- Palestine

To Live In War Is To Live In Hell

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 20:55:31 -0700

Zionism's Plan For The Arab World

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:34:27 -0600

Egypt LIFTS BLOCKADE On Palestine

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Wed, 25 May 2011 21:25:28 -0600

Source: BBC - May 25, 2011

Egypt is to open the Rafah border crossing into Gaza permanently to most Palestinians from Saturday, Egyptian state news agency Mena has said.

Gaza has been under blockade since 2007, when the Islamist Hamas movement took control of the territory.

Under ex-President Hosni Mubarak - ousted in February - Egypt opposed the Hamas administration and helped Israel to enforce the blockade.

Israel says the blockade is needed to stop weapons being smuggled into Gaza.

The Rafah crossing will be opened permanently from 0900 to 2100 every day except Fridays and holidays, beginning Saturday 28 May, Mena said.

"Palestinian women of all ages will be exempted from visas as will men under 18 or over 40," Mena reported.

Rafah is the only crossing into Gaza which bypasses Israel.

The BBC's Jon Leyne, in Cairo, says it is unlikely Israel will welcome the move, although it has been easing its own restrictions on its crossings with Gaza.

Significant shift

The transitional military government said last month that it intended to open the crossing permanently.

Our correspondent says the announcement illustrates the more independent-minded foreign policy likely to be adopted by Egypt's new rulers.

Egypt's co-operation in blockading Gaza was one of the most unpopular policies of former President Mubarak, he adds.

Last year, Israel eased restrictions on goods entering Gaza, but significant shortages in the territory remain.

Mena said the decision to open Rafah was part of efforts "to end the status of the Palestinian division and achieve national reconciliation".

Egypt's post-Mubarak government has already helped broker a reconciliation agreement between Hamas and the Fatah faction, which governs the Palestinian West Bank. Israel has condemned the deal.

Under Mr Mubarak, Egypt upheld its unpopular peace treaty with Israel and opposed Hamas in the internal Palestinian power-struggle.

Hundreds of smuggling tunnels run under the Egyptian border with Gaza.

The blockade has been condemned as a form of collective punishment of the population of the Gaza Strip because of the hardships it causes.

In 2010, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the blockade was a clear violation of international humanitarian law.

The Spirit of Rachel Corrie Vessel - Held At Sea Off Coast Of Egypt

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Tue, 24 May 2011 20:00:19 -0600

Source: Future Fast Forward - May 24, 2011

MORE food supplies were delivered to The Spirit of Rachel Corrie by a small boat at 5.30pm (Egyptian time) on Sunday.

Like before, The Spirit of Rachel Corrie -- MV Finch is its official name -- was not allowed to enter port and had to come close to the port entrance to receive the goods.

The food supplies are enough to last for two days.

Also delivered were 75 containers of fresh water, just in time to replenish the ship's water tank, which was at zero level early Sunday. The water is enough for only two days as it is used for washing, cooking and ship's operations.

It is essential for the people onboard to maintain hygiene as diseases can spread easily in cramped spaces like in the ship.

The water in the tank ran out on Sunday and the people onboard had to use bottled water to flush toilets, bathe and wash hands.

The first supply of food was delivered to the ship last Thursday.

Yesterday was exactly a week since The Spirit of Rachel Corrie was turned into a "prison ship" by the Egyptian authorities, thus hampering its humanitarian mission to deliver aid to the needy Palestinians.

The Malaysian-owned cargo ship is sponsored by the Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF) in its mission to break the Israeli siege of Gaza and deliver PVC pipes for rehabilitation of the damaged sewerage system in Gaza.

The mission achieved its first objective last Monday when it managed to surprise the Israeli navy and entered Palestinian waters, but was forced to turn back after an Israeli navy patrol vessel fired several warning shots over its bow.

The cargo ship has yet to achieve its second objective of delivering the 30 tonnes of 7.5km-long PVC pipes to the Palestinian Environment Ministry.

Meanwhile, yesterday was the first week anniversary of the success of The Spirit of Rachel Corrie mission to break the siege of Gaza.

In a classic case of David versus Goliath, the small general cargo ship managed to penetrate the cordon of the mighty Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

It was a historic event as no cargo vessel carrying humanitarian aid had come so close to the Palestinian waters before.

Even the previous ship MV Rachel Corrie, which PGPF had participated in last year, had failed to break the siege.

Last Monday morning, The Spirit of Rachel Corrie bypassed the Egyptian El Arish port authority and the country's navy to come close to its shores.

Cruising slowly and as close as 750m from the shore, the ship was only detected by IDF patrol vessels when it entered the security zone.

By the time the IDF vessels approached and started firing its first warning shot around 6.05am, The Spirit of Rachel Corrie had already entered Palestinian waters about a kilometre from its shore.

Several more warning shots were fired which forced the ship to stop and turnaround into Egyptian waters and anchor at the El Arish port.

The mission's earlier victory was shortlived as it has now been turned into a "prison ship" by the Egyptian authorities.

Zbigniew Brzezinski Talks Libya/U.S. Foreign Policy On CNN

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 19:08:30 -0600

Sarah Palin: 'Why is Israel apologising all the time?'

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 20:52:42 -0600

Presidential hopefuls must show fealty to Israel, and the Jewish money elite in America if they wish to succeed, it's not a secret, however Palin takes this 'rite of passage' to a frightening level. Perhaps it's her vacant stare, or the total contradiction of her statements measured only days (sometimes minutes) apart, but empty shells of ambition like Palin frighten me. I can only imagine how the real complexity of the world - it's various cultures, tensions, and opportunities would be homogenized in the mind of Palin into a mass of distorted and colorless moralistic computations, which all too often would churn out the thought, 'well......lets KILL'em!', as a solution to any external matter that proved difficult or challenging. Check out the last four paragraphs below, Palin's not even president and she's already attempting to provoke China, pure insanity.

Source: The Daily Mail - March 22, 2011

Sarah Palin thinks Israel should 'stop apologising'.

The former Alaska governor, currently in Israel on a two-day private tour, made the remark as she and husband Todd toured the Western Wall and its adjacent tunnels.

'Why are you apologising all the time,' Palin asked guides Israeli lawmaker, Danny Danon and Western Wall Rabbi, Shmuel Rabinowitz, after they told her Jews were not allowed to pray openly in the Temple Mount and about the riots following Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's decision to create an exit from the tunnels in the 90s.

The trip has raised speculation Palin is honing her foreign policy credentials ahead of a run for the U.S. presidency next year.

She arrived in Israel yesterday after a stop in India, wearing a large Star of David.

She went on to tell Danon that she had flags of Israel 'on my desk, in my home, all over the place'.

'She didn't go into diplomatic issues, but I can clearly say from the questions she asked in relation to our conflict here with the Muslims in these holy sites that she knows that we are right and that the Muslims are just claiming things for provocation and they're not right,' Danon told the Jerusalem Post.

Palin has tried to keep a low profile during what is her first trip to Israel. She dodged waiting paparazzi who were staking out hotels and holy sites in hopes of getting a glimpse of the former governor.

She rarely travels abroad and has been criticised for her weak foreign policy record.

Famously Palin didn't even own a passport until 2006 and once said ‘you can actually see Russia from Alaska’ when she asked about her insights into Russian politics.

A visit to Israel, a key U.S. ally, has become almost a rite of passage for potential Republican candidates at a time of strained relations between the U.S. and Israeli governments.

Israel is a key American ally in a volatile region and a top concern for Jewish voters and pro-Israel Christian groups in the U.S.

Palin's two-day private visit follows similar stops by former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, all potential candidates for president in 2012.

...

David Ricci, an expert in U.S.-Israel relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said the steady stream of Republican visitors sends a message to Mr Obama that Israel is of interest to the other party 'and he shouldn't push them around too much.'

As well as visiting holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City and elsewhere Palin also had dinner with Netanyahu planned before she heads home tomorrow.

During Sunday's visit to the Western Wall - a retaining wall of the compound where the biblical Jewish Temples stood 2,000 years ago - she said: 'Israel is absolutely beautiful, and it is overwhelming to see and touch the cornerstone of our faith, and I am so grateful to get to be here.

'I'm very thankful to know that the Israeli and American link will grow in strength as we seek peace along with you,' she added

While in India at the weekend Palin suggested China is preparing itself to launch a military offensive.

She questioned why the Far East country was stockpiling ballistic missiles, submarines and ‘new-age, ultramodern aircraft’ seemed unjustified when it did not face an outside threat.

‘What’s with the military buildup?’ She said. ‘China’s military growth can’t just be for defensive purposes.’

Speaking to an audience of business leaders and socialites on a rare foreign trip to India, she added she has not ruled out a Presidential run in 2012 and stressed the importance of shared free-market values.

In her New Delhi appearance she warned: ‘We’re going to need each other, especially as these other regions rise’ in an apparent reference to China.

Walls of Division

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 18:30:57 -0700

Pink Floyd's Roger Waters adds his voice to the calls for Israel to remove its separation wall. - Aljazeera

Israel Bombs Medical Supply Building

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 09:22:17 -0700

Why is Israel still bombing Gaza? Because they can?

The Real America: An Interview With Jonathan Adams

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 01:46:40 -0700

In Conversation With Ken O'Keefe from pentos films on Vimeo.

The Boy Hero (He Who Fights)

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:59:07 -0600

He who trapped in chains, of a culture run morbid
never having wanted but a little piece of joy, now found
living in prison, a cast away onboard what seems an empty vessel
when he asks out, in a solemn angry voice
where are they, when here I am?

I hear voices distant, but their world is only a ghost
in the face of my pain, as ever I would wish away
we never did err with you, but were born on a wrong way road
in a land no one knows, to a people without a home

I raise my voice to the on high, I'm even reaching to the sky
I'm looking for you there, and if not there,
then where?

Fighting Talk: The New Propaganda

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:39:47 -0600

Source: The Independent

Journalism has become a linguistic battleground - and when reporters use terms such 'spike in violence' or 'surge' or 'settler', they are playing along with a pernicious game, argues Robert Fisk

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Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...

But I am doing the Israelis an injustice. Their lexicon, and that of the White House - most of the time - and our reporters' lexicon, is the same. Yes, let's be fair to the Israelis. Their lexicon goes like this: Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.

How many times did I just use the word "terror"? Twenty. But it might as well be 60, or 100, or 1,000, or a million. We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. "Terror, terror, terror, terror". Each repetition justifies its predecessor.

Most of all, it's about the terror of power and the power of terror. Power and terror have become interchangeable. We journalists have let this happen. Our language has become not just a debased ally, but a full verbal partner in the language of governments and armies and generals and weapons. Remember the "bunker buster" and the "Scud buster" and the "target-rich environment" in the Gulf War (Part One)? Forget about "weapons of mass destruction". Too obviously silly. But "WMD" in the Gulf War (Part Two) had a power of its own, a secret code - genetic, perhaps, like DNA - for something that would reap terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. "45 Minutes to Terror".

Power and the media are not just about cosy relationships between journalists and political leaders, between editors and presidents. They are not just about the parasitic-osmotic relationship between supposedly honourable reporters and the nexus of power that runs between White House and State Department and Pentagon, between Downing Street and the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, between America and Israel.

In the Western context, power and the media is about words - and the use of words. It is about semantics. It is about the employment of phrases and their origins. And it is about the misuse of history, and about our ignorance of history. More and more today, we journalists have become prisoners of the language of power. Is this because we no longer care about linguistics or semantics? Is this because laptops "correct" our spelling, "trim" our grammar so that our sentences so often turn out to be identical to those of our rulers? Is this why newspaper editorials today often sound like political speeches?

For two decades now, the US and British - and Israeli and Palestinian - leaderships have used the words "peace process" to define the hopeless, inadequate, dishonourable agreement that allowed the US and Israel to dominate whatever slivers of land would be given to an occupied people. I first queried this expression, and its provenance, at the time of Oslo - although how easily we forget that the secret surrenders at Oslo were themselves a conspiracy without any legal basis.

Poor old Oslo, I always think. What did Oslo ever do to deserve this? It was the White House agreement that sealed this preposterous and dubious treaty - in which refugees, borders, Israeli colonies, even timetables - were to be delayed until they could no longer be negotiated.

And how easily we forget the White House lawn - though, yes, we remember the images - upon which it was Clinton who quoted from the Koran, and Arafat who chose to say: "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr President." And what did we call this nonsense afterwards? Yes, it was "a moment of history"! Was it? Was it so?

Do you remember what Arafat called it? "The peace of the brave". But I don't remember any of us pointing out that "the peace of the brave" was used by General de Gaulle about the end of the Algerian war. The French lost the war in Algeria. We did not spot this extraordinary irony.

Same again today. We Western journalists - used yet again by our masters - have been reporting our jolly generals in Afghanistan, as saying their war can only be won with a "hearts and minds" campaign. No one asked them the obvious question: Wasn't this the very same phrase used about Vietnamese civilians in the Vietnam War? And didn't we - didn't the West - lose the war in Vietnam? Yet now we Western journalists are using - about Afghanistan - the phrase "hearts and minds" in our reports as if it is a new dictionary definition, rather than a symbol of defeat for the second time in four decades.

Just look at the individual words we have recently co-opted from the US military. When we Westerners find that "our" enemies - al-Qa'ida, for example, or the Taliban - have set off more bombs and staged more attacks than usual, we call it "a spike in violence".

Ah yes, a "spike"! A "spike" is a word first used in this context, according to my files, by a brigadier general in the Baghdad Green Zone in 2004. Yet now we use that phrase, we extemporise on it, we relay it on the air as our phrase, our journalistic invention. We are using, quite literally, an expression created for us by the Pentagon. A spike, of course, goes sharply up then sharply downwards. A "spike in violence" therefore avoids the ominous use of the words "increase in violence" - for an increase, of course, might not go down again afterwards.

Now again, when US generals refer to a sudden increase in their forces for an assault on Fallujah or central Baghdad or Kandahar - a mass movement of soldiers brought into Muslim countries by the tens of thousands - they call this a "surge". And a surge, like a tsunami, or any other natural phenomena, can be devastating in its effects. What these "surges" really are - to use the real words of serious journalism - are reinforcements. And reinforcements are sent to conflicts when armies are losing those wars. But our television and newspaper boys and girls are still talking about "surges" without any attribution at all. The Pentagon wins again.

Meanwhile the "peace process" collapsed. Therefore our leaders - or "key players" as we like to call them - tried to make it work again. The process had to be put "back on track". It was a train, you see. The carriages had come off the line. The Clinton administration first used this phrase, then the Israelis, then the BBC. But there was a problem when the "peace process" had repeatedly been put "back on track" - but still came off the line. So we produced a "road map" - run by a Quartet and led by our old Friend of God, Tony Blair, who - in an obscenity of history - we now refer to as a "peace envoy". But the "road map" isn't working. And now, I notice, the old "peace process" is back in our newspapers and on our television screens. And earlier this month, on CNN, one of those boring old fogies whom the TV boys and girls call "experts" told us again that the "peace process" was being put "back on track" because of the opening of "indirect talks" between Israelis and Palestinians. This isn't just about clichés - this is preposterous journalism. There is no battle between the media and power; through language, we, the media, have become them.

Here's another piece of media cowardice that makes my 63-year-old teeth grind together after 34 years of eating humus and tahina in the Middle East. We are told, in many analysis features, that what we have to deal with in the Middle East are "competing narratives". How very cosy. There's no justice, no injustice, just a couple of people who tell different history stories. "Competing narratives" now regularly pop up in the British press.

The phrase, from the false language of anthropology, deletes the possibility that one group of people - in the Middle East, for example - is occupied, while another is doing the occupying. Again, no justice, no injustice, no oppression or oppressing, just some friendly "competing narratives", a football match, if you like, a level playing field because the two sides are - are they not? - "in competition". And two sides have to be given equal time in every story.

So an "occupation" becomes a "dispute". Thus a "wall" becomes a "fence" or "security barrier". Thus Israeli acts of colonisation of Arab land, contrary to all international law, become "settlements" or "outposts" or "Jewish neighbourhoods". It was Colin Powell, in his starring, powerless appearance as Secretary of State to George W Bush, who told US diplomats to refer to occupied Palestinian land as "disputed land" - and that was good enough for most of the US media. There are no "competing narratives", of course, between the US military and the Taliban. When there are, you'll know the West has lost.

But I'll give you an example of how "competing narratives" come undone. In April, I gave a lecture in Toronto to mark the 95th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian genocide, the deliberate mass murder of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by the Ottoman Turkish army and militia. Before my talk, I was interviewed on Canadian Television, CTV, which also owns Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper. And from the start, I could see that the interviewer had a problem. Canada has a large Armenian community. But Toronto also has a large Turkish community. And the Turks, as the Globe and Mail always tell us, "hotly dispute" that this was a genocide.

So the interviewer called the genocide "deadly massacres". Of course, I spotted her specific problem straight away. She couldn't call the massacres a "genocide", because the Turkish community would be outraged. But she sensed that "massacres" on its own - especially with the gruesome studio background photographs of dead Armenians - was not quite up to defining a million and a half murdered human beings. Hence the "deadly massacres". How odd! If there are "deadly" massacres, are there some massacres which are not "deadly", from which the victims walk away alive? It was a ludicrous tautology.

Yet the use of the language of power - of its beacon words and its beacon phrases - goes on among us still. How many times have I heard Western reporters talking about "foreign fighters" in Afghanistan? They are referring, of course, to the various Arab groups supposedly helping the Taliban. We heard the same story from Iraq. Saudis, Jordanians, Palestinian, Chechen fighters, of course. The generals called them "foreign fighters". Immediately, we Western reporters did the same. Calling them "foreign fighters" meant they were an invading force. But not once - ever - have I heard a mainstream Western television station refer to the fact that there are at least 150,000 "foreign fighters" in Afghanistan, and that all of them happen to be wearing American, British and other NATO uniforms. It is "we" who are the real "foreign fighters".

Similarly, the pernicious phrase "Af-Pak" - as racist as it is politically dishonest - is now used by reporters, although it was originally a creation of the US State Department on the day Richard Holbrooke was appointed special US representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the phrase avoids the use of the word "India" - whose influence in Afghanistan and whose presence in Afghanistan, is a vital part of the story. Furthermore, "Af-Pak" - by deleting India - effectively deleted the whole Kashmir crisis from the conflict in south-east Asia. It thus deprived Pakistan of any say in US local policy on Kashmir - after all, Holbrooke was made the "Af-Pak" envoy, specifically forbidden from discussing Kashmir. Thus the phrase "Af-Pak", which completely avoids the tragedy of Kashmir - too many "competing narratives", perhaps? - means that when we journalists use the same phrase, "Af-Pak", which was surely created for us journalists, we are doing the State Department's work.

Now let's look at history. Our leaders love history. Most of all, they love the Second World War. In 2003, George W Bush thought he was Churchill. True, Bush had spent the Vietnam War protecting the skies of Texas from the Vietcong. But now, in 2003, he was standing up to the "appeasers" who did not want a war with Saddam who was, of course, "the Hitler of the Tigris". The appeasers were the British who didn't want to fight Nazi Germany in 1938. Blair, of course, also tried on Churchill's waistcoat and jacket for size. No "appeaser" he. America was Britain's oldest ally, he proclaimed - and both Bush and Blair reminded journalists that the US had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Britain in her hour of need in 1940.

But none of this was true. Britain's oldest ally was not the United States. It was Portugal, a neutral fascist state during the Second World War, which flew its national flags at half-mast when Hitler died (even the Irish didn't do that).

Nor did America fight alongside Britain in her hour of need in 1940, when Hitler threatened invasion and the Luftwaffe blitzed London. No, in 1940 America was enjoying a very profitable period of neutrality, and did not join Britain in the war until Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Similarly, back in 1956, Eden called Nasser the "Mussolini of the Nile". A bad mistake. Nasser was loved by the Arabs, not hated as Mussolini was by the majority of Africans, especially the Arab Libyans. The Mussolini parallel was not challenged or questioned by the British press. And we all know what happened at Suez in 1956. When it comes to history, we journalists let the presidents and prime ministers take us for a ride.

Yet the most dangerous side of our new semantic war, our use of the words of power - though it is not a war, since we have largely surrendered - is that it isolates us from our viewers and readers. They are not stupid. They understand words in many cases - I fear - better than we do. History, too. They know that we are drawing our vocabulary from the language of generals and presidents, from the so-called elites, from the arrogance of the Brookings Institute experts, or those of those of the Rand Corporation. Thus we have become part of this language.

Over the past two weeks, as foreigners - humanitarians or "activist terrorists" - tried to take food and medicines by sea to the hungry Palestinians of Gaza, we journalists should have been reminding our viewers and listeners of a long-ago day when America and Britain went to the aid of a surrounded people, bringing food and fuel - our own servicemen dying as they did so - to help a starving population. That population had been surrounded by a fence erected by a brutal army which wished to starve the people into submission. The army was Russian. The city was Berlin. The wall was to come later. The people had been our enemies only three years earlier. Yet we flew the Berlin airlift to save them. Now look at Gaza today: which Western journalist - since we love historical parallels - has even mentioned 1948 Berlin in the context of Gaza?

Instead, what did we get? "Activists" who turned into "armed activists" the moment they opposed the Israeli army's boarding parties. How dare these men upset the lexicon? Their punishment was obvious. They became "terrorists". And the Israeli raids - in which "activists" were killed (another proof of their "terrorism") - then became "deadly" raids. In this case, "deadly" was more excusable than it had been on CTV - nine dead men of Turkish origin being slightly fewer than a million and a half murdered Armenians in 1915. But it was interesting that the Israelis - who for their own political reasons had hitherto shamefully gone along with the Turkish denial - now suddenly wanted to inform the world of the 1915 Armenian genocide. This provoked an understandable frisson among many of our colleagues. Journalists who have regularly ducked all mention of the 20th century's first Holocaust - unless they could also refer to the way in which the Turks "hotly dispute" the genocide label (ergo the Toronto Globe and Mail) - could suddenly refer to it. Israel's new-found historical interest made the subject legitimate, though almost all reports managed to avoid any explanation of what actually happened in 1915.

And what did the Israeli seaborne raid become? It became a "botched" raid. Botched is a lovely word. It began as a German-origin Middle English word, "bocchen", which meant to "repair badly". And we more or less kept to that definition until our journalistic lexicon advisors changed its meaning. Schoolchildren "botch" an exam. We could "botch" a piece of sewing, an attempt to repair a piece of material. We could even botch an attempt to persuade our boss to give us a raise. But now we "botch" a military operation. It wasn't a disaster. It wasn't a catastrophe. It just killed some Turks.

So, given the bad publicity, the Israelis just "botched" the raid. Weirdly, the last time reporters and governments utilised this particular word followed Israel's attempt to kill the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, in the streets of Amman. In this case, Israel's professional assassins were caught after trying to poison Meshaal, and King Hussain forced the then Israeli prime minister (a certain B Netanyahu) to provide the antidote (and to let a lot of Hamas "terrorists" out of jail). Meshaal's life was saved.

But for Israel and its obedient Western journalists this became a "botched attempt" on Meshaal's life. Not because he wasn't meant to die, but because Israel failed to kill him. You can thus "botch" an operation by killing Turks - or you can "botch" an operation by not killing a Palestinian.

How do we break with the language of power? It is certainly killing us. That, I suspect, is one reason why readers have turned away from the "mainstream" press to the internet. Not because the net is free, but because readers know they have been lied to and conned; they know that what they watch and what they read in newspapers is an extension of what they hear from the Pentagon or the Israeli government, that our words have become synonymous with the language of a government-approved, careful middle ground, which obscures the truth as surely as it makes us political - and military - allies of all major Western governments.

Many of my colleagues on various Western newspapers would ultimately risk their jobs if they were constantly to challenge the false reality of news journalism, the nexus of media-government power. How many news organisations thought to run footage, at the time of the Gaza disaster, of the airlift to break the blockade of Berlin? Did the BBC?

The hell they did! We prefer "competing narratives". Politicians didn't want - I told the Doha meeting on 11 May - the Gaza voyage to reach its destination, "be its end successful, farcical or tragic". We believe in the "peace process", the "road map". Keep the "fence" around the Palestinians. Let the "key players" sort it out. And remember what this is all about: "Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror."

Hezbollah Advances 20,000 Troops to Israeli Border

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 11:09:42 -0600

Source: DEBKAfile

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu keeps on vowing that Iran will not be allowed to establish an outpost on Israel's borders, but he has not lifted a finger to stop this menace ensconcing itself in the north. He cannot realistically expect feeble UN reprimands and the puny French contingent of UNIFIL to blow away the 20,000 Hizballah troops dug in in 160 new positions in South Lebanon, backed by a vast rocket arsenal - even though this is a gross violation of UN Security Council resolution 1701.

Iran's proxy has therefore won the first round of its drive to recover the forward positions lost in the 2006 war and stands ready for the next. Israel has reinforced its border defenses against this massed Hizballah strength just a few hundreds meters away.
...

In one instance last week, French troops on patrol were pulled out of their armed vehicles, their weapons snatched and they were beaten with sticks, rocks and eggs.

This was no spontaneous outburst. debkafile's military sources report that the "villagers" were instructed by Iran's new Iranian commander in Lebanon, Hossein Mahadavi, to hit on the French contingent to punish Paris for supporting the UN Security Council's expanded sanctions for its nuclear violations, while at the same time blocking the peacekeeper's access to the "closed areas" where the new Hizballah bases have been set up.

Tehran nominated a high-ranking officer to Lebanon - Mahadavi's former job was commander of Iran's Overseas Division - indicating the importance it attaches to this volatile borderland. Indeed, if Hizballah gets away with its new deployment in the South and is allowed to make it permanent, the UN force will have lost even this scrappy foothold and Hizballah will be free to carry on its preparations for war without the slightest hindrance.

So much for Netanyahu's pledge, reiterated during his talks and interviews in the United States last week, that in negotiations with Arabs, especially the Palestinians, Israel will never accept any accommodation that permits Iran to set up military and rocket bases on its borders.

The fact is that since he entered the prime minister's office, he and defense minister Ehud Barak have done nothing to hold back the stream of armed Hizballah militiamen flooding South Lebanon, although they are now actively endangering the one-and-a-half million Israelis living just across the border.

If they imagined that UN peacekeepers would suddenly stand up and start repelling this southward tide of men and war materiel, they need only to take note of the tepid UN reprimand last Friday to understand that the Elysee Palace had no intention of letting French troops pick up the Hizballah ball and chase the Shiite terrorists back to their former positions.

Tehran and Hizballah therefore felt they could safely issue a new spate of threats: Israelis traveling anywhere in the world faced kidnap or death in response to a series of hits attributed to their clandestine agencies, such as the assassination of a key Hizballah commander Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in 2008, the deaths of the Iranian nuclear physicist Prof. Massoud Ali Mohammmadi in the middle of Tehran in January of this year, and the Hamas operative responsible for Iranian money transfers to the Gaza Strip Mohammed al-Mabhouh in Dubai nine days later.

Israel responded to the verbal escalation on July 7, by doing something it has never done before: Col. Ronen Marli, chief of the northern border's Western Brigade - the unit which will have to hold off the enemy in the early hours of attack from Lebanon - exhibited to the public aerial photos and intelligence maps recording the new spread of Hizballah forces: He reported 20,000 armed men scattered through 160 village and towns - only in the South, where its presence is prohibited by the UN-mediated ceasefire of 2006. The images did not include the substantial strength Hizballah maintains in central Lebanon and the Beqaa Valley to the east, or its estimated 40,000 rockets and missiles.

The Israeli colonel was of the opinion that an "event (a military attack or terrorist operation) could erupt today or in a year." He admitted it could be a surprise. Adding: "But we are working in different ways to thwart any event and if happens, we'll know how to handle it."

The IDF backed him up with an announcement that Israel is beefing up its strength along the Lebanese border and, the next day, July 8, the Jerusalem center for terrorist threats, published a warning to Israelis abroad, including the United States, to beware of abductions and murderous attacks.

Saturday, a Hizballah spokesman responded: "All three (UN, France, Israel) are preparing something, but we are ready," it said. "Our forces in the South are on the highest level of war preparedness."

Hezbollah is the real military arm of the nation of Lebanon, and it has an ally in Iran, but in no way would this military organization be capable or willing to win a 'victory' in any sense of the word by attacking Israel. For Hezbollah to carry out such an act defies all common sense and provides no strategic value or longer term security. The outcome of such an act would far outweigh any potential benefits. The notion that Hezbollah would preemptively attack Israel at the behest of anyone, even Iran, is a fiction and this DEBKAfile author either knows it and doesn't care, or is caught in the web of violence self justified by the desire to see even parity of position with other nations as a threat.

Israel regularly allies itself with the U.S if it suits its interests, in fact militaries the world over ally themselves with various nations, even organizing bureaucratic structures like NATO to govern these alliances. It is not by mistake that the link between Iran and Hezbollah warrants an alternative definition in the Western media however, since Hezbollah is not recognized by the Western political apparatus as being a legitimate functioning organ of the Lebanese nation, but is instead branded a 'terrorist organization'.

In the realm of political theatre Lebanon has a military, one which proved largely inactive during Israels bombardment and invasion in 2006, and in proving ineffective gave command over to Hezbollah by way of default. The military in most respects fell out of favour with the Lebanese people. It was Hezbollah that defended the nations borders and secured 'territorial' integrity, even providing aid and assistance in rebuilding once the conflict closed.

If Israel is to see every strengthening of Iran's or Lebanon's military capability to defend itself, since both these countries have a considerable gap to mend to become offensively formidable, than war in the area is assured, caught as it is in a loop of poor logic.

The objective evidence proves without a doubt that Israel has been an aggressor nation since its inception, a nation whose mission of colonialism breeds distrust and defensiveness among it's neighbours. If Israel sees its neighbours acting to work in any tangible way to secure their own defense they thus declare it an act of aggression, or war, justifying their own further aggressiveness.

As long as Islamic nations are treated in the context of a double standard regarding their social/economic and political progress they will forever be branded as threats to the status quo, even if all they wish to do is develop internal nuclear based energy production upon which to grow their nations relative prosperity.

Atzmon Deconstructs Zionism and the Humanist Left

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 10:23:36 -0600

Atzmon is a warrior of the truth who has an unflinching ability to unmask circular logic and culturally embedded biases. He understands the totality of control exercised by the ideology of racial supremacy and its maintenance of power within the political/economic corridors of the industrialized world. He does an excellent job of turning the point of inspection towards the assumptions built into the 'liberal left' frame of reference, which he describes as having a supremacy complex of its own; one which declares a moral and ethical high-ground in juxtaposition to cultures that fail to adhere to a 'humanistic' liberal western worldview.

The crux of the matter is that the hypocrisy of the 'left' in its intellectual righteousness is exposed as an atheistic sham, which derives its values from a supposed 'universality' which simultaneously rejects the notion that cultures of various character can co-exist within a sphere of mutual respect. The nature of this liberal intolerance, for that's exactly what it is, is such that it provides a buffer of protection for the transgressions of fundamental human rights inflicted by the empire of conformity upon cultures that will not abandon their 'barbaric beliefs' in favor of a more 'enlightened' system of moral applications.

Source: Gilad Atzmon

Gilad Atzmon is a world renowned saxophonist and musician with a deep political passion for humanist issues and concern for the fate of the Palestinian people. He has written extensively about the issue and been published widely. As a self-exiled, former Jewish Israeli and IDF soldier, Atzmon’s perspective within the raging public discourse on Palestine is relatively unique. His views are bitterly opposed by some among anti-Zionist Jewish groups, who accuse him of anti-Semitism and of being a ‘self-hater’.

Atzmon fiercely resists the charge of anti-Semitism and insists that he is concerned with a proper and thorough examination of the ideology of what it is to be Jewish – in particular about how the notion of the Jews as ‘a chosen people’ has led, as he sees it, inexorably to the rise of Zionism and its present disproportionate influence on world affairs.

Atzmon also takes issue with the Western Left which he believes has failed either to recognize the true extent of Zionist influence (he singles Noam Chomsky out for criticism) and of not understanding how western Marxist/socialist ideologies are incompatible with Islamic societies and therefore can be of no use to them. These and other issues are discussed with him below. There are many things in what Atzmon says below that beg further question and comment but hopefully the exchange has served to illustrate his interpretation of the Palestinian situation and to provide an insight on a less frequently aired or understood perspective.

Miriam Cotton

MediaBite (Ireland)

June 21st 2010

MC: Following the murder and kidnap of unarmed aid activists in international waters by Israel, General Petraeus has said the situation [in Gaza] is no longer sustainable. Though he was in no sense condemning what Israel had done, do you think there may be a beginning of an end to unconditional US support for Israel?

GA: It is actually the other way around. It is Israel that ditches America. Israeli leadership realises that with America in the background the Jewish state won't be able to pursue its next two lethal plans: Nakaba 2 and dismantling Iranian nuclear capacity. Israel realises that if it wants to maintain its Jews only state as a regional power, it must ethnically cleanse the rest of the Palestinians. Israel is also convinced that its only chance of surviving in the region is if it maintains a nuclear hegemony. The USA makes things difficult for the Jewish State at the moment; it tries to slow Israel down. I believe that it is Israel that is leading the conflict rather than being subject to it.

MC: But surely that assessment overlooks some important factors. Nobody can seriously doubt that the US obsession with the region is entirely to do with oil, gas and geo-strategic matters such as Russian and Chinese proximity to these resources, in particular.

GA: This is a good way to put it. However you may also wonder what American interests are, who defines these interests and who shapes them. As it happens, AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) has been pretty effective in shaping American interests; we also know that the Wolfowitz doctrine made it into Bush’s doctrine. For the last three decades Americans failed to see the clear discrepancy between cheap oil and alliance with Israel. They might start to understand it now.

MC: But the Bush family was/is an oil dynasty too - with ties to as many if not more Arabic vested interests as to the Israelis - there are many more non-AIPAC, US vested interests like these than are in AIPAC. Everything the US has done there since the beginning of its so-called 'war on terror' - and long beforehand - has been aimed at securing the Middle East and about energy and other resources.

GA: This is all true. It is also true that AIPAC won’t necessarily interfere with unrelated political matters unless it involves Zionist, Israeli or Jewish interests. However, the Jewish lobby in America and in the UK has managed to shape the English speaking Empire’s vision of its needs and interests. From an American perspective, instead of admitting that American soldiers were actually sent to fight war for Israel, they were told instead that they were sent to die in the name of moral interventionism and democracy. They were actually told that they were ‘liberating the Iraqi people’. How wonderful! The oil and Israeli interests were presented as side issues. As we know, oil prices didn’t drop after 2003. And yet, Sadam Hussein, the bitterest enemy of Israel was removed. In the long run this plan didn’t work for Israel either. Iran had become the unchallenged Muslim leading power. Inshalah it also becomes a nuclear super power soon. This would obviously deter the Israelis from accomplishing its endless imperial aspirations.

MC: There is no other country in the Middle East in which the US and its allies could position the vast military threat that Israel has been made into if they are to achieve their ambitions for the region. The realisation of Zionist ambitions for Israel was and still is a secondary consideration for the US, despite the relatively powerful Israeli lobby.

GA: I am not so sure at all. I actually think that the Zionist Lobby has managed to destroy the American empire. I argue that the Credit Crunch is in fact a Zio-Punch. I argue that Greenspan created an economy boom to divert attention from Wolfowitz’ wars. The Zionists in fact have managed to bring down every super power they cling to. Britain, France and now America. You have to allow yourself to admit that the ‘War on Terror’ was actually a Zionist led war against Islam, a battle that was there to serve Israeli interests.

MC: Israel has been funded and encouraged to develop a nuclear arsenal of several hundred warheads, while the Iranians who do not even have one, but who control a lot of oil, are deemed to be a threat to world peace. Frankly, in these circumstances the Iranians and others would be justified in thinking they need some means of defending themselves against the only real threat at present- and against those who are in fact being the most provocative as well as doing the vast majority of the killing: US-Israel.

GA: This is indeed a very valid point. From an Iranian perspective, nuclear military capacity is a defensive means. The Iranians are constantly under a nuclear threat and so are the rest of the countries in the region and beyond.

MC: Britain and America don't fight any wars that they don't want to fight - not even justifiable wars, unless there is a percentage in it for them.

GA: Are you sure about this, or is that something we all prefer to believe? As it happens both in Britain and America the political parties are funded heavily by Jewish pro Israeli lobbies. Haim Saban, the multi-billionaire Israeli fund raiser for the American Democratic Party said last year that the best way to influence America is through political funding, the media and think tanks. There you go. Even the vision of ‘American interests’ can be no more than false interests when they have been manipulated into an alignment with what are really Israeli interests. At the end of the day, it is far cheaper to buy a western politician than buying a tank. It is far cheaper to recruit a ‘new friend of Israel’ than flying an F15 for one hour.

MC: Israel is essentially a creation of the British and other European powers - and the oil was firmly at the front of their minds even way back then.

GA: This is another myth that people like Chomsky want us to believe in. In fact the Balfour Declaration was there to pull America into the war. It was there to push Jewish German and Russian bankers to change their allegiance from Germany to Britain so they could fund the new American war. Amos Alon presents an embarrassing chapter in Jewish history in his monumental book The Pity of It All. In fact it worked for the British. Two months after the Declaration, America was in the war. This wasn’t about oil. It was another war funded by a Jewish political lobby.

MC: As with many other violent regimes that the US has propped up, the US doesn't care one jot what Israel gets up to with its own people so long as the commercial plan is proceeding towards its goal. The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is just one of the incidental costs that has to be paid to keep the US's bulldog in the region onside. Official US and UK statements after the attack on the aid flotilla were deplorable, with Obama for example declaring the deaths merely 'regrettable'. This was a clear signal to Turkey: do that again and this is what we will give you. Get in line.

GA: America is talking in many voices at the moment. It is confused or may even be lost in terms of foreign policy. Partially because there is a conflict between the American interests and the lobbies that gave the democrats the keys to the white house, namely AIPAC.

MC: US-Israel can no longer get away so easily as it once did with propagandising the Palestinians’ cause as a nation consisting entirely of terrorists nor cover up the increasingly blatant horrors that are being visited on them. What General Petraeus was signaling, it seems, is that a new strategy is needed - one that is less horrifying to world opinion so that they can all get on with business without attracting so much negative attention to the details.

GA: I think that General Petraeus together with his military advisers are realising that America is about to lose its grip in the Arab and Muslim world. At the end of the day, if I need your oil, I had better make friends with you rather than being caught in bed with your biggest enemy.

MC: They obviously didn’t feel that way about Iraq. They have secured what they wanted there so far and next up is Iran. At the same time, it's clear that the US has created a monster, Israel, in the Middle East that will prove much more difficult to rein in than was wanted or even envisaged in some respects.

GA: I agree with most of what you say. However, contemporary liberal democracy decisions are made by elected politicians that are bought by different kinds of ‘friends of Israel’. In America it is AIPAC and major Jewish fund-raisers such as Haim Saban whom I mentioned before, in Britain we had Lord ‘cash machine’ Levy and now the CFI (Conservative Friends of Israel). These pressure groups and individuals are there to suppress ethical reaction within the political system and beyond. However, following the last massacres in Gaza and on the Mavi Marmara, we saw a tidal wave of mass resentment towards Israel and its supportive Jewish lobbies. This is something that could lead eventually towards a cosmic shift also within politics.

MC: A different question - in the Irish version of the Sunday Times on the 6th of June there was an extraordinary article by one of Ireland's foremost journalists, Matt Cooper, which was headlined 'Israel presents a test of diplomatic skills', I kid you not. Cooper begins the piece by acknowledging the atrocity committed by Israel on the Mavi Marmara but subsequently works his way around to recommending what he calls a 'nuanced' way forward that is devoid of morality or of even basic humanity. The murders and all the previous Israeli slaughters that he has just condemned are benched - presumably in the interest of what he calls 'balanced' opinion later on in the same piece. 'Diplomacy' and Ireland’s ‘economic interests’ are invoked so as to finesse the horrific truths of what is really happening to the Palestinians out of the equation or at least into the margins. We are invited to understand the feelings of successive Israeli governments and by implication to compromise with their murderous intransigence after all. He rehearses the same jaded myth that Israel is surrounded by hostility, while ignoring the terror that it has since its incarnation routinely threatened and inflicted on its neighbours and on the Palestinians with all the might of the US military at its disposal - and says nothing at all of the huge cache of nuclear weapons which it has threatened to use against Iran, which has no nuclear weapons.

GA: It is indeed very interesting. Today we learned that Israel insists to probe its own crime. This is maybe the latest phase in Israeli manifested lunacy, arrogance or ignorance. The murderer tells the authorities, it is ok I can look into my own acts, leave it with me. ‘My parents and my cousin can review my acts.’ This is indeed a way to challenge world diplomacy. Will Israel get away with it this time? I hope not. But if it does, it is there to prove to us all again that kosher lobbies are corrupting our ethical perspectives. Considering the fatal danger of a total war invoked by Israel, our leaders do not have much time at their disposal. Israel is the ultimate danger to world peace. It must be confronted with the ultimate measures now.

MC: I don't agree that any sort of preemptive physical attack on Israel would be justified, if that is what you are referring to.

GA: I obviously do not refer to violence here but to some extreme measures of economic embargo, sanctions and cultural boycotts.

MC: To get back to the media, I'm asking what you think about the role the mainstream media has played in promoting the Israeli perspective. Senior journalists throughout the West especially, mostly talk in a register of language and from within a frame of reference that is essentially back to front on this and many other issues: the victims of outrageous Israeli aggression and illegality are described as terrorists for resisting while the most outrageous pronouncements and behaviours are 'nuanced' into an Orwellian inversion of meaning and truth – Matt Cooper-style. Unprovoked aggression is redefined as defensive action to protect ‘economic interests’ above all.

GA: As I mentioned before, Haim Saban states that influence is achieved through ‘political funding, media and think tanks’. You are concerned with media and ideology here. There is no doubt that in the English speaking empire we are facing a battle against a foreign ideology that was very successful in defining our needs, desires and notion of justice. It was also very successful in setting our notion of fear and terror. The neo-cons that were spreading the deceitful ideology of ‘moral interventionism’ via politics and media were largely Zionists with leftist roots. It is actually this ideology that signifies the horrifying shift of Zionism from the limited discourse of ‘promised land’ into global politics - namely ‘promised planet’.

You may want to ask yourself why their ideology was successful for a while, why did we let these people drag us into an illegal war and make us complicit in the murder of more than one million Iraqis. You may want to ask yourself how did the Wolfowitz Doctrine make it into American policy? I guess that ‘moral interventionism’ and ‘war against terror’ look nice on paper. It means that ‘we’ are kosher and the ‘other’ is evil. It took the West and humanity some time to realise that, in fact, we were serving an evil ideology and Zionist interests. It may also take us some time to realise that it is us who have become the darkest force around.

MC: Would you agree, that the complicit mainstream media narrative – which, as Chomsky has so clearly identified always runs in tandem with powerful economic perspectives - has been more powerful on Israel's behalf than ten AIPACs could ever have been?

GA: Not at all because as Saban makes it plainly clear, there is a continuum between the fund raiser, the think tank and the media. In terms of British politics there is an obvious ideological continuum between the Political Friend of Israel (Lord cash machine Levy) the advocates for the war within the media (Aaronovitch, Cohen) and the British neo-con think tank ( Euston Manifesto ).

MC: One of the major reasons the mainstream orthodoxy is being challenged now is because of the advent of the far more democratic, alternative media?

GA: I don’t think so. It is challenged because there is a growing fatigue for Zionist politics, a growing realisation that tribal politics left a deadly stain on British and American foreign affairs. Also, following the second Lebanon war, the Gaza massacre and the latest assault on the Mavi Marmara, there is a greater realisation that Israel is a murderous state driven by morbid enthusiasm. But there is another reason that must be stated. For very many years, the Left blocked any attempt of elaboration on global Zionism and Jewish power. As it happens, aside from the recent weakening of the Zionist cause, the Left lost power within the solidarity discourse. To a certain extent the two political phenomena are linked. As we know, The Left has unfortunately failed to garner the emerging power of Islam and its immense power within the discourse of liberation.

As a result, the Left has been left behind. It is pretty much irrelevant to the discourse. For the Left to bounce back it must learn to think ethically and make a political bond with Islamic movements and migrant communities in the West.

MC: There are a number of things in what you are saying that I would challenge. Firstly, and ironically, somewhat like the Zionists themselves, you place them front and centre of everything that is happening. To disregard the motives and influence of the many other non-Zionist groups who are equally involved with them is similar to the disregard the Zionists show for others.

GA: There is actually again a continuum that you fail to detect between the sense of chosensess that is inherent to Zionism and any other Jewish political discourse and the Zionist political practice which is relentlessly exercised around the world. Zionists do not try to control everything, I guess that they do not care much about tobacco for the time being (this is probably why we cannot smoke freely anymore) but they do care about Western foreign affairs and would use any possible means to shape them. Look at the pressure Zionist groups mount on the American administration with regard to Turkey, Iran, sanctions, attacking the Mavi Marmara and so on.

MC: Not to defend what the US/UK/EU are doing, but to define their role as you do is almost to infantilise them - it is seriously to underestimate how powerful, dangerous and manipulative they are in their own right.

GA: To be honest, they are not as clever as people seem to think.

MC: Nobody sensible thinks they are being clever about any of this, but that they are capable of uncontrolled greed backed up with equally uncontrolled violence.

GA: Actually Israeli violence is far from being ‘uncontrolled’. It is deadly and premeditated. This is the true notion of Israel’s power of deterrence. Back to your question. In fact they do it all in the open. David Miliband, who is also listed as an Israeli propaganda author, was acting against British universal jurisdiction just to allow Israeli war criminals to visit the UK. How do you explain it? Was it very clever of him? Was it very clever of David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen to advocate an illegal war while being also Jewish Chronicle (a UK Zionist outlet) writers? Was it a clever move to support a war that led to 1.5 million dead Iraqis? Is it very clever of Haim Saban to tell the American people ‘we the Jews influence your life through political funding, media, and think tanks’? The answer is no, it is not clever at all. It is an infantile arrogance that is inherent to the chauvinist identity. The success of the Zionist agenda so far has a lot to do with the fact that they operate within tolerant discourses and people like yourself and Chomsky would go out of your way to defend them with foggy ideology. Unfortunately, this ideology doesn’t hold water anymore. As you may know Chomsky is totally discredited. His lame argument against Walt and Mearsheimer, which is similar to yours, puts a big question mark over his entire life time project. This may be a shame but the good news is that the resentment towards Zionism, Israel and relentless Jewish lobbying is becoming a mass phenomenon. It exceeds the political discourse. It is a spirit, it is public and it is refreshing. This may be good news because we always wanted to be there, the only concern is that no one really controls it anymore.

MC: Where have these questions implied a defense of Zionists or Zionism? Merely to say that they are not alone in this or that they do not control what is happening in the Middle East on their own is in no way a defense either of their ideology or of their actions.

GA: To start with it is not a personal debate but and ideological one. However, I guess that failing to confront extensive Jewish lobbying is to provide Zionism with a body shield. You are talking about other American interests. What is so unique about AIPAC, David Miliband and CFI is the fact that right out in the open they promote the interests of a foreign government. Would a Muslim lobby get away with it? Could Iran or Pakistan get away with it? Would Chomsky rush to defend them as well? I really wonder.

MC: Chomsky has been a forthright critic of Israel's - was only recently prevented by the Israeli government from attending an engagement. He has made some puzzling statements but again, I think you ignore overwhelming evidence that contradicts what you say about him.

GA: I have a lot of respect for what Chomsky did along the years. However, as American activist Jeff Blankfort pointed out recently, Chomsky has been dismissing the power of the pro-Israel lobby. He opposed the BDS movement and made some efforts to “dissuade people from using the term ‘apartheid’ to describe Israel's control over Palestinian society”. Chomsky also opposes the Palestinian right of return and a one-state solution. Chomsky is in fact a liberal Zionist as well as a kibbutz enthusiast. This is enough to explain why his voice has been pushed to the margin within the Palestinian solidarity discourse. Considering his contribution on other fields of thought, it is a shame indeed.

MC: There is a lot that could and should be said in response to that but this discussion is not about Chomsky. AIPAC may be feted in Washington and London for now but it will go the way of all those who collaborate with the US in due course. As has been noted many times, US foreign policy makers think nothing of caricaturing former friends as villains when they stop being useful. The Israel-as-lone-defender-of-democracy-in- the-Middle-East myth has been forcefully sold for a long time, it's true, but seldom if ever have the economic and strategic spoils of war been so great.

GA: Why was it useful? Is it because it is true? Not really. Israel has never been a democracy - it is a racially exclusive society that managed to set up a ‘Jews only democracy’. Americans are clever enough to understand it. They went through a civil rights struggle not that long ago and in fact they still do. The deceitful image of Jewish democracy was there to create a phantasmic continuum between the USA and the Jewish State. It is obviously far more complicated to explain to the masses how exactly supporting a hawkish Jewish state in a sea of oil would make oil cheaper.

MC: Isn’t your fundamental mistake in this respect that you are confusing or ignoring much of the quite independent and equally violent avarice of the other vested interests with the extent of AIPAC’s influence, which everyone knows is undoubtedly strong.

GA: With due respect and without claiming to be free of errors, I do not think that you are pointing to any mistake in my reading of the situation. If anything, all I can see is you being reluctant to admit that we had been pulled by an extensive institutional and very dangerous lobby for more than a while. In fact, I know that you and others are holding this position because you want to believe that you are true humanists. I respect it. Indeed one of the most crucial questions we have to confront here is how to say what we think about Israel and its Jewish lobbies and still be humanists. I believe that the answer is to admit that we are confronted with an ideology that dismisses our notion of humanism, kindness and compassion. To a certain degree we are confronted here with a deep challenge: ‘how shall we perform kindness to the unkind.

This is why it is so important for me to maintain that the massacre on the Mavi Marmara was no less than killing Christ again. Regardless of the historicity of Jesus and regardless of the fact that there is NO continuum between the ancient Israelites and the contemporary Israelis, we see here a broad daylight assault on goodness and kindness. This deadly attempt was supported by the Israeli people, it was committed by their popular army and it is still supported by world Jewry except some sporadic Jews such as the Torah Jews who oppose it and obviously are highly respected for it. How do we confront it? Call for what it is. This must be our approach because as far as I can see, the Israelis and their lobbyists interpret your silence or reluctance to use the right language as weakness. If we want to help Israelis we may as well make it clear to them that we actually see through them.

MC: It is important to understand Zionist ideology and to challenge and expose what is inhumane in it. Mainstream western media has been criminally complicit in its refusal to do that. But if the Zionists never existed, the US and its EU allies would be in the Middle East right now, or at some other time, doing exactly what they are doing - as they have done for centuries in many other parts of the world that the Zionists had nothing to do with. Also there are many Jewish people in Israel who have been courageously protesting the treatment of the Palestinians by their own government for a long time and who were very vocal after the Mavi Marmara.

GA: “Many” is just slightly over the top. A Palestinian spokeswomen in London was asked in the late 1990’s what she thought of all those ‘good Jews’, those who support the Palestinians. Her answer was shockingly simple yet revealing. She said, “I admire all these beautiful and kind people, all fifteen of them”. In fact I follow their discourse and I cannot count more than eight of them. I am far from being impressed by the ‘Jews for this’ and ‘Jews for that’. I regard it as a Zionist fig leaf operation. Especially when it comes from Marxist Jews. If they are indeed Marxist, why don’t they just join the working class and fight Zionism along side the rest of us?

I will now go back to your question. What would have happened if Israel didn’t exist? Since we are dealing here with a hypothetical assumption you may have to agree that USA/UK/EU could have also used very different tactics. Britain and America in the past used diplomacy also. If you read the history of Zionism, from the very beginning Herzl was capitalizing on super- power interests in the region. This is even before oil was an issue. So you can equally argue that the way things evolved was inevitable due to the nature of Zionist political philosophy of bonding with influential powers. Israel Shahak would argue that this is the heritage of the Talmud. I argue that this is the exact meaning of the Biblical Story of Esther. In my paper From Purim to AIPAC I explore the continuum between the Bible and contemporary Jewish political lobbying.

MC: At the crudest level of all, Israel may have 500 nukes courtesy of the US, but the US arsenal and its overall military capability is many multiples of Israel’s. No contest.

GA: This is pretty irrelevant, I am afraid. America is or at least was a super power. It was engaged in a cold war. This may explain rather than justify why it has so many bombs. However Israel engaged in a territorial battle with its so called ‘enemies’. One must wonder why it needs atomic bombs at all. If Israel cares about Sderot and Ashkelon as much as it says, it would never nuke Gaza. The answer is pretty devastating. Israel possesses all those bombs because it insists on keeping the rest of the world in a constant threat. In case anyone fails to see it, the rest of the world is what we call humanity. And this is the crux of the matter. We are dealing here with a lethal collective that is driven by deadly psychosis against humanity and humanism.

MC: The Zionists have no monopoly on deadly psychosis towards other groups of people. The native American Indians have told the world a thing or two about the centuries-long psychosis of the Christian settlers there - the misery that led to mass suicides among many other horrors. It's surely fundamentally anti humanist – racist/discriminatory even - to single any one group of people out as being uniquely evil?

GA: To start with we both agree that the Zionists didn’t invent evil. In fact Zionism is an attempt to exercise some colonial barbarism in a world that has moved on from that kind of political philosophy. In short Zionists are guilty of committing colonial crimes 100 years too late. However, you make one crucial mistake here. You say “It's surely fundamentally anti humanist to single any one group of people out as being uniquely evil.” You maybe right, but Zionism is not at all a group of people, it is actually an ideology. In fact it is a racist, anti humanist ideology that must be confronted. Similarly, those who follow this ideology are succumbing to an inhuman philosophy and must be exposed, named and shamed. As you will notice in my writing, I never criticize Jews as Jews or Judaism as a religion. I concentrate on Jewish ideology, namely Jewishness that has a very particular supremacist interpretation of the Judaic core. In my writing I have managed to trace Jewishness in every modern Jewish political setting whether it is right wing Zionism, the pseudo- socialist Bund or the radical Matzpen. However, I must mention that Torah Jews are free of that fault. They draw their inspiration from the Torah and present a very unique form of tribal humanism.

MC: You say the left has failed to embrace the 'emerging power of Islam'. Left wing groups within Islam itself do not seem to be meeting with a good reception by and large.

GA: I don’t understand what you mean by Left groups within Islam. Islam is in itself a philosophy that promotes equality; it doesn’t need Left ideology and cannot integrate such an atheist precept. I guess that what you are referring to is Left groups within the Arab or Muslim world. Indeed, the entire left philosophy is Euro-centric and related to the industrial revolution. These ideas are completely irrelevant to the Near East and its understanding of struggle for liberation.

MC: Outside of Islam, the left can only offer solidarity and encouragement.

GA: I guess that what you are taking about is producing badges, scarves and caps with Palestinian flags. This is indeed nice. I always quote Lacan in that reference. Lacan says that making love is in practice making love to yourself through the other. In that sense, the Left’s notion of solidarity is in practice ‘making love to yourself at the expense of the oppressed’. I am not impressed with this concept at all.

MC: That may be true of certain types of activism but it is unfair to caricature much Left solidarity with the Palestinians like that. The Freedom Flotilla was about a lot more than producing badges and scarves. There are many journalists and activists who have made serious and effective efforts to support the Palestinians from within the left – some who have even given their lives to keeping up vital communication. And besides, the badges and scarves have served a purpose too by making sure we are not allowed to forget.

GA: As it happens I was in Athens and in Nicosia when the Flotilla left. I was working closely with the Freedom Mission, I gave talks and interviews. I was also in touch with activists in Istanbul. I can tell you that the Freedom Mission to Gaza is indeed a very refreshing move within the solidarity movement. The so-called Leftists within this movement certainly are not frightened by Islam or Hamas. They certainly respect the Palestinian democratic choice. I admire them for that and wish I could have been with them on board.

MC: To return to the Left and Islam, however justified Iran may be to perceive Israel as the real Middle Eastern threat; trade unionists are having a pretty hard time in Iran right now, for example. What is it that you think the left can or should be doing?

GA: To start with I do not talk about the Left in Iran, Iraq or Palestine. I am talking about the Left here, in Europe. The first thing to do is to accept the notion of otherness. For instance: to stand up for Hamas as a democratically elected body; to stand up for Hezbullah which presents Israel with fierce resistance; to support an Iranian nuclear project as a necessary defensive means; to support the Muslim right to love their Allah and to fight for freedom in his name. These things are rather basic and elementary. The left must also realise that Muslim migrant communities in the West are the first sufferers of cultural, social, racial and political oppression. If the Left wants to maintain ideological and ethical relevance it must join forces with these ethnic groups. It is also possible that the Western Left has already missed the train; this would mean that it belongs to history.

MC: I really cannot agree with some of what you say here. The Left is generally very aware of the need to respect cultural differences in Islam and has done more than any political grouping on either the centre or right to forge links and to challenge the discrimination suffered by migrant groups. As with Christianity, Judaism and other religions Islam has its faults.

GA: If this is the case, how do you explain the fact that the Left was so slow to accept Hamas? How many leftists support the Iraqi resistance? And what about the Taliban? Do you support any of those? I cannot agree with your statement about Islam and other religions.. You are here employing a typical liberal supremacist approach. You set yourself in an imaginary elitist position above and beyond your subject of criticism. If you want to criticize a body of thought you can only do it by means of deconstruction, by tracing inconsistency within. In order to do it you must first achieve a reasonable familiarity. This is by the way, what I try to do with Zionism and Jewish identity. I am obviously familiar enough to deconstruct different form of Jewish discourses. I am less familiar with the Judaic discourse and leave it out.

MC: There is nothing supremacist in the question – I explicitly say that all religions have their faults – but let me be clearer: women and homosexuals have been oppressed by most if not all religions to a greater or lesser extent. To criticize Islam for the same oppression in no way implies either that the problem is unique to it or that matters are perfect elsewhere.

GA: Miriam you are implying here that while Christianity and Jewish identity ‘moved on’, Islam was ‘left behind’. To be honest with you, I must admit that the dichotomy between the ‘Progressive’ and the ‘Reactionary’ is another symptom of Judaic binary opposition within the left discourse. Progressiveness is just another word for Choseness.

MC: Oppression is oppression the same as occupation is occupation.

GA: I obviously do not agree. Oppression is very complicated to define. Occupation, on the other hand, can be defined in positive terms such as territorial and legal.

MC: There is still much oppression of women and of homosexuals which cannot be explained away as mere cultural difference. Criticisng these things should not be a cultural taboo any more than criticising Zionism should be an anti-Semitic taboo.

GA: Sorry, I do not agree with you at all. There is a clear differentiation between the liberal Western discourse that celebrates individualism and the Eastern tribal discourse that values family, the community and culture. You tend to believe that you uphold some higher ethical system that allows you to pass judgment on other cultural assets that are foreign to you. You are obviously not alone. This is the nature of popular culture within the post Enlightenment discourse. I would argue instead that true tolerance is the capacity to accept even when you fail to understand. I myself obviously treat women and gays with total respect and fight for their equality within my environment. However, rather than criticising certain Islamic cultures I try to grasp its political and religious attitude towards different groups. I suggest everyone who claims to care about solidarity should do the same.

But before we move on, please let me address your last point.

As long as you argue that ‘X attitude towards Y is oppressive from a liberal perspective’, you may be correct, your argument could be valid and consistent. However, once you claim that ‘X attitude towards Y is oppressive categorically’ you produce an argument that is no different from a Neocon or moral interventionist. You basically claim to be better and more ethical than X.

These Issues are not simple. I can provide a solution but I guess that I have managed to formulate the complexity.

MC: How then is this different to your intolerance for what Zionists too would argue is their culture and belief in choseness and all that that has led to?

GA: This is very simple indeed. Zionist crimes are committed on the expense of others.

MC: You say you are a humanist. There is no humanist argument to justify the mutilation of girls’ genitalia and the lifelong misery that it causes to women.

GA: How do you know? Can’t you see that in order to make such a statement valid you have to set yourself beyond and above the human discourse? However, I obviously understand your point of view from a Western perspective. I am very suspicious of any call for moral interventionism. And just let me correct you. I do not carry the humanist flag. I am looking for the notion of humanism. As far as I can tell it is a dynamic notion. Like ethics it must be reshaped and revised all the time.

MC: I realise that not all Muslims endorse FGM. But these things are as sick as each other. Again, there are comparable evils in most if not all religions, societies and cultures – this is not to single Islam out.

GA: I am happy that you mentioned it because as far as I am aware, and I am not exactly an expert on the subject, FGM is not at all prescribed by Islam. However, just to mention that I do not remember coming across Left or Liberal criticism of similar Jewish ancient blood ritual that involves blood sucking and chopping of male infant sexual organ (Brit Mila). As it happens Jewish parents, both secular religious let a Rabbi circumcise and suck the blood of their sons when they are just 8 days old. How do you explain the fact that such a barbarian ritual takes place in our midst? Why doesn’t it provoke outrage? Why you yourself do not protest against it?

MC: It is not possible for a genuine humanist to look the other way wherever inhumanity is occurring, whoever is responsible for it. You are applying a double standard in this, I think. You defend FGM on cultural grounds but describe a comparable Jewish ritual as barbaric.

GA: It is rather obvious that when I refer to a Jewish blood ritual, I am criticising it from a western point of view by means of deconstruction. I live in the West, I tend to understand western ideology and culture and I am capable of pointing to a clear discrepancy between the human rights of a child and blood ritual. However, I am far less convinced that Western liberals possess the capacity to pass an ethical judgment regarding cultures that are remote to Western values and way of life. And yet one question remains – why is the liberal mind so concerned with FGM that is carried out in Africa, and not all troubled by a similar Jewish blood ritual that is practiced in our midst.

MC: To move on to the next question, however. That Muslims – or anyone anywhere - should be free to fight for freedom from violent invasion and occupation is axiomatic for most people, though not for pacifists of course. Invoking God for the purpose has never been anything other than a disaster, has it?

GA: Really? Here is where you tend to express your intolerance towards other’s belief. The greatest symphonies and architecture were actually created in the context of a dialogue with God. Islamic resistance that defeats Israel and Western imperialism whether it is in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza or South Lebanon is inspired by Allah. Why are you so disrespectful to God? In fact, I believe that you are failing to detect the importance of Islam within the context of Arabic and international resistance. It is peculiar but tragically rather common amongst leftists. As I said earlier on, this explains why left lost its relevance.

MC: There are a lot of unfounded assumptions in what you say but we will have to leave it there. This has been an interesting debate. We will have to agree to differ on a number of things. Thank you for the conversation.

GA: I too enjoyed it enormously and I really hope that the difference between us will lead to a further debate and many more realizations.

Peace to Gaza From Ireland

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 17:27:32 -0600

Source: Derry Friends of Palestine

St. Mary’s College in cultural exchange with Gaza Strip primary school…

When the call went through, everyone smiled.

St. Mary’s College had successfully linked up, via live video, with a girls’ primary school in Abasan al-Kabera in the Gaza Strip.
“Salam Gaza,” said the St. Mary’s girls. “Salam Derry,” replied the girls from Abasan Primary School.

Organised by Mr Stephen Crockett (St. Mary’s College teacher) and Mr. Patrick McCourt (St. Joseph’s School teacher), of the Derry Friends of Palestine’s Educational Committee, the event was set-up as a cultural exchange.

It was a remarkable exchange of ideas, stories and songs. Everyone in the room was struck by how both schools mirrored each other.
As Stephen Crockett encouraged his students to speak up, minutes later, so did Gazan teacher, Mrs. Nisra. As the St. Mary’s IT technician instructed the girls to look towards the camera, so did his Gaza counterpart.

The Year Eight pupils of Class A16 at St. Mary’s were given a classroom and all the equipment required to make the live link-up possible. However, because of the continuing Israeli blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip, the girls from the Abasan primary school had to travel to the local university to take part.

St. Mary’s began their performance with a wonderful solo rendition of ‘Ag Críost an síol’ and it was, in turn, met with applause from the young Gazan girls.

Soon after, several St. Mary’s students conducted two simple science experiments. Again, because of the Israeli blockade, the Gazan girls were unable to return the favour because the apparatus required is not allowed to be brought in to the Gaza Strip.

The Derry students continued with a short but impressive presentation on Bloody Sunday. The Year Eight pupils explained what happened on January 30, 1972 and relayed the importance of what happened recently in Guildhall Square when all 14 people who died as a result of Bloody Sunday were declared innocent.

Perhaps the most impressive part of the St. Mary’s performance was the finale. The award winning school choir sang parts of ‘Danny Boy’, ‘The Fields of Athenry’ and ‘I’ll Tell Me Ma’. The Gazan girls loved what they they were hearing and clapped again and again.

After St. Mary’s had finished, a little 12-year-old girl from the Abasan school was introduced and, on her own, sang an exquisite Arabic song about the famous Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

The little girl’s performance was so emotive that it brought Sinead MacLochlainn (Derry Friends of Palestine – Chairperson) to tears.
“I have visited the Gaza Strip before and you come away feeling that the people there are tremendously isolated,” she said. “This is one of the reasons why our Educational Committee organised this event.

“When the little girl was singing her song, I was really moved. I thought it was just wonderful. Although most of the people in the room may not have understood what she was singing about, I think they felt it. It was such a wonderful thing to experience.”

Ahmed Alnajjar (Ministry of Education & Higher Education – Gaza) helped to coordinate the event in Abasan. He praised both St. Mary’s College and the Derry Friends of Palestine for their support and added that they hope to stay in contact.

Mr. Alnajjar made sure to add his support to the findings of the Saville report.

“We, the people of Gaza, have a lot in common with the people of Ireland. When he heard about the Saville report last week, the people of Gaza rejoiced,” he said.

Mrs Lena McMorrow, Vice Principal of St Mary’s College, described the event as exciting and one which they hope to repeat again.
“It was a very exciting opportunity for all those involved. I know a lot of work has gone into the organising of the event and I have to commend everyone involved. It’s a remarkable piece of work and one that I am proud that St. Mary’s is part of.”

Twelve-year-olds Emily Crawley and Caitlin Quigley both took part in the video exchange.

Emily, who was part of the choir, said: “The event has taught me that we are all the same in God’s eyes. I really enjoyed listening to what they had to say

Egypt Refuses to Stop Iranian Aid Ships Destined for Gaza

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 21:43:38 -0600

Source: Ynet News

Kuwaiti paper says Egypt denied Israeli request to prevent Gaza aid ships from passing through Suez Canal

Egypt rejected Israel's request not to assist the Iranian ships slated to sail to the Gaza Strip in the coming days, Kuwaiti paper al-Dar reported on Friday. The report was not confirmed by any official Egyptian elements.

Facts regarding the Iranian flotilla to Gaza are vague and shrouded in mystery. As of yet, it is unclear whether the ships have already set sail, and the number of people on deck is unknown.

At the start of the week Iranian state radio reported that the first ship has already set sail and that another ship was slated to leave this weekend.

According to the Iranian Red Crescent, the ships are carrying humanitarian aid including gifts for the children of Gaza, baby cloths, toys and dolls.

The Kuwaiti report, which cites Egyptian sources, said the officers of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak appealed to Egyptian Intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and asked he prevent the passage of Iranian ships through the Suez Canal.

The Israeli sources argued in their request that Iran supports the Hamas organization, which is a terror group that also operates against the Egyptian authorities.

According to the paper's sources, the Egyptians rejected the Israeli request, and stressed in their response that, due to the international agreements on movement through the Suez Canal, Egypt cannot prevent any ship from sailing through it, unless it is a ship belonging to a state that is at war with Egypt, which is not the case with Iran.

The sources added that Cairo does not wish to be perceived as standing in the way of international organizations and Arab and Islamic states' desire to deliver humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people and break the Israeli siege on the Strip.

Meanwhile, the al-Dar report also cited sources from Iran's Interest Section in Egypt as saying that Cairo has issued entry visas for hundreds of Iranian citizens who has requested to accompany the ships in a land convoy.