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Why is this protest spreading when others have fizzled?

Young people locking arms, facing arrest on a cold, wet Seattle street—it could have been the WTO protests that rocked the city more than ten years ago. Only this time, Seattle is just one of dozens of places where the movement for the 99 percent is taking hold.

And, unlike the WTO protests—whose motivation was unclear to many Americans—the demonstrations now spreading virally from Wall Street immediately strike a chord: we all know that neither our economy nor our government is working for the benefit of the 99 percent.

Whatever issue you care to name, from childhood obesity (linked to agribusiness subsidies) to war (linked to the power of the military-industrial complex), from a watered-down health care bill (linked big Pharma and health insurance corporations), to a failing economy (which Wall Street and corporations have depleted in favor of global speculation), the power of the one percent is at the root of the problem. And the power of the 99 percent is key to the solution.

We’ve watched as urgent matters, like climate change, go unaddressed—in large part because powerful corporations fund think tanks, lobbyists, and Astroturf campaigns that spread confusion about the science and threaten the political fortunes of those who take leadership.

The #OccupyWallStreet movement is powerful because it is naming the source of the crisis—something that the political establishment had been unwilling to do.

The protests are giving the unemployed, the uninsured, the evicted, indebted students, homeless veterans, and would-be retirees a place to break out of their isolation. OccupyWallStreet shows that millions share their hardships and are standing up. Transforming shame, self-doubt, and isolation into solidarity unleashes enormous power.

But there’s more that makes OccupyWallStreet powerful. It is respectful, inclusive, and egalitarian. Protesters invite police to join them, noting that they, too, are part of the 99 percent. When Troy Davis was executed, a rally of supporters marched to lower Manhattan to a warm welcome by the OccupyWallStreet protesters. Even former tea party members have gotten involved.

The scene in Zuccotti Square is radically democratic – different teams have autonomy to manage food, sanitation, media, comfort, and other tasks necessary for a protracted stay. But no one directs the whole group. Instead, decisions are made by consensus at General Assemblies. Cornel West, Michael Moore, and other celebrities show up to speak, and their words are appreciated. But at the General Assemblies, each person who wishes to speak has a turn, and each one can help shape events.

I did not witness a single incident of violence in the three sites I visited: Zuccotti Park on Wall Street, McPherson Square in Washington, DC, and Westlake Plaza in Seattle. Nor have I read any accounts of protester violence. Only the police have resorted to violence, using pepper spray and, during arrests, bloodying the mostly young protesters.

Some have criticized the occupiers for failing to come up with a list of demands. But demands can be easily co-opted and endlessly debated.

Instead, OccupyWallStreet is holding out principles and values that are widely viewed as just—and this is already shifting the political debate. Just in the last few days, the president and vice president of the United States and the president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank all acknowledged that the protesters had a point.

Powerful movements build not on a laundry list of policy demands, but on principles and values. OccupyWallStreet has a moral force that speaks to the urgency of the times. The 99 percent, and our future descendants, are losing out in a world dominated by the 1 percent.

Powerful movements create their own spaces where they can shift the debate, and the culture, to one that better serves. That’s why showing up in person at the occupy sites is so critical to this movement’s success. In hundreds of communities around North America, people are showing up to make a statement and to listen to each other. They are also teaching one another to facilitate meetings, to take nonviolent direct action, to make their own media. They are taking care of each other, gathering food supplies, blankets, and clothes that can allow people to remain outdoors even as the weather gets wetter and colder. Like the uprisings of the Arab Spring, they are using social media, and getting out their own story, even when the corporate media chooses to distort or ignore their message. And they are growing. According to the Personal Democracy Forum, the numbers “liking” a Facebook Occupy site for the 54 cities now listed is growing at the rate of more than 25 percent per day.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, the clarity of their demand for change, and their growing power may be the most important news of our time.

By Sarah van Gelder

Sarah van Gelder is co-founder and executive editor of YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.

The White House announced Wednesday that it is imposing a new round of economic sanctions against Iran, while Vice President Joseph Biden warned that “nothing has been taken off the table” in regard to Washington’s response to an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, suggesting the possibility of military strikes.

Among the new targets of US sanctions is Mahan Air, Iran’s first privately owned airline, which flies to 12 countries. US officials claimed that the airline was involved in “secretly ferrying” members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Washington has seized upon the alleged plot to attempt to terrorize the American people, issuing a global travel warning against unspecified threats supposedly emanating from Iran while cautioning that attacks within the US itself are also possible.

The supposed terrorist plot was announced to the public by US Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday in Washington. The Justice Department’s case involves a wildly unlikely scenario involving a failed Iranian-American used car dealer from Texas, Manssor Arbabsiar, traveling to Mexico and attempting to enlist the feared drug cartel Los Zetas in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, Adel al-Jubeir, by blowing him up in an unnamed Washington restaurant. The other relevant plot twist is the fact that the supposed representative of Los Zetas contacted by Arbabsiar happened to be a confidential informant for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).

During Tuesday’s press conference, FBI Director Robert Mueller felt compelled to note that the government’s case “reads like the pages of a Hollywood script.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented to the Associated Press: “The idea that they would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador, nobody could make that up, right?”

That is precisely the question raised by the entire affair. It has all the earmarks of the type of conspiracy that has been “made up” by the US government repeatedly in the course of its “global war on terrorism,” using covert agents to ensnare hapless individuals in terrorist plots that never existed before US agencies invented it.

In this case, however, the alleged plot has been fashioned to implicate not merely a few individuals, but a nation of 75 million people and its government, setting the stage for a potential war that would prove far more catastrophic than the US interventions in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The only other person named in this alleged plot is Gholam Shakuri, described as a member of the Quds Brigade, the special operations division of the 150,000-member Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

What evidence the government claims to have, while wrapping the case in the mantle of national security secrecy, is of the flimsiest character and none of it indicates direct involvement in or even knowledge of the alleged plot by the Iranian government. Virtually all of it stems from a confession extracted from Arbabsiar, who was described by a former business partner as “sort of a hustler… albeit a bit lazy” and “no mastermind.”

Nonetheless, by Wednesday, US officials, “speaking on condition of anonymity,” were claiming that it was “more than likely” that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, knew of the alleged plot to kill the Saudi ambassador.

Such involvement was taken for granted by the US corporate media, which has treated the Iranian government as already tried, convicted and waiting for its sentence to be imposed. Well trained CIA mouthpieces such as CNN’s Wolf Blitzer have jumped on the case, stressing the most lurid elements of the government’s charges, which are accepted as proven.

The media’s response only proves that it is organically incapable of learning anything from its reaction to the similarly unproven charges concerning “weapons of mass destruction” that played such a crucial role in paving the way for the war against Iraq. Once again, the establishment media serves as a jingoistic instrument of war propaganda.

One of the details played up in most media reports about the supposed plot to kill the Saudi envoy by planting a bomb in his favorite Washington restaurant is the indifference of the plotters to potentially killing scores of others. Few of the reports have bothered to accurately quote Justice Department officials, who referred to the bomb plot targeting a “fictional restaurant” because the scheme was invented by the government agents and referred to no real eatery frequented by Mr. al-Jubeir. US Attorney Preet Bharara clarified that no explosives were involved and “no one was actually ever in any danger.”

The announcement of the supposed assassination conspiracy has provoked a flurry of demands from US politicians for retaliation. Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, claimed that the case proved that the “threat posed by Iran becomes more severe every day.” She said it had to be met with “crippling pressure on the Iranian regime and its enablers.”

Representative Peter King, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called the alleged plot an “act of war” and called on the Obama administration to deport any Iranian officials present in the US.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, affirmed that the supposed conspiracy had to involve top levels of the Iranian government. “I just don’t see how this could be done any other way,” she said.

For his part, President Obama called the alleged plot a “flagrant violation of US and international law.” Vice President Biden called it “an outrageous act, where the Iranians will have to be held accountable.”

In expressing their moral outrage over a hypothetical assassination plot that was apparently concocted by US intelligence, they all express the utter hypocrisy of the American ruling elite and the US government, which routinely carries out real assassinations all over the world and has even created a secret committee of the National Security Council to draw up hit lists that include US citizens. Iran itself has seen a number of its leading scientists murdered in what is widely deemed a US-Israeli campaign to sabotage the country’s nuclear program.

Given that the “sting” operation dates back to May and President Obama was briefed on it in June, the question inevitably arises as to why the White House has picked this moment to spring the alleged plot on the American public.

The Iranian government itself provided a perceptive explanation. “The US government and the CIA have very good experience in making up film scripts,” said Iranian presidential spokesman Ali Akbar Javanfekr in Tehran. Referring to the nationwide spread of anti-Wall Street protests, he added: “It appears that this new scenario is for diverting the US public opinion from internal crises.”

There is no doubt that the US ruling elite and its political establishment are becoming increasingly concerned about the social and economic crisis in the US and the growing anger of working people and youth, which has found an expression in the demonstrations against Wall Street. Promoting fear of a terrorist attack and preparing once again for war serve a definite political purpose in shifting attention from the conditions of mass unemployment and social inequality that have given rise to the nationwide protests.

While uncritically embraced by the mass media, the US charges against Iran have been treated with extreme skepticism by experts on Iran all over the world. Many questioned what possible motive the Iranian government could have in supporting such a plot.

“I am not convinced that Iran would attempt to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in the US. There is no political use to it,” Mohammed Qadri Saeed, a strategic expert at Cairo’s Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, told Reuters.

Under conditions where the uprisings in the Arab world, particularly the upheavals in Bahrain that were suppressed by Saudi troops and the unrest in Saudi Arabia’s own eastern province, are isolating and undermining the Saudi monarchy, Iran’s chief regional rival, such a plot could serve only to bolster the Saudi regime’s rule and justify redoubled US support.

The New York Times was compelled to acknowledge that Washington’s charges “provoked puzzlement from specialists on Iran, who said it seemed unlikely that the government would back a brazen murder and bombing plan on American soil.”

Among those questioning the US claims was Robert Baer, a 21-year veteran CIA case officer in the Middle East. He told ABC News that the US charges were not “credible.” The supposed plot, he said, “doesn’t fit their modus operandi at all.” He continued: “It’s completely out of character, they’re much better than this. They wouldn’t be sending money through an American bank, they wouldn’t be going to the cartels in Mexico to do this. It’s just not the way they work.”

Baer warned that the US administration could respond to the supposed conspiracy with “retaliatory attacks, you know, hit, bomb a Quds Force base in Tehran, any number of things, of course, which would lead to a huge escalation.”

The ex-CIA agent suggested that the plot could have been the work of someone “attempting to frame the government” in Tehran.

Why would Iran’s elite secret service choose a bankrupt former used car dealer with a criminal record to execute its first-ever plot on US soil? Why would this individual be sent to Mexico to seek out and hire Los Zetas, whose enterprise is drugs and the elimination of rival narco-traffickers, to kill an ambassador in Washington? The US Justice Department has provided no answers to these questions.

The most plausible explanation is that Arbabsiar was in Mexico not to carry out an assassination plan for the Quds force, but rather to conduct a drug deal. Caught by the DEA, he could have been “flipped,” becoming an instrument for the US government to concoct a phony terror case against Iran.

If this is indeed the case, it is another indication of the extreme recklessness of US foreign policy and Washington’s relentless search for provocations as a means of advancing its geo-strategic interests. The deepening economic crisis has only made US imperialism more desperate to assert its domination over the oil-producing regions of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, for which it has fought over the past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq. Increasingly, it sees Iran as the regional power that stands in the way of these predatory aims.

One of the most valuable benefits of putting political action into the form of nonviolent encampments is that we learn each other’s stories as we occupy our public parks and squares. Here’s a story from the October2011 occupation in Freedom Plaza, Washington, D.C. There are many more, and we’d like to hear yours when you join us.

Aristine Maharry is 29 years old and now lives in Freedom Plaza. She grew up in a very military family, with members of her family having participated in every major U.S. war going back to the war for independence, and with members of every generation having joined the military.

Maharry’s family did not encourage her to aspire to a military career, but — as in many such stories I’ve heard — actions spoke more loudly than words. Maharry was proud of her father’s military experience. She hoped from a very young age to join the U.S. Army. She grew up playing at army with her half-brothers. They would flip the couch on its side and toss pretend grenades. She loved the board game Risk. The biggest holiday in Aristine’s family was the Fourth of July. She doesn’t say she bled red white and blue. She says she bled green, Army green. She wanted to serve her country and other people. She was willing to die for her country. She was proud of her country.

Aristine was a good student and a good athlete. At age 7 she tested with an IQ of 185. She was placed in gifted and talented classes in all of the many public schools she attended. She got good grades, ran track, and was president of the Future Business Leaders of America at West Potomac High School in Northern Virginia, where at 16 she dual enrolled at George Mason University. She graduated from high school at 18 in the year 2000, was married the next January and pregnant in February.

Aristine knew that the military would be reluctant to enlist a mother of a child under 1 year of age. She hoped to take part in the Green to Gold program, enlisting and eventually becoming an officer. Her own father had dropped out of college to enlist and fight in Vietnam. She admired that history. However, when her first son was nine months old, Aristine became pregnant again. She headed to the recruiter’s office when her second son turned one in May 2004. She had a family and a good job in management training new personnel in the pharmacy department of Liberty Medical Supply in Florida. But recruiters’ job is to recruit, and Maharry didn’t require any persuading.

She arranged to train at the same camp her father had trained at, Fort Leonardwood in Missouri. She headed there in December 2004, leaving behind a husband and two little boys for the holidays. Aristine says it was a very sad time for her, very difficult, and also very cold in Missouri. But, she thought to herself: “All the other soldiers have families too. They do it. I’m not different. I can serve too. I want to do my part as an American.” She signed up to become a combat medic, hoping to care for injured soldiers.

The first few weeks of training in January were extremely hard, she says: lots of pushups, not a lot of sleep, but a great deal of hostility from drill sergeants conditioning recruits to face hostility in battle, struggling with their own post-traumatic stress, or simply acting out their sadism. Aristine characterized it as “ten times worse than in the movies.” She was in Charlie Company, Third Battalion, 10th Unit, 4th Platoon. Her platoon had four drill sergeants, three of them male named Davis, Harris, and something like Fontana (she doesn’t remember this name clearly), and one female drill sergeant named Gilliard.

The woman sergeant was not what you would call gentle and loving. Aristine witnessed Gilliard yank a male soldier across a desk and injure him. His offense had been to request a pen. Fontana (or whatever his exact name was) made Gilliard look sweet and delicate by comparison. He was shorter and meaner than the others, according to Maharry. She saw him slam a female private named Barr up against a wall.

Aristine is amazingly understanding of this abuse. The sergeants, she says, had just done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The training was their rest period between tours of combat. They were all, she believes, dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Aristine’s understanding this is even more amazing considering what happened next.

Aristine was doing pushups along with the other privates. It was dark. Fontana came up behind her and kicked her hard repeatedly in the pelvis. The next morning, with her 50-pound rucksack, Aristine was not able to keep up on the run in her usual way. One of the drill sergeants, Harris, told her she would have to report to “sick call.”

That night, Private Barr came and got Maharry. The two of them went to the military police (MP) and told their stories of abuse. The MPs sent them right back without indicating that they would do anything at all. The reports that the MPs took down may or may not still exist among their records.

The next morning Aristine reported to sick call. Before she did, Gilliard whispered in her ear that she needed to say she had slipped on ice, which was a complete fabrication. An X-ray showed a fractured pelvis. Aristine was put in the Army hospital on the base from January 8, 2005 to February 1st or 2nd, immobilized in bed with a morphine drug for pain. She was then sent on 30-day convalescent leave with heavy pain killers. If she did not return after the 30 days, she was told, the Army would come and find her. Through the course of her initial processing and training, she had already been advised repeatedly that going AWOL (absent without official leave) was punishable by anything up to death.

Aristine says she was “terrified” and “scared to death.” She didn’t tell her husband what had happened, as she was afraid that if he raised the issue she would be punished when she returned to the Army. When she did return, she pleaded with a physical therapist not to send her back to the same unit. It turned out that it was standard practice not to do that. Aristine worked hard, she says, to recover fast in the Physical Therapy Rehabilitation Program (PTRP) because those who did not, the “hold-overs,” would be kept in separate rooms in barracks with their units’ drill sergeants and would often be raped. Aristine did not use the word “rape” but indicated sex that was unwanted. “Rape” or “command rape” is an accurate term.

Unfortunately, the First Sergeant for the same Company she had been in before came and requested that Aristine return to the same unit. She passed a test and was returned. Once back, she was kept in a separate room, but resisted the drill sergeants’ attempts at sex, she says. A couple of female holdovers, she says, were also kept in private rooms. They would be taken out at night, and would cry endlessly when they were returned.

Aristine was now in the fourth week of training, with the same company, platoon, and drill sergeants (except for Fontana who was no longer there), but all new privates, her original group having long since graduated. Aristine was miserable, terrified, and “crying, crying, crying.” “How,” she asked herself, “could they send me back here?” The First Sergeant told her: “You’d better not open your mouth about what happened last time.” Maharry was still on lots of pain medicine and suffering mental pain as well.

Privates are all assigned “battle buddies,” and Aristine’s was a man named Principe. Privates objected that she couldn’t have a male battle buddy. The sergeants said that she could and that it happens in war. Luckily, Principe was a decent person, or — perhaps more to the point — a person who had not been in combat and was not placed in a command position. But Principe left early, during the eighth week. There was one more week to go.

During these later weeks of training, the drill sergeants were not as hard on the privates, and focused more on building camaraderie within the unit. They also brought the privates into the way the Army thinks. Drill Sergeant Davis said to whole platoon, as Aristine recalls: “It does not matter what happens in a room as long as two or more of you have the same story. That’s the party line.”

Aristine, like every private, slept with her weapon, knew its parts and how to assemble it, and gave it a name. Her gun was called “Blue.” Among the chants used in training were “We are Charlie Company and we like to party: drink blood drink blood all night long,” and another that began “Sharpen our machetes!”

Aristine was treated to particular abuse through these weeks. She was frequently awakened during the night and deprived of sleep. For weeks, she resisted the advances of the First Sergeant, Drill Sergeant Davis, and Drill Sergeant Kitchen. Aristine learned to sleep sitting straight up in the daytime.

During the final week, the First Sergeant called for her at night and said “We know what you did with your battle buddy” and “We know you’re selling pain killers.” He claimed that Principe had accused her of selling her pain killers. She knew that Principe would not have said that. She had no use for money in basic training, she desperately needed the pain killers, and the accusation named no party she’d sold to or any other details. There were no witnesses, and the accusation was false. There was never any trial or finding, just an accusation. The Army threatened to bring Aristine up on charges under Article 15 of the Universal Code of Military Justice. She refused to sign their forms, and they dropped the matter.

Aristine says that frequently she would cry as her Army superiors threatened her, repeatedly, for weeks. They would point out that she never received any letters in the mail. They claimed that nobody would know if they “took care of her.” Remarks included “We know how to make people shut up” and “We can make you be quiet forever.” Aristine says she took these as clear threats to kill her or imprison her, and that these threats were offered on multiple occasions.

Aristine injured her arm, and a doctor agreed not to treat her so that she could ship out, which was what she wanted: to escape Missouri.

Aristine’s birth mother showed up out of the blue. She had been an Army Captain. She had also been a model for ROTC posters and “Babes of the Military” calendars. Aristine was reluctant to tell her mother the true story, terrified that the Army would find out she’d talked and kill her or lock her away in prison. So Aristine told her mother the things she’d seen done to other female privates. She told her mother the Army was trumping up charges to keep her quiet. Aristine’s mother said she knew how it worked, and she kept quiet.

When I spoke with Aristine this week she said that she was still scared to be speaking about it. This is even more understandable considering the rest of the story.

After graduating, and being denied permission to walk in the graduation ceremony as punishment for the baseless accusation of selling drugs, Aristine shipped out to Fort Sam Houston near San Antonio, Texas. She was treated for her arm injury. She could not be sent on convalescent leave again so soon. Instead, she was sent to wait for a review by a medical board. Many she spoke with had been waiting two or more years for the medical board to review them. They could not leave for holidays or visit families. Aristine sank into depression. She felt unable to sit and do nothing, not to mention being constantly made fun of for not going to war.

She tried to switch from combat medic to a paperwork job that she could handle. She was told she was not fit for any duty until the medical board reviewed her case.

She tried to quit the Army with no benefits. They told her, she recounts: “Because we broke you, we have to fix you.”

I asked “Like Iraq?”

Aristine: “Yeah, like Iraq.”

A chaplain declined to help.

A physical therapist declined to help.

A woman, possibly named Rodriguez, told Aristine that if she “pulled the same s— here as in basic” she would “personally hunt you down and take care of you.”

Aristine went to a psychiatric clinic and said she was considering suicide. She really was. The clinic made her sign a statement that she would not kill herself. Then they sent her right back to hurry up and wait for the medical board.

Aristine left most of her possessions behind and went AWOL.

She was afraid to return to her family. She still does not want to face her father. She is deeply ashamed of having failed to succeed in the military. People had warned her she would fail. And she failed, or at least viewed it that way, even knowing that what was done to her was not her fault. She wished she’d listened to her colleagues at work who had told her “You’re too pretty,” and “Girls like you shouldn’t join the military.” She had taken those comments as insults to her pride. She now says they were right but didn’t go far enough. “It’s no place for anybody,” she now concludes.

Before joining up, Aristine had contacted both of her parents. Her father had never spoken about Vietnam. He now said “I saw things in the Army that no one should ever be exposed to.” He told her not to do it. She took that as fatherly protection and thought to herself “I’m stronger than he thinks.” He had received medals in Vietnam, she points out, but he’d also returned with “shell shock” or PTSD. Loud sounds would cause him to throw something or hit someone. He suffered tunnel vision in crowded places, and Aristine says she had the same symptom for a while.

Aristine went AWOL on July 5th (“my independence day”). She went to Florida and picked up three jobs, and then a job in New York. But in New York in November 2006, she had a checkbook stolen and reported it to the police. She did not face prosecution for going AWOL. But she was required to report to Fort Knox in Kentucky and sign out, along with many others in her same position — many women and men too, all suffering injuries, many from training and some from combat. They were made to put on Army uniforms and ordered about. She had to write out her story for a judge. She was told she could not speak with a judge. She was not told she could hire a lawyer. The Army may still have the report she wrote out. She was given a less than honorable discharge.

Aristine tried to reconcile with her husband. They tried counseling. She did not believe she could become pregnant anymore. But she did, and the pregnancy was very hard on her, her third son being born a month early. Doctors told her insurance would not cover problems related to military injuries. So Aristine went to the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) and asked to change her discharge to honorable and to obtain health coverage. She again had to write down her whole story, and this time she left a copy with her birth mother. She was now advised that she could have had a lawyer at Fort Knox.

Aristine is now on her own, but has joined together with a growing crowd of activists opposing the entire direction in which our war economy is dragging our nation and the world. Many people are finding the strength to tell their stories, and finding power in joining them together with others’.

Aristine Maharry thinks the military should release injured people to their families and treat them through the VA. She’s seen a woman forced to stay in a hotel, forbidden to see her family, while her family lived an hour and a half away. For what purpose?

Aristine thinks the Army should allow stretching during training to avoid countless shin injuries in women and men.

She thinks her story is similar to a great many others. She’s found the strength to talk after six years and in the midst of a nonviolent occupation. “The Army is keeping people quiet,” she says, “many, many people. Victims are sent to their attackers to ask for help.”

In school, Aristine says, she learned that America is always the hero, there to fix things and to help the rest of the world. “If it weren’t for us, the world would be lost!” But, she adds, you don’t learn the effects that wars have on people.

By David Swanson

27 October 2011

Warisacrime.org

David Swanson is the author of “War Is A Lie”

As of 7 October 2011, the 10th Anniversary of the US  invasion of Afghanistan , the human cost of the Afghan War has been estimated as about 1.4 million violent deaths and 4.2 million  non-violent avoidable deaths from Occupier-imposed deprivation, a total of 5.6 million war-related deaths. A detailed and documented Afghan War Human Cost Fact Sheet has been prepared to assist humane public discussion of the ongoing, US Alliance-imposed Afghan Holocaust and Afghan Genocide (5.6 million war-related deaths) that has now reached the dimensions of the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation).

1. Post-invasion non-violent avoidable deaths from deprivation total 4.2 million (using a baseline of expected annual mortality of 4 deaths per 1,000 of population for a high birthrate Developing country not subject to war). [1].

2. Post-invasion violent deaths total 1.4 million (assuming expert advice that the level of violence has been 4 times lower in the Afghan War than in the Iraq War and an Iraq War violent deaths/non-violent deaths ratio of 1.3). [1, 2, 3].

3. Post-invasion under-5 infant deaths total 2.9 million (nearly twice the number of the 1.5 million Jewish children killed by the Nazis in WW2). [1].

4. Afghan refugees total 3.2 million, this comprising 2.7 million in Iran and Pakistan and 0.4 million internally-displaced persons (IDPs)  in Afghanistan ). [4].

5. The US bombing and US-backed Pakistani Army offensive in NW Pakistan generated 2.5 million Pashtun refugees. [5].

6. Annual under-5 infant deaths in Occupied Afghanistan currently total 237,000, 90% avoidable and due to war-imposed deprivation. [6]

7. It was estimated in 2009 that the annual death rate was 7% for under-5 year old Afghan infants as compared to 4% for Poles in Nazi-occupied Poland and 5% for French Jews in Nazi-occupied France . [7].

8. Annual per capita total health expenditure permitted by the Occupiers in Occupied Afghanistan totals US$69 as compared to US$3,382 for Occupier Australia. [8].

9. Life expectancy at birth m/f (years): 47/50 (as compared to 80/84 for Occupier Australia). [8].

10. Gross national income per capita:  US$ 1,100 (as compared to US$37,250 for Occupier Australia) . [8].

11. Probability of dying under five (per 1 000 live births): 199 (as compared to 5 for Occupier Australia). [8].

12. Probability of dying between 15 and 60 years m/f (per 1 000 population): 440/352 (as compared to 79/45 for Occupier Australia). [8]

13. % of under-fives (2003–2008) suffering from stunting (WHO) moderate & severe: 59% (negligible in Occupier Australia except for Indigenous Australians). [6].

14. Adult literacy rate: females as a % of males, 2003–2007: 29% (about 100% for Occupier Australia)). [6].

15. Maternal mortality ratio (annual number of deaths of women from pregnancy-related causes per 100,000 live births): 1,800 (adjusted value 7 for Occupier Australia in 2008) [6].

16. US military deaths in and around Afghanistan in the Afghan War as of October 2011 totaled 1,721, Australian military deaths totaled 29 and total US Alliance deaths totaled 2,757. [9].

17. About 100,000 people die avoidably from opiate drug-related causes each year. The US Alliance restored the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from 6% of world market share in 2001 to about  90% today. It can accordingly be estimated that about 0.1 million people per year x 0.9 x 10 years  =  0.9 million people have died globally due to US Alliance restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry, this including about 200,000 Americans and 3,000 Australians. [10, 11, 12, 13].

18. Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University) and Professor Linda Bilmes (Harvard University) estimated the accrual cost of the Iraq War alone at over $3 trillion with huge impacts on oil prices, the Afghan war, US federal debt, liabilities for injured veterans, the global financial crisis and US recession.  Dr Michael Intriligator, a senior fellow at the US Milken Institute, has suggested a long-term cost of the Afghan War at $1.5 trillion to $2.0 trillion. Australia ‘s involvement costs about $1 billion annually. [14, 15].

19. Perverted fiscal diversion for the Afghan War continues to have mortal consequences in the US and other US Alliance countries such as Australia . Thus it has been estimated that about 1 million Americans die preventably each year from poverty, deprivation or violence (e.g. 30,000 Americans are killed by guns each year; 44 million Americans live in poverty and the difference between infant mortality rates between Singapore and the world’s richest country, the US, indicates that about 20,000 US infants die avoidably each year; about 20,000 Americans die annually from lack of medical insurance; and about 1 million Americans die preventably each year from these causes and related lifestyle choices such as drinking, smoking and obesity-linked problems). 9,000 Indigenous Australians die avoidably each year out of an Indigenous population of about 0.5 million due to Third World living conditions and a 2- to 3-fold underfunding of Aboriginal health (currently $1.5 billion annually but should be $3 billion to $4.5 billion annually). Australia spends about $1 billion annually on the Afghan war [16, 17, 18].

20. The horrendous fiscal diversion for war in Afghanistan (and in Iraq and indeed around the world) has contributed to the ongoing Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust in which an estimated 18 million people die avoidably each year from deprivation in the Developing World (minus China ). (There were 16 million global avoidable deaths  in 2003). [19].

21. Man-made global warming is a major problem for Humanity, together with nuclear weapons and poverty. The huge fiscal diversion for the Afghan War has crippled the political will of America to tackle man-made climate change. Both Dr James Lovelock FRS (Gaia hypothesis) and Professor Kevin Anderson ( Director, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Manchester, UK) have recently estimated that only about 0.5 billion people will survive this century due to unaddressed, man-made global warming. Noting that the world population is expected to reach 9.5 billion by 2050, these estimates translate to a climate genocide involving deaths of 10 billion people this century, this including 6 billion under-5 year old infants, 3 billion Muslims in a terminal Muslim Holocaust, 2 billion Indians, 1.3 billion non-Arab Africans, 0.5 billion Bengalis, 0.3 billion Pakistanis and 0.3 billion Bangladeshis. The nations that need to curb greenhouse gas pollution most quickly and indeed achieve 100% renewable energy by 2020 if the world is to have a 67% chance of avoiding a 2C temperature rise (estimates by Professor  Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, head of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany) are indeed the worst polluting US Alliance countries, namely  the US, Canada and Australia. “Annual per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution” in units of “tonnes CO2 -equivalent per person per year” (2005-2008 data) is 0.9 (Bangladesh and Afghanistan), 0.9 (Pakistan), 2.2 (India), less than 3 (many African and Island countries), 3.2 (the Developing World), 5.5 (China), 6.7 (the World), 11 (Europe), 16 (the Developed World), 23 (Canada), 27 (the US) and 30 (Australia; or 54 if Australia’s huge Exported CO2 pollution is included). Australia ‘s current annual domestic plus exported per capita GHG pollution is 64 tonnes CO2-e per person per year (71 times that of Bangladesh or Afghanistan ).  Professor Schellnhuber says that an average annual per capita GHG pollution of about 2.6 tonnes CO2-e per person per year is needed over 40 years on the path to zero emissions by 2050 with a 67% chance of avoiding a 2C temperature rise disaster (conservative odds: would you board a plane if there were a 33% chance of it crashing?). [20, 21, 22].

22. The US Alliance is involved in an Afghan Holocaust (huge numbers of people dying) and an Afghan Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention which states : “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” It must be noted that mass murderers rarely confess and “intent” is typically established by sustained, remorseless conduct (for 10 years in the case of the US Alliance in the Afghan War). [23].

23. The US Alliance is grossly violating Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War.

Article 55. To the fullest extent of the means available to it the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate. The Occupying Power may not requisition foodstuffs, articles or medical supplies available in the occupied territory, except for use by the occupation forces and administration personnel, and then only if the requirements of the civilian population have been taken into account. Subject to the provisions of other international Conventions, the Occupying Power shall make arrangements to ensure that fair value is paid for any requisitioned goods. The Protecting Power shall, at any time, be at liberty to verify the state of the food and medical supplies in occupied territories, except where temporary restrictions are made necessary by imperative military requirements.

Article 56. To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring and maintaining, with the cooperation of national and local authorities, the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics. Medical personnel of all categories shall be allowed to carry out their duties. If new hospitals are set up in occupied territory and if the competent organs of the occupied State are not operating there, the occupying authorities shall, if necessary, grant them the recognition provided for in Article 18. In similar circumstances, the occupying authorities shall also grant recognition to hospital personnel and transport vehicles under the provisions of Articles 20 and 21. In adopting measures of health and hygiene and in their implementation, the Occupying Power shall take into consideration the moral and ethical susceptibilities of the population of the occupied territory. [24].

24. While Western Mainstream media, politicians, academics, public servants and law enforcement agencies ignore these horrendous realities in gross violation of truth, humanity and rational risk management, I have made repeated, detailed formal complaints to the International Criminal Court over US Alliance and Australian war crimes and genocide complicity in Occupied Afghanistan and elsewhere. [25].

25. In 2009 the German Advisory Council on Climate Change (WBGU) determined that for a 75% chance of avoiding a 2 degree C temperature rise, the World must pollute less than 600 Gt CO2 (600 billion tonnes CO2) between 2010 and essentially zero emissions in 2050. Unfortunately Australia (through disproportionately huge annual fossil fuel burning and exports) had by August 2011  already used up its  “share” of this terminal greenhouse gas (GHG) budget and is now stealing the GHG entitlement of other countries, including wretchedly poor countries such as Bangladesh and Afghanistan. From this analysis major GHG polluter the US has about 3 years from mid-2010 to get to zero emissions while low emitters Afghanistan and Bangladesh have over 80 years left. The US and Australia are not merely war criminal, racist and genocidal  but also climate criminal, climate racist and climate genocidal  in relation to devastated Afghanistan. [26].

Conclusions.

An appalling irony is that according to the “official Bush Administration version of 9-11” no Afghans were involved in the 9-11 atrocity (3,000 dead). Osama bin Laden denied involvement, was not wanted by the FBI for this crime,  was offered up by the Afghan Government to a Third Country for trial (an offer rejected by the Americans) and was finally deliberately murdered by the Americans (this preventing long-sought judicial testimony and making Barack Obama an accessory after the fact of the 9-11 atrocity). Indeed many science, engineering, architecture, aviation, military and intelligence experts assert that the US did 9-11 [27].

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UN ODC) has stated clearly that  “the United States saw 38,400 deaths from illicit drug use in 2006, corresponding to a drug-related mortality rate of 182 deaths per one million inhabitants aged 15-64”. 60% of these are due to opiates and of opiate-related deaths 90% are due to US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry to about 90% of world market share i.e.  0.6 x 0.9 x 38,400 = 20,740 pa and 201,000 US opiate drug deaths since October 2001 due to US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry. The corresponding figure for Australia is 3,000 such deaths of Australians linked to the US Alliance and Australian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan . [28].

A s of 7 October 2011, the 10th Anniversary of the US  invasion of Afghanistan , the human cost of the Afghan War has been estimated as about 1.4 million violent deaths and 4.2 million  non-violent avoidable deaths from Occupier-imposed deprivation, a total of 5.6 million war-related deaths, carnage that has now reached the dimensions of the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) and which amounts to a US Alliance-imposed Afghan Holocaust and an Afghan Genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention. Mainstream media lying and censorship in the Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-beholden Western Murdochracies and Lobbyocracies ensures that ordinary citizens remain largely unaware of this ongoing catastrophe [29, 30]. Decent people must (a) inform everyone they can and (b) urge and apply sanctions and boycotts against all people, politicians, products, corporations and countries involved in this ongoing atrocity.

By Dr Gideon Polya

10 October 2011

Countercurrents.org

[1]  UN Population Division data (the 1998 Revision): http://esa.un.org/unpp/ .

[2]. Just Foreign Policy: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/ .

[3]. Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/ .

[4]. UNHCR: Afghanistan : http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/page?page=49e486eb6 .

[6]. UNICEF data on Afghanistan : http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/afghanistan_statistics.html .

[7]. Polish Holocaust, Afghan Holocaust and Western Holocaust denial: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya170410.htm .

[8]. WHO data in Afghanistan : http://www.who.int/countries/afg/en/ .

[9]. US casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan : http://icasualties.org/oef/ .

[10]. Australian National Drug Research Institute, “Tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs responsible for 7 million preventable deaths worldwide”, 2003: http://db.ndri.curtin.edu.au/media.asp?mediarelid=40 .

[11]. UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), World Drug Report 2007: http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/WDR-2007.html .

[12]. US foreign policy hugely supports global drug trade, Bellaciao: http://bellaciao.org/en/spip.php?article19234 .

[13]. Afghan Holocaust, Afghan Genocide: https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/ .

[14]. Joseph Stiglitz & Linda Bilmes, “The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond”, Washington Post, September 2010: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html .

[15]. Eli Clifton, “Bill for Afghan War could run into the trillions”, Information Clearing House, May 2010: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25479.htm .

[16]. Gideon Polya, “Carbon burning, Zionism and war kill 1 million Americans yearly”, Newsvine, 2008: http://gpolya.newsvine.com/_news/2008/06/19/1593137-carbon-burning-zionism-war-kill-1-million-americans-yearly .

[17]. Gideon Polya, “The Awful Truth”, National Indigenous Times, June 2007: http://www.nit.com.au/news/story.aspx?id=11552 .

[18]. Aboriginal Genocide: https://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/ .

[19]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007): http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com/2008/08/body-count-global-avoidable-mortality.html .

[20]. Climate Genocide: https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ .

[21]. Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact research, Terra Quasi-Incognita: Beyond the 20C line, International climate Conference, 28-30 September 2009, Oxford , UK : http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/4degrees/ppt/1-1schellnhuber.pdf .

[22]. Beyond Zero Emissions, “Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plan”, July 2010 (for free download see: http://beyondzeroemissions.org/about/bze-brand .

[23]. UN Genocide Convention: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html .

[24]. Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/92.htm .

[25]. 9 January 2010 Formal Complaint by Dr Gideon Polya to the International Criminal Court (ICC) re US Alliance Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, Muslim, Aboriginal, Biofuel and Climate Genocides: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/9-january-2010 .

[26]. Gideon Polya, “Shocking analysis by country of years left to zero emissions”, Green Blog, 1 August 2011:   http://www.green-blog.org/2011/08/01/shocking-analysis-by-country-of-years-left-to-zero-emissions/ .

[27]. “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/home .

[29]. “Mainstream Media Lying”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/ .

[30]. “Mainstream media censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/ .

Dr Gideon Polya currently teaches science students at a major Australian university. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career.

Legal mechanisms developed after the end of the Second World War to more easily prosecute war criminals are now being taken off the books to preserve Israeli impunity from accountability.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes an outraged international community demanded justice — a demand that resulted in the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the introduction of the new legal concept of universal jurisdiction. Justice, it seemed, would be impartial and hiding places for criminals scarce.

Universal jurisdiction is a simple concept. Deriving its authority from Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions, it places an obligation upon all states “to respect and ensure respect” for the laws of war, effectively requiring all states to prosecute suspected war criminals regardless of where the crimes were committed.

In reality, however, universal jurisdiction has rarely been invoked. This absence of enforcement in a world replete with war crimes and crimes against humanity may seem more than a little peculiar but is easily explained. In the vast majority of states the decision to investigate and prosecute lies with the state-controlled institutions of the police and public prosecutor’s office, and these unfortunately, unless they are politically sanctioned to do so, do not spend time investigating crimes committed elsewhere.

Consequently, when suspected war criminals travel abroad they travel with virtual impunity; the preparatory investigations needed to establish a case against them having simply not been done. Until mid September, however, there was one country where war criminals stood a fair chance of having their day in court.

In the UK the judicial system allowed private parties and individuals to present their own evidence of war crimes before a magistrate who could then, if he or she felt the case was strong enough, issue a warrant for the suspect’s arrest. Consequently, in 2005 retired Israeli General Doron Almog only escaped arrest by skulking in his plane before being flown back to Israel, while in 2009 Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni cancelled her trip rather than face arrest. Other senior Israeli figures simply chose to stay away from Britain.

Sadly on 15 September this means of potentially achieving justice was revoked. In response to Israeli protests the UK government chose to change its laws rather than see Israelis arrested. In a move condemned by Amnesty International, the UK government amended the law on universal jurisdiction so that in future only the Director of Public Prosecutions can authorize the arrest of a suspected war criminal (“Tories make life easier for war criminals,” Liberal Conspiracy, 30 March 2011).

Contradictory grounds

Oddly, the UK government defended its decision on two contradictory grounds. The first reason it put forward is that the evidence used to secure the arrests stands little chance bringing about “a realistic prospect of conviction.”

This is disingenuous, to say the least. As Geoffrey Robertson, a UN appeals judge, states: “The change in the law has nothing to do — as the UK claims — with ensuring that cases proceed on solid evidence. No district judge would issue an arrest warrant lightly (“DPP may get veto power over arrest warrants for war crime suspects,” The Guardian, 22 July 2010).” Secondly, the reason for the arrest is so the suspect cannot flee while further evidence is being gathered. Indeed, this is a common way for domestic investigations to proceed.

The other equally disingenuous reason the UK gave for the change in the law is that arresting suspected war criminals may endanger the non-existent peace process.

This absurd view was advanced by UK Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, who decried the previous law because it constituted a risk to “our ability to help in conflict resolution or to pursue a coherent foreign policy.”

Indeed, claiming that the previously granted arrest warrants had been politically motivated, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague declared, “We cannot have a position where Israeli politicians feel they cannot visit this country.”

However, the UK’s retreat from the implementation of universal jurisdiction is not a lone example of the power of the Israel lobby to affect states’ domestic legislation. A similar shameful episode ensued when Ariel Sharon was indicted before the Belgian courts, in that instance not just Israel but also the United States brought pressure to bear, Donald Rumsfeld going as far as to threaten to move NATO headquarters from Belgium.

Which raises the question, if enforcing international humanitarian law is a threat to peace, then why do we have it?

A more coherent view was advanced by Daniel Machover, partner at the law firm Hickman and Rose: “It is disgusting that the Foreign Office is exaggerating the impact on the peace process to get a few people who are suspects of very serious international crimes off the hook” (“Ministers move to change universal jurisdiction law,” The Guardian, 30 May 2010).

Skipping Holocaust dinner to vote

Nevertheless, the move to change the law was not unaccompanied by controversy, and The Jewish Chronicle reported that in the House of Lords the vote was tied 222 to 222 and only passed because one lord, Monroe Palmer, former president of the Liberal Democrats Friends of Israel group, put off an invitation to attend a Holocaust Education Trust dinner (“Universal jurisdiction change becomes law,” The Jewish Chronicle, 15 September 2011). That in itself seems odd; surely Palmer should have gone and perhaps learned that, to use the Latin phrase, “impunitas sempre ad deteriora invitat,” impunity always leads to greater crimes.

And certainly it is also at odds with the assessment by retired South African judge Richard Goldstone that “The lack of accountability for war crimes and possible war crimes against humanity has reached a crisis point; the ongoing lack of justice is undermining any hope for a successful peace process and reinforcing an environment that fosters violence” (“Goldstone defends Gaza war crimes report,” Ynet News, 29 September 2009).

Sadly, however, while Ilana Stein of the Israeli foreign ministry celebrated — “We are glad that Britain has made the right choice” — it seems that the lessons of the Holocaust have still to be learned.

By Richard Irvine

Richard Irvine teaches a course at Queen’s University Belfast entitled “The Battle for Palestine” which explores the entire history of the conflict. Irvine has also worked voluntarily in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and is coordinator of the Ireland-based Palestine Education Initiative.

Independence Avenue in Istanbul has been a bustling centre of commerce for hundreds of years. Today is no different: shoppers and other pedestrians walk 15 abreast on the thoroughfare that runs across what was once a 13th-century Genoese trading colony on the bank of the Bosphorus.

Atila Kocer, who runs a cramped mobile phone franchise, says 3,000 people visit his shop every day, many eager to buy iPhones despite the price tag of TL2,300 ($1,230). “This is a better year than last year – and last year was very good,” he says. It is a very different message from the one heard on high streets elsewhere in Europe.

Istanbul is much more than Independence Avenue, and Turkey much more than Istanbul, but the good economic times from which Mr Kocer is benefiting are shared across much of the country. Cranes clutter city skylines, and for much of the year sales of cars and white goods have increased by 20-30 per cent, although the pace has relented of late. Altogether, the country has experienced hypercharged economic growth, up 10.2 per cent for the first half of 2011.

It is a phenomenon with important consequences – for investors seeking an alternative to mediocre growth in the US and the eurozone; for Turkey’s ruling centre-right Justice and Development (AK) party, whose electoral success is rooted in the surge in living standards; and for Ankara’s rising influence on the world stage.

But even though today’s strong performance caps the AK party’s nine years in office, during which per capita income has tripled in dollar terms, there are fears it could prove unsustainable, as the current account deficit grows and the lira weakens. “This is a very vulnerable macroeconomic story,” says Murat Ucer, an economic consultant in Istanbul, arguing that the jump in dollar income, which has fed demand for imports, has far outstripped productivity growth.

Some of Ankara’s decisions – notably cutting interest rates at a time of rising inflation – have heightened concerns that parts of the economy have been growing too fast. And, despite schadenfreude among the governing elite about the European Union’s economic and financial travails, there is little doubt that a deep slump in the eurozone would gravely afflict both Independence Avenue and the Anatolian heartlands.

For now, however, international politicians and business leaders are heading for Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, and Ankara, eager to improve ties with one of the brightest success stories in a gloomy world economy. “There’s a vast potential that we haven’t tapped till now,” said Vince Cable, British business secretary, in Istanbul last month leading a delegation that included a UK construction company seeking to help build a third bridge over the Bosphorus. He depicted the trip as part of an effort to reorient ties towards the emerging markets that today account for half of global gross domestic product and offer the promise of continued growth.

His message is echoed by decision-makers such as Thomas Donohue, head of the US Chamber of Commerce, who complains that American-Turkish trade is worth a mere $15bn – less than a third as much as US trade with Singapore, despite Turkey’s credentials as a “bigger, stronger economy” than before.

Indeed, after a financial crisis a decade ago, the country’s economic situation is in many respects the envy of its northern neighbours.

“If you look at basic fundamentals in Turkey we are in good shape,” says Mehmet Simsek, finance minister. “We’ve created jobs, interest rates are by Turkish standards low and banks are healthy.” Public debt levels, too, are low.

Although much of the groundwork was laid by Kemal Dervis, finance minister in the previous coalition government during the crisis of 2001-02, it is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister, who has presided over the good times. On his way to a record-breaking third election victory in June – in which he increased his share of the vote – he promised more of the same.

Announcing construction plans at almost every stop – from a new canal to bypass the Bosphorus to hospitals and football stadiums for Anatolian towns, he vowed to make Turkey, today the 17th-largest economy in the world, one of the 10 biggest by 2023.

By that year – far from coincidentally, the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Turkish Republic – Mr Erdogan wants GDP per capita to more than double again to $25,000. (The rise in this figure during his tenure, dramatic in dollar terms, is more modest when measured in domestic currency and adjusted for inflation.)

The confidence conferred by growth – and the prospect of growth – is boosting Ankara’s diplomatic influence too. To many of its neighbours, caught in the upheaval of the Arab spring, Turkey offers an example of democracy and prosperity – and Mr Erdogan, who hopes to increase the country’s clout, cuts the image of a strong, determined leader. He kicked off a triumphal tour of north Africa last month by taking more than 200 businessmen to Egypt. Ahmet Davutoglu, foreign minister, declares it his duty to open an em­bassy wherever there is a Turkish entrepreneur.

“As this political change sweeps through the region and some significant presences retreat others are filling the vacuum and this country is one of those,” Tony Hayward, the former BP chief executive, now at Vallares, a London-based resources group in the process of taking over Turkish energy group Genel Energy, told the Financial Times last month.

Yet an increasing number of voices are warning that – in the short term, at least – this may be as good as things get. In a report last month, the International Monetary Fund predicted that the rate of growth would slow dramatically next year to just 2.5 per cent.

Even the Turkish central bank, while disputing such forecasts, says there are clear signs that the pace is letting up. It points to indicators such as industrial production and the purchasing manufacturer’s index, which in August dipped below the level of 50 that divides confidence from concern before edging up in September.

A chief reason for the IMF’s alarm – and the factor that explains why Ankara is keen to detect signs of slowdown – is the biggest blot on Turkey’s economic landscape: the yawning current account deficit. At about $75bn a year, it is now almost at 10 per cent of GDP. The government has hailed the latest figures, showing a $3.96bn deficit for August, as a sign the problem has peaked.

But it still forecasts only a modest reduction in the deficit, from 9.4 per cent of GDP at year end to 8 per cent next year and 7.5 per cent in 2013. Some analysts see such forecasts as a signal that Ankara’s priority remains delivering growth whatever the cost.

But even Mr Simsek acknowledges the deficit is an unsustainable byproduct of surging domestic demand and a low savings rate. “If Turkey didn’t have such relatively low savings rates, we could easily outpace the Chinese growth rate,” he notes ruefully.

Without such savings, however, economic growth leads to more imports and the country becomes increasingly reliant on foreign funds. Indeed, recent figures released by the central bank reveal that when the current account is taken together with the external liabilities of the corporate and financial sectors, Turkey will need more than $200bn in foreign financing over the next year.

Such debt requirements are becoming harder to meet. The lira has lost more than 20 per cent against both the dollar and the euro in the past year, as low interest rates, the current account deficit and a flight from global assets seen as less risky have all taken their toll.

Having welcomed the lira’s initial decline, the central bank has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars some days trying to stem its fall; in August, such interventions in effect underwrote the current account deficit. But the bank’s firepower may be limited – at only about $85bn, its reserves are much less than the country’s short-term liabilities.

Concern that the currency’s slide will feed through to inflation is also rising. The government expects consumer price inflation of 8 per cent rather than the 5.5 per cent target for end of the year; producer prices are even further astray.

Another problem is credit growth. The IMF’s recent World Economic Outlook cited Turkey as a country where soaring loan growth could undermine financial stability and re­ferred to a Turkish “boom” – a term that implies the strong possibility of a bust. Indeed, tucked away in the report is a graphic signalling that, of the Group of 20 leading economies, Turkey is at greatest risk of a financial crisis.

The IMF makes clear what it would like Turkey to do to avoid such a fate – raise interest rates and husband foreign reserves rather than spend them on propping up the lira. But it has not found a willing audience in Ankara, which has sought instead to manage overall domestic demand by making it harder for banks to increase lending.

Despite the lira’s slide, the central bank is keeping to its low interest rate policy, intended to diminish the country’s attractiveness to, and hence dependence on, foreign portfolio capital that could dry up.

It argues that Turkey’s vulnerability to external shocks will decrease as the current account deficit shrinks as a result of a combination of a slowing economy, which means fewer imports, and a weak currency, which could lead to more exports.

Some analysts, who prefer not to be quoted, argue that the bank’s insistence on low interest rates mirrors Mr Erdogan’s desire to keep the economy roaring ahead. The bank itself says the overriding reason for the most recent 50 basis point cut in August was to shore up the economy against bad news from the eurozone.

It argues that the risk of overheating is past, and that the biggest challenge facing Turkey is a fall in external demand.

In the longer term, prospects remain bright – the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates average annual growth for Turkey of 6.7 per cent in the next six years – faster than that of any other member.

But given its dependence on industrialised economies for trade and, in particular, financing, it cannot be an entirely safe harbour, despite its proud record of the past few years.

“If Turkey is the lifeboat tethered to the big ship, the rope between the two is very short,” says one observer of Ankara’s economic links to the EU, which absorbs half of the country’s exports. “If the big ship goes down, there’s very little they can do.”

Much of the international support that Israel receives is based on several lies it tells and re-tells as “facts”.

In 1991, negotiations started officially and unofficially between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (and the Palestinians associated with it) and the Israeli government. At the time, Israel had occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip for the previous 24 years.

Today, 20 years later, Israel and President Obama insist that the only way to bring about peace, and presumably end the Occupation, is to continue with negotiations. It is unclear if what Obama and Israel are claiming is that Israel needs 24 years of negotiations in order to end its 24-year occupation of Palestinian land, so that by the time the occupation ends, it will have lasted for 48 years.

This of course is the optimistic reading of the Israeli and US positions; the reality of the negotiations and what they aim to achieve, however, is far more insidious.

The negotiations have been based on specific goals to end certain aspects of the Israeli relationship to the Palestinians, namely some of the parts introduced since the 1967 war and the occupation, and the beginning of exclusive Jewish colonial settlement of these territories.But what always remains outside the purview of negotiations is the very core of the Palestinian-Israeli relationship, which the Palestinians are told cannot be part of any negotiations.

These off-limits core issues include what has happened since 1947-1948, including the expulsion of 760,000 Palestinians, the destruction of their cities and towns, the confiscation and destruction of their property, the introduction of discriminatory laws that legalise Jewish racial, colonial and religious privilege and deny Palestinian citizens of Israel equal rights and reject the right of the expelled refugees to return.

Yet, this core, which the Israelis summarise as Israel’s right to be, and to be recognised as, a “Jewish” state, is what is always invoked by the Israelis themselves as central to beginning and ending the negotiations successfully and which the Palestinians, the Israelis insist, refuse to discuss.

But the core issues of the question of the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis have always been based on the agonistic historical, geographic and political claims of the Palestinian people and the Zionist movement.

While the Palestinians have always based their claims on verifiable facts and truths that the international community agreed upon and recognised, Israel has always based its claims on facts on the ground that it created by force and which parts of the international community would only recognise as “legitimate”, retroactively.

How is one then to sift through these competing notions of truths and facts on the one hand, and facts on the ground, on the other?

The core issues of the US and Israeli agenda were best articulated in the speeches delivered by Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the United Nations (UN) last month in response to the PLO’s bid for statehood at the UN. It is there where both Netanyahu and Obama invoked what they called “truths” and “facts” to assert Israeli facts on the ground. As I will show, their strategy is engineered to convert Israeli facts on the ground from antonyms of truths and facts to synonyms with them.

The first ‘fact’

Let me begin with what Zionists and the US have defined as the first “fact”, which is by definition not open to any doubt or question. Obama insists: “These facts cannot be denied. The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland.”

Netanyahu echoes Obama by listing this first “fact” as the first “truth,” or rather by making sure that “the light of truth will shine” at the UN through his words: “It was here in 1975 that the age-old yearning of my people to restore our national life in our ancient biblical homeland … was … branded … shamefully, as racism.” He added later “and we will know that [the Palestinians are] ready for compromise and for peace … when they stop denying our historical connection to our ancient homeland.”

Now, this insistence that the first fact, nay the first truth, that Palestine is the historic homeland of modern European Jews who resided in Europe and not of the Palestinian people who lived in it for millennia, turns out to be neither factual nor truthful, though it indeed remains the primary and first claim made by Zionism and anti-Semitism.

The claim relies on anti-Semitic notions propagated initially by the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and later by secular anti-Semitism, both of which insisted that modern European Jews were blood and genetic descendants of the ancient Hebrews respectively, which is precisely how eighteenth century European philology’s reference to Jews as “Semites” would soon be transformed in the hand of political and racial anti-Semitism by the late nineteenth century from a “linguistic” category into a “racial” and biological one.

It is based on these anti-Semitic claims – that millenarian Protestants, secular anti-Semites, and Zionists called for the “restoration” of European Jews to the alleged homeland of their alleged ancestors.

The uncontroversial academic and historical facts that European Jews are descendants of European converts to Judaism from the centuries before Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century are unquestionable axioms in academic scholarship, including by Zionist historians.

No respected historian of European Jewry has ever argued that European Jews, or for that matter Moroccan, or Iraqi, or Yemeni Jews, were descendants of the ancient Hebrews. All respected scholars recognise them as descendants of converts to Judaism.

But even if the wildest genetic fantasies of anti-Semites and Zionists of Jews as a “race” were “proven”, would this make ancient Palestine, where the ancient Hebrews cohabited with other ancient peoples, the historic land of modern European Jews?

And even if one were to commit oneself to the science-fiction of Christian biblical archaeology which accompanied European colonialism in the nineteenth century and on which Israeli archaeology continues to be based, would that mean that modern Jews, now posited as direct genetic and biological descendants of the ancient Hebrews could claim the land where the ancient Hebrews lived with the Canaanites among other myriad groups as their own exclusive national domain and take it from its inhabitants who lived in it for millennia?

Could anyone today, except genocidal racists, link Germanic populations to an Aryan origin that started in northern India and based on that link, argue that northern India is the ancient homeland of all German-speaking people to which they must return and evict the current inhabitants of the land as nothing but recent interlopers in the land of the White Aryans?

These fantastical scenarios are precisely what Obama and Netanyahu tell us are undeniable facts and truths.

Indeed they both insist on them being the first fact, the very first indubitable principle of Zionism, which they want to impose on the international community and on the Palestinians!

The second “fact”

Obama’s second fact is asserted with a rhetorical flourish: “Let’s be honest: Israel is surrounded by neighbours that have waged repeated wars against it … These facts cannot be denied.”

But these also are not facts at all. Not even Israeli historians of Israel’s wars agree with them. But Israeli politicians and ideologues of course do. In his UN speech, Netanyahu himself echoes Obama’s words by telling us that Israel is threatened by its neighbours, that it is “surrounded by people sworn to its destruction and armed to the teeth by Iran” and enjoins presumably the American part of his audience at least not to “forget that the people who live in Brooklyn and New Jersey are considerably nicer than some of Israel’s neighbours.”

These racist overtones aside, the academic and historic record shows us however that it was Zionist forces who have waged war against the Palestinians in the wake of the 1947 Partition Plan starting on November 30, 1947.

By May 14, 1948, when Israel declared itself a state, it had expelled 400,000 Palestinians from their homes and was capturing their lands and territories, which were assigned to the Arab state. When three (not five!) Arab armies invaded Zionist-held Palestine on May 15, 1948, they were intervening to stop the expulsion of the Palestinian people and to protect their lands from being taken over by Zionist forces. At the end of the war, they failed miserably at their task. Israel was able to expel another 360,000 Palestinians and to capture half the territories of the Arab state adding them to the Jewish state.

• In 1956, Israel invaded Egypt along with Britain and France. This was in addition to intermittent but continuous cross border raids into the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egyptian-held Gaza over the decades to come.
• In 1967, Israel invaded Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and occupied their territories and all of the remaining lands of Palestine.
• In 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded their own territories (Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights), which Israel had earlier occupied, in an attempt to reclaim them but failed. They did not invade Israel itself.
• In 1978, in 1982, and in 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon killing tens of thousands of people.
• In 2008-2009, Israel invaded Gaza.

These are the undeniable facts that the international community and historians and the actual documentary record proves. As such, Israel was never invaded by its neighbours, except in 1948 – which was an attempt to stop Israel’s invasion of Palestinian territory and the expulsion of Palestinians.

That Israel won the majority of these wars cannot change the facts that it initiated them and that it has been the aggressor on its neighbours since even before its establishment in 1947. Indeed, Israel would launch raids on Iraq in 1981 and on Tunisia in 1985, neither of which was an immediate neighbour and without the slightest military provocation from either.

That Israel and the Zionist movement have been the aggressor in the region for the past century are the undeniable facts.

That Obama wants to assert that Israelis were victims of their neighbours is nothing short of imposing a fact on the ground by sheer American rhetorical and political power unrelated to real events. Obama’s invocation of honesty here turns out to be nothing short of a call for outright dishonesty.

But this “fact” for Obama derives from the “first fact”, namely, if European Jews have the right to colonise Palestine, expel the Palestinians, confiscate their lands, occupy them and discriminate against them by virtue of the first fact of their bogus historic claim, then any Palestinian or Arab resistance to the Zionists’ murderous campaigns is nothing short of aggression on Jews.

Obama proceeds to tell us other “facts”, including that “Israel’s citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel’s children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them.”

While a handful of Israelis have been killed over the years by rocket fire, tens of thousands of Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Jordanians and Syrians, have been killed by Israeli rocket fire during times of war and peace. Perhaps the most recent example can shed some light on this.

During Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Israeli rockets killed over 1,400 Palestinians while Hamas rockets against Israel did not kill a single Israeli, though several Israelis were shell-shocked and required psychological counselling. As for the murder of thousands of Arab children since 1948 and through the invasion of Gaza, Israel has killed at a rate of thousands of Arab children to one Jewish child in retaliatory attacks on Israel.

So, while Obama is indeed not lying that rockets have been fired on Israel and that historically Israeli Jewish children have been killed by attacks, he takes it out of the context of the much larger destruction and killings Israel engaged in against its neighbours since it was established, which is after all based on the first fact!

Obama’s half-facts, like his alleged full facts, end up being again engineered to impose Israeli facts on the ground. For these claims are being made to assert Israel’s need for “security”, which is of paramount importance, and which is the reason both Obama and Netanyahu claim that the negotiations have failed.

Let me quote several of Obama’s references to Israel’s security in his UN speech: “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable”; “Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their security”; “any lasting peace must acknowledge the very real security concerns that Israel faces every single day.”

So, basically Israel gets to invade the Palestinians and all its sovereign neighbours, some repeatedly, over the last six decades, and it continues to occupy their territories and invade their airspace and oppress the occupied populations and colonise their lands. However, for negotiations to be successful, Israel wants to ensure that its security be safeguarded from any resistance to Israeli attacks, colonisation, and occupation by those it continues to attack, colonise, and occupy. And this it can demand based on the first fact.

Obama, it should be noted, never mentioned the security concerns of Israel’s neighbours who have been the target of Israel’s attacks for over six decades. He did however mention the security of Palestinian children once alongside his several mentions of Israeli children despite the one-to-several-thousands victimisation ratio between them: “The measure of our actions must always be whether they advance the right of Israeli and Palestinian children to live in peace and security, with dignity and opportunity.”

Netanyahu picks up where Obama left off: “Our major international airport is a few kilometres away from the West Bank. Without peace, will our planes become targets for anti-aircraft missiles placed in the adjacent Palestinian state?”

What is most interesting about this statement is the fact that Israel’s airport has never been attacked by rockets, which is not to say that Israel has not attacked the airports of its neighbours. That, it has done with aplomb. In 1968, Israel bombed the Beirut international airport destroying 13 civilian airliners on the tarmac. It would attack Beirut airport again in 2006 – bombing runways.

As for plane hijackings, Israel was a pioneer in the Middle East, when its first hijacking took place in 1954. The Israeli air force would often seize flying civilian airliners in international skies and divert them to Israel, subject the passengers to inspection, interrogation as well as incarceration.

Indeed, Israel remains the only Middle East country that blew up a civilian airliner when it shot down a Libyan civilian plane in 1973, killing 108 passengers on board.

Negotiations and more negotiations

This takes us back to what Obama believes, the negotiations are and should be about, namely: “It is Israelis and Palestinians – not us – who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: On borders and security; on refugees and Jerusalem.”

The negotiations which started in 1991 in Madrid and continued in earnest after the 1993 Oslo agreement, however, were based on UN resolutions that stipulate that Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories (Resolutions 242 and 338), which would settle the borders question if it were not for Israel’s refusal to abide by the resolutions.

Moreover, the main issue that has terminated the negotiations and which both sides do not agree on has been Israeli Jewish colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

As luck would have it, the international community and international law both condemn Israeli colonial settlement in the 1967 territories, which are categorically considered illegal and have been declared as such myriad times by UN resolutions and policy statements.

It is curious that Obama never mentioned the colonial settlements in his speech, even though he had attempted a number of times in the last two years without success to intervene with the Israeli government to stop, or at least slow down, building them.

As for the issues of borders, the 1947 Partition Plan had already specified the borders of the two states, and Resolution 242, on which the negotiations are based, specified where Israel should be withdrawing to after the 1967 war, Israeli casuistry in that matter notwithstanding.

The Palestinian negotiating position echoes that of international law and UN resolutions while the Israeli position violates them. This also relates to the matter of the refugees which has also been settled by UN resolutions and international law while Israel remains adamant in its refusal to implement these resolutions by refusing to repatriate, compensate and return the property of the 760,000 Palestinians it expelled. Neither will it agree to compensate and return the property of the quarter of a million Palestinians (internal refugees and their descendants) who are Israeli citizens whom it expelled from one part of the country to another part of it.

But the so-called historical truths and the first “fact” that Netanyahu marshals to assert facts on the ground are endless.

He adds: “In my office in Jerusalem, there’s a … an ancient seal. It’s a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. The seal was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700 years, to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there’s a name of the Jewish official inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu. That’s my last name …”

“… My first name, Benjamin, dates back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin – Binyamin – the son of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. Jacob and his 12 sons roamed these same hills of Judea and Samaria 4,000 years ago, and there’s been a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since.”

Netanyahu (a name which Benjamin Netanyahu changed when he lived in the United States to Ben Nitay allegedly because it was easier for Americans to pronounce) is itself an invented Zionist name, which, like all other Zionist names, began to bestow on European Jews an ancient Hebrew lineage.

Indeed Netanyahu’s father Benzion Mileikowsky was the son of Polish Jews converted to Zionism, who named their son Benzion based on their ideological commitments and changed their name to “Netanyahu” after they immigrated to colonise Palestine in 1920.

The names of Benzion’s father and mother (and Benjamin Netanyahu’s grandparents) were Nathan Mileikowsky and Sarah Lurie, common European Jewish pre-Zionist names.

For Benjamin Mileikowsky (Netanyahu), a descendant of Polish Jewish colonists, to claim ancient Jerusalem as his ancestral origin, would be seen as a curious ideological and mythical fabrication during a dinner conversation, but to assert it as a fact-based political and territorial claim to the land of the Palestinians at the United Nations, makes a mockery of international law, which is the basis of UN resolutions that condemn Israel’s occupation and colonisation of the city.

While Israel today maintains at least 30 laws that grant Jews racial, religious and colonising privileges over Palestinian citizens of Israel – including the 2002 temporary law banning marriage between Israelis and Palestinians of the Occupied Territories – and more so against the Palestinian non-citizens living under Israeli occupation; Netanyahu claims, against these documented facts, that “The Jewish state of Israel will always protect the rights of all its minorities, including the more than one million Arab citizens of Israel.”

He adds a curious statement with regard to illegal Jewish colonial settlers in the Occupied Palestinian territories stating that “I wish I could say the same thing about a future Palestinian state, for as Palestinian officials made clear the other day – in fact, I think they made it right here in New York – they said the Palestinian state won’t allow any Jews in it. They’ll be Jew-free – Judenrein. That’s ethnic cleansing. There are laws today in Ramallah that make the selling of land to Jews punishable by death. That’s racism. And you know which laws this evokes.”

“Tel Aviv is the only Western city that does not have any Arab or Muslim inhabitants.”

While no Palestinian official since the negotiations started has ever dared to state unequivocally that Jewish colonial settlers must be returned to Israel in line with international law, this unverifiable claim by Netanyahu, even if proven true, would not be racist or discriminatory, but rather anti-colonial, refusing to allow Israeli Jews to colonise Palestinian lands against international law by virtue of some Jewish privilege that invokes the “first fact”.

It is Israeli laws that restrict access to Israel’s lands to its non-Jewish Palestinian citizens, even though 90 per cent of that land was confiscated from the Palestinian people. It is also Israeli cities that remain Araberrein; indeed, as many observers have noted, Tel Aviv is the only Western city that does not have any Arab or Muslim inhabitants.

If any racist laws are being evoked here, they are evoked by Israel’s own racist laws and practices, not by Palestinian anti-colonial resistance.

But this statement clarifies where Netanyahu stands on the question of Jewish colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is not Jewish colonisation of the land of the Palestinians that is racist as the UN defined it in 1975, but rather the application of international law by preventing Jews from colonising the land of the Palestinians that is racist.

For Zionism and Obama, any attempt to reject the Zionist “first fact” is immediate proof of anti-Semitism. This is yet another example of how facts on the ground are transformed by Israel and its US backers into “truths” and “facts”.

Israel has many racist and discriminatory laws against its Arab citizens [GALLO/GETTY]

Indeed, Netanyahu (or is it Mileikowsky, or Nitay?) asserts: “I came here to speak the truth. The truth is … that Israel wants peace. The truth is that I want peace. The truth is that in the Middle East at all times, but especially during these turbulent days, peace must be anchored in security. The truth is that we cannot achieve peace through UN resolutions, but only through direct negotiations between the parties. The truth is that so far the Palestinians have refused to negotiate. The truth is that Israel wants peace with a Palestinian state, but the Palestinians want a state without peace. And the truth is you shouldn’t let that happen.”

For Netanyahu and the Israelis, however, peace can only be achieved if the Palestinians recognise the rights of Jews to occupy their land, to colonise their lands, and to discriminate against them.

To do so, the Israelis offer a simple formula, which Obama has also endorsed and insists on, namely that the Palestinians must recognise Israel’s right to be a Jewish state.

Netanyahu does not mince words when he asserts that: “this year in the Knesset and in the US Congress, I laid out my vision for peace in which a demilitarised Palestinian state recognises the Jewish state. Yes, the Jewish state. After all, this is the body that recognised the Jewish state 64 years ago. Now, don’t you think it’s about time that Palestinians did the same? … Israel has no intention whatsoever to change the democratic character of our state. We just don’t want the Palestinians to try to change the Jewish character of our state. We want … them to give up the fantasy of flooding Israel with millions of Palestinians.”

Challenging the UN and international law, which has called on Israel to allow the Palestinians it expelled to come back to their homes, is identified as a “flood” that will undermine Israel’s raison d’être as a state that extends racial and colonial privileges to Jews, which indeed it would be.

Where Netanyahu is wrong is when he asserts that when the UN General Assembly called for the establishment of a Jewish State in 1947, it, by default, recognised the Jewish State’s right to expel the Palestinian people, colonise their lands, and confiscate their property for the exclusive use of Jews and to discriminate against them by law.

Not only did the UN Partition Plan grant no such rights to the Jewish state, it explicitly stated that the establishment of such a Jewish state means that this state cannot expel its non-Jewish population, and that “no discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex” (Chapter 2, Article 2) and that “no expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the Jewish State … shall be allowed except for public purposes. In all cases of expropriation full compensation as fixed by the Supreme Court shall be said previous to dispossession.” (Chapter 2, Article 8).

The fabrications and lies about UN recognition are being asserted by Netanyahu to the very international body that issued the Partition Plan, and are addressed to their face, as truths, when all they are is nothing less than facts on the ground established by Israel, condemned by the UN, and defended by the United States.

While the negotiations that the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis have engaged in have prevented the Palestinians from raising the 1947/1948 crimes of the Israeli state (and those committed in the decades to come) because they would render the “first fact” dubitable indeed, Netanyahu and Obama raise these crimes as a sacrosanct principle of the Jewishness of the state, indeed of the very “first fact” that they affirmed.

Indeed Netanyahu does the same with Israeli crimes post 1967, including the colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Finally, Netanyahu concludes with a call to expel the 1.6 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. He instructs PA President Abbas to: “Recognise the Jewish state, and make peace with us. In such a genuine peace, Israel is prepared to make painful compromises. We believe that the Palestinians should be neither the citizens of Israel nor its subjects. They should live in a free state of their own. But they should be ready, like us, for compromise.”

“We believe that the Palestinians should neither be the citizens of Israel nor its subjects.”

– Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister

Netanyahu offers his call for a new expulsion of Palestinian citizens of Israel as a compromise that the Palestinians should accept. In doing so, his logic is impeccable. If Palestinians recognise the “first fact”, namely, Israel’s right to be a Jewish state based on fabricated historical claims, and that it should guarantee Jewish racial and colonial privilege, then it follows that they must accept another expulsion of Palestinians from that state to ensure that Jewish privilege continues to operate.

It is this formula of peace that the Israelis offer the Palestinians and which the Palestinians, even the collaborating PA, cannot accept.

When Obama asserts that “peace depends upon compromise among peoples who must live together long after our speeches are over, and our votes have been counted,” he is being at best coy, for the peace that Israel seeks, as Netanyahu’s call for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens, rendering Israel finally Araberrein, clarify, will result in Palestinians and Israelis not living together at all.

The Pale of Palestinian settlement

The peace that Israel is proposing for Palestinians in fact evokes another memory, of how another country dealt with Jewish settlement, namely the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great and the creation of the Pale of Settlement in the late eighteenth century for Jews to be confined to, which they were for the most part till the early part of the twentieth century.

The Pale, like the Palestinian Bantustans, was the only territory where Russian Jews were allowed to live by the anti-Jewish czars, though Russian Christians also lived in it to ensure that there was no territorial contiguity for Jews. The Palestinian Bantustans would serve a similar function.

While Israel will become Araberrein, the Palestinian Bantustans carved out of West Bank and East Jerusalem territories would be criss-crossed by Jews-only roads and Jewish-only colonial settlements and cities, and by the Israeli army, which, as Netanyahu himself has proposed, will be stationed indefinitely in the Jordan Valley.

The Pale of Palestinian Settlement will be then called a “Palestinian State” which the Israelis and the Americans will immediately recognise as “sovereign”, though it would not even have the formal accoutrements of sovereignty. It is thus that the Palestinian State, whose existence would neither be a fact nor the truth, will be recognised as a fact on the ground, indeed the very last fact that Israel and the US will be asserting.

For the Palestinians to survive the more than a century-long Zionist assault on their society and country, their only option is to resist this Israeli- and American- imposed “peace”, and all the so-called facts they impose on them, from the very first “fact” to the very last one.

By Joseph Massad

27 October 2011

@ Al- Jazeera

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. His most recent books are The Persistence of the Palestinian Question and Desiring Arabs.

Source: Al Jazeera

The claim that Iran employed a used-car salesman with a conviction for cheque fraud to hire Mexican gangsters to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington goes against all that is known of Iran’s highly sophisticated intelligence service.

The confident announcement of this bizarre plot by the US Attorney General Eric Holder sounds alarmingly similar to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious claim before the UN in 2003 that the US possessed irrefutable evidence Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.

The problem is that the US government has very publicly committed itself to a version of events, however unlikely, that, if true, would be a case for war against Iran. It will be difficult for the US to back away from such allegations now.

Could the accusations be true? The plot as described in court was puerile, easy to discover and unlikely to succeed. A Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) informant in Corpus Christi, Texas, with supposed links to Los Zetas gangsters in Mexico, said he had been approached by an Iranian friend of his aunt called Mansour Arbabsiar to hire the Zetas to make attacks. A link is established with the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

None of this makes sense. The IRGC is famous for making sure that responsibility for its actions can never be traced to Iran. It usually operates through proxies. Yet suddenly here it is sending $100,000 (£63,000) from a known IRGC bank account to hire assassins in Mexico. The beneficiaries from such a plot are evident. There will be those on the neo-con right and extreme supporters of Israel who have long been pressing for a war with Iran. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have been vociferously asserting that Iran is orchestrating Shia pro-democracy protests, but without finding many believers in the rest of the world. Their claims are now likely to be taken more seriously in Washington. There will be less pressure on countries like Bahrain to accommodate their Shia populations.

In Iraq, the US and Britain were always seeing Iran’s hidden hand supporting their opponents, but they could never quite prove it. It was also true, to a degree never appreciated in the US, that Washington and Tehran were at one in getting rid of Saddam Hussein and installing a Shia government. There were points in common and a struggle for influence. The same has been true in Afghanistan, where Iran was delighted to see the anti-Shia Taliban overthrown in 2001.

Some Iran specialists suggest there might be a “rogue faction” within the Revolutionary Guard, but there is no evidence such a body exists or of a convincing motive for it to be associating with Mexican gangsters.

On Wednesday afternoon, we marched out of Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators have bedded down for the duration. Drums were pounding and shouts of “Whose streets? Our streets!” “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street,” and “This is what democracy looks like, that is what hypocrisy looks like!” rang out as we headed directly into New York City’s version of a police state. The helicopters with the high-tech sensors and high-resolution cameras hovered in the distant sky, the security cams peered down from walls, the barriers the police had set up hemmed us in — no street, just sidewalk for these demonstrators — and the cops, scores of flexi-cuffs looped at their belts, were lined up all (photo: Ianqui Doodle)

along the way, while empty buses wheeled past ready for future arrestees. (photo: Ianqui Doodle)

This was not exactly a shining Big Apple example of the “freedom” to demonstrate. It was demonstration as imprisonment and at certain moments, at least for this 67-year-old, it was claustrophobic. This is the way the state treats 15,000 terrorist suspects, not its own citizens.

Still, the energy and high spirits were staggering. The unions were out — nurses, teachers, construction workers — the bands were lively (“… down by the riverside, ain’t gonna study war no more…”), and hand-made signs were everywhere and about everything under the sun: “Crime does pay in the USA — on Wall Street,” “When did the common good become a bad idea,” “4 years in college, $100,000 in debt, for a hostess job,” “Eat the rich,” “Arab Spring to Wall Street Fall” (with the final “L” in “Fall” slipping off the sign), “We are the 99%,” “Legalize online poker, occupy Wall St.”

Amid the kaleidoscopic range of topics on those signs and in those chants and cries, one thing, one name, was largely missing: the president’s. In those hours marching and at Foley Square amid the din of so many thousands of massed people, I saw one sign that said “Obama = Bush” and another that went something like “The Barack Obama we elected would be out here with us.” That was it. Sayonara.

It’s as if the spreading movement, made up of kids who might once have turned out for presidential candidate Obama, had left him and his administration in the dust. Like big labor, the left, and the media, the administration that loved its bankers to death (and got little enough in return for that embrace) is now playing catch-up with a ragtag bunch of protesters it wouldn’t have thought twice about if they hadn’t somehow caught the zeitgeist of this moment. (Don’t forget that the Obama administration was similarly left scrambling and desperately behind events when it came to the demonstrators in Tahrir Square in Cairo last January.)

The best Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner could say a few days ago, when asked about his sympathies for the Occupy Wall Street movement, was: “I feel a lot of sympathy for what you might describe as a general sense among Americans that we’ve lost a sense of possibility.” Really? White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley didn’t know if the movement was exactly “helpful” for the White House agenda. Truly? And White House press spokesman Jay Carney commented blandly, “I would simply say that, to the extent that people are frustrated with the economic situation, we understand.” Do you?

Suddenly, last Thursday, with news about the anti-Wall Street movement whipping up a storm, the Obama administration found itself out of breath and running hard to reposition itself. Vice President Joe Biden said, “The core is the bargain has been breached with the American people,” while at his news conference addressing questions about the movement the president added, “I think it expresses the frustrations that the American people feel… [T]he protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

Still, those signs with everything but Barack Obama on them should be considered a warning. Recently, Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean writer and activist, penned a message from a man who died in the attacks of September 11th. His name was Salvador Allende, he was the elected president of Chile, and the “terrorists” on that day in 1973 were the Chilean military backed by the CIA. (Strangely enough, afterwards no one declared a global war on anyone.)

Dorfman, author most recently of Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile, channels warning words from “the dead” to Barack Obama. But mark my words, Allende’s isn’t the only warning to the president at this moment. Those kids in downtown Manhattan (and increasingly across the country and the world) are offering their own warning, and theirs, after a fashion, comes from the future, one in which Obama’s presidency could someday be seen as little but an irrelevancy.

By Tom Engelhardt

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com

Nazareth: Amid the enthusiastic applause in New York City and the celebrations in Ramallah, it was easy to believe — if only a for minute — that, after decades of obstruction by Israel and the United States, a Palestinian state might finally be pulled out of the United Nations’ hat. Will the world’s conscience be midwife to a new era ending Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians?

It seems not.

The Palestinian application, handed to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last week, has now disappeared from view — for weeks, it seems — while the United States and Israel devise a face-saving formula to kill it in the Security Council. Behind the scenes, the pair are strong-arming the council’s members to block Palestinian statehood without the need for the US to cast its threatened veto.

Whether or not President Barack Obama wields the knife with his own hand, no one is under any illusion that Washington and Israel are responsible for the formal demise of the peace process. In revealing to the world its hypocrisy on the Middle East, the US has ensured both that the Arab public is infuriated and that the Palestinians will jump ship on the two-state solution.

But there was one significant victory at the UN for Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, even if it was not the one he sought. He will not achieve statehood for his people at the world body, but he has fatally discredited the US as the arbiter of a Middle East peace.

Craven to Israel

In telling the Palestinians there was “no shortcut” to statehood — after they have already waited more than six decades for justice — the US president revealed his country as incapable of offering moral leadership on the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Obama is this craven to Israel, what better reception can the Palestinians hope to receive from a future US leader?

One guest at the UN had the nerve to politely point this out in his speech. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president who himself appears to be wavering from his original support for a Palestinian state, warned that US control of the peace process needed to end.

“We must stop believing that a single country, even the largest, or a small group of countries can resolve so complex a problem,” he told the General Assembly. His suggestion was for a more active role for Europe and the Arab states at peace with Israel.

Sarkozy appeared to have overlooked the fact that responsibility for solving the conflict was widened in much this way in 2002 with the creation of the Quartet, comprising the US, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.

The Quartet’s formation was necessary because the US and Israel realized that the Palestinian leadership would not continue playing the peace process game if oversight remained exclusively with Washington, following the Palestinians’ betrayal by President Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000. The Quartet’s job was to restore Palestinian faith in — and buy a few more years for — the Oslo process.

Blair’s bias

However, the Quartet quickly discredited itself too, not least because its officials never strayed far from the Israeli-Washington consensus. Last week senior Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath spoke for most Palestinians when he accused the Quartet’s envoy, Tony Blair, of sounding like an “Israeli diplomat” as he sought to dissuade Abbas from applying for statehood.

And true to form, the Quartet responded to the Palestinians’ UN application by limply offering Abbas instead more of the same tired talks that have gone nowhere for two decades.

The Palestinian leadership’s move to the UN, effectively bypassing the Quartet, widens the circle of responsibility for Middle East peace yet further. It also neatly brings the Palestinians’ 63-year plight back to the world body.

But Abbas’ application also exposes the UN’s powerlessness to intervene in an effective way. Statehood depends on a successful referral to the Security Council, which is dominated by the US. The General Assembly may be more sympathetic but it can confer no more than a symbolic upgrading of Palestine’s status, putting it on a par with the Vatican.

So the Palestinian leadership is stuck. Abbas has run out of institutional addresses for helping him to establish a state alongside Israel. And that means there is a third casualty of the statehood bid — the Palestinian Authority. The PA was the fruit of the Oslo process, and will wither without its sustenance.

Entering a new phase

Instead we are entering a new phase of the conflict in which the US, Europe, and the UN will have only a marginal part to play. The Palestinian old guard are about to be challenged by a new generation that is tired of the formal structures of diplomacy that pander to Israel’s interests only.

The young new Palestinian leaders are familiar with social media, are better equipped to organize a popular mass movement, and refuse to be bound by the borders that encaged their parents and grandparents. Their assessment is that the PA — and even the Palestinians’ unrepresentative supra-body, the Palestine Liberation Organization — are part of the problem, not the solution.

Until now they have remained largely deferential to their elders, but that trust is fast waning. Educated and alienated, they are looking for new answers to an old problem.

They will not be seeking them from the countries and institutions that have repeatedly confirmed their complicity in sustaining the Palestinian people’s misery. The new leaders will appeal over the heads of the gatekeepers, turning to the court of global public opinion. Polls show that in Europe and the US, ordinary people are far more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than their governments.

The first shoots of this revolution in Palestinian politics were evident in the youth movement that earlier this year frightened Abbas’ Fatah party and Hamas into creating a semblance of unity. These youngsters, now shorn of the distracting illusion of Palestinian statehood, will redirect their energies into an anti-apartheid struggle, using the tools of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience. Their rallying cry will be one person-one vote in the single state Israel rules over.

Global support will be translated into a rapid intensification of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Israel’s legitimacy and the credibility of its dubious claim to being a democracy are likely to take yet more of a hammering.

Events at the UN are creating a new clarity for Palestinians, reminding them that there can be no self-determination until they liberate themselves from the legacy of colonialism and the self-serving illusions of the ageing notables who now lead them. The old men in suits have had their day.

By Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook won this year’s Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net