NPR Correspondents, By Chance, in Earthquake
By AP.
NEW YORK (AP) - Two National Public Radio correspondents in central China by chance for a week’s worth of feature stories instead found themselves reporting gripping details of the earthquake that killed thousands on Monday.
Melissa Block narrated a first-person account while the ground was shaking and her report made it onto NPR within an hour and a half.
Block and fellow “All Things Considered” host Robert Siegel were in China to report a week’s worth of stories that were to air next week, the first time they had taken their show overseas. They purposely went to Chengdu because it was a city many Americans knew little about.
Block was about to interview a Protestant minister for a story about the influence of religion in the area when the quake struck.
“I had literally not gotten the first question out of my mouth when I heard this deep rumbling noise and this shaking of glass and I saw this look of panic on his face and the face of his colleagues and they dashed out of the room,” she told The Associated Press.
She followed them onto the street, all the while describing what was going on into her microphone. The quake lasted three minutes.
“The pavement was moving up and down and buildings were shaking and bricks and stones were falling off the tops of buildings,” she said. “The cross on the top of the church where we were talking was waving wildly back and forth … It was surreal.”
There was an immediate sense of relief when the earth stopped shaking that the buildings around them had not not fallen, she said. The streets were filled with people using text messages to contact families and friends.
For a few hours, Block and NPR producers in Washington could not locate Siegel. But Block and Siegel found each other near their hotel in Chengdu and compared notes. He had been out reporting.
Block was then driven to the site of a school collapse in the town of Juyuan, where the scene left her shaken.
“I’d just never been confronted by dozens upon dozens upon dozens of bodies of children wrapped in plastic with parents coming in and identifying them and upon realizing it was their child, collapsing in grief,” she said.
“It was a scene that was repeated over and over again,” she said. “I thought I had seen the extent of the victims and my producer said look over there - and there were four times as many under a tent.”
Angry survivors and police surrounded Block and producer Andrea Hsu, forcing them to leave the scene.
Block spoke at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday in China, where she was preparing to sleep for a few hours in her room on the 26th floor of a hotel. Hsu wasn’t as confident, and was planning to sleep on a chair in the hotel’s lobby.
They were to continue their earthquake reporting on Tuesday, NPR said.
By David Bauder
source
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Democracy's Failure by the Numbers
Gulf Seen Between Democracy in Theory and Practice: Survey
By Jim Lobe
13/05/08 - - WASHINGTON, May12 (IPS) - The basic democratic principle that "the will of the people should be the basis for the authority of government" is supported by overwhelming majorities throughout the world, according to a major new survey of more than 17,000 adults in 19 countries released here Monday.
Large majorities in most of those countries also believe that their own governments are not living up to that principle, according to the poll which was conducted and published by WorldPublicOpinion.org (WPO).
Indeed, an average of 74 percent of respondents in the 19 countries, which represent 59 percent of the world's total population, believe that "the will of the people" should have more influence in how their country is concerned than it currently does.
And an average of 63 percent of respondents say their country is being run by a "few big interests looking out for themselves," rather than "for the benefit of all the people."
The belief that governments were being run by "a few big interests" was particularly pervasive in Ukraine (84 percent), Mexico (83 percent), the United States (80 percent), Nigeria and South Korea (78 percent), and Argentina (71 percent).
"The perception that governments are not responsive to the popular will appears to be contributing to the low levels of confidence in government found around the world," noted Steven Kull, who directs both the WPO and its parent organisation, the University of Maryland's Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
"Most see their governments as primarily serving big interests rather than the people as a whole," he added.
The new survey, part of a series conducted by WPO earlier this year to probe global attitudes towards human rights and other key issues, was carried out between January and mid-March this year. The previous surveys have shown, among other things, majority support in most countries for a free press unfettered by government control, even stronger support for gender equality, and growing unease with the impact of economic globalisation, especially in western countries.
The 19 countries in the latest survey included Argentina, Mexico, and the U.S. in the Americas; France, Britain, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine in Europe; Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories (PT), and Turkey in the greater Middle East; Nigeria in sub-Saharan Africa; and China, India, Indonesia and South Korea in Asia.
On average, 85 percent agreed the principle enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose 60th anniversary is being celebrated this year, that "the will of the people should be the basis for the authority of the government." Fifty-two percent agreed "strongly", while 33 percent said they agreed "somewhat".
Those who said they agreed "strongly" were most prevalent in relatively new democracies, notably Ukraine (77 percent), Nigeria (75 percent), Indonesia (72 percent), Azerbaijan (63 percent), Mexico and the PT (59 percent each), although 70 percent of Turks, whose longer-standing democracy has been interrupted by several military interventions over recent decades, also agreed strongly.
By contrast, respondents in the more long-standing democratic states were less enthusiastic. While 55 percent of British respondents said they agreed strongly, that was true of only 44 percent of U.S. respondents, and 34 percent of French respondents.
The least enthusiastic respondents were found in India, the world's most populous democratic state, where only 53 percent said they either strongly (32 percent) or "somewhat" (21 percent) agreed with the basic principle -- far below the overall average of 85 percent and even the next most-sceptical group of respondents in Iran.
The survey found substantial dissatisfaction among respondents regarding their perceptions of how well their governments reflected the popular will. When asked to rate on a scale of 0-10 how much influence the "will of the people" has on their own government, the mean response was 4.5 -- well below what they said was the preferred level of 8.0.
An average of 74 percent of all respondents said they wished their government would be more responsive to the popular will than they perceived it to be. The biggest gaps were found in Egypt (97 percent), Nigeria (89 percent), Ukraine (86 percent), Mexico (85 percent), the U.S. and South Korea (83 percent). The smallest gaps were found in Jordan (44 percent) and India (46 percent).
The survey also found low levels of trust in their governments to "do what is right", with majorities respondents in 11 of the countries saying their governments did so "only some of the time" (48 percent) or "never" (six percent). Cynicism was particularly high in South Korea, Mexico, Argentina, and Ukraine.
On the other hand 83 percent of Chinese respondents said they could trust their national government to do what is right "just about always" (23 percent) or "most of the time" (60 percent). The percentages for Egypt were also high, at 13 percent and 71 percent, respectively. Smaller majorities in Russia, Jordan and the PT also said they trusted their government at least "most of the time", while 48 percent of Iranians agreed.
An average of 84 percent of all respondents said they believed their government leaders should be selected through elections in which all citizens can vote, as opposed to the 12 percent who said they should be selected some other way. Support was highest in Indonesia (97 percent), the U.S. (96 percent), Poland, Ukraine, and South Korea (91 percent). Support was lowest in India (33 percent), Egypt and Jordan (24 percent).
At the same time, three out of four respondents said elections alone should "not (be) the only time when the views of the people should have influence," but that leaders should also "pay attention to the views of the people as they make decisions". Four out of five respondents said policymakers should pay attention in particular to public opinion polls.
Views on this point were strongest in South Korea (94 percent), Nigeria (93 percent), Mexico (92 percent), Poland (91 percent), and Ukraine (90 percent) and weakest in Egypt (64 percent) and India (56 percent).
Respondents were also asked whether they thought their governments should take account of world public opinion in making decisions. Support for that proposition was strongest in Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, China, Azerbaijan, and Britain in descending order. Support was weakest by far in India, followed by the PT, the U.S., Russia, and Argentina. Among all 19 countries, respondents in the U.S. thought their government took into account world public opinion the least.
source
By Jim Lobe
13/05/08 - - WASHINGTON, May12 (IPS) - The basic democratic principle that "the will of the people should be the basis for the authority of government" is supported by overwhelming majorities throughout the world, according to a major new survey of more than 17,000 adults in 19 countries released here Monday.
Large majorities in most of those countries also believe that their own governments are not living up to that principle, according to the poll which was conducted and published by WorldPublicOpinion.org (WPO).
Indeed, an average of 74 percent of respondents in the 19 countries, which represent 59 percent of the world's total population, believe that "the will of the people" should have more influence in how their country is concerned than it currently does.
And an average of 63 percent of respondents say their country is being run by a "few big interests looking out for themselves," rather than "for the benefit of all the people."
The belief that governments were being run by "a few big interests" was particularly pervasive in Ukraine (84 percent), Mexico (83 percent), the United States (80 percent), Nigeria and South Korea (78 percent), and Argentina (71 percent).
"The perception that governments are not responsive to the popular will appears to be contributing to the low levels of confidence in government found around the world," noted Steven Kull, who directs both the WPO and its parent organisation, the University of Maryland's Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
"Most see their governments as primarily serving big interests rather than the people as a whole," he added.
The new survey, part of a series conducted by WPO earlier this year to probe global attitudes towards human rights and other key issues, was carried out between January and mid-March this year. The previous surveys have shown, among other things, majority support in most countries for a free press unfettered by government control, even stronger support for gender equality, and growing unease with the impact of economic globalisation, especially in western countries.
The 19 countries in the latest survey included Argentina, Mexico, and the U.S. in the Americas; France, Britain, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine in Europe; Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, the Palestinian Territories (PT), and Turkey in the greater Middle East; Nigeria in sub-Saharan Africa; and China, India, Indonesia and South Korea in Asia.
On average, 85 percent agreed the principle enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose 60th anniversary is being celebrated this year, that "the will of the people should be the basis for the authority of the government." Fifty-two percent agreed "strongly", while 33 percent said they agreed "somewhat".
Those who said they agreed "strongly" were most prevalent in relatively new democracies, notably Ukraine (77 percent), Nigeria (75 percent), Indonesia (72 percent), Azerbaijan (63 percent), Mexico and the PT (59 percent each), although 70 percent of Turks, whose longer-standing democracy has been interrupted by several military interventions over recent decades, also agreed strongly.
By contrast, respondents in the more long-standing democratic states were less enthusiastic. While 55 percent of British respondents said they agreed strongly, that was true of only 44 percent of U.S. respondents, and 34 percent of French respondents.
The least enthusiastic respondents were found in India, the world's most populous democratic state, where only 53 percent said they either strongly (32 percent) or "somewhat" (21 percent) agreed with the basic principle -- far below the overall average of 85 percent and even the next most-sceptical group of respondents in Iran.
The survey found substantial dissatisfaction among respondents regarding their perceptions of how well their governments reflected the popular will. When asked to rate on a scale of 0-10 how much influence the "will of the people" has on their own government, the mean response was 4.5 -- well below what they said was the preferred level of 8.0.
An average of 74 percent of all respondents said they wished their government would be more responsive to the popular will than they perceived it to be. The biggest gaps were found in Egypt (97 percent), Nigeria (89 percent), Ukraine (86 percent), Mexico (85 percent), the U.S. and South Korea (83 percent). The smallest gaps were found in Jordan (44 percent) and India (46 percent).
The survey also found low levels of trust in their governments to "do what is right", with majorities respondents in 11 of the countries saying their governments did so "only some of the time" (48 percent) or "never" (six percent). Cynicism was particularly high in South Korea, Mexico, Argentina, and Ukraine.
On the other hand 83 percent of Chinese respondents said they could trust their national government to do what is right "just about always" (23 percent) or "most of the time" (60 percent). The percentages for Egypt were also high, at 13 percent and 71 percent, respectively. Smaller majorities in Russia, Jordan and the PT also said they trusted their government at least "most of the time", while 48 percent of Iranians agreed.
An average of 84 percent of all respondents said they believed their government leaders should be selected through elections in which all citizens can vote, as opposed to the 12 percent who said they should be selected some other way. Support was highest in Indonesia (97 percent), the U.S. (96 percent), Poland, Ukraine, and South Korea (91 percent). Support was lowest in India (33 percent), Egypt and Jordan (24 percent).
At the same time, three out of four respondents said elections alone should "not (be) the only time when the views of the people should have influence," but that leaders should also "pay attention to the views of the people as they make decisions". Four out of five respondents said policymakers should pay attention in particular to public opinion polls.
Views on this point were strongest in South Korea (94 percent), Nigeria (93 percent), Mexico (92 percent), Poland (91 percent), and Ukraine (90 percent) and weakest in Egypt (64 percent) and India (56 percent).
Respondents were also asked whether they thought their governments should take account of world public opinion in making decisions. Support for that proposition was strongest in Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, China, Azerbaijan, and Britain in descending order. Support was weakest by far in India, followed by the PT, the U.S., Russia, and Argentina. Among all 19 countries, respondents in the U.S. thought their government took into account world public opinion the least.
source
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Channel Pentagon: The News Through the Filter
How the military analyst program controlled news coverage: in the Pentagon's own words
(updated below)
On the question of whether the Pentagon maintained an illegal covert domestic propaganda program -- and on the broader question of whether the American media's political coverage is largely shaped and controlled by the U.S. Government -- I don't believe it's possible to obtain more conclusive evidence than this:
These are excepts from a memorandum sent on January 14, 2005 -- just before President Bush was to be inaugurated for his second term -- from Capt. Roxie T. Merritt, the Director of DoD Press Operations, to several top Pentagon officials, including Larry Di Rita, the top aide to Donald Rumsfeld (pp. 7815-7816 (.pdf)). It reports on Merritt's conclusions and proposals in the wake of a Pentagon-organized trip to Iraq for their military analysts:
BACKGROUND
One of the most interesting things coming from this trip to Iraq with the media analysts has been learning how their jobs have been undergoing a metamorphosis. There are several reasons behind the morph . . . with an all voluntary military, no one in the media has current military background. Additionally we have been doing a good job of keeping these guys informed so they have ready answers when the networks come calling.
CURRENT ISSUES
The key issue here is that more and more, media analysts are having a greater impact on the television media network coverage of military issues. They have now become the go to guys not only for breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues. They also have a huge amount of influence on what stories the network decides to cover proactively with regard to the military. . . .
RECOMMENDATION
1.) I recommend we develop a core group from within our media analyst list of those that we can count on to carry our water. They become part of a "hot list" of those that we immediately make calls to or put on an email distro list before we contact or respond to media on hot issues. We can also do more proactive engagement with this list and give them tips on what stories to focus on and give them heads up on issues as they are developing. By providing them with key and valuable information, they become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves . . . .
3.) Media ops and outreach can work on a plan to maximize use of the analysts and figure out a system by which we keep our most reliably friendly analysts plugged in on everything from crisis response to future plans. This trusted core group will be more than willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter and the more they know, the more valuable they are to the networks. . . .
5.) As evidenced by this analyst trip to Iraq, the synergy of outreach shops and media ops working together on these types of projects is enormous and effective. Will continue to exam (sic) ways to improve processes.
The response from Di Rita, in full (ellipses in original):
This is a thoughtful note. . . I think it makes a lot of sense to do as you suggest and I guess I thought we were already doing a lot of this in terms of quick contact, etc. . . We ought to be doing this, though, and we should not make the list too small . . . .
So the Pentagon would maintain a team of "military analysts" who reliably "carry their water" -- yet who were presented as independent analysts by the television and cable networks. By feeding only those pro-Government sources key information and giving them access -- even before responding to the press -- only those handpicked analysts would be valuable to the networks, and that, in turn, would ensure that only pro-Government sources were heard from. Meanwhile, the "less reliably friendly" ones -- frozen out by the Pentagon -- would be "weeded out" by the networks. The pro-Government military analysts would do what they were told because the Pentagon was "their bread and butter." These Pentagon-controlled analysts were used by the networks not only to comment on military matters -- and to do so almost always unchallenged -- but also even to shape and mold the networks' coverage choices.
Even a casual review of the DoD's documents leaves no doubt that this is exactly how the program worked. The military analysts most commonly used by MSNBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC routinely received instructions about what to say in their appearances from the Pentagon. As but one extreme though illustrative example, Dan Senor -- Fox News analyst and husband of CNN's Campbell Brown -- would literally ask Di Rita before his television appearances what he should say (7900, 7920-21), and submitted articles to him, such as one he wrote for The Weekly Standard about how great the war effort was going, and Di Rita would give him editing directions, which he obediently followed.
Among the most active analysts in this program were all three of the most commonly used MSNBC commentators -- Gen. Montgomery Meigs, Gen. Wayne Downing, and Col. Ken Allard. They were frequently summoned by Chris Matthews and (in the case of Downing) by Brian Williams as NBC's resident experts. Matthews referred to them as "HARDBALL's war council" on January 17, 2005, when he had all three of them on together to bash The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh for reporting that the Pentagon was preparing attack plans against Iran -- an article that, like most Hersh articles, infuriated Di Rita and other DoD officials. The next day, Allard proudly wrote to Di Rita:
As you may have seen on MSNBC, I attributed a lot of what [Hersh] said to disgruntled CIA employees who simply should be taken out and shot.
In light of all of this, it is very hard to dispute the excited analysis of an unnamed Lt. Col when, in a March 4, 2005 email to various Pentagon officials (7751), he described the military analyst program as producing a "big payback." He then went further:
There are about 50 retired military analysts that are part of this group. . . . these are the folks that end up on FOX, CNN, etc. interpreting military happenings. These calls are conducted frequently and offer HUGE payback. . . . these end up being the people who carry the mail on talk shows.
On the Los Angeles Times blog a couple of weeks ago, Scott Collins opined that the principal reason the military analyst story had "no legs" (meaning that the original NYT story received so little subsequent coverage in the establishment media) is this:
Many Americans confronted with stories of media manipulation by government officials aren't, at this point, shocked and awed. Instead they've come to expect it. Increasingly, they consider the media simply a mouthpiece for whoever has the most power. You don't have to tell John Q. Public that the fix is in; he takes it for granted. . . .
So, many Americans, confronted with evidence that TV's talking heads are taking orders not just from government officials but also military-contractor clients, can be excused for not being all that surprised.
Clearly, the principal reason the story has received virtually no coverage on the television networks is because the story reflects so poorly on them. But as to his primary point, I don't believe Collins is right. The public has long been inculcated with the notion that we have a "liberal media" that opposes and undermines whatever Republicans do, etc. etc. Yet here is mountains of evidence as conclusive as can be as to how the Government/media cartel actually functions -- media outlets and their corporate parents rely on the Government for all sorts of favors and access and, in return, do nothing to displease them. To the contrary, the Bush administration itself here is proudly touting its ability to control media content and ensure the presence only of pro-Government voices with regard to war and military matters.
It's true that there are plenty of people who understand the core government-amplifying function of the establishment media, but there are also plenty of people -- likely far more -- who don't. That's precisely why the television networks are so eager to suppress and conceal these revelations and the endlessly illuminating evidence which supports them.
UPDATE: Each time I've written about this story, someone -- including, once, one of the producers of the show -- writes to point out that PBS' News Hour did broadcast a segment a couple of weeks ago examining the issues underlying the scandal. Indeed they did, and it was quite a good discussion. The transcript for that show can be read, and the show itself viewed, here.
On a different note, from the "for-what-it's-worth" department, Harry Reid was at FDL's Book Salon today to promote his new book, and this was the answer he gave when someone asked about whether he was planning to hold hearings (h/t Lish, who asked the question):
The answer is yes. I have personally spoken to Chairman Levin and he is tremendously concerned as I. And we are proceeding accordingly.
What is worth noting is that that's the first time Senate leadership has said they intend to hold hearings. In its recent article on the media's "deafening silence" over this story, The Politico said that if there were Congressional hearings held, then "the networks would be hard-pressed to continue their de facto blackout." I guess we'll find out if that's true.
-- Glenn Greenwald
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Currently in Glenn Greenwald's Blog
How the military analyst program controlled news coverage: in the Pentagon's own words
"We develop a core group from within our media analyst list of those that we can count on to carry our water. They become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves."
Saturday, May 10, 2008 14:48 EDT
CNN, the Pentagon's "military analyst program" and Gitmo
A detailed look at the documents produced by the Pentagon reveals just how corrupt the media's behavior was and, even more so, continues to be.
Friday, May 9, 2008 12:43 EDT
Neocons and the truth: Bitter enemies to the end
The fact-free extremists who brought us the invasion of Iraq haven't gone anywhere and are busy trying to exert their influence before this administration ends.
Thursday, May 8, 2008 14:36 EDT
McCain embraces Bush's radical views of executive power
The GOP nominee actually complains that it is judicial power that is excessive and is unduly limiting the powers of the president.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008 15:39 EDT
(updated below)
On the question of whether the Pentagon maintained an illegal covert domestic propaganda program -- and on the broader question of whether the American media's political coverage is largely shaped and controlled by the U.S. Government -- I don't believe it's possible to obtain more conclusive evidence than this:
These are excepts from a memorandum sent on January 14, 2005 -- just before President Bush was to be inaugurated for his second term -- from Capt. Roxie T. Merritt, the Director of DoD Press Operations, to several top Pentagon officials, including Larry Di Rita, the top aide to Donald Rumsfeld (pp. 7815-7816 (.pdf)). It reports on Merritt's conclusions and proposals in the wake of a Pentagon-organized trip to Iraq for their military analysts:
BACKGROUND
One of the most interesting things coming from this trip to Iraq with the media analysts has been learning how their jobs have been undergoing a metamorphosis. There are several reasons behind the morph . . . with an all voluntary military, no one in the media has current military background. Additionally we have been doing a good job of keeping these guys informed so they have ready answers when the networks come calling.
CURRENT ISSUES
The key issue here is that more and more, media analysts are having a greater impact on the television media network coverage of military issues. They have now become the go to guys not only for breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues. They also have a huge amount of influence on what stories the network decides to cover proactively with regard to the military. . . .
RECOMMENDATION
1.) I recommend we develop a core group from within our media analyst list of those that we can count on to carry our water. They become part of a "hot list" of those that we immediately make calls to or put on an email distro list before we contact or respond to media on hot issues. We can also do more proactive engagement with this list and give them tips on what stories to focus on and give them heads up on issues as they are developing. By providing them with key and valuable information, they become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves . . . .
3.) Media ops and outreach can work on a plan to maximize use of the analysts and figure out a system by which we keep our most reliably friendly analysts plugged in on everything from crisis response to future plans. This trusted core group will be more than willing to work closely with us because we are their bread and butter and the more they know, the more valuable they are to the networks. . . .
5.) As evidenced by this analyst trip to Iraq, the synergy of outreach shops and media ops working together on these types of projects is enormous and effective. Will continue to exam (sic) ways to improve processes.
The response from Di Rita, in full (ellipses in original):
This is a thoughtful note. . . I think it makes a lot of sense to do as you suggest and I guess I thought we were already doing a lot of this in terms of quick contact, etc. . . We ought to be doing this, though, and we should not make the list too small . . . .
So the Pentagon would maintain a team of "military analysts" who reliably "carry their water" -- yet who were presented as independent analysts by the television and cable networks. By feeding only those pro-Government sources key information and giving them access -- even before responding to the press -- only those handpicked analysts would be valuable to the networks, and that, in turn, would ensure that only pro-Government sources were heard from. Meanwhile, the "less reliably friendly" ones -- frozen out by the Pentagon -- would be "weeded out" by the networks. The pro-Government military analysts would do what they were told because the Pentagon was "their bread and butter." These Pentagon-controlled analysts were used by the networks not only to comment on military matters -- and to do so almost always unchallenged -- but also even to shape and mold the networks' coverage choices.
Even a casual review of the DoD's documents leaves no doubt that this is exactly how the program worked. The military analysts most commonly used by MSNBC, CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC routinely received instructions about what to say in their appearances from the Pentagon. As but one extreme though illustrative example, Dan Senor -- Fox News analyst and husband of CNN's Campbell Brown -- would literally ask Di Rita before his television appearances what he should say (7900, 7920-21), and submitted articles to him, such as one he wrote for The Weekly Standard about how great the war effort was going, and Di Rita would give him editing directions, which he obediently followed.
Among the most active analysts in this program were all three of the most commonly used MSNBC commentators -- Gen. Montgomery Meigs, Gen. Wayne Downing, and Col. Ken Allard. They were frequently summoned by Chris Matthews and (in the case of Downing) by Brian Williams as NBC's resident experts. Matthews referred to them as "HARDBALL's war council" on January 17, 2005, when he had all three of them on together to bash The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh for reporting that the Pentagon was preparing attack plans against Iran -- an article that, like most Hersh articles, infuriated Di Rita and other DoD officials. The next day, Allard proudly wrote to Di Rita:
As you may have seen on MSNBC, I attributed a lot of what [Hersh] said to disgruntled CIA employees who simply should be taken out and shot.
In light of all of this, it is very hard to dispute the excited analysis of an unnamed Lt. Col when, in a March 4, 2005 email to various Pentagon officials (7751), he described the military analyst program as producing a "big payback." He then went further:
There are about 50 retired military analysts that are part of this group. . . . these are the folks that end up on FOX, CNN, etc. interpreting military happenings. These calls are conducted frequently and offer HUGE payback. . . . these end up being the people who carry the mail on talk shows.
On the Los Angeles Times blog a couple of weeks ago, Scott Collins opined that the principal reason the military analyst story had "no legs" (meaning that the original NYT story received so little subsequent coverage in the establishment media) is this:
Many Americans confronted with stories of media manipulation by government officials aren't, at this point, shocked and awed. Instead they've come to expect it. Increasingly, they consider the media simply a mouthpiece for whoever has the most power. You don't have to tell John Q. Public that the fix is in; he takes it for granted. . . .
So, many Americans, confronted with evidence that TV's talking heads are taking orders not just from government officials but also military-contractor clients, can be excused for not being all that surprised.
Clearly, the principal reason the story has received virtually no coverage on the television networks is because the story reflects so poorly on them. But as to his primary point, I don't believe Collins is right. The public has long been inculcated with the notion that we have a "liberal media" that opposes and undermines whatever Republicans do, etc. etc. Yet here is mountains of evidence as conclusive as can be as to how the Government/media cartel actually functions -- media outlets and their corporate parents rely on the Government for all sorts of favors and access and, in return, do nothing to displease them. To the contrary, the Bush administration itself here is proudly touting its ability to control media content and ensure the presence only of pro-Government voices with regard to war and military matters.
It's true that there are plenty of people who understand the core government-amplifying function of the establishment media, but there are also plenty of people -- likely far more -- who don't. That's precisely why the television networks are so eager to suppress and conceal these revelations and the endlessly illuminating evidence which supports them.
UPDATE: Each time I've written about this story, someone -- including, once, one of the producers of the show -- writes to point out that PBS' News Hour did broadcast a segment a couple of weeks ago examining the issues underlying the scandal. Indeed they did, and it was quite a good discussion. The transcript for that show can be read, and the show itself viewed, here.
On a different note, from the "for-what-it's-worth" department, Harry Reid was at FDL's Book Salon today to promote his new book, and this was the answer he gave when someone asked about whether he was planning to hold hearings (h/t Lish, who asked the question):
The answer is yes. I have personally spoken to Chairman Levin and he is tremendously concerned as I. And we are proceeding accordingly.
What is worth noting is that that's the first time Senate leadership has said they intend to hold hearings. In its recent article on the media's "deafening silence" over this story, The Politico said that if there were Congressional hearings held, then "the networks would be hard-pressed to continue their de facto blackout." I guess we'll find out if that's true.
-- Glenn Greenwald
Buzz up!Share
Digg
Del.icio.us
Print Permalink
Post a comment | Read comments (349)
Currently in Glenn Greenwald's Blog
How the military analyst program controlled news coverage: in the Pentagon's own words
"We develop a core group from within our media analyst list of those that we can count on to carry our water. They become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves."
Saturday, May 10, 2008 14:48 EDT
CNN, the Pentagon's "military analyst program" and Gitmo
A detailed look at the documents produced by the Pentagon reveals just how corrupt the media's behavior was and, even more so, continues to be.
Friday, May 9, 2008 12:43 EDT
Neocons and the truth: Bitter enemies to the end
The fact-free extremists who brought us the invasion of Iraq haven't gone anywhere and are busy trying to exert their influence before this administration ends.
Thursday, May 8, 2008 14:36 EDT
McCain embraces Bush's radical views of executive power
The GOP nominee actually complains that it is judicial power that is excessive and is unduly limiting the powers of the president.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008 15:39 EDT
RIVERVIEW: University of Life
RIVERVIEW: University of Life
A productive, sustainable, therapeutic community
for people living with substance addiction and mental illness
Set on 244 acres of parkland, the RIVERVIEW University of Life utilises existing buildings and land to provide a unique opportunity for hands on education and training to guest students.
RIVERVIEW offers:
A clinical intake assessment wing where people are helped to stabilise on their medications and detox from their substance use. The time spent in this process is 7-30 days.
Guests then move into a transition wing where they engage primarily in regular psychotherapy, psycho-education and life skills training. During this transition period, guests are encouraged to take part in low impact activities which benefit the community and to reflect upon the skills and training they would like to undertake which will enhance achievement of their future goals. The period of time spent in this process is from 30-60 days.
Now guests are invited to make a decision to commit to remaining in the community for a minimum of two years, ideally three. During this time they will become a working student in any of the five faculties – Arts/Music, Education, Horticulture/Animal Management, Hotel and TradeBased Skills. They will have the opportunity to complete certification in any of the faculties in a timely fashion and then switch to another faculty as they self-manage their education. They may also take the option of ranging across faculties if they would like time to solidify their interest. The time-frame will be flexible and adjustable.
During this time, they will also be expected to fully engage in leisure, sporting and recreational pursuits, and to support the community in extracurricular activities that may be undertaken to enhance and improve the community.
On completion of this educative period, guests will have the option to remain in the community for a mutually agreeable period of time, as peer educators and mentors, or be assisted to gain employment and accommodation as they re-enter society. Those who choose to leave will remain founding members of the community and will be welcome to return at any time.
HORTICULTURE/ANIMAL MANAGEMENT FACULTY
The open parkland is home to a valuable collection of rare trees. Preserving and studying this collection forms part of the Horticulture/Animal Management curriculum, as does the creation of several extensive organic vegetable gardens, berry gardens, a temperate climate orchard and a small collection of maples. Animals such as chickens, rabbits, goats, llamas, sheep and a small herd of 10 prize winning Jersey cows are also cultivated for food and fibre, with horses, dogs and other companion animals providing therapeutic interaction to the recovering population.
Organic cultivation methods will be used in the gardens, including permaculture, companion planting, crop rotation and use of natural fertilisers and composting. Ancient as well as modern seed varieties will be used to increase the diversity of crops.
Animals are grown for food and fibre in an ethical and humane manner. The companion animals are available to provide support and love to all students while remaining the responsibility of this Faculty
TRADEBASED SKILLS FACULTY
The upgrade, rebuild and renovation of the heritage buildings in an ecofriendly and sustainable way, is the responsibility of the TradeBased Skills faculty. Supervised by a team of qualified tradespeople, the student workforce will progress through construction, carpentry, plumbing and electrical components to achieve a recognised certification of skill level.
Renovating the existing buildings using recycled, natural, recovered, non chemical materials, water saving, solar and wind technology, and non sweatshop products, is the overall goal of this faculty. An intangible yet highly influential aspect of this work is that the student workforce will be directly responsible for creating their own living environment, working on building their community and thus acquiring a sense of commitment and ownership of their own “place”.
ARTS/MUSIC FACULTY
First Nations drumming and carving will form the basis of this Faculty, together with music, painting, crafts such as weaving and sewing, and pottery. All the work of the guest students will be used throughout the campus to enhance, furnish and decorate the living areas. Decoration and entertainment for all special events will be the responsibility of this Faculty and all student work will become an intrinsic part of the College. A special responsibility of this faculty will be the creation and maintenance of a special sacred space for all members of the College as well as the decoration of this space on the occasion of visits by spiritual leaders.
The cultural heritage of the First Nations People will manifest across the entire College as a respect for the people, the animals and the land, an understanding and reverence for what went before, what happens now and what is to come for the future.
This Faculty will encourage creativity and diversity across art forms while delivering a high level of fundamental skills training. An important function of the Faculty will be to create a documentary to record the history of the creation and growth of this community.
EDUCATION FACULTY
Guest students will be able to study components of the standard curriculum they need, up to Senior Grade 12. Education will also be responsible for the general administration of the College so students will receive a solid grounding in office management including computer skills, accounting, purchasing, “interoffice liaison”, data collection and record keeping. Community relations will manage the public face of the College via this Faculty.
Education will interact with other Faculties periodically to provide theoretical learning, certification, guest speakers and special inservices as required.
Spiritual leaders, environmental experts, human rights advocates as well as those experienced in healing therapies, will be invited to attend the College on a frequent basis.
HOTEL FACULTY
Hotel is responsible for feeding and housing the entire campus. Students will gain experience across the entire range of Hotel service, from kitchen prep to fine cuisine, bussing and waiting to front of house, room cleaning to special event organising (in conjunction with Arts/Music), food safety, purchasing and waste management.
All Hotel functions will be carried out using natural and non chemical products, waste will be kept to a minimum, composting, reusing and recycling will be standard wherever possible.
RIVERVIEW understands that all people are not born with equal opportunity. The trauma of years which manifests in drug addiction, mental illness, often physical disability and marginalisation within society, cannot be undone without extensive and ongoing deep therapy.
The overriding philosophy of RIVERVIEW University of Life, is the compassionate, respectful, and nonjudgmental interaction with individuals, animals, and the land. Healing and personal growth will be achieved within a productive environment where everyone is useful and able to contribute, where this contribution is valued and valuable, and where caring for each other and the community is part of the healing process.
Currently there is no organisation which offers an entirely holistic method of healing which includes care for the environment as well as healing the people. There are however numerous therapeutic communities around the world which are similarly structured. These communities have a high rate of success in enabling guests to turn their lives around, deal with their individual traumas, and make a successful return into mainstream society.
With global warming, wars, poverty and increasing dysfunction within urban populations, the alienation of large groups of people with post traumatic stress disorder, mental illness and substance addiction, continues to increase. The creation of long term healing communities which offer a therapeutic process, married to environmentally friendly production, education and hands on useful work, is becoming more urgent.
Just as the land will not be healed overnight from years of pollution and mismanagement, so the people who have suffered deep trauma will not be healed by short term detox and “recovery” options. Hope for the future is dashed upon the reality of a society which does not welcome recovered addicts and criminals. While they may exit treatment clean, enthusiastic and determined to change their lives, “normal” society is not so forgiving of a lack of marketable skills, a history of criminal activity, and chronic illness. Relapse becomes the fault of the addict, yet another negative brick to weigh down a fragile psyche, not the fault of the system which knows the answers yet fails to provide real solutions.
The time has come to erect a healing model where both the people and the planet are respected, nurtured and healed.
This concept is supported by The Riverview Preservation Society, Cottage Farm Centre for Mental Health, S E E R S (Socially Ethically Environmentally Responsible Society), VANDU (Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users).
For further information please check out the Association of Therapeutic Communities at www.therapeuticcommunities.org . See below for other references:
www.sanpatrignano.org.
www.gatehouseacademy.com
www.delanceystreetfoundation.org
www.coolminetc.ie
www.rosehillcentre.com
For information, please call Tui Hill at S E E R S Inc, on 778 230 1696, at tui@shaw.ca, or standuphq@hotmail.com
A productive, sustainable, therapeutic community
for people living with substance addiction and mental illness
Set on 244 acres of parkland, the RIVERVIEW University of Life utilises existing buildings and land to provide a unique opportunity for hands on education and training to guest students.
RIVERVIEW offers:
A clinical intake assessment wing where people are helped to stabilise on their medications and detox from their substance use. The time spent in this process is 7-30 days.
Guests then move into a transition wing where they engage primarily in regular psychotherapy, psycho-education and life skills training. During this transition period, guests are encouraged to take part in low impact activities which benefit the community and to reflect upon the skills and training they would like to undertake which will enhance achievement of their future goals. The period of time spent in this process is from 30-60 days.
Now guests are invited to make a decision to commit to remaining in the community for a minimum of two years, ideally three. During this time they will become a working student in any of the five faculties – Arts/Music, Education, Horticulture/Animal Management, Hotel and TradeBased Skills. They will have the opportunity to complete certification in any of the faculties in a timely fashion and then switch to another faculty as they self-manage their education. They may also take the option of ranging across faculties if they would like time to solidify their interest. The time-frame will be flexible and adjustable.
During this time, they will also be expected to fully engage in leisure, sporting and recreational pursuits, and to support the community in extracurricular activities that may be undertaken to enhance and improve the community.
On completion of this educative period, guests will have the option to remain in the community for a mutually agreeable period of time, as peer educators and mentors, or be assisted to gain employment and accommodation as they re-enter society. Those who choose to leave will remain founding members of the community and will be welcome to return at any time.
HORTICULTURE/ANIMAL MANAGEMENT FACULTY
The open parkland is home to a valuable collection of rare trees. Preserving and studying this collection forms part of the Horticulture/Animal Management curriculum, as does the creation of several extensive organic vegetable gardens, berry gardens, a temperate climate orchard and a small collection of maples. Animals such as chickens, rabbits, goats, llamas, sheep and a small herd of 10 prize winning Jersey cows are also cultivated for food and fibre, with horses, dogs and other companion animals providing therapeutic interaction to the recovering population.
Organic cultivation methods will be used in the gardens, including permaculture, companion planting, crop rotation and use of natural fertilisers and composting. Ancient as well as modern seed varieties will be used to increase the diversity of crops.
Animals are grown for food and fibre in an ethical and humane manner. The companion animals are available to provide support and love to all students while remaining the responsibility of this Faculty
TRADEBASED SKILLS FACULTY
The upgrade, rebuild and renovation of the heritage buildings in an ecofriendly and sustainable way, is the responsibility of the TradeBased Skills faculty. Supervised by a team of qualified tradespeople, the student workforce will progress through construction, carpentry, plumbing and electrical components to achieve a recognised certification of skill level.
Renovating the existing buildings using recycled, natural, recovered, non chemical materials, water saving, solar and wind technology, and non sweatshop products, is the overall goal of this faculty. An intangible yet highly influential aspect of this work is that the student workforce will be directly responsible for creating their own living environment, working on building their community and thus acquiring a sense of commitment and ownership of their own “place”.
ARTS/MUSIC FACULTY
First Nations drumming and carving will form the basis of this Faculty, together with music, painting, crafts such as weaving and sewing, and pottery. All the work of the guest students will be used throughout the campus to enhance, furnish and decorate the living areas. Decoration and entertainment for all special events will be the responsibility of this Faculty and all student work will become an intrinsic part of the College. A special responsibility of this faculty will be the creation and maintenance of a special sacred space for all members of the College as well as the decoration of this space on the occasion of visits by spiritual leaders.
The cultural heritage of the First Nations People will manifest across the entire College as a respect for the people, the animals and the land, an understanding and reverence for what went before, what happens now and what is to come for the future.
This Faculty will encourage creativity and diversity across art forms while delivering a high level of fundamental skills training. An important function of the Faculty will be to create a documentary to record the history of the creation and growth of this community.
EDUCATION FACULTY
Guest students will be able to study components of the standard curriculum they need, up to Senior Grade 12. Education will also be responsible for the general administration of the College so students will receive a solid grounding in office management including computer skills, accounting, purchasing, “interoffice liaison”, data collection and record keeping. Community relations will manage the public face of the College via this Faculty.
Education will interact with other Faculties periodically to provide theoretical learning, certification, guest speakers and special inservices as required.
Spiritual leaders, environmental experts, human rights advocates as well as those experienced in healing therapies, will be invited to attend the College on a frequent basis.
HOTEL FACULTY
Hotel is responsible for feeding and housing the entire campus. Students will gain experience across the entire range of Hotel service, from kitchen prep to fine cuisine, bussing and waiting to front of house, room cleaning to special event organising (in conjunction with Arts/Music), food safety, purchasing and waste management.
All Hotel functions will be carried out using natural and non chemical products, waste will be kept to a minimum, composting, reusing and recycling will be standard wherever possible.
RIVERVIEW understands that all people are not born with equal opportunity. The trauma of years which manifests in drug addiction, mental illness, often physical disability and marginalisation within society, cannot be undone without extensive and ongoing deep therapy.
The overriding philosophy of RIVERVIEW University of Life, is the compassionate, respectful, and nonjudgmental interaction with individuals, animals, and the land. Healing and personal growth will be achieved within a productive environment where everyone is useful and able to contribute, where this contribution is valued and valuable, and where caring for each other and the community is part of the healing process.
Currently there is no organisation which offers an entirely holistic method of healing which includes care for the environment as well as healing the people. There are however numerous therapeutic communities around the world which are similarly structured. These communities have a high rate of success in enabling guests to turn their lives around, deal with their individual traumas, and make a successful return into mainstream society.
With global warming, wars, poverty and increasing dysfunction within urban populations, the alienation of large groups of people with post traumatic stress disorder, mental illness and substance addiction, continues to increase. The creation of long term healing communities which offer a therapeutic process, married to environmentally friendly production, education and hands on useful work, is becoming more urgent.
Just as the land will not be healed overnight from years of pollution and mismanagement, so the people who have suffered deep trauma will not be healed by short term detox and “recovery” options. Hope for the future is dashed upon the reality of a society which does not welcome recovered addicts and criminals. While they may exit treatment clean, enthusiastic and determined to change their lives, “normal” society is not so forgiving of a lack of marketable skills, a history of criminal activity, and chronic illness. Relapse becomes the fault of the addict, yet another negative brick to weigh down a fragile psyche, not the fault of the system which knows the answers yet fails to provide real solutions.
The time has come to erect a healing model where both the people and the planet are respected, nurtured and healed.
This concept is supported by The Riverview Preservation Society, Cottage Farm Centre for Mental Health, S E E R S (Socially Ethically Environmentally Responsible Society), VANDU (Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users).
For further information please check out the Association of Therapeutic Communities at www.therapeuticcommunities.org . See below for other references:
www.sanpatrignano.org.
www.gatehouseacademy.com
www.delanceystreetfoundation.org
www.coolminetc.ie
www.rosehillcentre.com
For information, please call Tui Hill at S E E R S Inc, on 778 230 1696, at tui@shaw.ca, or standuphq@hotmail.com
A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENTS: A New Kind of Politics
By Jack Random
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES - DISSEMINATE FREELY
Barack Obama has claimed the nomination of his party for the presidency largely on the promise of a new kind of politics, one that transcends traditional party lines. Obama and Republican John McCain will be competing in the fall for the decisive independent voters.
So who are the independents?
We are individuals who are hungry for change. We believe the government does not represent our interests. We believe our country is headed for hard times. We are not all the scapegoat reactionaries or gullible followers that so many media personalities think we are. We do not want war. We want peace and prosperity for all.
We are pragmatic populist progressive libertarians. We are pragmatic in our approach to political change, populist in that we believe the government has an obligation to listen to the people even when it does not want to hear the message, progressive in that we believe in the working class, in equal rights and equal opportunity. We are libertarian because we believe that no government should impose on the private affairs of its citizens.
Our pragmatism dictates that we are tempered in our expectations. We will not push for programs, reforms or legislation that has no realistic chance of being enacted. For example, we recognize that government sponsored health insurance (a single-payer system) is the ultimate solution to our health and medical care crisis but we also know that there is not a sufficient base of support to overcome the inevitable charge of “socialized medicine” – no matter how specious the accusation.
The politics of pragmatism means that in deference to other social, political and economic interests, we do not expect any branch of government to settle the questions of same sex marriage or a woman’s right to choose abortion. We do not believe these issues should decide the composition of our next government.
The politics of pragmatism, however, does not value and will not accept pandering. We expect our leaders to state their positions, express their values and explain their beliefs. We expect you to answer all questions openly and honestly without regard to political expediency.
We demand that our government listen to the people. We expect you to listen as intently as politicians traditionally listen to lobbyists and special interests – as if your political lives depended on it. We expect you to address all issues of great concern to the people. We expect you to find solutions that you believe have the greatest potential to alleviate today’s problems without creating new problems in the future. We expect you to balance the common good against the rights of individuals.
On the issue of national security, we expect a reasoned approach. We will not sacrifice individual civil liberties. We do not deny the relationship between American foreign policy and terrorism. We desire a foreign policy that respects the rights and cultural differences of other nations. We want an end to the policy of American exceptionalism that claims the right to attack other nations without provocation, that exempts America from the universal laws of all nations and that demands of others what we would not submit to ourselves. We support diplomacy, international law and international institutions that provide an alternative to military intervention for the resolution of conflicts.
As we strengthen international institutions and lengthen their reach, we would like to see unnecessary military bases shut down and the resources channeled to other causes that enhance our chances of survival on the planet.
On the issue of immigration, we recognize the concerns that an open border brings but we do not agree that a wall separating us from our neighbors is a reasonable solution. We cannot ignore the fundamental truth that nearly all of us are the descendents of unwanted invaders. A wall is the multi-billion dollar non-solution of pandering politicians who do not want to see the problem go away. If there were no immigration problem, how would they defend the policies they have promoted for two decades? If they could not blame illegal immigrants they would have to accept responsibility for the global trade policies that have stolen our jobs and deflated our wages.
We understand that illegal immigration is a symptom of the disease†that charades under the flag of Free Trade. We understand that neither a wall nor mass deportation is a practical solution. The migrant workers who came to this country were responding to the economic realities of their own nations – realities that were created by the global economic policy that our leaders in the White House and congress not only supported but sponsored.
We want our government to fight for international labor laws, including the right to living wages, and the means to enforce them. We want you to fight against anti-labor laws in our own nation that falsely proclaim the “right to work” as they set up barriers to union organization.
In the case of China, a nation that parlays unfair trade, environmental recklessness and exploited workers to economic dominance, that owns our debt and possesses the means to control our currency, we recognize that we cannot reverse the damage that has been done over decades in a day, a year or even four or eight years but we must begin the reversal now.
In the cases of India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Latin American and African nations, whose workers have been exploited to their ultimate detriment as well as ours, we should form a Fair Trade alliance to effect more immediate change, inviting the European Union and other nations to form a united front against the Free Trade mandate of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. We expect our government to take lead this effort.
On the issue of climate change and environmental protection, we recognize that time is short and will not wait for economic reform. In the last few decades we have witnessed an acceleration of global warming and natural catastrophes. We can no longer afford to debate the relative responsibility of human causes; we must act now.
Recognizing that we have done more than any other nation and probably more than all nations combined to fill the planet’s atmosphere with toxic pollutants, we hold a disproportionate responsibility to lead a green revolution.
Unlike labor standards and living wages, we cannot take a gradual approach to this crisis. We cannot allow China, India or any other developing nations to pursue the same industrial path that we followed in the last century. We must therefore enable all nations to follow a new path, a path of clean energy, a path that utilizes all the planet’s resources in solar, geothermal, wind and other renewable sources, a path that maximizes fuel efficiency, localized production and global mass transit.
America can lead this monumental effort by redirecting the resources we have devoted to weapons of mass destruction and war or watch other nations lead while our economy continues to struggle against the tide of planetary evolution. We can lead by moving the world away from the growing threat and inevitable catastrophe of nuclear energy. As recent history has instructed us, nuclear energy begets nuclear weapons. We can afford neither and we must take the lead in disarming and dismantling both with dedicated and sincere resolve.
While we lead the world in this critical transformation, we cannot ignore the degradation of human values that has eroded our standing abroad even as it has weakened us at home. Liberty and justice can no longer be slogans for military invasion even as the rights of citizens are sacrificed at home to the false gods of patriotism and security.
On this there can be no compromise. The right to privacy in one’s property, communications and personal affairs must be guarded religiously. The right to dissent in words and actions must be upheld. Freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of speech and the right to assemble in protest must be defended. The Patriot Act must be exposed for what it is: A pretext for enabling the most abusive government intrusion into the private lives of its citizens in all of human history.
We believe in a press that cannot be bought and will not be used as a government propaganda agent. We believe that every media outlet has a solemn responsibility to investigate and report the facts without fear of consequence. We believe that media reform ensuring the independence and diversity of the press is essential to a functioning democracy.
We believe in the right of individuals to be free from government invasion and interference in all cases except where a clear and compelling cause can be demonstrated to an impartial judicial authority.
We have not thrived as a nation by backtracking on the fundamental rights of our founding. Instead, we have always struggled to expand our rights and liberties and to defend them against the inevitable assault of our enemies.
At this critical time in our history, we must recognize that once again our most dangerous enemies are not those who would strike us from afar but those who live within our borders. These enemies wear the masks of our defenders. They have won positions of power and influence and they have launched a determined attack at the core of our greatness.
These enemies are not new to the American story. They were the profiteers and British loyalist during the revolution. They were the authors of the Alien and Sedition Acts. They were the traders and plantation masters who went to war rather than yield a way of life built on the exploitation of slaves. They were the corporate monopolists that suppressed labor with hired thugs. They were the McCarthy era fear mongers forcing citizens of every stripe to sign loyalty oaths and blacklisting those who resisted. They were the white supremacists preaching a gospel of intolerance, spreading terror with lynching and imposing their will with laws of segregation and disenfranchisement. They were the traditionalists who fought back women’s suffrage and continue to fight women’s rights and civil rights and opportunity for the least privileged among us.
The enemies of American freedom have always lived within our borders, disguised as friends and neighbors, waiting for the opportunity to press their cause of oppression. They always claim the moral high ground, always wear the badge of patriotism and always proclaim themselves defenders of the American way.
The enemies of America have come out of the shadows once again and it is the duty of every loyal citizen to oppose them with all the resolve and unity that we would summon to oppose a foreign invader.
We are at a crossroads. Perhaps all generations believe that theirs is the greatest challenge and all are largely correct. For as long as more and greater weapons are being developed without a reciprocal development of diplomacy and humanitarian values, the world of the future will always be more dangerous until at last the die is cast and we have crossed the threshold of no return.
I fear as we should all fear that we are approaching that threshold. That is the challenge we must embrace. That is the reason we will overcome all barriers to achieve a world that other generations have only dreamed: because we must, we will.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB, INCLUDING THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.
JAZZMAN CHRONICLES - DISSEMINATE FREELY
Barack Obama has claimed the nomination of his party for the presidency largely on the promise of a new kind of politics, one that transcends traditional party lines. Obama and Republican John McCain will be competing in the fall for the decisive independent voters.
So who are the independents?
We are individuals who are hungry for change. We believe the government does not represent our interests. We believe our country is headed for hard times. We are not all the scapegoat reactionaries or gullible followers that so many media personalities think we are. We do not want war. We want peace and prosperity for all.
We are pragmatic populist progressive libertarians. We are pragmatic in our approach to political change, populist in that we believe the government has an obligation to listen to the people even when it does not want to hear the message, progressive in that we believe in the working class, in equal rights and equal opportunity. We are libertarian because we believe that no government should impose on the private affairs of its citizens.
Our pragmatism dictates that we are tempered in our expectations. We will not push for programs, reforms or legislation that has no realistic chance of being enacted. For example, we recognize that government sponsored health insurance (a single-payer system) is the ultimate solution to our health and medical care crisis but we also know that there is not a sufficient base of support to overcome the inevitable charge of “socialized medicine” – no matter how specious the accusation.
The politics of pragmatism means that in deference to other social, political and economic interests, we do not expect any branch of government to settle the questions of same sex marriage or a woman’s right to choose abortion. We do not believe these issues should decide the composition of our next government.
The politics of pragmatism, however, does not value and will not accept pandering. We expect our leaders to state their positions, express their values and explain their beliefs. We expect you to answer all questions openly and honestly without regard to political expediency.
We demand that our government listen to the people. We expect you to listen as intently as politicians traditionally listen to lobbyists and special interests – as if your political lives depended on it. We expect you to address all issues of great concern to the people. We expect you to find solutions that you believe have the greatest potential to alleviate today’s problems without creating new problems in the future. We expect you to balance the common good against the rights of individuals.
On the issue of national security, we expect a reasoned approach. We will not sacrifice individual civil liberties. We do not deny the relationship between American foreign policy and terrorism. We desire a foreign policy that respects the rights and cultural differences of other nations. We want an end to the policy of American exceptionalism that claims the right to attack other nations without provocation, that exempts America from the universal laws of all nations and that demands of others what we would not submit to ourselves. We support diplomacy, international law and international institutions that provide an alternative to military intervention for the resolution of conflicts.
As we strengthen international institutions and lengthen their reach, we would like to see unnecessary military bases shut down and the resources channeled to other causes that enhance our chances of survival on the planet.
On the issue of immigration, we recognize the concerns that an open border brings but we do not agree that a wall separating us from our neighbors is a reasonable solution. We cannot ignore the fundamental truth that nearly all of us are the descendents of unwanted invaders. A wall is the multi-billion dollar non-solution of pandering politicians who do not want to see the problem go away. If there were no immigration problem, how would they defend the policies they have promoted for two decades? If they could not blame illegal immigrants they would have to accept responsibility for the global trade policies that have stolen our jobs and deflated our wages.
We understand that illegal immigration is a symptom of the disease†that charades under the flag of Free Trade. We understand that neither a wall nor mass deportation is a practical solution. The migrant workers who came to this country were responding to the economic realities of their own nations – realities that were created by the global economic policy that our leaders in the White House and congress not only supported but sponsored.
We want our government to fight for international labor laws, including the right to living wages, and the means to enforce them. We want you to fight against anti-labor laws in our own nation that falsely proclaim the “right to work” as they set up barriers to union organization.
In the case of China, a nation that parlays unfair trade, environmental recklessness and exploited workers to economic dominance, that owns our debt and possesses the means to control our currency, we recognize that we cannot reverse the damage that has been done over decades in a day, a year or even four or eight years but we must begin the reversal now.
In the cases of India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Latin American and African nations, whose workers have been exploited to their ultimate detriment as well as ours, we should form a Fair Trade alliance to effect more immediate change, inviting the European Union and other nations to form a united front against the Free Trade mandate of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. We expect our government to take lead this effort.
On the issue of climate change and environmental protection, we recognize that time is short and will not wait for economic reform. In the last few decades we have witnessed an acceleration of global warming and natural catastrophes. We can no longer afford to debate the relative responsibility of human causes; we must act now.
Recognizing that we have done more than any other nation and probably more than all nations combined to fill the planet’s atmosphere with toxic pollutants, we hold a disproportionate responsibility to lead a green revolution.
Unlike labor standards and living wages, we cannot take a gradual approach to this crisis. We cannot allow China, India or any other developing nations to pursue the same industrial path that we followed in the last century. We must therefore enable all nations to follow a new path, a path of clean energy, a path that utilizes all the planet’s resources in solar, geothermal, wind and other renewable sources, a path that maximizes fuel efficiency, localized production and global mass transit.
America can lead this monumental effort by redirecting the resources we have devoted to weapons of mass destruction and war or watch other nations lead while our economy continues to struggle against the tide of planetary evolution. We can lead by moving the world away from the growing threat and inevitable catastrophe of nuclear energy. As recent history has instructed us, nuclear energy begets nuclear weapons. We can afford neither and we must take the lead in disarming and dismantling both with dedicated and sincere resolve.
While we lead the world in this critical transformation, we cannot ignore the degradation of human values that has eroded our standing abroad even as it has weakened us at home. Liberty and justice can no longer be slogans for military invasion even as the rights of citizens are sacrificed at home to the false gods of patriotism and security.
On this there can be no compromise. The right to privacy in one’s property, communications and personal affairs must be guarded religiously. The right to dissent in words and actions must be upheld. Freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of speech and the right to assemble in protest must be defended. The Patriot Act must be exposed for what it is: A pretext for enabling the most abusive government intrusion into the private lives of its citizens in all of human history.
We believe in a press that cannot be bought and will not be used as a government propaganda agent. We believe that every media outlet has a solemn responsibility to investigate and report the facts without fear of consequence. We believe that media reform ensuring the independence and diversity of the press is essential to a functioning democracy.
We believe in the right of individuals to be free from government invasion and interference in all cases except where a clear and compelling cause can be demonstrated to an impartial judicial authority.
We have not thrived as a nation by backtracking on the fundamental rights of our founding. Instead, we have always struggled to expand our rights and liberties and to defend them against the inevitable assault of our enemies.
At this critical time in our history, we must recognize that once again our most dangerous enemies are not those who would strike us from afar but those who live within our borders. These enemies wear the masks of our defenders. They have won positions of power and influence and they have launched a determined attack at the core of our greatness.
These enemies are not new to the American story. They were the profiteers and British loyalist during the revolution. They were the authors of the Alien and Sedition Acts. They were the traders and plantation masters who went to war rather than yield a way of life built on the exploitation of slaves. They were the corporate monopolists that suppressed labor with hired thugs. They were the McCarthy era fear mongers forcing citizens of every stripe to sign loyalty oaths and blacklisting those who resisted. They were the white supremacists preaching a gospel of intolerance, spreading terror with lynching and imposing their will with laws of segregation and disenfranchisement. They were the traditionalists who fought back women’s suffrage and continue to fight women’s rights and civil rights and opportunity for the least privileged among us.
The enemies of American freedom have always lived within our borders, disguised as friends and neighbors, waiting for the opportunity to press their cause of oppression. They always claim the moral high ground, always wear the badge of patriotism and always proclaim themselves defenders of the American way.
The enemies of America have come out of the shadows once again and it is the duty of every loyal citizen to oppose them with all the resolve and unity that we would summon to oppose a foreign invader.
We are at a crossroads. Perhaps all generations believe that theirs is the greatest challenge and all are largely correct. For as long as more and greater weapons are being developed without a reciprocal development of diplomacy and humanitarian values, the world of the future will always be more dangerous until at last the die is cast and we have crossed the threshold of no return.
I fear as we should all fear that we are approaching that threshold. That is the challenge we must embrace. That is the reason we will overcome all barriers to achieve a world that other generations have only dreamed: because we must, we will.
Jazz.
JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS). THE CHRONICLES HAVE BEEN POSTED ON NUMEROUS CITES OF THE WORLDWIDE WEB, INCLUDING THE ALBION MONITOR, BELLACIAO, BUZZLE, COUNTERPUNCH, DISSIDENT VOICE, THE DAILY SCARE, THE NATIONAL FREE PRESS AND PACIFIC FREE PRESS. SEE WWW.JAZZMANCHRONICLES.BLOGSPOT.COM.
NDP TABLES NON-CONFIDENCE MOTION ON GROWING GAP
From: "Tony Martin, MP Sault Ste. Marie"
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MAY 7, 2008
OTTAWA - With the income gap in this country growing and ordinary Canadians working harder and longer just to make ends meet, the NDP is committed to standing up to the Conservative government's out of touch approach to dealing with important issues. Today, the NDP has introduced a non-confidence motion on the issue for its opposition day motion.
"This prime minister's economic agenda is unbalanced, unsustainable and is failing working families," said NDP Leader Jack Layton. "The Conservatives have drained the fiscal capacity of this country to weather the tough economic times ahead. Stephen Harper is too busy listening to his friends around the boardroom table, and is
ignoring the needs of ordinary Canadians sitting at the kitchen table."
NDP Poverty Critic Tony Martin (Sault Ste. Marie)will present the motion to the House on Thursday during the NDP's opposition day.
"Working families are scraping by and the Conservatives don't care," said Martin. "Since January, 55,000 workers have lost their jobs. And countless ordinary Canadians are left without access to the Employment Insurance program they paid into their whole lives. It's unacceptable."
Martin issued a warning that the Conservatives' current course is causing irreversible damage to Canadian families.
"Each day Stephen Harper's Conservatives are allowed to set Canada's economic agenda, the country takes another step in the wrong direction," said Martin. "The unbalanced economic agenda set by Harper and the Conservatives means the damage being done to working families is irreversible."
-30-
For more information, please contact:
Gaby Senay, NDP press secretary, 613-295-9228
The motion reads:
May 6, 2008 - Mr. Martin (Sault Ste. Marie) - That the House recognize the harmful effects on working and middle-income Canadians of the growing income gap fostered by this government's unbalanced economic agenda, including it's failure to reform employment insurance to ensure that people who lose their jobs during economic
downturns are protected and trained, and therefore the House has lost confidence in this government.
***
POUR DIFFUSION IMMÉDIATE
LE 7 MAI 2008
LE NPD DÉPOSE UNE MOTION DE DÉFIANCE SUR L'INÉGALITÉ ÉCONOMIQUE CROISSANTE
OTTAWA - Puisque l'inégalité économique s'empire dans ce pays et que les familles d'aujourd'hui doivent travailler de plus en plus fort pour joindre les deux bouts, le NPD est résolu à lutter contre l'approche déconnectée du gouvernement conservateur relativement aux questions importantes. Aujourd'hui, le NPD a présenté une motion de défiance en ce sens comme motion de l'opposition.
« Le programme économique de ce premier ministre est déséquilibré et intenable et laisse tomber les familles d'aujourd'hui, a dit le chef du NPD, Jack Layton. Les conservateurs ont détruit la capacité fiscale de ce pays de survivre aux
difficultés économiques qui s'en viennent. Stephen Harper est trop occupé à écouter ses amis dans les salles de conférence, et il tourne le dos aux véritables besoins des familles canadiennes. »
Le porte-parole du NPD en matière de pauvreté, Tony Martin (Sault Ste. Marie), présentera la motion à la Chambre jeudi pendant la journée d'opposition du NPD.
« Les familles d'aujourd'hui peinent à joindre les deux bouts et les conservateurs s'en fichent, a dit le député Martin. Depuis janvier, 55 000 travailleurs ont perdu leur emploi. Et d'innombrables autres Canadiens n'ont pas accès au régime d'assurance-emploi auquel ils ont cotisé toute leur vie. C'est inadmissible. »
Le député Martin a prévenu que les conservateurs font fausse route et que cela aura des conséquences irréparables pour les familles canadiennes.
« Chaque jour que les conservateurs de Stephen Harper décident du programme économique du Canada, le pays fait un autre pas dans la mauvaise direction, a dit le député Martin. Le programme économique déséquilibré de Harper et des conservateurs porte irréparablement atteinte aux familles d'aujourd'hui. »
-30-
Pour de plus amples renseignements, veuillez contacter :
Gaby Senay, attachée de presse du NPD, 613-295-9228
La motion se lit comme suite :
6 mai 2008 - M. Martin (Sault Ste. Marie) - Que la Chambre reconnaisse les effets néfastes sur la classe ouvrière et les Canadiens à revenu moyen de l'écart de plus en plus profond entre les revenus, creusé par le programme économique déséquilibré du gouvernement, notamment le fait qu'il n'ait pas réformé le régime d'assurance-emploi de manière à ce que les travailleurs qui perdent leur emploi en période de fléchissement économique soient protégés et formés, et par conséquent la Chambre a perdu confiance en ce gouvernement.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MAY 7, 2008
OTTAWA - With the income gap in this country growing and ordinary Canadians working harder and longer just to make ends meet, the NDP is committed to standing up to the Conservative government's out of touch approach to dealing with important issues. Today, the NDP has introduced a non-confidence motion on the issue for its opposition day motion.
"This prime minister's economic agenda is unbalanced, unsustainable and is failing working families," said NDP Leader Jack Layton. "The Conservatives have drained the fiscal capacity of this country to weather the tough economic times ahead. Stephen Harper is too busy listening to his friends around the boardroom table, and is
ignoring the needs of ordinary Canadians sitting at the kitchen table."
NDP Poverty Critic Tony Martin (Sault Ste. Marie)will present the motion to the House on Thursday during the NDP's opposition day.
"Working families are scraping by and the Conservatives don't care," said Martin. "Since January, 55,000 workers have lost their jobs. And countless ordinary Canadians are left without access to the Employment Insurance program they paid into their whole lives. It's unacceptable."
Martin issued a warning that the Conservatives' current course is causing irreversible damage to Canadian families.
"Each day Stephen Harper's Conservatives are allowed to set Canada's economic agenda, the country takes another step in the wrong direction," said Martin. "The unbalanced economic agenda set by Harper and the Conservatives means the damage being done to working families is irreversible."
-30-
For more information, please contact:
Gaby Senay, NDP press secretary, 613-295-9228
The motion reads:
May 6, 2008 - Mr. Martin (Sault Ste. Marie) - That the House recognize the harmful effects on working and middle-income Canadians of the growing income gap fostered by this government's unbalanced economic agenda, including it's failure to reform employment insurance to ensure that people who lose their jobs during economic
downturns are protected and trained, and therefore the House has lost confidence in this government.
***
POUR DIFFUSION IMMÉDIATE
LE 7 MAI 2008
LE NPD DÉPOSE UNE MOTION DE DÉFIANCE SUR L'INÉGALITÉ ÉCONOMIQUE CROISSANTE
OTTAWA - Puisque l'inégalité économique s'empire dans ce pays et que les familles d'aujourd'hui doivent travailler de plus en plus fort pour joindre les deux bouts, le NPD est résolu à lutter contre l'approche déconnectée du gouvernement conservateur relativement aux questions importantes. Aujourd'hui, le NPD a présenté une motion de défiance en ce sens comme motion de l'opposition.
« Le programme économique de ce premier ministre est déséquilibré et intenable et laisse tomber les familles d'aujourd'hui, a dit le chef du NPD, Jack Layton. Les conservateurs ont détruit la capacité fiscale de ce pays de survivre aux
difficultés économiques qui s'en viennent. Stephen Harper est trop occupé à écouter ses amis dans les salles de conférence, et il tourne le dos aux véritables besoins des familles canadiennes. »
Le porte-parole du NPD en matière de pauvreté, Tony Martin (Sault Ste. Marie), présentera la motion à la Chambre jeudi pendant la journée d'opposition du NPD.
« Les familles d'aujourd'hui peinent à joindre les deux bouts et les conservateurs s'en fichent, a dit le député Martin. Depuis janvier, 55 000 travailleurs ont perdu leur emploi. Et d'innombrables autres Canadiens n'ont pas accès au régime d'assurance-emploi auquel ils ont cotisé toute leur vie. C'est inadmissible. »
Le député Martin a prévenu que les conservateurs font fausse route et que cela aura des conséquences irréparables pour les familles canadiennes.
« Chaque jour que les conservateurs de Stephen Harper décident du programme économique du Canada, le pays fait un autre pas dans la mauvaise direction, a dit le député Martin. Le programme économique déséquilibré de Harper et des conservateurs porte irréparablement atteinte aux familles d'aujourd'hui. »
-30-
Pour de plus amples renseignements, veuillez contacter :
Gaby Senay, attachée de presse du NPD, 613-295-9228
La motion se lit comme suite :
6 mai 2008 - M. Martin (Sault Ste. Marie) - Que la Chambre reconnaisse les effets néfastes sur la classe ouvrière et les Canadiens à revenu moyen de l'écart de plus en plus profond entre les revenus, creusé par le programme économique déséquilibré du gouvernement, notamment le fait qu'il n'ait pas réformé le régime d'assurance-emploi de manière à ce que les travailleurs qui perdent leur emploi en période de fléchissement économique soient protégés et formés, et par conséquent la Chambre a perdu confiance en ce gouvernement.
Green Scare: The FBI's Domestic Terrorism Program
From: Kalanu!
Hello friends;
Some of you might have heard me ranting on about the Green Scare, the FBI led witch hunt that has seen almost 20 non-violent environmental activists sentenced to hard time in prison as domestic terrorists.
I don't want to get into the whole background story on this. Needless to say, one of the most disturbing cases that we've been watching involves a 19 year old paid FBI agent provocateur named 'Anna', who strung along a young man and entrapped him into planning with her and two others the destruction of a dam in California.
The bombing never happened, and the planning of it would have never gotten as far as it did were it not for Anna, who went out of her way to keep the group together and on track.
An article about Anna's role in this case is in a mainstream fashion magazine this month.
From what I've read, it's a clear case of FBI entrapment, yet yesterday Eric McDavid, a gentle, peaceful individual was sentenced to 19 years and 7 months! for his role in this 'eco-terror' act that never even happened.
I'm blown away, as no doubt anyone else who has been following this case is. Regardless of whether you think Eric conspired with Anna to blow up a dam, should he have been given a sentence stronger than that which murderers and rapists would receive?
Maybe you don't think there is a war against nature and the defenders of nature. Maybe you have blind trust in the US justice system.
Please read up on this and the other cases (Briana Waters is facing 20 years in prison this month for her alleged role as a lookout in an arson at a university of Washington biotech lab. A guilty verdict in her case was reached after one of the people who actually took part in the arson testified against her in exchange for leniency. There was no other evidence against her.)
Previous to Eric's sentencing, the most shocking repression occurred when Jeff Luers, a well-known forest activist from Oregon, was sentenced to 22 years for burning three SUV's. After 7 years in prison, his sentence has now been reduced to 10 years, which is still a lot of time when you consider the case of the US Forest Service firefighter who was given 3 years for over 30 fires she started in order to get overtime work. But Jeff was considered an eco-terrorist because he prefers trees and clean air to SUVs.
Any of us who take a stand for the earth need to be worried. There are activists facing hard time in these cases not because they committed the crimes, but because the people who commit acts of property destruction in the name of the earth often do so without leaving a trail, or when caught are urged to name certain individuals in exchange for leniency.
As in the case of Tre Arrow, it's clear that those whose names and voices are recognized and respected in this movement are silenced with false charges. Often it's the above-ground activists that must pay when the police state cannot find the actual underground perpetrators.
Aboveground activists such as the SHAC 7, a group of 6 young people from New Jersey, received sentences of two to six years for running a website that encouraged non-violent action against companies that perform animal testing. They were never even accused of a crime, just running a website.
The same arson or sabotage that would get anyone else a mischief charge and a suspended sentence is considered domestic terrorism if committed by people who care about the environment. It's also important to realize that regardless of who committed these acts of so-called 'eco-terror' that no one has ever been harmed in the process.
It doesn't matter in Eric's case because the action never happened, and never would have. Eric has been sentenced to 19 years and seven months for an alleged thought crime.
Decide for yourself whether the young activists whose lives are being ruined deserve to be treated as terrorists. Act accordingly if you believe that a serious injustice has occurred.
For more info on this case and others in the Green Scare, visit these links
http://bullsheet.wordpress.com/category/green-scare/
http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Scare
-in solidarity with all life,
Kalanu
http://treesit.blogspot.com
http://bullsheet.wordpress.com
http://pedaltopetal.blogspot.com
"Our work will be unfinished until not one human being is hungry or battered, not one single person is forced to die in war, not one innocent languishes imprisoned and no one is persecuted for his or her beliefs." - Leonard Peltier
Saturday, May 10, 2008
B. C. Liberals: Legislation without Representation
Dave Schreck's Strategic Thoughts
May 5, 2008
"Not a Dime without Debate"
Many British Columbians don't know whether the BC Legislature is sitting or not, and many don't care. That doesn't stop them from becoming very angry when they learn what is happening; it is like taking for granted that your car is going to start until it doesn't.
The Campbell government is on the verge of ramming 23 Bills through the Legislature with virtually no debate; that's much worse than a car breaking down, that's a fundamental failure of democracy.
As of Friday, May 2nd, 23 Bills had not yet passed second reading, let alone passed the detailed committee stage that precedes third reading.Until Campbell came to power in 2001, the rules that governed the BC Legislature saw the government call the session to order and the Opposition adjourn it. In other words, debate would continue for as long as the Opposition wanted to examine the government's legislation and spending estimates. On most occasions that meant that BC's Legislature sat into June, and occasionally into July.
Campbell changed the rules and implemented a fixed legislative calendar, except that in 2006 he didn't honor the calendar, not calling the House until late November. A major feature of the fixed legislative calendar, is that according to the amended rules of the Legislature all designated government business must pass by the pre-set date for adjournment in late May (or be voted on, which is the same thing, with a majority government). If the government and the opposition can't agree on how that will happen, the government introduces closure (time-allocation) to limit debate and force budgets and legislation through the Legislature with little or no debate.
Unless the Campbell government announces that a substantial portion of its 2008 spring legislative agenda will be set over to the fall, it will demonstrate an extreme abuse of power.
The pending legislation (10 of the 23 Bills were just introduced last week) includes substantial changes in how British Columbians live. The carbon tax, the cap and trade system for carbon emissions, limits on third party advertising before and during election campaigns, and a change to health legislation that puts a definition of "sustainability" on the same grounds as the concepts of universality, accessibility and comprehensiveness are but a few of the fundamental changes that the Campbell government appears willing to ram through without much debate by May 29th.
The legislature only sits for four days a week, no longer in the evenings, and it recesses for a week or more in every week in which there is a statutory holiday, hence, between May 5th and May 29th, it sits for only 12 days. It is outrageous that the Campbell government would contemplate substantial legislation with little or no opportunity for scrutiny.
It is not just the Official Opposition that would be offended; during the period of legislative debate, those who know something about pending legislation engage the public through the news media and feed their concerns to the Opposition as well as lobbying the government. Limiting debate means limiting opportunities for public involvement in the democratic process.
If the government forces passage of all 23 Bills that are currently outstanding by May 29th, its abuse of power may become more of a political issue than the substance of any of its most controversial legislation.
May 5, 2008
"Not a Dime without Debate"
Many British Columbians don't know whether the BC Legislature is sitting or not, and many don't care. That doesn't stop them from becoming very angry when they learn what is happening; it is like taking for granted that your car is going to start until it doesn't.
The Campbell government is on the verge of ramming 23 Bills through the Legislature with virtually no debate; that's much worse than a car breaking down, that's a fundamental failure of democracy.
As of Friday, May 2nd, 23 Bills had not yet passed second reading, let alone passed the detailed committee stage that precedes third reading.Until Campbell came to power in 2001, the rules that governed the BC Legislature saw the government call the session to order and the Opposition adjourn it. In other words, debate would continue for as long as the Opposition wanted to examine the government's legislation and spending estimates. On most occasions that meant that BC's Legislature sat into June, and occasionally into July.
Campbell changed the rules and implemented a fixed legislative calendar, except that in 2006 he didn't honor the calendar, not calling the House until late November. A major feature of the fixed legislative calendar, is that according to the amended rules of the Legislature all designated government business must pass by the pre-set date for adjournment in late May (or be voted on, which is the same thing, with a majority government). If the government and the opposition can't agree on how that will happen, the government introduces closure (time-allocation) to limit debate and force budgets and legislation through the Legislature with little or no debate.
Unless the Campbell government announces that a substantial portion of its 2008 spring legislative agenda will be set over to the fall, it will demonstrate an extreme abuse of power.
The pending legislation (10 of the 23 Bills were just introduced last week) includes substantial changes in how British Columbians live. The carbon tax, the cap and trade system for carbon emissions, limits on third party advertising before and during election campaigns, and a change to health legislation that puts a definition of "sustainability" on the same grounds as the concepts of universality, accessibility and comprehensiveness are but a few of the fundamental changes that the Campbell government appears willing to ram through without much debate by May 29th.
The legislature only sits for four days a week, no longer in the evenings, and it recesses for a week or more in every week in which there is a statutory holiday, hence, between May 5th and May 29th, it sits for only 12 days. It is outrageous that the Campbell government would contemplate substantial legislation with little or no opportunity for scrutiny.
It is not just the Official Opposition that would be offended; during the period of legislative debate, those who know something about pending legislation engage the public through the news media and feed their concerns to the Opposition as well as lobbying the government. Limiting debate means limiting opportunities for public involvement in the democratic process.
If the government forces passage of all 23 Bills that are currently outstanding by May 29th, its abuse of power may become more of a political issue than the substance of any of its most controversial legislation.
Israelis Facing History
New Israeli Scholars Face up to Its Origins
by Eric Rouleau
In the 1980s in Israel, a new generation of men and woman who had not lived through the Holocaust or the creation of their country came of age intellectually and embarked on a remarkable period of change. This change is indicative of how Israel’s intelligentsia has gradually matured to a point where it is now able to judge the country’s past without hang-ups, and free itself from the myths and taboos propagated by the country’s leaders.
The anti-conformism of this generation of intellectuals -- which includes historians, sociologists, philosophers, novelists, journalists, filmmakers and artists -- first made itself felt after the Six Day war in 1967. Events since then have only fuelled their dissent: The occupation, Palestinian resistance, the coming to power of the religious, nationalist right in 1977, the growing influence of settlers and expansionist rabbis, and the worsening tensions between clerics and secular society have all played their part. “Religious people often talk about Tel Aviv as if it were Sodom and Gomorrah,” says Michel Warshawski, a leader of the radical wing of the peace movement, “whereas for secular Israelis, Jerusalem is 'Tehran of the ayatollahs'.”
Peace with Egypt in 1979 raised hopes of a final peace settlement, but these hopes were dashed in 1982, with the invasion of Lebanon. This invasion, widely seen as Israel’s first offensive war, was launched on what turned out to be a false prospectus. Contrary to the Israeli government’s claims, the Palestine Liberation Organisation -- which Menahem Begin and Ariel Sharon set out to destroy -- had not behaved provocatively. Indeed, it had shown signs of readiness to compromise, and in any case did not pose a serious threat to Israel’s existence. At the time, many Israelis were shocked by their army’s extreme brutality and the high death toll among the Palestinian and Lebanese population. The worst atrocity, the terrible Sabra and Shatila massacres, was committed with the full knowledge of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
These events provoked an unprecedented response: Around 400,000 protestors took to the streets of Tel Aviv; 500 officers and soldiers deserted; and the refusnik movement was born, as young people refused to serve in the army, first in Lebanon and then in the occupied territories. The “purity of arms” which Israel had boasted of since its birth was seriously undermined.
Unintentionally, young historians further contributed to the discrediting of Israel’s self-image. From official archives, which were declassified in 1978 under Israel’s 30-year rule, they discovered that the conduct of the Israeli forces before and during the war of 1948 departed significantly from the idealised propaganda version. Simha Flapan, a fervent Zionist right up to his death, was the first to make use of official documents in a book that exposed the seven main myths that have been used to dupe the public for decades.
Dominique Vidal’s book, written with Sébastien Boussois, is the first to set out and analyse the conclusions of the so-called new historians. They are the first researchers since the foundation of the state of Israel to base their work not on secondary sources, as their predecessors did, but on documents from unimpeachable sources such as the archives of the cabinet, the army, the Palmach (shock troops), Zionist organisations, and the diaries of David Ben Gurion, who held the posts of defence and prime minister.
The book describes the circumstances which led to war with the Arabs, pays special attention to the role of Ben Gurion, which is ambiguous to say the least, and devotes a chapter to Benny Morris, the most prominent of the new historians and author of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Question (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Vidal and Boussois refer to Morris as schizophrenic because of the gulf between his quest for historical truth and his political position on the far right. The book also examines Ilan Pappé’s most recent book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006) which provoked a furore in Israel that forced its author -- like so many others -- to resign from the University of Haifa and go into exile at a British university.
Pappé is not the first dissident intellectual (nor is he likely to be the last) to leave his country to escape the suffocating atmosphere reserved for “lepers” such as him. But unlike his predecessors, it is much harder to dispute his versions of events, because they are so much more detailed. Pappé has had access to documents from 60 years of Israeli archives (unlike most of his colleagues who only had access to 40 years’ worth).
Pappé has also made use of the work of Palestinian historians in his writing, often for eyewitness accounts. He has collected the testimony of survivors of ethnic cleansing -- a source thus far studiously avoided by his fellow historians, either through an instinctive rejection of such material or through mistrust, or more prosaically because of their ignorance of the Arabic language. Such eyewitness accounts are all the more valuable as, so far, no Arab country has opened its archives to researchers.
Ultimately, the points of difference between Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris are not substantial. Both maintain that the 1948 war was not a David and Goliath struggle as is claimed, since the Israeli forces were clearly superior to their adversaries in both manpower and weaponry. Even at the height of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, there were only a few thousand poorly equipped Palestinian fighters, supported by some Arab volunteers from the Fawzi al-Qawuqji liberation army.
Even when the Arab states intervened on 15 May 1948, their forces were still far inferior to those of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organisation that later formed the core of the IDF, which was able to keep drawing on reinforcements. Morris and Pappé agree that the Arab forces invaded Palestine reluctantly as a last resort, not in order to destroy the fledgling Jewish state, which they knew they were incapable of doing, but to prevent Israel and Transjordan -- “in collusion” according to historian Avi Shlaim -- from carving up the territory granted to the Palestinians under the United Nations plan of 29 November 1947.
“I have no doubt we are capable of occupying all of Palestine,” Ben Gurion, the father of the Jewish state, had written to Moshe Sharett (Israel’s second prime minister, who served between Ben Gurion’s two terms) in February 1948, three months before the Arab-Israeli war began -- and a few weeks before the delivery of massive consignments of arms sent via Prague by the USSR. This boast did not stop him claiming publicly that Israel was threatened by a second Holocaust.
In the first week of the war in May 1948, carried away by news of Israeli victories according to Ilan Pappé, Ben Gurion wrote in his diary: “We shall establish a Christian state in Lebanon… we shall break Transjordan, bomb its capital, destroy its army… we shall bring Syria to its knees… our air force will attack Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo, and this will avenge our ancestors who were oppressed by the Egyptians and the Assyrians in Biblical times.”
In similar fashion, Morris and Pappé demolish the Israeli leadership’s carefully maintained myth that the Palestinians left their homes voluntarily in response to calls from the Arab authorities and radio stations (these broadcasts are entirely the inventions of Israeli propaganda, as complete recordings made at the time by the BBC reveal). In fact, the two historians confirm what has been known since the end of the 1950s: It was the Israeli authorities who forced the Palestinians to flee their land through blackmail, threats, brutality and terror.
They diverge, however, over the meaning of these expulsions: for Benny Morris, they are simply “collateral damage.” “All’s fair in love and war”, he explained, adding more recently and somewhat cynically, that Ben Gurion ought to have kept going until the very last Palestinian was gone. Where Morris sees an exodus resulting from war and “not the intention of either Jew or Arab,” Pappé shows that the ethnic cleansing was planned and executed in order to extend Israel’s territory -- in effect to judaise it.
And with reason. For although the Zionist leadership had publicly approved the UN plan, in reality they thought it intolerable: Their consent was just a tactic, as several documents in the archives and Ben Gurion’s own diary show.
True, they had been granted more than half of Palestine. The rest was to be returned to the indigenous Arabs, who were twice as numerous as the Jews. However, they viewed the territory earmarked for Israel as too small for the millions of immigrants its leaders hoped to attract. Moreover, 405,000 Palestinian Arabs would have lived there alongside 558,000 Jews, who would have accounted for just 58% of the population of the future Jewish state. Thus Zionism risked losing its very raison d’être: “making Palestine as Jewish as America is American and England is English,” in the words of Haim Weizmann, who went on to become Israel’s first president.
That is why thoughts of the transfer (in plain terms, expulsion) of the indigenous Arabs haunted the Zionist leaders, who debated the question endlessly -- usually behind closed doors. At the end of the 19th century, Theodor Herzl had suggested that the Ottoman sultan should deport the Palestinians to clear the way for Jewish colonisation. In 1930, Weizmann tried to persuade the British, who held the Mandate for Palestine, to do the same.
In 1938, following the proposal of a tiny Jewish state accompanied by a transfer of some Arabs, envisaged by a British commission under Lord Peel, Ben Gurion declared before the executive committee of the Jewish Agency: “I am in favour of an obligatory transfer, a measure which is by no means immoral.” The war of 1948 was to offer him his chance to put his plan into action by launching an offensive designed to uproot the indigenous population six months before the Arab armies intervened. To facilitate this process, Pappé has revealed, Ben Gurion had a file created by the Jewish Agency in 1939 on all the Arab villages, which was regularly updated throughout the 1940s. It recorded demographic and economic facts as well as political and military information.
Ilan Pappé has analysed in detail the measures to which the Israeli forces resorted. They make chilling reading, even if they are reminiscent of atrocities committed during ethnic cleansings carried out by other peoples from late antiquity on. The statistics produced by the historian are telling: in a few months, several dozen massacres and summary executions were recorded; 531 villages out of a thousand were destroyed or converted to accommodate Jewish immigrants; 11 ethnically mixed towns were purged of their Arab inhabitants.
On Ben Gurion’s instructions, all 70,000 of the Palestinian inhabitants of Ramleh and Lydda, including children and old people, were forced from their homes at bayonet point in the space of a few hours in mid-July 1948. Yigal Allon and the future prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was then a high-ranking officer in the military, ran the operation. Rabin wrote about it in his memoirs published in the United States, though they were later censored in the Hebrew edition. Numerous refugees died of exhaustion en route, as they were driven towards the Transjordanian border. There had been similar scenes in April 1948, in Jaffa, when 50,000 of its Arab citizens had to flee, terrorised by particularly intense artillery bombardment from the Irgun, a militant Zionist organisation, and fearful of more massacres. This is what Morris calls the “atrocity factor.”
These horrors are all the more unjustifiable since a large number of Arab villages, by Ben Gurion’s own admission, had declared their willingness not to fight the partition of Palestine. Some had even reached non-aggression agreements with their Jewish neighbours. That was the case in the village of Deir Yassin, where the irregular forces of the Irgun and the Lehi nevertheless massacred a large part of the population with the tacit agreement of the Haganah, according to Simha Flapan.
In total, 750-800,000 Palestinians were forced into exile between 1947 and 1949, and lost their land and property. According to an official Israeli estimate, the Jewish National Fund seized 300,000 hectares of Arab land, much of which was given to kibbutzim. The operation could not have been better planned: The day after the vote on 11 December 1948, on the famous resolution on the “right to return” by the UN General Assembly, the Israeli government adopted the Emergency Absentees’ Property law which, added to the law on the cultivation of abandoned lands of 30 June 1948, retrospectively legalised seizures -- and forbade the victims of seizures from claiming any compensation on returning home.
Despite the protests from some members of the Israeli government, shocked by the brutality of the ethnic cleansing, Ben Gurion -- who had not himself given an explicit written order -- did nothing to stop it. Nor did he openly condemn it. He limited himself to condemnation of the raping and pillaging which the Israeli soldiers carried out, though they benefited from complete impunity.
What is most astonishing is the silence of the international community, which has lasted for decades although international observers, including those from the UN, were aware of the atrocities. This makes it easier to understand why the Palestinians commemorate the nakba (catastrophe) rather than celebrate the Israeli war of independence.
Avi Shlaim, a fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Allen Lane and WW Norton, 2000) has demolished yet another myth: that of an Israel devoted to peace but confronted with belligerent Arab states bent on its annihilation. The title of his book is taken from the doctrine of the father of the ultranationalist right: In 1923, Zeev Jabotinsky declared that there should be no negotiations over a peace accord until the Jews had colonised the whole of Palestine behind a wall of iron, since the Arabs only understood the logic of force.
By adopting this doctrine, Israel’s political and military leaders on both the right and the left have managed to sabotage successive peace plans. Reckoning that time is on their side, and claiming, in the words of Ehud Barak (then prime minister), that Israel has no “partner for peace,” the leaders in Jerusalem chose to wait for their adversaries to accept Israel’s territorial expansion and the splitting-up of a hypothetical, demilitarised Palestinian state which is condemned to become a collection of Bantustans.
Shlaim’s book was a bestseller when it was published in English in 2000, and was translated into several languages, but had to wait five years before appearing in Hebrew. Most Israeli publishers deemed it to be of little interest. Yet Shlaim recognises the legitimacy of the Zionist movement and of Israel’s 1967 borders. “On the other hand,” he says, “I entirely reject the Zionist colonial project beyond that border.”
Almost all of the historians, sociologists, novelists, journalists and filmmakers who belong to the new wave of the intelligentsia are Zionists of a new sort -- known as post-Zionists. They share a desire to espouse the cause of peace by establishing historical truth and recognising the wrongs done to the Palestinians.
To get a sense of the scale of the change that has taken place since the 1980s, it is worth reading the research carried out by Sébastien Boussois in Israel among new historians and their opponents. Some observers have concluded that the advent of a stable Israel at peace with its neighbours will depend in large part on the impact these intellectuals have on Israeli society and especially its political class.
This is how Yehuda Lancry, former Israeli ambassador to France and the United States, put it:
The ‘new historians’, even a radical such as Ilan Pappé, bring light to the dark region of the Israeli collective consciousness and pave the way for a stronger adherence to mutual respect for and peace with the Palestinians.
Their work, far from representing a threat to Israel, does their country honour, and more: it is a duty, a moral obligation, a prodigious assumption of a liberating enterprise in order that the fault lines, the healthy interstices, necessary to the integration of the discourse of the Other, may take their place in Israeli experience.
Eric Rouleau is a journalist and former French ambassador. -- translated by George Miller.
Copyright ©2008 Le Monde diplomatique
----------------
Released: 10 May 2008
Word Count: 2,696
----------------
[Sidebar]
Are the Jews an Invented People?
by Eric Rouleau
When and How Were the Jewish People Invented? is the provocative title of the most recent book to be published in Israel by Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University. Sand, one of the “new” historians, attacks what he calls the myth that the Jews are the descendants of the Hebrews, exiled from the kingdom of Judea. He has attempted to show that the Jews are neither a race nor a nation, but ancient pagans -- being in the main, Berbers from North Africa, Arabs from the south of Arabia, and Turks from the Khazar empire -- who converted to Judaism between the fourth and eighth centuries CE. According to Sand, the Palestinians are probably descended from Hebrews who embraced Islam or Christianity.
Sand doesn’t challenge Israel’s right to exist or the notion of its sovereignty, but he thinks that sovereignty is undermined by its exclusively ethnic base, which stems from the racism of Zionist ideologues. In other words: Israel shouldn’t be a Jewish state, but a democratic secular one belonging to all its citizens.
Quoted in Haaretz on 21 March 2008, Sand was pessimistic about how his work would be received in Israel: “There was a time when anyone who claimed that the Jews had a pagan ancestry was accused on the spot of being an anti-Semite. Today, anyone who dares suggest that the Jews have never been and still are not a people or a nation is immediately denounced as an enemy of the state of Israel.”
Sand may be mistaken. A no less challenging work that presents the Torah as in large part a collection of myths and legends, has been well received by the Israeli media and in secular circles.
In their book, The Bible Unearthed, two eminent Israeli archaeologists, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, present an argument based on excavations and ancient documents which calls into question long-cherished convictions. Israeli society may be more receptive to challenging questions than it is given credit for.
Eric Rouleau is a journalist and former French ambassador. -- translated by George Miller
Copyright ©2008 Le Monde diplomatique
by Eric Rouleau
In the 1980s in Israel, a new generation of men and woman who had not lived through the Holocaust or the creation of their country came of age intellectually and embarked on a remarkable period of change. This change is indicative of how Israel’s intelligentsia has gradually matured to a point where it is now able to judge the country’s past without hang-ups, and free itself from the myths and taboos propagated by the country’s leaders.
The anti-conformism of this generation of intellectuals -- which includes historians, sociologists, philosophers, novelists, journalists, filmmakers and artists -- first made itself felt after the Six Day war in 1967. Events since then have only fuelled their dissent: The occupation, Palestinian resistance, the coming to power of the religious, nationalist right in 1977, the growing influence of settlers and expansionist rabbis, and the worsening tensions between clerics and secular society have all played their part. “Religious people often talk about Tel Aviv as if it were Sodom and Gomorrah,” says Michel Warshawski, a leader of the radical wing of the peace movement, “whereas for secular Israelis, Jerusalem is 'Tehran of the ayatollahs'.”
Peace with Egypt in 1979 raised hopes of a final peace settlement, but these hopes were dashed in 1982, with the invasion of Lebanon. This invasion, widely seen as Israel’s first offensive war, was launched on what turned out to be a false prospectus. Contrary to the Israeli government’s claims, the Palestine Liberation Organisation -- which Menahem Begin and Ariel Sharon set out to destroy -- had not behaved provocatively. Indeed, it had shown signs of readiness to compromise, and in any case did not pose a serious threat to Israel’s existence. At the time, many Israelis were shocked by their army’s extreme brutality and the high death toll among the Palestinian and Lebanese population. The worst atrocity, the terrible Sabra and Shatila massacres, was committed with the full knowledge of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
These events provoked an unprecedented response: Around 400,000 protestors took to the streets of Tel Aviv; 500 officers and soldiers deserted; and the refusnik movement was born, as young people refused to serve in the army, first in Lebanon and then in the occupied territories. The “purity of arms” which Israel had boasted of since its birth was seriously undermined.
Unintentionally, young historians further contributed to the discrediting of Israel’s self-image. From official archives, which were declassified in 1978 under Israel’s 30-year rule, they discovered that the conduct of the Israeli forces before and during the war of 1948 departed significantly from the idealised propaganda version. Simha Flapan, a fervent Zionist right up to his death, was the first to make use of official documents in a book that exposed the seven main myths that have been used to dupe the public for decades.
Dominique Vidal’s book, written with Sébastien Boussois, is the first to set out and analyse the conclusions of the so-called new historians. They are the first researchers since the foundation of the state of Israel to base their work not on secondary sources, as their predecessors did, but on documents from unimpeachable sources such as the archives of the cabinet, the army, the Palmach (shock troops), Zionist organisations, and the diaries of David Ben Gurion, who held the posts of defence and prime minister.
The book describes the circumstances which led to war with the Arabs, pays special attention to the role of Ben Gurion, which is ambiguous to say the least, and devotes a chapter to Benny Morris, the most prominent of the new historians and author of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Question (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Vidal and Boussois refer to Morris as schizophrenic because of the gulf between his quest for historical truth and his political position on the far right. The book also examines Ilan Pappé’s most recent book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006) which provoked a furore in Israel that forced its author -- like so many others -- to resign from the University of Haifa and go into exile at a British university.
Pappé is not the first dissident intellectual (nor is he likely to be the last) to leave his country to escape the suffocating atmosphere reserved for “lepers” such as him. But unlike his predecessors, it is much harder to dispute his versions of events, because they are so much more detailed. Pappé has had access to documents from 60 years of Israeli archives (unlike most of his colleagues who only had access to 40 years’ worth).
Pappé has also made use of the work of Palestinian historians in his writing, often for eyewitness accounts. He has collected the testimony of survivors of ethnic cleansing -- a source thus far studiously avoided by his fellow historians, either through an instinctive rejection of such material or through mistrust, or more prosaically because of their ignorance of the Arabic language. Such eyewitness accounts are all the more valuable as, so far, no Arab country has opened its archives to researchers.
Ultimately, the points of difference between Ilan Pappé and Benny Morris are not substantial. Both maintain that the 1948 war was not a David and Goliath struggle as is claimed, since the Israeli forces were clearly superior to their adversaries in both manpower and weaponry. Even at the height of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, there were only a few thousand poorly equipped Palestinian fighters, supported by some Arab volunteers from the Fawzi al-Qawuqji liberation army.
Even when the Arab states intervened on 15 May 1948, their forces were still far inferior to those of the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organisation that later formed the core of the IDF, which was able to keep drawing on reinforcements. Morris and Pappé agree that the Arab forces invaded Palestine reluctantly as a last resort, not in order to destroy the fledgling Jewish state, which they knew they were incapable of doing, but to prevent Israel and Transjordan -- “in collusion” according to historian Avi Shlaim -- from carving up the territory granted to the Palestinians under the United Nations plan of 29 November 1947.
“I have no doubt we are capable of occupying all of Palestine,” Ben Gurion, the father of the Jewish state, had written to Moshe Sharett (Israel’s second prime minister, who served between Ben Gurion’s two terms) in February 1948, three months before the Arab-Israeli war began -- and a few weeks before the delivery of massive consignments of arms sent via Prague by the USSR. This boast did not stop him claiming publicly that Israel was threatened by a second Holocaust.
In the first week of the war in May 1948, carried away by news of Israeli victories according to Ilan Pappé, Ben Gurion wrote in his diary: “We shall establish a Christian state in Lebanon… we shall break Transjordan, bomb its capital, destroy its army… we shall bring Syria to its knees… our air force will attack Port Said, Alexandria, and Cairo, and this will avenge our ancestors who were oppressed by the Egyptians and the Assyrians in Biblical times.”
In similar fashion, Morris and Pappé demolish the Israeli leadership’s carefully maintained myth that the Palestinians left their homes voluntarily in response to calls from the Arab authorities and radio stations (these broadcasts are entirely the inventions of Israeli propaganda, as complete recordings made at the time by the BBC reveal). In fact, the two historians confirm what has been known since the end of the 1950s: It was the Israeli authorities who forced the Palestinians to flee their land through blackmail, threats, brutality and terror.
They diverge, however, over the meaning of these expulsions: for Benny Morris, they are simply “collateral damage.” “All’s fair in love and war”, he explained, adding more recently and somewhat cynically, that Ben Gurion ought to have kept going until the very last Palestinian was gone. Where Morris sees an exodus resulting from war and “not the intention of either Jew or Arab,” Pappé shows that the ethnic cleansing was planned and executed in order to extend Israel’s territory -- in effect to judaise it.
And with reason. For although the Zionist leadership had publicly approved the UN plan, in reality they thought it intolerable: Their consent was just a tactic, as several documents in the archives and Ben Gurion’s own diary show.
True, they had been granted more than half of Palestine. The rest was to be returned to the indigenous Arabs, who were twice as numerous as the Jews. However, they viewed the territory earmarked for Israel as too small for the millions of immigrants its leaders hoped to attract. Moreover, 405,000 Palestinian Arabs would have lived there alongside 558,000 Jews, who would have accounted for just 58% of the population of the future Jewish state. Thus Zionism risked losing its very raison d’être: “making Palestine as Jewish as America is American and England is English,” in the words of Haim Weizmann, who went on to become Israel’s first president.
That is why thoughts of the transfer (in plain terms, expulsion) of the indigenous Arabs haunted the Zionist leaders, who debated the question endlessly -- usually behind closed doors. At the end of the 19th century, Theodor Herzl had suggested that the Ottoman sultan should deport the Palestinians to clear the way for Jewish colonisation. In 1930, Weizmann tried to persuade the British, who held the Mandate for Palestine, to do the same.
In 1938, following the proposal of a tiny Jewish state accompanied by a transfer of some Arabs, envisaged by a British commission under Lord Peel, Ben Gurion declared before the executive committee of the Jewish Agency: “I am in favour of an obligatory transfer, a measure which is by no means immoral.” The war of 1948 was to offer him his chance to put his plan into action by launching an offensive designed to uproot the indigenous population six months before the Arab armies intervened. To facilitate this process, Pappé has revealed, Ben Gurion had a file created by the Jewish Agency in 1939 on all the Arab villages, which was regularly updated throughout the 1940s. It recorded demographic and economic facts as well as political and military information.
Ilan Pappé has analysed in detail the measures to which the Israeli forces resorted. They make chilling reading, even if they are reminiscent of atrocities committed during ethnic cleansings carried out by other peoples from late antiquity on. The statistics produced by the historian are telling: in a few months, several dozen massacres and summary executions were recorded; 531 villages out of a thousand were destroyed or converted to accommodate Jewish immigrants; 11 ethnically mixed towns were purged of their Arab inhabitants.
On Ben Gurion’s instructions, all 70,000 of the Palestinian inhabitants of Ramleh and Lydda, including children and old people, were forced from their homes at bayonet point in the space of a few hours in mid-July 1948. Yigal Allon and the future prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was then a high-ranking officer in the military, ran the operation. Rabin wrote about it in his memoirs published in the United States, though they were later censored in the Hebrew edition. Numerous refugees died of exhaustion en route, as they were driven towards the Transjordanian border. There had been similar scenes in April 1948, in Jaffa, when 50,000 of its Arab citizens had to flee, terrorised by particularly intense artillery bombardment from the Irgun, a militant Zionist organisation, and fearful of more massacres. This is what Morris calls the “atrocity factor.”
These horrors are all the more unjustifiable since a large number of Arab villages, by Ben Gurion’s own admission, had declared their willingness not to fight the partition of Palestine. Some had even reached non-aggression agreements with their Jewish neighbours. That was the case in the village of Deir Yassin, where the irregular forces of the Irgun and the Lehi nevertheless massacred a large part of the population with the tacit agreement of the Haganah, according to Simha Flapan.
In total, 750-800,000 Palestinians were forced into exile between 1947 and 1949, and lost their land and property. According to an official Israeli estimate, the Jewish National Fund seized 300,000 hectares of Arab land, much of which was given to kibbutzim. The operation could not have been better planned: The day after the vote on 11 December 1948, on the famous resolution on the “right to return” by the UN General Assembly, the Israeli government adopted the Emergency Absentees’ Property law which, added to the law on the cultivation of abandoned lands of 30 June 1948, retrospectively legalised seizures -- and forbade the victims of seizures from claiming any compensation on returning home.
Despite the protests from some members of the Israeli government, shocked by the brutality of the ethnic cleansing, Ben Gurion -- who had not himself given an explicit written order -- did nothing to stop it. Nor did he openly condemn it. He limited himself to condemnation of the raping and pillaging which the Israeli soldiers carried out, though they benefited from complete impunity.
What is most astonishing is the silence of the international community, which has lasted for decades although international observers, including those from the UN, were aware of the atrocities. This makes it easier to understand why the Palestinians commemorate the nakba (catastrophe) rather than celebrate the Israeli war of independence.
Avi Shlaim, a fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Allen Lane and WW Norton, 2000) has demolished yet another myth: that of an Israel devoted to peace but confronted with belligerent Arab states bent on its annihilation. The title of his book is taken from the doctrine of the father of the ultranationalist right: In 1923, Zeev Jabotinsky declared that there should be no negotiations over a peace accord until the Jews had colonised the whole of Palestine behind a wall of iron, since the Arabs only understood the logic of force.
By adopting this doctrine, Israel’s political and military leaders on both the right and the left have managed to sabotage successive peace plans. Reckoning that time is on their side, and claiming, in the words of Ehud Barak (then prime minister), that Israel has no “partner for peace,” the leaders in Jerusalem chose to wait for their adversaries to accept Israel’s territorial expansion and the splitting-up of a hypothetical, demilitarised Palestinian state which is condemned to become a collection of Bantustans.
Shlaim’s book was a bestseller when it was published in English in 2000, and was translated into several languages, but had to wait five years before appearing in Hebrew. Most Israeli publishers deemed it to be of little interest. Yet Shlaim recognises the legitimacy of the Zionist movement and of Israel’s 1967 borders. “On the other hand,” he says, “I entirely reject the Zionist colonial project beyond that border.”
Almost all of the historians, sociologists, novelists, journalists and filmmakers who belong to the new wave of the intelligentsia are Zionists of a new sort -- known as post-Zionists. They share a desire to espouse the cause of peace by establishing historical truth and recognising the wrongs done to the Palestinians.
To get a sense of the scale of the change that has taken place since the 1980s, it is worth reading the research carried out by Sébastien Boussois in Israel among new historians and their opponents. Some observers have concluded that the advent of a stable Israel at peace with its neighbours will depend in large part on the impact these intellectuals have on Israeli society and especially its political class.
This is how Yehuda Lancry, former Israeli ambassador to France and the United States, put it:
The ‘new historians’, even a radical such as Ilan Pappé, bring light to the dark region of the Israeli collective consciousness and pave the way for a stronger adherence to mutual respect for and peace with the Palestinians.
Their work, far from representing a threat to Israel, does their country honour, and more: it is a duty, a moral obligation, a prodigious assumption of a liberating enterprise in order that the fault lines, the healthy interstices, necessary to the integration of the discourse of the Other, may take their place in Israeli experience.
Eric Rouleau is a journalist and former French ambassador. -- translated by George Miller.
Copyright ©2008 Le Monde diplomatique
----------------
Released: 10 May 2008
Word Count: 2,696
----------------
[Sidebar]
Are the Jews an Invented People?
by Eric Rouleau
When and How Were the Jewish People Invented? is the provocative title of the most recent book to be published in Israel by Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University. Sand, one of the “new” historians, attacks what he calls the myth that the Jews are the descendants of the Hebrews, exiled from the kingdom of Judea. He has attempted to show that the Jews are neither a race nor a nation, but ancient pagans -- being in the main, Berbers from North Africa, Arabs from the south of Arabia, and Turks from the Khazar empire -- who converted to Judaism between the fourth and eighth centuries CE. According to Sand, the Palestinians are probably descended from Hebrews who embraced Islam or Christianity.
Sand doesn’t challenge Israel’s right to exist or the notion of its sovereignty, but he thinks that sovereignty is undermined by its exclusively ethnic base, which stems from the racism of Zionist ideologues. In other words: Israel shouldn’t be a Jewish state, but a democratic secular one belonging to all its citizens.
Quoted in Haaretz on 21 March 2008, Sand was pessimistic about how his work would be received in Israel: “There was a time when anyone who claimed that the Jews had a pagan ancestry was accused on the spot of being an anti-Semite. Today, anyone who dares suggest that the Jews have never been and still are not a people or a nation is immediately denounced as an enemy of the state of Israel.”
Sand may be mistaken. A no less challenging work that presents the Torah as in large part a collection of myths and legends, has been well received by the Israeli media and in secular circles.
In their book, The Bible Unearthed, two eminent Israeli archaeologists, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, present an argument based on excavations and ancient documents which calls into question long-cherished convictions. Israeli society may be more receptive to challenging questions than it is given credit for.
Eric Rouleau is a journalist and former French ambassador. -- translated by George Miller
Copyright ©2008 Le Monde diplomatique
Friday, May 09, 2008
Israel's Protectors, Israel’s Critics
The Loathsome Smearing of Israel’s Critics
By Johann Hari
09/05/08 "The Independent" -- - 08/05/08 - - In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence — and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.
My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.
Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.
The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile “pro-Israel” writers and media monitoring groups — including Honest Reporting and Camera — said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.
Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, “Honest Reporting” claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews “poisoning the wells.” If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained — in labour — by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, “Honest Reporting” will say you didn’t explain “the real cause”: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.
The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups “nascent McCarthyism”. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: “Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary … It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.” If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.
The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: “Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security.” Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them “Jews For Genocide”, and said they “encourage” the “killers” of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an “artificial” people who can be collectively punished because they are “a terrorist population”. She believes that while “individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project”. Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.
These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter’s decision to speak to the elected Hamas government “border[ed] on anti-Semitism.” A Ha’aretz poll last month found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.
As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it — so last year he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can’t read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter’s comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B’tselem says this “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime”. Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called “a racist”. Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.
These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters’ hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein’s mother — who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps — had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.
Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews — the majority — are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.
We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
–Johann Hari
© Independent.co.uk
By Johann Hari
09/05/08 "The Independent" -- - 08/05/08 - - In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence — and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.
My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.
Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.
The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile “pro-Israel” writers and media monitoring groups — including Honest Reporting and Camera — said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.
Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, “Honest Reporting” claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews “poisoning the wells.” If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained — in labour — by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, “Honest Reporting” will say you didn’t explain “the real cause”: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.
The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups “nascent McCarthyism”. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: “Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary … It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.” If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.
The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: “Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security.” Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them “Jews For Genocide”, and said they “encourage” the “killers” of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an “artificial” people who can be collectively punished because they are “a terrorist population”. She believes that while “individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project”. Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.
These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter’s decision to speak to the elected Hamas government “border[ed] on anti-Semitism.” A Ha’aretz poll last month found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.
As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it — so last year he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can’t read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter’s comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B’tselem says this “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime”. Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called “a racist”. Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.
These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters’ hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein’s mother — who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps — had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.
Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews — the majority — are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.
We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
–Johann Hari
© Independent.co.uk
Breaking Fast in Lebanon
Breakfast in Beirut
by Rami G. Khouri
BEIRUT -- As often happens in this strange world, it was my water turtle Jerry who brought home to me the tough choices we make in times of war. This happened on Friday morning, when bullets and rocket-propelled grenades were exploding all around our apartment near the Hamra area of west Beirut, during the latest episode in Lebanon’s long-running civil strife and political showdown.
We went to bed Thursday night amid repeated rounds of automatic rifle and handgun fire, punctuated by the occasional roar of a loud explosion that was probably a rocket-propelled grenade. The fighting stopped around 1 a.m., soon after a serendipitous spring rainstorm engulfed Beirut.
The fighting resumed in the early morning. One of our balcony window panes shattered just after we woke up at 7:30 a.m., pierced by a bullet or a ricocheting stone. A few minutes later, as we prepared coffee in the kitchen that we thought was shielded from the shooting in the streets below, a bullet hit the balcony above us. Shattered stones fell past our balcony to the street below. We ducked and quickly got out of the kitchen, but with our coffee in hand.
Jerry the turtle was in his water tank on the balcony, and had not been fed since the previous night. We knew we had to feed him soon, but wondered whether it was safe to go on the balcony, from where the gunmen along the large street junction, 25 meters away and four stories below, could clearly see us.
The trouble was, we had no idea who was fighting whom, or whether any actual battles were taking place. Some neighbors thought that heavily armed fighters were simply asserting their presence and control of the neighborhood.
This was the third time in a generation that I lived through armed conflict in Beirut, including the early months of the civil war in 1975, the war with Israel in summer 2006, and now this battle -- both a local test of political strength and a proxy battle for the wider ideological war pitting United States-led, predominantly Sunni Muslim Arabs vs. Iranian- and Syrian-led, heavily Shiite Muslim Arabs. The regional and global confrontation translated this week into who controlled a few buildings and streets in West Beirut.
Our home is near two key buildings owned by the family of the late Rafik Hariri and his son Saad Hariri who essentially heads the government coalition: his home in Qoreitim district and the Future television station. Pro-Hariri armed young men had always occasionally patrolled our neighborhood, given our proximity to Hariri installations. This city block had much symbolic significance.
Hizbullah and its allies decided Wednesday-Thursday to make a show of force by quickly taking control of and closing Beirut’s airport and seaport, and then shutting down all the Hariri-owned media (television, radio and newspaper). The message was clear: Hizbullah could take over all Beirut at any moment it desired.
This was probably an inevitable moment, when Hizbullah felt it had to show the government the real balance of power between them. The fighting Thursday morning saw Hizbullah, Amal and smaller Lebanese leftist allies quickly take over Hariri-owned facilities, and then just as quickly turn them over to the Lebanese army, which is still seen as a national institution working for the unity and security of the country.
Hizbullah may have been making the point that it did not want to conquer Beirut or run all Lebanon, but rather that it wanted to push the government into making a negotiated deal that would recognize and institutionalize the real political and military power of Hizbullah and its allies. Thursday evening, both Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Future Movement leader Saad Hariri had made television statements in which they insulted each other, but also offered proposals to end the clashes and reach political agreement.
The two principal political leaders in Lebanon were doing what they have always done: protect their own communities’ rights and wellbeing, assert their willingness to fight if necessary, rely on foreign powers for whom they often acted as local proxies, insult each other with mutual accusations of serving Israeli or American interests, and, finally, offer proposals that comprised a political opening for dialogue and negotiations.
All of this happened in the span of 12 hours, during which my water turtle Jerry had not been fed. In his own little water tank world, he was getting anxious, as were all the Lebanese people who were becoming fed up with their leaders’ inclination to perpetuate civil strife. In the context of the new political balance of power in Lebanon, our stepping out on the balcony to feed Jerry might have risked our lives. I told my wife Ellen I would kneel down and do a semi-crawl to the balcony, reaching Jerry and his food without being seen by the gunmen whom we could see from the corner of our window. I was overruled by the prevailing balance of power in our home, when my wife insisted she could do the crawl more safely and swiftly. I concurred, and as she prepared to feed Jerry, I held my breath.
I also thought then that the situation might be changing. The gunfire was slowing down and becoming more sporadic. Every 10-15 minutes or so, a burst of shooting or a loud explosion would rattle our windows. It seemed that whoever was emerging on top was asserting his control of the neighborhood. Ellen timed her feeding expedition with one of the lulls, and all went smoothly.
An hour later, the situation seemed to change. The rumble of Lebanese army armored personnel carriers on our street signaled that the pro-Hizbullah gunmen had turned the neighborhood over to the army. The shooting and explosions stopped.
Neighbors ventured out onto their balconies for the first time in 18 hours. We and Jerry seemed to sense that a new situation was coming into being -- in Lebanon and the entire Middle East. Where it would lead was not clear, but by the next feeding on Friday night we would probably have a better idea. We decided to leave Jerry on the balcony, assuming that reaching him would not be dangerous. We shall soon find out.
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.
Copyright © 2008 Rami G. Khouri
by Rami G. Khouri
BEIRUT -- As often happens in this strange world, it was my water turtle Jerry who brought home to me the tough choices we make in times of war. This happened on Friday morning, when bullets and rocket-propelled grenades were exploding all around our apartment near the Hamra area of west Beirut, during the latest episode in Lebanon’s long-running civil strife and political showdown.
We went to bed Thursday night amid repeated rounds of automatic rifle and handgun fire, punctuated by the occasional roar of a loud explosion that was probably a rocket-propelled grenade. The fighting stopped around 1 a.m., soon after a serendipitous spring rainstorm engulfed Beirut.
The fighting resumed in the early morning. One of our balcony window panes shattered just after we woke up at 7:30 a.m., pierced by a bullet or a ricocheting stone. A few minutes later, as we prepared coffee in the kitchen that we thought was shielded from the shooting in the streets below, a bullet hit the balcony above us. Shattered stones fell past our balcony to the street below. We ducked and quickly got out of the kitchen, but with our coffee in hand.
Jerry the turtle was in his water tank on the balcony, and had not been fed since the previous night. We knew we had to feed him soon, but wondered whether it was safe to go on the balcony, from where the gunmen along the large street junction, 25 meters away and four stories below, could clearly see us.
The trouble was, we had no idea who was fighting whom, or whether any actual battles were taking place. Some neighbors thought that heavily armed fighters were simply asserting their presence and control of the neighborhood.
This was the third time in a generation that I lived through armed conflict in Beirut, including the early months of the civil war in 1975, the war with Israel in summer 2006, and now this battle -- both a local test of political strength and a proxy battle for the wider ideological war pitting United States-led, predominantly Sunni Muslim Arabs vs. Iranian- and Syrian-led, heavily Shiite Muslim Arabs. The regional and global confrontation translated this week into who controlled a few buildings and streets in West Beirut.
Our home is near two key buildings owned by the family of the late Rafik Hariri and his son Saad Hariri who essentially heads the government coalition: his home in Qoreitim district and the Future television station. Pro-Hariri armed young men had always occasionally patrolled our neighborhood, given our proximity to Hariri installations. This city block had much symbolic significance.
Hizbullah and its allies decided Wednesday-Thursday to make a show of force by quickly taking control of and closing Beirut’s airport and seaport, and then shutting down all the Hariri-owned media (television, radio and newspaper). The message was clear: Hizbullah could take over all Beirut at any moment it desired.
This was probably an inevitable moment, when Hizbullah felt it had to show the government the real balance of power between them. The fighting Thursday morning saw Hizbullah, Amal and smaller Lebanese leftist allies quickly take over Hariri-owned facilities, and then just as quickly turn them over to the Lebanese army, which is still seen as a national institution working for the unity and security of the country.
Hizbullah may have been making the point that it did not want to conquer Beirut or run all Lebanon, but rather that it wanted to push the government into making a negotiated deal that would recognize and institutionalize the real political and military power of Hizbullah and its allies. Thursday evening, both Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Future Movement leader Saad Hariri had made television statements in which they insulted each other, but also offered proposals to end the clashes and reach political agreement.
The two principal political leaders in Lebanon were doing what they have always done: protect their own communities’ rights and wellbeing, assert their willingness to fight if necessary, rely on foreign powers for whom they often acted as local proxies, insult each other with mutual accusations of serving Israeli or American interests, and, finally, offer proposals that comprised a political opening for dialogue and negotiations.
All of this happened in the span of 12 hours, during which my water turtle Jerry had not been fed. In his own little water tank world, he was getting anxious, as were all the Lebanese people who were becoming fed up with their leaders’ inclination to perpetuate civil strife. In the context of the new political balance of power in Lebanon, our stepping out on the balcony to feed Jerry might have risked our lives. I told my wife Ellen I would kneel down and do a semi-crawl to the balcony, reaching Jerry and his food without being seen by the gunmen whom we could see from the corner of our window. I was overruled by the prevailing balance of power in our home, when my wife insisted she could do the crawl more safely and swiftly. I concurred, and as she prepared to feed Jerry, I held my breath.
I also thought then that the situation might be changing. The gunfire was slowing down and becoming more sporadic. Every 10-15 minutes or so, a burst of shooting or a loud explosion would rattle our windows. It seemed that whoever was emerging on top was asserting his control of the neighborhood. Ellen timed her feeding expedition with one of the lulls, and all went smoothly.
An hour later, the situation seemed to change. The rumble of Lebanese army armored personnel carriers on our street signaled that the pro-Hizbullah gunmen had turned the neighborhood over to the army. The shooting and explosions stopped.
Neighbors ventured out onto their balconies for the first time in 18 hours. We and Jerry seemed to sense that a new situation was coming into being -- in Lebanon and the entire Middle East. Where it would lead was not clear, but by the next feeding on Friday night we would probably have a better idea. We decided to leave Jerry on the balcony, assuming that reaching him would not be dangerous. We shall soon find out.
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.
Copyright © 2008 Rami G. Khouri
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Gorbachev Charges US Aiming for a New Cold War
Gorbachev: US could start new Cold War
By Adrian Blomfield and Mike Smith in Paris
Last updated: 11:14 AM BST 07/05/2008
Mikhail Gorbachev has accused the United States of mounting an imperialist conspiracy against Russia that could push the world into a new Cold War.
AP
Mikhail Gorbachev: conspiracyWith Dmitry Medvedev due to be inaugurated today as Russian president, the Soviet Union's last leader said that the White House's claims of peaceful intentions towards its former superpower rival could no longer be trusted.
Delivering one of his most scathing attacks on the US, Mr Gorbachev told The Daily Telegraph that a US military build-up was under way to contain a resurgent Russia.
From Nato's expansion plans in the former Soviet Union to Washington's proposals for a bigger defence budget and a missile shield in central Europe, the US was deliberately quashing hopes for permanent peace with Russia, Mr Gorbachev said.
"We had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them," he said.
"The United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently.
"Every US president has to have a war."
The 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner's denunciation of the US mirrors the most belligerently anti-Western speeches of Vladimir Putin – who is said to consult Mr Gorbachev on foreign policy matters.
Mr Putin may be switching jobs to become prime minister, but many expect him to remain the most powerful figure in Russian politics.
Mr Gorbachev hinted that the former KGB spy could still direct Russia's foreign policy, leaving President Medvedev – seen by some as more liberal than his mentor – to concentrate on internal matters.
Yet if Washington blames Mr Putin's self-aggrandising rhetoric for the worst crisis in East-West relations since the Cold War, for Mr Gorbachev the blame lies entirely with the administration of President George W Bush.
"The problem is not with Russia," he said, speaking at a friend's château outside Paris.
"Russia does not have enemies and Putin is not going to start a war against the United States or any other country for that matter.
"Yet we see the United States approving a military budget and the defence secretary pledging to strengthen conventional forces because of the possibility of a war with China or Russia.
"I sometimes have a feeling that the United States is going to wage war against the entire world."
Last year, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, told a congressional committee that America needed to boost military spending to counter myriad threats including the "uncertain paths of China and Russia".
Those comments caused uproar in Russia, with pro-Kremlin newspapers claiming they heralded the start of a new Cold War.
Tensions have already been heightened by a US proposal to build a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic to counter a nuclear strike by Iran.
Mr Gorbachev, however, claimed the plans were an aggressive act against Russia.
"Erecting elements of missile defence is taking the arms race to the next level," he said. "It is a very dangerous step."
Relations have further deteriorated after Nato promised eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine, a move interpreted by Mr Gorbachev as an attempt to extend America's sphere of influence into Russia's backyard.
"The Americans promised that Nato wouldn't move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted."
For a man hailed as one of the heroes of the 20th century, Mr Gorbachev, now 77, often sounded like the ageing hardliners he struggled against in the Kremlin during the 1980s.
He railed against a "military-industrial complex" that he insisted was the "real government" of the US and, quoting a Russian documentary on state television, suggested that Margaret Thatcher had supplied weapons to Chechen terrorists.
Still, while Mr Gorbachev may be delighted by the rebirth of what many see as Russian imperialism, many wonder whether he approves of the way in which Mr Putin has eroded freedom of expression to such an extent that some claim glasnost is dead.
"I do not think that glasnost is dead in Russia," he said.
"There is a phenomenon in the West to criticise Putin's domestic record. But in Russia he has mass support. His popularity ratings are 70 to 80 percent.
"Is this not democracy?"
Story from Telegraph News:
Fisk: Beirut Burning?
Robert Fisk: Gun battles as Hizbollah claims Lebanon is at war
Friday, 9 May 2008
If you want to fight us, you'll have to fight us. This was Sayed Hassan Nasrallah's message to the Lebanese government yesterday and his words were followed within seconds by two massive gun battles in the streets of Beirut.
He had spoken in that careful, thought-through, distressing way in which he always threatens the Hizbollah's enemies. He even swapped the names of the Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, with that of the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt – calling Jumblatt the real prime minister and Siniora his deputy – and blamed both for trying to set up a CIA-Mossad base at Beirut airport. What other reason could there be, he asked, for the two men to demand the dismantlement of Hizbollah's communications system and the suspension of the head of airport security? This was "a Lebanese government declaration of war against the resistance". Well, maybe. But Nasrallah still wants the Hizbollah's enemies to be the Israelis – not his Lebanese opponents.
So what happened in the minutes after he spoke? At least one Shia Amal gunman started shooting at an office belonging to Sunni supporters of the government, some of whom may have been the youths apparently brought down from Tripoli for just such a battle. The Lebanese army was not fully engaged on the streets last night but its armoured vehicles were driving between the sectarian interfaces and apparently taking fire from both sides.
It was a dark and distressing speech by the secretary general of Hizbollah, which came less than 24 hours after the Grand Mufti, Mohammed Kabbani, furiously referred to the Hizbollah as "armed gangs of outlaws that have carried out the ugliest attacks against the citizens and their safety". Needless to say, neither Nasrallah nor Kabbani stated the obvious – that the first represents a large number of the Shia Muslim community and the second most of the Sunnis.
The sectarian background to this dangerous game is the point, of course. The street battles in Beirut are between Shia and Sunni, the first supporting the Iranian-armed Hizbollah, the second the Lebanese government, which now regularly carries the sobriquet "American-backed". In other words, the collapse of Beirut these past two days is part of the American-Iranian conflict – even though, be sure, the Americans will blame the Hizbollah for this and the Iranians will blame the Americans.
Yet still the language of Nasrallah – like that of Kabbani – was frightening, even though he had behind him the national flag of Lebanon with its green cedar tree as well as Hizbollah's own yellow banner. To call Jumblatt "a liar, a thief, a killer..." – though this view might be heartily reciprocated by Jumblatt himself – is language that puts Lebanese in danger of their lives.
Nasrallah's complaint that the suspension of Wafiq Chucair as head of airport security was part of an American-Israeli plot might sound a bit much, but his long and point-by-point insistence that Hizbollah should maintain its new communications links – including its cameras along the Beirut airport perimeter – was perhaps more reasoned, albeit that it helps allow his organisation to remain part of a state with the state. Wireless communications can easily be tapped, he said, and he added that new communications were the "most powerful tool" in Hizbollah's 2006 war against Israel.
Nasrallah intriguingly pointed out that Siniora's government had previously told the Hizbollah that it would allow the secure communications circuits to remain if the movement closed down its largely empty "tent city" in the centre of Beirut. Indeed, it has largely been in place for more than a year. Hizbollah had no argument with the Lebanese army – a view that might not be shared by General Michel Sulaiman, its commander, who stated yesterday that the situation is "threatening the army's impartiality".
All of which continues Lebanon's crisis. Beirut airport remained largely empty of aircraft yesterday – the Christian daily L'Orient Le Jour rightly suggested that it had been taken hostage by Hizbollah, who control all roads to the terminal – and there were brief gun battles between government and opposition supporters in the Bekaa Valley town of Saadnayel. Yet again, burning tyres were set up in areas demarcating Shia and Sunni districts, and the army closed the Corniche Mazraa highway, which divides west Beirut. By last night it was the scene of a gun battle. Kuwait urged its citizens to leave Lebanon – without being obliging enough to tell them exactly how to perform this task without an airport.
Friday, 9 May 2008
If you want to fight us, you'll have to fight us. This was Sayed Hassan Nasrallah's message to the Lebanese government yesterday and his words were followed within seconds by two massive gun battles in the streets of Beirut.
He had spoken in that careful, thought-through, distressing way in which he always threatens the Hizbollah's enemies. He even swapped the names of the Lebanese Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, with that of the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt – calling Jumblatt the real prime minister and Siniora his deputy – and blamed both for trying to set up a CIA-Mossad base at Beirut airport. What other reason could there be, he asked, for the two men to demand the dismantlement of Hizbollah's communications system and the suspension of the head of airport security? This was "a Lebanese government declaration of war against the resistance". Well, maybe. But Nasrallah still wants the Hizbollah's enemies to be the Israelis – not his Lebanese opponents.
So what happened in the minutes after he spoke? At least one Shia Amal gunman started shooting at an office belonging to Sunni supporters of the government, some of whom may have been the youths apparently brought down from Tripoli for just such a battle. The Lebanese army was not fully engaged on the streets last night but its armoured vehicles were driving between the sectarian interfaces and apparently taking fire from both sides.
It was a dark and distressing speech by the secretary general of Hizbollah, which came less than 24 hours after the Grand Mufti, Mohammed Kabbani, furiously referred to the Hizbollah as "armed gangs of outlaws that have carried out the ugliest attacks against the citizens and their safety". Needless to say, neither Nasrallah nor Kabbani stated the obvious – that the first represents a large number of the Shia Muslim community and the second most of the Sunnis.
The sectarian background to this dangerous game is the point, of course. The street battles in Beirut are between Shia and Sunni, the first supporting the Iranian-armed Hizbollah, the second the Lebanese government, which now regularly carries the sobriquet "American-backed". In other words, the collapse of Beirut these past two days is part of the American-Iranian conflict – even though, be sure, the Americans will blame the Hizbollah for this and the Iranians will blame the Americans.
Yet still the language of Nasrallah – like that of Kabbani – was frightening, even though he had behind him the national flag of Lebanon with its green cedar tree as well as Hizbollah's own yellow banner. To call Jumblatt "a liar, a thief, a killer..." – though this view might be heartily reciprocated by Jumblatt himself – is language that puts Lebanese in danger of their lives.
Nasrallah's complaint that the suspension of Wafiq Chucair as head of airport security was part of an American-Israeli plot might sound a bit much, but his long and point-by-point insistence that Hizbollah should maintain its new communications links – including its cameras along the Beirut airport perimeter – was perhaps more reasoned, albeit that it helps allow his organisation to remain part of a state with the state. Wireless communications can easily be tapped, he said, and he added that new communications were the "most powerful tool" in Hizbollah's 2006 war against Israel.
Nasrallah intriguingly pointed out that Siniora's government had previously told the Hizbollah that it would allow the secure communications circuits to remain if the movement closed down its largely empty "tent city" in the centre of Beirut. Indeed, it has largely been in place for more than a year. Hizbollah had no argument with the Lebanese army – a view that might not be shared by General Michel Sulaiman, its commander, who stated yesterday that the situation is "threatening the army's impartiality".
All of which continues Lebanon's crisis. Beirut airport remained largely empty of aircraft yesterday – the Christian daily L'Orient Le Jour rightly suggested that it had been taken hostage by Hizbollah, who control all roads to the terminal – and there were brief gun battles between government and opposition supporters in the Bekaa Valley town of Saadnayel. Yet again, burning tyres were set up in areas demarcating Shia and Sunni districts, and the army closed the Corniche Mazraa highway, which divides west Beirut. By last night it was the scene of a gun battle. Kuwait urged its citizens to leave Lebanon – without being obliging enough to tell them exactly how to perform this task without an airport.
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