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(I)

For almost half a century – since the end of World War II – the world lived in the fear of a devastating nuclear war. After this threat had receded with the end of the Cold War, brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union, mankind got only a short reprieve of roughly a decade before our minds were again consumed by an all-pervasive fear – in that case of a large invisible enemy by the name of “terrorism.”

Since the fateful events of the year 2001 in the United States, a “global war on terror” has been proclaimed by that country’s administration, with the “international community” – in actual fact the group of states aligned, in one way or the other, with the U.S. – following suit, albeit reluctantly and with much hesitation. While it is obvious that the term “war” is used in this phrase in a metaphorical sense, this development has reintroduced into international affairs an essentially Manichaean worldview according to which mankind is divided into good and evil – with no intermediate ground. This dichotomy does not only apply to states, but to peoples, civilizations, and religions alike.

The decisive events of this “war,” so far, namely the armed interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, have made obvious the extreme fragility of the international rule of law in the face of what is presented as an almost metaphysical danger: “international terrorism.” These all-out military confrontations will also have made us aware, by now, that a mythical, vaguely defined global “war on terror” – as an effort at eradicating forces that are perceived or determined as evil – may never end; to the contrary, it will itself become part of a global cycle of violence. It is against this background that the new U.S. administration has begun to cautiously distance itself from the doctrine as well as the term, suggesting that it be replaced by the more neutral and less ambitious phrase “Global Contingency Operation.” However, no unified stand has been taken on the issue so far, and the term continues to be used by officials of the U.S. administration, especially the military establishment.

Because of the vagueness of its goals, the lack of precision of the very notion of “terrorism,” and the discretionary dilemma inherent in any preventive use of force, this war will eventually become a self-defeating undertaking – unless it is made part of a comprehensive and truly universal (i.e. global) political effort, comprising a large majority of United Nations member states and not only the allies of the hegemonic power of the moment. Such a strategy will have to be aimed at eradicating the root causes of terrorist violence such as poverty, exploitation, and other forms of economic and social injustice, foreign occupation, denial of self-determination, etc.

If considerations of justice are excluded, the “global war on terror” will become a campaign of global revenge, a development that will ultimately bring about a multiplication of the terrorist threat in virtually all corners of the globe.

Only if terrorism is also understood as a form of reactive violence, and if one is prepared to undertake the intellectual effort at analyzing its specific causes, will one understand that further reactive violence – in the form of a global war on terror – can merely deal with the symptoms of the underlying conflict(s) and, in many circumstances, may even aggravate the situation. The course of events in Afghanistan is a drastic example of this dilemma: Seven and a half years into the conflict, the foreign armies are still fighting a largely invisible enemy and are losing control over ever larger parts of the territory – with first a British commander, then the President of the United States admitting that this may be a war that cannot be won militarily and, thus, hinting at the urgent need for a political approach.

(II)

This dilemma between an exclusively military and a more comprehensive political approach directly brings in the human rights dimension not only of terrorist violence, but also of counter-terrorism (in the form of the “global war on terror”) – and in different respects and at different levels:

1. In the first place, terrorist violence is often (though not always) a kind of reactive violence, namely a reaction to perceived violations of basic human rights (such as foreign occupation, oppression of civil liberties, denial of self-determination, etc.). It is to be stated that acknowledging this causal relationship does in no way mean condoning specific acts of terrorism. Politically motivated acts of violence against civilians – which is a kind of operative definition of terrorism accepted by international consensus – cannot be justified under any circumstances. Nonetheless, refusing to acknowledge the specific motives behind terrorist acts will make us incapable to respond rationally and to develop a comprehensive, effective and sustainable counter-terrorist strategy. Such a “rejectionist” attitude would also make us victims of a desire for blind revenge and would make of the supposedly reactive use of force which many describe as “global war” a battle against windmills – since this war would only target symptoms, not the causes of terrorist violence (about which the strategy is ignorant in such a scenario).
2. By definition, acts of terrorism are always a negation of the most basic human rights. Using violence against non-military targets to instill fear upon people is not only intrinsically evil in general moral terms; it is tantamount to violating the very rights that are derived from the inalienable dignity of the human being. Those rights are enshrined in the respective international covenants and in domestic constitutions; they include, first and foremost, the right to life; the right to live free from fear and intimidation; the right to form one’s political opinion free from manipulation and in an open public discourse – and not as a result of “blackmail” in the form of politically motivated violence; etc. It is to be emphasized, in this context, that no double standards must be allowed in the use of the term “terrorism” insofar as the negation of fundamental human rights is concerned: Acts of terrorism are a negation of the dignity of the human person and a denial of human rights independently of their motives and irrespective of whether they are committed by individuals, loosely organized groups, large and well-disciplined organizations, or regular armed forces; furthermore, the human rights aspect also relates to all acts of state terrorism.
3. Since the global war on terror was effectively proclaimed towards the end of the year 2001, the international public has increasingly become aware of a third human rights aspect related to terrorism and to the spiral of violence in which the perpetrators of this war may get entangled: The measures against terrorism, whether undertaken as part of a “global war” or within a domestic political and legal framework, must not themselves violate human rights. International humanitarian law applies in all such situations. To counter acts that negate human rights – namely acts of terrorism – by means of further violations of human rights is not only a self-contradictory undertaking, but will completely undermine the credibility of the anti-terrorist effort and may stir up even more terrorist violence – because such lawless counter-terrorist measures will create a sense of desperation and humiliation among those brutally treated. Since the fourth quarter of the year 2001, the examples of systematic human rights violations, committed as part of a global anti-terrorist campaign abound. Torture as a standard element of interrogation techniques; detention without trial; so-called “secret renditions” of terror suspects; their detention in secret prisons all around the globe; the denial of an accused person’s right to a defense of his own choosing in a court of law, etc.: all these practices constitute serious violations of human rights – that have already been widely and controversially discussed in connection with the ongoing global discourse on the war on terror – and may eventually turn a proclaimed and all-encompassing anti-terrorist effort into a “terrorism-generating” campaign. What is portrayed as necessary and unavoidable measures to fight terrorism may itself become a self-defeating strategy, bearing the hallmarks of (state) terrorism.

The risks and pitfalls of such tactics, not to speak of their immoral and technically illegal nature, have become more than evident in the anti-Western hatred triggered by the appalling human rights violations in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Furthermore, a Swiss member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has documented many of the human rights violations committed not only by the United States, but also by European Union member states as the former’s accomplices, as part of the “global war on terror,” especially as regards the secret “renditions” of terror suspects.

It is to be hoped that the incumbent President of the United States will make good on his electoral promises and not only revise, but reverse, the doctrine and policies that have been behind those measures, and that he will, without any further delay, close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay on the island of Cuba and annul his predecessor’s order by which so-called “military commissions” have been established to try terror suspects. The procedures laid out in this order are in clear and open violation of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (Third Geneva Convention of 1949).

It cannot be emphasized often enough: the moral high ground will inevitably be lost – and with devastating consequences for a country’s international reputation – if a war against terror is conducted through measures that include systematic human rights violations. Such a war will not be perceived as an exercise of legitimate self-defense, but will more resemble a campaign of outright revenge, fuelling a never-ending cycle of terrorist violence. The proclamations about a “terrorist threat” and the need to counter it by preventive measures may thus become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As aptly stated by a young American officer in an analysis of the United States’ anti-terrorist campaign: “mortgaging the principles established by the nation’s founders in the pursuit of short term gains will result in a series of successful battles, followed by a lost war.”

It is further to be hoped that, in the not too distant future, the International Criminal Court (ICC) will be in a position to exercise jurisdiction over all cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity – whether those are committed as part of terrorist or counter-terrorist campaigns. At present, the hands of the Court are tied because many of the countries whose citizens were – or still are – involved in or are suspects of the commission of such crimes have not become parties to the Rome Statute of the ICC, first and foremost among them the United States. For the Court to wait for “political” referrals of situations by the Security Council – as in the case of Sudan – cannot be an option. Many of the human rights violations that are being committed in the course of the global war on terror constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity as defined in the Rome Statute or in other international legal instruments such as the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Those governments that pursue the “global war on terror” – in whichever strategic or tactical framework – should not further try to prevent the International Criminal Court from executing its universal mandate. If they continue to do so they document, by such obstruction, that they do not take seriously international human rights standards and the rule of law – and they will finally defeat their own anti-terrorist campaign because they will de-legitimize it in the eyes of the international public. As the new global discourse on secret renditions, detention in secret prisons, systematic use of torture as part of routine interrogation techniques, etc., has amply demonstrated, the citizens of the world will simply not tolerate such illegal methods any longer.

(III)

Not only for tactical, but for essentially ethical reasons, it is of utmost importance that the war against terror be conducted in a manner that respects the inalienable human rights not only of the population – the citizens to be protected –, but also of terror suspects. The principles and values of a democratic polity do, under no circumstances, allow the erection of an effectively totalitarian system under the disguise of emergency measures supposedly necessitated by the fight against terror.

In order to minimize the need for measures due to which those rights might be violated, the human rights policy governing a state’s reaction to a terrorist threat must be complemented by a proactive human rights strategy – domestically and at the international level. If human rights are indeed taken seriously, a kind of reverse strategy has to be adopted in the definition of the scope of the “global war on terror.” The development of such a strategy will be an element of preventive self-defense in the genuine sense – unlike the forms of preemption that have been defined as the rationale of the ongoing war on terror in ever more theaters of operation.

A “battle” – if we may use the term in a metaphorical sense – will have to be waged for the safeguarding, or restoration, of human rights in a comprehensive and all-encompassing sense, including civil and political, social, economic and cultural rights, on all continents. However, such an effort will not succeed as a unilateral undertaking; it will have to be part of a long-term global development policy in a multilateral framework such as that of the United Nations or regional organizations like the European Union or ASEAN. Only this kind of strategy will produce sustainable results – through the eradication of the root causes of terrorism (which we have identified under category 1 above in the analysis of the human rights dimension of terrorist violence). The ongoing global economic crisis and its impact on the developing countries should serve as a stark reminder of what is at stake.

A global “war” – if we may again use the term in a metaphorical sense – against poverty and all forms of injustice will ultimately make a hot “global war on terror” obsolete. In any way, short-term military measures against violence can never replace a comprehensive long-term strategy.

If the “global war on terror” is only fought in the form of a reactive use of force that ignores the human rights implications in the three different dimensions we have outlined above, and if it exclusively remains in the military domain, such tactics may well lead to a perpetual confrontation that will condemn mankind to live in a state of constant fear – and that will ultimately undermine the very foundations of human rights on which a legitimate global order, the “international rule of law,” is to be built. David Miliband, Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, has aptly expressed the fundamental challenge: countries must respond to terrorism by “championing the rule of law, not subordinating it.”

As explained more than two centuries ago by Immanuel Kant, there can be no lasting peace without respect for human rights and the rule of law, and there will be no end to the terrorist threat, indeed to the cycle of violence triggered by the sequence of terrorist and counter-terrorist operations, unless the global war on terror is superseded by a genuine global and multidimensional effort for the enforcement of human rights.

This – and not the mere technicalities of the use of military force – is the historical challenge which the human race is faced with at a junction of history where it is not yet clear whether the absence of a balance of power will lead to a state of global anarchy – with the never-ending fear of terror as basic ingredient – or to the gradual emergence of a multipolar order that is founded on the principle of sovereign equality of states and peoples alike and, by implication, on the universal respect of human rights.

Those states and leaders who are seriously concerned about the threat of terrorism – and whose agenda goes beyond the realm of propaganda, short-term domestic political considerations, and a desperate defense of doomed imperial rule – will certainly take into consideration the second option; they shall engage in a proactive human rights policy that will make the first possibility (namely a state of global anarchy) a little less likely.

By Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Hans Köchler

21^st May 2009

I.P.O. Online Publications

Jakarta – It is undoubtedly exotic in its looks, but to the naive passerby the only thing that may seem truly extraordinary about this building in Palembang, the capital city of the Indonesian province South Sumatra, is its colourful architecture. The structure, which resembles a temple, is painted in deep red and pink and topped off with a jade green dome. Two towers in the shape of a five-tiered pagoda flank the sides, complete with Chinese-style touches on their roofs.

However, closer inspection reveals a crescent moon and star perched atop its dome. This is not a Chinese temple, but the Muhammad Cheng Ho Mosque. 

A synthesis of Chinese culture and Islam, the mosque would not have been possible under Suharto’s New Order era, in which funding and power of the Indonesian state were greatly expanded to maintain domestic order. Under Suharto, the expression of Chinese culture in any form was considered a threat to national identity, and thus repressed.

With the change of power in 1998, a number of discriminatory laws against ethnic Chinese were abolished, and since then Indonesia has seen a gradual and steady revival of Chinese culture. For many, it was a process of self-discovery and healing as the Chinese population was able to once again openly embrace its ethnicity.

Other attempts have also been made to revive Chinese identities. The building of the similarly named Muhammad Cheng Hoo Mosque in Surabaya in 2002 is one of the best examples of this revival. The mosque is near the city centre and its design is strongly influenced by the Chinese style in stark contrast to its Javanese surroundings. Palembang’s Cheng Ho Mosque, built in 2006, was inspired by the design of this mosque.

The mosque is named after Cheng Ho, commonly known as Zheng He, a 15th century Chinese admiral who is said to have helped spread Islam in Indonesia. According to a local historian, Cheng Ho visited Palembang four times between 1405 and 1433 to destroy a crew of pirates.

When I arrived in the city, I asked the driver about the Cheng Ho Mosque and he was surprised to learn that there was a mosque in the area with a Chinese name.

A local graduate student at Sriwijaya University who accompanied me during my visit also told me that she had never heard about the mosque. Though she frequents the area, she always thought that the twin minarets belonged to a Chinese temple. She is not alone: many people assume the same.

The Cheng Ho Mosque has a unique architectural design, combining elements of Palembang local culture with Chinese and Arabic nuances. Built on 5,000 square meters of land, the mosque is situated inside a middle-class housing complex. The minarets at both sides of the mosque mimic Chinese pagodas, painted in red and jade green.

The two-story mosque has been open since August 2008. There is no physical barrier separating the men and women at the mosque, so the men pray on the first floor and the women on the second. The mosque will eventually have a small house for the imam, an office, a library and a multipurpose room.

The Cheng Ho Mosque is more than a place of worship. It hosts both religious and social activities and has become a tourist destination of sorts, attracting visitors from Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and even Russia. In fact, when I arrived at the mosque, it was filled with dozens of junior high school students celebrating the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. They listened to the recitation of the Qur’an and were taught a religious lesson.

The Cheng Ho Mosque demonstrates that there is room in Indonesia for inhabitants to express their unique identity – a blend of Chinese culture and tradition and Islam within a local Indonesian context.

* Evi Nurvidya Arifin is Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from The Jakarta Globe.

by Evi Nurvidya Arifin,   13 May 2010

World renowned author and activist Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, took out full page ads in major American newspapers to express his views on the city of Jerusalem. Here are his words as published in The International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal on April 16, 2010 and in The New York Times on April 18, 2010:

It was inevitable: Jerusalem once again is at the center of political debates and international storms. New and old tensions surface at a disturbing pace. Seventeen times destroyed and seventeen times rebuilt, it is still in the middle of diplomatic confrontations that could lead to armed conflict. Neither Athens nor Rome has aroused that many passions.

For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics. It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture — and not a single time in the Koran. Its presence in Jewish history is overwhelming. There is no more moving prayer in Jewish history than the one expressing our yearning to return to Jerusalem. To many theologians, it IS Jewish history, to many poets, a source of inspiration. It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city; it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming. The first song I heard was my mother’s lullaby about and for Jerusalem. Its sadness and its joy are part of our collective memory.

Since King David took Jerusalem as his capital, Jews have dwelled inside its walls with only two interruptions; when Roman invaders forbade them access to the city and again, when under Jordanian occupation, Jews, regardless of nationality, were refused entry into the old Jewish quarter to meditate and pray at the Wall, the last vestige of Solomon’s temple. It is important to remember: had Jordan not joined Egypt and Syria in the war against Israel, the old city of Jerusalem would still be Arab. Clearly, while Jews were ready to die for Jerusalem they would not kill for Jerusalem.

Today, for the first time in history, Jews, Christians and Muslims all may freely worship at their shrines. And, contrary to certain media reports, Jews, Christians and Muslims ARE allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city. The anguish over Jerusalem is not about real estate but about memory.

What is the solution? Pressure will not produce a solution. Is there a solution? There must be, there will be. Why tackle the most complex and sensitive problem prematurely? Why not first take steps which will allow the Israeli and Palestinian communities to find ways to live together in an atmosphere of security. Why not leave the most difficult, the most sensitive issue, for such a time?

Jerusalem must remain the world’s Jewish spiritual capital, not a symbol of anguish and bitterness, but a symbol of trust and hope. As the Hasidic master Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav said, “Everything in this world has a heart; the heart itself has its own heart.”

Jerusalem is the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul.

-Elie Wiesel-

(IsraelNationalNews.com)

by Arutz Sheva

17^th April 2010

An extraordinary row has broken out between Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, author and Nobel peace prize winner, and a group of Jewish residents of Jerusalem over who speaks for the future of the disputed city.

Wiesel prompted the argument with an open letter to Barrack Obama appealing for him not to “politicise” differences over Jerusalem by pressing Israel to stop Jewish settlement construction there. In a reflection of the divisions that sometimes exist between Jews who live in the city and those who idealise it from afar, 100 Jewish residents have responded with their own open letter expressing “outrage” at Wiesel’s call, and accusing him of sentimentality and falsely claiming that there is no discrimination against Jerusalem’s Arab population.

Wiesel, who lives in the US, made the appeal to Obama in adverts in American newspapers last month.

“For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics,” he wrote. “It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city; it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming. The first song I heard was my mother’s lullaby about and for Jerusalem. Its sadness and its joy are part of our collective memory.” He went on to appeal to Obama not to press Israel on the issue of Jerusalem.

“Pressure will not produce a solution. Is there a solution? There must be, there will be. Why tackle the most complex and sensitive problem prematurely?” he asked. “Jerusalem must remain the world’s Jewish spiritual capital, not a symbol of anguish and bitterness, but a symbol of trust and hope.”

The 100 Jewish Jerusalemites, who include academics and political activists, responded in a letter in the New York Review of Books this week that expressed “frustration, even outrage” at Wiesel’s claims and at being “sacrificed for the fantasies of those who love our city from afar”.

“We cannot recognise our city in the sentimental abstraction you call by its name,” they wrote. “Your Jerusalem is an ideal, an object of prayers and a bearer of the collective memory of a people whose members actually bear many individual memories. Our Jerusalem is populated with people, young and old, women and men, who wish their city to be a symbol of dignity – not of hubris, inequality and discrimination. You speak of the celestial Jerusalem; we live in the earthly one.”

The writers accused Wiesel of being blind to history and the realities of life in Jerusalem today, including systematic discrimination against the Arab population and the efforts of “crafty politicians and sentimental populists” frantically trying to Judaize the Arab areas of the city “in order to transform its geopolitics beyond recognition”.

“Your claim that Jerusalem is above politics is doubly outrageous. First, because contemporary Jerusalem was created by a political decision and politics alone keeps it formally unified. The tortuous municipal boundaries of today’s Jerusalem were drawn by Israeli generals and politicians shortly after the 1967 war,” they wrote.

The writers added that by grabbing Palestinian land and villages and incorporating them into a greatly expanded Jerusalem, the Israeli government created “an unwieldy behemoth” larger than Paris.

“Now they call this artificial fabrication ‘Jerusalem’ in order to obviate any approaching chance for peace,” they said. The writers tartly noted that Wiesel chooses not to live in the city he claims such attachment to.

“We prefer the hardship of realizing citizenship in this city to the convenience of merely yearning for it,” they said.

Last month, a former Israeli cabinet minister, Yossi Sarid, responded to Wiesel with an open letter in which he said the author had been “deceived” into believing that all the city’s residents live freely and equally. He took Wiesel to task for claiming that Arabs were free to build anywhere in Jerusalem. The city’s Arab residents face routine obstacles to obtaining planning permission to build in the east and almost never receive authorisation for the west. “Not only may an Arab not build ‘anywhere’, but he may thank his God if he is not evicted from his home and thrown out on to the street with his family and property,” Sarid wrote.

He pointed to Arabs forcibly removed to make way for Jews.

“Those same zealous Jews insist on inserting themselves like so many bones in the throats of Arab neighbourhoods, purifying and Judaizing them with the help of rich American benefactors, several of whom you may know personally,” Sarid wrote. “Barrack Obama appears well aware of his obligations to try to resolve the world’s ills, particularly ours here. Why then undercut him and tie his hands?”

Extract from open letter to Obama from Elie Wiesel

“For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics. It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture – and not a single time in the Koran. Its presence in Jewish history is overwhelming.

“Today, for the first time in history, Jews, Christians and Muslims all may freely worship at their shrines. And, contrary to certain media reports, Jews, Christians and Muslims ARE allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city. The anguish over Jerusalem is not about real estate but about memory.”

Extract from open letter from 100 Jewish Jerusalemites to Wiesel

“Your letter troubles us, not simply because it is replete with factual errors and false representations, but because it upholds an attachment to some other-worldly city which purports to supersede the interests of those who live in the this-worldly one.

“We invite you to our city to view with your own eyes the catastrophic effects of the frenzy of construction. You will witness that, contrary to some media reports, Arabs are not allowed to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem. You will see the gross inequality in allocation of municipal resources and services between east and west.”

by Chris McGreal in Washington

12 May 2010

guardian.co.uk

In a recent public letter to President Obama, Elie Wiesel urged the President not to “pressure” Israel to cease settlement activity in Jerusalem. According to Wiesel:

For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics. It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Koran. Its presence in Jewish history is overwhelming…. To many theologians, it IS Jewish history…. It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city; it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming…. Contrary to certain media reports, Jews, Christians and Muslims ARE allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city. The anguish over Jerusalem is not about real estate but about memory.

The views expressed by Wiesel are not shared by a growing movement of Israelis who oppose the continued expansion of settlements and who have been protesting the eviction by the Israeli government of Palestinian residents of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. These Israelis have responded to Mr. Wiesel in the following letter. Among the one hundred signers are Israel Prize Laureates Avishai Margalit and Zeev Sternhell, former Knesset Speaker and Jewish Agency Chairman Avrum Burg, Professors David Shulman and Moshe Halbertal, former Knesset member Zehava Galan, and other Jerusalemites, many of whom are prominent intellectuals and academics.[1]

—Avner Inbar and Assaf Sharon

Dear Mr. Wiesel:

We write to you from Jerusalem to convey our frustration, even outrage, at your recently published letter on Jerusalem. We are Jewish Jerusalemites—residents by choice of a battered city, a city used and abused, ransacked time and again first by foreign conquerors and now by its own politicians. We cannot recognize our city in the sentimental abstraction you call by its name.

Our Jerusalem is concrete, its hills covered with limestone houses and pine trees; its streets lined with synagogues, mosques, and churches. Your Jerusalem is an ideal, an object of prayers and a bearer of the collective memory of a people whose members actually bear many individual memories. Our Jerusalem is populated with people, young and old, women and men, who wish their city to be a symbol of dignity—not of hubris, inequality, and discrimination. You speak of the celestial Jerusalem; we live in the earthly one.

For more than a generation now the earthly city we call home has been crumbling under the weight of its own idealization. Your letter troubles us, not simply because it is replete with factual errors and false representations, but because it upholds an attachment to some otherworldly city that purports to supersede the interests of those who live in the this-worldly one. For every Jew, you say, a visit to Jerusalem is a homecoming, yet it is our commitment that makes your homecoming possible. We prefer the hardship of realizing citizenship in this city to the convenience of merely yearning for it.

Indeed, your claim that Jerusalem is above politics is doubly outrageous. First, because contemporary Jerusalem was created by a political decision and politics alone keeps it formally unified. The tortuous municipal boundaries of today’s Jerusalem were drawn by Israeli generals and politicians shortly after the 1967 war. Feigning to unify an ancient city, they created an unwieldy behemoth, encircling dozens of Palestinian villages that were never part of Jerusalem. Stretching from the outskirts of Ramallah in the north to the edge of Bethlehem in the south, the Jerusalem that the Israeli government foolishly concocted is larger than Paris. Its historical core, the nexus of memories and religious significance often called the “Holy Basin,” makes up a mere one percent of its area. Now the government calls this artificial fabrication “Jerusalem” in order to obviate any approaching chance for peace.

Second, your attempt to keep Jerusalem above politics means divesting us of a future. For being above politics is being devoid of the power to shape the reality of one’s life. As true Jerusalemites, we cannot stand by and watch our beloved city, parts of which are utterly neglected, being used as a springboard for crafty politicians and sentimental populists who claim that Jerusalem is above politics and negotiation. All the while, they frantically “Judaize” East Jerusalem in order to transform its geopolitics beyond recognition.

We invite you to our city to view with your own eyes the catastrophic effects of the frenzy of construction. You will witness that, contrary to some media reports, Arabs are not allowed to build their homes anywhere in Jerusalem. You will see the gross inequality in allocation of municipal resources and services between east and west. We will take you to Sheikh Jarrah, where Palestinian families are being evicted from their homes to make room for a new Jewish neighborhood, and to Silwan, where dozens of houses face demolition because of the Jerusalem Municipality’s refusal to issue building permits to Palestinians.

We, who live in Jerusalem, can no longer be sacrificed for the fantasies of those who love our city from afar. The Jerusalem of this world must be shared by the people of the two nations residing in it. Only a shared city will live up to the prophet’s vision: “Zion shall be redeemed with justice.” As we chant weekly in our vigils in Sheikh Jarrah: “Nothing can be holy in an occupied city!”

By Avner Inbar & Assaf Sharon

27^th May 2010

Israel: “94% voted for the attack on Gaza” – Jerusalem Post

(LONDON) – Talking about anti-Semitism, and the accusation of anti-Semitism, is to many people a very sensitive issue. Nevertheless, I feel the need to highlight some points: As a Palestinian and as a Muslim, with firsthand experience of racism, whether here in UK or in occupied Palestine.

I do understand what it means to be subjugated to it; thus, I deeply empathise with those who suffer from the menace of racism and discrimination, those who are abused verbally, physically, emotionally, or otherwise for no other reason than the fact that they are “different”.

And I also do understand the awful feeling and dreadful sensation of being subjugated to subtle racist looks or remarks, only felt by you and not the people around you.

However, I do see a huge difference between a racist remark directed at a person or a group for their beliefs, race, or whatever that which makes them different, and between a snarl, a sneer or sarcasm against an occupying criminal entity called “Israel” and its people, for their CRIMES.

One must not fail to distinguish between the rage and fury caused by watching helplessly for decades the grim unstoppable crimes go unpunished year after year, and the racist blind hatred that might still exist among a tiny minority who, by nature, would be hating anything and anyone who is different anyway.

Furthermore, this occupying entity called “Israel” (a word that I myself detest to even pronounce and generally avoid to use) is not a theoretical being, nor does it operate in a vacuum; it’s neither an abstract concept nor a conjectural void it’s an entity run by PEOPLE.

It is an entity of PEOPLE, 94% of whom voted for the attack on Gaza – Overwhelming Israeli support of Gaza op – Jerusalem Post

It is an entity of PEOPLE, 71% of whom want U.S. to strike Iran – Haaretz Poll: 71% of Israelis want U.S. to strike Iran if talks fail

It is an entity of PEOPLE who violated and assaulted ALL neighbouring countries.

It is an entity of PEOPLE who live on a STOLEN land for over six decades, with no signs of shame, remorse, awakening of conscience, or willingness to neither admit nor right the wrongs they’ve committed.

Every normal person with some compassion would make a grimace of disgust and revulsion when hearing about such an entity or such a people who commit such despicable horrors…

Now, I find it difficult to be persuaded that such a reaction to such horrific crimes -when hearing the name “Israel” or “Israeli”- is an act of racism (anti-Semitism). On another note; we – Palestinians- do not have any responsibility whatsoever for the crime of the holocaust, nor do we carry the burden of European racism against Jewish people.

Furthermore, I do not see a difference between any kinds of racism including racism directed against Jewish people known as anti-Semitism. If we accept racism against Jewish people as being different, then it implies that we accept the racist absurdity of “Jewish exceptionalism”.

Racism is racism, many causes same consequences.

Thus, I do not see the suffering of Jewish people (horrible as it was) as a unique kind of suffering which must be revered and viewed as essentially and fundamentally different from other human suffering; the same way that I do not see our suffering as Palestinians as unique or different from any other.

Questions come pounding: Why is it that we –Palestinians- are constantly reminded of the horrors of the holocaust, when we had nothing to do with it?

Why is it that we Palestinians, are to suffer the same fate as the victims of the holocaust by the hands of those who brag worldwide to act for “never again”?

Why would the UN want to enforce the study of the history of our oppressors and occupiers -holocaust- upon our children who are languishing in refugee camps –who themselves along with their parents, and grandparents were victims of ethnic cleansing, planned and executed by those whom they are supposed to feel sympathy with?

Why is it that we are persistently bogged down by the fixation on anti-Semitism, while for sixty years (a century rather), we are the ones who are relentlessly suffering from a most vile evil racism (ethnic cleansing gradually becoming a form of “final solution”) perpetrated by a whole population of racist Zionists? (with all honesty, I must tell you that sometimes I imagine it would’ve been easier and less painful to us to be gassed and killed immediately rather than this policy of excruciating slow death that we have been going through for over a century).

How could the world keep asking us to recognize the “humanity” of a settler, who comes with his wife and children armed to his teeth, and at gun point evicts a Palestinian family, throws their entire belongings out, and moves in? What kind of “humanity” is this?

And most importantly, why is it that we are continuously been asked to feel compassion towards our tormentors who relentlessly murder and humiliate us, who attempt to annihilate us and our history and why, to what purpose, are we asked to feel their “humanity”, while their knife still piercing deep in our hearts?

Finally, I cannot speak on behalf of all the Palestinians, but as for myself, I must admit, the recent assault on Gaza was the last straw that broke the camel’s back; before that, I used to think that there is hope, those PEOPLE would wake up to their “humanity” one day, and regret the evil that they’ve done, unfortunately, the more I see of them, the more I realize that this hope and dream was an illusion.

Over the past few years, I have been reading and debating with many of those “soft” Zionists in the so called “peace camps”, all I found is an extremely arrogant groups of people, who are incapable of recognising, admitting, or willing to rectify the crimes they’ve done.

They are only interested in “peace” to protect their interests and to further secure their grip hold on the stolen land.

Moreover, very recently, and by sheer accident, I stumbled upon some honorific information that reveals the severity of decay of morality and lack of humanity amongst those RACIST Zionists – whose ideological bigotry and chauvinism surpasses all other- that left me in a state of shock for days; crying, shaking, suffocating with palpitations and suffering from severe panic attacks.

Undoubtedly, the world community should leave it to the victims to decide how to deal with those criminals in the future. Only the victims can investigate the fragile alleys of forgiveness or punishment. The victims should have the last say irrespective of what their judgment might be, they should not be vilified, indicted or moralized with, for they have suffered more than enough the emergence of forgiveness and reconciliation requires certain conditions:

None of these conditions are ever considered as an option amongst that mighty sick racist Zionist society.

As for me, I have no authority to talk in the name of all Palestinians, but I can state with all honesty, I DO NOT wish the Zionist murderers, those of whom were directly or indirectly involved in massacres, theft of land, subjugation and oppression, to remain in Palestine after its liberation from the occupier.

–except of course for the very few good people amongst them, as no soul should carry the liability of another-

I do not wish the invader, occupier and criminal racists to stay in Palestine, the land that they incessantly raped, destroyed and disfigured, nor do I desire them to be my neighbours.

They have shown no respect, no appreciation, and no love to this land or to her people They do not deserve to live there But these are only my own feelings, and I know that the decision is not mine.

More on anti Semitism

There are some more points that I would like to draw attention to:

1. “Israel” calls itself a Jewish state, and claims to be acting for all Jewish people, by Jewish people. It is still enjoying the moral and financial support of the majority of Jewish communities worldwide. The absence of a huge uproar of denunciation and disassociation by the majority of world Jewry, makes it hard for people not to blame Zionist Jews who live outside occupied Palestine for their guilt of complicity, active alliance or passive complacency by either silence or aiding and sustaining the criminals

2. “Israel” still enjoys the protection of the “Security Council” with its US vetoes on any UN resolution sanctioning “Israel’s” endless list of ongoing crimes and infractions of international law, and the “Israeli” criminals still roam with impunity, free from prosecution by any jurisdiction. This intolerable situation inevitably foments further rage and fury against the double standard and special treatment granted to the “Jewish” state

So, a sincere advice from a heart that cares, to all my Jewish friends who are really interested in preventing the re-emergence of real “anti Semitism”, and to those “Israelis” with some humanity left; I would say:

1. Instead of wasting time searching for the “humanity” within “Israeli” criminals, focus your energy on fighting and revealing “Israeli” crimes and exposing its inhumanity

2. Disassociate your selves completely from such an entity and proclaim this annulment loud and clear

3. Let go of the idea that anti Semitism is a “special” case of racism; treat all racism with the same degree of unambiguous condemnation

4. Try to look at the situation from the standpoint of non Jewish people, who will not accept or understand the insistence on the uniqueness of the Jewish suffering, whereas the world has seen since the end of WW2 the massacres of millions and millions of non Jews. The world is now inflamed by hatred against Muslims, not against Jews.

5. With love in my heart, with sincere and pure feelings, I would appeal to you to look inwards and search for reasons, as to why you feel that the world should accept racism against you as somehow worse or different, and as to why you feel that your suffering is unique and unlike others’, because this is not how the world sees it. All suffering has the same value to those who go through it, and all racism has the same consequences and must be ostracized with the same ferociousness

6. Those of us who are involved in the support of Palestinian cause are inevitably going to be accused of anti Semitism, that does not make us in any shape or form anti-Semites, for we know very well that we are not; hence, false labels, and bogus allegations should not frighten or deter us, distract us or hinder our determination of doing what we think is right

7. And finally, please, do not freak out when people point out to certain aspects of Judaism and the Jewish culture that they might not like or find incompatible with humanity, equality, or fairness, after all assessment and criticism have always been accepted by other religions, belief-systems and cultures, and this is what freedom of thought and freedom of speech are all about, people have the right to look at different ideologies, scrutinize them, criticize them and sieve out what appears to be hindering the human moral development, as long as all this is done in a non offensive manner, without slander or abuse, but rather in a respectful, academic, genuine and good-intentional search for truth2

PS:

I know that what I have said might appear too strong, unfamiliar, or painful to hear, but I can only speak of what’s in my heart, as I believe that only through openness and honesty that trust can be built

We have a saying in Arabic; “sadeequka man sadaqak, wassaddaqak”

صديقك من صدَقك و صدّقك

“Your true friend is that who is honest with you and who believes you”

Arabic word for honesty: sidq

And for friend: sadeeq

Both friend and honesty share the same root: sa-da-qa= told the truth

I am a Jerusalem-born Palestinian refugee living in exile for over 42 years. I was forced to leave my homeland, Palestine at the age of seven during the six-day war. I am a mathematician by profession. I started writing about three years ago when my friends insisted I should write about my memories, experiences, and feelings as a Palestinian. I did… but it all came out -for some strange reason- sounding -as I am told- like poetry! So I self published two books (I Believe in Miracles, and Palestine, The True Story. Write to me at :nahidaexiledpalestinian@gmail.com

By Nahida Izzat

Chris Hedges is one of the best, one of the most morally useful, writers we have. He’s free of loyalty to political party or dogma. He knows war first hand and describes it without flinching. He’s an almost ideal gadfly to our corporatocracy. But he has a hangup on religion that holds him back.

Hedges will tell you that he has no use for fantasies about life after death. He’ll profess no interest in gods or prayer or a divine plan or anything of the sort. He’s perfectly aware of what lies on the negative side of the balance sheet for religion (or what he would call institutional religion), how it trains blind obedience, how it diminishes the value of life before death, how it shifts responsibility from people to imaginary beings, how it divides groups of people who kill in its name. But when you ask what, then, lies on the positive side of the account for religion that justifies supporting it, Hedges’ answers range from slim to silly.

One answer he gave me was that there are mysteries in the world, including emotions like love. Well, of course there are. But, I told him, I make no claim to having plumbed the depths of every emotion and having perfectly understood it, I just have no use for god or heaven. Does one have to claim omniscience to be an atheist? I thought only God claimed that!

But Hedges will tell you that it’s wiser to be an agnostic than an atheist because you just don’t know. But, of course, no one who says this means it quite that simply. If I were to be “agnostic” on whether the world is secretly run by demons dwelling in the livers of antelopes and every other imaginable lunacy, I wouldn’t have time to do any substantive being of an agnostic. I could just say “I’m an agnostic on all fantastical BS” and leave it at that. But when it comes to whatever it is that Hedges and others reluctant to fully part with religion mean by “religion,” they want to see some agnostical activity going on, specifically lamentation of the passing of religion. I don’t think engaging in such activity tends to make one more or less arrogant or humble.

Hedges’ latest article is called “After Religion Fizzles, We’re Stuck with Nietzsche.” He opens with five good paragraphs on damage done, both by major religious institutions and by religiosity in general. Then he writes:

“But I cannot rejoice in the collapse of these institutions. We are not going to be saved by faith in reason, science and technology, which the dead zone of oil forming in the Gulf of Mexico and our production of costly and redundant weapons systems illustrate. Frederick Nietzsche’s Übermensch or “Superman” — our secular religion — is as fantasy-driven as religious magical thinking.”

Setting aside the dubious idea that U.S. culture today is driven by anything resembling Nietzsche’s Übermensch, how in the world did we leap from the collapse of religion to “faith in reason, science, and technology”? Of course, we have too much of that as well, but it’s not all we have or all we could have. We aren’t limited to religion or THAT. And it’s not the central explanation of the oil spill or the wars, given that a majority of us oppose the policies that have led to both. We have allowed our “leaders” to act against our interests, as if they knew best, a habit encouraged by religion, not science.

Of course, we need to be respectful of nature. Of course, we need to be humble in the face of ecosystems (and emotions) that we do not begin to understand. Of course, we need to stop trying to conquer the world and behaving as if we were its gods. We need to outgrow “faith in reason, science, and technology” just as we need to outgrow faith in religion. And we are doing so. Suggesting that we must choose one catastrophic course or the other, religion or scientific domination, does not help our progress. I’m not making an argument about whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic — I think either, in so far as it distracts from action, is morally inexcusable. I’m suggesting that if we want to progress or even survive it will be through overcoming both religion and faith in technology.

In his final address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr., said:

“There is nothing wrong with power, if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

I imagine Hedges agrees with that. But he should notice that King is suggesting a choice other than science or religion, one just as available to an atheist as to an agnostic or to a religious believer like King. All being agreed on the wisdom of such a course, the question of whether or not to keep dragging the vestiges of religion down through the centuries becomes a separate question, to be decided based on whether religion does more harm or good.

Hedges goes on to say that there are “religiously motivated people toiling in the inner city and the slums of the developing world” and that they “remain true to the core religious and moral values ignored by [religious] institutions.” What values? Hedges lists “individual responsibility” and “compassion, especially for the weak, the impoverished, the sick and the outcast.” But, of course, most people who have been responsible and compassionate have been religious for the same reason that most people who have been servile and cruel have been religious: most people, period, have been religious. In fact, polling on political questions at least begins to suggest that the most responsible and compassionate Americans today, on average, are atheists. We’re less likely to support injustices like wars and torture. Whether we’re more responsible and compassionate through all aspects of our lives, I do not know, but I haven’t seen any evidence that we’re less so — just antiquated fear mongering about how morality will disappear if religion does.

Hedges continues his effort to equate the loss of religion with moral decline:

“We are rapidly losing the capacity for the moral life. We reject the anxiety of individual responsibility that laid the foundations for the open society. . . . The great religions set free the critical powers of humankind. . . . [R]eligious thinkers were our first ethicists. . . . These religious institutions are in irreversible decline. . . . But don’t think the world will be a better place for their demise. As we devolve into a commodity culture, in which celebrity, power and money reign, the older, dimming values of another era are being replaced. . . . We live in the age of the Übermensch who rejects the sentimental tenets of traditional religion. The Übermensch creates his own morality based on human instincts, drive and will. We worship the ‘will to power’ and think we have gone ‘beyond good and evil.’ We spurn virtue. We think we have the moral fortitude and wisdom to create our own moral code.”

And here is where religion holds Hedges back. We must, of course, find the moral fortitude and wisdom to create our own moral code to address our own moral circumstances. We will find most of that wisdom in lessons from the past, of course, and most of it from past religious observers. But we will be hindered by keeping alive almost anything we meaningfully refer to as religion, anything suggesting deference to a greater authority than the accumulated wisdom of humanity. We must be free of that if we are to envision what we need to become. For all of his failings, this is what Nietzsche attempted to do, and to some degree succeeded in doing. Hedges knows that Nietzsche condemned all the undesirable traits of modern culture that Hedges himself laments. But Hedges lays the blame, nonetheless, at Nietzsche’s doorstep as an enemy of religion.

And there’s something wrong with the timing of Hedges’ tale of woe. The cultural damage he describes is all current, while the loss of religion that he fears will cause it is substantially in the future. The vast majority of Americans today are more religious than Hedges himself is. We can’t fix their shortcomings by making them religious. Instead, we have to make them — and ourselves — more responsible and compassionate in a way that, indeed, moves beyond existing ways of thinking.

Without religious beliefs, we might still have violence, but Germans would not have made the worst of Nietzsche in Nazism. Without religious beliefs we might still have oil drilling, but we wouldn’t have senators telling us they don’t care because it is the next life that matters. And if Afghans and Iraqis did not belong to a different religion than most Americans, we wouldn’t bomb them and burn their babies with fire bombs and white phosphorous. Whether you agree with the views of the religious “extremists” or not, you have a moral choice: will you condemn the basis of their thinking or provide respectable cover for it?

By David Swanson

Does it have to be that an entire country and it’s innocent civilians have to be punished after the failed New York Times Square bomb attempt by one person? It seems to be that way. Maybe another false flag operation was planned to issue stern warnings to Pakistan that should there be a successful attack next, there might even be a “boots-on-the ground” US presence on Pakistan as reported by the New York Times, a Zionist mouthpiece, on Saturday May 9, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/world/asia/09pstan.html. After the unsuccessful bomb attack by US citizen Faisal Shehzad who was captured by US authorities on board a flight to Pakistan via Dubai, the US administration has started issuing threats to Pakistan.

The first threat came on May 5, 2010 from Fareed Zakaria, author and host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” in which he reported that “Pakistan is the epicentre of Islamic terrorism” and that “..It’s worth noting that even the terrorism that’s often attributed to the war in Afghanistan tends to come out of Pakistan, to be planned by Pakistanis, to be funded from Pakistan or in some other way to be traced to Pakistan…”. Zakaria was a favored student of Dr. Huntington the celebrated author of “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order”. Zakaria has also been noted to be involved with George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz in pushing for the war on Iraq.

Why would Zakaria use the words “Islamic Terrorism” rather than Muslim terrorism? In my article, The Winds of Change, published by Countercurrents on May 4, 2010 I’d written that since the war cannot be waged on Islam, the next best is to wage it on its adherents to weaken them. The strategy is working. The affluent group of Muslims are being weakened as they pursue materialistic objectives whereas the poorer Muslims are being intimidated through wars waged on them. One group fears the loss of wealth and the other fears loss of lives, not their own maybe but of their families.

On May 7, 2010, US military commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal met with Pakistan’s military commander General Ashfaq Kiyani in Islamabad to clearly issue a stern warning that Pakistan must immediately begin a military offensive against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in North Waziristan. US ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson also met with Pakistani president Asif Zardari and used “forceful” language to convey the American point that the Pakistanis had to move more assertively against the militants threaded through the society. As if that is not enough, pressure mounted from Hillary Clinton on May 7, 2010 that it faced “very severe consequences” if a terror plot like Times Square bombing were traced to Pakistan. US officials have even admitted that if there is a successful attack, the US will have to act. Maybe there is a successful attack being planned by the US either on its soil or on some European, Indian or Israeli soils. If the unsuccessful bomb attack is so politically successful, one would wonder how successful will be a successful bomb attack.

The answers to the question why US has urged Pakistan to launch a military offensive in the northern areas is very clear. It is to create more fear and terrorism, more suicide bombings, ensure more terrorists are bred, continue and further increase drone attacks and, demoralize and weaken the military through exhausting the hardware in its arsenal such that if a joint US-Indian-NATO attack is launched on Pakistan in the near future, it’ll not be able to sustain the war. Nuclear deterrence against an enemy already on its soil is pointless.

The one thing that most Muslim leaders severely lack is diplomacy and negotiation skills, more so a nuclear state like Pakistan than any of the others who’ve no strong and viable defences. Pakistan could easily retaliate to threats from US or India but being an indebted nation whose leaders are corrupt to the nth degree and who have families overseas, they’re unable to demonstrate diplomacy or use language that would remove threats so they submit to threats. Zardari is a known state criminal and the US has all the scoops on him to blackmail him should he not relent to US demands.

It is now obvious that the US has military intentions towards Pakistan. India and Israel but more so the latter would like to see Pakistan denuclearized. Pakistan is also of significant geo-political importance as it would serve as a corridor for land-locked Afghanistan and the former Soviet satellites. 9/11 led to the occupation of Afghanistan, WMDs led to the occupation of Iraq and its becoming obvious that the relentless pressure of terrorism might lead to Pakistan’s occupation and subsequent denuclearization. The Zionists have mastered the art of fabrication without being challenged. They’ve not only fabricated 9/11, WMDs and other false flag operations but they’ve also fabricated an economic culture leading to rewards for the obedient servants and slavery for the masses throughout the world.

Much as the US, France, Germany and UK would like to bomb Iran to the rubble because of its oil and gas, Russia and China have not been supportive of actions against Iran in the United Nations. The next best target is therefore Pakistan as the US needs not secure UN, Russian or Chinese support for actions against it. The excuse of containing the epicentre of “Islamic terrorism” is sufficient. Pakistan is in the pressure cooker with the lid on and the stove flame on high.

By Gulam A. Mitha

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

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

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

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

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

Looking at this by fuel, in order of importance:

Peak oil

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

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

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

Peak coal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peak natural gas

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

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

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

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

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

Peak uranium

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nuclear power is clearly not the answer to peak oil.

Conclusions

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

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

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

(Abridged from the page Global hydrocarbons peak.)

By Matthew Wild

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By George Monbiot

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

11^th May 2010

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