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John Pilger says that while the dangers of Rupert Murdoch’s dominance are understood, the role played by the respectable media, such as the New York Times and the BBC, notably in the promotion of colonial wars, is at least as important

Britain is said to be approaching its Berlusconi Moment. That is to say, if Rupert Murdoch wins control of Sky he will command half the television and newspaper market and threaten what is known as public service broadcasting. Although the alarm is ringing, it is unlikely that any government will stop him while his court is packed with politicians of all parties.

The problem with this and other Murdoch scares is that, while one cannot doubt their gravity, they deflect from an unrecognised and more insidious threat to honest information. For all his power, Murdoch’s media is not respectable. Take the current colonial wars. In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox Television is almost cartoon-like in its warmongering. It is the august, tombstone New York Times, “the greatest newspaper in the world”, and others such as the once-celebrated Washington Post, that have given respectability to the lies and moral contortions of the “war on terror”, now recat as “perpetual war”.

In Britain, the liberal Observer performed this task in making respectable Tony Blair’s deceptions on Iraq. More importantly, so did the BBC, whose reputation is its power. In spite of one maverick reporter’s attempt to expose the so-called dodgy dossier, the BBC took Blair’s sophistry and lies on Iraq at face value.

This was made clear in studies by Cardiff University and the German-based Media Tenor. The BBC’s coverage, said the Cardiff study, was overwhelmingly “sympathetic to the government’s case”. According to Media Tenor, a mere two per cent of BBC news in the build-up to the invasion permitted anti-war voices to be heard. Compared with the main American networks, only CBS was more pro-war.

So when the BBC director-general Mark Thompson used the recent Edinburgh Television Festival to attack Murdoch, his hypocrisy was like a presence. Thompson is the embodiment of a taxpayer-funded managerial elite, for whom political reaction have long replaced public service. He has even laid into his own corporation, Murdoch-style, as “massively left-wing”. He was referring to the era of his 1960s predecessor Hugh Greene, who allowed artistic and journalistic freedom to flower at the BBC. Thompson is the opposite of Greene; and his aspersion on the past is in keeping with the BBC’s modern corporate role, reflected in the rewards demanded by those at the top. Thompson was paid £834,000 last year out of public funds and his 50 senior executives earn more than the prime minister, along with enriched journalists like Jeremy Paxman and Fiona Bruce.

Murdoch and the BBC share this corporatism. Blair, for example, was their quintessential politician. Prior to his election in 1997, Blair and his wife were flown first-class by Murdoch to Hayman Island in Australia where he stood at the Newscorp lectern and, in effect, pledged an obedient Labour administration. His coded message on media cross-ownership and de-regulation was that a way would be found for Murdoch to achieve the supremacy that now beckons.

Blair was embraced by the new BBC corporate class, which regards itself as meretorious and non-ideological: the natural leaders in a managerial Britain in which class is unspoken. Few did more to enunciate Blair’s “vision” than Andrew Marr, then a leading newspaper journalist and today the BBC’s ubiquitous voice of middle-class Britain. Just as Murdoch’s Sun declared in 1995 it shared the rising Blair’s “high moral values” so Marr, writing the Observer in 1999, lauded the new prime minister’s “substantial moral courage” and the “clear distinction in his mind between prudently protecting his power base and rashly using his power for high moral purpose”. What impressed Marr was Blair’s “utter lack of cynicism” along with his bombing of Yugoslavia which would “save lives”.

By March 2003, Marr was the BBC’s political editor. Standing in Downing Street on the night of the “shock and awe” assault on Iraq, he rejoiced at the vindication of Blair who, he said, had promised “to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right” and as a result “tonight he stands as a larger man”. In fact, the criminal conquest of Iraq smashed a society, killing up to a million people, driving four million from their homes, contaminating cities like Fallujah with cancer-causing poisons and leaving a majority of young children malnourished in a country once described by Unicef as a “model”.

So it was entirely appropriate that Blair, in hawking his self-serving book, should select Marr for his “exclusive TV interview” on the BBC. The headline across the Observer’s review of the interview read, “Look who’s having the last laugh.” Beneath this was a picture of a beaming Blair sharing a laugh with Marr.

The interview produced not a single challenge that stopped Blair in his precocious, mendacious tracks. He was allowed to say that “absolutely clearly and unequivocally, the reason for toppling [Saddam Hussein] was his breach of resolutions over WMD, right?” No, wrong. A wealth of evidence, not least the infamous Downing Street Memo, makes clear that Blair secretly colluded with George W Bush to attack Iraq. This was not mentioned. At no point did Marr say to him, “You failed to persuade the UN Security Council to go along with the invasion. You and Bush went alone. Most of the world was outraged. Weren’t you aware that you were about to commit a monumental war crime?”

Instead, Blair used the convivial encounter to deceive, yet again, even to promote an attack on Iran, an outrage. Murdoch’s Fox would have differed in style only. The British public deserves better.

By John Pilger

September 27, 2010 “Truthdig” — Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retribution. She exacted divine punishment on arrogant mortals who believed they could defy the gods, turn themselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around them. The price of such hubris was almost always death.

Nemesis, related to the Greek word némein, means “to give what is due.” Our nemesis fast approaches. We will get what we are due. The staggering myopia of our corrupt political and economic elite, which plunder the nation’s wealth for financial speculation and endless war, the mass retreat of citizens into virtual hallucinations, the collapsing edifices around us, which include the ecosystem that sustains life, are ignored for a giddy self-worship. We stare into electronic screens just as Narcissus, besotted with his own reflection, stared into a pool of water until he wasted away and died.

We believe that because we have the capacity to wage war we have the right to wage war. We believe that money, rather than manufactured products and goods, is real. We believe in the myth of inevitable human moral and material progress. We believe that no matter how much damage we do to the Earth or our society, science and technology will save us. And as temperatures on the planet steadily rise, as droughts devastate cropland, as the bleaching of coral reefs threatens to wipe out 25 percent of all marine species, as countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh succumb to severe flooding, as we poison our food, air and water, as we refuse to confront our addiction to fossil fuels and coal, as we dismantle our manufacturing base and plunge tens of millions of Americans into a permanent and desperate underclass, we flick on a screen and are entranced.

We confuse the electronic image, a reflection back to us of ourselves, with the divine. We gawk at “reality” television, which of course is contrived reality, reveling in being the viewer and the viewed. True reality is obliterated from our consciousness. It is the electronic image that informs and defines us. It is the image that gives us our identity. It is the image that tells us what is attainable in the vast cult of the self, what we should desire, what we should seek to become and who we are. It is the image that tricks us into thinking we have become powerful—as the popularity of video games built around the themes of violence and war illustrates—while we have become enslaved and impoverished by the corporate state. The electronic image leads us back to the worship of ourselves. It is idolatry. Reality is replaced with electronic mechanisms for preening self-presentation—the core of social networking sites such as Facebook—and the illusion of self-fulfillment and self-empowerment. And in a world unmoored from the real, from human limitations and human potential, we inevitably embrace superstition and magic. This is what the worship of images is about. We retreat into a dark and irrational fear born out of a cavernous ignorance of the real. We enter an age of technological barbarism.

To those entranced by images, the world is a vast stage on which they are called to enact their dreams. It is a world of constant action, stimulation and personal advancement. It is a world of thrills and momentary ecstasy. It is a world of ceaseless movement. It makes a fetish of competition. It is a world where commercial products and electronic images serve as a pseudo-therapy that caters to feelings of alienation, inadequacy and powerlessness. We may be locked in dead-end jobs, have no meaningful relationships and be confused about our identities, but we can blast our way to power holding a little control panel while looking for hours at a screen. We can ridicule the poor, the ignorant and the weak all day long on trash-talk shows and reality television shows. We are skillfully made to feel that we have a personal relationship, a false communion, with the famous—look at the outpouring of grief at the death of Princess Diana or Michael Jackson. We have never met those we adore. We know only their manufactured image. They appear to us on screens. They are not, at least to us, real people. And yet we worship and seek to emulate them.

In this state of cultural illusion any description of actual reality, because it does not consist of the happy talk that pollutes the airwaves from National Public Radio to Oprah, is dismissed as “negative” or “pessimistic.” The beleaguered Jeremiahs who momentarily stumble into our consciousness and in a desperate frenzy seek to warn us of our impending self-destruction are derided because they do not lay out easy formulas that permit us to drift back into fantasy. We tell ourselves they are overreacting. If reality is a bummer, and if there are no easy solutions, we don’t want to hear about it. The facts of economic and environmental collapse, now incontrovertible, cannot be discussed unless they are turned into joking banter or come accompanied with a neat, pleasing solution, the kind we are fed at the conclusion of the movies, electronic games, talk shows and sitcoms, the kind that dulls our minds into passive and empty receptacles. We have been conditioned by electronic hallucinations to expect happy talk. We demand it.

We confuse this happy talk with hope. But hope is not about a belief in progress. Hope is about protecting simple human decency and demanding justice. Hope is the belief, not necessarily grounded in the tangible, that those whose greed, stupidity and complacency have allowed us to be driven over a cliff shall one day be brought down. Hope is about existing in a perpetual state of rebellion, a constant antagonism to all centers of power. The great moral voices, George Orwell and Albert Camus being perhaps two of the finest examples, describe in moving detail the human suffering we ignore or excuse. They understand that the greatest instrument for moral good is the imagination. The ability to perceive the pain and suffering of another, to feel, as King Lear says, what wretches feel, is a more powerful social corrective than the shelves of turgid religious and philosophical treatises on human will. Those who change the world for the better, who offer us hope, have the capacity to make us step outside of ourselves and feel empathy.

The role of knowledge and art, as the ancient Greeks understood, is to create ekstasis, which means standing outside one’s self to give our individual life and struggle meaning and perspective. The role of art and scholarship is to transform us as individuals, not entertain us as a group. It is to nurture this capacity for understanding and empathy. Art and scholarship allow us to see the underlying structures and assumptions used to manipulate and control us. And this is why art, like intellectual endeavor, is feared by the corporate elite as subversive. This is why corporations have used their money to deform universities into vocational schools that spit out blinkered and illiterate systems managers. This is why the humanities are withering away.

The vast stage of entertainment that envelops our culture is intended to impart the opposite of ekstasis. Mass entertainment plays to the basest and crudest instincts of the crowd. It conditions us to have the same aspirations and desires. It forces us to speak in the same dead clichés and slogans. It homogenizes human experience. It wallows in a cloying nostalgia and sentimentalism that foster historical amnesia. It turns the Other into a cartoon or a stereotype. It prohibits empathy because it prohibits understanding. It denies human singularity and uniqueness. It assures us that we all have within us the ability, talent or luck to become famous and rich. It forms us into a lowing and compliant herd. We have been conditioned to believe—defying all the great moral and philosophical writers from Socrates to Orwell—that the aim of life is not to understand but to be entertained. If we do not shake ourselves awake from our electronic hallucinations and defy the elites who are ruining the country and trashing the planet we will experience the awful and deadly retribution of the gods.

By Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and author of the bestseller “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” reports on Bush’s plan for Iran, and how a callous war, conceived by zealots, will lead to a disaster of biblical proportions.

 

It happened twenty-eight years ago – 16 September 1982. A massacre so awful that people who know about it cannot forget it. The photos are gruesome reminders – charred, decapitated, indecently violated corpses, the smell of rotting flesh, still as foul to those who remember it as when they were recoiling from it all those years ago. For the victims and the handful of survivors, it was a 36-hour holocaust without mercy. It was deliberate, it was planned and it was overseen. But to this day, the killers have gone unpunished.

Sabra and Shatila – two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon – were the theatres for this staged slaughter. The former is no longer there and the other is a ghostly and ghastly reminder of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children – more specifically, Israel’s inhumanity, the inhumanity of the people who did Israel’s bidding and the world’s inhumanity for pretending it was of no consequence. There were international witnesses – doctors, nurses, journalists – who saw the macabre scenes and have tried to tell the world in vain ever since.

Each act was barbarous enough on its own to warrant fear and loathing. It was human savagery at its worst and Dr Ang Swee Chai was an eye witness as she worked with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society on the dying and the wounded amongst the dead. What she saw was so unimaginable that the atrocities committed need to be separated from each other to even begin comprehending the viciousness of the crimes. [1]

People tortured. Blackened bodies smelling of roasted flesh from the power shocks that had convulsed their bodies before their hearts gave out – the electric wires still tied around their lifeless limbs.

People with gouged out eye sockets. Faces unrecognisable with the gaping holes that had plunged them into darkness before their lives were thankfully ended.

Women raped. Not once – but two, three, four times – horribly violated, their legs shamelessly ripped apart with not even the cover of clothing to preserve their dignity at the moment of death.

Children dynamited alive. So many body parts ripped from their tiny torsos, so hard to know to whom they belonged – just mounds of bloodied limbs amongst the tousled heads of children in pools of blood.

Families executed. Blood, blood and more blood sprayed on the walls of homes where whole families had been axed to death in a frenzy or lined up for a more orderly execution.

There were also journalists who were there in the aftermath and who had equally gruesome stories to tell, none of which made the sort of screaming front page headlines that should have caused lawmakers to demand immediate answers. What they saw led them to write shell-shocked accounts that have vanished now into the archives, but are no less disturbing now. These accounts too need to be individually absorbed, lest they be lumped together as just the collective dead rather than the systematic torture and killing of individual, innocent human beings.

Women gunned down while cooking in their kitchens. [2] The headless body of a baby in diapers lying next to two dead women. [3] An infant, its tiny legs streaked with blood, shot in the back by a single bullet. [4] Slaughtered babies, their bodies blackened as they decomposed, tossed into rubbish heaps together with Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey. [5] An old man castrated, with flies thick upon his torn intestines. [6] Children with their throats slashed. [7] Mounds of rotting corpses bloated in the heat – young boys all shot at point-blank range. [8]

And most numbing of all are the recollections of the survivors whose experiences were so shockingly traumatic that to recall them must have been painful beyond all imaginings. One survivor, Nohad Srour, 35 said:

“I was carrying my one year-old baby sister and she was yelling “Mama! Mama!” then suddenly nothing. I looked at her and her brain had fallen out of her head and down my arm. I looked at the man who shot us. I’ll never forget his face. Then I felt two bullets pierce my shoulder and finger. I fell. I didn’t lose consciousness, but I pretended to be dead.”[9]

The statistics of those killed vary, but even according to the Israeli military, the official count was 700 people killed while Israeli journalist, Amnon Kapeliouk put the figure at 3,500. [10] The Palestinian Red Crescent Society put the number killed at over 2,000.[11] Regardless of the numbers, they would not and could not mitigate what are clear crimes against humanity.

Fifteen years later, Robert Fisk, the journalist who had been one of the first on the scene, said:

“Had Palestinians massacred 2,000 Israelis 15 years ago, would anyone doubt that the world’s press and television would be remembering so terrible a deed this morning? Yet this week, not a single newspaper in the United States – or Britain for that matter – has even mentioned the anniversary of Sabra and Shatila.”[12]

Twenty-eight years later it is no different.

The political developments

What happened must be set against the background of a Lebanon that had been invaded by the Israeli army only months earlier, supposedly in ‘retaliation’ for the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador in London on 4 June 1982. Israel attributed the attempt to Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) then resident in Beirut. In reality, it was a rival militant group headed by Abu Nidal. Israel wanted to oust the PLO from Lebanon altogether and on 6 June 1982, Israel began its devastating assault on the Lebanese and Palestinian civilian population in the southern part of Lebanon. Lebanese government casualty figures numbered the dead at around 19,000 with some 30,000 wounded, but these numbers are hardly accurate because of the mass graves and other bodies lost in the rubble. [13]

By 1 September, a cease-fire had been mediated by United States envoy Philip Habib, and Arafat and his men surrendered their weapons and were evacuated from Beirut with guarantees by the US that the civilians left behind in the camps would be protected by a multinational peacekeeping force. That guarantee was not kept and the vacuum then created, paved the way for the atrocities that followed.

As soon as the peacekeeping force was withdrawn, the then Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon moved to root out some “2,000 terrorists” he claimed were still hiding in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. After totally surrounding the refugee camps with tanks and soldiers, Sharon ordered the shelling of the camps and the bombardment continued throughout the afternoon and into the evening of 15 September leaving the “mopping-up” of the camps to the Lebanese right-wing Christian militia, known as the Phalangists. The next day, the Phalangists – armed and trained by the Israeli army – entered the camps and proceeded to massacre the unarmed civilians while Israel’s General Yaron and his men watched the entire operations. More grotesquely, the Israeli army ensured there was no lull in the 36 hours of killings and illuminated the area with flares at night and tightened their cordon around the camps to make sure that no civilian could escape the terror that had been unleashed.

Inquiries, charges and off scot-free

Although Israel’s Kahan Commission of Inquiry did not find any Israeli directly responsible, it did find that Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for “not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre” before sending the Phalangists into the camps. It, therefore, lamely recommended that the Israeli prime minister consider removing him from office. [14] Sharon resigned but remained as Minister without portfolio and joined two parliamentary commissions on defence and Lebanese affairs. There is no doubt, as Chomsky points out “that the inquiry was not intended for people who have a prejudice in favour of truth and honesty”, but it certainly gained support for Israel in the US Congress and among the public. [15] It took an International Commission of Inquiry headed by Sean MacBride to find that Israel was “directly responsible” because the camps were under its jurisdiction as an occupying power. [16] Yet, despite the UN describing the heinous operation as a “criminal massacre” and declaring it an act of genocide [17], no one was prosecuted.

It was not until 2001 that a law suit was filed in Belgium by the survivors of the massacre and relatives of the victims against Sharon alleging his personal responsibility. However, the court did not allow for “universal jurisdiction” – a principle which was intended to remove safe havens for war criminals and allow their prosecution across states. The case was won on appeal and the trial allowed to proceed, but without Sharon who by then was prime minister of Israel and had immunity. US interference led to the Belgian Parliament gutting the universal jurisdiction law and by the time the International Criminal Court was established in The Hague the following year, the perpetrators of the Sabra and Shatila massacre could no longer be tried because its terms of reference did not allow it to hear cases of war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide pre-dating 1 July 2002. Neither Sharon nor those who carried out the massacres have ever been punished for their horrendous crimes.

The bigger picture

The length of time since these acts were carried out should be no impediment to exposing the truth. More than 60 years after the Nazi atrocities against the Jews in Europe, the world still mourns and remembers and erects monuments and museums to that violent holocaust. How they are done, to whom they are done and to how many does not make the crimes any more or less heinous. They can never be justified even on the strength of one state’s rationale that another people ought to be punished, or worse still, are simply inferior or worthless beings. It should lead all of us to question on whose judgment are such decisions made and how can we possibly justify such crimes at all?

The atrocities committed in the camps of Sabra and Shatila should be put in the context of an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. The MacBride report found that these atrocities “were not inconsistent with wider Israeli intentions to destroy Palestinian political will and cultural identity.” [17] Since Deir Yassin and the other massacres of 1948, those who survived have joined hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing a litany of massacres committed in 1953, 1967, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the 2002 Jenin massacre, and the most recent, the 2008/2009 atrocity committed on the people of Gaza. Thus were the victims and survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre gathered up in the perpetual nakba of the slaughtered, the dispossessed, the displaced and the discarded – a pattern of ethnic cleansing perpetrated under the Zionist plan to finally and forever extinguish Palestinian society and its people.

This is why we must remember Sabra and Shatila, twenty-eight years on.

By Sonja Karkar

16 September, 2010

Sonja Karkar is editor of Australians for Palestine

Footnotes:

[1] Dr Ang Swee Chai, “From Beirut to Jerusalem”, Grafton Books, London, 1989

[2] James MacManus, Guardian, 20 September 1982

[3] Loren Jenkins, Washington Post, 20 September 1982

[4] Elaine Carey, Daily Mail, 20 September 1982

[5] Robert Fisk, “Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War”, London: Oxford University Press, 1990

[6] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[7] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[8] Robert Fisk, ibid.

[9] Lebanese Daily Star, 16 September 1998

[10] Amnon Kapeliouk, “Sabra & Chatila – Inquiry into a Massacre”, November 1982

[11] Schiff and Ya’ari,, Israel’s Lebanon War, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1984,

[12] Robert Fisk, Fifteen Years After the Bloodbath, The World turns its Back, shaml.org, 1997

[13] Noam Chomsky, “The Fatal Triangle” South End Press, Cambridge MA, p.221

[14] The Complete Kahan Commission Report, Princeton, Karz Cohl, 1983, p. 125 (Hereafter, the Kahan Commission Report).

[15] Chomsky, ibid. p.406

[16] The Report of the International Commission to Enquire into Reported Violations of International Law by Israel during Its Invasion of the Lebanon, Sean MacBride, 1983 (referred to as the International Commission of Inquiry or MacBride report)

[17] United Nations General Assembly Resolution, 16 December 1982

[18] MacBride report, ibid. p.179

 

 

 

 

Though much about his background and public service warrants criticism, he also deserves praise rarely given properly, this article offering some and the writer’s personal reflections on his commencement address to my June 14, 1956 graduating class, a message not heard now by US leaders – erudite, incisive and timely. More on it below.

Some Background

Had an assassin not taken his life, his health surely would have, some around him saying “from a medical standpoint, (he) was a mess.” Indeed so, having been hospitalized more than three dozen times in his life and given last rites on three occasions.

At age 2 years, 9 months, he nearly died of scarlet fever. He contracted measles, whooping cough and chicken pox the same year, and as a child, was susceptible to upper respiratory infections and bronchitis. In 1935, he suffered jaundice, had a history of sports-related injuries because of his weak physique, and his mother remembered him as “a very, very sick little boy.” In the 1930s, he began taking steroids for colitis, later developing complications, including a duodenal ulcer, back pain, digestive trouble, and underactive adrenal glands known as Addison’s disease.

He had a host of other problems as well, including a bout of malaria as a naval officer in the Pacific. At age 43, the 1960 presidential campaign exhausted him because he overdid it for a man of his health and stamina. In 1947, his Addisonism was diagnosed, at the time told he had one year to live, and was given his last rites shortly afterward. Yet as senator and president, his health problems were hidden, an observer calling it “one of the most cleverly laid smoke screens ever put down around a politician(‘s)” physical well-being.

His Assassination

Much about it has been written and speculated, some of the best from James Douglas in his 2008 book titled, “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters,” debunking mainstream myths and much more. From a wealth of information he uncovered, he showed how threatening Kennedy was to the military-industrial complex and had to go, “the CIA’s fingerprints….all over the crime and the events leading up to it.”

The notion of a lone gunman is ludicrous, the evidence clearly implicating a national security state coup against one of its own deemed unreliable. Though to some degree a cold warrior, he changed, was chastened by the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and refused another. He also fired CIA Director Allen Dulles, his assistant General Charles Cabell, and once said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” reason enough to kill him.

Worst of all was his growing opposition to imperial wars, specifically in Southeast Asia. Though he initially sent troops and advisors, he changed, in 1961 opposing advice to send more to Laos, telling Averell Harriman, his Geneva Conference representative: “Did you understand? I want a negotiated settlement in Laos. I don’t want to put troops in.”

The same year, he opposed using nuclear weapons in Berlin and Southeast Asia and once called Pentagon generals “crazy” for suggesting them, perhaps with Curtis LeMay (1906 – 1990) in mind, a zealot who wanted to nuke the Soviets while we had the edge, even at the cost of a few US cities.

Kennedy also wouldn’t attack or invade Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis, saying throughout it he “never had the slightest intention of doing so.”

He swung to peace, away from war, telling an American University audience in 1963 that nuclear weapons should be abolished, the Cold War ended, followed by a “general and complete disarmament,” and America no longer using its might to force Pax Americana on the world. Shortly afterward he signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets, and in October 1963 (about a month before his assassination), he signed National Security Action Memorandum 263, calling for removing 1,000 US troops from Vietnam by year’s end and the remainder by December 1965.

Douglas wrote how, as president, he underwent a spiritual transformation from cold warrior to peacemaker, knowing it put him at odds with the Pentagon, CIA, most members of Congress, and nearly all of his advisors. As a result, he understood his vulnerability, perhaps by coup or assassination, a condition he nonetheless accepted and paid for with his life.

Besides turning toward peace and more, he also signed Executive Order (EO) 11110 on June 4, 1963 to:

— amend EO 10289 (dated September 17, 1951) designating and empowering the Treasury to perform certain “functions of the President without the approval, ratification, or other action of the President;” and

— perhaps bypass the Fed and empower the president to issue currency; it constitutionally empowered the federal government to create and “issue silver certificates against any silver bullion, silver, or standard silver dollars in the Treasury.”

Though not verified, some believe he then ordered the Treasury Secretary to issue nearly $4.3 billion worth of United States notes, perhaps to replace Federal Reserve Notes. Whether or not he wanted to end the Federal Reserve System (and return money creation power to Congress as the Constitution mandates) is speculation, but perhaps fearing it, besides the above cited reasons and more, led to his assassination five months later.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson said: “Silver has become too valuable to be used as money.” In late 1963, after he became president, US notes were withdrawn from circulation, and noted Fed critic and author of “The Creature from Jekyll Island,” G. Edward Griffin, wrote on page 569 of his book:

“There was a third point, however, which everyone seemed to overlook. The Executive Order 11110 did not instruct the Treasury to issue Silver Certificates. It merely authorized it to do so if the occasion should arise. The occasion never arose. The last issuance of Silver Certificates was in 1957….six years before the Kennedy (EO). In 1987, (it) was rescinded by (EO) 12608 signed by Ronald Reagan.”

Without mentioning EO 11110, he did it by amending EO 10289, rescinding the Treasury’s right to issue silver-backed notes.

Had Kennedy lived and served a second term, imagine the possibilities. Ending the Vietnam war alone would have been a powerful legacy.

Kennedy’s June 14, 1956 Commencement Speech

Given outdoors on a blistering hot/humid day, he began expressing “pleasure to join with my fellow alumni in this pilgrimage to the second home of (my) youth,” noting the difference between academia’s purpose to advance knowledge and his own “where the emphasis is somewhat different,” saying:

“Our political parties, our politicians are interested, of necessity, in winning popular support – a majority; and only indirectly truth is the object of our controversy,” often sacrificed for political advantage.

The “political profession needs to have its temperature lowered in the cooling waters of the scholastic pool. We need both the technical judgment and the disinterested viewpoint of the scholar, to prevent us from becoming imprisoned by our own slogans. Therefore, it’s regrettable that the gap between the intellectual and the politician seems to be growing.”

No wonder, he added, that politicians are so scorned, quoting James Russell Lowell’s mid-19th century satiric attack on Caleb Cushing, a celebrated Attorney General and congressional member, calling him “true to one party, that is himself.” It’s as true today than then.

Kennedy’s entire talk was full of scholarly references and quotes, including Lord Melbourne to a youthful historian Thomas Macauley about the differences between scholars and politicians. Another from philosopher Sidney Hook, saying “Many intellectuals would rather die than agree with the majority, even on the rare occasions when the majority is right.”

Yet he reminded the audience that today’s politicians and intellectual climate have a common ancestry, America’s early leaders, also distinguished for their writing and intellect, including Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, and John Adams among others.

“Books were their tools, not their enemies. Locke, Milton, Sydney, Montesquieu, Coke, and Bollingbroke were among those widely read in political circles and frequently quoted in political pamphlets. Our political leaders traded in the free commerce of ideas with lasting results both here and abroad.”

A contemporary of Jefferson called him “A gentleman of 32, who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin.” He was also a statesman and third US president.

“Daniel Webster could throw thunderbolts at Hayne on the Senate floor and then stroll a few steps down the corridor and dominate the Supreme Court as the foremost lawyer of his time. John Quincy Adams, after being summarily dismissed from the Senate for a notable display of independence, could become Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard and then become a great Secretary of State” as well as president.

“The link between the American scholar and American politician” lasted over a century. In the 1856 campaign, Republicans had “three brilliant orators – William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Those were the carefree days when the eggheads were all Republicans.” One of their own became president on March 4, 1861, denied a second term by his April 1865 assassination, challenging the establishment and existing order also his undoing.

Kennedy quoted John Milton, Bismark, Goethe and others, his erudition on display for those attending, a man with an intellect who used it. He reminded the audience that politicians and intellectuals “operate within a common framework – a framework we call liberty. The lock on the door of the legislature, the Parliament, or the assembly hall – by order of the King, the Commissar, or the Fuehrer – has historically been followed or preceded by a lock on the door of the university, the library, or the print shop.”

Where freedom is endangered, he said, politicians and intellectuals “should be natural allies, working more closely together for the common cause against the common enemy.” They both must decide whether to be “an anvil or a hammer….whether (they are) to give to the world in which (they were) reared and educated the broadest possible benefits of (their) learning” for society’s benefit, or do it solely for their own. “As one who is familiar with the political world, I can testify” to the challenge we face.

He opted against handing over political and public life to experts “who ignore public opinion. Nor would I adopt from the Belgian constitution of 1893 the provision giving 3 votes instead of 1 to college graduates; or give Harvard a seat in the Congress as William and Mary was once represented in the Virginia House of Burgesses.”

But he urged politicians and intellectuals to work together, warning that we don’t “need scholars or politicians like Lord John Russell, of whom Queen Victoria remarked, he would be a better man if he knew a third subject – but he was interested in nothing but the constitution of 1688 and himself. What we need are men who can ride easily over broad fields of knowledge and recognize the mutual dependence of our two worlds.”

He ended quoting what an English mother once wrote the Provost of Harrow, saying “Don’t teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament.”

“Well, perhaps she was right – but if more politicians knew poetry and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live on this commencement day of 1956.”

Aged 39, he scarcely had more than seven years left before America’s dark forces killed him, a lesson his successors never forgot. Neither should we knowing the rogues that followed and their agendas, worst of all post-9/11, putting the nation on a fast track toward despotism unless cooler heads can stop them.

By Stephen Lendman

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/.

 

The blessed month of Ramadan is upon us. To a Muslim no other month is as meritorious as this particular month is when the reward of every good deed done is multiplied several times. It is not difficult to understand why the Prophet Muhammad (S) said that fasting is like a curtain against the Hellfire. It is also the month when the Qur’an was sent down as a guide to mankind – with clear signs for guidance and judgment between right and wrong. As instructed in the Qur’an every able bodied Muslim who is not ill or on a journey is obligated to fast the entire month from dawn to dusk (2:185). In that practice, Muslims are also reminded that it is something that was also prescribed to people who came before them so that they may learn self-restraint (2:183). Thus, teaching self-restraint is the essence of fasting.

Probably at no other time in America is this message more relevant than this Ramadan. Truly, it has been a very difficult month for most Muslim Americans who are viciously attacked both verbally and physically by the anti-Muslim bigots and chauvinists. Last week a Bangladeshi-American taxi cab driver was stabbed severely by a young white Christian student who not too long ago was an embedded photo-journalist with the American forces in Afghanistan . The published reports also suggest that the attacker was affiliated with a group that had supported the construction of a Muslim cultural center in Lower Manhattan . If this report is true then it is perhaps not difficult to understand what religiously intolerant messages spewed out by bigots — Christian ministers like Franklin Graham and John Hagee, and Republican politicians like Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, and Rudy Giuliani — can do to anyone.

For the GOP, i.e., the Republicans Islamophobia is the new anti-communism. As a result of such onslaught on Islam, many Muslim houses of worship are vandalized and discrimination against Muslims is at an all time high. On August 28 equipment at the construction site of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro in Tennessee was set on fire. In June, someone broke the sign at the future site of the center. Previously, the words “Not Welcome” were spray-painted on the sign. On the ninth anniversary of 9/11, a Christian church wants to burn the Qur’an.

A recently published Pew Research Center poll reported that more Americans now have unfavorable than favorable views of Islam by 38 percent to 30 percent. In 2005, it was reversed: 41 percent had favorable views, 36 percent unfavorable. Republicans voiced negative views of Muslims by more than 2-1, with 54 voicing unfavorable views and 21 percent giving positive ones. Obviously, America is failing in its role as a nation that values religious tolerance.

In spite of such hateful barrages, Muslims should practice self-restraint and avoid any heated discussion that can be counterproductive. They have the noble examples of their beloved Prophet Muhammad (S) and his companions to follow.

The tenth year of the Prophetic mission of Muhammad (S) was a sad one. He had lost his wife – Khadija (R) and uncle – Abi Talib who had tried to protect him for years against the pagans. To make things worse, Abu Lahab , an uncle of the Prophet and an ardent enemy of Islam, had now become the chief of the clan; and the Prophet was ill-treated as never before. On one occasion a passer-by leaned over his gate and tossed a piece of putrefying offal into his cooking pot; and once when he was praying in the courtyard of his house, a man threw over him a sheep’s uterus filthy with blood and excrement. On another occasion, when the Prophet (S) was coming from the Ka’bah , a man took a handful of dirt and threw it in his face and head. When he returned home, one of his daughters washed him clean of it, weeping while the Prophet (S) reassured her, “Weep not, little daughter, Allah will protect your father.”

It was then that he decided to seek help from the Thaqif, the people of Ta’if – a decision that eloquently reflected the apparent gravity of his situation in Makkah. Accompanied by his disciple, Zaid ibn Haritha , Muhammad (S) came to Ta’if. On his arrival, he went straight to the house of three brothers who were the leaders of Thaqif at that time, the sons of ‘Amr ibn Umayyah. When the Prophet (S) invited them to Islam and asked them to help him against his opponents, they abused him verbally. So the Prophet rose to leave them, perhaps intending to try elsewhere in Ta’if; but when he had left them they stirred their slaves and retainers to insult him and shout at him, until a crowd of people were gathered together against him who started pelting stones at him. His feet started bleeding. Zaid himself was injured with a head injury. The Prophet could not walk any longer. But the unbelievers put him on his feet and again resumed throwing stones at him. Ultimately, the Prophet (S) was forced to take refuge in a private orchard. Once he had entered it the crowd began to disperse, and, tethering his camel to a palm tree, he made for the shelter of a vine and sat in its shade.

When he felt himself to be in safety and at peace, Muhammad (S) prayed : “O God, unto You do I complain of my weakness, of my helplessness, and of my lowliness before men. O Most Merciful of the merciful, You are the Lord of the weak. And You are my Lord, Unto whose hands will you entrust me, unto some far off stranger who will ill-treat me? Or unto a foe whom You have empowered against me? I care not, so You be not wroth with me. But Your favoring help – that were for me the broader way and the wider scope! I take refuge in the Light of Your Countenance whereby all darknesses are illumined and the things of this world and the next are rightly ordered, lest You make descend Your anger upon me, or lest Your wrath beset me. Yet is it Yours to reproach until You are well pleased. There is no power and no might except through You.”

After he had made the supplication, Muhammad (S) looked up. He saw a cloud providing shade to him and in that cloud was seated the Angel Jibril (Gabriel). Jibril said, “Allah has heard what your community has said and He had also witnessed what the people of Ta’if had done to you. He has sent you the Angel who is entrusted with the mountains. Whatever you command, he will carry it out.”

The Angel who is entrusted with the mountains approached Muhammad (S) and said, “O Muhammad, I am the Angle of Mountains. I am at your command. If you command me I shall destroy this town by smashing it with the Mountain Akhshab.”

At this moment of trial, what the Prophet of mercy had to say simply surprised the Angel. The Prophet (S) said, “ I beg forgiveness for them. Even if these people do not accept Islam , I do hope from Allah that there will emerge from there a people submissive unto Him who will not associate any partners to Him. ”

No man has ever uttered such words for those who caused so much suffering. But such was the person Muhammad (S) . No wonder that he is described in the Qur’an as the Rahmatal-lil ‘alameen — the mercy to the entire universe (21:107)!

In later years, when asked by his wife A’isha (R) if there was ever a more troubling moment in his life than that of Uhud, the Prophet (S) replied, “I had the most troubling time in Ta’if .”

It was all too natural for the Prophet of Islam to forgive all his tormentors on the day of the conquest of Makkah some ten years later. After entering the city of his birth from where he was forced to flee, Muhammad (S) performed the ritual tawaf (encircling of the Ka’bah) on his camel, surrounded by the Muslims. When he had finished, he said, ‘There no divinity except Allah and He has no partner. Men and women of Quraysh be not proud for all are equal; we are all the sons of Adam , and Adam was made of dust.’ Then he recited this verse to them:

In the Name of Allah , the Beneficent, the Merciful

O mankind! Lo! We have created you male and female, and have made you nations and tribes so that you may know each another. Surely the noblest of you, in the sight of Allah , is the best in conduct. Lo! Allah is All-knowing, All-aware. (Qur’an xlix.13)

After this he said to them: ‘O Quraysh , what do you think I am going to do to you?’ The people thought carefully before answering because they knew that according to the laws of war they could all be taken prisoners. They also knew, however, that the Prophet Muhammad (S) was generous, so they replied, ‘You will treat us as a kind nephew and a generous brother would.’ To this he replied with the words used by the Prophet Joseph when his brothers came to Egypt : ‘God forgives you and He is the Most Merciful of the merciful.’ Later the Prophet (S) went to the hill of Safa and there the crowd followed him and surged forward, taking his hand one by one, to declare their faith in Islam. He then turned to the Ka’bah and, pointing his staff at the three hundred and sixty-five idols, which were placed there, recited from the Qur’an :

In the Name of Allah , the Beneficent, the Merciful

… Truth has come and falsehood has vanished away.

Lo! Falsehood is ever bound to vanish.

(Qur’an 17:81)

At this, each idol fell over onto its face. Together with his followers the Prophet (S) then proceeded to purify the Ka’bah, after which he ordered Bilal (RA), the Abyssinian companion, to climb on top of it and perform the call to prayer.

Since then the call to prayer has been heard five times a day in Makkah. The Ka’bah has served the purpose for which it was built by Abraham thousands of years ago — as a sanctuary for the worship of Allah, our Creator, and Makkah continues to be the spiritual center of Islam . That nascent faith of Islam has now grown to become the faith of some 1.6 billion people in our planet. No fear-mongering and xenophobia will be able to stop a faith that is global and growing fast.

(Speech delivered at the Ramadan celebration in the Trinity Church , Swarthmore College , Pennsylvania on August 28, 2010 . The stories are extracted from the author’s upcoming book – The Book of Devotional Stories in Islam, pub. A.S. Noordeen, Kuala Lumpur , Malaysia .)

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui

 

New York, September 2, 2010 — The National Council of Churches today reiterated its statement of August 11 condemning plans by a Florida church to burn the Qur’an on September 11.

On the eve of Ramadan, the NCC and its Interfaith Relations Commission called upon Christians and persons of other faiths to express respect for Muslims and Islam. The August 11 statement, which expressed dismay over recent out outbreaks of Islamophobia and anti Muslim sentiments, said, in part,

We also decry the anti-Muslim actions and plans of many church leaders and members, such as those of the Dove World Outreach Center in the U.S.A.  Misguided or confused about the love of neighbor by which Christ calls us to live,  leaders and members of this church and others are engaged in harassment of Muslims, and in the planning of an “International Burn the Qur’an Day,” to be held on September 11th.   Such open acts of hatred are not a witness to Christian faith, but a grave trespass against the ninth commandment, a bearing of false witness against our neighbor.  They contradict the ministry of Christ and the witness of the church in the world.

We ask all Christians to promote respect and love of neighbor, and to speak and work against extremist ideas, working with Muslims as appropriate, in order to live out the commandment to love our neighbor, and to promote peace.

The Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, said the council had chosen to repeat its statement in response to “many requests from persons of good will who wish to make it abundantly clear to the international community that millions of Americans reject the anti-Muslim expressions of some communities who seem to be reacting out of fear and a misunderstanding of the true nature of Islam.”

See earlier NCC statements at http://www.ncccusa.org/news/100811ramadanrespect.html and http://www.ncccusa.org/MK.cordobamosque.html

 

On marks out of ten for his speech to the UN on the subject of ending the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, I’d give President Obama minus five.

Earlier this month (on 4 September) I wrote a piece with the headline Obama has signalled his coming complete surrender to Zionism and its lobby. That surrender, it seems to me, is now effectively a fait accompli.

“After 60 years in the community of nations, Israel’s existence must not be a subject for debate,” Obama proclaimed. “It should be clear to all that efforts to chip away at Israel’s legitimacy will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of the United States.”

Leaving aside the matter of whether Zionism’s monster child is legitimate or not (I say it’s not), only a complete idiot would deny that Israel exists. The question is – WHICH Israel must not have its existence debated? Israel inside its borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war or the greater Israel of today? That’s not a question Obama is prepared to ask let alone answer.

In my view the most appropriate response to Obama from the Arab and wider Muslim would be something this: All American presidents who refuse to demand (with the promise of sanctions if necessary) that Israel end its occupation of all Arab land grabbed in 1967 will only be met by the unshakeable opposition of all Arabs and other Muslims everywhere.

We now know what Obama himself expects of those Arabs who “count themselves as friends of the Palestinians”. They “must seize the opportunity for a peace agreement that will lead to a Palestinian state.” They can do that, Obama added, “by supporting the Palestinian Authority financially and politically and by coming to terms with Israel’s existence.”

Again the question – the existence of WHICH Israel must the Arabs come to terms with? To Obama I say, “Mr. President, until you are prepared to answer this question, you will have no credibility whatsoever in the Arab and wider Muslim world, at least far as ‘the street’ (the masses) is concerned.”

Obama’s notion that there is an opportunity for a peace agreement to be seized can only be the product of desperate and deluded wishful thinking on his part unless he believes that he can bribe and bully the discredited Palestinian Authority into accepting crumbs from Zionism’s table. It’s not totally impossible that he might be able to do so, but that would only provoke a Palestinian civil war. Could that be what Zionism really wants, in order to have a pretext for completing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine?

Perhaps most depressing of all was Obama’s statement about the need for an independent Palestinian state. It is required, he said, to provide Israel with “true security”. No mention of it being needed to go some way to righting the terrible wrong done to the Palestinians in Zionism’s name.

Yes, President Obama did call on Israel to continue its moratorium on new settlement activity. The question is – What is he going to do when, in a few days or three months from now, Israel defies him?

We know the answer. Nothing.

By Alan Hart

27 September, 2010

Alanhart.net

Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent. He is author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs at http://www.alanhart.net and tweets via http://twitter.com/alanauthor

 

28 years after the Massacre at Sabra-Shatila

Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, Beirut: The untreated psychic wounds are still open. Accountability, justice and basic civil rights for the survivors are still denied. Scores of horror testimonies have been shared over the past nearly three decades by survivors of the September 1982 Sabra- Shatila massacre.

More come to light only through circumstantial evidence because would be affiants perished during the slaughter. Other eyewitness are just beginning to emerge from deep trauma or self imposed silence. Some testimonies will be shared this month by massacre survivors at Shatila camp. They will sit with the every growing numbers of international visitors who annually come to commemorate one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century.

There are no average massacre testimonies. Zeina, a handsome bronzed-faced middle-aged woman, an acquaintance of Munir Mohammad’s family, asked a foreigner the other day: “How can it be 28 years? I think it was just last fall that my husband Hussam and our two daughters, Maya, 8 years old, and Sirham, 9 years old, left our two room home to search for food because the Israeli army had sealed Shatila camp nearly two days before and few inside Shatila Camp had any. I still pray and wait for them to return.”

In Shatila Palestinian refugee camp and outside Abu Yassir’s shelter, the bullet marks still cover the lower half of the 11 “walls of death” where some of the dried blood is mixed and feathered in with the thin mortar. An elderly gentleman named Abu Samer still has some souvenirs of the American automatic pistols fitted with silencers and a couple of knives and axes that were strapped to some of the killers belts as they quickly and silently shot, carved and chopped whoever they came upon starting at around 6 p.m. on Thursday September 16, 1982. These weapons were gifted to Israel by the US Congress and subsequently issued along with drugs

and alcohol and other “policing equipment” by Ariel Sharon to the killers in his “most moral army.” Earlier this year, one of the murderers from the Numour al-Ahrar (Tigers of the Liberals) militia, the armed wing of Lebanon’s right-wing National Liberal Party founded by former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, nonchalantly confessed, “we sometimes used these implements in order to advance silently through the alleys of Shatila so as not to cause unnecessary panic during our work.” The Tigers militia, one of five Christian killer units, was assisted inside Shatila by more than two dozen Israeli Mossad agents, and led in this blitz by none other than Dani Chamoun, son of the former President.

No plaque or sign notes what happened here.

The world learned of the slaughter at Sabra-Shatila on the morning of Sunday September 19, 1982. Photos, many now available on the Internet, taken by witnesses such as Ralph Shoneman, Mya Shone, Ryuichi Hirokawa, Ali Hasan Salman, Ramzi Hardar, Gunther Altenburg, and Gaza and Akka Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) Hospital staff, preserve the gruesome images deeply etched in the survivors memory. The Israeli Kahan Commission, five months later in its February 7, 1983 Report, substantially whitewashed Israeli responsibility referring more than once to the massacre as “a war.” Zeina ushered me down a narrow alley from her house arriving at the 3 by 8 meter wall outside her sister’s home, spraying here and there with an aerosol can as we walked. She apologized for the spray but insisted that she and her neighbors could even now smell the slaughter that happened there three decades earlier.

For readers unfamiliar with the location of Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Beirut, this particular “wall of death” is located across from the PRCS Akka Hospital, such as it is, after years without adequate financial or NGO support. Locating the 11 “walls of death” requires help from the few older Palestinians who still live in this quarter. They are among those still living at the scene and who still vividly recall the details of the massacre. Some provide personal history of some of the butchered, seemingly urging the dead to return by making them seem so alive, often describing a personality trait and the name of their family village in Palestine.

“A sweet boy who adored his older brothers Mutid and Bilal” Zeina recalls that Munir Mohammad was 12 years old on September 16, 1982, a pupil at the Shatila camp school, named Jalil (Galilee). Virtually all of the 75 remaining UNRWA schools in Lebanon, like other Palestinian institutions, are named after villages, towns or cities in occupied Palestine.

Often they are named after villages that no longer actually exist, being among the 531 villages the Zionists colonizers obliterated during and after the 1947-48 Nakba (Catastrophe). Zeina recalls that it was late on a Thursday afternoon, September 16, that the Israeli shelling had grown intense. Designed to drive the camp residents into the shelters, almost all of which Israeli intelligence, arriving the previous day in three white vehicles and posing as “concerned NGO staff” had identified and noted the coordinates on their maps. Some residents, thinking aid workers had come to help the refugees, actually revealed their secret sanctuaries. Other refugees, based on their experience in the crowded shelters during the preceding 75 days of indiscriminate, “Peace for Galilee” Israeli bombing of Shatila, suggested to the “aid workers” that the shelters needed better ventilation and perhaps the visitors would help provide it.

According to Zeina the Israeli agents quickly sketched the shelter locations, marked them with a red circle and returned to their HQ which was located less than 70 meters on the raised terrain at the SE corner of Shatila camp still known as Turf Club Yards. Today, this sandy area still contains three death pits which according to the late American journalist Janet Stevens is where some of the hundreds of still missing bodies of the more than 3,000 slaughtered are likely buried. Janet had theorized that there was a second Sabra-Shatila Massacre that occurred on Sunday morning, September 19th, which piggybacked the first and was conducted on the west side of Shatila inside the second Israeli-Phalange HQ, known as the Cite Sportiff athletic complex. As the Israeli soldiers took custody from the Phalange militia of the surviving refugees, trucks entered Cite Sportiff loaded with hundreds of camp residents on the back to be taken to “holding centers”.

Family members forced to wait outside heard volleys of gunfire and screams from inside the complex. Hours later the same flat beds drove away to unknown locations, tarps covering the unseen mounded cargo. Camp resident, Mrs. Sana Mahmoud Sersawi, one of the 23 complainants in the Belgium case filed against Ariel Sharon on June 16, 2001, (currently but not fatally sidetracked) explained: “The Israelis who were posted in front of the Kuwaiti embassy and at the Rihab benzene station at the entrance to Shatila demanded through loudspeakers that we come to them. That’s how we found ourselves in their hands. They took us to the Cite Sportiff, and the men were marched behind us. But they took the men’s shirts off and started blindfolding them. The Israelis interrogated the young people and the Phalange delivered about 200 more people to the Israelis. And that’s how neither my husband nor my sister’s husband ever came back.” Journalist Robert Fisk and others who studied these events, concur that more slaughter was done during the 24 hour period after 8 a.m. Saturday, the hour the Israeli Kahan Commission, which declined to interview any Palestinians, ruled that the Israelis had stopped all the killing.

Eyewitness testimony also established that the “aid workers” described by Zeina passed the shelter descriptions and locations to Lebanese Forces operatives Elie Hobeika and Fadi Frem, and their ally, Major Saad Haddad of the Israeli-allied South Lebanese Army. Thursday evening, Hobeika, de facto commander since the assassination the week previously of Phalange leader and President-elect Bachir Gemayel, led one of the death squads inside the killing field of the Horst Tabet area near Abu Yassir’s shelter.

It was in 8 of the 11 Israeli-located and marked shelters that the first of the massacre victims were quickly and methodically slaughtered. There being few perfect crimes, even in massacres, the killers failed to find 3 of the shelters. One of the overlooked shelters was just 25 meters from Abu Yassir’s shelter. Apart from these three undiscovered hiding places there were practically no Shatila shelter survivors. American journalist David Lamb wrote about this first night of butchery and the “walls of death”: “Entire families were slain. Groups consisting of 10-20 people were lined up against walls and sprayed with bullets. Mothers died while clutching their babies. All men appeared to be shot in the back.

Five youths of fighting age were tied to a pickup truck and dragged through the streets before being shot.” At around about 8 p.m. on September 18 Munir Mohammad entered the crowded Abu Yassir shelter with his mother Aida and his sisters and brothers Iman, Fadya, Mufid and Mu’in. Keeping the relatively few camp shelters for the woman and children while the men took their chances outside was a common practice as the massacre unfolded. But a few men did enter to help calm their young children.

“If any of you are injured, we’ll take you to the hospital”. Munir later recalled events that night: “The killers arrived at the door of the shelter and yelled for everyone to come out. Men who they found were lined up against the wall outside. They were immediately machine gunned.” As Munir watched, the killers left to kill other groups and then suddenly returned and opened fire on everyone, and all fell to the ground. Munir lay quietly not knowing if his mother and sisters were dead. Then he heard the killers yelling: “If any of you are injured, we’ll take you to the hospital.

Don’t worry. Get up and you’ll see.” A few did try to get up or moaned and they were instantly shot in the head. Munir remembered: “Even though it was light out due to the Israeli flares over Shatila, the killers used bright flash lights to search the darkened corners. The killers were looking in the shadows”. Suddenly Munir’s mother’s body seemed to shift in the mound of corpses next to him. Munir thought she might be going to get up since the killers promised to take anyone still alive to the hospital. Munir whispered to her: “Don’t get up mother, they’re lying”. And Munir stayed motionless all night barely daring to breath, pretending to be dead.

Munir could not block out the killers words. Years later he would repeat to an interviewer as they passed the Shatila Burial ground known as Martyrs Square: “After they shot us, we were all down on the ground, and they were going back and forth, and they were saying: ‘If any of you are still alive, we’ll have mercy and pity and take them to the hospital. Come on, you can tell us.’ If anyone moaned, or believed them and said they needed an ambulance, they would be rescued with shots and finished off there and then. What really disturbed me wasn’t just the death all around me. I didn’t know whether my mother and sisters and brother had died. I knew most of the people around me had died. And it’s true I was afraid of dying myself. But what disturbed me so very much was that they were laughing, getting drunk and enjoying themselves all night long. They threw blankets on us and left us there till morning. All night long [Thursday the 16th) I could hear the voices of the girls crying and screaming, ‘For god’s sake, leave us alone.’

I mean, I can’t remember how many girls they raped. The girl’ voice, with their fear and pain, I can’t ever forget them.” The same kind of dégagé is displayed by the half dozen confessed militia murderers featured in German director Monika Borgmann’s 2005 film Massaker, one of whom opined: “With hanging or shooting you just die, but this is double,” explaining how he took an old Palestinian man and held him back against a wall, slicing him open in the shape of a cross. “You die twice since you also die from the fear,” he said nonchalantly describing white flesh and bone as if in a charcuterie waiting to be served.

The killers also explained how they began a frantic rush to dispose of as many bodies as possible before the media entered Shatila. One testified how the Israeli army gave them large plastic trash bags to dispose of bodies. Another confessed that they forced people into army trucks to ferry them to Cite Sportiff where they were killed. And that they used chemicals to destroy many of the corpses. Several mentioned that Israeli army officers conferred with the militia’s leaders in Beirut on the eve of the massacres.

The venomous hatred persists to this day To this day, the Hurras al-Arz (Guardians of the Cedars) boasts of its role in the carnage. Less than two weeks before the massacre the party issued a call for the confiscation of all Palestinian property in Lebanon, the outlawing of home ownership and the destruction of all refugee camps. The party statement of September 1, 1982 declared: “Action must be taken to reduce the numbers of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, until the day comes when no single Palestinian remains on our soil.”

In 1982 certain political parties referred to Palestinians as “a bacillus which must be exterminated” and graffiti on walls read: ”The duty of every Lebanese is to kill a Palestinian”–the same hatred commonly expressed today in occupied Palestine among colonists, extremist Rabbis and politicians. The ‘Guardians’ call for outlawing Palestinian refugee property ownership was indeed achieved in 2001 by a law drafted by current Minister of Labor, who pledged on September 1, 2010 that “Parliament will never allow Palestinian refugees the right to own property.”

The mentality that allowed the Massacre at Sabra-Shatila 1982 is largely unchanged in 2010, as Lebanon still resists the call of the international community to grant the survivors of the Sabra-Shatila massacre basic civil rights. Some who have studied the Arabic websites and observed gatherings of the political parties represented at the 1982 massacre, claim the hate language is actually worse today and is being used to stir up Parliamentary opposition Palestinian civil rights.

During the month following the 1982 Massacre, British Dr. Paul Morris treated Munir at Gaza Hospital approximately one kilometer north of Abu Yassir’s shelter, and kept the youngster under observation. Dr. Morris reported to researcher Bayan Nuwayhed al Hout (Sabra and Shatila: September 1982, Pluto Press, London, 2004) that Munir “Will smile once in a while, but he doesn’t react spontaneously like others of this age, except just occasionally.” Then the doctor banged on the table, and said: ‘The lad has to be saved. He has to leave the camp, if only for a while, to recover himself.”

When Munir was asked by al Hout if one day when he grew up and would be able to carry a weapon would he consider revenge. The pre-teen replied, replied: “No, No. I’d never think of revenge by killing children. The way they killed us. What did the children do wrong?” Munir’s 15 year old brother Mufid was among the first to enter Abu Yassir’s shelter, but he left and later appeared at Akka Hoppital with a gunshot wound. After being bandaged he left the hospital to seek safety and his family. No one has seen him since and for a long time Munir could not even mention him.

According to camp residents, Munir’s older brother, Nabil, then 19 years old, being of fighting age would have been shot on sight by the killers. Aware of this, Nabil’s cousin and his cousin’s wife fled with him as the Israeli shelling increased and camp residents reported indiscriminate killing. The trio dodged sniper bullets to seek refuge in a nursing home where his aunt worked. Like Munir, Nabil soon learned that his mother and siblings were all dead.

Postscript

Now in America, both Munir and Nabil are leading relatively ‘normal lives’ considering the horror and lost family they experienced while escaping death at Sabra-Shatila. Munir and Nabil have become a credit to Shatila camp, to Palestine and to their adopted country. Residing in the Washington DC area, Munir is married and busy with his career. Nabil is devoting his life to advocacy for peace and justice in the Middle East, working with an NGO.

Both brothers return to Shatila camp regularly. Also apparently living ‘normal lives’ are the six “Christian” militia killers featured in Borgmann’s film Massaker. “They are all living ordinary lives. One of them is a taxi driver,” Borgmann explains. As is well known, the massacres at Sabra-Shatila were undeniable war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Each killing was a violation of international laws enshrined in the Fourth Geneva Convention, International Customary Law and jus cogens. Similar massive crimes have seen charges brought against Rwandan officials, Chile’s ex-president, General Augusto Pinochet, Chad’s former president, Hissein Habre, former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, Liberia’s Taylor and Sudan’s Bachir.

No one has been punished or even investigated for the Sabra-Shatila massacre. On March 28, 1991 Lebanon’s Parliament retroactively exempted the killers from criminal responsibility. However, this law has no standing in international law and the international community remains legally obligated to punish those responsible. The victims and their families of the Sabra-Shatila massacre as well as virtually all human rights organizations including but not limited to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Humanitarian Law Project, strenuously oppose blanket amnesty for the killers. They argue that the 1991 violates Lebanon’s constitution, as well as international law and promotes impunity for heinous crimes.

It was precisely to achieve justice for the victims of crimes such as Sabra-Shatila that the International Criminal Court was established. The ICC must begin its work without further delay and all people of goodwill must encourage Lebanon to grant the survivors of the Sabra-Shatila Massacre basic civil rights.

By Franklin Lamb

28 April, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon. He can be reached at

fplamb@gmail.com

 

I write to you regarding your programme of 16th August, 2010, about The Freedom Flotilla and particularly the killings of unarmed civilians by Israeli Navy Seals on the ship MV “Mavi Marmara’, on 3lst May, 2010. I have been campaigning for the rights of Palestinians for over ten years. I have visited Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories many times. I was part of the Freedom Flotilla in May on the MV ‘Rachel Corrie’, my third journey on a Free Gaza boat.

I am deeply disappointed at the misrepresentation, lack of truth, and bias displayed by your programme [“Death in the Med”]. This programme had an opportunity to inform and educate the public about the background to the flotilla, the motives of the passengers and crew on board the MV ‘Mavi Marmara’, who (like all of us on the boats trying to get to Gaza) were concerned for the suffering  of the people of Gaza. Over 650 people – from all faiths and none, – from over 40 countries, representing the human family and uniting in nonviolent resistance to break a cruel siege (collective punishment is illegal under International Law) to bring hope and support to the people of Gaza. Before leaving their various ports, as part of the undertaking, all passengers made pledges of nonviolence, all people, and cargoes were searched, and all undertook to go in a spirit of peace to resist (as is our moral right and duty) the breaking of Human Rights and International Law by Israel through its siege of Gaza and occupation of Palestine. This journey of courage and call for justice by people on board the MV ‘Mavi Marmara’ and the flotilla represented the conscience of the world. The boats carried no arms, and were no threat to Israel, but what they did carry were voices of dissent from every corner of the world, (including Jews) saying to Israel ‘no more sieges, occupations, wars and threats of violence’, we refuse to be silent in the face of your ethnic cleansing and persecution of the Palestinian people. Our motives were honourable, we did it for the children of Gaza, knowing that in the end, truth and justice will prevail.

Sadly, the Panorama programme did not see the true significance of this historic journey and missed an opportunity for the media to fulfil its responsibility to ‘tell the truth and nothing but the truth’. They choose instead to try to demonize the passengers on the MV ‘Mavi Marmara’ from the word go by trying to make them out as violent terrorists. They choose to collude with the Israeli propaganda of lies and manipulation of facts thus trying to turn the victims into aggressors. The fact that Israeli commandoes started shooting from the zodiac assault boats and the helicopters from the word go was not stated. The audio and video footage used (provided by Israeli military intelligence) was proven to be doctored, and the IDF have admitted this. Your programme showed audio containing what was purported to be anti-semitic remarks issued over the radio by members on the flotilla, and you showed a clip of a percussion grenade exploding in one of the Israeli zodiac assault boats. These things never happened. There is so much commentary in this documentary that is inaccurate that it does a grave disservice to investigative journalism and the BBC. But the real people hurt by this programme, are the families of the 9 unarmed passengers who were assassinated in this unprovoked, illegal, massacre by the Israeli navy seals. So too the more than 40 unarmed people who were injured on the illegal military assault in International waters, whose only crime was to care about Gaza and its people.

The programme failed totally to cover the real suffering of the Palestinian people, it failed totally to cover the fact that the mass kidnapping of 650 unarmed world citizens and the high-jacking of 7 boats, was in International waters and it failed totally to ask the real questions of Israel ‘why is this Port of Gaza – the only port in the Middle East to be a closed military zone (42 years) – not open for the people of Gaza and Palestine to travel and trade with the world as is their human right? Perhaps, the BBC Panorama will stop taking the propaganda of the Israeli Government (Jane Corbin travelling on Israeli Zodiacs embedded with Israeli military, hardly leads to objective report of facts). These  same zodiacs which boarded all the flotilla ships (including the one I travelled on) kidnapped unarmed citizens, hijacked boats (an act of piracy), confiscated all possessions (which Israel still hold onto), forced all under military arms to go to Israel, detained all, violently assaulted many, imprisoned and repatriated foreigners – all an abuse of our human rights and most of which was not reported by BBC Panorama. The role of the BBC is not to give credibility to the Israeli military but to report facts and allow the public to make up their own minds. By planting doubt in the minds of the public about the events on board the MV ‘Mavi Marmara’. It has done a grave injustice and further injury to the families of all those who were assassinated by Israeli Navy seals, on that terrible morning of 3lst May, 2010. I would like to ask the BBC Panorama Team, ‘what do you intend to do to redress the injustice you have done to the good names of all those who were killed, and injured, and their families on board the MV ‘Mavi Marmara’ on 3lst May, 2010? I await your response.

 

 

Kofi Annan is a respected personality.So when he decided to chair the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), it was expected to draw the attention of the African leadership to bring back the focus on agriculture and food security. Sitting far away in India, the original seat of Green Revolution, I watched with interest the pathway AGRA was taking to ensure food security for all.

Green Revolution has become synonymous with food production. The moment you say there is a need to increase production, the chances are that two of the three people you meet would point to Green Revolution as the way forward. Nothing wrong, you would say. In a way I agree. In my understanding, Green Revolution is only indicative of the importance that needs to be accorded to agriculture, but it should not entail going the same route that India had followed.

Indian agriculture is in terrible crisis, a direct fallout of the Green Revolution technology and the accompanying policies. Over 200,000 farmers have taken their own lives, often drinking the pesticides they had brought for killing insects. Another 40 per cent of the Indian farmers (of the 600 million farming population) want to quit agriculture if given a choice. Productivity is on the decline, environment has been contaminated by chemicals, insect equilibrium has been distorted, water table has gone down drastically, organic matter in soils has disappeared, and farm incomes have dropped. In short, the natural resource base has been destroyed beyond recognition. The only gainers are the companies supplying chemical inputs and machines. Their profits continue to soar.

I don’t think African leaders would like to bring in an unforeseen disaster in the name of food security. But I guess they are so indebted to the international financial institutions that even if they feel that all is not well, they have little choice but to accept the approach being suggested.

Take a look at the recommendations of the ‘concrete outcomes’ emerging from the latest meeting of the African Green Revolution Forum that ended at Accra/Ghana in the first week of September. While it may appear to be all pious intention, but to a discerning eye it become obvious that the real motive is to push unwanted technology and finance/capital to Africa. This will sustain the economies of US/Europe already reeling under recession. In a way, AGRA is basically intended to bailout the multinational companies dealing with seed/technology and agribusiness.

In a press release (Sept 7, 2010), the organisers said: the moderators of breakout panel sessions published a series of concrete outcomes, including:

• Empowerment of women throughout the agricultural value chain by accelerating access to improved technology, finance and markets

• Support for an Impact Investment Fund for African Agriculture to scale up access to finance by farmers and agribusinesses

• Increased investment for science, technology and research for food nutrition security

• Accelerated access to improved seed by promoting the entire value chain, including support for plant breeding, seed companies and seed distribution systems

• Improved fertilizer supply systems and more efficient fertilizer value chains

• More inclusive business models linking agri-business, commercial farms and smallholder farmers

• The need for better management of Africa’s water and natural resources

• Acknowledgement that mixed crop livestock systems are the backbone for Africa’s agriculture

While all this may appear fine, I think even in India there was no need for a Green Revolution. My argument is that when India imported the dwarf high-yielding wheat varieties from CIMMYT/Mexico, it knew that varieties alone would not be able to deliver. What came as a package were two important planks of a policy initiative that I call it as ‘famine-avoidance’ strategies. To ensure that farmers get an incentive to continue farming the same crop, the government set up a mechanism to provide assured prices which became better known as procurement prices. At the same time, it set up a Food Corporation of India (FCI) to mop up the surplus grain that flows into the markets.

Without these two planks, there would have been no Green Revolution.

Just think. If these two strategies were in place prior to the introduction of Green Revolution technology, farmers would have got the necessary support to increase crop production. Crop production did not pick up prior to Green revolution period because there was no assured prices and no assured market.

What is not being realised that the production of wheat and rice (the two most important staples) went up not only because of the high-yielding varieties but because the policy makers had put together the two-planks of the ‘famine-avoidance’ strategy. Assured prices through the instrument of Minimum Support Price (MSP) became an attraction for the farmer who would normally be squeezed out by the trade at the time of the harvest. At the same time, the government set up a procurement system which ensured that whatever flows into the mandis (and is not purchased by the private trade) would be bought by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and other government agencies.

This means that farmers got an assured price and an assured market. They knew that their efforts would not go abegging. And no wonder, production of mainly four crops — wheat, rice, sugarcane and cotton — has gone up. These are the only four crops where the market is assured, whether through the FCI purchase or by the sugar companies etc., and production of these crops has been on the rise.

Africa actually needs to put these two food security planks into place. It has to be backed by a sustainable farming system (among some of the wonderful initiatives are: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=47528), which have been demonstrated in several parts of Africa, and provide an assured price and an assured market. Farmers would do the rest. Otherwise, Africa is likely to be destroyed beyond recognition with the kind of 2nd Green Revolution that is being pushed aggressively, and you know by whom.

Kofi Annan is a wise man. I am sure he will have the courage to stand up, and demonstrate that Africa has a viable and sustainable future. Africa needs SAGRA — Sustainable Agriculture for Africa, and not AGRA.

14 September, 2010

Ground Reality