Why Is Obama Silent Over The New Congo War?

The last Congo war that ended in 2003 killed 5.4 million people, the worst humanitarian disaster since World War II. The killing was directly enabled by international silence over the issue; the war was ignored and the causes obscured because governments were backing groups involved in the fighting.  Now a new Congo war has begun and the silence is, again, deafening.

President Obama seems not to have noticed a new war has broken out in the war-scarred Congo; he  appears blind to the refugee crisis and the war crimes committed by the invading M23 militia against the democratically elected government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

But appearances can be deceiving. The U.S. government has their bloody hands all over this conflict, just as they did during the last Congo war when Bill Clinton was President. President Obama’s inaction is a conscious act of encouragement for the invaders, just as Clinton’s was. Instead of Obama denouncing the invasion and the approaching overthrow of a democratically elected government, silence becomes a very powerful action of intentional complicity on the side of the invaders.

Why would Obama do this? The invaders are armed and financed by Rwanda, a “strong ally” and puppet of the United States. The United Nations released a report conclusively proving that the Rwandan government is backing the rebels, but the U.S. government and U.S. media cartoonishly pretend that the issue is debatable.

The last Congo War that killed 5.4 million people was also the result of the U.S.-backed invading armies of Rwanda and Uganda, as explained in the excellently researched book “Africa’s World War,” by French journalist Gerard Prunier.

In fact, many of the same Rwandan war criminals involved in the last Congo War, such as Bosco Ntaganda, are in charge of the M23 militia and wanted for war crimes by the U.N. international criminal court. The current Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, is a “good friend” of the U.S. government and one of the most notorious war criminals on the planet, due to his leading roles in the Rwandan genocide and consequent Congo War.

A group of Congolese and Rwandan activists have been demanding that Kagame be tried for his key role in the Rwandan genocide.

As Prunier’s book explains, the Rwandan genocide was sparked by Kagame’s invasion of Rwanda — from U.S. ally Uganda. After Kagame took power in post-genocide Rwanda, he then informed the U.S. — during a trip to Washington D.C. — that he would be invading the Congo. Prunier quotes Kagame in Africa’s World War:

“I delivered a veiled warning [to the U.S.]: the failure of the international community to take action [against the Congo] would mean that Rwanda would take action… But their [the Clinton Administration’s] response was really no response at all”  (pg 68).

In international diplomacy speak, such a lack of response — to a threat of military invasion — acts as a glaring diplomatic green light.

The same blinding green light is now being offered by Obama to the exact same war criminals as they again invade the Congo.

But why again? The Democratic Republic of the Congo’s current President, Joseph Kabila, helped lead the military invasion during the last Congo war. As a good stooge, he delivered Congo’s immense mining and oil wealth to multi-national corporations. But then his puppet strings started to fray.

Kabila later distanced himself from U.S. puppets Rwanda and Uganda, not to mention the U.S. dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. The IMF, for example, warned Kabila against a strategic infrastructural and development aid package with China, but Kabila shrugged them off. The Economist explains:

“…[The Congo] appears to have gained the upper hand in a row with foreign donors over a mining and infrastructure package worth $9 billion that was agreed a year ago with China. The IMF objected to it, on the ground that it would saddle Congo with a massive new debt, so [the IMF] is delaying forgiveness of most of the $10 billion-plus that Congo already owes.”

This act instantly transformed Kabila from an unreliable friend to an enemy. The U.S. and China have been madly scrambling for Africa’s immense wealth of raw materials, and Kabila’s new alliance with China was too much for the U.S. to bear.

Kabila further inflamed his former allies by demanding that the international corporations exploiting the Congo’s precious metals have their super-profit contracts re-negotiated, so that the country might actually receive some benefit from its riches.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is home to 80 percent of the world’s cobalt, an extremely precious mineral needed to construct many modern technologies, including weaponry, cell phones, and computers. The DRC is possibly the most mineral/resource rich country in the world — overflowing with everything from diamonds to oil — though its people are among the world’s poorest, due to generations of corporate plunder of its wealth.

Now, a new war is underway and the U.N. is literally sitting on their hands. There are 17,500 U.N. peacekeepers in the DRC, not to mention U.S. Special Forces. The invading M23 militia has 3,000 fighters. What was the U.N.’s response to the invasion? The New York Times reports:

“United Nations officials have said that they did not have the numbers to beat back the rebels and that they were worried about collateral damage, but many Congolese have rendered their own verdict. On Wednesday, rioters in Bunia, north of Goma, ransacked the houses of United Nations’ personnel.”

If Obama and/or the U.N. made one public statement about militarily defending the elected Congolese government against invasion, the M23 militia would have never acted.

Human Rights Watch and other groups have correctly labeled the M23’s commanders as responsible for “ethnic massacres, recruitment of children, mass rape, killings, abductions and torture.”

But at the U.N. the Obama administration has been actively protecting this group. The New York Times continues:

“Some human rights groups say that Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations and a leading contender to be President Obama’s next secretary of state, has been far too soft on Rwanda, which is a close American ally and whose president, Paul Kagame, has known Ms. Rice for years. The activists have accused her of watering down language in a Security Council resolution that would have mentioned Rwanda’s links to the [M23] rebels and say she also tried to block the publication of part of a [U.N.] report that detailed Rwanda’s covert support for the M23.”

It’s likely that the Obama administration will jump into action as soon as his M23 allies complete their military objective of regime change, and re-open the Congo’s mineral wealth to U.S. corporations to profit from. There are currently talks occurring in U.S.-puppet Uganda between the M23 and the Congo government. It is unlikely that these talks will produce much of a result unless Kabila stands down and allows the M23 and its Rwandan backers to take over the country. The M23 knows it’s in an excellent bargaining position, given the silence of the U.N. and the United States government.

If the war drags on, expect more international silence. Expect more massacres and ethnic cleansing too, and expect the still-recovering people of the Congo to be re-tossed into massive refugee camps where they can again expect militia-sponsored killings, rape, starvation, and the various barbarisms that have accompanied this especially brutal war, a brutality that grows most viciously in environments of silence.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/08/17/opposition-groups-want-rwandan-president-paul-kagame-investigated-for-war-crimes/

http://www.economist.com/node/13496903?zid=309ah=80dcf288b8561b012f603b9fd9577f0e

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/world/africa/congo-rebels-in-goma-vow-to-take-kinshasha.html

Expelling Diplomats: The Downside

A Cheap Political Trick…

The Houla massacre has whipped up a new wave of outrage at the claimed brutality of Syria’s government. Syrian envoys were kicked out of some Western capitals, more financial sanctions slapped on the regime in Damascus, and more furious demands are being made for a regime change toppling Bashar al-Assad and more calls for military intervention issued.

The civilized world kicking out Syrian diplomats was to be the thin reed of straw that would certainly break the camel’s back in Damascus’ Presidential Palace.

However, expelling Syrian diplomats, who no one is even suggesting, had anything to do with the massacre at Houla constitutes a politically cheap feel good knee jerk reaction to the horrific images from the slaughter at Houla. Certainly the images of chopped bodies and that of a precious baby with a pacifier in its mouth and a bullet hole in its temple reminded many of us of the My Lai, Sabra-Shatila, Srebrenica, and Rwanda massacres to note just a few. Encouraging a global reaction, some in Washington vowed that the Obama doctrine and the right to protect (R2P) could not allow the Syrian regime to remain in power and Houla was to be the game changer.

The Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961 signed by 186 countries constructed a frame for diplomatic relations between independent countries. It specifies the privileges of a diplomatic mission that enables diplomats to perform their function without fear of coercion, harassment or politically motivated expulsions by the host country. Its articles are a cornerstone of modern international relations.

While Article 9 does grant the host nation the right to declare a particular member of the diplomatic staff to be persona non grata, the understanding of the drafters of the Vienna Convention and the trauvaux preparatoire make plan that the provision is to be used solely for high crimes and under no circumstances to embarrass or trivialize the sending government or its diplomatic mission. The US action with respect to expelling Syrian diplomats does both.

As diplomacy is the practice of conducting international relations, as in negotiating alliances, treaties, and agreements, it is difficult to take seriously White House and NATO claims of a preference for diplomacy rather than war with Syria, while they lead the campaign to expel the very Syrian diplomats necessary for dialogue and negotiations.

The idea to have American allies summarily expel Syrian diplomats was hatched, according to a US congressional source, in the fertile office of outgoing US Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, Jeffrey Feltman, rumored to be on his way to New York to become, unimaginably one might be forgiven for thinking, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Political Affairs. The Feltman appointment by Ban Ki-moon is thought by two staffers on John Kerry’s US Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be a pro quid quo for American support for Ban’s re-election as UN Secretary-General and Feltman’s support for Senator Kerry’s being appointed Secretary of State in Obama’s second administration.

Feltman has had an enduring love affair with the UN, especially the Security Council, which he reportedly views as a true and tested sharp arrow in the quiver of the US-Israel foreign policy apparatus. His tenure at the State Department, when he “leaves” his current post as expected in June, will remain substantially unchanged preserving his de facto ambassadorships to five countries in the Middle East, despite these posts being pro forma occupied by his personally approved “potted plants,” no disrespect intended to the current occupants at those diplomatic posts.

Feldman’s office also produced UN Security Council Resolution 1757 setting up a Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) targeting Syria and Hezbollah for the 2005 Rafiq Hariri assassination, and earlier, in September of 2004, UN Resolution 1559 which he has written was designed in his office to disarm the National Lebanese Resistance and expel Syrian troops from Lebanon. UN SCR 1757, setting up the STL, was passed on a 10-0 with 5 abstentions under Feltman’s favorite section of the UN Charter, being Chapter Seven, with its potential for using unlimited military force to enforce Security Council decisions. So far in Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman has initiated no fewer than a dozen “Welch Club” projects between 2005 and the present in order to guarantee “Lebanon’s independence, sovereignty, and freedom from foreign interference.” In no way to be confused with Undersecretary Feltman’s own activities here.

The premises of the US diplomatic mission in Libya’s eastern city of Benghazi, came under attack during the night of 6/5/12. The US embassy in Damascus had been closed earlier in the crisis, and the US Embassy in Beirut is on near lock down status with plans to close and evacuate staff on one hours’ notice if deemed prudent. These events highlight the importance of respecting the 1961 Vienna Convention and not expelling diplomats as political gamesmanship because the rash expulsions may not only generate unintended consequences, but inevitably invite retaliatory expulsions. Hence the Syrian government declared 17 US and Western diplomats, persona non grata earlier this week. Syria’s much respected Deputy Foreign Minister, Faisal Makdad told the media in Damascus that, “We waited for so long for the other side to correct their policies and offer the needed support to Annan’s plan and the observers’ mission. But we regret that we had to take this measure because they do not want this mission to succeed.”

The gratuitous chest thumping political theater led by Washington also undermines international treaty law while eroding respect for the nearly universally agreed to protections of diplomats, envoys, embassies and consulates.

Hopefully the White House and its allies will act immediately to contain this latest provocation and lift their diplomatic expulsion edicts against Syria. The Obama administration ought also to engage in dialogue to resolve its differences with the Syrian government mindful of Kofi Annan’s just announced revised 6 point peace proposal and on a basis of “principles of equality and mutual respect.

War Porn: The New Safe Sex

The early 21st century is addicted to war porn, a prime spectator sport consumed by global couch and digital potatoes. War porn took the limelight on the evening of September 11, 2001, when the George W Bush administration launched the “war on terror” – which was interpreted by many of its practitioners as a subtle legitimization of United States state terror against, predominantly, Muslims.

This was also a war OF terror – as in a manifestation of state terror pitting urban high-tech might against basically rural, low-tech cunning. The US did not exercise this monopoly; Beijing practiced it in Xinjiang, its far west, and Russia practiced it in Chechnya.

Like porn, war porn cannot exist without being based on a lie – a crude representation. But unlike porn, war porn is the real thing; unlike crude, cheap snuff movies, people in war porn actually die – in droves.

The lie to finish all lies at the center of this representation was definitely established with the leak of the 2005 Downing Street memo, in which the head of the British MI6 confirmed that the Bush administration wanted to take out Iraq’s Saddam Hussein by linking Islamic terrorism with (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction (WMD). So, as the memo put it, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

In the end, George “you’re either with us or against us” Bush did star in his own, larger-than-life snuff movie – that happened to double as the invasion and destruction of the eastern flank of the Arab nation.

The New Guernica

Iraq may indeed be seen as the Star Wars of war porn – an apotheosis of sequels. Take the (second) Fallujah offensive in late 2004. At the time I described it as the new Guernica. I also took the liberty of paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre, writing about the Algerian War; after Fallujah no two Americans shall meet without a corpse lying between them. To quote Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, there were bodies, bodies everywhere.

The Francisco Franco in Fallujah was Iyad Allawi, the US-installed interim premier. It was Allawi who “asked” the Pentagon to bomb Fallujah. In Guernica – as in Fallujah – there was no distinction between civilians and guerrillas: it was the rule of “Viva la muerte!”

United States Marine Corps commanders said on the record that Fallujah was the house of Satan. Franco denied the massacre in Guernica and blamed the local population – just as Allawi and the Pentagon denied any civilian deaths and insisted “insurgents” were guilty.

Fallujah was reduced to rubble, at least 200,000 residents became refugees, and thousands of civilians were killed, in order to “save it” (echoes of Vietnam). No one in Western corporate media had the guts to say that in fact Fallujah was the American Halabja.

Fifteen years before Fallujah, in Halabja, Washington was a very enthusiastic supplier of chemical weapons to Saddam, who used them to gas thousands of Kurds. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the time said it was not Saddam; it was Khomeinist Iran. Yet Saddam did it, and did it deliberately, just like the US in Fallujah.

Fallujah doctors identified swollen and yellowish corpses without any injuries, as well as “melted bodies” – victims of napalm, the cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel. Residents who managed to escape told of bombing by “poisonous gases” and “weird bombs that smoke like a mushroom cloud … and then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. The pieces of these strange bombs explode into large fires that burn the skin even when you throw water over them.”

That’s exactly what happens to people bombed with napalm or white phosphorus. The United Nations banned the bombing of civilians with napalm in 1980. The US is the only country in the world still using napalm.

Fallujah also provided a mini-snuff movie hit; the summary execution of a wounded, defenseless Iraqi man inside a mosque by a US Marine. The execution, caught on tape, and watched by millions on YouTube, graphically spelled out the “special” rules of engagement. US Marine commanders at the time were telling their soldiers to “shoot everything that moves and everything that doesn’t move”; to fire “two bullets in every body”; in case of seeing any military-aged men in the streets of Fallujah, to “drop ‘em”; and to spray every home with machine-gun and tank fire before entering them.

The rules of engagement in Iraq were codified in a 182-page field manual distributed to each and every soldier and issued in October 2004 by the Pentagon. This counter-insurgency manual stressed five rules; “protect the population; establish local political institutions; reinforce local governments; eliminate insurgent capabilities; and exploit information from local sources.”

Now back to reality. Fallujah’s population was not protected: it was bombed out of the city and turned into a mass of thousands of refugees. Political institutions were already in place: the Fallujah Shura was running the city. No local government can possibly run a pile of rubble to be recovered by seething citizens, not to mention be “reinforced”. “Insurgent capabilities” were not eliminated; the resistance dispersed around the 22 other cities out of control by the US occupation, and spread up north all the way to Mosul; and the Americans remained without intelligence “from local sources” because they antagonized every possible heart and mind.

Meanwhile, in the US, most of the population was already immune to war porn. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke out in the spring of 2004, I was driving through Texas, exploring Bushland. Virtually everybody I spoke to either attributed the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to “a few bad apples”, or defended it on patriotic grounds (“we must teach a lesson to “terrorists”).

I Love A Man In Uniform

In thesis, there is an approved mechanism in the 21st century to defend civilians from war porn. It’s the R2P – “responsibility to protect” doctrine. This was an idea floated already in 2001 – a few weeks after the war on terror was unleashed, in fact – by the Canadian government and a few foundations. The idea was that the concert of nations had a “moral duty” to deploy a humanitarian intervention in cases such as Halabja, not to mention the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the mid-1970s or the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

In 2004, a panel at the UN codified the idea – crucially with the Security Council being able to authorize a “military intervention” only “as a last resort”. Then, in 2005, the UN General Assembly endorsed a resolution supporting R2P, and in 2006 the UN Security Council passed resolution 1674 about “the protection of civilians in armed conflict”; they should be protected against “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.

Now fast-forward to the end of 2008, early 2009, when Israel – using American fighter jets to raise hell – unleashed a large-scale attack on the civilian population of the Gaza strip.

Look at the official US reaction; “Israel has obviously decided to protect herself and her people,” said then-president Bush. The US Congress voted by a staggering 390-to-5 to recognize “Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza”. The incoming Barack Obama administration was thunderously silent. Only future Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We support Israel’s right to self-defense.”

At least 1,300 civilians – including scores of women and children – were killed by state terror in Gaza. Nobody invoked R2P. Nobody pointed to Israel’s graphic failure in its “responsibility to protect” Palestinians. Nobody called for a “humanitarian intervention” targeting Israel.

The mere notion that a superpower – and other lesser powers – make their foreign policy decisions based on humanitarian grounds, such as protecting people under siege, is an absolute joke. So already at the time we learned how R2P was to be instrumentalized. It did not apply to the US in Iraq or Afghanistan. It did not apply to Israel in Palestine. It would eventually apply only to frame “rogue” rulers that are not “our bastards” – as in Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. “Humanitarian” intervention, yes; but only to get rid of “the bad guys.”

And the beauty of R2P was that it could be turned upside down anytime. Bush pleaded for the “liberation” of suffering Afghans – and especially burqa-clad Afghan women – from the “evil” Taliban, in fact configuring Afghanistan as a humanitarian intervention.

And when the bogus links between al-Qaeda and the non-existent WMDs were debunked, Washington began to justify the invasion, occupation and destruction of Iraq via … R2P; “responsibility to protect” Iraqis from Saddam, and then to protect Iraqis from themselves.

The Killer Awoke Before Dawn

The most recent installment in serial episodes of war porn is the Kandahar massacre, when, according to the official Pentagon version (or cover up) an American army sergeant, a sniper and Iraqi war veteran – a highly trained assassin – shot 17 Afghan civilians, including nine women and four children, in two villages two miles apart, and burned some of their bodies.

Like with Abu Ghraib, there was the usual torrent of denials from the Pentagon – as in “this is not us” or “we don’t do things these way”; not to mention a tsunami of stories in US corporate media humanizing the hero-turned-mass killer, as in “he’s such a good guy, a family man”. In contrast, not a single word about The Other – the Afghan victims. They are faceless; and nobody knows their names.

A – serious – Afghan enquiry established that some 20 soldiers may have been part of the massacre – as in My Lai in Vietnam; and that included the rape of two of the women. It does make sense. War porn is a lethal, group subculture – complete with targeted assassinations, revenge killings, desecration of bodies, harvesting of trophies (severed fingers or ears), burning of Korans and pissing on dead bodies. It’s essentially a collective sport.

US “kill teams” have deliberately executed random, innocent Afghan civilians, mostly teenagers, for sport, planted weapons on their bodies, and then posed with their corpses as trophies. Not by accident they had been operating out of a base in the same area of the Kandahar massacre.

And we should not forget former top US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who in April 10, 2010, admitted, bluntly, “We’ve shot an amazing number of people” who were not a threat to the US or Western civilization.

The Pentagon spins and sells in Afghanistan what it sold in Iraq (and even way back in Vietnam for that matter); the idea that this is a “population-centric counter-insurgency” – or COIN, to “win hearts and minds”, and part of a great nation building project.

This is a monumental lie. The Obama surge in Afghanistan – based on COIN – was a total failure. What replaced it was hardcore, covert, dark war, led by “kill teams” of Special Forces. That implies an inflation of air strikes and night raids. No to mention drone strikes, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s tribal areas, whose favorite targets seem to be Pashtun wedding parties.

Incidentally, the CIA claims that since May 2010, ultra-smart drones have killed more than 600 “carefully selected” human targets – and, miraculously, not a single civilian.

Expect to see this war porn extravaganza celebrated in an orgy of upcoming, joint Pentagon-Hollywood blockbusters. In real life, this is spun by people such as John Nagl, who was on General David Petraeus’ staff in Iraq and now runs the pro-Pentagon think-tank Center for New American Security.

The new stellar macho, macho men may be the commandos under the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). But this a Pentagon production, which has created, according to Nagl, an “industrial strength counter-terrorism killing machine”.

Reality, though, is much more prosaic. COIN techniques, applied by McChrystal, relied on only three components; 24-hour surveillance by drones; monitoring of mobile phones; and pinpointing the physical location of the phones from their signals.

This implies that anyone in an area under a drone watch using a cell phone was branded as a “terrorist”, or at least “terrorist sympathizer”. And then the focus of the night raids in Afghanistan shifted from “high value targets” – high-level and mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban – to anyone who was branded as helping the Taliban.

In May 2009, before McChrystal arrived, US Special Forces were carrying 20 raids a month. By November, they were 90 a month. By the spring of 2010, they were 250 a month. When McChrystal was fired – because of a story in Rolling Stone (he was competing with Lady Gaga for the cover; Lady Gaga won) – and Obama replaced him with Petraeus in the summer of 2010, there were 600 a month. By April 2011, they were more than 1,000 a month.

So this is how it works. Don’t even think of using a cell phone in Kandahar and other Afghan provinces. Otherwise, the “eyes in the sky” are going to get you. At the very least you will be sent to jail, along with thousands of other civilians branded as “terrorist sympathizers”; and intelligence analysts will use your data to compile their “kill/capture list” and catch even more civilians in their net.

As for the civilian “collateral damage” of the night raids, they were always presented by the Pentagon as “terrorists”. Example; in a raid in Gardez on February 12, 2010, two men were killed; a local government prosecutor and an Afghan intelligence official, as well as three women (two of them pregnant). The killers told the US-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) command in Kabul that the two men were “terrorists” and the women had been found tied up and gagged. Then the actual target of the raid turned himself in for questioning a few days later, and was released without any charges.

That’s just the beginning. Targeted assassination – as practiced in Afghanistan – will be the Pentagon’s tactic of choice in all future US wars.

Pass The Condom, Darling

Libya was a major war porn atrocity exhibition – complete with a nifty Roman touch of the defeated “barbarian” chief sodomized in the streets and then executed, straight on YouTube.

This, by the way, is exactly what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a lightning visit to Tripoli, had announced less than 48 hours before the fact. Gaddafi should be “captured or killed”. When she watched it in the screen of her BlackBerry she could only react with the semantic earthquake “Wow!”

From the minute a UN resolution imposed a no-fly zone over Libya under the cover of R2P, it became a green card to regime change. Plan A was always to capture and kill Gaddafi – as in an Afghan-style targeted assassination. That was the Obama administration official policy. There was no plan B.

Obama said the death of Gaddafi meant, “the strength of American leadership across the world”. That was as “We got him” (echoes of Saddam captured by the Bush administration) as one could possibly expect.

With an extra bonus. Even though Washington paid no less than 80% of the operating costs of those dimwits at NATO (roughly $2 billion), it was still pocket money. Anyway, it was still awkward to say, “We did it”, because the White House always said this was not a war; it was a “kinetic” something. And they were not in charge.

Only the hopelessly naïve may have swallowed the propaganda of NATO’s “humanitarian” 40,000-plus bombing which devastated Libya’s infrastructure back to the Stone Age as a Shock and Awe in slow motion. This never had anything to do with R2P.

This was R2P as safe sex – and the “international community” was the condom. The “international community”, as everyone knows, is composed of Washington, a few washed-up NATO members, and the democratic Persian Gulf powerhouses of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), plus the House of Saud in the shade. The EU, which up to extra time was caressing the helm of Gaddafi’s gowns, took no time to fall over themselves in editorials about the 42-year reign of a “buffoon”.

As for the concept of international law, it was left lying in a drain as filthy as the one Gaddafi was holed up in. Saddam at least got a fake trial in a kangaroo court before meeting the executioner (he ended up on YouTube as well). Osama bin Laden was simply snuffed out, assassination-style, after a territorial invasion of Pakistan (no YouTube – so many don’t believe it). Gaddafi went one up, snuffed out with a mix of air war and assassination. They are The Three Graceful Scalps of War Porn.

Sweet Emotion 

Syria is yet another declination of war porn narrative. If you can’t R2P it, fake it.

And to think that all this was codified such a long time ago. Already in 1997, the US Army War College Quarterly was defining what they called “the future of warfare”. They framed it as “the conflict between information masters and information victims”.

They were sure “we are already masters of information warfare … Hollywood is ‘preparing the battlefield’ … Information destroys traditional jobs and traditional cultures; it seduces, betrays, yet remains invulnerable … Our sophistication in handling it will enable us to outlast and outperform all hierarchical cultures … Societies that fear or otherwise cannot manage the flow of information simply will not be competitive. They might master the technological wherewithal to watch the videos, but we will be writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties. Our creativity is devastating.”

Post-everything information warfare has nothing to do with geopolitics. Just like the proverbial Hollywood product, it is to be “spawned” out of raw emotions; “hatred, jealousy, and greed – emotions, rather than strategy”.

In Syria this is exactly how Western corporate media has scripted the whole movie; the War College “information warfare” tactics in practice. The Syrian government never had much of a chance against those “writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties”.

For example, the armed opposition, the so-called Free Syrian Army (a nasty cocktail of defectors, opportunists, jihadis and foreign mercenaries) brought Western journalists to Homs and then insisted to extract them, in extremely dangerous condition, and with people being killed, via Lebanon, rather than through the Red Crescent. They were nothing else than writing the script for a foreign-imposed “humanitarian corridor” to be opened to Homs. This was pure theater – or war porn packaged as a Hollywood drama.

The problem is Western public opinion is now hostage to this brand of information warfare. Forget about even the possibility of peaceful negotiations among adult parties. What’s left is a binary good guys versus bad guys plot, where the Big Bad Guy must be destroyed at all costs (and on top of it his wife is a snob bitch who loves shopping!)

Only the terminally naïve may believe that jihadis – including Libya’s NATO rebels – financed by the Gulf Counter-revolution Club, also know as Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) are a bunch of democratic reformists burning with good intentions. Even Human Rights Watch was finally forced to acknowledge that these armed “activists” were responsible for “kidnapping, detention, and torture”, after receiving reports of “executions by armed opposition groups of security force members and civilians”.

What this (soft and hard) war porn narrative veils, in the end, is the real Syrian tragedy; the impossibility for the much-lauded “Syrian people” to get rid of all these crooks – the Assad system, the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Syrian National Council, and the mercenary-infested Free Syrian Army.

Listen To The Sound of Chaos 

This – very partial – catalogue of sorrows inevitably brings us to the current supreme war porn blockbuster – the Iran psychodrama.

2012 is the new 2002; Iran is the new Iraq; and whatever the highway, to evoke the neo-con motto, real men go to Tehran via Damascus, or real men go to Tehran non-stop.

Perhaps only underwater in the Arctic we would be able to escape the cacophonous cortege of American right-wingers – and their respective European poodles – salivating for blood and deploying the usual festival of fallacies like “Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map”, “diplomacy has run its course”, “the sanctions are too late”, or “Iran is within a year, six months, a week, a day, or a minute of assembling a bomb”. Of course these dogs of war would never bother to follow what the International Atomic Energy Agency is actually doing, not to mention the National Intelligence Estimates released by the 17 US intelligence agencies.

Because they, to a great extent, are “writing the scripts, producing them, and collecting the royalties” in terms of corporate media, they can get away with an astonishingly toxic fusion of arrogance and ignorance – about the Middle East, about Persian culture, about Asian integration, about the nuclear issue, about the oil industry, about the global economy, about “the Rest” as compared to “the West”.

Just like with Iraq in 2002, Iran is always dehumanized. The relentless, totally hysterical, fear-inducing “narrative” of “should we bomb now or should we bomb later” is always about oh so very smart bunker buster bombs and precision missiles that will accomplish an ultra clean large-scale devastation job without producing a single “collateral damage”. Just like safe sex.

And even when the voice of the establishment itself – the New York Times – admits that neither US nor Israeli intelligence believe Iran has decided to build a bomb (a 5-year-old could reach the same conclusion), the hysteria remains inter-galactic.

Meanwhile, while it gets ready – “all options are on the table”, Obama himself keeps repeating – for yet another war in what it used to call “arc of instability”, the Pentagon also found time to repackage war porn. It took only a 60-second video now on YouTube, titled Toward the Sound of Chaos, released only a few days after the Kandahar massacre. Just look at its key target audience: the very large market of poor, unemployed and politically very naïve young Americans.

Let’s listen to the mini-movie voice over: “Where chaos looms, the Few emerge. Marines move toward the sounds of tyranny, injustice and despair – with the courage and resolve to silence them. By ending conflict, instilling order and helping those who can’t help themselves, Marines face down the threats of our time.”

Maybe, in this Orwellian universe, we should ask the dead Afghans urinated upon by US Marines, or the thousands of dead in Fallujah, to write a movie review. Well, dead men don’t write. Maybe we could think about the day NATO enforces a no-fly one over Saudi Arabia to protect the Shi’ites in the eastern province, while Pentagon drones launch a carpet of Hellfire missiles over those thousands of arrogant, medieval, corrupt House of Saud princes. No, it’s not going to happen.

Over a decade after the beginning of the war on terror, this is what the world is coming to; a lazy, virtually worldwide audience, jaded, dazed and distracted from distraction by distraction, helplessly hooked on the shabby atrocity exhibition of war porn.

Source: Asia Times

The Troubling Case of Saif Gadhafi

ICC Prosecutor’s Career Move Switches Horses and Legal Theories in Libya

Zintan, Libya…

Despite the claims of the National Transitional Council of Libya (NTC) that Saif al Islam Gadhafi, the apprehended subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant that ordered his transport to The Hague, is in a secure hidden location near Zintan, Libya, a town approximately 85 miles southwest of Tripoli, this is not the case.

Neither are the assurances by Steven Anderson, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) who on 11/23/11 announced that Saif al-Islam’s injuries had been “taken care of,” nor his profuse assurances that Saif is in good health.  In point of fact, following the ICRC assurances, the Ukrainian-born Doctor Andrei Murakhovsky who lives in Zintan reported that “Saif’s wound is covered with gangrenous tissue and necrotic tissue.”  He added that “This wound is not in good condition and requires amputation. His index finger has been ripped off at the level of the middle phalange (finger bone), the bones are all shattered. It’s the same thing with the thumb of that hand.” Dr. Murakhovsky told the Reuters news service.

The morning of 11/24/11, Libyan NTC Prime Minister Abdurrahim El-Keib still insisted that “Saif al-Islam is receiving the best possible treatment, but for now he is not in the hands of the provisional central government and we don’t know where he is.”

Regarding Saif al Islam’s “secure and hidden location”, most people in the village of Zintan know where he is being held, as does this observer who visited a motley group of B-western movie types who are currently guarding and “protecting” Saif.

Although armed with a Power of Attorney from one of Saif’s family members to visit him, the group refused my request to visit Saif with the excuse that they had to consult their commander who was not expected to return for a few days since he was now the new NTC Libyan Defense Minister.

On the question of Saif’s health, there is increasing concern also because his guards claim they cannot take him to Zintan’s only hospital because someone would likely kill him in order to collect on the substantial rumored Qatar/NATO offered cash reward for whoever assassinates him thus presumably helping “the new Libya” and its allies avoid a messy trial.

Meanwhile, after what he claims in a change of heart, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, now professes that Libya, not The Hague, is the best place after all for Saif al Islam and his trial. Since its establishment by the United Nations in 2002, the ICC has had just one Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. To the reported expressed relief of many international defense lawyers, several ICC staff and ICC judges, plus legal commentators familiar with his prosecutorial work, the ICC will have his successor chosen next month in New York.  This coming weekend in New York, the legal defense organization, Avocats Sans Frontiers (ASF, ie Lawyers Without Borders) will meet in order to try to agree on a successor to propose to the 18 ICC Judges who will decide.

Prosecutor Ocampo’s visit this week to Libya caused some raised eyebrows among the groups noted above when he suddenly announced that the ICC would not invoke its UN Security Council-granted power and proceed with Case # ICC 01/11. This case was opened at the ICC on March 3, 2011, having been assigned to the ICC by the UN Security Council following the preceding month’s uprising in Benghazi, Libya.

Speculation among some in The Hague, in Libya and from ASF lawyers is that knowing that he would not be re-elected for another term as ICC Prosecutor, due to among other reasons he has not won one case during his 9 year term, has repeatedly incurred the wrath of ICC judges for bringing cases which they ruled lacked sufficient evidence and his penchant for self-aggrandizing publicity and making inaccurate claims about cases and defendants that border on judicial misconduct, Ocampo decided to switch horses.

One egregious example of his making false representations is the current ICC case involving Saif al-Islam Gadhafi in which Ocampo made several inaccurate headline-grabbing statements over the past several weeks claiming to be negotiating “indirectly” with Saif al Islam to give himself up to the ICC. Saif has emphatically denied Ocampo’s grandstanding claims and presumably, were Ocampo to attempt to personally prosecute his case Saif’s legal team would immediately file a motion to replace Ocampo for cause, as provided by ICC rules.

Given these problems, Ocampo, according to someone who accompanied him during his visit this week to Libya, decided to accept a lucrative offer from the NTC to advise the oil-rich country on setting up a legal system to try Saif al Islam and others.

The assurances by Moreno-Ocampo, NATO officials and American UN Ambassador Susan Rice that Libya is currently fully capable of currently handling trials of former regime loyalists are nonsense. Rice exhibited ignorance and surprise here last weekend when she claimed not to know that Libya had the death penalty and would apply the death penalty in the ICC case if given the chance.  The Libyan public’s apparent preference is for the death penalty by hanging in the two Libya ICC cases. This was the case with Rwanda, which is one reason the Ruanda Tribunal did not allow the government of Rwanda to conduct certain trials even though that government assured the UN it would not actually carry out a death penalty sentence. Libya has offered no such assurances to the ICC against the use of the death penalty nor has it submitted a legal challenge to ICC jurisdiction over the Saif al Islam or Abdullah Sanussi cases, as the Rome Statute requires.

Despite switching jobs, Ocampo has not lost interest in prosecuting the Saif al Islam case which he views as his best chance of finally winning at least an ICC related case, but not at The Hague where there is the possibility that Saif would not be convicted, given Court rules of procedure and ICC legal staff resources that would actually assist an accused in presenting his defense before the court.  Ocampo is said to be betting on gaining a victory in Saif’s high profile case by working with the NATO-created NTC government in Libya and running the prosecution as a behind the scenes “consultant” and helping Libya’s NTC keep the UN and ICC at bay while allowing the NTC to try both Saif’s case and that of Abdullah Sanussi if and when the latter is proven to have been captured.  Ocampo is said to relish the job of becoming the “Father of Libya’s new legal system.”  Ocampo is now explaining that it was never his role “to tell Libyan officials how to hold a fair trial and the  standard of the ICC is that it has to be a judicial process that is not organized to shield the suspect and I respect that it’s important for the cases to be tried in Libya.”  He then added, “There are so many different traditions; it is difficult to say what is a fair trial.”

No sooner had the surprising news and Ocampo’s sudden vagueness about what constitutes a fair trial begun to ricochet around the Internet than this observer received an email from an international criminal lawyer whose office is two blocks from the Carl Moultrie Courthouse in Washington, DC. The American lawyer was appalled: “Paying Ocampo as a consultant for the new Libyan government on criminal trial procedures is a ridiculous thought/idea.  He has no idea of fair trial rights and has not achieved a conviction in his nearly 9 years at the ICC.”

Nor were the ICC judges thrilled at the perceived betrayal.  The ICC quickly fired off a reminder to Ocampo, to the new Libyan government and the media that it is the ICC judges, and not the ICC Prosecutor, who will decide whether a case will be held in The Hague or in the country where the alleged crimes occurred and only they will decide if Libya has the ability to conduct a fair trial. The ICC is signaling that the Ocampo-generated international headlines to the contrary notwithstanding, the issue of trial venue in Libya has not settled in ICC case # 01/11.

Prosecutor Ocampo knows well that once the ICC decides to open an investigation of a case, national courts may not investigate that case and are relieved from their obligation to do so. In addition, since the ICC has issued an arrest warrant against Libyan defendants, all states – including Libya – are obliged to cooperate fully with the Court. 

Following  the public dressing down from The Hague, Ocampo  has now retreated a bit and told CNN on 11/23/11 that: “ The only condition is the new Libyan government has to present their position to the International Criminal Court judges and the judges will decide if the case can be prosecuted in Libya. Libya will present evidence to ICC judges that the country can hold the trial, and the judges will decide if they are satisfied,” Ocampo explained.

The ICC, if it takes up the question as expected, should rule in the developing Saif al Islam case, precisely as the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found in ruling against that country’s request for trial jurisdiction, although like Libya today, Rwanda claimed to have a “modern functioning court system.”   The reason is that an initial review of Libya’s criminal judicial system and discussion with Libyan criminal defense lawyers as well as with international criminal defense lawyers with years of experience in international tribunals’ practice, shows that it is very clear that persons accused of serious crimes in Libya currently do not have even the most minimal judicial rights that are required by international norms. Today Libyan defendants do not benefit from adequate legal representation, financial support for indigent accused, travel and investigation support for defense teams, or security for defense teams. Libya’s central and local governments place impediments curtailing defense teams in the discharge of their functions.

An admittedly cursory inquiry in Libya among lawyers here also reveals nonexistent or inadequate accommodation and transport arrangements for witness, as well as a lack of arrangements for protection of witnesses before, during and after testifying in court. In addition, the NTC is engaging in a pattern of threatening potential witnesses preparing to testify against NATO in another case. Similarly the NTC is failing to provide safe and secure travel for Libyan witnesses living abroad, including in Algeria, Tunisia, Mali, Niger, and Egypt. Interviews with Libyan lawyers and officials as well as visits to detention facilities in Libya reveal that conditions are not in compliance with international standards and that there is widespread torture of prisoners in Libya and threats against the families of prisoners.

One could wish Luis Mareno-Ocampo good luck in his new career as would be “Father of the New Libya’s Legal system,” but the current ICC case # 01/11 is too critical for all involved to wait to learn whether his project gets completed and meets international standards.

Part 2: The 7th Billion Human on Earth—Frog in the pot metaphor

“Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal.”  David Suzuki

In October of 2011, the 7th billion human being will land on this planet.  From that threshold, humans will continue multiplying by 1.0 billion every 13 years to reach more than 10 billion within 39 years at the mid century.  The ramifications stagger the mind of any thinking American.  This series will give you an idea of what our civilization faces.

From 1964 to 2006, the United States, via mass immigration, grew from 193 million to 300 million.  It added over 100 million people in a 40 year span.  Today, America stands at 312 million people in 2011.  It adds 3.1 million people annually.  It races toward adding 100 million people by 2035—a scant 24 years from now.

In many ways, the American public cannot fathom its own critical condition as to overpopulation.  Americans charged onto the North American continent with unlimited topsoil, trees, fresh water, resources and unimaginable spaces.

If truth be told, the Native Americans kept it perfectly intact for thousands of years of ecological balance and harmony. They also kept their own numbers in equilibrium with nature.  Birds, ducks, geese, deer and buffalo numbered in the millions while clear skies and crystal clean streams offered unlimited food, shelter and clothing.

But starting in 1850, Europeans fled from potato famines, wars and diseases to stampede into America by the millions.  They brought horses, farms, locomotives, chemicals, booze, diseases, factories and the Industrial Revolution with them.  They blasted, mined, poisoned and trashed the national landscape. If you look along America’s highways, lakes, streams and farms, you will see billions of pieces of trash and dumps covering the land.  Americans individually or collectively show no responsibility for picking up after themselves.

Over the last 150 years, Americans enjoyed no end to water, energy and resources.   A sense of cultural entitlement runs through this society with the idea that all these resources available today will be there tomorrow.

A CULTURAL PARADIGM OF NO END TO PLENTY OF EVERYTHING

Four things operate in the American mind in the 21^st century: 1. Religion  promotes “Go forth multiply and take dominion over the land.” 2. Capitalism  promotes unlimited growth, production and consumption—that demands ever increasing human population expansion. 3.  No limits to water, energy and resources. 4. Technology will solve any problem.

Man! Are we in for a rude awakening or what?!  One look at one billion humans living in misery and squalor around the planet today renders a hint and harbinger as to America’s future.

Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed, offers a sobering reality check to those four aforementioned myths. “In his brilliantly written Collapse, Diamond examines in fascinating historic detail why past societies succeeded or failed. He then connects these stories to troubling scenes from 21^st century in Rwanda, Australia, China and Montana—and extracts practical lessons for a world that desperately needs to redefine progress.” James R. Karr

As it stands today, Australia may be the first “First World” country that exceeds its carrying capacity.  With 96 percent of that continent covered in desert sand, it lacks water and arable soil.  A new book, Overloading Australia, by Mark O’Connor and William Lines, points out the obvious facts that Australia cannot support its current 21 million population let alone its immigration-driven projections to add 20 million by mid century.  Additionally, it suffers accelerating carbon emissions and unsustainable ecological footprint dilemmas—that can only worsen with population growth.

Another book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Dr. Joseph Tainter, illustrates how highly multifaceted civilizations fail.  If not for the 70 percent importation of oil burned in the US daily, our civilization would fall within days. Astoundingly, U.S. leaders push for population growth by pressing for more immigration.

Ironically, those immigrants flee already overloaded civilizations that expand by 78 million annually.  Startlingly, no one possesses the ability to connect the dots at the national, local or personal levels.  Societal ethnocentrism!

In “On American Sustainability—Anatomy of a societal collapse”, by Chris Clugston, “Most Americans believe that we are ‘exceptional’—both as a society and as a species.  We believe that America was ordained through divine providence to be the societal role model for the world. We believe through our superior intellect, we can harness and even conquer nature in our continuous quest to improve the material living standards associated with our ever-increasing population…we now find ourselves in a predicament. We are irreparably overextended—living hopelessly beyond our means ecologically and economically…we are about to discover that we are another unsustainable society subject to the inescapable consequences of our unsustainable resource behavior—societal collapse.”

HOW DID WE GET TO THIS POINT AND AVOIDANCE OF REALITY? 

Dr. Jack Alpert, www.skil.org, wrote, “Think better or perform genocide”, “When you lower a frog into a pot of boiling water, it feels the heat and jumps out. When you lower a frog into a pot of cold water and then place the pot on the stove and heat it, the frog does not feel the heat, does not jump out, and boils to death.  It appears a frog gathers, processes and values, the available information well enough to save its life in the first case, but not in the second.

“Is it possible that humans think like frogs?  When immersed in our environment, we cannot appreciate our dangerous destination and cannot identify or change our behavior that would avoid it.  Consider that we are experiencing ever increasing social conflict and cannot see it.  We are experiencing ever diminishing wellbeing and cannot see it.  That our progeny will live an animalistic life near subsistence and we can’t see it.”

The question I ask: will we awaken as a civilization before Mother Nature becomes the grim reaper of the 21^st century on a scale far greater than ever experienced in history?  It will be up to the thinkers and doers at this point in time.  You are one of them if you’re reading this series.

Part 1: The 7th Billion Human on Earth—Our Perilous Future

State of Our Union Reality Check

On 25 January 2011, during President Obama’s State of the Union speech he said, “America’s moral example must always shine for all who yearn for freedom, justice, and dignity. And because we have begun this work, tonight we can say that American leadership has been renewed and America’s standing has been restored.”

On 25 January 2011, Chief Correspondent for Channel 4 News in the UK, Alex Thomson reported on Israeli filmmaker Nurit Kedar regarding her film Concrete, in which former soldiers involved in Operation Cast Lead allowed themselves to be named and they stated how their commanders would “psych up” the soldiers before an operation so they were ready to shoot indiscriminately.

One soldier said “he was told to shell every house in a neighbourhood” but the official The IDF/Israel Defense Forces reported “its operational orders during the war emphasized ‘proportionality’ and ‘humanity.’

In the report aired on Channel 4 News, thirty-year-old Shay who was in the Elite Combat Unit, appeared “disturbed by taking over the house of a wealthy Palestinian family to fight Operation Cast Lead. He recalls being disgusted that Israeli conscripts had already defecated all over the bathroom of this family house. The family photos had been scrawled over. Graffiti was on the walls saying, ‘long live Israel.’ All the time we were there you could sense this family with us. Meaning they were there. All the clichés. There was a wooden rocking horse, I remember, you’d be on guard and next to you there’s a wooden rocking-horse.”

24-year-old tank commander Ohad stated, “The order was very clear that if a car came within 200 metres of me I could simply shoot at it. Shoot a shell at it. We needed to cleanse the neighbourhoods, the buildings, the area. It sounds really terrible to say ‘cleanse’, but those were the orders…I don’t want to make a mistake with the words.” [1]

I don’t want to make any mistakes with words either and the work that must be done is to cleanse hypocrisy in high places and open the eyes of the American government to their culpability, if we are to ever again be ‘moral examples that shine for all who yearn for freedom, justice, and dignity’ for only then can we say with integrity that “American leadership has been renewed and America’s standing has been restored.”

On April 3, 2009 the President of the United Nations Human Rights Council commissioned a fact-finding mission “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”

The Council appointed the Jewish Justice Richard Goldstone, a South African Constitutional Court judge and the former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Justice Goldstone issued the 575-page report on September 29, 2009 and the Goldstone Report accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes perpetuated during the 22 days of assault on Gaza which began two days after Christmas day in 2008, when the Israeli military launched Operation Cast Lead; a full-scale attack on Gaza that killed 13 Israelis and 1,400 Palestinians.

Over 5,000 Palestinians were injured, 400,000 were left without running water, 4,000 homes were destroyed, rendering tens of thousands who are still homeless because of Israel’s targeted attacks upon them, their schools, hospitals, streets, water wells, sewage system, farms, police stations and UN buildings.

The 22 days of Israel’s attack on the people of Gaza was enabled by US-supplied weapons and we the people of the US who pay taxes provide over $3 billion annually to Israel although Israel has consistently misused U.S. weapons in violation of America’s Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts.

During the 22 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, “Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault was decided upon in June 2008, and the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39) were approved by Congress in September. The GBU 39 bombs were delivered to Israel in November (prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation!) for use in the initial air raids on Gaza.”[2]

In a 71-page report released March 25, 2009, by Human Rights Watch, Israel’s repeated firing of US-made white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes.

“Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza,” provides eye witness accounts of the devastating effects that white phosphorus munitions had on civilians and civilian property in Gaza.

“Human Rights Watch researchers found spent shells, canister liners, and dozens of burnt felt wedges containing white phosphorus on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a United Nations school in Gaza immediately after hostilities ended in January.

“Militaries officially use white phosphorus to obscure their operations on the ground by creating thick smoke. It has also been used as an incendiary weapon, though such use constitutes a war crime.

“In Gaza, the Israeli military didn’t just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops,” said Fred Abrahams, senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report. “It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren’t in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died.” [Ibid]

During the 22 days of attack on Gaza, the UN Security Council, Amnesty International, International Red Cross, and global voices of protest rose up and demanded a ceasefire, but both houses of Congress overwhelmingly endorsed resolutions to support a continuation of Israel’s so called “self defense.”

America is the worlds largest arms supplier to Israel and under a Bush negotiated deal with Israel-which Obama signed onto during Christmas time 2009, we the people who pay taxes in America will now also provide another $30 billion in military aid to Israel over the next decade.

In November 2006, Father Manuel, the parish priest at the Latin Church and school in Gaza warned the world:

“Gaza cannot sleep! The people are suffering unbelievably. They are hungry, thirsty, have no electricity or clean water. They are suffering constant bombardments and sonic booms from low flying aircraft. They need food: bread and water. Children and babies are hungry…people have no money to buy food. The price of food has doubled and tripled due to the situation. We cannot drink water from the ground here as it is salty and not hygienic. People must buy water to drink. They have no income, no opportunities to get food and water from outside and no opportunities to secure money inside of Gaza. They have no hope.

“Without electricity children are afraid. No light at night. No oil or candles…Thirsty children are crying, afraid and desperate…Many children have been violently thrown from their beds at night from the sonic booms. Many arms and legs have been broken. These planes fly low over Gaza and then reach the speed of sound. This shakes the ground and creates shock waves like an earthquake that causes people to be thrown from their bed. I, myself weigh 120 kilos and was almost thrown from my bed due to the shock wave produced by a low flying jet that made a sonic boom.

“Gaza cannot sleep…the cries of hungry children, the sullen faces of broken men and women who are just sitting in their hungry emptiness with no light, no hope, no love. These actions are War Crimes!”

In his State of the Union Speech, President Obama said “the Secretary of Defense has also agreed to cut tens of billions of dollars in spending.” Obama also said he is “willing to eliminate whatever we can honestly afford to do without…We cannot win the future with a government of the past…Our success in this new and changing world will require reform, responsibility, and innovation. It will also require us to approach that world with a new level of engagement in our foreign affairs.”

Let us be clear that engagement in the 21st century requires “a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures.” – William Fulbright

Only when America uses our might to do right will it be reality that American leadership has been renewed and America’s moral standing restored.

LEARN MORE:
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/15session/A.HRC.15.21_en.pdf

1. http://www.channel4.com/news/israeli-soldiers-ordered-to-cleanse-gaza
2. http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/9-us-arms-used-for-war-crimes-in-gaza/

America: Locked and Loaded – Guns, Speech and Madness

Last week, while heading a ‘Congress on your Corner’ meeting in a parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, House member Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) suffered a head-shot from a deranged 22 year old youth named Jared Loughner. In total, the gun-toting walking insane-asylum killed six and wounded 13 people.

A bright light of energy, intellect and personality in the House of Representatives, Ms. Giffords struggles for her life in an Arizona hospital. Loughner sits in a jail cell with the demons swirling in his head.

Media pundits scream from the tops of their lungs for gun control, more police and better social interaction.
But wait, let’s examine America’s current obsession with violence, killing and murder:

The majority of Americans support(ed) two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past 10 years with deaths in excess of 1 million Iraqis and Afghanistans, 2.5 million refugees, plutonium loaded bombs that create birth defects for decades and countless bodily carnage for the hundreds of thousands of wounded:

“Even with the lower confirmed figures, by the end of 2006, an average of 5,000 Iraqis had been killed every month by US forces since the beginning of the occupation. However, the rate of fatalities in 2006 was twice as high as the overall average, meaning that the American average in 2006 was well over 10,000 per month, or over 300 Iraqis every day. With the surge that began in 2007, the current figure is likely even higher.” Sources:After Downing Street, July 6, 2007
Title: “Is the United States Killing 10,000 Iraqis Every Month? Or Is It More?”

Author: Michael Schwartz; AlterNet, September 17, 2007. Title: “Iraq death toll rivals Rwanda genocide, Cambodian killing fields” Author: Joshua Holland.

In other words, Americans condone mass killing on an unimaginable scale. They don’t question it while their tax dollars support the oxymoron of “War against Terror.” Americans lack even the slightest clue as to the mayhem and suffering they caused all those families from all that death. They supported 2.2 million Vietnamese deaths in our 10 year Vietnam war while only 58,300 of their kids returned home in coffins. After 1975, another 175,000 combat troops committed suicide when they returned home to falter against their own demons. War scrambles a man’s mind. Yet, this society continues to operate as if war must continue in cycles, i.e., Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Iraq. No doubt, our politicians and generals will contrive another war at some point in the future.

Thus, today in America, we condone and encourage incredible violence. If you visit any packed video arcade at any mall in America, you will see our youth shooting, stomping, murdering, slashing and killing endless numbers of human beings on the video screen. A visit to the cinema in the same malls depicts half of all movies featuring gratuitous killing.

Those same kids return home to video games on their own computers like “Doom” and “Zombies killing spree” where they see peoples’ heads chopped off among other atrocities. By the time they finish with murdering and mayhem on their computers, they click on their televisions with “CSI: Miami”; “CSI: Los Angeles”; “CSI: New York” ; “Detroit 187” ; “Law and Order” ; “Criminal Minds” ; “Vampire Diaries” and many other shows featuring diabolical violence.

Any doubts that a percentage of those youth will turn into cold blooded murderers?

In the January 24, 2011 Time Magazine, Michael Grunwald wrote a piece, “Fire Away!” Every year in America, 31,224 Americans die from guns. Police intervention, assaults, murderers and suicides account for 100,000 Americans being shot annually. A mind-numbing 17,352 Americans shoot themselves to death annually. Eight children die from gun violence every day in America. A whopping 86 people die from gun violence 24/7!

Where cities grow more compact, tempers grow more irritated, people shoot each other with uncommon consistency.
If they don’t shoot each other, they drink themselves into a stupor before jumping into a 4,000 pound missile and drive down the highway to kill another 26,000 people (1982 figures) annually , now down to 13,000 people in 2009, with the biggest bullet in America: a car! Millions drive drunk everyday in America!

If we can’t secure a gun, we use a knife! In 2008, even as gun killings fell, the number of killings committed with knives or other “cutting instruments” rose 50 percent in New York City. Thousands of Americans kill others with knives annually.
Let’s face it; as we compact ourselves more and more into cities and urban areas, we face accelerating human densities not normal for the human animal.

“Tell me what you will of the benefactions of city civilization, of the sweet security of the streets—all as part of the natural upgrowth of man towards the high destiny we hear so much of. I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found. If the death exhalations that brood the broad towns in which we so fondly compact ourselves were made visible, we should flee as from a plague. All are more or less sick; there is not a perfectly sane man in all of San Francisco.” John Muir 1874

As we allow more “parenting” by television violence, mall viciousness-video arcades, movie brutalities and aggression within homes from angry parents—a growing percentage of our citizens cannot help but express themselves with the violence template that we condone.

What can we do to obviate such U.S. atrocities as Tucson, Columbine, Texas University, University of Virginia, Oklahoma, Unabomber, ad infinitum?

1. Stop killing people in ‘enemy’ countries by withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan. Leave their civilizations to their people to solve their problems by their cultures and choices. After 10 years, more ‘war’ is not the answer! This would bring a measure of peace to the world ‘mind’ and human race.

2. Take the $12 billion monthly war bill and inject it into America’s school systems to foster education and better mental health assessments. Discover at-risk children at an early age for remediation and support to families. (As a retired math/science teacher, I know the value of student/teacher ratios.)

3. Better to build a healthy young man or woman than try to repair a broken one like Loughner or Lindsey Lohan or any of our tortured military with PTSD.

4. Normalize cities by moving toward “stabilized population policies.” We cannot keep up with our youth in our overpopulated and overwhelmed city schools where violence, isolation and frustration become the norm.

5. We must question, debate and move toward emotionally healthier television. I grew up on “Father Knows Best” ; “My Three Sons” ; “Leave it to Beaver”; “Captain Kangaroo” ; “Mr. Rogers” ; “The Muppets” . Offer intriguing shows that entertain by stretching the mind and imagination.

6. Provide high school students with mandatory family, relationship, child rearing, compatibility and means courses to move them toward a positive future with children.

Finally, what have you done to stop the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? Answer: nothing, right?! That’s why they continue 10 years later! This Republican form of government is not a spectator sport. You provide the vital ingredient to make it work. Why does violence continue on such a horrific and prolific level in the USA? Answer: we apathetically set the paradigm and we reap the obvious results. Your convictions without action equals nothing but horrific entertainment.

Why We Shouldn’t Disarm Crazy People

This is a rehash of a piece I wrote in 2004. I am reworking it because of the calls for additional gun control after the tragic shootings in Tucson on Saturday. I have heard a lot of people say something along these lines:

“I believe people should be allowed to own guns. But there HAS to be SOME control. I mean, there are so many crazy people out there. You can’t let just ANYONE have a gun.”

Herewith are four scenarios to illustrate how gun control does not stop crimes.

• You are a 23-year-old girl and you have recently broken up with your creepazoid boyfriend. He has been stalking you, so you purchase a gun for your protection, and you apply for a concealed carry permit so you can pack heat in your purse. Your application sits on some little nudenik bureaucrat’s desk awaiting his “approval”. Your ex-boyfriend follows you to the grocery store around 10:00 one night. As you exit the store, he proceeds to rape you.
• You came to America from Egypt 25 years ago. You have an MBA and a well-paying job that affords you and your family a comfortable suburban lifestyle. You have thoroughly assimilated into American culture, so much so that you have converted from Islam to Christianity and changed your name from Jamir Ali to James Oliver. There has just been another terrorist attack in American and, in its aftermath, a series of assaults on Arab-Americans. You are walking your dog one evening and four redneck punkazoids jump you, beat you to a bloody pulp and leave you to die. Your concealed carry application is sitting on the same desk as the application of the young lady in the first scenario.
• On the morning of April 20, 1999, you and 1800 other people are going about your daily business in a gun-free zone in Littleton, Colorado. Two psychopathic malcontents walk in and start spraying bullets, killing 13 people before they kill themselves. No one shoots back, because this is a “gun-free zone.”
• On the morning of September 11, 2001, you are a crew member aboard a gun-free zone that has just been commandeered by terrorists. One of them pulls out a box cutter and slits your throat. You are defenseless, as this is a gun-free zone. After these terrorists off you, they proceed to off the pilot and co-pilot, who are similarly defenseless. And then all hell really breaks loose. (1)

Each of the above stories involves crazy people and normal people. Each involves people who obeyed gun laws suffering at the hands of people who were undeterred by gun laws.

In only one of the above cases did the assailants use guns. In perpetrating their orgy or blood, Harris and Klebold broke something like 20 laws. If someone plots for over a year to undertake something as horrific as Columbine or 9/11, they are by definition not deterred by your silly-posterior gun laws.

Gun laws do not deter crime. If you are determined enough, you will use a gun anyway (Harris and Klebold) or you will find a plan B such as a knife (O.J. Simpson), fertilizer (Tim McVeigh), a bathtub (Andrea Yates) or box cutters (Atta and Company). The only people affected by gun laws are law abiders.

In the words of an old billboard, 10 out of 10 criminals prefer their victims disarmed. Disarming crazy people does not make them less crazy or less criminal. It just leaves law-abiding people defenseless. Evil abhors a vacuum. When you disarm innocent people bad things happen.

The Second Amendment to our Constitution states:

“A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”

This Amendment does not “grant” any rights. It guarantees a “right of the people” that existed already – see Luke 22:36. It does not merely apply to defense against murderers, rapists and robbers, but to tyrants as well. The “well-regulated Militia” of which it speaks does not mean the federally armed and sponsored National Guard, but rather citizens skilled in both the use of firearms as well as teamwork in the field.

Such a militia was necessary not for the security of any old willy-nilly state, but of a “free state.” Militias played a vital part in securing this nation’s independence. The Founders understood that an armed populace was an essential counterforce against tyranny.

The history of the last century bears witness to this. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership posts a wonderful illustration of the relationship between gun control and genocide. Various degrees of gun control – licensing, confiscation, bans on private ownership, bans on concealed carry, requiring demonstration of a “need” to own a firearm – led to genocide in Armenia, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China, Guatemala, Uganda, Cambodia and Rwanda.

The world’s worst crazies can be found in government. The sicker they are, the more power they accumulate. Show me a tyrant – Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-Il, Castro – who is not certifiably insane. The ultimate aim of gun control is to totally disarm the citizenry and leave them defenseless against psychopaths who pull the strings of power.

And if you believe “we should take away all the guns”, ask yourself what you mean by “we” as well as how such a “take away” shall be implemented.

If you believe “we should take away all the guns”, you had better think twice. And three or four or five times if necessary.

“But,” you ask, “what would you say if you or a loved one were a victim of gun violence?”

I don’t know what I would say. And it really irks me when people claim to speak for other people. Some victims of gun violence support more gun control and some don’t. Some black people blindly support Obama and some don’t. Some military veterans support all of America’s wars and some don’t. One’s demographic does not necessarily determine one’s political views.

I leave you with this interview with John Green, whose nine-year-old daughter was so tragically killed on Saturday morning. At the 1:40 mark, he states that “we don’t need any more restrictions on our society.”

Indeed we don’t. Let us not succumb to the emotions of the moment. Liberty is a lot easier to surrender than it is to get back.

(1)  This is not a 9/11 truth post. I respect the truth movement and I have several doubts about the official story. However, this is about gun control. Any 9/11 truth comments WILL be deleted.

Shoah Backfires

For years  Israelis and  Zionists have been pumping  ‘Shoah’ into our veins by using every possible propaganda outlet: media, education, Hollywood, music, literature, billboards and so on.

Seemingly they have been very successful : We are all properly ‘Holocausted ‘. We accept the suffering of the Jewish people — and we have even managed to draw a universal message from it all.

We do accept that a real Shoah is taking place in front of our eyes in Palestine, where the Jewish state locks millions of Palestinians behind bars: it starves them,  it stops medical supplies, food, cement, and educational materials from getting in. But it does not stop there – when the Jewish state feels like it, it also kills Palestinians indiscriminately.  It either blitzes them with white phosphorous , or  sends in its tank battalions  to drive over Gaza.

In preparation for  Holocaust Memorial Day (1), London Zionist mouthpiece  The Jewish Chronicle is  very disturbed by a UK-based  pro Palestinian web site named shoah.org.uk. The site is obviously dedicated to the Palestinian Holocaust.

The Jewish paper insists that  the Shoah — like Israel – is a ‘Jews only club’. They do not want to ‘let anyone else in’.

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust told the Jewish paper, “Using the word ‘Shoah’ in this context is done with the sole intention of causing offence to Holocaust survivors, their families and the wider Jewish community and shows the greatest possible disrespect to the tragedy of the Holocaust.”

I would fiercely argue that Pollock is wrong.  Using the word ‘Shoah’ in this very context is there to awaken the world, the Jews, and holocaust victims in particular,  to the fact that the biggest current  perpetrator of crimes against humanity – is actually  the Jewish state.

Mark Gardner, of the  Community Security Trust, said: “This website is yet another sickening example of how the Holocaust is perverted by anti-Zionists in order to attack Israel and Zionism.”

Mark Gardner is almost correct; anti Zionists do indeed use the Shoah as a means of mirroring. And it is now an accepted fact that the Palestinians are the last victims of Hitler. It is also becoming accepted that the Israelis are the Nazis of our time. And tragically enough, the crimes in Palestine carried out by the Jewish state are also being committed in the name of the Jewish people. As if this is not enough, it is Jewish pilots who drop white phosphorus from planes which are decorated with Jewish symbols.

These facts are disturbing and demand the immediate attention of world Jewry.

Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies ( another morbid institute that claims to represent British Jews ) told the Jewish Chronicle  that “even without delving into what is clearly a one-sided and skewed narrative, by virtue of its title, this website is extremely provocative and any trivialisation of the Holocaust in which over six million Jewish men, women, and children were systematically murdered is completely abhorrent.”

Benjamin is probably too lame to grasp that what we see here is the total opposite – We are actually witnessing an acceptance of an astute universalising of the holocaust as carrying a humanistmessage for all of us. We can see a deeper understanding of the true moral meaning of that historical event.

Surely we need to stand up against all forms of ethno-centric homicidal policies. And it seems clear that Israel is no different from Nazi Germany in that regard. In fact Israel is far worse, because Israel acts under the guise of being a democracy, and its merciless policies are a  reflection of the majority Israeli population’s yearning to live in a ‘Jews only’ state.

However, a few questions are still left open – Why exactly do the aforementioned Jews from the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies want to maintain the notion and reality of historical suffering as being exclusively Jewish property? Why don’t they want anyone else to use the word ‘Shoah’?  Why do they demand a total control over the usage of words and applications of meanings ?

Can you imagine a Ukrainian protesting against the word ‘famine’ being  applied to the situation in Ethiopia?

I really wonder why so many Jews insist on grounding their identity politics on suffering and being hated by others?

For clearly, one must admit that being loathed is not exactly something to  brag about.

I am bewildered.

(1) It is interesting to read the definition of the Holocaust Memorial Day on the official HMD’s site:

“HMD is about remembering the victims and those whose lives have been changed beyond recognition of the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and the ongoing atrocities today in Darfur.”

Basically everywhere except in Palestine.

2nd Anniversary Reflections of Operation Cast Lead

On April 3, 2009 the President of the United Nations Human Rights Council commissioned a fact-finding mission “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”

The Council appointed the Jewish Justice Richard Goldstone, a South African Constitutional Court judge and the former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Justice Goldstone issued the 575-page report on September 29, 2009 and the Goldstone Report accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes perpetuated during the 22 days of assault on Gaza which began two days after Christmas day in 2008, when the Israeli military launched Operation Cast Lead; a full-scale attack on Gaza that killed 13 Israelis and 1,400 Palestinians.

Over 5,000 Palestinians were injured, 400,000 were left without running water, 4,000 homes were destroyed, rendering tens of thousands who are still homeless because of Israel’s targeted attacks upon them, their schools, hospitals, streets, water wells, sewage system, farms, police stations and UN buildings.

The 22 days of Israel’s attack on the people of Gaza was enabled by US-supplied weapons and we the people of the US who pay taxes provide over $3 billion annually to Israel although Israel has consistently misused U.S. weapons in violation of America’s Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts.

America is the worlds largest arms supplier to Israel and under a Bush negotiated deal with Israel-which Obama signed onto during Christmas time 2009, we the people who pay taxes in America will also provide another $30 billion in military aid to Israel over the next decade.

During the 22 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, “Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault was decided upon in June 2008, and the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39) were approved by Congress in September. The GBU 39 bombs were delivered to Israel in November (prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation!) for use in the initial air raids on Gaza. [1]

In a 71-page report released March 25, 2009, by Human Rights Watch, Israel’s repeated firing of US-made white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes.

“Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza,” provides eye witness accounts of the devastating effects that white phosphorus munitions had on civilians and civilian property in Gaza.

“Human Rights Watch researchers found spent shells, canister liners, and dozens of burnt felt wedges containing white phosphorus on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a United Nations school in Gaza immediately after hostilities ended in January.

“Militaries officially use white phosphorus to obscure their operations on the ground by creating thick smoke. It has also been used as an incendiary weapon, though such use constitutes a war crime.

“In Gaza, the Israeli military didn’t just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops,” said Fred Abrahams, senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report. “It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren’t in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died.” [Ibid]

During the 22 days of attack on Gaza, the UN Security Council, Amnesty International, International Red Cross, and global voices of protest rose up and demanded a ceasefire, but both houses of Congress overwhelmingly endorsed resolutions to support a continuation of Israel’s so called “self defense.”

In November 2006, Father Manuel, the parish priest at the Latin Church and school in Gaza warned the world:

“Gaza cannot sleep! The people are suffering unbelievably. They are hungry, thirsty, have no electricity or clean water. They are suffering constant bombardments and sonic booms from low flying aircraft. They need food: bread and water. Children and babies are hungry…people have no money to buy food. The price of food has doubled and tripled due to the situation. We cannot drink water from the ground here as it is salty and not hygienic. People must buy water to drink. They have no income, no opportunities to get food and water from outside and no opportunities to secure money inside of Gaza. They have no hope.

“Without electricity children are afraid. No light at night. No oil or candles…Thirsty children are crying, afraid and desperate…Many children have been violently thrown from their beds at night from the sonic booms. Many arms and legs have been broken. These planes fly low over Gaza and then reach the speed of sound. This shakes the ground and creates shock waves like an earthquake that causes people to be thrown from their bed. I, myself weigh 120 kilos and was almost thrown from my bed due to the shock wave produced by a low flying jet that made a sonic boom.

“Gaza cannot sleep…the cries of hungry children, the sullen faces of broken men and women who are just sitting in their hungry emptiness with no light, no hope, no love. These actions are War Crimes!”

TJP Liberty Report Gaza – 2nd Anniversary Cast Lead – Ken O’Keefe Dec. 27, 2010

1. http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/9-us-arms-used-for-war-crimes-in-gaza/

How and Why I got ‘on-board’ with The FREEDOM FLOTILLA to Gaza

I am an American without a drop of Arab blood within me and my org has been an endorsing org of the FREEDOM FLOTILLA, since I learned about it on the final day of the 27th annual American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s Washington, D.C. Conference on 10 June 2007.

On the first day of the conference, I learned that among the invited speakers who did NOT show or send a representative were Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Republican National Committee.

But, 86 year old, walker-bound Congressman Paul Findley, a moderate Republican blew me away when he addressed the luncheon crowd:

“I was here for the first convention 27 years ago and I still have a fire in my belly for the civil and human rights of Arabs. It is time to speak openly and honestly about Israel.

“But, in American politics, that is still forbidden.”

An audible gasp was heard from the crowd when he next remarked, “Israel is why we invaded Iraq!  Were it not for Israel’s influence and hard lobbying, we would not have invaded Iraq. It is time to understand that American complicity and undivided support of Israel was a main factor that led to 9/11.

“Neither Hussein or Lebanon were any threat to America, but Israel used USA donated ammunitions to slaughter 18,000 innocent civilians!

“President Bush’s claim that 9/11 happened because they hate our freedom is absolute rubbish!

“The attack was payback for what we have done by our blind allegiance to and complicity with Israel in regards to Palestine and Lebanon.

“Only Israel pressured America to wage war in Iraq and only Israel is pressuring America to invade Iran.

“Pity that we cannot seem to shed our fear of Israel. We are afraid to speak out on Capitol Hill, for fear of losing the next election. They are more like trained poodles jumping through hoops than leaders!

“Why this fear? How did we get here?

“Forty years ago to this day, June 8, 1967 the change occurred, the floodgates opened and money poured into Israel as never before.

“When President Johnson heard about the U.S.S. Liberty being attacked by Israel he ordered the rescue fighter planes to return to the deck. The rescue mission was aborted and the survivors have said they heard LBJ’s voice tell Admiral Giest, ‘Get those planes back on deck. I don’t care if the ship sinks, I will not embarrass Israel.’

“LBJ also threatened to court martial anyone who reported what had happened. Johnson accepted Israel’s false claim of “mistaken identity” and he knew it was a lie.  That is when the change began and Israel learned they could get away with murder of U.S.A. soldiers.”

LEARN MORE: LIBERTY means Freedom and “Never Give Up!” Read more…

http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1728&Itemid=233

The final speakers at the 27th annual ADC conference inspired a wave of hope amongst the SRO crowd in the Empire Room at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, when they announced the birth of the FREE GAZA Movement and their plan to sail ten boats through international waters to bring food, water, medicine directly to the people of Gaza.

Irish American dissident, [not a Jew, but had once been married to one] Greta Berlin, a proud member on the Jewish S.H.I.I.T.E. List- of over 7,000 Jews who have been labeled as “self-hating and Israel-threatening Ediots” by radical fundamentalist Zionists hatemongers-informed the crowd:

“We have been invited by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society of Gaza to go to Gaza. The people of Gaza expect us and will come out in their boats to meet us. We will fish together.”

Co-visionary of End the Siege in Gaza, Dr. Paul Larudee, a former Fulbright-Hayes lecturer and piano tuner who had scheduled twenty piano tuning appointments throughout the West Bank during the summer of 2006, but spent two weeks in a Ben Gurion jail cell before Israel deported him, further ignited the crowd:

“So far we have raised the money for two boats, but we want to send ten. So far eighty people have committed to ship themselves to Gaza through international waters; we are not going through Israel.

“Israel claims Gaza is unoccupied and so, we are going to unoccupied territory, as soon as we raise another $150,000.00 for six more boats. We will embark in Cypress and disembark in Gaza. This can play out in many ways; we may get blown out of the water, we may get towed away, but we will remain nonviolent and exercise the sovereignty of international waters, for we are not going through Israel.

“We will not allow the Coast Guard to enter onto our boats; we will demonstrate nonviolently our solidarity with the residents of Gaza who invited us. We are taking food, water, medicine, but the issue is solidarity with the people of Gaza. If our rights are denied, we will remain nonviolent.”

At that time in 2007, there were already scores of writers, teachers, medics, musicians, secretaries, parents, grandparents, lawyers, students, activists, actors, playwrights, politicians, singer-songwriters, web designers, international training consultants, and a Hollywood film industry worker and an aviator on board with the movement. They lived in South Africa, Australia, America, England, Israel and Palestine and all supported creative nonviolent action.

Despite the humanitarian crisis at that time in 2007, the Israeli Government, who under international law is responsible for the welfare and needs of those they occupy continued and still does persist to control air, water and land borders that imprisons 1.5 million human beings-70% of whom are children under the age of 18.

“Missing from Israel’s security framing is the very fact of occupation, which Israel both denies exists…and that ‘security’ requires Israel control over the entire country…rendering impossible a just peace based on human rights, international law, reconciliation.” – America-Israeli, Professor and Co-Founder of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Jeff Halper, “Obstacles to Peace: A Reframing of the Palestinian Israeli Conflict” Page 1.

Just before Greta and Paul spoke, Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and political economist who has worked in Gaza since 1985 and had just returned from there informed the crowd:

“In 1948 we began with emergency food aid and we are still there. There is nothing new in Gaza, just more acute and the internal breakdown due to restrictions and 527 physical barriers and cantonizations make it impossible for Palestinian businessmen to move their goods and they have been forced to hire Israelis as middle men who are able to transport Palestinian goods over the 535 miles of roads that Palestinians have been denied access to. The few Palestinians who are able to access these roads have become a privileged class.

“This new class is also dependent on international donors who are not building new structures to challenge the occupation and this has resulted in the humanitarization of Palestine; donors and Israelis are not treating them as human beings with political rights.

“This has caused fragmentation, isolation, cantonization which will soon become worse. The physical impediments, roadblocks and required permits have caused most of the people to give up, for their efforts to move their goods increases their costs so much and since there is no guarantee that their efforts will result in them being able to transport their wares, many have given up.

“In Gaza there are literally streets under Hamas control and within a few blocks other streets under Fatah control. The neighborhoods have become so fragmented that my taxi driver kept changing his radio station and flag on his windshield so we could travel from block to block.

“There is a great sense that the people are robbed of their space and time and this has resulted in a de-development of the human being. The impact of the divisions in Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank means the people can no longer carry the mantle of nationalism, they are so drained by just trying to get through the day there is no time for politics, so the mantle of nationalism is now being upheld by Arabs in Israel.

“Soon Palestinians will be required to obtain visas to move from one canton to the other and visas will also soon be issued at Ben Gurion for any foreigners wishing to enter the West Bank.

“The issue is no longer occupation but sovereign control…Palestinians have become interlopers in their own country. All vestiges of Palestinian presence is being destroyed by Israel.”

Immediately after that prelude the conference crowd united with over 5,000 truth, justice and peace activists who had converged on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol for a nonviolent demonstration against the Israeli occupation on a hot humid Sunday afternoon to declare:

“40 years of Israel’s occupation are enough!”

Mitchell Plitnick, Director of Education and Policy for Jewish Voice for Peace and also a member of the S.H.I.I.T.E. List; exclaimed,

“Forty years is not just enough; it is too much!”

Another truth telling secular Jew on the S.H.I.I.T.E. List, Phyllis Bennis, who is also a journalist, author, scholar and Director of The New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies whose specialty is the Middle East and United Nations issues whom assumed the role of M.C. at the demonstration stated:

“This day is historic and has global importance. While we say no to US support for Israeli occupation, our counterparts from all around the world are saying the same message to their own governments. From South Africa to Brazil, from Australia to Canada, from Britain to Malaysia, Ramallah to Tel-Aviv, today is a day of international action. The world says no to occupation and we say no to U.S. support of occupations…There are now 535 checkpoints and there are 535 members of Congress. Perhaps those checkpoints should be named for them.”

Another member of the S.H.I.I.T.E. List, Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom, Co-founder and co-director of Clergy for Peace, an Israeli/Palestinian interfaith initiative of Christians, Muslims, and Jews working for justice and peace in the Middle East, who also completed three years of active duty and sixteen years of reserve duty in the Israeli Army- the last eight as a conscientious objector-and who worked with Rabbis for Human Rights informed the activists:

“Land theft devours its inhabitants, it devours its children. The majority of Israelis want the occupation to end. We have problems with our governments, not with people. We rabbis must empower those rabbis who are not here to speak to their congregations of American Jews. We Jewish people are small in number, but a few committed people can make a difference and we can make this happen. The occupation will end when we free Jewish hearts from fear and liberate their minds of propaganda.”

The diversity of America was well represented in D.C. on 10 June 2007. We were individuals and members of over 300 sponsoring organizations who marked the 40th Anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

We came to raise our voice and demand that both Israel and America uphold International Law and Universal and inalienable human rights for the four million Palestinians who have been denied them.

Some media turned out, but the largest establishment forces manned the roof-tops of the Capitol and were well equipped by the Industrial Military Complex.

My mind was liberated over Gaza in 2006 when I read an article by Father Manuel, the parish priest at the Latin Church and school in Gaza who informed the world four years ago:

“Gaza cannot sleep! The people are suffering unbelievably. They are hungry, thirsty, have no electricity or clean water. They are suffering constant bombardments and sonic booms from low flying aircraft. They need food: bread and water. Children and babies are hungry…people have no money to buy food. The price of food has doubled and tripled due to the situation. We cannot drink water from the ground here as it is salty and not hygienic. People must buy water to drink. They have no income, no opportunities to get food and water from outside and no opportunities to secure money inside of Gaza. They have no hope.

“Without electricity children are afraid. No light at night. No oil or candles…Thirsty children are crying, afraid and desperate…Many children have been violently thrown from their beds at night from the sonic booms. Many arms and legs have been broken. These planes fly low over Gaza and then reach the speed of sound. This shakes the ground and creates shock waves like an earthquake that causes people to be thrown from their bed. I, myself weigh 120 kilos and was almost thrown from my bed due to the shock wave produced by a low flying jet that made a sonic boom.

“Gaza cannot sleep…the cries of hungry children, the sullen faces of broken men and women who are just sitting in their hungry emptiness with no light, no hope, no love. These actions are War Crimes!”

Garth Hewitt – From The Broken Heart Of Gaza (Father Musallam’s Letter)

On April 3, 2009 the President of the United Nations Human Rights Council commissioned a fact-finding mission “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”

The Council appointed the Jewish Justice Richard Goldstone, a South African Constitutional Court judge and the former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Justice Goldstone issued the 575-page report on September 29, 2009 and the Goldstone Report accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes perpetuated during the 22 days of assault on Gaza which began two days after last Christmas day, when the Israeli military launched Operation Cast Lead; a full-scale attack on Gaza that killed 13 Israelis and 1,400 Palestinians.

Over 5,000 Palestinians were injured, 400,000 were left without running water, 4,000 homes were destroyed, rendering tens of thousands who are still homeless because of Israel’s targeted attacks upon them, their schools, hospitals, streets, water wells, sewage system, farms, police stations and UN buildings.

The 22 days of Israel’s attack on the people of Gaza was enabled by US-supplied weapons and we the people of the US who pay taxes provide over $3 billion annually to Israel although Israel has consistently misused U.S. weapons in violation of America’s Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts.

America is the worlds largest arms supplier to Israel and under a Bush negotiated deal with Israel, we the people who pay taxes in America will also provide another $30 billion in military aid to Israel over the next decade.

During the 22 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, “Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault was decided upon in June 2008, and the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39) were approved by Congress in September. The GBU 39 bombs were delivered to Israel in November (prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation!) for use in the initial air raids on Gaza. [1]

In a 71-page report released March 25, 2009, by Human Rights Watch, Israel’s repeated firing of US-made white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes.

“Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza,” provides eye witness accounts of the devastating effects that white phosphorus munitions had on civilians and civilian property in Gaza.

“Human Rights Watch researchers found spent shells, canister liners, and dozens of burnt felt wedges containing white phosphorus on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a United Nations school in Gaza immediately after hostilities ended in January.

“Militaries officially use white phosphorus to obscure their operations on the ground by creating thick smoke. It has also been used as an incendiary weapon, though such use constitutes a war crime.

“In Gaza, the Israeli military didn’t just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops,” said Fred Abrahams, senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report. “It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren’t in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died.” [Ibid]

During the 22 days of attack on Gaza, the UN Security Council, Amnesty International, International Red Cross, and global voices of protest rose up and demanded a ceasefire, but both houses of Congress overwhelmingly endorsed resolutions to support a continuation of Israel’s so called “self defense.”

What Israel did under the cover of night in International waters on America’s Memorial Day 2010, to Citizens of the World with a Conscience who physically got on board the FREEDOM FLOTILLA, must be the final straw that breaks America’s ‘special relationship’ with the Israel.

When will Obama get it, that it is in America’s best interests to: End the Siege on Gaza, End the Occupation of Palestine and Honor and uphold Equal Human Rights for ALL!

1. http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/9-us-arms-used-for-war-crimes-in-gaza/

Overpopulation in 21st Century America: Frog in the Pot Metaphor

Part 2

From 1964 to 2006, the United States, via mass immigration, grew from 193 million to 300 million.  It added over 100 million people in a 40 year span.  Today, America stands at 309 million people in 2010.  It adds 3.1 million people annually.  It races toward adding 100 million people by 2035—a scant 25 years from now.

In many ways, the American public cannot fathom its own critical condition as to overpopulation.  Americans charged onto the North American continent with unlimited topsoil, trees, fresh water, resources and unimaginable spaces.

If truth be told, the Native Americans kept it perfectly intact for thousands of years of ecological balance and harmony. They also kept their own numbers in equilibrium with nature.  Birds, ducks, geese, deer and buffalo numbered in the millions while clear skies and crystal clean streams offered unlimited food, shelter and clothing.

But starting in 1850, Europeans fled from potato famines, wars and diseases to stampede into America by the millions.  They brought horses, farms, locomotives, chemicals, booze, diseases, factories and the Industrial Revolution with them.  They blasted, mined, poisoned and trashed the national landscape. If you look along America’s highways, lakes, streams and farms, you will see billions of pieces of trash and dumps covering the land.  Americans individually or collectively show no responsibility for picking up after themselves.

Over the last 150 years, Americans enjoyed no end to water, energy and resources.   A sense of cultural ‘entitlement’ runs through this society with the idea that all these resources available today will be there tomorrow.

A CULTURAL PARADIGM OF NO END TO PLENTY OF EVERYTHING

Four things operate in the American mind in the 21^st century: 1. Religion  promotes “Go forth multiply and take dominion over the land.” 2. Capitalism  promotes unlimited growth, production and consumption—that demands ever increasing human population expansion. 3.  No limits to water, energy and resources. 4. Technology will solve any problem.

Man! Are we in for a rude awakening or what?!  One look at one billion humans living in misery and squalor around the planet today renders a hint and harbinger as to America’s future.

Jared Diamond’s book, Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed, offers a sobering reality check to those four aforementioned myths. “In his brilliantly written Collapse, Diamond examines in fascinating historic detail why past societies succeeded or failed. He then connects these stories to troubling scenes from 21^st century in Rwanda, Australia, China and Montana—and extracts practical lessons for a world that desperately needs to redefine progress.” James R. Karr

As it stands today, Australia may be the first “First World” country that exceeds its carrying capacity.  With 96 percent of that continent covered in desert sand, it lacks water and arable soil.  A new book, Overloading Australia, by Mark O’Connor and William Lines, points out the obvious facts that Australia cannot support its current 21 million population let alone its immigration-driven projections to add 20 million by mid century.  Additionally, it suffers accelerating carbon emissions and unsustainable ecological footprint dilemmas—that can only worsen with population growth.

Another book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, by Dr. Joseph Tainter, illustrates how highly multifaceted civilizations fail.  If not for the 70 percent importation of oil burned in the US daily, our civilization would fall within days. Astoundingly, U.S. leaders push for population growth by pressing for more immigration already at over 2.4 million annually.

Ironically, those immigrants flee already overloaded civilizations that expand by 77 million annually.  Startlingly, no one possesses the ability to connect the dots at the national, local or personal levels.  Societal ethnocentrism!

In “On American Sustainability—Anatomy of a societal collapse”, by Chris Clugston, “Most Americans believe that we are ‘exceptional’—both as a society and as a species.  We believe that America was ordained through divine providence to be the societal role model for the world. We believe through our superior intellect, we can harness and even conquer nature in our continuous quest to improve the material living standards associated with our ever-increasing population…we now find ourselves in a predicament. We are irreparably overextended—living hopelessly beyond our means ecologically and economically…we are about to discover that we are another unsustainable society subject to the inescapable consequences of our unsustainable resource behavior—societal collapse.”

HOW DID WE GET TO THIS POINT AND AVOIDANCE OF REALITY?

Dr. Jack Alpert, www.skil.org, wrote, “Think better or perform genocide”, “When you lower a frog into a pot of boiling water, it feels the heat and jumps out. When you lower a frog into a pot of cold water and then place the pot on the stove and heat it, the frog does not feel the heat, does not jump out, and boils to death.

“It appears a frog gathers, processes and values, the available information well enough to save its life in the first case, but not in the second.

“Is it possible that humans think like frogs?  When immersed in our environment, we cannot appreciate our dangerous destination and cannot identify or change our behavior that would avoid it.

“Consider that we are experiencing ever increasing social conflict and cannot see it.  We are experiencing ever diminishing wellbeing and cannot see it.  That our progeny will live an animalistic life near subsistence and we can’t see it.”

The question I ask: will we awaken as a civilization before Mother Nature becomes the grim reaper of the 21^st century on a scale far greater than ever experienced in history?  It will be up to the thinkers and doers at this point in time.  You are one of them if you’re reading this series.

If any of us, no matter what our race, creed or color might be, refuse to engage our U.S. Congress as we have not for 30 years as to the immigration equation—our children will find themselves living in a terribly degraded America where the American Dream will be described by the history books as a ‘fleeting fantasy’ from the era of 1950 to 2010.  These are several of the top organizations where you can take collective action to change the course of American history.

The Cathedrals of South America

While in South America this month, I first visited the main cathedral in Santiago, Chile, and then I saw the main cathedral in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They were both highly lovely. And they both featured a multitude of paintings, murals and statues that glorified the strong physical and emotional bond that exists between adults and children. There were many statues depicting St. Mary nurturing and protecting the baby Jesus. Then there was St. Christopher, helping the young Jesus to safely cross a river. And of course there was St. Anthony. And I forget who all else. In the Buenos Aires cathedral especially, almost every icon there emphasized and illuminated the loving and protective nature of this strong protective adult-child bond.

There was also a bunch of artwork portraying the protective and nurturing bond that is supposed to exist between God the Son and all the rest of us poor lost sheep, God’s children.

The artwork in both churches made this very meaningful, holy and protective relationship absolutely jump out at me. “Adults are SUPPOSED to protect and nurture children,” these statues practically screamed. “There is a sacred and profound nature that exists within the parent-child bond.”

And face it, guys. The archetype of a benevolent god is based on the protective nature of adults toward children.

I bet that you know what is coming up next, right? The world’s adults today are NOT doing a good job of protecting their children. Napalm, white phosphorus, drones, Shock and Awe, child pornography, “spare the rod and spoil the child,” child prostitution, child slavery, child molestation, children soldiers, you name it. “How could ANYONE stoop so low as to hurt a child?” you might ask. And yet children’s trust in their adult protectors is violated daily and routinely at least a million times a day. Nothing justifies that. End of lecture.

Another thing about Chile and Argentina that almost blew my mind is that both countries used to be democracies and then both countries were seized by brutal dictatorships — dictatorships that involved torture, death squads, disappearances, concentration camps, assassinations and all that other messy stuff. Full-out dictatorships. No holds barred. CIA advisors in the background. Knocks on the door at midnight. Krystallnachts. Cattle prods. The whole nine yards.

And yet today both Chile and Argentina are democracies again. Go figure. It gives one pause. Perhaps this means that if the USA is ever taken over by dictators too, then we too might be able to find our way back. And I’m even going to go out on a limb here and suggest that had America and Britain not battled Hitler to the teeth, then sooner or later the German people would have given him the boot too. Look what happened in the Soviet Union. Eventually people do tend to speak up.

Maybe there is hope for the human race yet.

And maybe, just maybe, adults and governments will finally stop creating “collateral damage” that involves barbecuing babies — like what has happened or is still happening in places like Auschwitz, Rwanda, Baghdad and Gaza.

****

I just got some interesting information regarding Eva Peron from someone named Ivan Guarneti, stuff that I didn’t know. Apparently Eva was one of the first people to do battle with the IMF, among other things:

Unfortunately [many people] keep repeating all the arguments, word by word, that the Argentine oligarchy used between 1954-1983 to destroy my country and to commit the second genocide in our history, after the one perpetrated against our native nations. Juan Peron won free and democratic elections three times in Argentina. During none of those three times were there any claims of fraud, not even from the vicious pro-American opposition.

During his second presidency, Peron was kicked out of office by a military coup supported by the IMF and Washington.
The government which took office after mass-murdering unarmed civilians in Plaza de Mayo by bombing them from the air, went on to install firing squads as the new justice system — to such a point, that the popular imaginary named this new government la “Revolucion Fusiladora” (the way we all remember it nowadays) by twisting the self-denomination of “Revolucion Libertadora” given by the oligarchy.

They got Argentina immediately into signing agreements with the IMF (which Peron rejected in the 1950s) and into privitizing (of course, to American and British companies) the new exploration for oil fields. The process of murdering, torturing and encarcerating poltical opponents opened in June 1955, a few months after the bombing of Plaza de Mayo, and only ended in October 1983, after the whole country’s industrial base and a whole generation had been destroyed and disappeared.

Peron wasn’t either a socialist revolutionary, or a convinced democrat, nor a fascist, much less a dictator. Peron was an extremly ecclectic and pragmatic leader who saw an amazing opportunity to industrialize a rich but semi-feudal country. He was a man who understood that only the working class goes all the way although unfortunatly, himself didn’t want to go all the way.
Argentine women were able to vote for the first time because Peron and Evita legalized the female vote after Peron took office.
Millions of argentine workers bought the first homes in generations thanks to the Peron-Evita credit policies of buy today, pay when you can (if you ever can), no interest at all.

Workers for the first time in the history of Argentina had the right to eight-hour days, vacations, free health care for all, high salaries, and the right to free education for all, from elementary school all the way to university, Masters Degrees and PHDs — without paying a penny.

In only a decade, Argentina went froma stuck in the middle ages to having a home-grown aero-space industry, automobile industry, shipyards, oil industry, biochemistry industry, railways and highways all across the country, hopitals, schools, universities, etc, etc. And the same thing happened in culture and the arts: film, theatre, radio plays, literature, etc, (also sports). They all flourished during the late 40s.

Last, Argentine workers of that era had a very similar standard of life to the American workers, and way above European workers. No other country in Latin America to this day has ever built an equal-opportunity society with such levels of high salaries, such a volume of unionization and workers qualification and education as was had in Argentina of late 40s an early 50s.

That was the reason that Argentina got almost 30 years of “on and off” dictatorship between 1955-1983. The West (USA and Europe) needed to destroy the Argentine industrial base and the unionization of its working class — in order to integrate Argentina into their “International Division of Labor” design. Back then, there was no room in the world for an industrialized Latin American country.

The Twelve Days Before Christmas and an Open Letter to The House

Recently I and other concerned Americans petitioned our representatives in the House of Congress to vote NO on HR 867, a resolution that called for President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to oppose the United Nations consideration of the Goldstone Report.

My Congressperson Ginny Brown-Waite co-sponsored the resolution and on November 3, 2009, 344 House congressional reps voted to kill the Goldstone Report.

In response to my plea, Congressperson Ginny Brown-Waite wrote to me:

“The Council’s appointment of Richard Goldstone, a well-respected judge who is himself Jewish, to oversee the report gave some hope that the report would be fair.  The Israeli Government, however, refused to cooperate with the mission.  The Israeli Government concluded that any report emanating from the Human Rights Council, even with Goldstone’s leadership, would be hopelessly biased.  This is a shame because the Israeli Government may have been able to better explain its version of events and thereby prevent Hamas’ side of the story from dominating the narrative of the report.

“The Goldstone Report does raise some serious questions about the Israeli invasion of Gaza.  The report includes in Section XIV credible allegations that some Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians as human shields that were sent first into houses and properties where fighters were hiding.  The report also found instances where civilians known not to pose a military threat were killed in cold blood.  When pressed about these serious human rights violations the Israeli Government insisted that it is conducting an internal investigation and that if it concludes Israeli soldiers did not follow the rules of engagement they will be held accountable.

“While the Goldstone Report did raise serious questions about Israeli actions, it went too far when it concluded that Israeli policy in Gaza was designed ‘to deliberately and systematically inflict suffering on civilians.’ This is unfair and untrue… As Ehud Barak wrote in The Wall Street Journal, ‘After enduring eight years of ongoing rocket fire, and after all diplomatic efforts to stop this barrage failed it was my duty as defense minister to do something about it.  It’s as simple and self-evident as the right to self-defense. While such logic eluded Mr. Goldstone and his team, it was crystal clear to the thousands of Israeli children living in southern Israel who had to study, play, eat and sleep while being preoccupied about the distance to the nearest bomb shelter.”

“Israel must never be denied its right to defend itself…Goldstone’s report is fundamentally biased and flawed and for this reason I have urged the President to oppose further consideration of the report and supported passage of H.Res. 867.”

I respond:

On April 3, 2009 the President of the United Nations Human Rights Council commissioned a fact-finding mission “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”

The Council appointed the Jewish Justice Richard Goldstone, a South African Constitutional Court judge and the former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Justice Goldstone issued the 575-page report on September 29, 2009 and the Goldstone Report accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes perpetuated during the 23 days of assault on Gaza which began two days after last Christmas day, when the Israeli military launched Operation Cast Lead; a full-scale attack on Gaza that killed 13 Israelis and 1,400 Palestinians.

Over 5,000 Palestinians were injured, 400,000 were left without running water, 4,000 homes were destroyed, rendering tens of thousands who are still homeless because of Israel’s targeted attacks upon them, their schools, hospitals, streets, water wells, sewage system, farms, police stations and UN buildings.

The 23 days of Israel’s attack on the people of Gaza was enabled by US-supplied weapons paid for with US tax dollars and we the people of the US who pay taxes provide over $30 billion annually to Israel although Israel has consistently misused U.S. weapons in violation of America’s Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts.

America is the worlds largest arms supplier to Israel and under a Bush negotiated deal with Israel, we the people who pay taxes in America will also provide another $30 billion in military aid to Israel over the next decade.

During the 23 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, “Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault was decided upon in June 2008, and the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39) were approved by Congress in September. The GBU 39 bombs were delivered to Israel in November (prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation!) for use in the initial air raids on Gaza. [1]

In a 71-page report released March 25, 2009, by Human Rights Watch, Israel’s repeated firing of US-made white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes.

“Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza,” provides eye witness accounts of the devastating effects that white phosphorus munitions had on civilians and civilian property in Gaza.

“Human Rights Watch researchers found spent shells, canister liners, and dozens of burnt felt wedges containing white phosphorus on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a United Nations school in Gaza immediately after hostilities ended in January.

“Militaries officially use white phosphorus to obscure their operations on the ground by creating thick smoke. It has also been used as an incendiary weapon, though such use constitutes a war crime.

“In Gaza, the Israeli military didn’t just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops,” said Fred Abrahams, senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report. “It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren’t in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died.” [Ibid]

During the 23 days of attack on Gaza, the UN Security Council, Amnesty International, International Red Cross, and global voices of protest rose up and demanded a ceasefire, but both houses of Congress overwhelmingly endorsed resolutions to support a continuation of Israel’s so called “self defense.”

In November 2006, Father Manuel, the parish priest at the Latin Church and school in Gaza warned the world:

“Gaza cannot sleep! The people are suffering unbelievably. They are hungry, thirsty, have no electricity or clean water. They are suffering constant bombardments and sonic booms from low flying aircraft. They need food: bread and water. Children and babies are hungry…people have no money to buy food. The price of food has doubled and tripled due to the situation. We cannot drink water from the ground here as it is salty and not hygienic. People must buy water to drink. They have no income, no opportunities to get food and water from outside and no opportunities to secure money inside of Gaza. They have no hope.

“Without electricity children are afraid. No light at night. No oil or candles…Thirsty children are crying, afraid and desperate…Many children have been violently thrown from their beds at night from the sonic booms. Many arms and legs have been broken. These planes fly low over Gaza and then reach the speed of sound. This shakes the ground and creates shock waves like an earthquake that causes people to be thrown from their bed. I, myself weigh 120 kilos and was almost thrown from my bed due to the shock wave produced by a low flying jet that made a sonic boom.

“Gaza cannot sleep…the cries of hungry children, the sullen faces of broken men and women who are just sitting in their hungry emptiness with no light, no hope, no love. These actions are War Crimes!”

Rabbi Brian Walt, was born in Cape Town, South Africa and was active as a student in the struggle against Apartheid there. In June 2009, he and a few thoughtful Jews founded Ta’anit Tzedek: Jewish Fast for Gaza because “Isaiah said that the result of justice is peace and security and the psalmist wrote to move away from evil and pursue the good; seek peace and pursue it.”

On December 18, 2009 Rabbi Walt wrote, Hannukah and Operation Cast Lead: One year later from which I excerpt:

“Tomorrow is Shabbat Hannukah, the Sabbath that occurs during Hannukah.   Exactly one year ago, on Shabbat Hannukah (Saturday December 27, 2008), Israel launched Operation Cast Lead.

“On that day, Saturday December 27, 2008, at 11:30 in the morning, a time when schoolchildren were still in school, 88 Israeli aircraft simultaneously attacked 100 preplanned targets in Gaza within a span of 4 minutes.  This initial attack was followed by another attack and by the end of that Sabbath day, at least 230 Palestinians were killed and more than 700 injured.

“Shabbat Hannukah last year, was the day with the highest one day death toll in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…Our traditional greeting for Shabbat is Shabbat Shalom/ A Sabbath of Peace.  That day was far from a Sabbath of Peace.

“Not only did the Israeli military assault start on Hannukah, the name of the campaign, Operation Cast Lead, is from a Hannukah poem by Haim Nachman Bialik about a dreidel made from cast lead that a father bought for his child.  The poem became a popular Hannukah children’s song.  I learned the song when I was a child and Jewish children in Israel and around the world sing it joyously.  From now on the image of the cast lead dreidl will be associated with the lead of armaments and the violence of Operation Cast Lead.

“Israel with one of the strongest armies in the world bombarded one and a half million people who live in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, in an open air prison, in isolation enforced by  the Israeli siege with no way to leave or enter.
Israel claimed it had no choice, any nation-state would do the same thing.  Israel has a right and a responsibility to defend itself.  The rockets that Palestinian armed groups fired into Israeli civilian areas terrorized the entire population, damaged property and sometimes injured and killed civilians.

“Was it true that Israel had no choice?  Was this a wise or an ethical way to defend oneself?

“As a Jew, as a rabbi, as a human being I was shocked.  Israel is a state that acts in the name of the Jewish people.  This attack was neither wise, nor ethical.  Is this what the ethical tradition of our people had come to?   We say that to be Jewish is to be compassionate,  “the compassionate who are also the children of the compassionate”?  Isn’t  the essence of our faith  that every human being is created in the image of God?

“In June of this year, 10 rabbis came together to break the silence and created Taanit Tzedek – Jewish Fast for Gaza. Within a few weeks Taanit Tzedek – Jewish Fast for Gaza garnered the support of 300 people, including rabbis, ministers, imams, cantors and rabbinical students.

“Our call is simple…As Jews, people of many faiths and people of conscience, we can no longer stand idly by Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

“Since Hamas’ electoral victory in January 2006, Israel has subjected the Gaza Strip to an increasingly intolerable blockade that restricts Gaza’s ability to import food, fuel and other essential materials, and to export finished products. As a result, the Gazan economy has completely collapsed. Most of Gaza’s industrial plants have been forced to close, further contributing to already high levels of unemployment and poverty and rising levels of childhood malnutrition.

“On three things the world stands: on justice, on truth, and on peace.” (Mishnah Avot 1:18).

“Our call is three-fold:  Break the Silence, Lift the Siege, Pursue Peace

Break the Silence: We must affirm the humanity of the residents of Gaza by breaking our silence about their suffering.  They are human beings, just like us, created in the image of God and as deserving of human dignity, compassion and justice.

Lift the Siege: The Israeli siege on Gaza by land, air and sea that is causing untold human suffering is an unconscionable attack on civilians.   This siege that is supported by U.S. government and the EU must be lifted.

Pursue the Peace: There is no military solution to the conflict.  The only real solution is a negotiated settlement and it is time for Israel to negotiate with all relevant parties including Hamas towards a resolution of the conflict.

“Now, a year later, the suffering in Gaza is even greater than a year ago.  Gazans have no way to rebuild their homes, to reclaim their agricultural land, to renew their lives as Israel blocks the entry of materials needed for reconstruction.  Israel still doesn’t allow sufficient food into Gaza, the water supply is contaminated and there is the danger of a catastrophic health crisis.

“Tomorrow for Sahbbat Hannukah we will read a special Haftarah, a prophetic portion assigned by the rabbis for particular days.    For Shabbat Hannukah the rabbis made a surprising choice, they assigned the passage from Zachariah that ends:

‘Not by Might, nor by Power, but My Spirit’

“Operation Cast Lead is based on the belief that overwhelming military force will provide security for the people of Israel.  The rockets from Gaza are also a desperate effort to resist by military means.   Israel is less secure than before the operation.  There is no military solution to this or any other human conflict.  The only solution is political a direct negotiated settlement.  As the prophet Isaiah said justice is the only way to create peace and security.

“Hannukah is a rejection of power and military might and an affirmation of the Spirit of God that inheres in every human being.  And it is this connection to the Spirit of Life that must be the center of our lives. [2]

Beginning the twelve days before this Christmas, this Christian of Conscience, began fasting daily in repentance for my Governments persistence in seeking SECURITY in imperialism and militarism.

The twelve days before Christmas, from the land of plenty, I have been in mourning over the 2.5 billion people on our planet who exist on less than $2.00 a day and the over 15,000 babies and young children who die daily because of malnutrition and substandard or nonexistent health care.

The twelve days before Christmas, as I reflected on the 42 years of Military Occupation and misery in the West Bank and Gaza perpetuated by so called democracies that blatantly deny equal human rights for all the citizens of the so called Holy Land, I have wondered what Jesus/AKA: The Prince of Peace would say to all the deaf, dumb and blind Americans who claim to be Christians 2009 years after The Prince of Peace walked the earth as a Palestinian Jew who was born, lived and died under a brutal military occupation but lived a life of NONVIOLENCE, forgiveness and love.

I imagine The Prince of Peace would remind US All of the Sermon on the Mount, which is understood by Christians of conscience to be our ‘marching orders’ and of which the 20th century agitator of church, state and media, Dorothy Day wrote:

“Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing…Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be peacemakers.”

I spin the Christian Manifesto this way:

About 2,000 years ago, when The Prince of Peace was about 33, he hiked up a hill and sat down under an olive tree and began to teach the people:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.”

In other words: it is those who know their own spiritual poverty, their limitations, failures and transgressions and yet trust that God loves them in spite of it all; already live in the Kingdom of God.

How comforted we will all be, when we see, we haven’t got a clue, as to the depth and breadth of pure love and mercy of The Divine Mystery of The Universe.

God’s name in ancient Aramaic is Abba which means Daddy as much as Mommy and He/She: The Lord has said, “My ways are not your ways. My thoughts are not yours.” -Isaiah 55:8

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

The essence of meek is to be patient with ignorance, slow to anger and never hold a grudge. In other words: how comforted you will be when you also know humility; when you know yourself, the good and the bad, for both cut through every human heart.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they will be filled.”

In other words: how comforted you will be when your greatest desire is to do what “God requires, and he has already told you what that is; BE JUST, BE MERCIFUL and walk humbly with your Lord.”-Micah 6:8

“Blessed are the merciful, they will be shown mercy.”

In other words: how comforted you will all be when you choose to return only kindness to your ‘enemy.’

“For with the measure you measure against another, it will be measured back to you” The Prince of Peace warned his disciples as he explained the law of karma in Luke 6:27-38.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they see God.”

In other words: how comforted you will be when you WAKE UP and see God is already within you, within every man, every woman and every child. The Supreme Being is everywhere, the Alpha and Omega, beginning and end; Beyond The Universe -and yet so small; within the heart of every atom.

“Blessed are The Peacemakers: THEY shall be called the daughters and sons of God.”

My CHRISTmas prayer for America is that we will Give Peace a Chance and that God would bless US everyone with a conscience and desire to tell the truth, to seek peace and pursue justice. My hope is that 2010 will be a year acceptable to the Lord and War Is Over.

Happy Xmas (War Is Over) – John Lennon

1. http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/9-us-arms-used-for-war-crimes-in-gaza/

2. http://rabbibrian.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/hannukah-and-operation-cast-lead-one-year-later/

Only in Solidarity do “we have it in our power to begin the world again. ~ Tom Paine

House to Vote on Resolution to Reject Goldstone Report

The U.S. House of Representatives will vote on Tuesday on a resolution calling on President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ in multilateral fora.”

Headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, a former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the U.N. report found that evidence indicates both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes during Israel’s 22-day assault on the Gaza Strip, dubbed “Operation Cast Lead”, which began on December 27, 2008.

The report recommended that allegations of war crimes by both parties be investigated.

The current text of the proposed Congressional resolution, H. Res. 867, contains numerous factual inaccuracies, beginning with the assertion that the U.N. inquiry had “pre-judged” its findings and was “one-sidedly” mandated to “investigate all violations of international human rights law and International Humanitarian Law by . . . Israel, against the Palestinian people . . . particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression”.

The actual mandate adopted on April 3 was “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”

The quoted text is not from the April 3 mandate, but from U.N. General Assembly resolution S-9/1 on January 12, 2009, which resulted in the later appointment of the mission by the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

Also, omitted in the draft resolution’s reproduction of the text are the words “occupying Power” before “Israel”. Under international law, the occupying power is in fact obligated to investigate allegations of war crimes and violations of human rights.

The draft U.S. resolution states that the Goldstone report “makes no mention of the relentless rocket and mortar attacks, which numbered in the thousands and spanned a period of eight years, by Hamas and other violent militant groups in Gaza against civilian targets in Israel, that necessitated Israel’s defensive measures”.

But this criticism itself ignores the fact that even if Israel’s military operations were justifiable as  “defensive measures”, Israel would still be legally obligated to conduct its operations in accordance with international law, and to conduct investigations into alleged war crimes conducted by its own forces.

The draft resolution also makes no mention of the relentless siege of Gaza by Israel, or the fact that Hamas had been strictly observing a cease-fire agreed to in June, only firing rockets after Israel had first violated that truce with repeated attacks against Gazans, a continuation of the crippling siege, and an airstrike and invasion of Gaza by Israeli forces on November 4 that ultimately resulted in the complete breakdown of the truce.

It also makes no mention of the fact that the Goldstone report contains a section dedicated to examining the impact of rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian militants on southern Israel, or that mission’s efforts to do so were impeded by Israel’s refusal to cooperate.

The draft resolution states that the U.N. mission “included a member who, before joining the mission, had already declared Israel guilty of committing atrocities in Operation Cast Lead by signing a public letter on January 11, 2009, published in the Sunday Times, that called Israel’s actions ‘war crimes’”.

That letter to the Sunday Times also stated, “We condemn the firing of rockets by Hamas into Israel and suicide bombings which are also contrary to international humanitarian law and are war crimes.”

But criticism of the Goldstone report on the similar basis that one of its members had beforehand declared Hamas guilty of war crimes is lacking in the draft resolution.

It calls the Goldstone report’s findings “that the Israeli military had deliberately attacked civilians during Operation Cast Lead” “unsubstantiated”. In fact, the 575 page report provides extensive documentation for its findings.

The draft resolution states that “the authors of the report, in the body of the report itself, admit that ‘we did not deal with the issues . . . regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas and second-guessing decisions made by soldiers and their commanding officers ‘ in the fog of war.’”

This is an outright fabrication. Those words do not in fact appear in the body of the actual report.

Those words actually come from an alleged e-mail from Richard Goldstone in which he explained why the U.N. report did not rely on a Colonel Kemp for its inquiry. The full text of the statement from that e-mail, replacing the part omitted in the draft resolution, reads “we did not deal with the issues he raised regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas…” (emphasis added).

The draft resolution states that Richard Goldstone had been quoted in the October 16 edition of the Jewish daily Forward as saying, “If this was a court of law, there would have been nothing proven”.

But omitted is the further context of that remark in the same article, which added, “He recalled his work as chief prosecutor for the international war crimes tribunal in Yugoslavia in 1994. When he began working, Goldstone was presented with a report commissioned by the U.N. Security Council based on what he said was a fact-finding mission similar to his own in Gaza.

“’We couldn’t use that report as evidence at all,’ Goldstone said. ‘But it was a useful roadmap for our investigators, for me as chief prosecutor, to decide where we should investigate. And that’s the purpose of this sort of report.”

The draft resolution asserts that the Goldstone report “in effect, denied the State of Israel the right to self-defense”, but offers no supporting evidence for this.

The Goldstone report found that “While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self-defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”

The draft resolution states that “the report usually considered public statements made by Israeli officials not to be credible, while frequently giving uncritical credence to statements taken from what it called the ‘Gaza authorities’, i.e. the Gaza leadership of Hamas”, but offers no examples from the report.

The report does, in fact, question the credibility of Israeli officials. It notes in one instance that “it considers the credibility of Israel’s position damaged by the series of inconsistencies, contradictions and factual inaccuracies in the statements justifying the attack.”

In another example illustrating Israel’s lack of credibility, it “acknowledges that significant efforts [were] made by Israel to issue warnings”, but that “The credibility of instructions to move to city centres for safety was also diminished by the fact that the city centres themselves had been the subject of intense attacks”.

The Goldstone report also observed that “By refusing to cooperate with the Mission, the Government of Israel prevented it from meeting Israeli Government officials, but also from travelling to Israel to meet Israeli victims and to the West Bank to meet Palestinian Authority representatives and Palestinian victims.”

The U.N. report also noted that “In establishing its findings, the Mission sought to rely primarily and whenever possible on information it gathered first-hand. Information produced by others, including reports, affidavits and media reports, was used primarily as corroboration.”

The draft resolution asserts that “notwithstanding a great body of evidence that Hamas and other violent Islamist groups committed war crimes by using civilians and civilian institutions, such as mosques, schools, and hospitals, as shields, the report repeatedly downplayed or cast doubt upon that claim”.

The “great body of evidence” is an apparent reference to remarks from Israeli officials found to be demonstrably lacking in credibility, which were commonly simply repeated by U.S. officials and the mainstream media.

The U.N. mission did examine “whether and to what extent the Palestinian armed groups violated their obligation to exercise care and take all feasible precaution to protect the civilian population in Gaza” and found that “Palestinian armed groups were present in urban areas during the military operations and launched rockets from urban areas”.

But it “found no evidence, however, to suggest that Palestinian armed groups either directed civilians to areas where attacks were being launched or that they forced civilians to remain within the vicinity of the attacks.”

While there is no evidence that Hamas deliberately used civilians as human shields, the Goldstone report “investigated four incidents in which the Israeli armed forces coerced Palestinian civilian men at gunpoint to take part in house searches during the military operations” and concluded “that this practice amounts to the Use of Palestinian civilians as human shields and is therefore prohibited by international humanitarian law.”

The draft resolution, besides calling upon the White House and State Department to reject the Goldstone report and its recommendations, also “reaffirms its support for the democratic, Jewish State of Israel, for Israel’s security and right to self-defense, and, specifically for Israel’s right to defend its citizens from violent militant groups and their state sponsors.”

It makes no similar mention of the right of Palestinians to security and self-defense from Israel and its U.S. sponsor.

Human rights groups, including the Israeli organization B’Tselem, have called upon the international community to implement its recommendation that suspected violations of international law be investigated.