeini’s opportunism and practical cynicism in consolidating the Islamic Revolution might have not only produced but also prevented abominable excesses of “revolutionary” Islamism.

Of all the organized tendencies in the Iranian Revolution, the MEK perhaps most instantiated Michel Foucault’s vision of its more radical “non-Western” character (see Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, 2005). But just as Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Islamic Revolution in Iran ought to be a disturbing reminder of the inherent limitations and right-wing character of the Foucauldian critique of modernity, so should the MEK’s historical Shariati-inspired Islamism stand as a warning against all similar post-New Left valorizations of “culture.”

More recently, the MEK has found advocates among the far-Right politicians of the U.S. government such as Representative Tom Tancredo, Senators Sam Brownback and Kit Bond and former Senator and Attorney General John Ashcroft — precisely those who are most enchanted by the ideological cult of “America.” The MEK’s former patron, the Baathist Saddam Hussein, had unleashed the MEK on Iran in a final battle at the close of the Iran-Iraq war 1980–88, after which Khomeini ordered the slaughter of all remaining leftist political prisoners in Iran, as many as 30,000, mostly affiliated with the MEK and Tudeh, in what Abrahamian called “an act of violence unprecedented in Iranian history — unprecedented in form, content, and intensity” (Tortured Confessions, 1999, 210). After the 2003 invasion and occupation, the U.S. disarmed but protected the MEK in Iraq. However, since the U.S. military’s recent redeployment in the “status of forces” agreement with the al-Maliki government signed by Bush but implemented by Obama, the MEK has been subjected to brutal, murderous repression, as its refugee camp was raided by Iraqi forces on July 28–29, seemingly at the behest of the Iranian government, of which the dominant, ruling Shia constituency parties in Iraq have been longstanding beneficiaries.

The grotesque and ongoing tragedy of the MEK forms a shadow history of the Islamic Revolution and its aftermath, eclipsed by the Khomeiniite Islamic Republic, but is essential for grasping its dynamics and trajectory.

6. See, for instance, Sean Penn, Ross Mirkarimi and Reese Erlich, “Support Iranians, not U.S. Intervention,” CommonDreams.org, July 21.

The drums of war are heard again in Israel and they are sounded because once more Israel’s invincibility is in question. Despite the triumphant rhetoric in the various media commemorative reports, two years after ‘Cast Lead’, the sense is that that campaign was as much of a failure as was the second Lebanon war of 2006. Unfortunately, leaders, generals and the public at large in the Jewish State know only one way of dealing with military debacles and fiascos. They can be redeemed only by another successful operation or war but one which has to be carried out with more force and be more ruthless than the previous one with the hope for better results in the next round.

Force and might, so explained leading commentators in the local media (parroting what they hear from the generals in the army), is needed in order to ‘deter’, to ‘teach a lesson’ and to ‘weaken’ the enemy. There is no new plan for Gaza – there is no real desire to occupy it and put in under direct Israeli rule. What is suggested is to pound the Strip and its people once more, but with more brutality and for a shorter time. One might ask, why would this bear different fruits than the ‘Cast Lead Operation’? But this is the wrong question. The right question is what else can the present political and military elite of Israel (which includes the government and the main opposition parties) do?

They have known now for years what to do in the West Bank – colonize, ethnically cleanse and bisect the area to death, while remaining publicly loyal to the futile discourse of peace or rather the ‘peace process’. The end result is expected to be a docile Palestinian Authority within a heavily Judaized West Bank. But they are at a total loss about how to manage the situation in the Gaza Strip, ever since Ariel Sharon ‘disengaged’ from it. The unwillingness of the people of Gaza to be disengaged from the West Bank, and the World, seems to be more difficult to defeat, even after the horrible human toll the Gazans paid in December 2008 for their resistance and defiance.

The scenario for the next round is unfolding in front of our eyes and it resembles depressingly the same deterioration that preceded the massacre of Gaza two years ago: daily bombardment on the Strip and a policy that tries to provoke Hamas so that more expanded assaults would be justified. As one general explained, there is now a need to take into account the damaging effect of the Goldstone report: namely the next major attack should look more plausible than the 2009 one (but this concern may not be that crucial to this particular government; nor would it serve as an obstacle).

As always in this part of the world, other scenarios are possible – less bloody and maybe more hopeful. But it is hard to see who can generate a different short term future: the perfidious Obama administration? The helpless Arab regimes? timid Europe or the handicapped UN? The steadfastness of the people of Gaza and that of the Palestinian people in general means that the grand Israeli strategy to wither them away – as the founder of the Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, hoped to do to the indigenous people of Palestine already in the very end of the nineteenth century – will not work. But the price may yet rise and it is time for all those who voiced a powerful and effective voice AFTER the Gaza massacre two years ago, to do it NOW, and try and avert the next one.

This voice is described in Israel as the attempt to ‘delegitimize’ the Jewish State. It is the only voice that seems to concern seriously the government and the intellectual elite of Israel (far more annoying to them than any soft condemnation by Hillary Clinton or the EU). The first attempt to counter this voice was to claim that delegitimization was anti-Semitism in disguise. This seems to have backfired since Israel demanded to know who in the world supports its policies; well it transpired that the only enthusiastic supporters of Israeli policy in the Western world nowadays are extreme right wing, traditionally anti-Semitic, organizations and politicians The second attempt is to try and argue that these attempts in the form of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, would make Israel more determined to continue and be a rogue state. However, this is a vacuous threat: Israeli policies are not generated by this moral and decent voice; on the contrary, this voice is one of the few factors that restrain the aggressive policy, and who knows when, if in the future western governments would joined their publics as they did eventually in the case of Apartheid South Africa, it may even bring an end to these policies and enable Jews and Arabs alike to live in peace in Israel and Palestine.

This voice is effective because is shows clearly the link between the racist character of the state and the criminal nature of its policies towards the Palestinians. The voice turned recently into an organized and clearly defined campaign with a clear message: Israel will remain a pariah state as long as its constitution, laws and the policies will continue to violate the basic human and civil rights of the Palestinians, wherever they are, including the right to live and exist.

What is needed now is for the noble but totally futile energy invested by the Israeli peace camp and its like in the west in the concept of ‘co-existence’ and the projects of ‘dialogue’ to be reinvested in the attempt to prevent another genocidal chapter in the history of Israel’s war against the Palestinians, before it is too late.

By Ilan Pappe

27 December , 2010

Mondoweiss

Ilan Pappé is the coauthor with Noam Chomsky of Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians (Haymarket Books).

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, gave an exclusive interview to Brazilian journalist Natalia Viana of the online publication Opera Mundi on Monday. (Viana, 2004 graduate of Narco News’ School of Authentic Journalism, now is co-chair, with Bill Conroy, of its investigative journalism program.) Assange didn’t hide his irritation at the freezing of his Swiss bank account (on the pretext of his having registered it at a local address while he does not reside in a European country) and with other actions taken against his organization since it published embarrassing documents from US Embassies.

Assange was preparing to turn himself in to British police, who arrested him in London this morning. Assange is accused of sexual crimes in Sweden. The accusation isn’t very clear and includes charges of having unprotected sex with two women while he was in Stockholm giving a speech. On November 18 Swedish authorities issued an arrest warrant with the objective of interrogating him for “reasonable suspicion of rape, sexual and coercive aggression.” The WikiLeaks founder faces a hearing in the Westminster court in the central region of London, where it will be decided if he will be extradited to Sweden.

Natalia Viana: What is the accusation against you and how do you feel about your imminent arrest?

Julian Assange: There are many accusations. The most serious is that I and our people have committed espionage against the United States. This is false. There is also a so-called “rape” investigation from Sweden. This is false and will go away once the facts come out, but is being used to attack our reputation in the meantime.

Viana: Regarding the accusation of espionage, have there been any legal charges filed?

Assange: It is a formal investigation involving the heads of the FBI, CIA, and the US Attorney General and so on. Australia is also conducting a similar “whole of government” investigation and assisting the United States. One of the alleged sources, Bradley Manning (US soldier accused of being WikiLeaks’ source), sits in solitary confinement in a prison cell in Virginia. He faces 52 years if convicted on all charges.

Viana: What is the difference between what WikiLeaks does and espionage?

Assange: WikiLeaks receives material from whistleblowers (persons who denounce wrongdoing in the organizations in which they work) and journalists and makes it public. Espionage would require us to actively take material and give it deliberately to a foreign power.

Viana: In the Sweden case, what do the women allege?

Assange: They say that I had consensual sex. The case was dropped within 12 hours when the chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, read the interviews. Then it was picked back up again after political involvements.The whole thing is very disturbing. They just froze my Swiss bank account, my defense fund.

Viana: On what basis?

Assange: They do claim I was putting them in danger. But there is nothing to suggest that. And, in any case, it’s false.

Viana: What is your opinion about the freezing of your money transfers by the business PayPal, and that Amazon removed your site? How do you see those acts?

Assange: It is fascinating to see the tentacles of the corrupt American elite. In some ways, seeing the reaction is as important as the material we have released. PayPal and Amazon froze our accounts for political reasons. With PayPal, 70,000 euros were frozen. With our defense fund, that was 31,000 euros.

Viana: What do they allege?

Assange: They say that we were conducting “illegal activities,” and that clearly is untrue. More, they are echoing the accusations of (US Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton about publishing embarrassing US government documents. However, the head of the Senate Committee for Homeland Security bragged to the press about how he had called Amazon and demanded they shut us down.

Viana: What is WikiLeaks doing to defend itself from the freezing of its donations?

Assange: We have lost 100,000 euros this week alone as a result of the freezing of our assets. We have accounts in other banks – in Iceland and Germany, for example, that the public can still use. We have a website. We also accept credit card donations.

Viana: What more is WikiLeaks doing to defend itself?

Assange: We are counting on a diversity of support from good people. We have more than 350 websites in the world that are reproducing our content. We value that more than anything.

By Natalia Viana

09 December, 2010

Opera Mundi/ translated by Narco News

Statistics and soldiers’ testimonies reveal a harrowing epidemic of sexual assault in the US military

Sexual assault within the ranks of the military is not a new problem. It is a systemic problem that has necessitated that the military conduct its own annual reporting on the crisis.

A 2003 Air Force Academy sexual assault scandal prompted the department of defense to include a provision in the 2004 National Defense Authorization Act that required investigations and reports of sexual harassment and assaults within US military academies to be filed. The personal toll is, nevertheless, devastating.

Military sexual trauma (MST) survivor Susan Avila-Smith is director of the veteran’s advocacy group Women Organizing Women. She has been serving female and scores of male clients in various stages of recovery from MST for 15 years and knows of its devastating effects up close.

“People cannot conceive how badly wounded these people are,” she told Al Jazeera, “Of the 3,000 I’ve worked with, only one is employed. Combat trauma is bad enough, but with MST it’s not the enemy, it’s our guys who are doing it. You’re fighting your friends, your peers, people you’ve been told have your back. That betrayal, then the betrayal from the command is, they say, worse than the sexual assault itself.”

On December 13, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other groups filed a federal lawsuit seeking Pentagon records in order to get the real facts about the incidence of sexual assault in the ranks.

The Pentagon has consistently refused to release records that fully document the problem and how it is handled. Sexual assaults on women in the US military have claimed some degree of visibility, but about male victims there is absolute silence.

Pack Parachute, a non-profit in Seattle, assists veterans who are sexual assault survivors. Its founder Kira Mountjoy-Pepka, was raped as a cadet at the Air Force Academy. In July 2003 she was member of a team of female cadets handpicked by Donald Rumsfeld, at the time the secretary of defense, to tell their stories of having been sexually assaulted. The ensuing media coverage and a Pentagon investigation forced the academy to make the aforementioned major policy changes.

Report reveals alarming statistics

Mountjoy-Pepka often works with male survivors of MST. She stated in a telephone interview that four per cent of men in the military experience MST. “Most choose not to talk about it until after their discharge from the military, largely because the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in over 60 percent of MST cases is too overwhelming,” she informed Al Jazeera.

Last week the Pentagon released its “annual report on sexual harassment and violence at the military service academies”. At its three academies, the number of reports of sexual assault and harassment has risen a staggering 64 percent from last year.

The report attributes the huge increase to better reporting of incidents due to increased training and education about sexual assault and harassment. Veteran’s Administration (VA) statistics show that more than 50 percent of the veterans who screen positive for MST are men.

According to the US Census Bureau, there are roughly 22 million male veterans compared to less than two million female vets.

In Congressional testimony in the summer of 2008, Lt. Gen. Rochelle, the army chief of personnel, reported the little known statistic that 12 percent (approximately 260) of the 2,200 reported rapes in the military in 2007 were reported by military male victims.

Due to their sheer numbers in the military, more men (at a rough estimate one in twenty), have experienced MST than women.

Shamed into silence

Billy Capshaw was 17 when he joined the Army in 1977. After being trained as a medic he was transferred to Baumholder, Germany. His roommate, Jeffrey Dahmer, by virtue of his seniority ensured that Capshaw had no formal assignment, no mail, and no pay. Having completely isolated the young medic, Dahmer regularly sexually assaulted, raped, and tortured him.

Dahmer went on to become the infamous serial killer and sex offender who murdered 17 boys and men before being beaten to death by an inmate at Columbia Correction Institution in 1994.

Capshaw reflects back, “At that young age I didn’t know how to deal with it. My commander did not believe me. Nobody helped me, even though I begged and begged and begged.”

The debilitating lifelong struggle Capshaw has had to face is common among survivors of military sexual assault.

Later during therapy he needed to go public. Since then he says, “I’ve talked to a lot of men, many of them soldiers, who are raped but who won’t go public with their story. The shame alone is overwhelming.”

In 1985 Michael Warren enlisted in the navy and for three years worked as a submarine machinist mate on a nuclear submarine. One day he awoke to find another soldier performing fellatio on him.

He recollects with horror, “I was paralyzed with fear. I was in disbelief… shame. When I reported it to the commander he said it was better for me to deal with it after being discharged. Nobody helped me, not even the chaplain. The commander at the processing centre wouldn’t look me in the face. When I filled out my claim later they didn’t believe me. It’s so frustrating.”

Armando Javier was an active duty Marine from 1990 to 1994. He was a Lance Corporal at Camp Lejeune in 1993 when he was raped.

Five Marines jumped Javier and beat him until he was nearly unconscious, before taking turns raping him. His sexual victimization narrative reads, “One of them, a corporal, pulled down my shorts and instructed the others to ‘Get the grease’. Another corporal instructed someone to bring the stick. They began to insert the stick inside my anus. The people present during this sadistic and ritual-like ceremony started to cajole, cheer, and laugh, saying “stick em’ – stick-em’.”

Extreme shame and trauma compelled him not to disclose the crime to anyone except a friend in his unit. He wrote in his account, “My experience left me torn apart physically, mentally, and spiritually. I was dehumanized and treated with ultimate cruelty, by my perpetrators… I was embarrassed and ashamed and didn’t know what to do. I was young at that time. And being part of an elite organization that values brotherhood, integrity and faithfulness made it hard to come forward and reveal what happened.”

The reality of being less equal

Women in America were first allowed into the military during the Revolutionary War in 1775 and their travails are as old. Drill instructors indoctrinate new recruits into it at the outset by routinely referring to them as “girl,” “pussy,” “bitch,” and “dyke.”

A Command Sergeant Major told Catherine Jayne West of the Mississippi National Guard, “There aren’t but two places for women – in the kitchen or in the bedroom. Women have no place in the military.”

She was raped by fellow soldier Private First Class Kevin Lemeiux, at the sprawling Camp Anaconda, north of Baghdad. The defense lawyer in court merely wanted to know why, as a member of the army, she had not fought back.

The morning after the rape, an army doctor gave her a thorough examination. The army’s criminal investigation team concluded her story was true. Moreover, Lemeiux had bragged about the incident to his buddies and they had turned him in. It seemed like a closed case, but in court the defense claimed that the fact that West had not fought back during the rape was what incriminated her. In addition, her commanding officer and 1st Sergeant declared, in court, that she was a “promiscuous female.”

In contrast, Lemeiux, after the third court hearing of the trial, was promoted to a Specialist. Meanwhile his lawyer entered a plea of insanity.

He was later found guilty of kidnapping but not rape, despite his own admission of the crime. He was given three years for kidnapping, half of which was knocked off.

The long term affects of MST

Jasmine Black, a human resources specialist in the Army National Guard from June 2006 to September 2008 was raped by another soldier in her battalion when she was stationed in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. She reported it to her Sexual Assault Response Coordinator (SARC) and the Military Police, but the culprit was not brought to book.

After an early discharge due to MST and treatment at a PTSD Residential Rehabilitation Treatment Program (PRRTP) facility, she was raped again by a higher-ranking member of the air force in February 2009

Administrator for a combat engineering instruction unit in Knoxville, Tennessee, Tracey Harmon has no illusions. “For women in the military, you are either a bitch, a dyke, or a whore. If you sleep with one person in your unit you are a whore. If you are a lesbian you are a dyke, and if you don’t sleep with other soldiers you are a bitch.”

Maricela Guzman served in the navy from 1998 to 2002 as a computer technician on the island of Diego Garcia. She was raped while in boot camp, but fear of consequences kept her from talking about it for the rest of her time in the military. “I survived by becoming a workaholic and was much awarded as a soldier for my work ethic.”

On witnessing the way it treated the native population in Diego Garcia, she chose to dissociate from the military. Post discharge, her life became unmanageable. She underwent a divorce, survived a failed suicide attempt and became homeless before deciding to move in with her parents. A chance encounter with a female veteran at a political event in Los Angeles prompted her to contact the VA for help. Her therapist there diagnosed her with PTSD from her rape.

The VA denied her claim nevertheless, “Because they said I couldn’t prove it … since I had not brought it up when it happened and also because I had not shown any deviant behavior while in the service. I was outraged and felt compelled to talk about what happened.”

While it will go to any length to maintain public silence over the issue, the military machine has no such qualms within its own corridors. Guzman discloses, “Through the gossip mill we would hear of women who had reported being raped. No confidentiality was maintained nor any protection given to victims. The boys’ club culture is strong and the competition exclusive. That forces many not to report rape, because it is a blemish and can ruin your career.”

The department of defence reported that in fiscal year 2009, there were 3,230 reports of sexual assault, an increase of 11 percent over the prior year.

However, as high as the military’s own figures are of rape and sexual assault, victims and advocates Al Jazeera spoke with believe the real figures are sure to be higher.

Veteran April Fitzsimmons, another victim of sexual assault, knows what an uphill battle it is for women to take on the military system. “When victims come forward, they are ostracized and isolated from their communities. Many of the perpetrators are officers who use their ranks to coerce women to sleep with them. It’s a closely interwoven community, so they are safe and move fearlessly amongst their victims.”

Her advice to women considering joining the US military?

“The crisis is so severe that I’m telling women to simply not join the military because it’s completely unsafe and puts them at risk. Until something changes at the top, no woman should join the military.”

This is the first in a two part series on sexual harassment in the US military.

Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

By Dahr Jamail

21 December, 2010

Aljazeera

The Obama administration has devoted enormous attention and effort to a worldwide campaign to destabilize Iran and open the way to direct military aggression, the latest mass of documents released by WikiLeaks confirms. The first batch of more than 250,000 secret diplomatic cables between the State Department and 270 US embassies and missions around the world were made public Sunday night by the Internet-based organization, which is opposed to US militarism.

The documents reveal a wide range of efforts by the US government over the past decade, and especially in the last three years, to mobilize support for its campaign against Iran—as well as to forestall a premature Israeli air strike against the Islamic Republic, which US officials feared would be counterproductive and strengthen Iran in the long run.

The most provocative allegation contained in the documents is the claim, in a February 24, 2010 cable describing a US-Russian meeting, that North Korea had shipped Iran 19 medium-range, Russian-designed missiles, capable of delivering nuclear warheads. This claim was trumpeted in US media accounts of the WikiLeaks documents, as though it was a smoking gun, but it amounts to no more than an unsupported US government allegation, similar to lies used by the Bush administration to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The New York Times devoted a lengthy article to the claim of a “cache” of missiles which it said would give Iran the ability to strike cities 2,000 miles away: “If fired from Iran, that range, in theory, would let its warheads reach targets as far away as Western Europe, including Berlin. If fired northwestward, the warheads could easily reach Moscow.”

The Times account was crafted in collaboration with the Obama administration—as the newspaper’s editors shamelessly admit, explaining, “At the request of the Obama administration, The New York Times has agreed not to publish the text of the cable.”

The WikiLeaks documents also demonstrate that US embassies throughout the Middle East and Central Asia were instructed to focus their espionage activities on Iran, particularly in those countries with a common border. This was necessary because there has been no official US presence in Tehran since the 1979 takeover by militant students, who branded the embassy—with perfect justice—as a “nest of spies.”

Washington pursued a course of heavy-handed diplomatic pressure on countries with important economic relations with Tehran, particularly China, Russia and Germany. The Bush administration intervened with China in November 2007, seeking to intercept a cargo of missile stabilizers en route from North Korea to Iran via Beijing, one of at least a dozen such diplomatic exchanges targeting cargo ranging from carbon fiber to gyroscopes to ordinary chemicals.

Particularly significant are the repeated entreaties by the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and other Arab sheikdoms for American military intervention against Iran. All of the crowned heads of the Persian Gulf still tremble at the memory of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which destroyed the absolute monarchy of the Shah, at the time the most powerful ruler in the Middle East.

As early as 2005, two years into the US war in Iraq, Arab rulers who nominally opposed the US invasion, because of overwhelming popular hostility, were urging Washington behind the scenes to extend its war of aggression into Iran. Tailoring their arguments to the lies used by the Bush administration to justify the attack on Iraq, they argued that Iran would certainly develop a nuclear bomb if left undisturbed.

Saudi King Abdullah frequently pressed the US to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities “to cut off the head of the snake,” while officials in Bahrain and Jordan also told their US interlocutors that military means should be used against Iran if necessary. “The danger of letting it go on is greater than the dangers of stopping it,” Bahrain’s King Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa told visiting US General David Petraeus.

The transparent falsity of these arguments—urgently warning that an Iranian bomb was “inevitable” in 2006, 2007 or 2008—provides a useful yardstick for evaluating similar arguments today, made by both the Obama administration and Israel.

The uncensored views of the Arab sheiks also shed light on a major foreign policy initiative of the Obama administration, the extension of US military relationships with the Persian Gulf states, and in particular, the resumption of massive arms sales to Saudi Arabia and its smaller neighbors. In September, the Pentagon publicly endorsed a record $60 billion sale of weapons, including advanced fighter jets, to Saudi Arabia.

These sales have both a political/diplomatic and a military/technical component, since the huge influx of US-built weapons means that American troops can operate seamlessly with their counterparts in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the UAE and Oman. “We are helping these allied and partner nations create their own containment shield against Iran,” a US officer told the press at the time. “It is a way of deterring Iran, but helpful to us in so many other ways.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while denouncing the WikiLeaks release of the documents, seized on the anti-Iranian comments reported by US diplomats in the Arab capitals as proof that the US concern over the supposed Iranian threat was widely shared. “I think that it should not be a surprise that Iran is a source of great concern, not only in the US,” she said, adding, “the comments reported in the cables prove that Iran poses a serious threat in the eyes of its neighbors, and beyond the region.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in a similar vein, citing the WikiLeaks documents as proof that the Arab rulers shared Israel’s hostility to Iran. He declared, “Our region has been hostage to a narrative that is the result of 60 years of propaganda, which paints Israel as the greatest threat. In reality leaders understand that that view is bankrupt. For the first time in history there is agreement that Iran is the threat.”

Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took the occasion of the WikiLeaks document release to reiterate US preparations for military action against Iran. Speaking Sunday on CNN, Mullen said, “Iran is still very much on a path to be able to develop nuclear weapons, including — and including weaponizing them, putting them on a missile and being able to use them.”

In response to a direct question from interviewer Fareed Zakaria, he said, “We’ve actually been thinking about military options for a significant period of time. And I’ve spoken with many others, that we’ve had options on the table. We continue to do that…and we will continue to do that in the future.”

Exactly what those “military options” are, Admiral Mullen did not say. But within 24 hours, a terrorist attack in the Iranian capital seemed to provide at least one answer. Two Iranian nuclear scientists were targeted for attack by groups of men riding motorcycles, who attached bombs to their cars, rode away, and then detonated them.

Majid Shahriari, a professor in the nuclear engineering department at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran was killed, and Fereydoon Abbasi, a professor at the same university who is involved in nuclear research at the Defense Ministry, was wounded. The wives of both men and one other person were wounded in the attacks, which took place in two separate locations.

The organized, simultaneous character of the attack suggests that an intelligence service or services was involved. It is the fifth such attack on an Iranian nuclear expert in the recent period. Professor Shahriari was said to be an expert in the separation of isotopes and to have taught at the Supreme National Defense University, run by the Iranian Army. Iran’s nuclear facilities have also reportedly been targeted for cyber-warfare attack, with the Stuxnet worm, rumored to have been devised by the Israelis.

At a news conference, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that “undoubtedly the hand of the Zionist regime and Western governments is involved” in the killing. Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s nuclear development program, warned the US and its allies not to “play with fire.”

According to press reports, Abbasi was targeted by the US-sponsored sanctions regime adopted by the UN Security Council, which barred him from international travel since 2007 because of his alleged role in the Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

By Patrick Martin

The batch of 250,000 US classified documents released by WikiLeaks to several news outlets, some of whose content was made public Sunday, sheds new light on the sordid nature of American imperialist intrigue and conspiracy around the globe.

The WSWS will analyze the documents more thoroughly in a subsequent article, but “highlights” published by the Guardian and the New York Times are revealing.

The leaked material consists of classified cables from US embassies, some dispatched as recently as early 2010. The cables, most of which date from 2007-2010, contain US officials’ comments on foreign governments and leaders and speculation about the activities and maneuvers of the latter, as well as details about American foreign policy operations.

In a revelation that should surprise no one, the US State Department and American diplomacy in general turn out to be a vast nest of spies.

The Guardian explains that the WikiLeaks documents “reveal how the US uses its embassies as part of a global espionage network, with diplomats tasked to obtain not just information from the people they meet, but personal details, such as frequent flyer numbers, credit card details and even DNA material.

“Classified ‘human intelligence directives’ issued in the name of Hillary Clinton or her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, instruct officials to gather information on military installations, weapons markings, vehicle details of political leaders as well as iris scans, fingerprints and DNA.”

The British newspaper reports that Washington’s “most controversial target was the leadership of the United Nations.” One of the leaked directives requests “the specification of telecoms and IT systems used by top UN officials and their staff and details of ‘private VIP networks used for official communication, to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys.’” In response, a UN spokesperson discreetly commented, “We are aware of the reports.”

Among other revelations: Officials from numerous Arab regimes have repeatedly urged the US to bomb Iran and destroy its nuclear program. The Financial Times, based on the documents, reports: “The Saudi ambassador to Washington … spoke to General David Petraeus, then incoming central command chief, in April 2008 about King Abdullah’s ‘frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran.’”

The reactionary Arab states “fear a nuclear-armed Iran would make it the undisputed superpower in the region, particularly at a time when the power of their own ally, the US, has receded.”

Moreover, notes the Financial Times, “The leaks will reinforce suspicions that Israel is considering an attack on Iranian facilities. According to reports of the cables, Ehud Barak, the defence minister, warned in 2009 that the world had six to 18 months to deal with Iran’s nuclear programme.”

The new WikiLeaks exposé also reveals that the US has been trying since 2007 “to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device.” (New York Times) For its part, the Pakistani regime is fearful that if the media were to get word of the fuel removal, they would portray it as the US taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

The New York Times reports this gem as well: “When American diplomats pressed other countries to resettle detainees, they became reluctant players in a State Department version of ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’ Slovenia was told to take a prisoner if it wanted to meet with President Obama, while the island nation of Kiribati was offered incentives worth millions of dollars to take in Chinese Muslim detainees, cables from diplomats recounted. The Americans, meanwhile, suggested that accepting more prisoners would be ‘a low-cost way for Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.’”

US officials were thoroughly aware of the deep-going corruption of the Afghan government, the documents reveal. The Times reports that United Arab Emirates officials discovered that Afghan vice president Ahmed Zia Massoud was carrying $52 million in cash when he tried to enter that country last year. According to one of the cables, Massoud “was ultimately allowed to keep [the money] without revealing [its] origin or destination.”

The US government is outraged that the world’s population is getting a glimpse into its dirty operations. In a deeply hypocritical statement, the White House issued a statement Sunday denouncing WikiLeaks for its “reckless and dangerous action.” The press release claimed that WikiLeaks had “put at risk not only the cause of human rights but also the lives and work of these individuals [named in the documents].”

On the eve of the new release of documents, the US State Department wrote WikiLeaks a threatening letter, claiming that making the material publicly available was illegal and would “place at risk the lives of countless individuals.” The November 28 letter also asserted, without providing any proof, that the leaks would “place at risk on-going military operations,” and “place at risk on-going cooperation between countries.”

On Sunday afternoon, WikiLeaks reported that its web site had been compromised. “We are currently under a mass distributed denial of service attack,” WikiLeaks said on its Twitter page. A DDOS attack is an attempt to make a given web site unavailable to the public, usually by flooding it with requests for data.

The State Department letter, signed by legal adviser Harold Hongju Koh, was addressed to WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange and the latter’s lawyer, Jennifer Robinson. Assange and Robinson had written to Louis B. Susman, US ambassador to the United Kingdom, asking which individuals would be put at risk by the new disclosures and apparently offering limited redactions.

In his reply, Koh asserted that “We will not engage in a negotiation regarding the further release or dissemination of illegally obtained U.S. Government classified materials.” The State Department official’s letter has two indignant references to the “violation of U.S. law” involved in the documents being provided to WikiLeaks and that organization’s holding and publishing them.

The analogy hardly does justice to the present situation, but Koh’s effort might be likened to a Mafia hit man writing to an eyewitness of a mob slaying and complaining bitterly about his or her upcoming testimony. The US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are criminal and murderous on a massive scale. WikiLeaks not only has the legal right, it has the moral obligation to do anything in its power to disrupt these bloody operations. It is to the everlasting shame of the mainstream media that it has not exerted any of its efforts along the same lines.

Washington attempted to weaken the impact of the WikiLeaks material by leaking its own story in regard to the material in the middle of last week. US officials and diplomats, including Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, have been scurrying about the past few days, attempting to alert and reassure some of the governments and leaders referred to in the documents.

By video link from an undisclosed location on Sunday, Assange told reporters that “The material that we are about to release covers essentially every major issue in every country.” The WikiLeaks founder faced trumped up sexual assault charges in Sweden.

Among the apparent revelations not yet to appear in the Guardian or the Times, which are releasing the material piecemeal, is that the US has for years supported the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey, an organization that both Washington and Ankara have placed on their lists of “terrorist” groups.

Deborah Guido, spokeswoman for the US embassy in Ankara, told the media that the American government’s policy “has never been nor will ever be in support of the PKK. Anything that implies otherwise is nonsense.” Turkish commentators were more inclined to believe the report.

Mehmet Yegin, an expert at the Center for American Studies at the USAK research organization, suggested, according to the English-language version of the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet, “that U.S. support for the PKK could have been a result of Turkey’s decision in 2003 not to allow the United States to enter Iraq through Turkish soil.”

Some of the more sensitive material yet to be published involves the US-UK relationship. The US diplomatic cables reportedly include scathing remarks about British operations in Afghanistan and Prime Minister David Cameron. The Daily Mail in Britain reports: “The documents include highly damaging and embarrassing communiques from U.S. embassies around the world, especially from London–revealing the truth behind the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the U.K. and the U.S.

“The U.S. ambassador to London made an unprecedented personal visit to Downing Street [the British prime minister’s residence] to warn that whistleblower website WikiLeaks was about to publish secret assessments of what Washington really thinks of Britain.”

The global diplomatic crisis triggered by the WikiLeaks documents speaks to the extremely volatile international situation and the number of flashpoints, which do not require much fuel to be ignited.

Furthermore, that a small organization with a computer bank and sympathizers within the US military and intelligence apparatus can wreak such havoc is testimony to the decline of American imperialism and the chaos and disorientation that characterize its daily activities. The US foreign policy establishment lurches from one improvised and violent plan to the next, resentful and fearful of foes and “friends” alike.

By David Walsh

Because of modern alarmist reactions to the word “Palestine,” many non-Arabs and non-Muslims take offense when it is argued that Jesus was a Palestinian (peace be upon him).

Jesus’ ethnicity, skin color, and culture often accompany this conversation, but few people are willing to acknowledge the fact he was non-European. A simple stroll down the Christmas aisle will show you the dominant depiction of Jesus: a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white man.

Islamophobia and anti-Arab propaganda have conditioned us to view Palestinians as nothing but heartless suicide bombers, “terrorists,” and “enemies of freedom and democracy.” Perpetual media vilification and demonization of Palestinians, in contrast to the glorification of Israel, obstructs us from seeing serious issues such as the Palestinian refugee crisis, the victims of Israel’s atrocious three-week assault on Gaza during the winter of 2008-2009, the tens of thousands of homeless Palestinians, and many other struggles that are constantly addressed by human rights activists around the world.

To speak from the perspective of the Palestinians, especially in casual non-Arab and non-Muslim settings, generates controversy because of the alignment between Palestinians and violent stereotypes. So, how could Jesus belong to a group of people that we’re taught to dehumanize?

When I’ve spoken to people about this, I’ve noticed the following responses: “No, Jesus was a Jew,” or “Jesus is not Muslim.” The mistake isn’t a surprise to me, but it certainly is revealing. Being a Palestinian does not mean one is Muslim or vice versa. Prior to the brutal and unjust dispossession of indigenous Palestinians during the creation of the state of Israel, the word “Palestine” was a geographic term applied to Palestinian Muslims, Palestinian Christians, and Palestinian Jews. Although most Palestinians are Muslim today, there is a significant Palestinian Christian minority who are often overlooked, especially by the mainstream Western media.

That dominant narrative not only distorts and misrepresents the Palestinian struggle as a religious conflict between “Muslims and Jews,” but consequentially pushes the lives of Palestinian Christians into “non-existence.” That is, due to the media’s reluctance to report the experiences and stories of Palestinian Christians, it isn’t a surprise when white Americans are astonished by the fact that Palestinian and Arab Christians do, in fact, exist. One could argue that the very existence of Palestinian Christians is threatening, as it disrupts the sweeping and overly-simplistic “Muslim vs. Jew” Zionist narrative. To learn about many Palestinian Christians opposing Israeli military occupation, as well as Jews who oppose the occupation, is to reveal more voices, perspectives, and complexities to a conflict that has been immensely portrayed as one-sided, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim.

Yeshua (Jesus’ real Aramaic name) was born in Bethlehem, a Palestinian city in the West Bank and home to one of the largest Palestinian Christian communities. The Church of the Nativity, one of the oldest churches in the world, marks the birthplace of Jesus and is sacred to both Christians and Muslims. While tourists from the around the world visit the site, they are subject to Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks. The Israeli construction of the West Bank barrier also severely restricts travel for local Palestinians. In April of 2010, Israeli authorities barred Palestinian Christians from entering Jerusalem and visiting the Church of Holy Sepulchre during Easter. Yosef Zabaneh, a Palestinian Christian merchant in Ramallah, said: “The Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank doesn’t distinguish between us, but treats all Palestinians with contempt.”

Zabaneh’s comments allude to the persistent dehumanization of Palestinians, as well as the erasure of Palestinians, both Christians and Muslims. By constantly casting Palestinians as the villains, even the term “Palestine” becomes “evil.” There is refusal to recognize, for example, that the word “Palestine” was used as early as the 5th century BCE by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. John Bimson, author of “The Compact Handbook of Old Testament Life,” acknowledges the objection to the use of “Palestine”:

The term ‘Palestine’ is derived from the Philistines. In the fifth century BC the Greek historian Herodotus seems to have used the term Palaistine Syria (= Philistine Syria) to refer to the whole region between Phoenicia and the Lebanon mountains in the north and Egypt in the south… Today the name “Palestine” has political overtones which many find objectionable, and for that reason some writers deliberately avoid using it. However, the alternatives are either too clumsy to be used repeatedly or else they are inaccurate when applied to certain periods, so “Palestine” remains a useful term…

Deliberately avoiding the use of the name “Palestine” not only misrepresents history, but also reinforces anti-Palestinian racism as acceptable. When one examines the argument against Jesus being a Palestinian, one detects a remarkable amount of hostility aimed at both Palestinians and Muslims. One cannot help but wonder, is there something threatening about identifying Jesus as a Palestinian? Professor Jack D. Forbes writes about Jesus’ multi-cultural and multi-ethnic environment:

When the Romans came to dominate the area, they used the name Palestine. Thus, when Yehoshu’a [Jesus] was born, he was born a Palestinian as were all of the inhabitants of the region, Jews and non-Jews. He was also a Nazarene (being born in Nazareth) and a Galilean (born in the region of Galilee)… At the time of Yehoshu’a’s birth, Palestine was inhabited by Jews-descendants of Hebrews, Canaanites, and many other Semitic peoples-and also by Phoenicians, Syrians, Greeks, and even Arabs.

Despite these facts, there are those who use the color-blind argument: “It does not matter what Jesus’ ethnicity or skin color was. It does not matter what language he spoke. Jesus is for all people, whether you’re black, white, brown, yellow, etc.” While this is a well-intentioned expression of inclusiveness and universalism, it misses the point.

When we see so many depictions of Jesus as a Euro-American white man, the ethnocentrism and race-bending needs to be called out. In respect to language, for instance, Neil Douglas-Klotz, author of “The Hidden Gospel: Decoding the Spiritual Message of the Aramaic Jesus,” emphasizes the importance of understanding that Jesus spoke Aramaic, not English, and that his words, as well as his worldview, must be understood in light of Middle Eastern language and spirituality. Douglas-Klotz provides an interesting example which reminds me of the rich depth and meaning of Arabic, Urdu, and Farsi words, especially the word for “spirit”:

Whenever a saying of Jesus refers to spirit, we must remember that he would have used an Aramaic or Hebrew word. In both of these languages, the same word stands for spirit, breath, air, and wind. So ‘Holy Spirit’ must also be ‘Holy Breath.’ The duality between spirit and body, which we often take for granted in our Western languages falls away. If Jesus made the famous statement about speaking or sinning against the Holy Spirit (for instance, in Luke 12:10), then somehow the Middle Eastern concept of breath is also involved.

Certainly, no person is superior to another based on culture, language, or skin color, but to ignore the way Jesus’ whiteness has been used to subjugate and discriminate against racial minorities in the West and many other countries is to overlook another important aspect of Jesus’ teachings: Love thy neighbor as thyself. Malcolm X wrote about white supremacists and slave-owners using Christianity to justify their “moral” and “racial superiority” over blacks. In Malcolm’s own words, “The Holy Bible in the White man’s hands and its interpretations of it have been the greatest single ideological weapon for enslaving millions of non-white human beings.” Throughout history, whether it was in Jerusalem, Spain, India, Africa, or in the Americas, white so-called “Christians” cultivated a distorted interpretation of religion that was compatible with their racist, colonialist agenda.

And here we are in the 21st century where Islamophobia (also stemming from racism because the religion of Islam gets racialized) is on the rise; where people calling themselves “Christian” fear to have a black president; where members of the KKK and anti-immigration movements behave as if Jesus were an intolerant white American racist who only spoke English despite being born in the Middle East. It is astonishing how so-called “Christians” like Ann Coulter call Muslims “rag-heads” when in actuality, Jesus himself would fit the profile of a “rag-head,” too. As would Moses, Joseph, Abraham, and the rest of the Prophets (peace be upon them all). As William Rivers Pitt writes:

The ugly truth which never even occurs to most Americans is that Jesus looked a lot more like an Iraqi, like an Afghani, like a Palestinian, like an Arab, than any of the paintings which grace the walls of American churches from sea to shining sea. This was an uncomfortable fact before September 11. After the attack, it became almost a moral imperative to put as much distance between Americans and people from the Middle East as possible. Now, to suggest that Jesus shared a genealogical heritage and physical similarity to the people sitting in dog cages down in Guantanamo is to dance along the edge of treason.

Without acknowledging Jesus as a native Middle Eastern person — a Palestinian — who spoke Aramaic — a Semitic language that is ancestral to Arabic and Hebrew — the West will continue to view Islam as a “foreign religion.” Hate crimes and discriminatory acts against Muslims, Arabs, and others who are perceived to be Muslim will persist. They will still be treated as “cultural outsiders.” Interesting enough, Christianity and Judaism are never considered “foreign religions,” despite having Middle Eastern origins, like Islam. As Douglas-Klotz insists, affirming Jesus as a native Middle Eastern person “enables Christians to understand that the mind and message” of Jesus arises from “the same earth as have the traditions of their Jewish and Muslim sisters and brothers.”

Jesus would not prefer one race or group of people over another. I believe he would condemn today’s demonization and dehumanization of the Palestinian people, as well as the misrepresentations of him that only fuel ignorance and ethnocentrism. As a Muslim, I believe Jesus was a prophet of God, and if I were to have any say about the Christmas spirit, it would be based on Jesus’ character: humility, compassion, and Love. A love in which all people, regardless of ethnicity, race, culture, religion, gender, and sexual orientation are respected and appreciated.

And in that spirit, I wish you a merry Christmas. Alaha Natarak (Aramaic: God be with you).

By Jehanzeb Dar

The author blogs at Muslim Reverie. He recently wrote a chapter in “Teaching Against Islamophobia” on the demonization of Muslims and Arabs in mainstream American comics.

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran has sentenced two prominent opposition filmmakers to six years in jail each on vague charges of working against the ruling system, their lawyers said Monday.

One of the two, internationally renowned filmmaker and opposition supporter Jafar Panahi, has won awards at the Chicago, Cannes and Berlin film festivals. Several of his films have been banned in Iran.

He has also been banned from shooting films or scriptwriting for 20 years and was barred from leaving the country for the same period, his lawyer Farideh Qeirat said.

“Panahi has been sentenced to six years in jail on charges of conspiring against the (ruling) system and is denied his professional rights including shooting films and scriptwriting,” the semi-official ISNA news agency quoted Qeirat as saying. “He has also been barred from leaving the country for 20 years and from doing any interviews with domestic or foreign media during this period,” she added.Qeirat said she will appeal the unusually heavy sentence.

Mohammad Rasulov, another opposition filmmaker, received a six-year jail term, his lawyer Iman Mirzazadeh said. Mirzazadeh said he will also appeal the sentence.

Both filmmakers supported the opposition in Iran’s disputed presidential election last June. Reformists say opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi was the rightful winner and that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the vote through massive vote fraud.

Ahmadinejad’s re-election has been challenged by a range of public figures, including filmmakers and singers who have expressed support for the opposition and criticized the harsh government crackdown on street protesters.

Panahi was arrested after Iranian security forces raided his Tehran home in early March. He was freed on bail in May. The 49-year-old acclaimed filmmaker was briefly detained last year when he visited the gravesides of the victims of Tehran’s postelection unrest and was later banned from traveling abroad.

By Huffington Post

Wave of edicts urge: ‘Hate the gentile’

Nazareth: Jews must not rent homes to “gentiles”. That was the religious decree issued this week by at least 50 of Israel’s leading rabbis, many of them employed by the state as municipal religious leaders. Jews should first warn, then “ostracise” fellow Jews who fail to heed the directive, the rabbis declared.The decree is the latest in a wave of racist pronouncements from some of Israel’s most influential rabbis.

In October, Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed, delivered a ruling, signed by 17 other rabbis in the city, telling Jewish residents not to sell or rent property to members of the country’s Palestinian Arab minority, who make up a fifth of the population.

His followers turned words into deeds by attacking Arab students in the city and threatening to burn down the homes of Jewish landlords renting to the students.

Similar edicts have recently been backed by dozens of rabbis in Tel Aviv and nearby Bnei Brak, a suburb of 150,000 mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews. They have threatened to “expose” any Jews who rent to “foreigners” — in this case, a reference to migrant workers and African refugees who are crowded into neglected neighbourhoods in the centre of the country.

After many weeks of silence on these declarations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was finally forced to issue a condemnation yesterday, describing the rabbis’ call as undemocratic and contradicting the bible, which, he said, called for Jews to “love the stranger”.

Nonetheless, racism in Israel is increasingly enjoying high-level sanction among the most influential sectors of the religious establishment.

The latest ruling was signed by Shlomo Aviner, a spiritual leader of Israel’s national-religious camp; Yosef Elyashiv, a senior ultra-Orthodox rabbi; and Avigdor Neventzal, rabbi of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Its sentiments have also been echoed by Ovadia Yosef, a former chief rabbi of Israel and the spiritual leader of Shas, an important political and religious party in Mr Netanyahu’s government. “Selling to [non-Jews], even for a lot of money, is not allowed. We won’t let them take control of us here,” Mr Yosef said recently.

Two months ago, Mr Yosef explained the logic behind his views and those of like-minded rabbis.

“Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us.” Explaining why God allowed non-Jews long lives, he added: “Imagine that your donkey would die, you’d lose your income. [The donkey] is your servant. … That’s why he [the gentile] gets a long life, to work well for the Jew.”

Mr Yosef’s remarks against “gentiles” were greeted with respectful silence by Israeli officials and most of the media. It was left to the United States government and the New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to issue rebukes. Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s head, accused the rabbi of advancing “hateful and divisive ideas”.

The rabbis’ use of theology to support racial discrimination is being applied to more than just housing.

This summer, Yosef Elitzur and Yitzhak Shapira, who head an influential seminary in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, published The King’s Torah, a 230-page guide to how Jews should treat non-Jews.

The two rabbis concluded that Jews were obligated to kill anyone who posed a danger, immediate or potential, to the Jewish people, and implied that all Palestinians were to be considered a threat. On these grounds, the pair justified killing Palestinian civilians and even their babies.

Last month Mr Shapira also backed the use of Palestinians as human shields, a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and a practice that Israel’s supreme court has outlawed.

The King’s Torah, far from being condemned by moderate rabbis, has been greeted with a general silence and enthusiastic support from a number of notable religious leaders.

Arik Ascherman, head of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, said the growing extremism of the the Orthodox religious establishment in Israel reflected the increasingly right-wing atmosphere in Israel that made the expression of ultra-nationalist views permissible.

In the current climate, he said, moderate rabbis were reluctant to speak out against their colleagues. Many of these rabbis belong to the Conservative or Reform streams of Judaism, which are not officially recognised in Israel.

“The religious sanction being given to the political right by these rabbis is dangerous. It makes their opinions seem more acceptable,” he said.

That is being reflected in public surveys, in which many Israeli Jews express support for anti-Arab views. A poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute published last week showed that 46 per cent of the country’s Jews did not want to live near Arab citizens, and 39 per cent felt the same about foreign workers.

Even more, 53 per cent, wanted Arab citizens to be encouraged to leave Israel and half believed Arabs should not have equal rights with Jews. Among the religious public, racist sentiments were more popular.

Israeli prosecutors, meanwhile, have turned a blind eye to the refusal of several prominent endorsers of The King’s Torah to obey a summons calling them for investigation. “Our holy Torah is not a subject for investigation or trial by flesh and blood,” the rabbis said.

In all, the rabbinical establishment is growing increasingly bold in promoting its vision of a Jewish state run according to holy law, according to Zvi Barel, a commentator with the daily newspaper Haaretz.

“They and their supporters are transforming zealous fundamentalism and the shameful The King’s Torah into the mainstream,” Mr Barel wrote recently.

The general trend towards extremism has not happened by chance, said Sefi Rachelevsky, a prominent Israeli writer critical of the Orthodox rabbinate. Israel’s public coffers pay the salaries of some of the most extremist rabbis, and the education system regularly falls under the political control of religious parties like Shas.

Mr Shapira, who advocates killing non-Jewish babies, receives large sums from the education ministry for his yeshiva — a seminary where he spreads his message of hate. Religious students also receive extra subsidies unavailable to normal students to encourage their attendance at such yeshivas.

The rabbis exert their influence on the youngest and most impressionable too. When the new school year started in September, 52 per cent of Jewish children in first grade attended a strictly religious school.

Pupils in some of the most religious schools, Mr Rachlevsky pointed out, are taught that Jews sit above nature, which comprises four categories: “inanimate”, “vegetable”, “animal” and “speakers” — or non-Jews, who are considered no more than talking animals.

By Jonathan Cook

09 December, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

A November 10 Qatar News Agency article headlined, “Israel Plans to Rebuild Old Jerusalem – Palestinian Official,” saying:

Attorney Ahmed Al-Ruwaidi, “responsible for the Jerusalem unit in the Palestinian Authority (PA), said Israel plan(s) to build new settlement homes in old Jerusalem where the ancient walls of the city will be overshadowed by modern bridges, synagogues and gardens spreading from the Arab neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah to Wdi Al Joze and Suwaneh.”

The scheme involves home demolitions, dispossessions, and new settlement construction to solidify “the capital and spiritual center of Israel and the Jewish people (by creating) a world city which attracts the souls of millions of believers across the globe.”

Projects completed so far are part of the plan, to completely transform Jerusalem’s Old City, Al-Ruwaidi adding:

“All the settlement projects in Jerusalem during the past three years, some of which have been practically implemented, fall under the (plan’s) framework, including a decision to erect a thousand new settlement units in Jebel Abu Ghunaim aimed at completing the isolation of the city with a wall of settlements.”

“Israel announced previously it will build 50,000 new units in the city. The implementation of 20,000 of (them) has been initiated practically under projects that have been approved from time to time for political objectives linked to political and international action.”

So far, 20,000 Palestinian housing units face demolition, to accommodate new settlements, Old City excavation projects, and other Jews only development. As a result, Palestinians will be dispossessed and excluded.

East Jerusalem Home Demolitions

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) tracks them as they happen, its East Jerusalem data showing that:

“Since 1967, around 2,000 homes have been demolished,” 670 from 2000 – 2008 with about 20,000 outstanding demolition orders.

Currently, Palestinians comprise about one-third of the city’s population, confined to 7% of its land “in mostly inadequate housing.” Prior Israeli master plans aimed at maintaining a 70 – 30% split favoring Jews, a policy to widen going forward.

Already, discriminatory measures exist, including encircling densely populated Palestinian neighborhoods by “green space” or “unzoned land” where building is prohibited. Applications to rezone, increase density, or build in small areas designated for residential construction are denied. As a result, new housing can’t accommodate Palestinian population increases.

Moreover, their public services are restricted, including for education, healthcare, and vital infrastructure needs for roads, sewage and water connections. East Jerusalem Palestinians contribute around 40% of city taxes, yet get 8% of Municipal spending in return.

Since 1967, Jewish settlements have proliferated in East Jerusalem, to expand its Jewish character, and one day Judaize the entire city as Israel’s exclusive capital. “Settlements built on the (city’s) outskirts….also dissect the continuity between the northern and southern West Bank, jeopardizing the feasibility of a future Palestinian State.”

East Jerusalem Palestinians hold city IDs, revokable for anyone residing outside its boundaries or assuming another citizenship, even temporarily. As second class residents, their rights keep eroding, including to their own homes.

From 1967 – 2003, 90,000 Jewish housing units were completed, most with government subsidies. “None were built for Palestinians with public funding.” Israel’s Master Plan 2020, discussed below, “purports to plan for the long term fate of East Jerusalem, yet it has been prepared with no consultation of any kind with the Palestinian community.” Why? Because exclusion is eventually planned, though not explicitly stated in 2020’s language.

Under international law, however, settlement construction is illegal. So are home demolitions, Fourth Geneva prohibiting “any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons,” except when “absolutely necessary by military operations.” Forced displacement is also banned, yet Israel continues it relentlessly, a discriminatory policy to delegitimize the Palestinian presence in the city as well as claim it as their rightful capital.

Israel’s Jerusalem Master Plan 2020

Titled, “Demography, Geopolitics, and the Future of Israel’s Capital: Jerusalem’s Proposed Master Plan,” it stresses assuring a Jewish majority, continuing Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s judicial writ that:

“We must bring Jews to eastern Jerusalem at any cost. We must settle tens of thousands of Jews in a brief time. Jews will agree to settle in eastern Jerusalem even in shacks. We cannot await the construction of orderly neighborhoods. The essential thing is that Jews will be there.”

As a result, after the 1967 Six Day War, 70,000 dunams were annexed to the north, south, and east of the old municipal boundaries. The plan was to control large areas “with a minimal Arab population and to prevent the possibility of the city’s partition in the future.” Thus, Jewish settlements proliferated and keep growing, Palestinians displaced to accommodate them.

Previous master plans called for accelerated Jewish population growth. It’s still current policy, new settlement construction continuing to accommodate it. The latest plan calls for expanding Jewish neighborhoods, saying expropriating Arab land isn’t “plausible” as in the past, when, in fact, that’s precisely what’s happening through tens of thousands of new housing units, ones for Jews only on Palestinian land.

According to Khalil Tofakji, head of the Arab Studies Society in Occupied East Jerusalem’s Mapping Department: between now and 2020, Israel will complete its “Judaism plan.”

Mustafa Barghouti, an MP and Palestinian National Initiative’s Secretary General, said plans are underway to “impose a new reality on the ground,” around $1.5 billion allocated this year alone to Judaize the city. Besides settlement expansions and new ones, projects include a $500 million light rail line, luxury hotels, synagogues, commercial and other development – on expropriated Palestinian land.

Barghouti said Israel is doing to East Jerusalem “what they did in Jaffa, Haifa and Acre, (incrementally) taking (it) over (to) then declare their demands” – total Judaization.

Despite softer Master Plan 2020 language, at issue is increasing Jewish presence in the city, dispossessing Palestinians to accommodate them. Jamal Juma, head of the Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, says that:

Israelis “are occupying the Palestinian houses inside the old town, which was historically divided to four quarters, Muslim, Christian, Armenian and Jewish. (They’re) slowly infiltrating the other quarters (as well by) taking over Palestinian properties.”

A Final Comment

A previous article explained that Jerusalem is politically important for Jews as its historic capital, national and religious center, and symbol of Judaism’s revival and prominence. For Christians, it’s where Jesus lived and died, and for Muslims it’s their third holiest site (the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount and Al-Aqsa Mosque) after Mecca’s Sacred Mosque and the Mosque of the Prophet in Madina.

Israel, however, transformed Jerusalem from a multi-cultural, multi-religious city into a predominantly Jewish one toward eventually Judaizing it entirely. For decades, incremental progress continued. The goal remained constant, to establish irreversible “facts on the ground,” making Jerusalem Israel’s capital with an exclusive Jewish presence, despite Palestinians rightfully claiming it for their own.

Therein lies the heart of the conflict, along with ending the occupation, achieving peace and self-determination, as well as granting Palestinian refugees their right to return. Justice will be denied until those issues are equitably resolved, what so far is nowhere in sight.

By Stephen Lendman

16 December, 2010

Countercurrents.org

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/