| Author | Message | | LiberateAmerica | | Posted: Mon Jul 03, 2006 2:20 pm Post subject: A Warning to Those Who Dare to Criticize Israel in the U.S. |
| A Warning to Those Who Dare to Criticize Israel in the Land of Free Speech
Another Case Study: Mary Robinson
By ROBERT FISK
04/24/04 "The Independent" -- Behold Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, would-be graduation commencement speaker at Emory University in the United States. She has made a big mistake. She dared to criticise Israel. She suggested--horror of horrors--that "the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the occupation". Now whoah there a moment, Mary! "Occupation"? Isn't that a little bit anti-Israeli?
Are you really suggesting that the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Israel, its use of extrajudicial executions against Palestinian gunmen, the Israeli gunning down of schoolboy stone-throwers, the wholesale theft of Arab land to build homes for Jews, is in some way wrong?
Maybe I misheard you. Sure I did. Because your response to these scurrilous libels, to these slurs upon your right to free speech, to these slanderous attacks on your integrity, was a pussy-cat's whimper. You were "very hurt and dismayed". It is, you told The Irish Times, "distressing that allegations are being made that are completely unfounded".
You should have threatened your accusers with legal action. When I warn those who claim in their vicious postcards that my mother was Eichmann's daughter that they will receive a solicitor's letter--Peggy Fisk was in the RAF in the Second World War, but no matter--they fall silent at once.
But no, you are "hurt". You are "dismayed". And you allow Professor Kenneth Stein of Emory University to announce that he is "troubled by the apparent absence of due diligence on the part of decision makers who invited her [Mary Robinson] to speak". I love the "due diligence" bit. But seriously, how can you allow this twisted version of your integrity to go unpunished?
Dismayed. Ah, Mary, you poor diddums.
I tried to check the spelling of "diddums" in Webster's, America's inspiring, foremost dictionary. No luck. But then, what's the point when Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines "anti-Semitism" as "opposition to Zionism: sympathy with opponents of the state of Israel".
Come again? If you or I suggest--or, indeed, if poor wee Mary suggests--that the Palestinians are getting a raw deal under Israeli occupation, then we are "anti-Semitic". It is only fair, of course, to quote the pitiful response of the Webster's official publicist, Mr Arthur Bicknell, who was asked to account for this grotesque definition.
"Our job," he responded, "is to accurately reflect English as it is actually being used. We don't make judgement calls; we're not political." Even more hysterically funny and revolting, he says that the dictionary's editors tabulate "citational evidence" about anti-Semitism published in "carefully written prose-like books and magazines". Preposterous as it is, this Janus-like remark is worthy of the hollowest of laughs.
Even the Malaprops of American English are now on their knees to those who will censor critics of Israel's Middle East policy off the air.
And I mean "off the air". I've just received a justifiably outraged note from Bathsheba Ratskoff, a producer and editor at the American Media Education Foundation (MEF), who says that their new documentary on "the shutting-down of debate around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict"--in reality a film about Israel's public relations outfits in America--has been targeted by the "Jewish Action (sic) Task Force". The movie Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land was to be shown at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
So what happened? The "JAT" demanded an apology to the Jewish community and a "pledge (for) greater sensitivity (sic) when tackling Israel and the Middle East conflict in the future". JAT members "may want to consider threatening to cancel their memberships and to withhold contributions".
In due course, a certain Susan Longhenry of the Museum of Fine Arts wrote a creepy letter to Sut Jhally of the MEF, referring to the concerns of "many members of the Boston community"--otherwise, of course, unidentified--suggesting a rescheduled screening (because the original screening would have fallen on the Jewish Sabbath) and a discussion that would have allowed critics to condemn the film. The letter ended--and here I urge you to learn the weasel words of power--that "we have gone to great lengths to avoid cancelling altogether screenings of this film; however, if you are not able to support the revised approach, then I'm afraid we'll have no choice but to do just that".
Does Ms Longhenry want to be a mouse? Or does she want to have the verb "to longhenry" appear in Webster's? Or at least in the Oxford? Fear not, Ms Longhenry's boss overrode her pusillanimous letter. For the moment, at least.
But where does this end? Last Sunday, I was invited to talk on Irish television's TV3 lunchtime programme on Iraq and President Bush's support for Sharon's new wall on the West Bank. Towards the end of the programme, Tom Cooney, a law lecturer at University College, Dublin, suddenly claimed that I had called an Israeli army unit a "rabble" (absolutely correct--they are) and that I reported they had committed a massacre in Jenin in 2002.
I did not say they committed a massacre. But I should have. A subsequent investigation showed that Israeli troops had knowingly shot down innocent civilians, killed a female nurse and driven a vehicle over a paraplegic in a wheelchair. "Blood libel!" Cooney screamed. TV3 immediately--and correctly--dissociated themselves from this libel. Again, I noted the involvement of an eminent university--UCD is one of the finest academic institutions in Ireland and I can only hope that Cooney exercises a greater academic discipline with his young students than he did on TV3--in this slander. And of course, I got the message. Shut up. Don't criticise Israel.
So let me end on a positive note. Just as Bathsheba is a Jewish American, British Jews are also prominent in an organisation called Deir Yassin Remembered, which commemorates the massacre of Arab Palestinians by Jewish militiamen outside Jerusalem in 1948. This year, they remembered the Arab victims of that massacre--9 April--on the same day that Christians commemorated Good Friday.
The day also marked the fourth day of the eight-day Jewish Passover. It also fell on the anniversary of the 1945 execution by the Nazis of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer at Flossenburg concentration camp. Jewish liberation 3,000 years ago, the death of a Palestinian Jew 2,000 years ago, the death of a German Christian 59 years ago and the massacre of more than 100 Palestinian men, women and children 56 years ago. Alas, Deir Yassin Remembered does not receive the publicity it merits.
Webster's dictionary would meretriciously brand its supporters "anti-Semitic", and "many members of the Boston community" would no doubt object. "Blood libel," UCD's eminent law lecturer would scream. We must wait to hear what UCD thinks. But let us not be "hurt" or "dismayed". Let's just keep on telling it how it is. Isn't that what American journalism school was meant to teach us?
Copyright: The Independent. UK. | |  | | Cowboy | | Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2006 1:17 am Post subject: |
| | Quote: | | You should have threatened your accusers with legal action. |
An absurd claim by a guy who constantly makes absurd claims.
Freedom of speech does not require that somebody provide somebody else with a forum.
Mary Robinson's critics have as much right to cancel and criticize her as she has to speak her mind.
Fisk's idea of free speech is obviously very Islamist slanted. Speech can be free as long as it says what he wants to hear.
| Quote: | Towards the end of the programme, Tom Cooney, a law lecturer at University College, Dublin, suddenly claimed that I had called an Israeli army unit a "rabble" (absolutely correct--they are) and that I reported they had committed a massacre in Jenin in 2002.
I did not say they committed a massacre. But I should have. |
Never mind, of course, that the claim has long been completely discredited. | | | | Bolero | | Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2006 4:25 am Post subject: |
| Yes, we know, it's only a "massacre" when Israelis die...
http://www.counterpunch.org/christison06222005.html
"...On April 3, 2002, Israel began a two-week siege of the West Bank city of Jenin and its adjacent refugee camp, as part of a massive assault on all West Bank cities launched in retaliation for a March 27 suicide bombing at a restaurant in the Israeli town of Netanya where a Passover seder was being held. This bombing killed 29 Israelis and was widely labeled in the media the “Passover Massacre.” Palestinian fighters put up considerable resistance throughout the siege of the Jenin refugee camp, killing 23 Israeli soldiers. By general agreement, 52 Palestinians were killed, slightly fewer than half of whom were civilians.
The argument over how many dead Palestinians make a massacre is extremely unseemly, and it is unfortunate that Greenspan chose to resort to this kind of puerile “did not/did too” argumentation. By all objective standards, Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp was a humanitarian disaster. It matters little that the Palestinian civilian dead in Jenin did not match the number of Israeli civilians killed at the Passover seder. In Jenin, Israeli forces used helicopter gunships, fighter jets, missile attacks, and tank assaults to level entire residential apartment blocs, shooting civilians in their homes, demolishing buildings with their residents still inside, and ultimately leaving approximately 3,000 people homeless. The Israelis laid siege to Jenin’s hospitals, refused to allow ambulances to transport wounded, barred the entry of humanitarian aid workers, and refused to allow the media in until the siege was over. Mosques were desecrated, water and electricity were shut off for the duration of the siege, food shipments into both the city and the refugee camp, where fighting was concentrated, were blocked. The Israelis used civilians as human shields, forcing them at gunpoint to knock on doors so that soldiers would not risk being shot trying to enter the homes...." | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Tue Jul 04, 2006 4:35 am Post subject: |
| 
The Jenin "massacre" has long, long been discredited.
Funniest story of the hoax was the Jenin publicity "funeral" where the supposedly killed Pali fell off of the funeral litter in front of the camera, hot up and ran away. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 10:59 am Post subject: Fear and Learning in America |
| April 16, 2002
Fisk on Campus
Fear and Learning in America
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
Osama bin Laden once told me that Americans did not understand the Middle East. Last week, in a little shuttle bus shouldering its way through curtains of rain across the Iowa prairies, I opened my copy of the Des Moines Register and realised that he might be right. "BIG HOG LOTS CALLED GREATER THREAT THAN BIN LADEN," announced the headline. Iowa's 15 million massive pigs, it seems, produce so much manure that the state waterways are polluted. "Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and US democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says Robert F Kennedy Junior, president of... a New York environment group... 'We've watched communities and American values shattered by these bullies,' Kennedy said..." I took out my pocket calculator and did a little maths. Cedar Rapids, I reckoned, was 7,000 miles from Afghanistan. Another planet, more like.
I've been travelling to the United States for years, lecturing at Princeton or Harvard or Brown University, Rhode Island, or San Francisco, or Madison, Wisconsin. God knows why. I refuse all payment and take just a business-class round trip from Beirut because I can't take 14 hours of screaming babies in each direction. American college students are tough as nails and bored as cabbages, and in some cities - Washington is top of the list - I might as well talk in Amharic. If you don't use phrases like "peace process", "back on track" or "Israel under siege", there's a kind of computerised blackout on the faces of the audience. Total Disk Failure. Why should my latest bout of Americana have been any different?
Sure, there were the usual oddballs. There was the old black guy whose first "question" on the Middle East in a Chicago University lecture theatre was a long and proud announcement that he hadn't paid taxes to the IRS since 1948 - a claim so wonderful that I forbore the usual threat to close down on him. There were the World Trade Centre conspiracists who insisted that the US government had planted explosives in the twin towers. There was the silver-haired lady who wanted to know why God couldn't be made to resolve the hatred between Israelis and Palestinians. And a Native American Indian in Los Angeles who ranted on about a Jewish plot to deprive his people of their land. A bespectacled man with long white hair in a ponytail shut him up before declaring that the Israeli-Palestinian war was identical to the American-Mexican war that deprived his own people of... well, of Los Angeles. I began to calculate the distance between LA and Jenin. A galaxy perhaps.
And there were the little tell-tale stories that showed just how biased and gutless the American press has become in the face of America's Israeli lobby groups. "I wrote a report for a major paper about the Palestinian exodus of 1948," a Jewish woman told me as we drove through the smog of downtown LA. "And of course, I mentioned the massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin by the Stern Gang and other Jewish groups - the massacre that prompted 750,000 Arabs to flee their homes. Then I look for my story in the paper and what do I find? The word 'alleged' has been inserted before the word 'massacre'. I called the paper's ombudsman and told him the massacre at Deir Yassin was a historical fact. Can you guess his reply? He said that the editor had written the word 'alleged' before 'massacre' because that way he thought he'd avoid lots of critical letters."
By chance, this was the theme of my talks and lectures: the cowardly, idle, spineless way in which American journalists are lobotomising their stories from the Middle East, how the "occupied territories" have become "disputed territories" in their reports, how Jewish "settlements" have been transformed into Jewish "neighbourhoods", how Arab militants are "terrorists" but Israeli militants only "fanatics" or "extremists", how Ariel Sharon - the man held "personally responsible" by Israel's own commissioner's inquiry for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinians - could be described in a report in The New York Times as having the instincts of "a warrior". How the execution of surviving Palestinian fighters was so often called "mopping up". How civilians killed by Israeli soldiers were always "caught in the crossfire". I demanded to know of my audiences - and I expected the usual American indignation when I did - how US citizens could accept the infantile "dead or alive", "with us or against us", axis-of-evil policies of their President.
And for the first time in more than a decade of lecturing in the United States, I was shocked. Not by the passivity of Americans - the all-accepting, patriotic notion that the President knows best - nor by the dangerous self-absorption of the United States since 11 September and the constant, all-consuming fear of criticising Israel. What shocked me was the extraordinary new American refusal to go along with the official line, the growing, angry awareness among Americans that they were being lied to and deceived. At some of my talks, 60 per cent of the audiences were over 40. In some cases, perhaps 80 per cent were Americans with no ethnic or religious roots in the Middle East - "American Americans", as I cruelly referred to them on one occasion, "white Americans", as a Palestinian student called them more truculently. For the first time, it wasn't my lectures they objected to, but the lectures they received from their President and the lectures they read in their press about Israel's "war on terror" and the need always, uncritically, to support everything that America's little Middle Eastern ally says and does.
There was, for example, the crinkly-faced, ex-naval officer who approached me after a talk at a United Methodist church in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas. "Sir, I was an officer on the aircraft carrier John F Kennedy during the 1973 Middle East war," he began. (I checked him out later and he was, as my host remarked, "for real".) "We were stationed off Gibraltar and our job was to refuel the fighter jets we were sending to Israel after their air force was shot to bits by the Arabs. Our planes would land with their USAF and Marine markings partly stripped off and the Star of David already painted on the side. Does anyone know why we gave all those planes to the Israelis just like that? When I see on television our planes and our tanks used to attack Palestinians, I can understand why people hate Americans."
In the United States, I'm used to lecturing in half-empty lecture halls. Three years ago, I managed to fill a Washington auditorium seating 600 with just 32 Americans. But in Chicago and Iowa and Los Angeles this month, they came in their hundreds - almost 900 at one venue at the University of Southern California - and they sat in the aisles and corridors and outside the doors. It wasn't because Lord Fisk was in town. Maybe the title of my talk - "September 11: ask who did it, but for heaven's sake don't ask why" - was provocative. But for the most part they came, as the question-and-answer sessions quickly revealed, because they were tired of being suckered by the television news networks and the right-wing punditocracy.
Never before have I been asked by Americans: "How can we make our press report the Middle East fairly?" or - much more disturbingly - "How can we make our government reflect our views?" The questions are a trap, of course. Brits have been shoving advice at the United States ever since we lost the War of Independence, and I wasn't going to join their number. But the fact that these questions could be asked - usually by middle-aged Americans with no family origins in the Middle East - suggested a profound change in a hitherto docile population.
Towards the end of each talk, I apologised for the remarks I was about to make. I told audiences that the world did not change on 11 September, that the Lebanese and Palestinians had lost 17,500 dead during Israel's 1982 invasion - more than five times the death toll of the international crimes against humanity of 11 September - but the world did not change 20 yearsago. There were no candles lit then, no memorial services. And each time I said this, there was a nodding of heads - grey-haired and balding as well as young - across the room. The smallest irreverent joke about President Bush was often met with hoots of laughter. I asked one of my hosts why this happened, why the audience accepted this from a Briton. "Because we don't think Bush won the election," she replied.
Of course, it's easy to be fooled. The first local radio shows illustrated all too well how the Middle East discourse is handled in America. When Gayane Torosyan opened WSUI/KSUI for questions in Iowa City, a caller named "Michael" - a leader of the local Jewish community, I later learnt, though he did not say this on air - insisted that after the Camp David talks in 2000, Yasser Arafat had turned to "terrorism" despite being offered a Palestinian state with a capital in Jerusalem and 96 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza. Slowly and deliberately, I had to deconstruct this nonsense. Jerusalem was to have remained the "eternal and unified capital of Israel", according to Camp David. Arafat would only have got what Madeleine Albright called "a sort of sovereignty" over the Haram al-Sharif mosque area and some Arab streets, while the Palestinian parliament would have been below the city's eastern walls at Abu Dis. With the vastly extended and illegal Jerusalem municipality boundaries deep into the West Bank, Jewish settlements like Maale Adumim were not up for negotiation; nor were several other settlements. Nor was the 10-mile Israeli military buffer zone around the West Bank, nor the settlers' roads, which would razor through the Palestinian "state". Arafat was offered about 46 per cent of the 22 per cent of Palestine that was left. I could imagine the audience of WSUI/KSUI falling slowly from their seats in boredom.
Yet back at my folksy, wooden-walled hotel, the proprietor and his wife - P Force volunteers in the Kennedy era - had listened to every word. "We know what is going on," he said. "I was a naval officer in the Gulf back in the Sixties and we only had few ships there then. In those days, the Shah of Iran was our policeman. Now we've got all those ships in there and our soldiers in the Arab countries and we seem to dominate the place." Osama bin Laden, I said to myself, couldn't put it better.
How odd, I reflected, that American newspapers can scarcely say even this. The Daily Iowan - there are no fewer than four dailies in Iowa City, press freedom being represented by the number of newspapers rather than their depth of coverage - had none of my hotel landlord's forthrightness. "The situation in the Middle East is one that many Americans do not adequately understand," it miserably lamented, "nor can they be reasonably articulate about it." This rubbish - that Americans were too dumb to comprehend the Middle East bloodbath and should therefore keep their mouths shut - was a pervasive theme in editorials. Even more instructive were the reports of my own lectures.
The headline, "Fisk: Who really are the terrorists?" in the Daily Iowan last week at least caught the gist of my message, and included my own examples of American press bias in the Middle East, although it failed on the facts, wrongly reporting that it was the United Nations (rather than the far more persuasive Israeli Kahan Commission) which concluded that Sharon was "personally responsible" for the Sabra and Chatila massacre. The Des Moines Register's account of one of my talks was intriguing. It concentrated on my interviews with Osama bin Laden - which I had indeed mentioned in my lecture - and then referred to my account of how an Afghan crowd beat me up last December. I had told the American audience that the Afghans were outraged by US bombing raids that had just killed their relatives around Kandahar and how important it had been to include this fact in my own report of the fray - to give context and reason to the Afghan attack on me. The Register used my words to describe the attack but then itself made no mention of the reasons. Long live, I thought, the Iowa City Press-Citizen, whose own headline - "Middle East reporter slams media" - got the point.
It's not that Iowans have any excuse to be unaware of the Middle East. In the small town of Davenport, Israelis have been trained in the systems of the Apache AH-64 attack helicopters used to assassinate Palestinians on Israel's wanted list. According to one local journalist, several Iowa companies, including the regional office of Rockwell, have been involved in military contracts worth millions of dollars with Israel. CemenTech of Indianola supplies equipment to the Israeli air force. The day I arrived in Iowa City, John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General, was telling Iowans that a hundred foreign nationals "from countries known as home to terrorists" had been interrogated in the state. Another hundred were likely to be "interviewed" soon. There was no editorial comment on this.
So Iowa University classes were absorbing. One young woman began by announcing that she knew the American media were biased. When I asked why, she said that "it has to do with America's support for Israel..." and then, red-faced, she dried up. Not so the student in Rex Honey's global studies class. After I had outlined the military trap into which the Americans had been lured in Afghanistan - the supposed "victory" followed by further engagements with al-Qa'ida and then, inevitably, daily battles with Afghan warlords and sniping attacks on Western troops - he put his hand up. "So how do we beat them?" he asked. There was a gentle ripple of laughter through the room. "Why do you want to 'beat' the Afghans," I asked? "Why not help them build a new land?" The student came up to me afterwards, hand outstretched. "I want to thank you, sir, for all you told us," he said. I had a suspicion he was a military man. Are you planning to join the army, I asked? "No, sir," he replied. "I'm going to join the Marines."
I advised him to stay clear of Afghanistan. In its own way, the American national press was doing the same. Two days later, the Los Angeles Times, in a remarkable dispatch from its correspondent David Zucchino, reported on the bitterness and anger among Afghans whose families had been killed in United States B-52 bomber raids. The recent American battle in Gardez, the report said, had left "bitterness in its wake".
If only the same bluntness was applied to the Palestinian-Israeli war. Alas, no. On the freeway past Long Beach on Friday, I opened the LA Times to be told that Israel "mops up [sic] in the West Bank", while the syndicated columnist Mona Charen was telling readers in other papers that "98 per cent of Palestinians have not been living under occupation since Israel pulled out under the Oslo accords" and that the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, Ehud Barak, had offered Arafat "97 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza". This was 1 per cent higher even than the statistic from "Michael" on WSUI/KSUI radio. Arafat - "this murderer with the deaths of thousands of Jews and Arabs on his hands" - was to blame. The issue between Israel and her neighbours, Charen contended, "is not occupation, it is not settlements and it certainly is not Israeli brutality and aggression. It is the Arabs' inability to live peacefully with others".
Maybe California is organically different from the rest of the United States, but its journalists as well as its students seemed a tad smarter than the Midwest of America. The Orange County Register, a traditionally conservative newspaper in an area that is now 50 per cent Latino, has been trying to tell the truth about the Middle East and was carrying a tough feature by Holger Jensen, which warned that if President Bush didn't rein in Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister "will succeed where Osama bin Laden failed: forcing us into a war of civilisations against 1.2 billion Muslims". When I lunched with senior editorial staff, they invited three members of the Orange County Muslim community to join them.
Cocktails with friends of the Methodist church revealed a sane grasp of the Middle East - one of them was deeply disturbed by a recent remark by Israel's Internal Security Minister, Uzi Landau, who had said that "we're not facing human beings, but rather beasts". A black guest commended the UN secretary general Kofi Annan's criticism of Israel. Yet when I flipped on Fox News, there was Benjamin Netanyahu out-Sharoning Sharon, declaring that Palestinian suicide bombers would soon be prowling America's streets, meeting Congressmen to enlist their help in Israel's "war on terror", even while the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, was in Israel.
"Why Israel's Mission Must Continue," the New York Times's comment page shouted on Friday. A long and tedious article on Israel's crusade against "terror" by an Israeli army colonel, Nitsan Alon, included several of my favourite cop-out phrases, including the stock reference to "a large number of civilians" who were - yes - "caught in the crossfire".
By the time I was addressing the more bohemian denizens of an art club in Los Angeles, the newspapers I was attacking were beginning to turn up. Mark Kellner arrived to report for The Washington Times. "He's going to stitch up everything you say," a friend remarked. "The Washington Times is to the right of the Republican Party." We shall see.
But if my audiences had been largely made up of Americans without any Middle East roots, the same could not be said of Sunday's cocktails at the home of Stanley Sheinbaum, the philanthropist, art collector and libertarian - we shall forget the period in which he helped to run the Los Angeles Police Department - where my little speech was to set off some verbal hand-grenades. Sheinbaum it was who met Syria's President Hafez el-Assad at President Jimmy Carter's request, arranging Assad's extraordinary summit with Carter in Geneva. "Tell me something good about yourself," he said to me. Have you heard nothing good from anyone else, I enquired? "Nope," he said.
But I liked Sheinbaum, a crusty, humorous man in his eighties who encourages every liberal Jewish American to have his say about the Middle East. As the lunchtime fog embraced the rose gardens and villas and swimming pools and hills of Brentwood, up stepped Rabbi Haim dov Beliak to explain how he intends to close down the bingo and gambling operations of one of America's greatest Jewish settlement builders. "Call me when you get back to Beirut - by all means write about it." As we scoffed Stanley Sheinbaum's strawberries and sipped his fine Californian red wine, another rabbi approached. "You're gonna have some hostile people in your audience," he said. "Just let 'em hear the truth."
So I did. I talked about the cowardice of Secretary Powell, who dawdled his way around the Mediterranean to give Sharon time to finish destroying the Jenin refugee camp. I talked about the rotting bodies of Jenin and the growing evidence that back in 1982 Sharon's troops handed the survivors of the Sabra and Chatila massacre back to their Phalangist tormentors to be killed. I said that Arafat was never offered 96 per cent of the West Bank at Camp David. I advised the 100 or so people in the room to read the Israeli journalist Amira Haas' courageous reports in Haaretz. I talked about the squalor of the Palestinian camp. I talked of suicide bombings as "evil" but suggested that Israel would never have security until it abided by UN Security Council Resolution 252; that Israel would never have peace until it abandoned all of the West Bank, Gaza, Golan and East Jerusalem.
"I find it very difficult to ask you a question, because what you said made me so angry," a woman began afterwards. Why did I not realise that the Palestinians wanted to destroy all of Israel, that the right-of-return would destroy the state? For an hour I explained the reality I saw in the Middle East; an all-powerful Israel fighting an old-time colonial war. I talked about the 1954-62 Algerian war, its brutality and cruelty, the French army's torture and killings, the Algerians' slaughter of civilians, the frightening parallels with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. I talked about the Palestinians who wanted, at the least, an admission of the injustice their people had suffered in 1948, adding that there were Palestinians aplenty who realised that financial compensation would have to suffice for most of those refugees whose homes were in what is now Israel. I talked about Sharon and his bloody record in Lebanon. And about the pressures of the Israeli lobby in America, the fear of being labelled an anti-Semite, and the feeble reporting of the Middle East.
A rabbi was the first to tell me afterwards that the Palestinians were victims, that they should be given a real state. An old lady asked me for the name of the best book on the Algerian war. I gave it to her; Alastair Horne's A Savage War of Peace . A card was pushed into my hand. "Insightful talk!" the owner had written at the bottom and - hate though I do the word "insightful" - I couldn't help noticing that the name on the card was Yigal Arens, the son of one of Israel's most ruthless right-wing ministers, who had once informed me - in Beirut, back in 1982 - that Israel would "fight forever" against Palestinian terror.
On the freeway to LAX afterwards, the terminals and control tower looming through the Californian haze, I looked over Saturday's LA Times. A report on page 12 revealed that the BBC's award-winning film on Sharon's involvement in the Sabra and Chatila massacres had been dropped from a Canadian film festival after protests from Jewish groups. The organisers had explained that The Accused "could invite unwanted attention from interest groups" - whatever that means. But a paragraph at the end of the report caught my attention. "Sharon, who was the Israeli defence minister at the time, allegedly facilitated the assault on the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps..." There it was again. Allegedly? How many angry letters was that little lie supposed to avoid? Allegedly indeed.
But on reflection, I didn't think the Americans I met would be fooled by this. I didn't think my hotel proprietor would accept "allegedly". Nor the old naval officer from the John F Kennedy. Nor the listeners to KSUI. Nor even Stanley Sheinbaum. Yes, Osama bin Laden told me he thought Americans didn't understand the Middle East. Maybe he was right then. But not any more. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 11:04 am Post subject: U.S. to pay $48 million to cover damages to Gaza power stati |
| We can't afford to fix the levee system right in New Orleans but can spare millions to pay for the Zionazi bombing of Gaza:
Ha'aretz, July 1, 2006
U.S. to pay $48 million to cover damages to Gaza power station
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz Correspondent and Haaretz Service
United States officials said they expect that U.S. funds will be used to pay for the damages caused by an Israel Air Force strike Tuesday on a Palestinian power station in the Gaza Strip. The power station was insured by a U.S. government agency, according to The Boston Globe.
The Foreign and Defense Ministry departments that oversee foreign relations were unaware of the decision to target civilian facilities in the Strip, or the decision to attack the power station. Because of this, officials did not know that the station was insured by a U.S. government agency. Israel did not inform the U.S. prior to attacking the power station.
The power station in Gaza was built over a period of five years, at a cost of $150 million. In 1999, the Enron Corporation, along with Palestinian businessman Said Khoury, began working on the project. In 2000, Khoury's Morganti Group purchased Enron's share of the project.
The power station began operating in 2002, reaching full commercial capacity in 2004. The owners of the power station insured it, through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, for a sum of $48 million due to "political risks." OPIC is a U.S. government authority that insures U.S. investments in developing markets.
A spokesman for the agency said the insurance purchased by the Morganti Group covers instances of political violence, which include wars and acts of terror.
US Support for Israel PRIMARY MOTIVATION for tragic attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and on 9/11:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/08/05/the-gorilla-in-the-room-is-us-support-for-israel.php
Sunday New York Times Ad: 'America and Israel: A Troubling Alliance':
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/06/30/sunday-new-york-times-ad-america-and-israel-a-troubling-a.php
Scroll down to the 'Pro-Israel lobby under attack' UPI article at the following URL:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/03/17/u-s-middle-east-policy-motivated-by-pro-israel-lobby.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Jul 05, 2006 11:06 am Post subject: Israel's Appalling Bombing in Gaza, Starving in the Dark |
| Israel's Appalling Bombing in Gaza, Starving in the Dark
By VIRGINIA TILLEY
On the excuse of rescuing one kidnapped soldier, Israeli is now bombing
the Gaza Strip and is poised to re-invade. It has also arrested a third
of the Palestinian parliament, wrecking even its fragile illusion of
capacity and reducing the already-empty vessel of the Palestinian
Authority into broken shards.
In the shambles, Palestinians may be observing one bitter pill of
compensation: vicious angling by Fatah to reclaim control of
Palestinian national politics and its rivalry with Hamas are now
rendered obsolete. Even the dogged international community cannot
maintain its dogged pretense that the PA is actually capable of any
governance at all. The demise of the disastrous Oslo model, Israel's
device to ensure its final dismemberment of Palestinian land and its
fatal cooptation of the Palestinian national movement, may finally be
at hand. Perhaps Palestinian unity again has a chance.
But no one knows what will replace the PA. It is therefore not
surprising that this transformed diplomatic landscape is absorbing the
principal attention of an anxious international community.
Nevertheless, politics should not be the greatest international
concern. For over in Gaza, one appalling act must now eclipse all
thoughts of "road maps" or "mutual gestures": on Wednesday, Israeli war
planes repeatedly bombed and utterly demolished Gaza's only power
plant. About 700,000 of Gaza's 1.3 million people now have no
electricity, and word is that power cannot be restored for six months.
It is not the immediate human conditions created by this strike that
are monumental. Those conditions are, of course, bad enough. No lights,
no refrigerators, no fans through the suffocating Gaza summer heat. No
going outside for air, due to ongoing bombing and Israel's impending
military assault. In the hot darkness, massive explosions shake the
cities, close and far, while repeated sonic booms are doubtless
wreaking the havoc they have wrought before: smashing windows, sending
children screaming into the arms of terrified adults, old people
collapsing with heart failure, pregnant women collapsing with
spontaneous abortions. Mass terror, despair, desperate hoarding of food
and water. And no radios, television, cell phones, or laptops (for the
few who have them), and so no way to get news of how long this
nightmare might go on.
But this time, the situation is worse than that. As food in the
refrigerators spoils, the only remaining food is grains. Most people
cook with gas, but with the borders sealed, soon there will be no gas.
When family-kitchen propane tanks run out, there will be no cooking. No
cooked lentils or beans, no humus, no bread ? the staples Palestinian
foods, the only food for the poor. (And there is no firewood or coal in
dry, overcrowded Gaza.)
And yet, even all this misery is overshadowed by a grimmer fact: no
water. Gaza's public water supply is pumped by electricity. The taps,
too, are dry. No sewage system. And again, word is that the electricity
is out for at least six months.
The Gaza aquifer is already contaminated with sea water and sewage, due
to over-pumping (partly by those now-abandoned Israeli settlements) and
the grossly inadequate sewage system. To be drinkable, well water is
purified through machinery run by electricity. Otherwise, the brackish
water must at least be boiled before it can be consumed, but this
requires electricity or gas. And people will soon have neither.
Drinking unpurified water means sickness, even cholera. If cholera
breaks out, it will spread like wildfire in a population so densely
packed and lacking fuel or water for sanitation. And the hospitals and
clinics aren't functioning, either, because there is no electricity.
Finally, people can't leave. None of the neighboring countries have
resources to absorb a million desperate and impoverished refugees:
logistically and politically, the flood would entirely destabilize
Egypt, for example. But Palestinians in Gaza can't seek sanctuary with
their relatives in the West Bank, either, because they can't get out of
Gaza to get there. They can't even go over the border into Egypt and
around through Jordan, because Israel will no longer allow people with
Gaza identification cards to enter the West Bank. In any case, a cordon
of Palestinian police are blocking people from trying to scramble over
the Egyptian border--and war refugees have tried, through a hole blown
open by militants, clutching packages and children.
In short, over a million civilians are now trapped, hunkered in their
homes listening to Israeli shells, while facing the awful prospect,
within days or weeks, of having to give toxic water to their children
that may consign them to quick but agonizing deaths.
One woman near the Rafah border, taking care of her nephews, spoke to
BBC: "If I am frightened in front of them I think they will die of
fear." If the international community does nothing, her children may
soon die anyway.
The astonishing scale of this humanitarian situation is indeed matched
only by the deafening drizzle of international reaction. "Of course it
is understandable that [the Israelis] would want to go after those who
kidnapped their soldier," says Kofi Anan (while the Palestinian
population cowers in the dark listening to thundering explosions
demolish their society), "but it has to be done in such a way that
civilian populations are not made to suffer." Even as Israel bombs
smash Gaza's roadways, the G-8 stands up on its hind-legs to intone,
"We call on Israel to exercise utmost restraint in the current crisis."
How about the Russians, now angling for position in the new "Great
Game" of the Middle East? "The right and duty of the government of
Israel to defend the lives and security of its citizens are beyond
doubt," says Russia's foreign ministry, as though poor Corporal Shalit
warrants any of this mayhem, "But this should not be done at the cost
of many lives and the lives of many Palestinian civilians, by massive
military strikes with heavy consequences for the civilian population."
And what says noble Europe, proud font of human rights conventions,
architects of the misión civilizatrice? "The EU remains deeply
concerned," mumbles the mighty defenders of humanitarian law, "about
the worsening security and humanitarian developments." Seemingly soggy
phrases like "deeply concerned" are diplomatic code for "We are
seriously unhappy." But under these circumstances, "remains deeply
concerned" suggests that this staggering crime is just one more
sobering moment in the failed "road map."
Diplomatic bubbles of unreality in the Middle East are the norm rather
than the exception, but at some point the international community must
face the very unwelcome fact that it needs to change gear. A country
that claims kinship among the western democracies of Europe is behaving
like a murderous rogue regime, using any excuse to reduce over a
million people to utter human misery and even mass death. Plastering
Corporal Shalit's face over this policy is no more convincing that
South African newspapers emblazoning the picture of one poor murdered
white doctor over their coverage of the 1976 Soweto uprising.
Israel has done many things argued to be war crimes: mass house
demolitions, closing whole cities for weeks, indefinite "preventative"
detentions, massive land confiscation, the razing of thousands of
square miles of Palestinian olive groves and agriculture, systematic
physical and mental torture of prisoners, extrajudicial killings,
aerial bombardment of civilian areas, collective punishment of every
description in defiance of the Geneva Conventions--not to mention the
general humiliation and ruin of the indigenous people under its
military control. But destroying the only power source for a trapped
and defenseless civilian population is an unprecedented step toward
barbarity. It reeks, ironically, of the Warsaw Ghetto. As we flutter
our hands about tectonic political change, we must take pause: in the
eyes of history, what is happening in Gaza may come to eclipse them
all.
Dr. Virginia Tilley is a professor of political science, currently
working in South Africa. She can be reached at tilley@hws.edu | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
