A Growing US-Israeli Feud?
by Tony Karon
Uncomfortable at the spectacle of the Obama administration in an open confrontation with the Israeli government, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman -- who represents the interests of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party on Capitol Hill as faithfully as he does those of the health insurance industry -- called for a halt. “Let’s cut the family fighting, the family feud,” he said. “It’s unnecessary; it’s destructive of our shared national interest. It’s time to lower voices, to get over the family feud between the US and Israel. It just doesn’t serve anybody’s interests but our enemies’.”
The idea that the United States and Israel are “family” with identical national interests is a convenient fiction that Lieberman and his fellow Israel partisans have worked relentlessly to promote -- and enforce -- in Washington over the past two decades. If the bonds are indeed familial, however, the recent showdown between Washington and the Netanyahu government may be counted as one of those feuds in which truths are uttered in the heat of the moment that call into question the fundamental terms of the relationship. Such truths are never easily swept under the rug once the dispute is settled. The immediate rupture, that is, precludes a simple return to the status quo ante; instead, a renegotiation of the terms of the relationship somehow ends up on the agenda.
Sure, the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government are now working feverishly to find a formula that will allow them to move on from a contretemps that began when the Israelis ambushed Vice-President Joe Biden, announcing plans to build 1,600 new housing units for settlers in occupied East Jerusalem. He was, of course, in Israel to promote the Obama administration’s failing efforts to rehabilitate negotiations toward a two-state peace agreement, a goal regularly spurned by Israel’s continued construction on land occupied in 1967.
Once again, as when Obama demanded a complete settlement freeze from the Netanyahu government in 2009, the Israelis will fend off any demand that they completely reverse their latest construction plans. Instead, they will shamelessly offer to continue their settlement activity on a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” basis, professing rhetorical support for a two-state solution to placate the Americans, even as they systematically erode its prospects on the ground.
There is, as former Secretary of State James Baker has noted, no shortage of chutzpah in this Israeli government. “United States taxpayers are giving Israel roughly $3 billion each year, which amounts to something like $1,000 for every Israeli citizen, at a time when our own economy is in bad shape and a lot of Americans would appreciate that kind of helping hand from their own government,” Baker said in a recent interview. “Given that fact, it is not unreasonable to ask the Israeli leadership to respect US policy on settlements.”
Sooner or later, the present imbroglio is likely to be fudged over, but make no mistake, it opened Washington up to a renewed discussion of the conventional wisdom of unconditional support for Israel. It also brought into the public arena the way US administrations over the past two decades have enabled that country’s ever-expanding occupation regime and whether such a policy is compatible with US national interests in the Middle East.
Back in 2006, the foreign policy thinkers John Mearshimer and Stephen Walt provoked a firestorm of ridicule and ad hominem abuse for suggesting in their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, that the goals pursued by the two sides were, in fact, far from identical and often at odds -- and that partisans motivated by Israel’s interests lobbied aggressively to skew US foreign policy in their favor. Israel partisans also heaped derision on the suggestion by the Iraq Study Group commissioned by President George W. Bush that the United States would not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East without first settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Petraeus weighs in
Response to the reiteration of the idea that Israel’s behavior might be jeopardizing US interests has been strikingly muted by comparison. That’s because it came from General David Petraeus, commander of US Central Command (Centcom), which oversees America’s two wars of the moment. He is the most celebrated US military officer of his generation, and a favorite of those most ferocious of Israel partisans, the neocons.
Petraeus told Senators: “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in [Centcom’s] AOR [Area of Responsibility].” He added, “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaida and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizbullah and Hamas.” He also stressed that “progress toward resolving the political disputes in the Levant, particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict, is a major concern for Centcom.”
Normally, any linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a wave of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is pooh-poohed by neocons and other Israel partisans. Typically, they will derisively suggest that those who argue for the linkage made by Petraeus are naïve in their belief that al-Qaida would give up its jihad if only Israel and the Palestinians made peace. That, by the way, is a straw-man argument of the first order: The US has done plenty on its own to antagonize the Muslim world, and ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would not in itself resolve that antagonism. The point is simply that a fair solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for repairing relations between the United States and the citizenry of many Muslim countries.
Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, who has made a profession of trying to negate the difference between anti-Semitism and criticism of (or hostility to) Israel, gamely ventured that “Gen Petraeus has simply erred in linking the challenges faced by the US and coalition forces in the region to a solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and blaming extremist activities on the absence of peace and the perceived US favoritism for Israel”. His conclusion: “This linkage is dangerous and counterproductive.”
You can hear the pain in Foxman’s admission that “it is that much more of a concern to hear this coming from such a great American patriot and hero.” That Petraeus chose to make his concerns public at the height of a public showdown between Israel and the United States, and to do so on Capitol Hill, where legislators seemed uncertain how to respond, signaled the seriousness of the uniformed military in pressing the issue.
The most powerful lobby
Longtime Washington military and intelligence affairs analyst Mark Perry caught the special significance of this at Foreign Policy’s website: “There are important and powerful lobbies in America: the NRA, the American Medical Association, the lawyers – and the Israeli lobby. But no lobby is as important, or as powerful, as the US military.” He noted as well that, in a January Centcom briefing of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, Petraeus had evidently suggested the Palestinian territories -- over which Israel continues to exercise sovereign military control -- be included under Centcom’s area of responsibility, a prospect that would make Israel’s leadership apoplectic.
It’s not that, as far as we know, Petraeus harbors any particular animus, or affection, for the Jewish state. It’s that, in his institutional role as the commander of hundreds of thousands of US troops stationed across what Washington strategists like to call the “arc of instability,” he is concerned about aggravating hostility towards the United States.
The idea that Washington needs to rein in Israeli expansionism and force a political solution to its conflict with the Palestinians is hardly novel for America’s unsentimental men in uniform. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former US Mideast envoy General Anthony Zinni, both of whom had their formative experiences of the region in the course of massive US military deployments there, were on the same page as Petraeus is today.
Lieutenant General Keith Dayton is the US officer responsible for creating and training the Palestinian Authority security force that has cracked down on West Bank militants and restrained them from attacking Israel over the past few years. He was no less blunt than Petraeus in a speech in Washington last year. He emphasized the premise on which the force was built, and withstood charges from within its own community that it was simply a gendarmerie for Israel: Its soldiers believed themselves to be the nucleus of the army of a future Palestinian state. The loyalty of his men, he warned, should not be taken for granted: “There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you’re creating a state, when you’re not.”
Vice-President Biden, too, was quoted in the Israeli press as having berated Netanyahu -- behind closed doors -- over his plans for settlement expansion, warning that it would put at risk the lives of American personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Tough-love solution
In public, of course, Biden offered familiar pablum direct from Joe Lieberman’s “family” album: “From my experience, the one precondition for progress [in the Middle East] is that the rest of the world knows this -- there is no space between the US and Israel when it comes to security, none. That’s the only time that progress has been made.”
In fact, the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict suggests that the reverse is true. The origins of the peace process the Obama administration is now trying so desperately to resuscitate do not lie in the unconditional American support for Israel that has become a third rail in national politics over the past two decades. They lie in the national interest based tough love of the administration of President George H. W. Bush.
Grounded in a realist reading of American national interests across the Middle East -- at a moment when a military campaign to eject Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces from Kuwait had put hundreds of thousands of US troops on the ground there -- the first Bush administration recognized the need to balance Israel’s reasonable interests with those of its Arab neighbors. That’s why, in 1991, it dragged Israel’s hawkish Likud government under Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to the Madrid conference, and so broke Israel’s “security” taboo on direct engagement with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
The Bush administration also made it clear that there would be immediate and painful consequences for Israel if it continued building settlements on land conquered in the war of 1967, construction which the United States was then willing to term not only “unhelpful” -- the preferred euphemism of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and now Barack Obama -- but illegal. Under the direction of Bush family consigliere and Secretary of State Jim Baker, Washington threatened to withdraw $10 billion in loan guarantees if Israeli colonization of Palestinian territory continued. In the resulting political crisis, Israelis -- mindful of their dependency on US support -- voted Shamir out of office and chose Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister.
Rabin has been rightly lionized as a leader who took a courageous decision to change course in the face of bitter domestic opposition. To understand how Israel started down the path of peace, however, it’s necessary to clean the Vaseline off the lens of history and quiet the string section.
Only three years earlier, Rabin had ordered Israeli troops to use baseball bats to break the limbs of stone-throwing teenagers in hopes of stopping the Palestinian intifada. He certainly did not embrace the Oslo peace process with the PLO out of some moral epiphany. He changed course thanks to a cold-blooded assessment of Israel’s strategic position at the time.
The United States then had a growing stake in creating a regional Pax Americana that required Arab support. Given the end of the cold war, Israel’s value as an ally was diminishing, while its expansionist policies, antagonizing Arab public opinion and making it more difficult for vulnerable regional governments to ally with Israel’s enabler, were increasingly a liability for Washington.
Rabin had reason to believe that US support for Israel at the expense of its neighbors would prove neither unconditional nor eternal. At the same time, the PLO had been weakened by years of Israeli military attacks and by a disastrous diplomatic blunder -- it had aligned itself with Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war. It was a fortuitous moment, he concluded, to press for a political solution with the Palestinians on favorable terms, by trading the West Bank and Gaza for peace.
Where are the consequences?
Rabin acted because the consequences of maintaining the status quo seemed increasingly unpleasant, which takes nothing away from his courage in doing so. The same could be said for South Africa’s last white president, FW de Klerk. He opted to negotiate an end to apartheid with Nelson Mandela’s ANC because the collapse of the Soviet Union had removed the most persuasive rationale the United States and other western powers had for backing his white-rule regime. Similarly, it’s unlikely that the Soviet political system would have put Mikhail Gorbachev in power if the KGB hadn’t determined that far-reaching changes were necessary to prevent Moscow from being eclipsed as a superpower, thanks to western economic and technological advances.
If US pressure and the spectre of isolation and opprobrium pushed Israel onto the path of a two-state solution, the easing of that pressure and the creation of the “familial” notion of US-Israel ties have coincided with a steady movement away from completing the peace process. Even at the height of the Oslo era, coddled by Clinton, the Israelis kept on expanding the settlements that jeopardized geographic prospects for Palestinian statehood.
The Israeli opposition, led by Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu, sought to prove Rabin wrong. They were convinced that American support could be maintained without conceding Palestinian statehood -- by making constant end runs around the Oval Office and appealing directly to Capitol Hill and US public opinion.
Sharon and Netanyahu were vindicated in spades when the suicide-terror strategy taken up by the second Palestinian intifada and the attacks of 9/11 led George W. Bush’s administration to re-conceptualize the world on the basis of its Global War on Terror. This, in turn, led Washington’s political class to accept Israel not as just another ally in that war, but as a model for how to conduct it.
In the Bush years, the peace process and the two-state solution became a hollow catechism that could be mouthed by Israeli leaders (and their supporters in Washington), while getting on with the task of smashing the Palestinian national movement and expanding settlements. In real terms, the peace process -- the series of reciprocal moves designed to build confidence for concluding final status talks and implementing a two-state solution -- died when Ariel Sharon came to power in February 2001.
Grand guignol
Even his 2005 withdrawal of Jewish settlements from Gaza was never conceived in terms of a peace process; it wasn’t even negotiated or coordinated with the Palestinian Authority. Sharon, in fact, imagined his unilateral withdrawal as a substitute for a peace agreement. It was designed, as Sharon’s top aide Dov Weissglass so memorably explained, as a dose of “formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Despite mounting Arab exasperation, the Bush administration put no pressure on Israel to bring the peace process to a conclusion, limiting itself to the Grand Guignol of the “Annapolis process.” With all external compulsion to conclude a peace agreement removed, domestic political pressure in Israel not surprisingly collapsed as well. The Palestinians were now largely locked behind the vast separation wall that winds through the West Bank and the siege lines of Gaza. Their plight is once again invisible to Israelis, only 40% of whom, when asked by pollsters, even express an interest in seeing the peace process restarted. Only around 20% believe that such a move would bring any results.
“Israel has no real intention of quitting the territories or allowing the Palestinian people to exercise their rights,” wrote Israeli political commentator Gideon Levy in Haaretz on 18 March. “Israel does not truly intend to pursue peace, because life here seems to be good even without it. The continuation of the occupation doesn’t just endanger Israel’s future, it also poses the greatest risk to world peace, serving as a pretext for Israel’s most dangerous enemies. No change will come to pass in the complacent, belligerent and condescending Israel of today.”
The Obama administration can’t be under any illusions on this score. And they are being forced to confront it by another kind of pressure. The bills are coming due for Bush’s War-on-Terror adventurism. Those responsible for maintaining the US imperium in the Muslim world are now raising warning flags that the price to be paid for continuing to indulge Israel in evading its obligation to offer a fair settlement to the Palestinians could be high -- and, worse than that, unnecessary.
Israel’s leaders, and its voters, have amply demonstrated that they will not voluntarily relinquish control of the Palestinian territories as long as there are no real consequences for maintaining the status quo. Sure, you can tell them that the status quo is untenable, but the whole history of Israel from the 1920s onward has been about transforming the impossible into the inevitable by changing the facts on the ground. Building settlements on occupied territory in violation of international law after 1967 seemed untenable at the time; today, the US government says Israel will keep most of those major settlement blocs in any two-state solution. It is precisely in line with this sort of improvisational logic that Sharon calculated he could hold on to the settlements of the West Bank if he gave up the settlements of Gaza; the same logic allows Netanyahu to say the words “two states for two peoples” while always winking at his base that he has no intention of allowing it to happen.
A peace process that requires Israel and the Palestinians to reach a bilateral consensus on the distribution of land and power under the prodding of US matchmakers is a non-starter -- and therefore unlikely to lead to a goal which is of increasing urgency in America’s national interest. Arguably, it’s increasingly important even for the Israelis, since the status quo has already eroded prospects for a two-state solution to the point where both sides may be consigned to an even longer and more bitter conflict.
Hence the necessity of correcting Vice-President Biden: Progress in the Middle East will not come until the United States changes Israel’s cost-benefit analysis for maintaining the status quo. The only Israeli leader capable of accepting the parameters of a two-state peace with the Palestinians, which are already widely known, is one who can convincingly demonstrate to his electorate that the alternatives are worse. Right now, without real pressure, without real cost, with nothing but words, there is simply no downside to the status quo for Israel. Until there is, things are unlikely to change, no matter the peril to US troops throughout the Middle East.
Tony Karon is a senior editor at Time.com and runs the website Rootless Cosmopolitan. This article was first published at TomDispatch.com
Copyright © 2010 Le Monde diplomatique – distributed by Agence Global
Friday, April 02, 2010
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Honduras: A Great Awakening
Hondurans' Great Awakening
By Dana Frank
This article appeared in the April 5, 2010 edition of The Nation.
March 18, 2010
Two powerful forces have swept through Honduras since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya: one magnificent, the other truly horrible. The first is the resistance movement that rose up to contest the coup, surprising everyone in its breadth, nonviolence and resilience. The second is the new regime's brutal repression in response. "It's been terribly painful, and a great awakening," reflects Ayax Irías, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Honduras.
While the conflict continues to escalate, the Obama administration is vigorously supporting the coup regime under Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa. "We believe that President Lobo and his administration have taken the steps necessary to restore democracy," declared Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on March 4. But the resistance movement itself, with its demand for a reconstitution of Honduran society from below, is a vivid testament to the country's need for real democracy. As the resistance faces off against the US-backed oligarchs and military, there's no question that this is the most important moment in Honduran history, even more important than the immense general strike of 1954, from which all modern Honduran history flows.
I returned to Honduras in February for the first time since the coup to find a country transformed. People involved in the resistance were bursting with political energy, with an utterly new faith in their power. But they were also well aware of how dangerous the situation is--as am I, so I am changing some of the identifying details of those with whom I spoke.
Most obviously new was the graffiti, which was everywhere I went--from Tegucigalpa, the capital; to San Pedro Sula, the big industrial city in the north; to the smaller cities of El Progreso and La Lima in the banana zone; to, most daringly, the walls along the US Air Force base at Palmerola. "¡Golpista!," the all-important epithet that means a perpetrator or supporter of the coup, or golpe de estado, was splayed on storefronts, television stations and houses. Most messages were straightforward: "Militares Asesinos" or "¡Elecciones No!," protesting the November 29 elections, boycotted by almost all pro-resistance candidates, who objected that no free and fair elections could take place under military occupation. Others were more pointedly personal: "Micheletti Pinochetti," equating the coup-regime president, Roberto Micheletti, with the dictator of Chile after its 1973 coup, Augusto Pinochet. "Erase me, golpista!" taunted one wall.
Even more remarkable was the change in young people. Teenagers and twentysomethings I had known for a decade--largely the children of trade unionists--who before hadn't been politically engaged at all, were suddenly sitting up in their chairs differently, eager to tell me stories of marches they'd joined, tear gas they'd tasted. One 15-year-old girl arrived in a red T-shirt reading, "I ♥ Honduras Without Golpistas." Cellphones kept going off with newly popular songs of the resistance as ring tones--"Traidores" or "Nos Tienen Miedo Porque No Tenemos Miedo" (They're afraid of us because we're not afraid), the song by Argentine Liliana Felipe and Mexican Jesusa Rodríguez, which has become the informal anthem of the resistance.
Older folks in the resistance, by contrast, had a sober look in their eyes. Unlike their children, those in their 50s and 60s know how much more terrible things can get; they lived through the 1970s and '80s in Central America. But as veterans of those struggles, they also had a clear sense that this was the main chance they'd been waiting for their whole lives; people were finally coming together and rising up. "All these years I've been involved in the struggle, but I've never felt that change was so close," Efraín Aguilar, a lifelong union activist, told me in low, firm tones.
In Tegucigalpa, I mentioned to a cabdriver the name of a Honduran Congressman I had just met in the airport the day before. "Golpista!" he spat out. He rattled off the man's connections to Micheletti and the most elite of Honduran oligarchs and kept talking with me about the resistance. Finally I asked him, Aren't you afraid to speak so openly with an unknown passenger? "After what we've been through, it doesn't matter anymore," he said.
When the military packed President Zelaya onto a plane to Costa Rica on June 28 in his now-famous pajamas, and the majority of Congress installed Micheletti as president with the collusion of the Supreme Court, enormous semi-spontaneous demonstrations and protests followed, beginning that same afternoon. Hundreds of thousands of people streamed into Tegucigalpa from small villages and cities throughout the country. An ad hoc national coalition calling itself the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular formed within days, uniting the campesino movement; indigenous, African-descent and women's organizations; human rights groups; trade unions; and, most astonishingly welcome, the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender movement, in what they together refer to as un movimiento amplio, a broad movement. Trade unions make up the backbone of the movement, especially the teachers, public-sector workers, banana workers and bottling-plant workers, whose meeting halls are essential to the resistance. But part of what makes the resistance so strong is its diversified base, with each social group organized within its own constituency, each with a representative in the top-level coordinating committee--and each with its own stake in reconstituting Honduras.
The women's movement is just one example. Numerous observers reported that 60 to 70 percent of the demonstrators have been women, who join the resistance not only as individuals but also with long-established groups like the Center for Women's Rights; they have specific collective demands, linking the coup, the resistance movement and their vision of a new future. "Ni golpe de estado ni golpe a mujeres," for example, showed up on posters, in chants and in demands that the Frente take on domestic violence.
What unites the resistance is not just opposition to the coup regime but a positive vision of a new Honduras, to be enacted through a national assembly that would, in turn, produce a new Constitution. The slogan I saw everywhere, "Por un constituyente no excluyente" (For a constitutional convention that doesn't exclude), captures widespread hopes that the new Constitution, modeled after ones recently passed in Bolivia (2009), Ecuador (2008) and Venezuela (1999), could guarantee and expand basic rights of the sectors that make up the resistance, such as land rights for campesinos and indigenous peoples, women's rights and basic labor rights.
The resistance, broadly defined, has a solid middle-class presence as well, including not just left-wing college students but large numbers of Liberal Party members loyal to Zelaya. During the big marches in the capital, many supporters from the middle class weren't comfortable joining on foot, so they came in their cars, whole families honking, waving banners and shouting. In one march on August 17, thousands of cars joined at the end, so many that it took them two hours to pass by.
By a sheer act of collective will, the movement has been overwhelmingly nonviolent, a decision made entirely from below, then officially ratified by the resistance coalition after the first week. What supporters call their movimiento pacífico, in classic Gandhian fashion, has served to sharply highlight, within Honduras and all over the world, the brutality of the government.
From day one, the coup government launched a vicious assault on those who dared to challenge it, deploying not just the military but municipal police and newly mobilized paramilitary assassins. Peaceful demonstrations full of old people and children were met with volley after volley of tear gas, the kinds that make you vomit or cry or feel like you can't breathe, or all three. According to eyewitnesses, media reports and independent Honduran human rights groups that are bravely tracking all this repression, police swept through crowds beating marchers with batons sporting new metal tips, snatching bystanders and protesters alike and throwing them into the back of trucks. Once in custody, many were beaten, tortured and/or raped. According to the Committee of Families of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), more than 3,000 people have been illegally detained since June 28. COFADEH reports that at least forty-one Hondurans associated with the resistance have been killed, including trade unionists and GLBT activists. One of the first was Isis Obed, 19, shot in the head by a government sniper from atop the Tegucigalpa airport at a demonstration on July 5 when President Zelaya tried to return by plane. The great majority of those killed have been rank-and-file activists who were kidnapped or shot in their homes or in the streets by unknown assailants.
While much international attention has focused on the capital, the repression has been nationwide. On the highway in Choloma, outside San Pedro Sula, protesters at twelve demonstrations in July, August and September occupied a strategic bottleneck through which trucks have to pass carrying industrial products to Puerto Cortés. Witnesses reported that the protesters were met with brutal attacks: tear gas and beatings, but also violence directed especially at women, including nightsticks jammed into women's crotches, rapes in detention and foul insults telling them they deserved it because they weren't in their proper place in the home. Irma Villanueva, 25, testified on the radio that she was detained and gang-raped by four police officers after a demonstration in Choloma on August 14.
In a snowballing process of collective awakening and self-discovery, though, this ongoing process of protest, repression and even greater subsequent protest has changed ordinary people's sense of themselves and their power--all the more astonishing because none of this was supposed to happen in Honduras. "Hondurans always had the reputation of being cowards," reflected Irías, the sociologist. "I never imagined that Hondurans had the ability or disposition to struggle like this." Before the coup, Honduras was largely known as the political black hole of Central America: during the 1970s and '80s, it didn't produce large guerrilla movements on the left as did its neighbors Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Instead, it served as the "USS Honduras," the base for the Reagan administration's Contra war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.
Honduras did, in fact, have a small armed left in the '80s and government-sponsored death squads led by the notorious Battalion 3-16, which killed more than 100 activists. But the country's population of 7.8 million, despite a poverty rate above 60 percent, has remained largely in the ideological thrall of a few oligarch families locked into a two-party patronage system, never able to mobilize a third party from the left and not, in general, engaged in meaningful debate.
Now, if nothing else, the country is politicized down to the bone. "What I love is that everyone--men, women, old people, little kids--is talking about politics," said Zoila Lagos, a veteran of the 1980s struggles who lives in a poor barrio near Choloma. In Tegucigalpa especially, activists discussed the resistance openly with me, in stores, in cabs and on crowded streets downtown. One young man told me it was a deliberate strategy: "We're normalizing the resistance, normalizing the concepts of struggle, so they're something familiar." There's a new moral line in the sand between the resistance, representing the vast majority of the Honduran people, and the golpistas--the oligarchs, their media and the military.
The alternative media have been essential to this rapid politicization at the grassroots. When the coup was launched, every metropolitan daily newspaper except one, every big-city television station except one and the great majority of the mainstream radio stations overtly supported the new regime, spouting bald lies that even the most neutral could see through: that the protesters were just violent riffraff; that Hugo Chávez was about to invade Honduras. La Prensa, a San Pedro Sula daily, even airbrushed out the blood dripping from the head of Isis Obed in a photograph taken just after he was killed at the airport. The outrageous collusion of the mainstream media, owned by the same oligarchs who have controlled the government for decades and who perpetrated the coup, contributed to the growth of popular consciousness and a higher level of critical thinking about the power structure within Honduras. "It opened the eyes of the people. The media are exactly the same, but the people aren't," observed Padre Melo, an esteemed Jesuit priest who directs Radio Progreso, an alternative radio station in El Progreso.
Critiques of the press were everywhere I went, like the big white banner sporting the logo of one of San Pedro Sula's leading dailies, promising "Get Stupid in Three Days. Read La Prensa." People kept repeating their favorite chant from the marches: "¡No somos cinco, no somos cien, prensa vendida cuéntanos bien!" (We're not five, we're not a hundred, sold-out press, count us well!).
Alternative radio has been particularly important in breaking through what those in the resistance call the "media fence" around the coup. Two powerful stations, Radio Globo in the capital and Radio Progreso in the north, have fully developed studios, transmitters and websites. Others are low-wattage operations run by indigenous groups, or Radio Uno in San Pedro Sula, run by teenagers in their school uniforms out of a journalism school. The programming on these stations is highly participatory--full of call-ins and local news reports--and it fills the streets, as vendors, cabdrivers and store owners play them day and night.
The coup government is well aware of the importance of the resistance media and has repeatedly clamped down on these outlets as well as opponents in the print media, often brutally, accusing them of "media terrorism." On the day of the coup, for example, the military surrounded Radio Progreso and shut it down for several hours. Since then, "we've gotten bomb threats almost daily," reported Radio Progreso director Padre Melo. Most recently, on January 6 unknown assailants burned down Radio Faluma Bimetu, a station run by Afro-indigenous Garífuna people in Triunfo de la Cruz.
No one really knows how deep all this popular politicization runs. Many Hondurans are keeping their heads low, quietly cheering on the resistance. Others still believe the mainstream media and are grateful that the government is "restoring order." We do have a few crude quantitative measures. While the government keeps revising its initial figures downward, it appears that the November 29 election, boycotted by the resistance, had only a 35 or 40 percent voter turnout. For another measure, 450,000 to 600,000 Hondurans, a very low estimate, participated in demonstrations on the two biggest days of protest: July 5 and September 15. As a percentage of the population, that's the equivalent in the United States of more than 20 million people.
On February 17 I was interviewed on Radio Uno by Pedro Brizuela, a wily and witty veteran communist in his 70s, who for many years has been working with the Garífuna along the Atlantic coast. Exactly one week later, assassins gunned down his 36-year-old daughter, Claudia, as she opened her front door in San Pedro Sula. It was a clear message to Pedro and to anyone else in the movement: keep fighting, and we'll kill your children.
Under the new Lobo administration, the repression isn't over, and it's getting more insidious. Lobo has reappointed the same military leaders who perpetrated the coup, with the exception of Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, who was dismissed only to be named head of Hondutel, the state-owned telephone company, which the oligarchs are itching to privatize. Paramilitary-style violence against the resistance has escalated since Lobo's inauguration on January 27. On February 15, two masked men on a motorcycle gunned down Julio Fúnez Benítez, of the sanitation workers' union. On March 14, two vehicles shot forty-seven bullets into the car of Nahún Ely Palacios Arteaga, news director of Canal 5 in the Aguán Valley, killing him instantly. Both men had protested the coup government.
The government, military and media want to pretend that this is all common crime, which is, in fact, rampant in Honduras--violence has touched both sides. On March 1 one outspoken pro-coup journalist was shot at, and her driving companion, a TV reporter, was killed. But no one in the movement believes there is anything random about the recent murders of resistance members, including one campesino activist, two trade unionists and a rank-and-file activist, which appear clearly intended to terrorize the grassroots resistance.
What happens next? The Lobo administration faces the task of suppressing a movement that is truly popular, with great determination, organizational capacity and hope. The Frente is still consolidating and expanding its regional base. It has announced that it does not recognize the Lobo government and plans to continue to destabilize what it views as a weak and illegitimate regime. It has denounced the impunity that continues, including the so-called "amnesty" in which the generals who perpetrated the coup--and who, with the exception of Vásquez Velásquez, remain at the top of the armed forces--were swiftly charged, tried and exonerated in January. The Frente's plan is to continue to challenge the government at the grassroots, forcing in the next year a National Assembly that would, in turn, lead to a constitutional convention and a new Constitution. It is already moving forward with plans for its own National Assembly on June 28, the anniversary of the coup. The Frente has announced it will eventually become a political party, but not for some time, in part because of the risk of co-optation as it tries to hold together its diverse base. "The struggle has only begun," observed Zoila Lagos, my friend from Choloma.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has swiftly recognized Lobo's new government and is pretending everything's just fine in Honduras. US aid, both military and humanitarian, is flowing once again, shoring up an unstable government with little legitimacy. Inside our own media fence, Honduras has largely dropped from the headlines.
Progressives in the United States need to make sure the Obama administration doesn't get away with shoring up the coup regime of the Honduran oligarchs and military. We need to demand that the United States withdraw its recognition of the Lobo government; halt all aid, as the Frente has explicitly requested; cut ties to the Honduran military, including ongoing training at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly known as the School of the Americas); and close the US base at Palmerola. Obama and Clinton should denounce the ongoing human rights abuses and the outrageous impunity granted the Honduran armed forces, police and paramilitaries--along with the Congress members and Supreme Court justices who backed the coup. If we're going to achieve any of these goals, though, we need to build our own movimiento amplio in support of the Honduran people. We can begin by building up grassroots pressure on members of Congress, district by district, working through our own unions, faith communities, immigrant organizations, GLBT and women's groups.
Whatever happens next, the Honduran people are not going back to sleep. As Carlos Humberto Reyes, the grand charismatic figure at the head of the resistance, who ran for president as an independent but pulled out in protest, said to me, "The important thing is that the people have changed."
Dana Frank is a history professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author, among other books, of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America, which focuses on Honduras. She is writing a book on the AFL-CIO's cold war intervention in the Honduran labor movement.
By Dana Frank
This article appeared in the April 5, 2010 edition of The Nation.
March 18, 2010
Two powerful forces have swept through Honduras since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya: one magnificent, the other truly horrible. The first is the resistance movement that rose up to contest the coup, surprising everyone in its breadth, nonviolence and resilience. The second is the new regime's brutal repression in response. "It's been terribly painful, and a great awakening," reflects Ayax Irías, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Honduras.
While the conflict continues to escalate, the Obama administration is vigorously supporting the coup regime under Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa. "We believe that President Lobo and his administration have taken the steps necessary to restore democracy," declared Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on March 4. But the resistance movement itself, with its demand for a reconstitution of Honduran society from below, is a vivid testament to the country's need for real democracy. As the resistance faces off against the US-backed oligarchs and military, there's no question that this is the most important moment in Honduran history, even more important than the immense general strike of 1954, from which all modern Honduran history flows.
I returned to Honduras in February for the first time since the coup to find a country transformed. People involved in the resistance were bursting with political energy, with an utterly new faith in their power. But they were also well aware of how dangerous the situation is--as am I, so I am changing some of the identifying details of those with whom I spoke.
Most obviously new was the graffiti, which was everywhere I went--from Tegucigalpa, the capital; to San Pedro Sula, the big industrial city in the north; to the smaller cities of El Progreso and La Lima in the banana zone; to, most daringly, the walls along the US Air Force base at Palmerola. "¡Golpista!," the all-important epithet that means a perpetrator or supporter of the coup, or golpe de estado, was splayed on storefronts, television stations and houses. Most messages were straightforward: "Militares Asesinos" or "¡Elecciones No!," protesting the November 29 elections, boycotted by almost all pro-resistance candidates, who objected that no free and fair elections could take place under military occupation. Others were more pointedly personal: "Micheletti Pinochetti," equating the coup-regime president, Roberto Micheletti, with the dictator of Chile after its 1973 coup, Augusto Pinochet. "Erase me, golpista!" taunted one wall.
Even more remarkable was the change in young people. Teenagers and twentysomethings I had known for a decade--largely the children of trade unionists--who before hadn't been politically engaged at all, were suddenly sitting up in their chairs differently, eager to tell me stories of marches they'd joined, tear gas they'd tasted. One 15-year-old girl arrived in a red T-shirt reading, "I ♥ Honduras Without Golpistas." Cellphones kept going off with newly popular songs of the resistance as ring tones--"Traidores" or "Nos Tienen Miedo Porque No Tenemos Miedo" (They're afraid of us because we're not afraid), the song by Argentine Liliana Felipe and Mexican Jesusa Rodríguez, which has become the informal anthem of the resistance.
Older folks in the resistance, by contrast, had a sober look in their eyes. Unlike their children, those in their 50s and 60s know how much more terrible things can get; they lived through the 1970s and '80s in Central America. But as veterans of those struggles, they also had a clear sense that this was the main chance they'd been waiting for their whole lives; people were finally coming together and rising up. "All these years I've been involved in the struggle, but I've never felt that change was so close," Efraín Aguilar, a lifelong union activist, told me in low, firm tones.
In Tegucigalpa, I mentioned to a cabdriver the name of a Honduran Congressman I had just met in the airport the day before. "Golpista!" he spat out. He rattled off the man's connections to Micheletti and the most elite of Honduran oligarchs and kept talking with me about the resistance. Finally I asked him, Aren't you afraid to speak so openly with an unknown passenger? "After what we've been through, it doesn't matter anymore," he said.
When the military packed President Zelaya onto a plane to Costa Rica on June 28 in his now-famous pajamas, and the majority of Congress installed Micheletti as president with the collusion of the Supreme Court, enormous semi-spontaneous demonstrations and protests followed, beginning that same afternoon. Hundreds of thousands of people streamed into Tegucigalpa from small villages and cities throughout the country. An ad hoc national coalition calling itself the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular formed within days, uniting the campesino movement; indigenous, African-descent and women's organizations; human rights groups; trade unions; and, most astonishingly welcome, the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender movement, in what they together refer to as un movimiento amplio, a broad movement. Trade unions make up the backbone of the movement, especially the teachers, public-sector workers, banana workers and bottling-plant workers, whose meeting halls are essential to the resistance. But part of what makes the resistance so strong is its diversified base, with each social group organized within its own constituency, each with a representative in the top-level coordinating committee--and each with its own stake in reconstituting Honduras.
The women's movement is just one example. Numerous observers reported that 60 to 70 percent of the demonstrators have been women, who join the resistance not only as individuals but also with long-established groups like the Center for Women's Rights; they have specific collective demands, linking the coup, the resistance movement and their vision of a new future. "Ni golpe de estado ni golpe a mujeres," for example, showed up on posters, in chants and in demands that the Frente take on domestic violence.
What unites the resistance is not just opposition to the coup regime but a positive vision of a new Honduras, to be enacted through a national assembly that would, in turn, produce a new Constitution. The slogan I saw everywhere, "Por un constituyente no excluyente" (For a constitutional convention that doesn't exclude), captures widespread hopes that the new Constitution, modeled after ones recently passed in Bolivia (2009), Ecuador (2008) and Venezuela (1999), could guarantee and expand basic rights of the sectors that make up the resistance, such as land rights for campesinos and indigenous peoples, women's rights and basic labor rights.
The resistance, broadly defined, has a solid middle-class presence as well, including not just left-wing college students but large numbers of Liberal Party members loyal to Zelaya. During the big marches in the capital, many supporters from the middle class weren't comfortable joining on foot, so they came in their cars, whole families honking, waving banners and shouting. In one march on August 17, thousands of cars joined at the end, so many that it took them two hours to pass by.
By a sheer act of collective will, the movement has been overwhelmingly nonviolent, a decision made entirely from below, then officially ratified by the resistance coalition after the first week. What supporters call their movimiento pacífico, in classic Gandhian fashion, has served to sharply highlight, within Honduras and all over the world, the brutality of the government.
From day one, the coup government launched a vicious assault on those who dared to challenge it, deploying not just the military but municipal police and newly mobilized paramilitary assassins. Peaceful demonstrations full of old people and children were met with volley after volley of tear gas, the kinds that make you vomit or cry or feel like you can't breathe, or all three. According to eyewitnesses, media reports and independent Honduran human rights groups that are bravely tracking all this repression, police swept through crowds beating marchers with batons sporting new metal tips, snatching bystanders and protesters alike and throwing them into the back of trucks. Once in custody, many were beaten, tortured and/or raped. According to the Committee of Families of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), more than 3,000 people have been illegally detained since June 28. COFADEH reports that at least forty-one Hondurans associated with the resistance have been killed, including trade unionists and GLBT activists. One of the first was Isis Obed, 19, shot in the head by a government sniper from atop the Tegucigalpa airport at a demonstration on July 5 when President Zelaya tried to return by plane. The great majority of those killed have been rank-and-file activists who were kidnapped or shot in their homes or in the streets by unknown assailants.
While much international attention has focused on the capital, the repression has been nationwide. On the highway in Choloma, outside San Pedro Sula, protesters at twelve demonstrations in July, August and September occupied a strategic bottleneck through which trucks have to pass carrying industrial products to Puerto Cortés. Witnesses reported that the protesters were met with brutal attacks: tear gas and beatings, but also violence directed especially at women, including nightsticks jammed into women's crotches, rapes in detention and foul insults telling them they deserved it because they weren't in their proper place in the home. Irma Villanueva, 25, testified on the radio that she was detained and gang-raped by four police officers after a demonstration in Choloma on August 14.
In a snowballing process of collective awakening and self-discovery, though, this ongoing process of protest, repression and even greater subsequent protest has changed ordinary people's sense of themselves and their power--all the more astonishing because none of this was supposed to happen in Honduras. "Hondurans always had the reputation of being cowards," reflected Irías, the sociologist. "I never imagined that Hondurans had the ability or disposition to struggle like this." Before the coup, Honduras was largely known as the political black hole of Central America: during the 1970s and '80s, it didn't produce large guerrilla movements on the left as did its neighbors Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Instead, it served as the "USS Honduras," the base for the Reagan administration's Contra war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.
Honduras did, in fact, have a small armed left in the '80s and government-sponsored death squads led by the notorious Battalion 3-16, which killed more than 100 activists. But the country's population of 7.8 million, despite a poverty rate above 60 percent, has remained largely in the ideological thrall of a few oligarch families locked into a two-party patronage system, never able to mobilize a third party from the left and not, in general, engaged in meaningful debate.
Now, if nothing else, the country is politicized down to the bone. "What I love is that everyone--men, women, old people, little kids--is talking about politics," said Zoila Lagos, a veteran of the 1980s struggles who lives in a poor barrio near Choloma. In Tegucigalpa especially, activists discussed the resistance openly with me, in stores, in cabs and on crowded streets downtown. One young man told me it was a deliberate strategy: "We're normalizing the resistance, normalizing the concepts of struggle, so they're something familiar." There's a new moral line in the sand between the resistance, representing the vast majority of the Honduran people, and the golpistas--the oligarchs, their media and the military.
The alternative media have been essential to this rapid politicization at the grassroots. When the coup was launched, every metropolitan daily newspaper except one, every big-city television station except one and the great majority of the mainstream radio stations overtly supported the new regime, spouting bald lies that even the most neutral could see through: that the protesters were just violent riffraff; that Hugo Chávez was about to invade Honduras. La Prensa, a San Pedro Sula daily, even airbrushed out the blood dripping from the head of Isis Obed in a photograph taken just after he was killed at the airport. The outrageous collusion of the mainstream media, owned by the same oligarchs who have controlled the government for decades and who perpetrated the coup, contributed to the growth of popular consciousness and a higher level of critical thinking about the power structure within Honduras. "It opened the eyes of the people. The media are exactly the same, but the people aren't," observed Padre Melo, an esteemed Jesuit priest who directs Radio Progreso, an alternative radio station in El Progreso.
Critiques of the press were everywhere I went, like the big white banner sporting the logo of one of San Pedro Sula's leading dailies, promising "Get Stupid in Three Days. Read La Prensa." People kept repeating their favorite chant from the marches: "¡No somos cinco, no somos cien, prensa vendida cuéntanos bien!" (We're not five, we're not a hundred, sold-out press, count us well!).
Alternative radio has been particularly important in breaking through what those in the resistance call the "media fence" around the coup. Two powerful stations, Radio Globo in the capital and Radio Progreso in the north, have fully developed studios, transmitters and websites. Others are low-wattage operations run by indigenous groups, or Radio Uno in San Pedro Sula, run by teenagers in their school uniforms out of a journalism school. The programming on these stations is highly participatory--full of call-ins and local news reports--and it fills the streets, as vendors, cabdrivers and store owners play them day and night.
The coup government is well aware of the importance of the resistance media and has repeatedly clamped down on these outlets as well as opponents in the print media, often brutally, accusing them of "media terrorism." On the day of the coup, for example, the military surrounded Radio Progreso and shut it down for several hours. Since then, "we've gotten bomb threats almost daily," reported Radio Progreso director Padre Melo. Most recently, on January 6 unknown assailants burned down Radio Faluma Bimetu, a station run by Afro-indigenous Garífuna people in Triunfo de la Cruz.
No one really knows how deep all this popular politicization runs. Many Hondurans are keeping their heads low, quietly cheering on the resistance. Others still believe the mainstream media and are grateful that the government is "restoring order." We do have a few crude quantitative measures. While the government keeps revising its initial figures downward, it appears that the November 29 election, boycotted by the resistance, had only a 35 or 40 percent voter turnout. For another measure, 450,000 to 600,000 Hondurans, a very low estimate, participated in demonstrations on the two biggest days of protest: July 5 and September 15. As a percentage of the population, that's the equivalent in the United States of more than 20 million people.
On February 17 I was interviewed on Radio Uno by Pedro Brizuela, a wily and witty veteran communist in his 70s, who for many years has been working with the Garífuna along the Atlantic coast. Exactly one week later, assassins gunned down his 36-year-old daughter, Claudia, as she opened her front door in San Pedro Sula. It was a clear message to Pedro and to anyone else in the movement: keep fighting, and we'll kill your children.
Under the new Lobo administration, the repression isn't over, and it's getting more insidious. Lobo has reappointed the same military leaders who perpetrated the coup, with the exception of Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, who was dismissed only to be named head of Hondutel, the state-owned telephone company, which the oligarchs are itching to privatize. Paramilitary-style violence against the resistance has escalated since Lobo's inauguration on January 27. On February 15, two masked men on a motorcycle gunned down Julio Fúnez Benítez, of the sanitation workers' union. On March 14, two vehicles shot forty-seven bullets into the car of Nahún Ely Palacios Arteaga, news director of Canal 5 in the Aguán Valley, killing him instantly. Both men had protested the coup government.
The government, military and media want to pretend that this is all common crime, which is, in fact, rampant in Honduras--violence has touched both sides. On March 1 one outspoken pro-coup journalist was shot at, and her driving companion, a TV reporter, was killed. But no one in the movement believes there is anything random about the recent murders of resistance members, including one campesino activist, two trade unionists and a rank-and-file activist, which appear clearly intended to terrorize the grassroots resistance.
What happens next? The Lobo administration faces the task of suppressing a movement that is truly popular, with great determination, organizational capacity and hope. The Frente is still consolidating and expanding its regional base. It has announced that it does not recognize the Lobo government and plans to continue to destabilize what it views as a weak and illegitimate regime. It has denounced the impunity that continues, including the so-called "amnesty" in which the generals who perpetrated the coup--and who, with the exception of Vásquez Velásquez, remain at the top of the armed forces--were swiftly charged, tried and exonerated in January. The Frente's plan is to continue to challenge the government at the grassroots, forcing in the next year a National Assembly that would, in turn, lead to a constitutional convention and a new Constitution. It is already moving forward with plans for its own National Assembly on June 28, the anniversary of the coup. The Frente has announced it will eventually become a political party, but not for some time, in part because of the risk of co-optation as it tries to hold together its diverse base. "The struggle has only begun," observed Zoila Lagos, my friend from Choloma.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has swiftly recognized Lobo's new government and is pretending everything's just fine in Honduras. US aid, both military and humanitarian, is flowing once again, shoring up an unstable government with little legitimacy. Inside our own media fence, Honduras has largely dropped from the headlines.
Progressives in the United States need to make sure the Obama administration doesn't get away with shoring up the coup regime of the Honduran oligarchs and military. We need to demand that the United States withdraw its recognition of the Lobo government; halt all aid, as the Frente has explicitly requested; cut ties to the Honduran military, including ongoing training at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly known as the School of the Americas); and close the US base at Palmerola. Obama and Clinton should denounce the ongoing human rights abuses and the outrageous impunity granted the Honduran armed forces, police and paramilitaries--along with the Congress members and Supreme Court justices who backed the coup. If we're going to achieve any of these goals, though, we need to build our own movimiento amplio in support of the Honduran people. We can begin by building up grassroots pressure on members of Congress, district by district, working through our own unions, faith communities, immigrant organizations, GLBT and women's groups.
Whatever happens next, the Honduran people are not going back to sleep. As Carlos Humberto Reyes, the grand charismatic figure at the head of the resistance, who ran for president as an independent but pulled out in protest, said to me, "The important thing is that the people have changed."
Dana Frank is a history professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author, among other books, of Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America, which focuses on Honduras. She is writing a book on the AFL-CIO's cold war intervention in the Honduran labor movement.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
USA: What Neofascism Looks Like
"This Is What Neofascism Looks Like"
by Matthew Rothschild
Republicans and their media outlet, Fox News, have encouraged rightwing violence in recent years -- and intensely so since the 2008 presidential election. In the incidents during this past week, we may have seen a prelude to something that could grow much worse.
The rightwing violence we’ve been witnessing this past week in America may be a prelude to something much worse.
The hideous and bigoted slurs aimed at Representatives Barney Frank and John Lewis; the spitting on another black Representative, Emanuel Cleaver; the throwing of bricks through the windows of other legislators’ offices; the cutting of a gas line at the home of the brother of a legislator; the lynching threats; the assassination threats; the mailing of a shredded American flag doused in gasoline: All of these incidents are the acts of modern-day brownshirts. This is what neofascism looks like.
Republicans have been tardy and muted at best in criticizing such criminal acts. And at worst they have said nothing, or have even egged on the criminals -- as with Sarah Palin’s putting cross-hairs on a map where she has targeted Democrats, with the reckless message:
“Don't Retreat, Instead -- RELOAD!”
And far from distancing himself from Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain invited her down to Arizona to campaign for him. And he has defended her rhetoric on the Today Show this week, saying her choice of words was “fine.”
"The language that we should be using today is the language that we are using," he said, though he did add, "Any threats of violence or anything along those lines is totally unacceptable and we condemn it all.”
House Minority Leader John Boehner also pulled away from the madding crowd. "Violence and threats are unacceptable. That is not the American way," he said on Fox News. "Yes, I know there's anger, but let's take that anger and go out and register people to vote, go volunteer on a political campaign, and let's do it the right way."
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley chimed in: This “is not what should be going on in America. We should have respect for other peoples’ opinions.”
But then there is House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, who not only stretched the truth about a bullet he said was aimed at his office. He also said Democratic leaders “are dangerously fanning the flames by suggesting that these incidents be used as a political weapon.”
But it has been Republicans and their mouthpieces on Fox and talk radio who have been fueling the hatred around the country. They can try to distance themselves from it now, but the damage has been done.
There is, across the land, a level of vileness we haven’t seen in this country in four decades. And this vileness, as history shows us, can lead to even worse acts of violence.
When 14 percent of Americans in a recent poll believe that President Obama may be the Antichrist, you have to worry for his safety.
It would not surprise me in the least if someone tried to gun down President Obama—or Speaker Pelosi, for that matter, so demonized is she in rightist circles.
The wise author Chris Hedges has been warning us for a couple years now about the rise of neofascism in America. Recently, he wrote, “We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity.”
This past week may mark the beginning of that descent.
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.
Copyright © 2010 The Progressive -- distributed by Agence Global
by Matthew Rothschild
Republicans and their media outlet, Fox News, have encouraged rightwing violence in recent years -- and intensely so since the 2008 presidential election. In the incidents during this past week, we may have seen a prelude to something that could grow much worse.
The rightwing violence we’ve been witnessing this past week in America may be a prelude to something much worse.
The hideous and bigoted slurs aimed at Representatives Barney Frank and John Lewis; the spitting on another black Representative, Emanuel Cleaver; the throwing of bricks through the windows of other legislators’ offices; the cutting of a gas line at the home of the brother of a legislator; the lynching threats; the assassination threats; the mailing of a shredded American flag doused in gasoline: All of these incidents are the acts of modern-day brownshirts. This is what neofascism looks like.
Republicans have been tardy and muted at best in criticizing such criminal acts. And at worst they have said nothing, or have even egged on the criminals -- as with Sarah Palin’s putting cross-hairs on a map where she has targeted Democrats, with the reckless message:
“Don't Retreat, Instead -- RELOAD!”
And far from distancing himself from Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain invited her down to Arizona to campaign for him. And he has defended her rhetoric on the Today Show this week, saying her choice of words was “fine.”
"The language that we should be using today is the language that we are using," he said, though he did add, "Any threats of violence or anything along those lines is totally unacceptable and we condemn it all.”
House Minority Leader John Boehner also pulled away from the madding crowd. "Violence and threats are unacceptable. That is not the American way," he said on Fox News. "Yes, I know there's anger, but let's take that anger and go out and register people to vote, go volunteer on a political campaign, and let's do it the right way."
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley chimed in: This “is not what should be going on in America. We should have respect for other peoples’ opinions.”
But then there is House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, who not only stretched the truth about a bullet he said was aimed at his office. He also said Democratic leaders “are dangerously fanning the flames by suggesting that these incidents be used as a political weapon.”
But it has been Republicans and their mouthpieces on Fox and talk radio who have been fueling the hatred around the country. They can try to distance themselves from it now, but the damage has been done.
There is, across the land, a level of vileness we haven’t seen in this country in four decades. And this vileness, as history shows us, can lead to even worse acts of violence.
When 14 percent of Americans in a recent poll believe that President Obama may be the Antichrist, you have to worry for his safety.
It would not surprise me in the least if someone tried to gun down President Obama—or Speaker Pelosi, for that matter, so demonized is she in rightist circles.
The wise author Chris Hedges has been warning us for a couple years now about the rise of neofascism in America. Recently, he wrote, “We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity.”
This past week may mark the beginning of that descent.
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine.
Copyright © 2010 The Progressive -- distributed by Agence Global
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Orion's Belt: Coroner Blames Victim in Two Year Old Hutchinson Wrongful Death
Delta motorcyclist impaired before crash with Mountie
Coroner's report says actions of both drivers contributed to crash
Motorcyclist Orion Hutchinson was killed in the collision with the Jeep. (Family photo)
March 23, 2010
CBC News
A coroner's report says the actions of both drivers contributed to the crash. A coroner's report says the actions of both drivers contributed to the crash. (CBC)
A Delta, B.C., motorcyclist killed in a collision with an RCMP officer's Jeep two years ago was impaired and speeding at the time of the crash, a coroner's investigation has determined.
The actions of both drivers, Orion Glenn Hutchinson, 21, and RCMP officer Cpl. Benjamin (Monty) Robinson, played a role in the collision, a report by the B.C. Coroners Service concluded.
Hutchinson was likely killed almost immediately by injuries he suffered when his motorcycle slammed into a Jeep driven by Robinson on a street in the community of Delta, south of Vancouver, on Oct. 26, 2008, the report said.
Speed, alcohol blamed
Coroner Mark Coleman concluded that speed and alcohol on Hutchinson's part were also contributing factors to the accident.
The motorcyclist had an alcohol level above the legal limit and was travelling between 66 km/h and 96 km/h when the collision occurred, Coleman concluded.
Robinson was making a left-hand turn and moving between 24 km/h and 29 km/h at the time of the crash, the coroner said.
"Speed and alcohol intoxication on the part of Mr. Hutchinson were contributing factors. Alcohol intoxication on the part of the driver of the Jeep is also believed to be contributing factor," concluded Coleman in the one-page report.
"I classify this death as accidental and make no recommendations."
Officer charged
Robinson, who was off-duty at the time of the collision, identified himself to witnesses before leaving the crash site with his two children to take them to his nearby home.
RCMP Cpl. Benjamin Robinson was charged with obstruction of justice following the crash. RCMP Cpl. Benjamin Robinson was charged with obstruction of justice following the crash. (CBC)
He later testified that he had two shots of vodka before returning to the crash scene and failing a Breathalyzer test.
Delta police recommended a charge of impaired driving against Robinson, but the Crown decided not to proceed. Instead, he was charged in December 2009 with attempting to obstruct justice. The case is still before the courts.
Robinson was suspended with pay following the crash.
He was also the most senior of the four Mounties involved in the Taser death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver airport in October 2007.
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/03/23/bc-delta-motorcycle-crash-robinson-hutchinson.html#ixzz0j3EvcdKz
Coroner's Report into the Death of Orion Hutchinson
http://www.cbc.ca/bc/news/bc-100323-coroners-report-hutchinson.pdf
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Canada's Long Embrace of the Honduran Dictatorship
Canada's Long Embrace of the Honduran Dictatorship
By TODD GORDON and JEFFERY R. WEBBER
http://www.counterpunch.com/gordon03192010.html
Peter Kent recently returned from a three day trip (February 17-20) to Honduras, proudly declaring the mission a success. As Canada’s Minister of State for the Americas, Kent is the Tory government’s point person for Canada’s growing political and economic interests in the region. Honduras has become an important focus of those interests, since the military coup last June against the moderately left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya, swung the country sharply back to the right.
Ignoring the ongoing abuses of human rights in the country under the new coupist presidency of Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, Kent has been following through with his promise to promote the normalization of the country’s relations with the rest of the hemisphere. Lobo won fraudulent elections held in November under the military dictatorship in a context of repression and intimidation. The election was boycotted by the anti-coup movement, and the Organization of American States and European Union refused to send official observers. Despite this, immediately following Lobo’s inauguration on January 27, Kent declared that Canada will “support President Lobo’s efforts as he moves to fully reintegrate Honduras into the international and hemispheric community, including in the Organization of American States.”
Canada, Honduras and the OAS
On his way to Honduras Kent met with the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, on February 16. Kent used the meeting to push Canada’s goal of recognizing the Lobo government onto the OAS agenda. Roberto Micheletti, the dictator that replaced Zelaya after the coup, withdrew Honduras from the organization when it became clear that the majority of member states were going to vote to kick the country out. While some staunch imperial allies in the region, such as Colombia and Peru, have recognized the Lobo government, other countries, notably Venezuela and Brazil, have refused to do so. The re-admittance of Honduras into the OAS will be a contentious and divisive issue, pitting the U.S., Canada, and their right wing allies, against those countries that want less influence from North American imperialism in the region.
Kent’s visit to Honduras, following his meeting with Insulza, was thus intended to strengthen the new government’s claim to legitimacy and its case for reinsertion into the OAS. Acting as if everything is once again well and good in Honduras also makes it easier for Canada to deepen its economic ties with the country. Canada is the largest mining investor in Honduras, for example, and its interests will increase significantly should Lobo and the right get their way and pass a new mining law that increases the rights of foreign capital.
Peter Kent and the Boys in Honduras
Unsurprisingly, then, Kent was all praise for Lobo and his administration during his latest trip. He was pleased that “President Lobo is beginning the process of national reconciliation, including supporting the formation of a truth commission.” Besides meeting with Lobo, Kent also met with three of the latter’s cabinet ministers. These included Micheletti’s spokesperson, Minister of Planning and Cooperation, Arturo Corrales. Corrales supported the Micheletti government’s refusal to implement the San José-Tegucigalpa Accord, which it had initially signed along with Zelaya and which called for a government of national reconciliation (itself a very problematic feature of the Accord from a democratic perspective). Kent also met with Foreign Minister, Mario Canahuati. Canahuati is the son of one of Honduras’s most powerful capitalists, the maquila magnate, Juan Canahuati. His brother, Jesus, is the president of the Honduran Manufacturers’ Association. Mario, meanwhile, was Lobo’s vice presidential candidate in the 2005 election, which Lobo lost to Zelaya, and is the past president of the Honduran National Business Council, a pro-coup organization.
Kent also met with Canadian business leaders in the country, though he didn’t publicly disclose which ones (requests from his office for the names of companies with which he met went unanswered).
Who Kent Didn’t Talk To
Kent suggested the Lobo government was taking crucial steps toward, “healing the wounds created by the recent political impasse,” steps which will allow “Honduras to regain a sense of trust in their country’s democratic institutions.”
This depiction of political developments in the country is hard to square with facts on the ground – namely, political assassinations, repression, torture, and mass arrests. Kent might have grasped this had he bothered to meet with the Committee of Family Members of the Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), the country’s most prestigious human rights organization, founded in the 1980s.
On January 30, three days after the celebrated inauguration of Pepe Lobo, COFADEH reports that Blas López, a Secondary School Teacher and known member of the anti-coup resistance, was discovered dead from multiple gun shot wounds. On February 2, Vanessa Zepeda, a 29-year-old union activist and active member of the resistance, was killed after she was thrown from a moving vehicle in the streets of Tegucigalpa. On February 15, just two days prior to Kent’s arrival in Honduras, Julio Fúnez Benítez, a union activist and resistance member who had received multiple death threats by coupist supporters, was gunned down and killed by men on a motorcycle. Four days after Kent left the country, and only a day after the release of his press communiqué exalting the successes of Lobo’s administration, Claudia Larisa Brizuela Rodríguez, the 36-year-old daughter of a prominent radio journalist and resistance activist was shot in the face in front of her children after opening the front door to her home.
Such para-military terrorization of peaceful resisters has been a continuous stain on Honduras’ human rights record from the moment of Micheletti’s coup on June 28, 2009, through the transition to Pepe Lobo, and on until the present day. According to COFADEH, by the end of February, 2010, there had been 43 politically-motivated assassinations of civilians associated with the resistance since the coup. This number is almost certainly a low estimate, the human rights organization acknowledges, as community members and the families of those killed are often too afraid to come forward for fear of reprisal. Many political murders are passed over in the mainstream media as “gang killings.” As far back as January, the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (National Front of Popular Resistance, FNRP) claimed that over 130 activists had been assassinated.
In a communiqué released on March 5, 2010, COFADEH argues that the selective attacks against members of the resistance are part of an orchestrated campaign to demobilize and fragment the FRNP. They document 250 violations of human rights since Lobo’s inauguration.
According to the report, the government is also engaged in a full-blown disinformation campaign through the domestic, coup-backing, private media, and the mainstream international media outlets, to consolidate the image of Pepe Lobo as a legitimate, democratic, and civilian government open to foreign investment and good relations with North America and the European Union. Disgracefully, the EU fell in line with North American imperialism and decided at the end of February to normalize relations with Honduras.
Imperialism Re-Booted in Latin America
The first decade of this century witnessed mass, extra-parliamentary mobilizations overthrow a series of heads of state in Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia, followed by the election of a vast array of self-described left and centre-left governments across South and Central America. Overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US state has felt its grip on the region loosen.
Recent years have seen renewed efforts by the Bush and Obama governments to reconstitute the contours of a new counter-reform offensive. The Obama administration, today, sees new sources of hope in the consolidation of right-wing governments in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Panama, and, more recently, Honduras and Chile. New U.S. military bases in Colombia and Panama illustrate the utility of such clients. Washington is also betting on its ability to turn a number of centre-left regimes – Kirchner in Argentina, Funes in El Salvador, Colom in Guatemala, and Mujica in Uruguay, among others – against the relatively more independent regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent the first five days of March on a whirlwind tour of the region, denouncing Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and attempting to pressure various governments into normalizing relations with the Honduran dictatorship.
Clinton met with Lobo in Guatemala City on March 5. “We support the work that President Lobo is doing to promote national unity and strengthen democracy,” she told journalists gathered at a news conference. Earlier in the week, during a visit to Buenos Aires, she claimed that the “Honduras crisis has been managed to a successful conclusion.” It was also apparently “done without violence.”
As Eric Toussaint, president of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, recently pointed out in the Socialist Worker, “we can see that the Obama administration is in no hurry to break with the methods used by its predecessors: witness the massive funding of different opposition movements within the context of its policy to ‘strengthen democracy’; the launching of media campaigns to discredit governments that do not share its political agenda (Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Manuel Zelaya’s Honduras and so on); maintaining the blockade of Cuba; the support for separatist movements in Bolivia (the media luna and the regional capital, Santa Cruz), in Ecuador (the city of Guayaquil and its province), and in Venezuela (the petroleum state of Zulia, the capital of which is Maracaibo); the support for military attacks, like the one perpetrated by Colombia in Ecuador in March 2008; as well as actions by Colombian or other paramilitary forces in Venezuela.”
Canada’s imperial role in the region has taken on a similar guise as the U.S., although shaped more specifically around Canadian mining and other capitalist interests in the area.
Kent’s last trip to the region, prior to the Honduras visit, saw him in Venezuela. Apparently there was insufficient time to meet with any representatives of the democratically-elected government of Hugo Chávez, although he met with a number of groups associated with the far-right opposition. On January 28, after having returned to Canada, Kent issued a news release declaring that there was “shrinking democratic space in Venezuela” under Chávez. “During my recent visit to Venezuela,” Kent said, “I heard many individuals and organizations express concerns related to violations of the right to freedom of expression and other basic liberties.”
The comments elicited a response from Chávez on his weekly Alo Presidente TV program. The Venezuelan President said he wouldn’t take advice from an “ultraright” government that had just “closed” parliament. Chávez was referring to Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper’s, notorious suspension, or “proroguement,” of the Canadian parliament on December 30 until March 3 to avoid debate surrounding Canadian military abuses in occupied Afghanistan. The Vancouver Sun reported that Roy Chaderton Matos, Venezuela’s ambassador to the OAS, accused the Canadian government of backing “coup-plotters” and “destabilizers” the country.
Last week, Peter Van Loan, Minister of International Trade, made a further show of whom Canada considers its friends in the region, tabling legislation to implement the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Of course, no word was uttered of the infamous record of human rights violations committed by the Álvaro Uribe regime in Colombia, nor of its intimate ties to paramilitary networks operating with impunity throughout the country. “The Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement will provide greater market access for Canadian exporters of goods such as wheat, pulses, barley, paper products and heavy equipment,” the press release from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade declared this week. “An increasing number of Canadian investors and exporters are entering the Colombian market, and it is also a strategic destination for Canadian direct investment, especially in mining, oil exploration, printing and education.”
The effort to consolidate the coupist installation of the far-right in Honduras is, in other words, merely the latest puzzle piece in a much wider and reviving North American imperial project in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Resistance Continues
In Honduras, as elsewhere, the resistance has not been cowed. On March 8, the FNRP released their 51st communiqué. They announced that they would be organizing a poll of the Honduran people on June 28, 2010 to assess the popularity of the call for an Inclusive and Popular Constituent Assembly. The date will commemorate the first anniversary of the coupist regime, and will represent the unbreakable will of the Honduran people to resist, and to build an authentic democracy that transforms at its roots the reigning system of injustice and repression.
The communiqué condemned the U.S. government’s efforts to construct a legitimate face for this dictatorship, especially the role played by U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens.
The resistance also pointed to the role played by the private media in defending the Honduran oligarchy and the coup regime that serves its interests. In particular, the FNRP pointed to the way in which the daily newspapers La Prensa and El Heraldo, owned by business tycoon, Jorge Canahuati, have portrayed working class families and popular leaders aligned with the resistance as terrorists. The FNRP also highlighted the parallel part played by the TV station Corporación de Televicentro, property of Rafael Ferrari.
The Communiqué closed with a call to popular movements to attend the Second Gathering for the Refoundation of Honduras, in the city of La Esperanza, between March 12 and 14.
According to Claudia Korol’s América Latina en Movimiento report, dispatched from on scene in La Esperanza, over a thousand delegates had gathered by March 13th, representing an array of different popular sectors: Lenca and Garífuna peoples’ movements; feminists; environmentalists; rural and urban trade unionists; peasants; and different currents of the revolutionary left – many with links going back to the Central American revolutionary struggles of the 1980s.
A mix of popular political traditions focusing on decolonization, anti-imperialism, and socialism converged as those gathered broke off into twenty simultaneous popular assemblies to discuss a variety of themes: the preservation of water, forests, land, subsoil, traditional territories, and air; the political system and popular sovereignty; culture; justice; autonomy; sexual diversity; health; communications; foreign policy and international relations; anti-patriarchal struggles; anti-racism; national security; work and workers’ rights; the economic system; indigenous and black communities; youth; fighting corruption and learning about popular accounting.
These different general discussions then fed into issues of strategic orientation: What does refounding Honduras mean, and how is it different than mere reform? What will a refounded Honduras look like? What are the necessary stages to get there? What do we mean by constituent power and the building of popular power from below? How can we strengthen our popular organizations to foment this popular power? What are we really calling for when we demand a Popular and Democratic Constituent Assembly? How can we shape our participation as a resistance movement to ensure that the genuine interests, aspirations, and proposals of the people will be included in the new constitution?
In the coming months these questions will begin to take concrete form through the extra-parliamentary struggles in the streets and the countryside, in defiance of selective assassinations, intimidation, media obfuscation, and imperialist meddling.
Todd Gordon teaches political science at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Cops, Crime and Capitalism: The Law-and-Order Agenda in Canada (Fernwood), and the forthcoming Imperial Canada (Arbeiter Ring Publishing).
Jeffery R. Webber teaches political science at the University of Regina. He is the author of two forthcoming books: Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (Brill) and Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket).
Together they are currently writing a book on Canadian imperialism in the Americas in the age of neoliberalism.
By TODD GORDON and JEFFERY R. WEBBER
http://www.counterpunch.com/gordon03192010.html
Peter Kent recently returned from a three day trip (February 17-20) to Honduras, proudly declaring the mission a success. As Canada’s Minister of State for the Americas, Kent is the Tory government’s point person for Canada’s growing political and economic interests in the region. Honduras has become an important focus of those interests, since the military coup last June against the moderately left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya, swung the country sharply back to the right.
Ignoring the ongoing abuses of human rights in the country under the new coupist presidency of Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, Kent has been following through with his promise to promote the normalization of the country’s relations with the rest of the hemisphere. Lobo won fraudulent elections held in November under the military dictatorship in a context of repression and intimidation. The election was boycotted by the anti-coup movement, and the Organization of American States and European Union refused to send official observers. Despite this, immediately following Lobo’s inauguration on January 27, Kent declared that Canada will “support President Lobo’s efforts as he moves to fully reintegrate Honduras into the international and hemispheric community, including in the Organization of American States.”
Canada, Honduras and the OAS
On his way to Honduras Kent met with the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, on February 16. Kent used the meeting to push Canada’s goal of recognizing the Lobo government onto the OAS agenda. Roberto Micheletti, the dictator that replaced Zelaya after the coup, withdrew Honduras from the organization when it became clear that the majority of member states were going to vote to kick the country out. While some staunch imperial allies in the region, such as Colombia and Peru, have recognized the Lobo government, other countries, notably Venezuela and Brazil, have refused to do so. The re-admittance of Honduras into the OAS will be a contentious and divisive issue, pitting the U.S., Canada, and their right wing allies, against those countries that want less influence from North American imperialism in the region.
Kent’s visit to Honduras, following his meeting with Insulza, was thus intended to strengthen the new government’s claim to legitimacy and its case for reinsertion into the OAS. Acting as if everything is once again well and good in Honduras also makes it easier for Canada to deepen its economic ties with the country. Canada is the largest mining investor in Honduras, for example, and its interests will increase significantly should Lobo and the right get their way and pass a new mining law that increases the rights of foreign capital.
Peter Kent and the Boys in Honduras
Unsurprisingly, then, Kent was all praise for Lobo and his administration during his latest trip. He was pleased that “President Lobo is beginning the process of national reconciliation, including supporting the formation of a truth commission.” Besides meeting with Lobo, Kent also met with three of the latter’s cabinet ministers. These included Micheletti’s spokesperson, Minister of Planning and Cooperation, Arturo Corrales. Corrales supported the Micheletti government’s refusal to implement the San José-Tegucigalpa Accord, which it had initially signed along with Zelaya and which called for a government of national reconciliation (itself a very problematic feature of the Accord from a democratic perspective). Kent also met with Foreign Minister, Mario Canahuati. Canahuati is the son of one of Honduras’s most powerful capitalists, the maquila magnate, Juan Canahuati. His brother, Jesus, is the president of the Honduran Manufacturers’ Association. Mario, meanwhile, was Lobo’s vice presidential candidate in the 2005 election, which Lobo lost to Zelaya, and is the past president of the Honduran National Business Council, a pro-coup organization.
Kent also met with Canadian business leaders in the country, though he didn’t publicly disclose which ones (requests from his office for the names of companies with which he met went unanswered).
Who Kent Didn’t Talk To
Kent suggested the Lobo government was taking crucial steps toward, “healing the wounds created by the recent political impasse,” steps which will allow “Honduras to regain a sense of trust in their country’s democratic institutions.”
This depiction of political developments in the country is hard to square with facts on the ground – namely, political assassinations, repression, torture, and mass arrests. Kent might have grasped this had he bothered to meet with the Committee of Family Members of the Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), the country’s most prestigious human rights organization, founded in the 1980s.
On January 30, three days after the celebrated inauguration of Pepe Lobo, COFADEH reports that Blas López, a Secondary School Teacher and known member of the anti-coup resistance, was discovered dead from multiple gun shot wounds. On February 2, Vanessa Zepeda, a 29-year-old union activist and active member of the resistance, was killed after she was thrown from a moving vehicle in the streets of Tegucigalpa. On February 15, just two days prior to Kent’s arrival in Honduras, Julio Fúnez Benítez, a union activist and resistance member who had received multiple death threats by coupist supporters, was gunned down and killed by men on a motorcycle. Four days after Kent left the country, and only a day after the release of his press communiqué exalting the successes of Lobo’s administration, Claudia Larisa Brizuela Rodríguez, the 36-year-old daughter of a prominent radio journalist and resistance activist was shot in the face in front of her children after opening the front door to her home.
Such para-military terrorization of peaceful resisters has been a continuous stain on Honduras’ human rights record from the moment of Micheletti’s coup on June 28, 2009, through the transition to Pepe Lobo, and on until the present day. According to COFADEH, by the end of February, 2010, there had been 43 politically-motivated assassinations of civilians associated with the resistance since the coup. This number is almost certainly a low estimate, the human rights organization acknowledges, as community members and the families of those killed are often too afraid to come forward for fear of reprisal. Many political murders are passed over in the mainstream media as “gang killings.” As far back as January, the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (National Front of Popular Resistance, FNRP) claimed that over 130 activists had been assassinated.
In a communiqué released on March 5, 2010, COFADEH argues that the selective attacks against members of the resistance are part of an orchestrated campaign to demobilize and fragment the FRNP. They document 250 violations of human rights since Lobo’s inauguration.
According to the report, the government is also engaged in a full-blown disinformation campaign through the domestic, coup-backing, private media, and the mainstream international media outlets, to consolidate the image of Pepe Lobo as a legitimate, democratic, and civilian government open to foreign investment and good relations with North America and the European Union. Disgracefully, the EU fell in line with North American imperialism and decided at the end of February to normalize relations with Honduras.
Imperialism Re-Booted in Latin America
The first decade of this century witnessed mass, extra-parliamentary mobilizations overthrow a series of heads of state in Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia, followed by the election of a vast array of self-described left and centre-left governments across South and Central America. Overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US state has felt its grip on the region loosen.
Recent years have seen renewed efforts by the Bush and Obama governments to reconstitute the contours of a new counter-reform offensive. The Obama administration, today, sees new sources of hope in the consolidation of right-wing governments in Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Panama, and, more recently, Honduras and Chile. New U.S. military bases in Colombia and Panama illustrate the utility of such clients. Washington is also betting on its ability to turn a number of centre-left regimes – Kirchner in Argentina, Funes in El Salvador, Colom in Guatemala, and Mujica in Uruguay, among others – against the relatively more independent regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and Ecuador.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent the first five days of March on a whirlwind tour of the region, denouncing Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and attempting to pressure various governments into normalizing relations with the Honduran dictatorship.
Clinton met with Lobo in Guatemala City on March 5. “We support the work that President Lobo is doing to promote national unity and strengthen democracy,” she told journalists gathered at a news conference. Earlier in the week, during a visit to Buenos Aires, she claimed that the “Honduras crisis has been managed to a successful conclusion.” It was also apparently “done without violence.”
As Eric Toussaint, president of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, recently pointed out in the Socialist Worker, “we can see that the Obama administration is in no hurry to break with the methods used by its predecessors: witness the massive funding of different opposition movements within the context of its policy to ‘strengthen democracy’; the launching of media campaigns to discredit governments that do not share its political agenda (Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Manuel Zelaya’s Honduras and so on); maintaining the blockade of Cuba; the support for separatist movements in Bolivia (the media luna and the regional capital, Santa Cruz), in Ecuador (the city of Guayaquil and its province), and in Venezuela (the petroleum state of Zulia, the capital of which is Maracaibo); the support for military attacks, like the one perpetrated by Colombia in Ecuador in March 2008; as well as actions by Colombian or other paramilitary forces in Venezuela.”
Canada’s imperial role in the region has taken on a similar guise as the U.S., although shaped more specifically around Canadian mining and other capitalist interests in the area.
Kent’s last trip to the region, prior to the Honduras visit, saw him in Venezuela. Apparently there was insufficient time to meet with any representatives of the democratically-elected government of Hugo Chávez, although he met with a number of groups associated with the far-right opposition. On January 28, after having returned to Canada, Kent issued a news release declaring that there was “shrinking democratic space in Venezuela” under Chávez. “During my recent visit to Venezuela,” Kent said, “I heard many individuals and organizations express concerns related to violations of the right to freedom of expression and other basic liberties.”
The comments elicited a response from Chávez on his weekly Alo Presidente TV program. The Venezuelan President said he wouldn’t take advice from an “ultraright” government that had just “closed” parliament. Chávez was referring to Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper’s, notorious suspension, or “proroguement,” of the Canadian parliament on December 30 until March 3 to avoid debate surrounding Canadian military abuses in occupied Afghanistan. The Vancouver Sun reported that Roy Chaderton Matos, Venezuela’s ambassador to the OAS, accused the Canadian government of backing “coup-plotters” and “destabilizers” the country.
Last week, Peter Van Loan, Minister of International Trade, made a further show of whom Canada considers its friends in the region, tabling legislation to implement the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement. Of course, no word was uttered of the infamous record of human rights violations committed by the Álvaro Uribe regime in Colombia, nor of its intimate ties to paramilitary networks operating with impunity throughout the country. “The Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement will provide greater market access for Canadian exporters of goods such as wheat, pulses, barley, paper products and heavy equipment,” the press release from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade declared this week. “An increasing number of Canadian investors and exporters are entering the Colombian market, and it is also a strategic destination for Canadian direct investment, especially in mining, oil exploration, printing and education.”
The effort to consolidate the coupist installation of the far-right in Honduras is, in other words, merely the latest puzzle piece in a much wider and reviving North American imperial project in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Resistance Continues
In Honduras, as elsewhere, the resistance has not been cowed. On March 8, the FNRP released their 51st communiqué. They announced that they would be organizing a poll of the Honduran people on June 28, 2010 to assess the popularity of the call for an Inclusive and Popular Constituent Assembly. The date will commemorate the first anniversary of the coupist regime, and will represent the unbreakable will of the Honduran people to resist, and to build an authentic democracy that transforms at its roots the reigning system of injustice and repression.
The communiqué condemned the U.S. government’s efforts to construct a legitimate face for this dictatorship, especially the role played by U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens.
The resistance also pointed to the role played by the private media in defending the Honduran oligarchy and the coup regime that serves its interests. In particular, the FNRP pointed to the way in which the daily newspapers La Prensa and El Heraldo, owned by business tycoon, Jorge Canahuati, have portrayed working class families and popular leaders aligned with the resistance as terrorists. The FNRP also highlighted the parallel part played by the TV station Corporación de Televicentro, property of Rafael Ferrari.
The Communiqué closed with a call to popular movements to attend the Second Gathering for the Refoundation of Honduras, in the city of La Esperanza, between March 12 and 14.
According to Claudia Korol’s América Latina en Movimiento report, dispatched from on scene in La Esperanza, over a thousand delegates had gathered by March 13th, representing an array of different popular sectors: Lenca and Garífuna peoples’ movements; feminists; environmentalists; rural and urban trade unionists; peasants; and different currents of the revolutionary left – many with links going back to the Central American revolutionary struggles of the 1980s.
A mix of popular political traditions focusing on decolonization, anti-imperialism, and socialism converged as those gathered broke off into twenty simultaneous popular assemblies to discuss a variety of themes: the preservation of water, forests, land, subsoil, traditional territories, and air; the political system and popular sovereignty; culture; justice; autonomy; sexual diversity; health; communications; foreign policy and international relations; anti-patriarchal struggles; anti-racism; national security; work and workers’ rights; the economic system; indigenous and black communities; youth; fighting corruption and learning about popular accounting.
These different general discussions then fed into issues of strategic orientation: What does refounding Honduras mean, and how is it different than mere reform? What will a refounded Honduras look like? What are the necessary stages to get there? What do we mean by constituent power and the building of popular power from below? How can we strengthen our popular organizations to foment this popular power? What are we really calling for when we demand a Popular and Democratic Constituent Assembly? How can we shape our participation as a resistance movement to ensure that the genuine interests, aspirations, and proposals of the people will be included in the new constitution?
In the coming months these questions will begin to take concrete form through the extra-parliamentary struggles in the streets and the countryside, in defiance of selective assassinations, intimidation, media obfuscation, and imperialist meddling.
Todd Gordon teaches political science at York University, in Toronto. He is the author of Cops, Crime and Capitalism: The Law-and-Order Agenda in Canada (Fernwood), and the forthcoming Imperial Canada (Arbeiter Ring Publishing).
Jeffery R. Webber teaches political science at the University of Regina. He is the author of two forthcoming books: Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (Brill) and Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket).
Together they are currently writing a book on Canadian imperialism in the Americas in the age of neoliberalism.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Sunday, March 14, 2010
GoldCorp's Legacy in Guatemala
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4732
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Israel Expands Attacks on Human Rights NGO's to the U.S.
Inside the Lawfare Project:
Netanyahu’s attack on human rights NGO’s comes to the US
by Max Blumenthal on March 13, 2010
http://mondoweiss.net/2010/02/all-in-a-days-work-columbia-dean-is-fronting-for-the-israel-lobby.html
As the anti-Goldstone, human rights-bashing Lawfare Project’s opening event on March 11 wrapped up, I asked its chairman, Columbia University Law School Dean David Schizer, for an interview. Schizer, who had just attacked the Goldstone Report from the podium, pointedly refused to speak to me and looked for the exit. As Schizer was leaving, he was politely confronted by Columbia Law School Professor Katherine Franke, who heads the school’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Law.
"Why didn’t you invite any speakers with an alternative perspective?" Franke asked Schizer.
His reply was curt. "We invited one or two but they couldn’t make it," Schizer claimed before hurrying away.
Schizer was understandably nervous about his exposure. After all, he had just presided over a day-long conference during which Israeli human rights workers were labeled as traitors while Judge Richard Goldstone and human rights groups were compared to "anti-Semitic street gangs." After several speakers had harshly condemned legal efforts against the construction of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Schizer appeared beside them to lend his credibility to their views.
Schizer attacks Goldstone
Held in the ornate NY County Lawyers Association meeting room in downtown Manhattan, where the walls were adorned with portraits of the pioneers of international jurisprudence, the Lawfare Project’s conference had the look of a non-partisan academic conference. However, the event was organized by a network of American Zionist groups and conservative operatives with apparent encouragement from the Israeli government.
As Scott Horton noticed at Harper’s, the Lawfare Project’s rollout event followed a remarkably similar conference in Jerusalem two weeks earlier. Both conferences followed legislation in the Knesset designed to force NGO’s to disclose their foreign donors so they can be more easily branded as a fifth column and to strangle human rights groups in Israel and occupied Palestine.
The presence of high-level Israeli officials like UN Ambassador Gabriela Shalev at the Lawfare Project conference suggested that the Netanyahu administration was the hidden hand behind the event. If so, the Israeli government has deployed its American Jewish allies to take the fight across the Atlantic to groups like Human Rights Watch and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Both groups were attacked at the event as anti-Israeli and anti-American.
I arrived late in the day but just in time for a panel moderated by Pat Robertson’s longtime legal counsel, Jay Sekulow. Sekulow, a convert from Judaism to evangelical Christianity who has spent his career representing anti-gay and anti-abortion clients, appears to be playing a key role in the Lawfare Project.
Through his American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), Sekulow reaps millions of dollars each year from Christian conservative donors. He uses that money to pay himself upwards of $600,000, provide a lavish lifestyle for his family, and procure the services of the PR firm, 5WPR, which represents other upstanding clients like Girls Gone Wild and the pro-settler Hebron Fund.
5WPR was handling the press list for the Lawfare Project and shuttling its speakers to and from media appearances. 5W Senior Account Executive Maggie Davis told me that through the firm’s relationship with Sekulow, she was arranging media appearances for Brooke Goldstein, founder of the Children’s Rights Institute, which happens to share a domain address with the Lawfare Project. Both websites were registered by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which played a direct role in planning the conference. Gladstone is now the lead spokesperson for the Lawfare Project, according to 5W’s Davis.
NGO Monitor legal advisor Anne Herzberg was featured prominently at the conference. During a panel discussion, she accused the European Union of "pouring hundreds of millions into these NGO’s…that are actually in favor of a one-state solution." Without naming those NGO’s or explaining why accepting foreign money was such a crime, Herzberg boasted of suing human rights groups to force them disclose their donors. She accused Israeli NGO’s like B’tselem of causing "a breach of sovereignty" against Israel by contributing data to the Goldstone Report — an insinuation that Israeli human rights workers were traitors.
An NGO Monitor report was distributed to conference attendees identifying groups supposedly promoting "post-colonial ideology" as "anti-state," "anti-democracy" and "anti-American." The report identified NGO Monitor’s top targets: the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and Al-Haq. Al-Haq was singled out because, along with a staffer from the Israeli group B’Tselem, it filed an expert opinion in the case to move a section of the separation wall annexing thousands of acres of farmland from the Palestinian town of Bil’in to a nearby Jewish settlement.
The attack on Al Haq highlights part of NGO’s Monitor’s not-so-hidden agenda: to allow the settler movement to usurp land in the West Bank without limitations. As Didi Remez reported, NGO Monitor has partnered with the Institute for Zionist Strategies, led by Yisrael Harel, who helped to found the Gush Emunim settler movement and lives in the religious nationalist settlement of Ofra. Remez also pointed out that NGO Monitor has made no demand for financial transparency from pro-settler organizations which are also engaged in what it would call "lawfare."
NGO Monitor has also targeted US-based human rights group. It has gone after Human Rights Watch on the basis of the group’s contribution of reporting to the Goldstone Report and because Goldstone was at one point a HRW board member. The Center for Constitutional Rights was singled out because its founder, Michael Ratner, went on the recent Gaza Freedom March with Code Pink. None of the factual documentation these groups released was challenged by the NGO Monitor report or in Herzberg’s presentation. Instead, the groups and their leadership are being targeted with a scattershot of accusations that recall McCarthyism in its crudest form.
As a consequence of his zeal, NGO Monitor director Gerald Steinberg was hauled into an Israeli court this month and forced to apologize for claiming a Palestinian human rights group "justified violence." Yossi Alpher, a former advisor to Ehud Barak, has condemned Steinberg’s activities, writing that NGO Monitor "seems dead set on eliminating human rights monitoring of Israel entirely and smearing anyone who supports this vital activity."
The NGO Monitor report and the speakers at the Lawfare Project event expressed alarm about the effectiveness of the global BDS movement and its success in exposing apartheid practices in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Speaker Richard Heidemann, the Honorary Chairman of B’nai Brith, said that the fight against BDS was essential to the Lawfare Project. "We have to stand up against slander, we have to stand up against boycott," he proclaimed. "If you were accused of apartheid, wouldn’t you consider taking action?" However, he proposed no specific measures or tactics other than making vehement statements.
Francois-Henri Briard, a conservative French attorney, voiced his outrage that the BDS movement had successfully pressured the French company Veolia to pull out of an Israeli light rail project that would have connected illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank to Jerusalem. He called the initiative against the rail line "an attack on Israeli sovereignty" even though it specifically targeted the settlement enterprise across the Green Line.
Jeremy Rabkin, an outspoken neoconservative law professor, echoed Herzberg’s smearing of human rights groups as treasonous. "These human rights groups we keep hearing about are not loyal to their country or to democracy, but to some strange world order," he declared.
Not to be outdone, David Matas, the senior legal counsel to B’nai Brith Canada, maintained that because the International Criminal Court represented the legacy of the Holocaust, it should always side with Israel. He went on to compare the Goldstone Report and efforts to invoke international law to prosecute Israeli officials to "anti-Semitism by gangs in the street."
Matas’s invective against international law was ironic in light of the fact that his most notable court case called upon international legal bodies to prosecute China for supposedly harvesting the organs of Falun Gong practitioners. In September 2009, Matas hailed a Spanish court (the concept of "forum shopping" in Spanish courts was attacked repeatedly during the conference) for indicting former Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Chinese officials for what he called "genocide and torture."
Matas has defined genocide as merely stating "the intent to kill" a group of people. What’s more, he has justified prosecuting Zemin by invoking International Criminal Court statutes governing the prosecution of high government officials who did not directly commit crimes against humanity but may have allowed them to occur through specific administrative measures. Couldn’t these statutes also be applied against the Israeli government officials who oversaw the assault on Gaza?
Matas’s invocation of international law to prosecute Chinese officials while attacking it to protect Israeli officials highlighted the underlying cynicism of the Lawfare Project. Indeed, the project has nothing to do with combatting the abuse of international law per se; it is an ideologically-driven effort to intimidate anyone who stands in the way of Israel’s human rights abuses.
According to 5W’s Davis, the Lawfare Project’s opening event was a strategy session designed to "raise awareness." Though it is still unclear what actions the project will take, the demonization that human rights groups and other democratic elements in Israel have weathered foreshadows the attacks their American allies may soon face.
Related posts:
1. ”Lawfare’ project has some interesting roommates’
2. It’s OK for Americans to fund settlements, but aid human-rights groups? No way
3. All in a day’s work: Columbia dean is fronting for the Israel lobby
4. 11 Palestinian human rights orgs call for investigation of Palestinian violations alleged by Goldstone
5. Human Rights Groups Say Israel and Hamas Fail in Investigations
Netanyahu’s attack on human rights NGO’s comes to the US
by Max Blumenthal on March 13, 2010
http://mondoweiss.net/2010/02/all-in-a-days-work-columbia-dean-is-fronting-for-the-israel-lobby.html
As the anti-Goldstone, human rights-bashing Lawfare Project’s opening event on March 11 wrapped up, I asked its chairman, Columbia University Law School Dean David Schizer, for an interview. Schizer, who had just attacked the Goldstone Report from the podium, pointedly refused to speak to me and looked for the exit. As Schizer was leaving, he was politely confronted by Columbia Law School Professor Katherine Franke, who heads the school’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Law.
"Why didn’t you invite any speakers with an alternative perspective?" Franke asked Schizer.
His reply was curt. "We invited one or two but they couldn’t make it," Schizer claimed before hurrying away.
Schizer was understandably nervous about his exposure. After all, he had just presided over a day-long conference during which Israeli human rights workers were labeled as traitors while Judge Richard Goldstone and human rights groups were compared to "anti-Semitic street gangs." After several speakers had harshly condemned legal efforts against the construction of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Schizer appeared beside them to lend his credibility to their views.
Schizer attacks Goldstone
Held in the ornate NY County Lawyers Association meeting room in downtown Manhattan, where the walls were adorned with portraits of the pioneers of international jurisprudence, the Lawfare Project’s conference had the look of a non-partisan academic conference. However, the event was organized by a network of American Zionist groups and conservative operatives with apparent encouragement from the Israeli government.
As Scott Horton noticed at Harper’s, the Lawfare Project’s rollout event followed a remarkably similar conference in Jerusalem two weeks earlier. Both conferences followed legislation in the Knesset designed to force NGO’s to disclose their foreign donors so they can be more easily branded as a fifth column and to strangle human rights groups in Israel and occupied Palestine.
The presence of high-level Israeli officials like UN Ambassador Gabriela Shalev at the Lawfare Project conference suggested that the Netanyahu administration was the hidden hand behind the event. If so, the Israeli government has deployed its American Jewish allies to take the fight across the Atlantic to groups like Human Rights Watch and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Both groups were attacked at the event as anti-Israeli and anti-American.
I arrived late in the day but just in time for a panel moderated by Pat Robertson’s longtime legal counsel, Jay Sekulow. Sekulow, a convert from Judaism to evangelical Christianity who has spent his career representing anti-gay and anti-abortion clients, appears to be playing a key role in the Lawfare Project.
Through his American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), Sekulow reaps millions of dollars each year from Christian conservative donors. He uses that money to pay himself upwards of $600,000, provide a lavish lifestyle for his family, and procure the services of the PR firm, 5WPR, which represents other upstanding clients like Girls Gone Wild and the pro-settler Hebron Fund.
5WPR was handling the press list for the Lawfare Project and shuttling its speakers to and from media appearances. 5W Senior Account Executive Maggie Davis told me that through the firm’s relationship with Sekulow, she was arranging media appearances for Brooke Goldstein, founder of the Children’s Rights Institute, which happens to share a domain address with the Lawfare Project. Both websites were registered by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which played a direct role in planning the conference. Gladstone is now the lead spokesperson for the Lawfare Project, according to 5W’s Davis.
NGO Monitor legal advisor Anne Herzberg was featured prominently at the conference. During a panel discussion, she accused the European Union of "pouring hundreds of millions into these NGO’s…that are actually in favor of a one-state solution." Without naming those NGO’s or explaining why accepting foreign money was such a crime, Herzberg boasted of suing human rights groups to force them disclose their donors. She accused Israeli NGO’s like B’tselem of causing "a breach of sovereignty" against Israel by contributing data to the Goldstone Report — an insinuation that Israeli human rights workers were traitors.
An NGO Monitor report was distributed to conference attendees identifying groups supposedly promoting "post-colonial ideology" as "anti-state," "anti-democracy" and "anti-American." The report identified NGO Monitor’s top targets: the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and Al-Haq. Al-Haq was singled out because, along with a staffer from the Israeli group B’Tselem, it filed an expert opinion in the case to move a section of the separation wall annexing thousands of acres of farmland from the Palestinian town of Bil’in to a nearby Jewish settlement.
The attack on Al Haq highlights part of NGO’s Monitor’s not-so-hidden agenda: to allow the settler movement to usurp land in the West Bank without limitations. As Didi Remez reported, NGO Monitor has partnered with the Institute for Zionist Strategies, led by Yisrael Harel, who helped to found the Gush Emunim settler movement and lives in the religious nationalist settlement of Ofra. Remez also pointed out that NGO Monitor has made no demand for financial transparency from pro-settler organizations which are also engaged in what it would call "lawfare."
NGO Monitor has also targeted US-based human rights group. It has gone after Human Rights Watch on the basis of the group’s contribution of reporting to the Goldstone Report and because Goldstone was at one point a HRW board member. The Center for Constitutional Rights was singled out because its founder, Michael Ratner, went on the recent Gaza Freedom March with Code Pink. None of the factual documentation these groups released was challenged by the NGO Monitor report or in Herzberg’s presentation. Instead, the groups and their leadership are being targeted with a scattershot of accusations that recall McCarthyism in its crudest form.
As a consequence of his zeal, NGO Monitor director Gerald Steinberg was hauled into an Israeli court this month and forced to apologize for claiming a Palestinian human rights group "justified violence." Yossi Alpher, a former advisor to Ehud Barak, has condemned Steinberg’s activities, writing that NGO Monitor "seems dead set on eliminating human rights monitoring of Israel entirely and smearing anyone who supports this vital activity."
The NGO Monitor report and the speakers at the Lawfare Project event expressed alarm about the effectiveness of the global BDS movement and its success in exposing apartheid practices in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Speaker Richard Heidemann, the Honorary Chairman of B’nai Brith, said that the fight against BDS was essential to the Lawfare Project. "We have to stand up against slander, we have to stand up against boycott," he proclaimed. "If you were accused of apartheid, wouldn’t you consider taking action?" However, he proposed no specific measures or tactics other than making vehement statements.
Francois-Henri Briard, a conservative French attorney, voiced his outrage that the BDS movement had successfully pressured the French company Veolia to pull out of an Israeli light rail project that would have connected illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank to Jerusalem. He called the initiative against the rail line "an attack on Israeli sovereignty" even though it specifically targeted the settlement enterprise across the Green Line.
Jeremy Rabkin, an outspoken neoconservative law professor, echoed Herzberg’s smearing of human rights groups as treasonous. "These human rights groups we keep hearing about are not loyal to their country or to democracy, but to some strange world order," he declared.
Not to be outdone, David Matas, the senior legal counsel to B’nai Brith Canada, maintained that because the International Criminal Court represented the legacy of the Holocaust, it should always side with Israel. He went on to compare the Goldstone Report and efforts to invoke international law to prosecute Israeli officials to "anti-Semitism by gangs in the street."
Matas’s invective against international law was ironic in light of the fact that his most notable court case called upon international legal bodies to prosecute China for supposedly harvesting the organs of Falun Gong practitioners. In September 2009, Matas hailed a Spanish court (the concept of "forum shopping" in Spanish courts was attacked repeatedly during the conference) for indicting former Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Chinese officials for what he called "genocide and torture."
Matas has defined genocide as merely stating "the intent to kill" a group of people. What’s more, he has justified prosecuting Zemin by invoking International Criminal Court statutes governing the prosecution of high government officials who did not directly commit crimes against humanity but may have allowed them to occur through specific administrative measures. Couldn’t these statutes also be applied against the Israeli government officials who oversaw the assault on Gaza?
Matas’s invocation of international law to prosecute Chinese officials while attacking it to protect Israeli officials highlighted the underlying cynicism of the Lawfare Project. Indeed, the project has nothing to do with combatting the abuse of international law per se; it is an ideologically-driven effort to intimidate anyone who stands in the way of Israel’s human rights abuses.
According to 5W’s Davis, the Lawfare Project’s opening event was a strategy session designed to "raise awareness." Though it is still unclear what actions the project will take, the demonization that human rights groups and other democratic elements in Israel have weathered foreshadows the attacks their American allies may soon face.
Related posts:
1. ”Lawfare’ project has some interesting roommates’
2. It’s OK for Americans to fund settlements, but aid human-rights groups? No way
3. All in a day’s work: Columbia dean is fronting for the Israel lobby
4. 11 Palestinian human rights orgs call for investigation of Palestinian violations alleged by Goldstone
5. Human Rights Groups Say Israel and Hamas Fail in Investigations
Saturday, March 06, 2010
Methane on the Move?
Arctic Methane on the Move?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/arctic-methane-on-the-move/
Methane is like the radical wing of the carbon cycle, in today’s atmosphere a stronger greenhouse gas per molecule than CO2, and an atmospheric concentration that can change more quickly than CO2 can. There has been a lot of press coverage of a new paper in Science this week called “Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”, which comes on the heels of a handful of interrelated methane papers in the last year or so. Is now the time to get frightened?
No. CO2 is plenty to be frightened of, while methane is frosting on the cake. Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the brake pedal is broken. This is CO2. Then you figure out that the accelerator has also jammed, so that by the time you hit the truck in front of you, you will be going 90 miles per hour instead of 60. This is methane. Is now the time to get worried? No, you should already have been worried by the broken brake pedal. Methane sells newspapers, but it’s not the big story, nor does it look to be a game changer to the big story, which is CO2.
[Note: Edited Toyota velocities to reflect relative radiative forcings of anthropogenic CO2 and methane. David]
For some background on methane hydrates we can refer you here. This weeks’ Science paper is by Shakhova et al, a follow on to a 2005 GRL paper. The observation in 2005 was elevated concentrations of methane in ocean waters on the Siberian shelf, presumably driven by outgassing from the sediments and driving excess methane to the atmosphere. The new paper adds observations of methane spikes in the air over the water, confirming the methane’s escape from the water column, instead of it being oxidized to CO2 in the water, for example. The new data enable the methane flux from this region to the atmosphere to be quantified, and they find that this region rivals the methane flux from the whole rest of the ocean.
What’s missing from these studies themselves is evidence that the Siberian shelf degassing is new, a climate feedback, rather than simply nature-as-usual, driven by the retreat of submerged permafrost left over from the last ice age. However, other recent papers speak to this question.
Westbrook et al 2009, published stunning sonar images of bubble plumes rising from sediments off Spitzbergen, Norway. The bubbles are rising from a line on the sea floor that corresponds to the boundary of methane hydrate stability, a boundary that would retreat in a warming water column. A modeling study by Reagan and Moridis 2009 supports the idea that the observed bubbles could be in response to observed warming of the water column driven by anthropogenic warming.
Another recent paper, from Dlugokencky et al. 2009, describes an uptick in the methane concentration in the air in 2007, and tries to figure out where it’s coming from. The atmospheric methane concentration rose from the preanthropogenic until about the year 1993, at which point it rather abruptly plateaued. Methane is a transient gas in the atmosphere, so it ought to plateau if the emission flux is steady, but the shape of the concentration curve suggested some sudden decrease in the emission rate, stemming from the collapse of economic activity in the former Soviet bloc, or by drying of wetlands, or any of several other proposed and unresolved explanations. (Maybe the legislature in South Dakota should pass a law that methane is driven by astrology!) A previous uptick in the methane concentration in 1998 could be explained in terms of the effect of el Nino on wetlands, but the uptick in 2007 is not so simple to explain. The concentration held steady in 2008, meaning at least that interannual variability is important in the methane cycle, and making it hard to say if the long-term average emission rate is rising in a way that would be consistent with a new carbon feedback.
Anyway, so far it is at most a very small feedback. The Siberian Margin might rival the whole rest of the world ocean as a methane source, but the ocean source overall is much smaller than the land source. Most of the methane in the atmosphere comes from wetlands, natural and artificial associated with rice agriculture. The ocean is small potatoes, and there is enough uncertainty in the methane budget to accommodate adjustments in the sources without too much overturning of apple carts.
Could this be the first modest sprout of what will grow into a huge carbon feedback in the future? It is possible, but two things should be kept in mind. One is that there’s no reason to fixate on methane in particular. Methane is a transient gas in the atmosphere, while CO2 essentially accumulates in the atmosphere / ocean carbon cycle, so in the end the climate forcing from the accumulating CO2 that methane oxidizes into may be as important as the transient concentration of methane itself. The other thing to remember is that there’s no reason to fixate on methane hydrates in particular, as opposed to the carbon stored in peats in Arctic permafrosts for example. Peats take time to degrade but hydrate also takes time to melt, limited by heat transport. They don’t generally explode instantaneously.
For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earth’s climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen.
References
Dlugokencky et al., Observational constraints on recent increases in the atmospheric CH4 burden. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L18803, doi:10.1029/2009GL039780, 2009
Reagan, M. and G. Moridis, Large-scale simulation of methane hydrate dissociation along the West Spitsbergen Margin, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L23612, doi:10.1029/2009GL041332, 2009
Shakhova et al., Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, Science 237: 1246-1250, 2010
Shakhova et al., The distribution of methane on the Siberian Arctic shelves: Implications for the marine methane cycle, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 32, L09601, doi:10.1029/2005GL022751, 2005
Westbrook, G., et al, Escape of methane gas from the seabed along the West Spitsbergen continental margin, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L15608, doi:10.1029/2009GL039191, 2009
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/arctic-methane-on-the-move/
Methane is like the radical wing of the carbon cycle, in today’s atmosphere a stronger greenhouse gas per molecule than CO2, and an atmospheric concentration that can change more quickly than CO2 can. There has been a lot of press coverage of a new paper in Science this week called “Extensive methane venting to the atmosphere from sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf”, which comes on the heels of a handful of interrelated methane papers in the last year or so. Is now the time to get frightened?
No. CO2 is plenty to be frightened of, while methane is frosting on the cake. Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the brake pedal is broken. This is CO2. Then you figure out that the accelerator has also jammed, so that by the time you hit the truck in front of you, you will be going 90 miles per hour instead of 60. This is methane. Is now the time to get worried? No, you should already have been worried by the broken brake pedal. Methane sells newspapers, but it’s not the big story, nor does it look to be a game changer to the big story, which is CO2.
[Note: Edited Toyota velocities to reflect relative radiative forcings of anthropogenic CO2 and methane. David]
For some background on methane hydrates we can refer you here. This weeks’ Science paper is by Shakhova et al, a follow on to a 2005 GRL paper. The observation in 2005 was elevated concentrations of methane in ocean waters on the Siberian shelf, presumably driven by outgassing from the sediments and driving excess methane to the atmosphere. The new paper adds observations of methane spikes in the air over the water, confirming the methane’s escape from the water column, instead of it being oxidized to CO2 in the water, for example. The new data enable the methane flux from this region to the atmosphere to be quantified, and they find that this region rivals the methane flux from the whole rest of the ocean.
What’s missing from these studies themselves is evidence that the Siberian shelf degassing is new, a climate feedback, rather than simply nature-as-usual, driven by the retreat of submerged permafrost left over from the last ice age. However, other recent papers speak to this question.
Westbrook et al 2009, published stunning sonar images of bubble plumes rising from sediments off Spitzbergen, Norway. The bubbles are rising from a line on the sea floor that corresponds to the boundary of methane hydrate stability, a boundary that would retreat in a warming water column. A modeling study by Reagan and Moridis 2009 supports the idea that the observed bubbles could be in response to observed warming of the water column driven by anthropogenic warming.
Another recent paper, from Dlugokencky et al. 2009, describes an uptick in the methane concentration in the air in 2007, and tries to figure out where it’s coming from. The atmospheric methane concentration rose from the preanthropogenic until about the year 1993, at which point it rather abruptly plateaued. Methane is a transient gas in the atmosphere, so it ought to plateau if the emission flux is steady, but the shape of the concentration curve suggested some sudden decrease in the emission rate, stemming from the collapse of economic activity in the former Soviet bloc, or by drying of wetlands, or any of several other proposed and unresolved explanations. (Maybe the legislature in South Dakota should pass a law that methane is driven by astrology!) A previous uptick in the methane concentration in 1998 could be explained in terms of the effect of el Nino on wetlands, but the uptick in 2007 is not so simple to explain. The concentration held steady in 2008, meaning at least that interannual variability is important in the methane cycle, and making it hard to say if the long-term average emission rate is rising in a way that would be consistent with a new carbon feedback.
Anyway, so far it is at most a very small feedback. The Siberian Margin might rival the whole rest of the world ocean as a methane source, but the ocean source overall is much smaller than the land source. Most of the methane in the atmosphere comes from wetlands, natural and artificial associated with rice agriculture. The ocean is small potatoes, and there is enough uncertainty in the methane budget to accommodate adjustments in the sources without too much overturning of apple carts.
Could this be the first modest sprout of what will grow into a huge carbon feedback in the future? It is possible, but two things should be kept in mind. One is that there’s no reason to fixate on methane in particular. Methane is a transient gas in the atmosphere, while CO2 essentially accumulates in the atmosphere / ocean carbon cycle, so in the end the climate forcing from the accumulating CO2 that methane oxidizes into may be as important as the transient concentration of methane itself. The other thing to remember is that there’s no reason to fixate on methane hydrates in particular, as opposed to the carbon stored in peats in Arctic permafrosts for example. Peats take time to degrade but hydrate also takes time to melt, limited by heat transport. They don’t generally explode instantaneously.
For methane to be a game-changer in the future of Earth’s climate, it would have to degas to the atmosphere catastrophically, on a time scale that is faster than the decadal lifetime of methane in the air. So far no one has seen or proposed a mechanism to make that happen.
References
Dlugokencky et al., Observational constraints on recent increases in the atmospheric CH4 burden. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L18803, doi:10.1029/2009GL039780, 2009
Reagan, M. and G. Moridis, Large-scale simulation of methane hydrate dissociation along the West Spitsbergen Margin, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L23612, doi:10.1029/2009GL041332, 2009
Shakhova et al., Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, Science 237: 1246-1250, 2010
Shakhova et al., The distribution of methane on the Siberian Arctic shelves: Implications for the marine methane cycle, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 32, L09601, doi:10.1029/2005GL022751, 2005
Westbrook, G., et al, Escape of methane gas from the seabed along the West Spitsbergen continental margin, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 36, L15608, doi:10.1029/2009GL039191, 2009
Friday, March 05, 2010
Welcome Our Microbial Overlords
The New Carnival of Evolution Is Up
Synthetic Biology: Ten Years Old, Ten Years On »
I For One Welcome Our Microbial Overlords
source
Can the bacteria in our bodies control our behavior in the same way a puppetmaster pulls the strings of a marionette? I tremble to report that this wonderfully creepy possibility may be true.
The human body is, to some extent, just a luxury cruise liner for microbes. They board the SS Homo sapiens when we’re born and settle into their assigned quarters–the skin, the tongue, the nostrils, the throat, the stomach, the genitals, the gut–and then we carry them wherever we go. Some of microbes deboard when we shed our skin or use the restroom; others board at new ports when we shake someone’s hand or down a spoonful of yogurt. Just as on a luxury cruise liner, our passengers eat well. They feed on the food we eat, or on the compounds we produce. While the biggest luxury lines may be able to carry a few thousand people, we can handle many more passengers. Although the total mass of our microbes is just a few pounds, the tiny size of their cells means that we each carry about 100 trillion microbes–outnumbering our own cells by more than ten to one.
It’s important to bear in mind that you can carry this galaxy of microbes around and enjoy perfect health. These microbes, for reasons that are not entirely clear, behave like well-mannered passengers. They do not barge into the kitchen, take a cleaver to the cooks, and then eat all the food. Aboard the SS Homo sapiens, the crew includes a huge staff of security guards armed with lethal chemical sprays and other deadly weapons, ready to kill any dangerous stowaway (also known as the immune system). For some reason, the immune system does not unleash its deadly fury on the microbes–even when the microbes are fairly close relatives to truly dangerous pathogens.
In fact, our microbial passengers may actually help out the cruise liner’s crew. They can close up the ecological space in our bodies, so that invading pathogens can’t get a solid foothold. Some species in our guts can break down our food in ways that we can’t, and synthesize certain vitamins and other compounds beyond our biochemistry. The genes that the microbes carry–millions of them–expand our biochemical powers enormously.
To understand the human microbiome better, scientists have been cataloging the microbes in and on people’s bodies, and they’ve been sequencing their DNA. (Listen to my recent podcast with biologist Rob Knight for more.) Yesterday, Nature published a head-spinningly huge study on the microbiome from a team of European and Chinese researchers. Lurking in the stool of 124 volunteers, the scientists found, were 3.3 million microbial genes. The scientists identified a core of bacteria species carried in most people’s guts, as well as other species that varied from person to person.
As Ed Yong rightly points out, this study is most impressive as a titanic database. It is not the Theory of Everything for the human microbiome. That will take a lot longer to build, because the microbial ecosystem inside of us is so complex. Individual species don’t just sit in isolation, surviving in their own special way. Microbes cooperate with one another to get the food they need and produce the conditions in which they can thrive. In Microcosm, for example, I write about research suggesting that E. coli–a minor member of the gut ecosystem–may keep oxygen levels low enough for other species to invade and dominate. And it’s not as if there is some Platonic ideal of a microbiome that we all carry around with us from birth to death. The diversity of microbes I carry is different from the one you carry, and they both change over our lifetimes. Every time we take a dose of antibiotics, for example, the balance can change dramatically. And as the diversity of microbes changes, so do its ecological functions.
Which brings me, at last, to the possibility that the human microbiome can become our puppetmaster.
First some background. A lot of parasites have evolved the ability to manipulate their hosts for their own benefit. (I get into more detail about this in my book Parasite Rex and in this segment of the show Radio Lab.)
Very often, the parasites cause hosts to do things that help the parasites, instead of themselves. For example, a protozoan called Toxoplasma needs to get from rats to cats, and to help the process along, it makes rats lose their fear of cats. Parasites can also change the diet of their host as well as the way in which their hosts digest their food. Parasitic wasps living inside caterpillars, for example, cause catepillars to convert the plants they eat into compounds that supply quick energy (good for wasp larvae growing quickly) instead of storing them as fat for their own metamorphosis.
I was reminded of this sinister manipulation by a paper that was published in Science today by Rob Knight and his colleagues. They built on previous research that revealed that mice genetically engineered to be obese have different kinds of microbial diversity in their guts than normal mice. Scientists have found that if they transfer microbes from an obese mouse to a regular mouse that has had all its own germs stripped out, the recipient mouse will develop extra fat. In the case of these obese mice, it appears that the microbes become less efficient at helping the animals digest food, triggering a series of changes that leads the mice to be fat.
Knight and his colleagues discovered a different–and more disturbing–way that microbes can make mice fat. They started out by engineering mice so that they didn’t produce a protein normally found on the surface of gut cells, called TLR5. TLR5 can recognize bacteria, and some studies suggest that the cells can then pass along signals to the immune system, possibly sending a stand-down command so that the immune system doesn’t start trying to kill the microbes (and end up killing gut cells too).
Born without TLR5, mice got 20% fatter than normal. Not only that, but the mice had lots of other familiar symptoms that go along with being overweight, such as high levels of triglyceride, cholesterol, and blood pressure. Without TLR5 exerting its soothing influence, the mice suffered from chronic inflammation, probably thanks to the low-level war they were waging on their microbes. And things got worse for the mutant mice when they had to eat a high-fat diet. They gained more weight on a high-fat diet than regular mice, suffered even more inflammation, and even ended up diabetic.
The obesity of these TLR5-deficient mice was not the result of inefficiency, as in previous studies. Instead, the mice wanted to eat more–about 10 percent more than regular mice. Knight and his colleagues restricted the diet of the mutant to what the regular mice ate. A lot of their symptoms went away. So the change in their behavior was critical to their weight change.
The scientists also discovered that the make-up of the microbial diversity changed significantly in the mutant mice. Were the microbes giving the mice their symptoms? To find out, Knight and his colleagues knocked out the microbes with antibiotics. The mice ate less, put on less fat, and showed less diabetes-like symptoms.
To isolate the effects of the microbes even more, the scientists transferred them from mutant mice into the bodies of ordinary mice that had first had all their own germs stripped out. Remember–these mice have a normal set of TLR5 receptors. The scientists found that the microbes made the recipient mice hungry–and also made them obese, insulin resistant, and so on.
So here we are. Mice with a genetic make-up that alters the diversity of their gut microbes get hungry, and that hunger makes them eat more. They get obese and suffer lots of other symptoms. Get rid of that particular set of microbes, and the mice lose their hunger and start to recover. And that distinctive diversity of microbes can, on its own, make genetically normal mice hungry–and thus obese, diabetic, and so on.
When I first learned of this work, I asked Knight–with a mix of dread and delight–whether the microbes were manipulating their hosts, driving them to change their diet for the benefit of the microbes. He said he thinks the answer is yes.
This discovery doesn’t just have the potential to change the way we think about why we eat what we eat. (Am I really hungry? Or are my microbes making me hungry?) It also provides a new target in the fight against obesity, diabetes, and related disorders. What may be called for is some ecological engineering.
Synthetic Biology: Ten Years Old, Ten Years On »
I For One Welcome Our Microbial Overlords
source
Can the bacteria in our bodies control our behavior in the same way a puppetmaster pulls the strings of a marionette? I tremble to report that this wonderfully creepy possibility may be true.
The human body is, to some extent, just a luxury cruise liner for microbes. They board the SS Homo sapiens when we’re born and settle into their assigned quarters–the skin, the tongue, the nostrils, the throat, the stomach, the genitals, the gut–and then we carry them wherever we go. Some of microbes deboard when we shed our skin or use the restroom; others board at new ports when we shake someone’s hand or down a spoonful of yogurt. Just as on a luxury cruise liner, our passengers eat well. They feed on the food we eat, or on the compounds we produce. While the biggest luxury lines may be able to carry a few thousand people, we can handle many more passengers. Although the total mass of our microbes is just a few pounds, the tiny size of their cells means that we each carry about 100 trillion microbes–outnumbering our own cells by more than ten to one.
It’s important to bear in mind that you can carry this galaxy of microbes around and enjoy perfect health. These microbes, for reasons that are not entirely clear, behave like well-mannered passengers. They do not barge into the kitchen, take a cleaver to the cooks, and then eat all the food. Aboard the SS Homo sapiens, the crew includes a huge staff of security guards armed with lethal chemical sprays and other deadly weapons, ready to kill any dangerous stowaway (also known as the immune system). For some reason, the immune system does not unleash its deadly fury on the microbes–even when the microbes are fairly close relatives to truly dangerous pathogens.
In fact, our microbial passengers may actually help out the cruise liner’s crew. They can close up the ecological space in our bodies, so that invading pathogens can’t get a solid foothold. Some species in our guts can break down our food in ways that we can’t, and synthesize certain vitamins and other compounds beyond our biochemistry. The genes that the microbes carry–millions of them–expand our biochemical powers enormously.
To understand the human microbiome better, scientists have been cataloging the microbes in and on people’s bodies, and they’ve been sequencing their DNA. (Listen to my recent podcast with biologist Rob Knight for more.) Yesterday, Nature published a head-spinningly huge study on the microbiome from a team of European and Chinese researchers. Lurking in the stool of 124 volunteers, the scientists found, were 3.3 million microbial genes. The scientists identified a core of bacteria species carried in most people’s guts, as well as other species that varied from person to person.
As Ed Yong rightly points out, this study is most impressive as a titanic database. It is not the Theory of Everything for the human microbiome. That will take a lot longer to build, because the microbial ecosystem inside of us is so complex. Individual species don’t just sit in isolation, surviving in their own special way. Microbes cooperate with one another to get the food they need and produce the conditions in which they can thrive. In Microcosm, for example, I write about research suggesting that E. coli–a minor member of the gut ecosystem–may keep oxygen levels low enough for other species to invade and dominate. And it’s not as if there is some Platonic ideal of a microbiome that we all carry around with us from birth to death. The diversity of microbes I carry is different from the one you carry, and they both change over our lifetimes. Every time we take a dose of antibiotics, for example, the balance can change dramatically. And as the diversity of microbes changes, so do its ecological functions.
Which brings me, at last, to the possibility that the human microbiome can become our puppetmaster.
First some background. A lot of parasites have evolved the ability to manipulate their hosts for their own benefit. (I get into more detail about this in my book Parasite Rex and in this segment of the show Radio Lab.)
Very often, the parasites cause hosts to do things that help the parasites, instead of themselves. For example, a protozoan called Toxoplasma needs to get from rats to cats, and to help the process along, it makes rats lose their fear of cats. Parasites can also change the diet of their host as well as the way in which their hosts digest their food. Parasitic wasps living inside caterpillars, for example, cause catepillars to convert the plants they eat into compounds that supply quick energy (good for wasp larvae growing quickly) instead of storing them as fat for their own metamorphosis.
I was reminded of this sinister manipulation by a paper that was published in Science today by Rob Knight and his colleagues. They built on previous research that revealed that mice genetically engineered to be obese have different kinds of microbial diversity in their guts than normal mice. Scientists have found that if they transfer microbes from an obese mouse to a regular mouse that has had all its own germs stripped out, the recipient mouse will develop extra fat. In the case of these obese mice, it appears that the microbes become less efficient at helping the animals digest food, triggering a series of changes that leads the mice to be fat.
Knight and his colleagues discovered a different–and more disturbing–way that microbes can make mice fat. They started out by engineering mice so that they didn’t produce a protein normally found on the surface of gut cells, called TLR5. TLR5 can recognize bacteria, and some studies suggest that the cells can then pass along signals to the immune system, possibly sending a stand-down command so that the immune system doesn’t start trying to kill the microbes (and end up killing gut cells too).
Born without TLR5, mice got 20% fatter than normal. Not only that, but the mice had lots of other familiar symptoms that go along with being overweight, such as high levels of triglyceride, cholesterol, and blood pressure. Without TLR5 exerting its soothing influence, the mice suffered from chronic inflammation, probably thanks to the low-level war they were waging on their microbes. And things got worse for the mutant mice when they had to eat a high-fat diet. They gained more weight on a high-fat diet than regular mice, suffered even more inflammation, and even ended up diabetic.
The obesity of these TLR5-deficient mice was not the result of inefficiency, as in previous studies. Instead, the mice wanted to eat more–about 10 percent more than regular mice. Knight and his colleagues restricted the diet of the mutant to what the regular mice ate. A lot of their symptoms went away. So the change in their behavior was critical to their weight change.
The scientists also discovered that the make-up of the microbial diversity changed significantly in the mutant mice. Were the microbes giving the mice their symptoms? To find out, Knight and his colleagues knocked out the microbes with antibiotics. The mice ate less, put on less fat, and showed less diabetes-like symptoms.
To isolate the effects of the microbes even more, the scientists transferred them from mutant mice into the bodies of ordinary mice that had first had all their own germs stripped out. Remember–these mice have a normal set of TLR5 receptors. The scientists found that the microbes made the recipient mice hungry–and also made them obese, insulin resistant, and so on.
So here we are. Mice with a genetic make-up that alters the diversity of their gut microbes get hungry, and that hunger makes them eat more. They get obese and suffer lots of other symptoms. Get rid of that particular set of microbes, and the mice lose their hunger and start to recover. And that distinctive diversity of microbes can, on its own, make genetically normal mice hungry–and thus obese, diabetic, and so on.
When I first learned of this work, I asked Knight–with a mix of dread and delight–whether the microbes were manipulating their hosts, driving them to change their diet for the benefit of the microbes. He said he thinks the answer is yes.
This discovery doesn’t just have the potential to change the way we think about why we eat what we eat. (Am I really hungry? Or are my microbes making me hungry?) It also provides a new target in the fight against obesity, diabetes, and related disorders. What may be called for is some ecological engineering.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Fallujah's Genetic Legacy
Disturbing story of Fallujah's birth defects
By John Simpson
BBC News, Fallujah
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8548961.stm
Many parents blame the American attacks
Six years after the intense fighting began in the Iraqi town of Fallujah between US forces and Sunni insurgents, there is a disturbingly large number of cases of birth defects in the town.
Fallujah is less than 40 miles (65km) from Baghdad, but it can still be dangerous to get to.
As a result, there has been no authoritative medical investigation, certainly by any Western team, into the allegations that the weapons used by the Americans are still causing serious problems.
The Iraqi government line is that there are only one or two extra cases of birth defects per year in Fallujah, compared with the national average.
'Daily cases'
But in the impressive new Fallujah General Hospital, built with American aid, we found a paediatric specialist, Dr Samira al-Ani, who told us that she saw two or three new cases every day.
Most of them, she said, exhibited cardiac problems.
I have nothing documented. But I can tell you that year by year the number [is] increasing
Dr Samira al-Ani
Fallujah General Hospital
When asked what the cause was, she said: "I am a doctor. I have to be scientific in my talk. I have nothing documented. But I can tell you that year by year, the number [is] increasing."
The specialist, like other medical staff at the hospital, seemed nervous about talking too openly about the problem.
They were well aware that what they said went against the government version, and we were told privately that the Iraqi authorities are anxious not to embarrass the Americans over the issue.
There are no official figures for the incidence of birth defects in Fallujah.
The US military authorities are absolutely correct when they say they are not aware of any official reports indicating an increase in birth defects in Fallujah - no official reports exist.
Mothers warned
But it is impossible, as a visitor, not to be struck by the terrible number of cases of birth defects there.
We heard many times that officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children.
We went to a clinic for the disabled, and were given details of dozens upon dozens of cases of children with serious birth defects.
Baby girl with birth defect
Dozens of children were being treated at a clinic for the disabled
One photograph I saw showed a newborn baby with three heads.
While we were at the clinic, people kept arriving with children who were suffering major problems - a little girl with only one arm, several children who were paralysed, and another girl with a spinal condition so bad I asked my cameraman not to film her.
At the clinic we were told that the worst problems were to be found in the neighbourhood of al-Julan, near the river.
This was the heart of the resistance to the Americans during the two major offensives of April and September 2004, and was hit constantly by bombs and shells.
River water
We went to a house where three children, all under six, were suffering from birth defects.
Two boys were partially paralysed, and their sister clearly had serious brain damage.
Like all the other parents we spoke to, their mother had no doubt that the American attacks were responsible.
Outside, a man who had heard we were there had brought his four-year-old daughter to show us. She had six fingers on each hand, and six toes on each foot.
She was also suffering from a number of other serious health problems. The father told us that the house where they still lived had been hit by an American shell during the fighting in 2004.
There may well be a link with drinking-water, especially in al-Julan.
After the fighting was over, the rubble from the town was bulldozed into the river bank, and most people in this area get their water from the river.
The true causes of the problem, and the question of the effects of the weapons the Americans used, can be resolved only by a proper independent inquiry by medical experts.
And until the security situation in and around Fallujah improves, it will be difficult to carry that out.
By John Simpson
BBC News, Fallujah
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8548961.stm
Many parents blame the American attacks
Six years after the intense fighting began in the Iraqi town of Fallujah between US forces and Sunni insurgents, there is a disturbingly large number of cases of birth defects in the town.
Fallujah is less than 40 miles (65km) from Baghdad, but it can still be dangerous to get to.
As a result, there has been no authoritative medical investigation, certainly by any Western team, into the allegations that the weapons used by the Americans are still causing serious problems.
The Iraqi government line is that there are only one or two extra cases of birth defects per year in Fallujah, compared with the national average.
'Daily cases'
But in the impressive new Fallujah General Hospital, built with American aid, we found a paediatric specialist, Dr Samira al-Ani, who told us that she saw two or three new cases every day.
Most of them, she said, exhibited cardiac problems.
I have nothing documented. But I can tell you that year by year the number [is] increasing
Dr Samira al-Ani
Fallujah General Hospital
When asked what the cause was, she said: "I am a doctor. I have to be scientific in my talk. I have nothing documented. But I can tell you that year by year, the number [is] increasing."
The specialist, like other medical staff at the hospital, seemed nervous about talking too openly about the problem.
They were well aware that what they said went against the government version, and we were told privately that the Iraqi authorities are anxious not to embarrass the Americans over the issue.
There are no official figures for the incidence of birth defects in Fallujah.
The US military authorities are absolutely correct when they say they are not aware of any official reports indicating an increase in birth defects in Fallujah - no official reports exist.
Mothers warned
But it is impossible, as a visitor, not to be struck by the terrible number of cases of birth defects there.
We heard many times that officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children.
We went to a clinic for the disabled, and were given details of dozens upon dozens of cases of children with serious birth defects.
Baby girl with birth defect
Dozens of children were being treated at a clinic for the disabled
One photograph I saw showed a newborn baby with three heads.
While we were at the clinic, people kept arriving with children who were suffering major problems - a little girl with only one arm, several children who were paralysed, and another girl with a spinal condition so bad I asked my cameraman not to film her.
At the clinic we were told that the worst problems were to be found in the neighbourhood of al-Julan, near the river.
This was the heart of the resistance to the Americans during the two major offensives of April and September 2004, and was hit constantly by bombs and shells.
River water
We went to a house where three children, all under six, were suffering from birth defects.
Two boys were partially paralysed, and their sister clearly had serious brain damage.
Like all the other parents we spoke to, their mother had no doubt that the American attacks were responsible.
Outside, a man who had heard we were there had brought his four-year-old daughter to show us. She had six fingers on each hand, and six toes on each foot.
She was also suffering from a number of other serious health problems. The father told us that the house where they still lived had been hit by an American shell during the fighting in 2004.
There may well be a link with drinking-water, especially in al-Julan.
After the fighting was over, the rubble from the town was bulldozed into the river bank, and most people in this area get their water from the river.
The true causes of the problem, and the question of the effects of the weapons the Americans used, can be resolved only by a proper independent inquiry by medical experts.
And until the security situation in and around Fallujah improves, it will be difficult to carry that out.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
No Alternatives for Harper Israel Policy
Canadian aid groups told to keep quiet on policy issues
Earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince wait in line to collect water this week. Aid groups in Canada say they've been warned by the Conservatives not to weigh in on policy.
Non-governmental organizations say they're receiving veiled warnings about positions that clash with Ottawa's
See also:
* Tories' hard line on criticism of Israel could spark backlash, MP says
* Harper must make abortion part of health pledge, Ignatieff says
* Gerald Caplan: If the PM is serious about the plight of mothers...
Campbell Clark
Ottawa — From Friday's Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010 9:30PM EST Last updated on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2010 4:14PM EST
Aid groups say the federal government is casting a chill over advocacy work that takes positions on policy or political issues – and one claims a senior Conservative aide warned them against such activities.
An official with a mainstream non-governmental aid group said that Keith Fountain, policy director for International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda, gave a verbal warning that the organization's policy positions were under scrutiny: “Be careful about your advocacy.”
The official did not want to be identified out of concern that it might jeopardize funding for the group's aid projects from the Canadian International Development Agency, or CIDA.
That's a concern voiced by some other NGO leaders, who said they have received hints the government dislikes their policy advocacy or criticisms of the government policies, but did not want to be identified.
Most aid organizations, from church-based organizations such as Anglican and Mennonite aid agencies to big agencies such as World Vision, Oxfam and CARE, take public positions on some policy issues, and some organize letter-writing campaigns or publish pamphlets.
The aid groups use CIDA money to finance 75 per cent of specific programs, but don't use it for advocacy.
Some have had veiled warnings about positions that clash with Ottawa's on issues such as climate change, free trade with Colombia, or the Middle East, said Gerry Barr, president of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation, an umbrella group.
“NGOs are being positively invited to remain silent on key questions of public policy,” he said.
Cheryl Curtis, executive director of the Anglican Church's Primate's World Relief and Development Fund, said government officials have never warned her organization about public-policy positions, but other aid organizations have reported such messages.
“We've certainly heard that amongst colleagues,” she said, adding: “There clearly is a conversation that's brewing at the government level.”
But the government insists that is not so.
A spokesman for Ms. Oda, Jean-Luc Benoit, did not specifically respond to a question about whether Mr. Fountain had warned an aid agency about its advocacy work. But he said an NGO's funding is evaluated on effectiveness in delivering aid and matching CIDA's aid priorities.
“This is about best use of taxpayers' dollars to help the poor, not about what these organizations do with their own money,” Mr. Benoit said in an e-mail.
The fears among the NGOs have been amplified by the government's move to reject a $7-million funding request from Kairos, an aid organization backed by a coalition of churches.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said publicly that Kairos was de-funded because it supported a boycott campaign against Israel. (Kairos insists it doesn't support a boycott.)
The government later backtracked and said the agency's funding was turned down because it did not meet CIDA's new areas of focus. But Ms. Curtis, who is also chair of Kairos's board of directors, said the feeling that the agency lost funding for political reasons has not gone away.
“Each and every one of us who are members of Kairos feel that keenly,” she said.
Another aid NGO, the left-leaning Montreal-based Alternatives, can't get CIDA to return its calls since the National Post – citing unnamed government sources – reported that the organization's long-standing $2.1-million funding proposal would be rejected because of its political advocacy. Its most recent aid funding ran out last March.
Alternatives produces a newspaper that has published left-wing commentators and, for example, a piece that made a controversial argument for a “united Israel” and against Israel's status as a Jewish state – rather than the internationally endorsed “two-state solution” of Israel existing beside a separate Palestinian state.
“Everything we hear is that Alternatives' advocacy work is the main reason we'll eventually be cut,” said the organization's executive director, Michel Lambert.
Earthquake survivors in Port-au-Prince wait in line to collect water this week. Aid groups in Canada say they've been warned by the Conservatives not to weigh in on policy.
Non-governmental organizations say they're receiving veiled warnings about positions that clash with Ottawa's
See also:
* Tories' hard line on criticism of Israel could spark backlash, MP says
* Harper must make abortion part of health pledge, Ignatieff says
* Gerald Caplan: If the PM is serious about the plight of mothers...
Campbell Clark
Ottawa — From Friday's Globe and Mail Published on Thursday, Feb. 11, 2010 9:30PM EST Last updated on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2010 4:14PM EST
Aid groups say the federal government is casting a chill over advocacy work that takes positions on policy or political issues – and one claims a senior Conservative aide warned them against such activities.
An official with a mainstream non-governmental aid group said that Keith Fountain, policy director for International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda, gave a verbal warning that the organization's policy positions were under scrutiny: “Be careful about your advocacy.”
The official did not want to be identified out of concern that it might jeopardize funding for the group's aid projects from the Canadian International Development Agency, or CIDA.
That's a concern voiced by some other NGO leaders, who said they have received hints the government dislikes their policy advocacy or criticisms of the government policies, but did not want to be identified.
Most aid organizations, from church-based organizations such as Anglican and Mennonite aid agencies to big agencies such as World Vision, Oxfam and CARE, take public positions on some policy issues, and some organize letter-writing campaigns or publish pamphlets.
The aid groups use CIDA money to finance 75 per cent of specific programs, but don't use it for advocacy.
Some have had veiled warnings about positions that clash with Ottawa's on issues such as climate change, free trade with Colombia, or the Middle East, said Gerry Barr, president of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation, an umbrella group.
“NGOs are being positively invited to remain silent on key questions of public policy,” he said.
Cheryl Curtis, executive director of the Anglican Church's Primate's World Relief and Development Fund, said government officials have never warned her organization about public-policy positions, but other aid organizations have reported such messages.
“We've certainly heard that amongst colleagues,” she said, adding: “There clearly is a conversation that's brewing at the government level.”
But the government insists that is not so.
A spokesman for Ms. Oda, Jean-Luc Benoit, did not specifically respond to a question about whether Mr. Fountain had warned an aid agency about its advocacy work. But he said an NGO's funding is evaluated on effectiveness in delivering aid and matching CIDA's aid priorities.
“This is about best use of taxpayers' dollars to help the poor, not about what these organizations do with their own money,” Mr. Benoit said in an e-mail.
The fears among the NGOs have been amplified by the government's move to reject a $7-million funding request from Kairos, an aid organization backed by a coalition of churches.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said publicly that Kairos was de-funded because it supported a boycott campaign against Israel. (Kairos insists it doesn't support a boycott.)
The government later backtracked and said the agency's funding was turned down because it did not meet CIDA's new areas of focus. But Ms. Curtis, who is also chair of Kairos's board of directors, said the feeling that the agency lost funding for political reasons has not gone away.
“Each and every one of us who are members of Kairos feel that keenly,” she said.
Another aid NGO, the left-leaning Montreal-based Alternatives, can't get CIDA to return its calls since the National Post – citing unnamed government sources – reported that the organization's long-standing $2.1-million funding proposal would be rejected because of its political advocacy. Its most recent aid funding ran out last March.
Alternatives produces a newspaper that has published left-wing commentators and, for example, a piece that made a controversial argument for a “united Israel” and against Israel's status as a Jewish state – rather than the internationally endorsed “two-state solution” of Israel existing beside a separate Palestinian state.
“Everything we hear is that Alternatives' advocacy work is the main reason we'll eventually be cut,” said the organization's executive director, Michel Lambert.
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