By Gary Lord* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

"We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
- Thomas Jefferson, US Declaration Of Independence.

Today, much of the world's most critically important debates are mired in time-wasting, dishonest, pseudo-scientific gobbledy-gook. Politicians and professional spin-doctors muddy the waters with ridiculous, headline-grabbing arguments that do nothing but stall progress. Teams of professional lawyers search for obtuse loopholes to protect their wealthy clients from socially important judgements. Media whores chase rabbits through thickets of steaming prose that grow denser by the day, till the truth is nowhere to be found.

It's time to draw a line in the sand. It's time to agree that certain issues are not up for debate any more. It's time to demand that certain facts be recognised as universal, self-evident truths. And if we can do this, then perhaps, like those who long ago overthrew slavery and imperial control, we can all move forward to a better future.

FACTS

I propose that the following ten facts be acknowledged as no longer worth debating:

1. Evolution is real. The world was created billions of years ago. Modern human beings evolved from ancestors who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago.

2. Man-made global warming is real. Even if the earth is warming partly due to natural processes, there is absolutely no scientific basis for doubt that the earth is warming, and that human activity is accelerating this problem. Therefore, there is absolutely no excuse for not doing everything we can to urgently combat this growing crisis.

3. We don't know the whole truth about what happened on September 11th, 2001, because the US government's 9/11 Commission was a reluctantly organized cover-up. The commission heads were government stooges. Important evidence was ignored or supressed. 48 pages of the final report were redacted. Conspiracy theories have only been able to proliferate because the official government version of events is so blatantly inadequate.

4. Dr Bruce Ivins did not single-handedly orchestrate the US anthrax attacks of October 2001. Robert Mueller's FBI mis-managed the investigation from the start by harassing innocent suspects, ignoring a host of important evidence, and then closing the case prematurely without conclusive evidence after Ivins died. Obviously they did not want to find the real killers.

5. The US-led invasion of Iraq was illegal. Saddam never had any WMDs, nor any ties to terrorists, and the people who made the decision to invade Iraq knew that perfectly well. They lied, they "sexed up" the intelligence, they side-lined the United Nations, and they intimidated or eliminated anyone else who stood in their way.

6. The USA and their international "Coalition Of The Willing" partners invaded Iraq for the oil. There were secondary motives, of course, including establishing a new US military foothold in the Middle East (especially after the USA quietly caved in to Bin Laden's demand to withdraw from Saudi Arabia). But with peak oil looming, control of Iraq's oil resources was always the primary objective. It's no coincidence that the President and Vice President of the USA at the time were both former oil company CEOs.

7. Israel's treatment of Palestinians amounts to apartheid, and Washington supports this because the US government is riddled with excessive pro-Israeli influences. US foreign policy is inordinately skewered towards Israel, and it is only US protectionism that makes international condemnation of Israeli apartheid impossible. US-support of Zionist expansion results in atrocious living conditions for Palestinians, and consequently not just a more dangerous Middle East, but also a more dangerous world for all of us.

8. Corporate media outlets are not trustworthy news sources. They have been heavily complicit in efforts to mislead the public about Iraq, Iran, the global financial crisis, global warming, and many other critically important issues. Moguls who control media monopolies collude with fellow billionaires and government leaders to keep the public confused, misled and uninformed. Rupert Murdoch in particular is as much a War Criminal as George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard.

9. Despite a change of government, the USA still condones torture and holds people without charge in secret gulags around the world. It still spies on its own citizens and reserves the right to kill them without due process anywhere in the world. It still kills innocent civilians of other nations without due concern. All this has been justified by both major US political parties as part of a "war on terror" that has never been clearly defined, and which also has no clear goals. This implies that these illegal and unconstitutional US government actions will persist indefinitely, as will the self-declared "Long War" against anyone they chose to proclaim an enemy combatant. This is not acceptable behaviour for a civilized nation.

10. The richest 1% of people on this planet should not control 40% of the wealth. That's just wrong. Wealthy individuals and global corporations, particularly the financial sector, currently wield massively disproportionate power in comparison to ordinary individuals. This cannot be allowed to continue.

CONCLUSIONS

If we can agree that these ten, simple facts are true, then we are forced to draw some rather horrific conclusions. It's no wonder most people would rather ignore them!

There is a global conspiracy to keep the public uninformed. Such language may sound alarmist, but there is no other way to describe it. The world's super-rich elites have informally bonded together to keep the public ignorant about important issues - including war crimes - that these people just don't want to discuss. As the ten above truths demonstrate, this conspiracy is no longer a "theory" - it is an observable fact.

It is tempting to declare that Western democratic government is no longer functional in any meaningful sense. The social contract between people and government has been broken. The Fourth Estate is broken too. The corporations, the banks, the lobbyists and their employers have taken control of the decision-making process. There is no meaningful oversight or accountability. Even the public debating process is skewed to the point of farce.

Effectively, what we have now is economic class warfare, waged from the top down. Those of us at the bottom, who know what is going on, have nobody to represent us in the corridors of power. We have no real voice in the mainstream media. We are disenfranchised, even as we continue working and paying taxes to support the official lies.

As history shows, people cannot be treated like this forever without consequence.

* Gary Lord is an Australian writer who became politically active when his country spear-headed the illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq. He is working on a book about his experiences as the author of several blogs including Bush Out, Howard Out, and Riding The Juggernaut.

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, who is the Racist of them All
By Dr. Elias Akleh*

It seems that Durban Anti-Racism Review Conference II that started last Monday April 20th in Geneva has concluded with the worthless ineffective declaration with 143 articles calling for the protection of vulnerable minorities, and urging states to combat impunity for crimes of genocide. It also named "neo-Nazi, neo-Fascism, and other violent national ideologies" as dangers that need to be combated. These are routine calls that are not new and are known to every state. More like Durban I there were no solutions, no action plans, no regulations, no laws, and no remedial and preventative measures to racism, discriminations and xenophobia.

A main reason for the ineffectiveness, and some may consider failure, of Durban II is due to the growing number of Western countries blindly joining the US and Israel in boycotting the Conference. This sabotaging boycott started with Durban I conference in 2001 when the US and Israel walked out of the conference after the attempt of the Arab states to define Zionism as a racist ideology.

Although the Durban 2001 Declaration and Program of Action did not include any inciting language against Israel, but asserted that Israel as a state is entitled to security like all other states, American President Obama decided to boycott the conference claiming concern over adopting language from the 2001 final document and its expressions of what he called "antagonism towards Israel". He claimed that participating in the 2009 Conference "would have involved putting our imprimatur on something that we just don't believe." Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and New Zealand followed the American and Israeli suit and boycotted the Conference.

The real reasons for the leaders of these countries boycotting the Durban Conference is their unwillingness to look in the mirror and face their own dark records of racism and discrimination, their inability to show real improvement in their anti-racist and anti-discriminatory records, and most importantly their inability to totally control and manipulate the Conference and its outcome to serve their own interest in suppressing the growing anti-racist movement.

The US has been, since inception, and still is a racist society rather than the melting pot they claim to be. The US was established on discrimination against the Native American Indians and the theft of their land, was built on the backs of the African slaves, and "emancipated" through a racist civil war. America entered wars against many nations and finally fought Bush's "Crusade" war against the so-called Islamic terrorists. The latest election of last November is the clearest proof of its racist division. The fate of the black communities of flooded New Orleans in 2005, and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 show the ugly face of the American racism and discrimination. When asked to identity themselves a majority of the Americans would use racist terminology such as African American, Latino American, British American, Arab American, Jewish American and so on.

Canadians are similar to the Americans; they are originally European occupiers, who dispossessed the indigenous people; the First Nations of Canada. There is also discrimination between the main two occupiers of Canada; French and English.

Australians, originally British occupiers, are no better than the American or the Canadians. They have disenfranchised and discriminated against the Australian Aborigines and had massacred the indigenous inhabitants of the Tasmanian Island. The history of the British colonies, once the sun never set on them, is a clear sign of British racism and discrimination against other people. The governments of the rest of the boycotting countries do not have better records either.

The boycotters said they would not attend the Conference for fears that the Iranian President; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would use the summit to propagate what they claim to be hate speech and anti-Semitic views. Yet Ahmadinejad's speech dealt directly with the source of racism (Western coercive powers he called them and I call them the power elites), who used Zionist ideology to create "the most cruel and repressive, racist regime in occupied Palestine" Israel. European delegates walked out of the conference refusing to face this ugly truth even though many more international delegates stayed and applauded Ahmadinejad's speech expressing their support and conviction of the Israeli racism.

Ahmadinejad's speech was anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic, for these are totally two different things, although Zionists claim them to be the same. Anti-Zionism stands against the nationally chauvinist and religiously racist and supremacist terrorist state of Israel. The majority of Zionist Jewish Israeli citizens are originally Khazars, Russian, European and North and South Americans and not Semitic. The few real Semitic Jews, such as the Iranian Jewish community, who constitutes the second largest Jewish community in the Middle East after Israel, stand against the Zionist Israeli state, and refuse to immigrate to Israel. Zionist Israel is in fact the worst anti-Semitic since it had perpetrated war crimes and genocides against all its Arab neighbors; the real Semites, who lived on the land for thousands of years.

Zionist Jewish Israelis prescribe to a jealous, vengeful, racist, and murdering god, who chooses a small group of people over the rest of his children, who wants to be glorified through their genocidal crimes against other nations, who orders this chosen people to burn villages, commit crimes against helpless children, women and elderly, commit crimes against farm animals and against mother Earth by burning crops, cutting down trees and razing fertile land.

This jealous god (Exodus 20:5) hates all people even his own chosen (Exodus 33:20) and threatens them with annihilation if they don't "serve him joyfully" (Deuteronomy 28:47 - 62) and if they turn to Aryan gods (Deuteronomy 6:15). He orders his chosen people to commit genocide (Samuel I 15:3), fratricide (Exodus 3:27 -28), cannibalism (Leviticus 26:29), robbery and theft (Exodus 3:22), to keep slaves (Leviticus 25:44 - 46), to discriminate against women and to despise children (Leviticus 27: 2- 8), to demand all gold to be delivered to him and fosters avariciousness (Exodus 25:3, 33:5), and he even encourages the torture of animals (Exodus 29:36). Biblical scholar Raymund Schwager has found in the Old Testament 600 passages of explicit violence, 1000 descriptive verses of god's own violent actions of punishment, 100 passages where god expressly commanded ancient Israelites to kill people. Do we then wonder why Israel is a brutal racist terrorist state?

Let us look at some racist quotes of their Zionist leaders. Joseph Weitz, the head of Jewish Agency's Colonization Department, stated in 1940 "between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples (Israelis and Palestinians) together in this country. There is no other way than to transfer Arabs from here to neighboring countries ...all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left". (A solution to The Refugee Problem by Joseph Weitz, Davar, September 29, 1967, originally from "My Diary and Letters to the Children" Massada, 1965, III, p. 293)

Here are some quotes by David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister: "We must expel Arabs and take their place" (Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press 1985), "We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return. The old will die and the young will forget" and "The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British mandate. The Jewish people have another map which our youth and adults should strive to fulfill... from the Nile to the Euphrates".

Menahim Begin, another Israeli Prime Minister, described the Palestinians as "beasts walking on two legs" (speech to the Knesset quoted in Amnon Kapeliok's "Begin and the Beasts"; New Statesman, June 25, 1982. Every Israeli leader and political figure, without exception, had advocated the annihilation of Arabs, including the use of nuclear bombs, and the transfer of Palestinians. Israel's wars against its neighbors express this racist nihilistic policy.

Even Israel's so-called religious rabbis express their racist supremacist inclinations and their genocidal thirst. All rabbis boast of their supremacy as god's chosen people. "Jewish blood and a goy's (gentile's, non-Jew) blood are not the same" explained Israel's rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg (Jerusalem Post, June 19, 1989) inferring that killing isn't murder if the victim was a (gentile) non-Jew. Israeli army chief Rabbi, Brig General Avicai Ronsky, authorized the distribution of religious booklets to the army encouraging them to murder every Palestinians in Gaza. Other Rabbis such as Yisrael Rosen, the director of religious Tsomet Institute, called for "All of Palestinians must be killed; men, women, infants and even their beasts". This genocidal call was supported by Rabbi Mordechai Eliyaho, former Chief Eastern Rabbi for Israel, Rabbi Dov Lior, president of the Council of Rabbis in Judea and Samaria (West Bank of Palestine), and by Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, Chief Rabbi of Safad. The rest of Rabbis in Israel follow suit of course.

Since Israel is described as a Jewish state (absolute racism), it follows that Israeli Jews enjoy special rights which Palestinians and all other Goyim are denied. Israeli Supreme Court recognizes two operational judicial systems in Israel; one for Jews and the other for Palestinians, where laws could be created and modified right on the spot to penalize Palestinians, and to deprive them from the simplest civil and human rights.

Zionists, eventually, succeeded in omitting from Durban Conference Declaration any mention of the late Palestinian holocaust in Gaza, and had toned down the anti-Islamic hatred paragraph so that it would not infringe on freedom of expression, as they claimed. Yet they introduced a paragraph recalling that "The (Jewish) holocaust must never be forgotten".

The Jews had perpetrated numerous uglier holocausts against other nations (Goyim) than they have suffered on the hands of the Nazis. Yet there was no mention of the holocausts ancient Israelites perpetrated against the indigenous people of the Middle East. There was no mention of the holocaust of African slaves, who lost an estimated 99 millions in a span of a hundred years, while being transported on slave ships belonging to Jewish slave traders such as Aaron Lopez, Moses Levy, Moses Seixas and many others. The Carnegie Institute in Washington DC contains authentic incriminating documentation entitled "Documents Illustrative of History of Slave Trades in America" (Who Brought the Slaves to America? By Walter White).

There was no mention of the 100 million Christian Russians who were exterminated by the Jewish Commissars under the orders of Leon Trotsky (a Jew) in 1917-1945. Russian Jews were also responsible for the killing of 65 million other Christians in the Bolshevik Revolution. Ten million Ukrainians were murdered and starved to death by Stalin and his Jewish Cheka (pre-KGB secret police) led by his Jewish brother-in-law Lazar Kagnovitch, who was also responsible for mass execution in Estonia, Latvia and Lethuania, and the murder of three million Moslems in USSR, and the massacres of Cossaks and Volga Germans. All accounted for at least 40 million deaths (holocausts)

All these holocausts, and many others, are well documented historical events, while the Jewish Holocaust is surrounded by many doubts and denials. It is a real perplexing issue that any scientific study of this holocaust is met by resistance and is severely punishable by laws. What happens to the freedom of expression and to scientific research when it comes to Jewish matters? One wonders what secrets such studies would reveal, and why wouldn't they refute these denials by such studies once and for all. What is so taboo and illegal about studying any historical event?

Racist Jewish Israel is the most dangerous terrorist tool controlled by behind -he-scene Western Zionist power elite. Armed with the most devastating Western-made weapons and with its own WMD Israeli government constitutes a grave danger to the Middle East and to the world peace.

* Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer from a Palestinian descent born in the town of Beit Jala. His family was first evicted from Haifa after the "Nakba" of 1948, then from Beit Jala after the "Nakseh" of 1967. He lives now in the US, and publishes his articles on the web in both English and Arabic.

Rahm Israel Emanuel: Will Handle U.S. Domestic Policy for Israel
Dennis Ross: Will Handle U.S. Foreign Policy for Israel

By Mohamed Khodr

"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."
-- Prof. Arnold Toynbee, British Historian

"The nation which indulges towards another---a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. ..a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification ...Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests."
--President George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796

"Our attachment to no nation on earth should supplant our attachment to liberty."
--Thomas Jefferson: Declaration on Taking Up Arms, 1775. Papers 1:201

"I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent interests of the community."
--James Madison, Federalist No: 10: Warning of "Factions/Special Interests" acting against the National Interest

Despite such warnings from our founding fathers against the corruptive influence of a minority "faction/special interest group", our government has nevertheless surrendered, pandered, implemented, paid and died for the vital interests of a small foreign nation, Israel. America has in effect "outsourced" its foreign policy and national interests to this foreign nation to the detriment of its own interests---political, economic, military, credibility, moral leadership, and friendly alliances around the world.
In effect, our Israeli shackled government would rather expend our treasury, our military youth, sacrifice our economic interests around the world, than dare challenge, change, or have the moral and just courage to even allow a political debate on this destructive "special relationship". a nation condemned and despised around the world as a rogue brutal military occupier of an entire people living under its American paid for boots, uniforms, rifles, tanks, bullets, missiles, rockets, cluster bombs fighter jets, access to our latest technology and spy satellites, bulldozers, fences, barbed wires, walls, and concentration camps. The Nazism of Germany and the Apartheid of South Africa live in Israel's policies with our government's full knowledge, support, political protection, and funding. Many courageous people, including compassionate humanitarian Jews in and out of Israel have made this comparison. Israeli men and women like Uri Avnery, Professor Israel Shahak (deceased), Prof. Illan Pappe, Prof. Avi Shlaim, Israel Shamir, Journalists Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, and many others who work for peace and justice in the Holy Land.
"On the morrow of a persecution in Europe in which they had been the victims of the worst atrocities ever known... the Jews' immediate reaction to their own experience was to become persecutors in their turn... In 1948, the Jews knew, from personal experience, what they were doing; and it was their supreme tragedy that the lessons learnt by them from their encounter with the Nazi German Gentiles should have been not to eschew but to initiate some of the evil deeds that the Nazis had committed against the Jews"
--Famed British Historian Arnold Toynbee, "A Study of History"

"What do we have to do with apartheid? Does a separation fence constitute separation? Do separate roads for Jewish settlers and Palestinians really separate? Are Palestinian enclaves between Jewish settlements Bantustans? Roadblocks and inspections at every turn; licenses and permits for every little matter; the arbitrary seizure of land; special privileges in water use; cheap, hard labor; forming and uniting families by bureaucratic"
--Yossi Sarid, Haaretz April 4, 2005, "Yes, it is Apartheid" (former Knesset Member)

"What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it (Israel) did to another people to guarantee its existence...Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?....Somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticize it is to be immediately dubbed anti-Semitic, as if the Palestinians were not Semitic.. People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful".
--Former South African Archbishop Desmund Tutu, "Apartheid in the Holy Land", Guardian April 29, 2002

"Israeli Fascism is alive and kicking. It is growing in the flowerbed that produced the various religious-nationalist underground groups of the past: the group that tried to bomb the Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount, the underground that tried to assassinate the Palestinian mayors, the "Kach" gang, the perpetrator of the Hebron massacre Baruch Goldstein, the murderer of peace activist Emil Gruenzweig, the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin and all the underground groups that were uncovered at an early stage before their deeds could bring them to public notice".
--Uri Avnery, Counterpunch, "Prof. Ze'ev Sternhell's Warning on the Growth of Israeli Fascism-It Can Happen Here (Israel)", September 29, 2008

In launching his presidential campaign, Obama, like all his predecessors, knew that as a democratic candidate the path to the White House must first gain the support and approval of Jewish Americans. Thus in January 2008 he showed his allegiance to the Star of David by writing a letter to U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad (a staunchly Pro Israel Neocon and pusher of the Iraq, Afghan Wars) asking him to vote against a U.N. Resolution condemning Israel's catastrophic siege of Gaza, with 1.3 million Palestinians, an illegal collective punishment that's depriving the population from food, water, medicines, fuel, education, and health care, in direct violation of the U.N. Charter and the Fourth Geneva Convention despite Israel's signatory to both. Obama wrote:

"All of us are concerned about the impact of closed border crossings on Palestinian families. However, we have to understand why Israel is forced to do this. The Security Council should clearly and unequivocally condemn the rocket attacks... If it cannot bring itself to make these common sense points, I urge you to ensure that it does not speak at all"

Pander on Mr. President Elect to the right wing Jewish lobby that controls the very body you serve in, the Senate, as well as the White House. AIPAC usually writes Congressional legislation and resolutions, did they write this for you?

The political, economic, academic, and media power of the Israel Lobby is unsurpassed in the history of America. Jewish monies, amounting to fifty to sixty percent of contributions to the Democratic Party, in conjunction with AIPAC, a most powerful Israeli lobby, ensure that no debate or criticism of Israel ever surfaces. Any who dare challenge Israel's illegal and brutal occupation and theft of Palestinian land pays a heavy price in smears, loss of credibility, employment, even receive death threats

President Jimmy Carter, who gifted Israel with a peace agreement with Egypt, endured the vilest attacks by many Jews around the world, especially in Israel and its second homeland, America, for his book, "Palestine-Peace or Apartheid", to the extent that the he was not invited to attend the Democratic Convention held in Denver.

In a Los Angeles Times interview Carter said this: "A debate in America is an absolutely hopeless dream. "There is not a single candidate in America, for governor, for House of Representatives, for Senate or for president that would dare say anything that was not acceptable to Israel."

Dual loyalty of Jewish Americans has always been a persistent question in political discourse (see Counterpunch article below).

Your choice, Mr. Obama, of Senator Joe Biden was another pandering signal of your allegiance to Israel as he's proudly proclaimed, "I'm a Zionist" in an interview with ShalomTV. During his V.P. debate he proudly asserted that no one in the Senate is a better friend of Israel than him. Speaking to the National Jewish Democratic Council on September 23, 2008, Biden sold his soul, Obama's, and our national interest for Jewish votes and contributions. He said:

"I've spent 35 years in my career dealing with issues related to Israel. My support for Israel begins in my stomach, goes to my heart and ends up in my head. And I promise you, I guarantee you, I guarantee you. I would not have joined Barack Obama's ticket as vice president were I in any doubt, even the slightest doubt, that he shares the same commitment to Israel that I share. I guarantee it. It's that simple. That is a fact."
--Senator Joe Biden; Vice Presidential Candidate

"The Israelis control the policy in the Congress and the senate ... somewhere around 80 percent of the senate of the United States is completely in support of Israel -- of anything Israel wants...."
-- Senator William Fulbright, Chairman Senate Foreign Relations Committee, October 7, 1973 on CBS' "Face the Nation".

"I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy [in the Middle East] not approved by the Jews. [Former Secretary of State George] Marshall and [former Defense Secretary James Forestall] learned that..... Terrific control the Jews have over the news media and the barrage the Jews have built up on congressmen.... I am very much concerned over the fact that the Jewish influence here is completely dominating the scene and making it almost impossible to get congress to do anything they don't approve of. The Israeli embassy is practically dictating to the congress through influential Jewish people in the country"
--Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in February 1957 quoted in Fallen Pillars , page 99, by Donald Neff

"I've never seen a president --I don't care who he is-- stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles your mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what's going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what grip those people have on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don't have any idea what goes on."
--Admiral Thomas Moorer of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington Report 12/1999, p.124 quoting from Andrew Hurley's book, "One Nation Under Israel"

-- AFTER 9/11: "Why do they hate us? Pentagon's Answer

"Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights"
-- US Defense Department's Defense Science Board: (Christian Science Monitor: 11/29/2004). .

A Historic Election:

"In his speech, Obama intends to remove any doubts that the Democratic Party's donors and constituents, many of whom are Jewish, may have about his support for Israel". (Haaretz, see link below)

To say that your election is a historical sentinel event is an under statement. You rose in this nation to the highest office in the land upon the ashes of the millions of African slaves ripped from their land, transported like cattle, bought and sold as property, killed, abused, raped, and hung from gallows; yet in your victory speech you ignored the advocacy and struggle of African American organizations, primarily the NAACP, and civil rights leaders who paved your path to glory and who in tears thanked God that they lived to see the election of an African American, men like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Representatives John Lewis and Charles Rangel, Ambassador Andrew Young, Ida B. Wells, Medgar Evers, Rosa Parks, W. E. B. Du Bois, Roy Wilkins, Julian Bond, and so many others who gave so much so that you can fulfill the dream and the promise of Dr. King's America Odd how in all your speeches you never mentioned Dr. King by name.

But you did mention and thank the two people (both Jewish) most responsible for your successful campaign:

"To my campaign manager David Plouffe, my chief strategist David Axelrod...you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you've sacrificed to get it done."
--President Elect Barack Obama's Victory Speech November 4, 2008

Obama's First Appointment: Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff: "Son of a terrorist".
Will ensure a domestic policy supportive of Israel.

The appointment of Rahm Emmanuel as your Chief of Staff will have immediate negative repercussions in Congress and around the world. Emanuel is a known hawk and Zionist. His appointment will ensure that U.S. domestic policy will benefit Israel. damn U.S. interests. He will be the gateway to all information that reaches you, thus America and the world will understand that only Pro Israel agendas need apply to the White House.

In an interview with the Israeli Hebrew paper, Ma'ariv 11/6/08, Rahm Emanuel's father, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel, said this of his son's influence on you.

"Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel, Why wouldn't he be? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House."

Rahm's father insults all Arabs in this statement but this hardly raises a hair in the media nor was it denounced by his son, nor more importantly by Mr. Obama. Obama condemned and distanced himself from friends who came under deliberate smears and media attacks for "insulting" Jews, but Arabs are unworthy of his support, being the American untouchables. What if this was an Arab insulting Jews, do you think you'll ever be President?

You probably are aware that Dr. Benjamin Emanuel was a member of the Jewish terrorist group, Irgun (led by Menachem Begin) that was responsible for wide ranging terrorist attacks against both the British and Palestinians. Irgun famously massacred an entire village, Deir Yassin. Menachem Begin even boasted of this terrorist massacre of the village in his book "The Revolt".

Rahm Emanuel served as a volunteer in the Israeli Army during the first Gulf War, protecting his beloved Israel, rather than serve in the U.S. military.

In the Israeli paper, Haaretz (11/7/08 "U.S. Jews laud Obama pick of Rahm Emanuel for Chief of Staff")
William Daroff, the director of the Washington office of the United Jewish Communities (UJC), an umbrella organization representing 155 Jewish Federations and 400 independent Jewish communities across North America was quoted as saying: "Rep. Emanuel is also a good friend of Israel, coming from good Irgun Stock".

In the same article another Jewish American leader, Ira N. Forman, Executive Director of the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) said: "Obama made an outstanding selection (Rahm Emanuel) His voting record and leadership in support of the U.S.-Israel relationship are outstanding."

"Rahm Emanuel has a long history of militarist ideology behind him. His father was a member of the ultra-right-wing terrorist organization Etzel that killed British civilians as part of their anti-British struggle in Palestine in the 1940s. Emanuel, himself a citizen of Israel as well as the United States, has been one of several Congressional leaders enforcing the "Israel Lobby" consensus on the Democrats, in the process shutting out the peace voices that believe Israel's security would be better served by the U.S. putting pressure on Israel to end the Occupation, move the Wall to inside the pre-67 boundaries, and remove the settlers from the West Bank or tell them to live there as Palestinian citizens."
--Rabbi Michael Lerner, (barackobama.com) November 7, 2008, "Rahm Emanuel is no Reason for Hope or Celebration", November 7, 2008***

DENNIS ROSS: Will Ensure a Foreign Policy supportive of Israel as he's done under Clinton and Bush.
Your campaign announced that Dennis Ross will be your top adviser on Israel and Iran Ross is now at the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (founded in 1985 by AIPAC's Martin Indyk)). He is also the First Chairman of the newly established Jerusalem based think tank, The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, founded by the Jewish Agency. He was a staunch supporter of the Iraq war. His appointment will be a recurrent nightmare and devastating blow to peace in the Middle East, especially to the Palestinians, doomed to occupation and refugee status as long as our Presidents and Congress have Israel as an albatross around their cowardly necks.
In addition to Ross, Obama's Middle East policy advisors reads like a Who's Who of Jewish Americans, all staunch supporters of Israel at any cost to this nation.
Obama's other key Middle East Advisers include:
* Anthony Lake: Served at Director of the National Security Council under Clinton

* Mara Rudman: Former National Security Council Assistant to President Clinton. Works on MidEast issues.

* Dan Shapiro and Eric Lynn: Advisors and Liaisons to the Jewish community. Lynn was an intern at AIPAC.

* Daniel Kurtzer: An orthodox Jew appointed by Bush as Ambassador to Israel.

* Martin Indyk: Former research director at AIPAC, founding executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, AIPAC's influential think tank. Served under Clinton at the National Security Council on Arab-Israeli issues, Iraq, Iran and South Asia. Served two terms as U.S. Ambassador to Israel.

* Former Representative Mel Levine: Served on House Foreign Affairs Committee, Former Board Member of AIPAC Board, and John Kerry's former Top Mideast Advisor. His Quote: "By every rating and criterion, [Senator] Kerry's votes have shown 100 percent solid support for Israel. That's well understood in his home state of Massachusetts, but not yet throughout the rest of the country."

* Lee Rosenberg: AIPAC treasurer and strong Obama supporter: In an interview with Ynet.com (2/3/08) he was quoted as saying: "Rosenberg says that the Security of Israel "is the global and policy issue that I care most about" and rejects claims that questioned Obama's commitment to the Jewish Stat. . "He's always been a strong supporter of the security of Israel," he says."

From Obama's early political campaigns in Chicago, Jewish monies and support have been at the heart of his campaigns for which he expresses eternal gratitude for the "support of so many friends in the Jewish? community, ?dating back to my first days in public life in Chicago".

Mr. Obama, you've received the most sought after seal of approval in your run for the Presidency, an approval only given to the lucky few who've shown their true patriotic allegiance, no, not to America, but to Israel. You've received the approval of AIPAC, a self identifying lobby group that has thumbed its nose on U.S. law requiring it to register as such. How clever that the acronym, AIPAC, stands for the American Israeli PUBLIC AFFAIRS Committee, and not the American Israeli Political Action Committee.

"AIPAC has stressed? that it is satisfied with Obama's? positions on the Middle East; a spokeswoman recently told the New Republic: "Like all the leading presidential candidates, the senator has a strong record on issues of importance to the pro-Israel community."

During your presidential campaign you've adopted every Pro Israel/AIPAC policy toward the Palestinians, Iran, and the Middle East. Among them.

1. Among the first to support Israel's devastating invasion of Lebanon in 2006 claiming that Israel was simply defending itself against terrorism.
2. Lead sponsor in the Senate of Legislation promoting Divestment from Iran.
3. Among sponsors of the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act of 2007
4. No negotiations with Hamas and Hezbollah
5. No condemnation of Israel's brutal two year siege of Gaza with 1.3 million people.
6. No Palestinian "right of return"
7. Strong supporter of more aid to Israel.
8. Jerusalem as an undivided eternal capital of Israel (slightly backtracked on this)
9. While condemning Iran's nuclear program (Iran signatory to Non Proliferation Treaty) supports Israel despite Israel's 200 -300 nuclear weapons and a non signatory to the NPT)

Missing from your pandering speeches to AIPAC and Jewish organizations was any mention of the Arab Peace Plan, land for peace formula, occupation, illegal settlements, settler violence, Israeli human rights abuses, violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, total siege of Gaza, thousands of Palestinian prisoners, including children, and just as importantly---Israel's direct violation of Section 4 of the U.S. Arms Export Control Act that stipulates that American weapons can legally only be used for internal security or self defense. Israel's decades' long bombing and killing of civilians by American weapons clearly violates this law, but no government has had the courage to challenge Israel. History and experience say that like all your predecessors (with exception of Eisenhower) you won't dare either. .

In fact, Mr. Obama, I can guarantee that five days after your inauguration, January 27, 2009, you will join most of Congress and your administration officials in celebration of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day established by the United Nations in 2005 at the behest of the Bush Administration. Perhaps you'll be at the U.S. taxpayer built and funded Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum. No other historical holocaust is so recognized and funded by us, the taxpayers.

Your immediate abandonment of "CHANGE" soon after you were elected is already disturbing and bodes ill for your presidency. You're potential appointees are mostly recycled Clinton officials who are primarily Pro Business, and Pro Israel Jews who offer you protection from the fabricated "Jewish Problem" raised against you by right wing Jewish organizations and individuals.

According to the New York Times, "The New Team" (November 12, 2008) the Jewish Americans listed below, among others, are being considered for senior administration positions. Each can have an important policy impact on MidEast policies, including the educational programs in American schools regarding the possible obligatory teaching of the Holocaust and the marginalization of programs on Arabic, Muslim culture, Islam.

* Richard J. Danzig: For a senior Pentagon position

* Joel Klein: For Secretary of Education. Klein was Superintendent of the New York City School System who succumbed to a ruthless Jewish lobbying group and Pro Israel media pressure to fire Debbie Almontasar, a Muslim educator and principle of a school slated to teach Arabic and MidEast culture. The school was attacked as a "Madrassah" for Jihad, Holy War and militant Islam. Klein replaced her with a Jewish principle. Danielle Salzburg. What else will Klein as Secretary of Education succumb to under the powerful Jewish lobby and media?

* James Steinberg: For Director of the National Security Council

Due to your obvious intimidation by the Israel Lobby regarding the "Anti Israel" position of two Non-Jewish but prominent foreign policy experts, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski and Mr. Robert Malley, both serving at your request on your foreign policy advisory team, you shamelessly dismissed Dr. Brzezinski's role as your advisor, an honorable man who's served this nation with high distinction while accepting Mr. Robert Malley's resignation, a highly respected diplomat.

If this is how you respond to pressure from the Israeli Lobby during a campaign, how much of our national interest will you sacrifice to their demands?

You're being warned not to mess with Israel and its powerful Lobby given their domination of Congress, Israel's second Knesset.

"Even if, in an impossible-to-imagine worst-case scenario, Obama wanted to fundamentally change the US-Israeli relationship, it is unlikely he would be able to do so" Why? In the article Eran Lerman, Director of the Israel and Middle East Office of the American addressed the issue by saying: "To do that, he is going to need to go to Capitol Hill and build coalitions. And coalition-building in Washington is good for Israel because Israel has many friends on the Hill".
--Jerusalem Post, November 7, 2008, Analysis: So, nu, can we?

"Will Obama be able to take the One-Jerusalem/Israel-first crowd for granted as he wheels around Jerusalem and Tehran? No. As my commenters point out, these elements are deep in American Jewish life; and we're not talking about just voters, but the Jewish establishment, or to be precise the Zionist constituents of the American power structure, from the media to the think tanks to the big-money zip codes of 10022 and 90210....he apartheid conditions in the West Bank are destroying the Jewish state, and that the Israel lobby is standing in the way of progress.....Neo-conservatism really means "transfer." Ethnic cleansing.
-Phillip Weiss (Phillip Weiss website), October 17, 2008

"He (Obama) will have to tell Israel a few home truths: that America can no longer remain uncritical in the face of Israeli army brutality and the colonisation for Jews and Jews only on Arab land. Obama will have to stand up at last to the Israeli lobby (it is, in fact, an Israeli Likud party lobby) and withdraw Bush's 2004 acceptance of Israel's claim to a significant portion of the West Bank. US officials will have to talk to Iranian officials - and Hamas officials, for that matter. Obama will have to end US strikes into Pakistan - and Syria".
-Robert Fisk, U.K. Independent, Obama Has to Pay for Eight Years of Bush's Delusions. He will have to get out of Iraq, and he will have to tell Israel a few home truths, November 8, 2008

"The negative (Jewish) campaign glossed over Obama's deep ties in the Chicago Jewish
Community and how he has picked a preeminently pro-Israel foreign policy team"
--Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 5, 2008

.
Mr. Obama, after your victory you called the leaders of nine nations among them Israel, naturally. Yet despite our economic, energy, and credit crisis you did not see fit to call one Arab leader in the Middle East, the very region we and Europe called upon begging for increased oil production, their money and investments to shore up our banks and financial system. Despite American, British, and Israeli bombs killing innocent Muslims, these cowardly pandering dictators called you. While their banks are failing their priority is saving American banks.

America and the world have laid their anguished and frustrated hope in your hands for peace and prosperity after the hell Bush/Cheney/Neocons and Israel created around the world. Yet you start with a hand sullied and biased toward special interests, both domestic and foreign, the very groups you promised to end their influence.

Will you have the courage to be America's president, a president of all Americans, Jews and Gentiles, a president for America's interests, not Israel's, a president who will heed the warnings of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison not to have a "passionate attachment" to any foreign nation, to avoid "foreign entanglements" that sabotage our interests, to end the influence of "factions", i.e. special interests that dominate our national policies?

I for one will go against the tide of Obamaphoria and predict that as far as foreign policy is concerned, especially in the Middle East, you will fail, for America is always ten steps behind the brilliant and inflammatory military and political machinations of Israel and its lobby.

As Ariel Sharon said: "The Arabs may have the Oil, but we have the matches".

To pay for your domestic programs you will depend entirely on borrowed money. Given the severe financial crisis, astronomical deficits, and debt of our government thanks to the influence of special interest groups, both domestic and foreign, you'll have a very small window with which to maneuver to pay for a semblance of your domestic programs.

But rest assured, given the apathy and disinterest of our population, you can succumb to these special interest groups without a beep from our citizen spectators who put more thought into sales and football games than the future of their children.

Let's meet four years from now and you can prove me wrong. In the meantime hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims will continue to die at the hands of an Imperial Western-Israeli alliance---the true Axis of Evil. Welcome to another Israel Apartheid Wall---The Washington D.C. Beltway.

Recall the words of the man most responsible for your election as an African American:

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy"
--Dr. Martin Luther King, Strength to Love, 1963

Sources for Article:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp
(George Washington's Farewell Address 1796: Warning of a "Passionate Attachment" to a Foreign Nation)

http://www.dailynewscaster.com/2008/08/24/joe-biden-i-am-a-zionist/
Joe Biden Video: "I am a Zionist", September 23, 2008

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6640.shtml
"Obama Pivots Away From Dovish Past
Larry Cohler-Esses, The Jewish Week, 8 March 2007

http://www.forward.com/articles/14018/
"Obama Campaign Appoints Adviser To Coordinate Jewish Outreach"

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/10/0082187
("Obama's Jews": Harpers; October 2008)

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/826665.html
"In his speech, Obama intends to remove any doubts that the Democratic Party's donors and constituents, many of whom are Jewish, may have about his support for Israel".

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3513083,00.html
(Lee Rosenberg's interview on Barack Obama's commitment to Israel)

http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/obama_on_zionism_and_hamas.php
"Obama on Zionism and Hamas", May 12, 2008 (Interview with Jeffrey Goldberg)

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1211288137944&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
"Obama the Zionist", May 21, 2008

http://origin.barackobama.com/issues/foreign_policy/#onisrael
(Obama/Biden on Israel)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rahm_Emmanuel
(Rahm Emanuel Brief Biography)

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2008/04/israel-sittin-1.html
(interview with President Carter)

http://www.counterpunch.org/christison09062004.html
"Dual Loyalties: The Bush Neocons and Israel"
By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON
Former CIA political analysts

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html
"The Israel Lobby" by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

"For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby'. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country - in this case, Israel - are essentially identical."

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2008/01/24/obama-gaza-siege-forced-on-israel/
"Obama's Letter to U.S. Ambassador to U.N. "Gaza Siege "Forced on Israel"

http://jews4obama2008.wordpress.com/barack-obamas-breakfast-on-feb-24-2008-with-ohio-jews/
(SEE: Barack Obama's Breakfast Speech on February 24 with Ohio Jews)
"He then said that he will carry with him to the White House "an unshakable commitment to the security of Israel and the friendship between the United States and Israel. The US-Israel relationship is rooted in shared interests, shared values, shared history and in deep friendship among our people ... I will work tirelessly as president to uphold and enhance the friendship? between the two countries.": Barack Obama??

http://jta.org/news/article/2008/10/28/110913/mccainobamaadvisers
"A look at Obama and McCain advisers", By Ron Kampeas * October 28, 2008

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=what_does_it_mean_to_be_the_proisrael_candidate
Article: ""What Does It Mean To Be the Pro-Israel Candidate?"
"The major candidates in both parties seek the "pro-Israel" label. Now is the time to debate what it means to support Israel, so that a year from now, elected leaders will be able to refer to publicly recognized ideas to justify acting more sensibly".
--Gershom Gorenberg | January 18, 2008

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/us/series/the_new_team/index.html
"Obama: The New Team"

http://jews4barack.com/mythfacts/?cat=20
Joe Biden's Speech to Jewish Americans. Obama like me totally supports Israel

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/nyregion/28school.html
"Critics Cost Muslim Educator Her Dream School: Role of Joel Klein, Superintendent of NYC Schools: now considered for Secretary of Education)
*** [Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine http://www.tikkun.org, chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives http://www.spiritualprogressives.org, author of 11 books (most recently the 2006 national best-seller The Left Hand of God) and as a member of Rabbis for Obama recently debated Bill Kristol about how Jews should vote in the election.]
http://www.aipac.org/about_AIPAC/default.asp (From AIPAC's own website: A Lobbying Group)
"As America's leading pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC works with both Democratic and Republican political leaders to enact public policy that strengthens the vital U.S.-Israel relationship".

http://www.newstatesman.com/200105140019
(Source for Ariel Sharon quote: "Arabs may have the oil....)
--John Pilger: "The big threat in the Middle East is Israel, not Iraq: it could play the nuclear card to blackmail the Americans", May 14, 2001

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Author: Mohamed Khodr is a political activist who frequently writes on the plight of Palestinians living under the brutal occupation of Israel, U.S. Foreign Policy, Islam, and Arab politics.

Jones, a wealthy financier, had on many occasion in the good old days - when trains were flourishing and coaches were the last word in technological luxury - crossed the continent by Pullman. He was well known and well served and was accustomed to every convenience, particularly when dining. Imagine his exasperation, then, when it turned out that the chef did not have tutti-frutti ice cream.

"No tutti-frutti?" he shouted. "I always have tutti-frutti."

"I'm sorry, sir," said the waiter, soothingly. "We have chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, black walnut, cherry, mocha almond -"

"I want tutti-frutti," cried Jones, banging the table and turning red. "I have always had tutti-frutti and I won't have anything else."

For miles he muttered, scowled, growled, and snarled at everyone, so that every train employee on board had visions of angry reprisals. Finally, the train stopped at a station; a word to the conductor kept it there while the crew scoured the town for tutti-frutti ice cream.

A whole pint of the dessert was found and all of it was presented to Jones, with huge gobs of cherry sauce on it, together with a sliced banana and a swirl of whipped cream.

"Here is your tutti-frutti ice cream, Mr. Jones," said the quaking waiter.

Jones looked at it with a scowl, then with a sudden swipe of his arm hurled it to the floor, shouting, "I'd rather have my grievance!".

The following is from the late science fiction author and polymath Isaac Asimov who adds, "And how many of the world's miseries are caused by people who won't be consoled because they would rather have their grievances. And how many speeches on the Middle East situation of the sixties and seventies might profitably [have begun] with a story like the one above".

Art attack

by Peter Kennard | New Statesman | 17 January 2008 (cross-posted at peoplesgeography.com)

Banksy attracts the press attention, but around him is an increasingly influential movement of political artists operating outside the mainstream
The phone rings; the number is withheld. It's Banksy. He wants to know whether I can go to Bethlehem over Christmas. He is putting on an exhibition, bringing together like-minded artists from all over the world to raise awareness of the situation in Palestine. Like the annual guerrilla art shows that have taken place in London for the past six years, it will be called "Santa's Ghetto". Two weeks later, I find myself involved in an experience that transforms my ideas about what artists can do in the face of oppression.

We are living through an exciting time for political art. I have been an artist for 40 years, and my work has always focused on political and social issues. In the 1970s, I started making photo montage work, drawing on imagery from the Vietnam War and the row over nuclear armaments (a retrospective opens at the Pump House Gallery this month). Since the build-up to the Iraq War in 2002, I have been collaborating with a younger artist, Cat Picton Phillipps, developing new techniques and using digital technology to expose the lies that led to the invasion and the subsequent humanitarian disaster.

Over this period, our work has become linked to a group of young artists who work outside the official art world. Most of them started out painting graffiti on walls. The central figure in this group is Banksy, but although he attracts most of the press coverage, he is surrounded by a growing band of talented, politically committed artists. Our associates come from Spain and Italy, the US, Britain and Palestine. Since the era of the Bush/Blair war in Iraq, this movement has become increasingly politicised, just as my generation was politicised by the war in Vietnam. These are artists who want to connect with the real world, rather than work for the market, which has more of a stranglehold on art than ever. They combine creativity with protest, insisting that art should be more than the icing on the cake for the super-rich.

We arrived in Bethlehem with four fellow artists: Blu, an Italian who has painted on walls from Bologna to Buenos Aires; Sam3, from Spain; the long-standing Banksy collaborator Paul Insect, from Britain; and Gee Vaucher, another Brit and the only other artist of my generation. The rest are all in their thirties and come from street-art backgrounds. All of them are well informed about the Middle East and came to Bethlehem to show their solidarity with the Palestinians.

Banksy had been to the West Bank a number of times to paint on the Separation Wall. He knows and understands the situation and had a team of focused, sussed people working with him. They found a disused fast-food joint in Manger Square and managed to rent it. The idea was to show a combination of western and Palestinian artists. The art was available to buy on site only, so if you wanted to get hold of the latest Banksy or any of the other artworks, you would have to travel to Bethlehem to place a bid. This was important, because Bethlehem is being starved of its tourist trade as visitors are bussed in to see the Church of the Nativity and bussed out an hour later back to Israel. All proceeds from the sale, which exceeded $1m, went to local charities.

For our contribution, Cat and I decided to print a dollar bill across 18 sheets of the Jerusalem Post, ripped through to expose images of pre-Naqba Palestine. The pictures show the richness of Palestine's history and the diversity of its culture - a sobering antidote to the stereotype of a violent, irrational people that we so often see on the news. We wanted to make the work in Bethlehem because taking finished pieces over would be difficult, given Israel's heavy and ever-changing restrictions on what and who can travel in to the Palestinian territories.

We teamed up with a group of Palestinians, who helped to get hold of materials and sort out logistics. They also gave us all a window on life in the West Bank, with looming Israeli settlements and endless checkpoints. Every night we would pile into a kebab restaurant, where we would drink and dance, arguing over and discussing that day's work. One night over dinner, the Palestinians recounted how they had been held and tortured by the Israeli authorities while they were still in their mid-teens. It was extraordinary how welcoming they were to this motley band of artists. All the privations and restrictions have only increased the Palestinians' resilience and their desire to communicate with the outside world.

Through these friends we found a commercial printing house in Hebron, which got involved in sorting out our highly unconventional printing needs. This involved printing a giant dollar across many sheets of newspaper and also making a giant print to plaster on the Separation Wall. The printers immediately committed their time and energy to the project, and ended up printing for Banksy and the other artists.

Through this process of making, the people of Bethlehem became involved in what the work was saying. After we pasted our picture on the wall, we went for tea in the cafe opposite. The cafe owner, whose business has been destroyed by the wall, told us he appreciated the statement we had plastered on to the cement that he has to stare at every day of his life.

Sticking up a poster or painting the Separation Wall in the West Bank might sound inconsequential, but these are highly practical ways to help, in contrast to the intellectual interventions prevalent in much contemporary art. They contribute to a town and a people that are having their lifeblood strangled out of them.

In this context, it is important that the work communicates directly to the Palestinian people. While there has been a move to take on contemporary issues in a direct way in the theatre, in visual art the idea still holds that if you have something to say about the world, you have to hide it behind theory and obscurity. It sometimes seems that Britain's art colleges turn out experts in camouflage, rather than fine art.

The pressure of world events is so great that it is increasingly difficult to sustain the idea of art for art's sake. Radical art and politics converge in times of crisis, and that is happening now. I know, from my experience as a tutor at the Royal College of Art and at the University of the Arts in London, that the ironies of the Nineties YBA movement are now a thing of the past. Many art students and young artists are searching for ways to make a direct connection between their awareness of how things are in the world and their own art practice.

This involves thinking about not only the form of the art itself, but also the process of making. There are many collaborations taking place across media and disciplines, and artists are looking for new methods of distribution.

Unlike in my youth, there is no organised "left" into which artists can slot, but there is a concrete wall, 425 miles long, and we can turn it into an international canvas of dissent.

Four to watch

Blu burst on to the public-art scene after the success of his contributions to the "Urban Edge" show in Milan in 2005. His reputation is built on expansive, surreal, often aggressive wall and pavement murals. Though renowned for his playfulness, acclaimed pieces from 2007, such as Fantoche in Switzerland, Letter A in New York and Reclaim Your City in Berlin, have a more macabre tone.

Suleiman Mansour co-founded al-Wasiti Art Centre in east Jerusalem, which he now directs, and went on to lead the New Vision artists' group, which proved influential during the first intifada. A pioneer of resistance art, Mansour makes work that revolves around the Palestinian struggle. He was head of the League of Palestinian Artists for four years, and won the Nile Award at the 1998 Cairo Biennale as well as the Palestine Prize for the Visual Arts the same year. He is famous for using locally sourced materials, such as mud and henna, in his pieces.

Sam3 (Samuel Marín) comes from Granada in southern Spain, where his ephemeral long, black silhouettes haunt the cityscape. Famous works include his 12 Shadows project for AlterArte and the iconic Erase Yourself, a silent protest against the civic legal authorities for removing graffiti in Barcelona.

Paul Insect is a London-based ex-designer whose pioneering of "steampunk", a mixture of Gothic Victoriana and futuristic themes, has proved popular with the British arts intelligentsia. In July last year, Damien Hirst bought his entire "Bullion" show at the Lazarides Gallery in Soho. His painting Unicorn sold for an estimated £24,500 at Sotheby's last month.

Ben du Preez

By Régis Debray, Le Monde Diplomatique

Foreword from the journal: Last year President Jacques Chirac asked Régis Debray to study the situation in the Middle East. On 15 January 2007 Debray sent the French authorities the following document on Palestine. It is an important key to understanding a long policy drift whose results are now obvious.

How the world backed itself into a corner

Dennis Ross, formerly the United States envoy to the Middle East, admitted back in 2000 that mistakes had been made in the 1978 Camp David accords: the diplomatic process had not taken enough account of developments on the ground, especially the settlements. The number of Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories doubled from 1994 to 2000. As many Israelis have settled in the West Bank since the Oslo accords of 1993 as in the previous 25 years. With an international conference again being discussed, it would be a mistake to continue to ignore the real state of affairs. There is no need for a committee of inquiry. The report has already been drawn up, many times over. No conflict in the world is as well documented, mapped and recorded.

The OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), a United Nations agency, keeps up-to-date, detailed maps of the disputed territories, with photographs, population counts and graphs. It takes an hour to look at them, but doing so might forestall some of the never-ending statements of good intentions.

The maps show that the physical, economic and human basis for a viable Palestinian state is disappearing. The two-state solution and Israeli writer Amos Oz's "fair divorce" (a territory shared between two national homes, one smaller than the other and demilitarised but sovereign, viable and continuous) are now empty phrases belonging to the realm of might-have-been. Some might argue that we have not yet reached the point of no return and that the Israelis may have won the territorial battle (with only 22% of British mandate Palestine now outside their control) but the Palestinians are sure to win the demographic battle. They invoke the resilience of the local population in the face of the steam roller that is slowly but surely implementing the 1968 Allon Plan and the 1984 "Road Plan 50".

It is clear from developments on the ground that:

• the purpose of the security wall is not, as is believed, to trace a border that, however illegal (since it encloses over 10% of the West Bank), will at least serve as the dotted line for a future international frontier;

• it is true (as Ehud Omert said on Israeli army radio on 20 March 2006) that Israel's strategic border lies on the Jordan: the whole valley has been declared a forbidden area and the intervening area has been nibbled away (cross-river transit is only possible at certain points);

• the new east-west bypass roads built at the expense of the old north-south axis clearly chart a territory in the process of annexation, with space for three or four Arab bantustans (Jenin, Ramallah and Jericho). The exhaustion of natural resources in these overcrowded enclaves will eventually lead to massive emigration (much of the elite, especially Christian, has already left); and

• with the construction of the separation wall, the ongoing judaisation of East Jerusalem and reconfiguration of the Jerusalem municipality, the UN's repeated but purely formal condemnations have no effect on Israel's grip on the whole city (1).

Away from the cameras

There is a huge gap between what is said because we want to hear it (local withdrawals, easing of travel restrictions, removal of one checkpoint out of 20, a change of tone) and what is being done on the ground, which we don't want to see (interlinking of settlements, construction of bridges and tunnels, encirclement of Palestinian towns, expropriation of land, destruction of houses). Some would describe that gap as duplicity, others as ambiguity. The gradual encroachment happens out of sight of the cameras, without causing a stir and without an explicit colonial diktat. Nobody makes a formal complaint, even supposing they can find out what's going on – difficult if you haven't grown up locally. Israeli maps and school textbooks refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria and, following the Knesset's recent rejection of a proposal from a Labour education minister, obliteration of the 1967 green line is now a legal fait accompli.

This is not just a gap between the de facto and de jure situations. It reflects a method and tradition going back to the earliest days of the Yishuv (2): the strategy of fait accompli. That strategy has always paid off: the Jewish state was there before it was declared and recognised in 1948, as was the army. What we have is a theatre with two stages: on the international stage we hear repeated vague and encouraging speeches concerning withdrawal, coexistence and a Palestinian state, but the things that count (settlements, roads, tunnels, water tables) happen on the operational stage next door, where the outcome is decided out of public view.

Understanding how public opinion works in a democracy, successive Israeli governments of the left and right take care to administer regular painkillers, plans for unilateral withdrawal or the partial dismantlement of settlements and encouraging announcements that are always conditional and come to nothing. The media live from day to day, with no attempt to remember. Who now recalls that the road map (3) was supposed to be "a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005"?

The Oslo process did not just remain a dead letter: with the military reoccupation of Zones A and B (4) in April 2002, it went into reverse.

Territorial fragmentation cuts off local authorities from any possible central Palestinian administration and from each other, while the systematic physical destruction of national institutions, Palestinian infrastructure and political leaders by the Israeli army ensures internal anarchy and the spread of clans and gang violence: bottomless chaos. Clearly the path that has been taken is not that of nation building but the deconstruction of all possible governance beyond the separation wall. It is the logical counterpart of a 30-year annexation process that will be endorsed, when the time comes, "in view of the new reality on the ground".

Autosuggestion

In these circumstances, constant invocation of the road map by all parties has more to do with autosuggestion than a sober look at the consistent transformation of reality. That reality may not be visible from Geneva, Paris or New York, but it is immediately apparent to anyone travelling throughout the country after a few years' absence. It is a land carved up by military force, where the Israeli settlements are no longer shapes on a Palestinian background – instead the Palestinian areas appear as shapes on a solidly-infrastructured Israeli background: a land where water reserves are confiscated and a temporary travel restriction is very close to a permanent ban.

Some may take comfort in these ideas:

• since it was possible to withdraw settlements from Gaza, it should be possible in the near future in the West Bank. That is to ignore the fact that the withdrawal of 8,000 settlers from one place in Gaza was soon followed by the unpublicised installation of 20,000 settlers in another (the West Bank/Jerusalem). Gaza is not part of the promised land, whereas Judea and Samaria are its backbone. Sharon did not make any secret of the fact that withdrawal on the margins would be compensated by strengthening the Israeli presence elsewhere (438,000 settlers to date, including 192,910 in East Jerusalem);

• the dismantling of four small settlements in the north (1,000 settlers) and the proposed concentration of 60,000 settlers in the most populous blocs, Maale Adumim, Ariel and Gush Etzion, will create a free space. But with the settlements linked in a continuous string under cover of the security wall, the West Bank has been effectively cut in two. The wall separates Palestinians from each other even more than it separates them from the Israelis.

What is taking shape is not the Palestinian state announced and desired by all: it is an as yet unperceived Israeli territory enclosing three self-governing Palestinian enclaves.

All parties have a vested interest in preserving the international pretence (5). For the Israelis, history is being created under the cover of the pretence. The Palestinians cannot be told the truth – they are under occupation yet hoping for a better life and not self-destruction; wishful thinking provides notables, elected representatives and officials with a living, status, dignity and a raison d'?tre. The Europeans chose to salve their consciences by providing financial and humanitarian aid to apologise for their political passivity and voluntary blindness. The thinking of the Americans owes more to the Old Testament than the New; their link with Israel is a parent-child relationship beyond criticism. This shared illusion of self-protection results from the coincidence of opposing interests.

Is this situation tenable to the end of the century? It seems doubtful, given Israel's obsession with security, which makes it less secure, and its disregard for the demographic and religious trends in the region (6). Could not at least one European government convey to our Israeli friends that we are not all taken in by the deception, and that those who deceive may not be be its first victims – but will certainly be its last?

I have been invited to Haiti by “Haiti Solidarity” so am off there shortly. I will be staying and meeting with women activists from the Lavalas movement. I have a pretty good knowledge of Haitian history and contemporary politics but there is always more to learn and I needed to focus on details. So for the past month I have immersed myself in all things Haitian from talking with people - (all of a sudden I keep meeting Haitians!), reading books and news archives, listening to interviews and listening to Haitian music. The music has been a real revelation – listening to the drum rhythms is like I am listening to some deep Yoruba drumming and you begin to realise that the majority of Haitian people are still very connected to Africa.

Getting to grips with the complexities and intrigues of Haitian politics is no easy task. I believe the only way you can begin to grasp what has happened in Haiti over the past 10 years, and why, is by going back to the beginning and following the country’s history through to the present. Otherwise you are left frustrated and with too many unanswered questions.

I started with a re-reading of C.L.R. James account of the Haitian revolution, “The Black Jacobins” and ended with “An Unbroken Agony: Haiti from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President” by Randall Robinson.

In the early hours of February 29th 2004, democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his wife Mildred were forced to leave their home under escort of US military and summarily marched onto an unmarked plane whose destination they did not know and were not told.

An Unbroken Agony presents a detailed day by day and hour by hour account of the immediate events leading to the kidnapping and removal of President Aristide. Noted activist and one of the few truly progressive African American voices, Randall Robinson, sets down the facts of the Coup D’Etat, side by side with his own commentary. He provides the evidence that the US was actively involved while France was directly complicit in the Coup that ousted Aristide and saw him flown, along with his with wife to the Central African Republic. Once there, they were literally dumped off the plane and for all intense and purposes held prisoner.

Robinson begins with an historical overview of Haiti from “the most fateful of days” in 1492 when Christopher Columbus landed on the shores of the island he named Hispaniola but which the indigenous people called Ayiti to the only successful slave revolt in history which led to an independent nation in 1804. The struggle for emancipation by the Black Jacobins was led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines and denied France the most profitable slave economy in the world. Not only was Haiti the most profitable, it was also arguably the most cruel. For example slaves were slaughtered for the amusement of their French masters and on one occasion, men were bayoneted and then dogs were let loose to rip them to shreds and devour them.

The history of Haiti is often a tale of history repeating itself. In response to the creation of the “first free republic in the Americas” the US and Europe imposed a global embargo and France demanded that Haiti pay $21 billion (in today’s dollars) as compensation for loss of it’s slaves and territory. Thus right from the beginning the new country found itself in a debt which it has never recovered from. In 1915 the US occupied Haiti for 19 years and, despite independence, the wealth of the country was held in the hands of a tiny minority and remains so till today. Robinson spends a whole chapter discussing class and caste in Haiti from it’s historical roots to the present. A society that saw itself as almost “a race apart from the large majority of Haitian people”.

“In Haiti today color remains as insuperable a barrier to social progress as ever”. ….Not even the least controversial of President Aristide’s proposed social reforms were conceded by his lighter-skinned and more privileged fellow citizens. Not even his proposal to strike the word peasant as a category of citizenship from the national birth certificate for that all rural blacks bore.”

He continues with a quote from Langston Hughes

“It was in Haiti that I first realised how class lines may cut across color lines within a race, and how dark people of the same nationality may scorn those below them”

Robinson chronicles the rise to power of Aristide from his early days during the Duvalier years, as a young priest in La Saline, a poor neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince to the populist and much loved leader of the Lavalas family. He details the actions of the various rebel groups supported by the Haitian moneyed classes and businesses and trained and armed by the US.

“Over the course of 2003, the Bush administration broadened its assault on Haiti into a crippling, multipronged campaign. In addition to arming the Duvalierist insurgents and organising Haiti’s tiny, splintered political opposition, the administration moved apace to strangle Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, into a state of economic, social and political collapse.”

President and Mrs Aristide’s last 24 hours in Haiti are detailed hour by hour moving back and forth between their activities and the whereabouts and manoeuvring of the rebels 100km from Port-au-Prince. Robinson goes into great detail to show that neither President Aristide nor his wife changed their routine or cancelled scheduled appointments including an interview with US radio journalist Tavis Smiley. That they were under great pressure during that period is a fact but until the early hours of the morning of the 29th both insisted they were not leaving Haiti. He also shows that despite warnings from the US that Aristide was going to be shot and the rebels were on their way to Port-au-Prince, they were in fact in the area of Gonaives and not moving.

Robinson’s presentation of Aristide is almost saintly. He does not try to hide his unwavering support of Aristide and his Lavalas party. I've read criticisms that Robinson does not address Aristide’s governance and there is only one good guy here and that is Aristide. Whilst I agree he does not cover Aristide's governance and that the book is partisan, I do not take that as a failing as some have said. Randall Robinson, Maxine Waters and Amy Goodman have time and time again proved their honesty and determination to see justice done. The US on the other hand has a record of lies, deceit, assassinations and attempted assassinations of leaders it does not like, support of rebels against governments it doesn’t like whether they are elected democratically or not. The US has a record of supporting undemocratic oligarchies, monarchies and dictatorships when it suits them.

Randall Robinson set out to write about the history, oppression and punishment of a nation of Black people who dared to resist White Supremacist hegemony and in this he succeeded. The purpose of the book is to chronicle the US government’s actions in the support and removal of a democratically elected President. One who was escorted in the dead of night on a US military plane by US military personnel and unceremoniously dumped in Central Africa. As Robinson points out, the irony was that his host/jailer in the Central African Republic was an unelected ruler who came to power via a coup but who was supported financially by the US and whose country was and remains under French ownership.

The book sets the record straight and acts as a counter balance to the wall of lies presented by the US and other Western governments and the media which continues to present the Bush governments version of events without question.

Links:

Read an excerpt

Haitian Solidarity

Interview with Randall Robinson.
Institute for Democracy and Justice in Haiti

- Originally published at Black Looks

The British Medical Journal has featured two opinions on the subject, one for and one against, and is allowing its readers online, either academics or members of the public, to vote.

Go to this page. Scroll down a bit and you can find the icon to click on to participate in the vote. Once you open the page, it will look like this (Thanks to Jews Sans Frontières).

Read here my opinion for a Boycott.

If you are for a boycott, please participate, because the Giyus, Israel's largest cyber support network, is already in, if we judge from the poll results as of today.

Cross posted at Les Politiques.

From the New Yorker's David Remnick: The Apostate

Excerpts:

Short of being Prime Minister, Burg could not be higher in the Zionist establishment. His father was a Cabinet minister for nearly four decades, serving under Prime Ministers from David Ben-Gurion to Shimon Peres. In addition to a decade-long career in the Knesset, including four years as Speaker, Burg had also been leader of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency for Israel. And yet he did not obey the commands of pedigree. “Defeating Hitler” and an earlier book, “God Is Back,” are, in combination, a despairing look at the Israeli condition. Burg warns that an increasingly large and ardent sector of Israeli society disdains political democracy. He describes the country in its current state as Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic, xenophobic, and, like Germany in the nineteen-thirties, vulnerable to an extremist minority...

...After Burg described Israel as a perpetually “frightened society,” the discussion quickly grew tense: SHAVIT: You are patronizing and supercilious, Avrum. You have no empathy for Israelis. You treat the Israeli Jew as a paranoid. But, as the cliché goes, some paranoids really are persecuted. On the day we are speaking, Ahmadinejad is saying that our days are numbered. He promises to eradicate us. No, he is not Hitler. But he is also not a mirage. He is a true threat. He is the real world—a world you ignore.
BURG: I say that as of this moment Israel is a state of trauma in nearly every one of its dimensions. And it’s not just a theoretical question. Would our ability to cope with Iran not be much better if we renewed in Israel the ability to trust the world? Would it not be more right if we didn’t deal with the problem on our own but, rather, as part of a world alignment beginning with the Christian churches, going on to the governments and finally the armies? Instead, we say we do not trust the world, they will abandon us, and here’s Chamberlain returning from Munich with the black umbrella and we will bomb them alone...

...Burg told Shavit that Israel should give up its nuclear weaponry in exchange for an unspecified “deal” with its Arab neighbors. Israel’s “law of return,” which allows any Jew around the world to immigrate and become a citizen, was “dynamite” in the Arab world, he said, and needed to be reëvaluated. One subject that especially infuriated Shavit, and provoked countless letters to the editor, e-mail screeds, and editorial-page rebuttals, was Burg’s depiction of the European Union as an almost irresistibly attractive “biblical utopia” and his flouting of the fact that he holds a French passport, because his wife is French-born, and voted in the recent French elections. When Shavit asked Burg if he recommended that all Israelis acquire a second passport, Burg replied, “Whoever can”—a moment of determined cosmopolitanism. Shavit sarcastically called Burg “the prophet of Brussels.” He went on:

SHAVIT: There really is a deep anti-Zionist pattern in you. Emotionally, you are with German Jewry and American Jewry. They excite you, thrill you, and by comparison you find the Zionist option crude and spiritually meagre. It broadens neither the heart nor the soul.
BURG: Yes, yes. The Israeli reality is not exciting. People are not willing to admit it, but Israel has reached the wall. Ask your friends if they are certain their children will live here. How many will say yes? At most fifty per cent. In other words, the Israeli élite has already parted with this place. And without an élite there is no nation.
SHAVIT: You are saying that we are suffocating here for lack of spirit.
BURG: Totally. We are already dead. We haven’t received the news yet, but we are dead. It doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t work. . . . There is no one to talk to here. The religious community of which I was a part—I feel no sense of belonging to it...

...Burg comes from a conservative Zionist family; his father helped found Mafdal, the National Religious Party. But when he started out in politics he joined the Labor Party; he was deeply influenced by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a scientist and philosophy professor at Hebrew University who had contempt for the Greater Israel movement’s conflation of religion and politics and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Leibowitz referred to abusive Israeli soldiers as “Judeo-Nazis” and was so upset by the sight of the festivities around the Western Wall after the Six-Day War that he referred to it as a “disco wall.” In the pursuit of increasingly higher offices, Burg avoided such language. He held back, he self-censored. “You’re into the system,” he said. “You’re in the tunnel. I was a devoted politician and so I talked the talk.” But then, he said, “after some fifteen, twenty years in political life I had a feeling all of a sudden that, to use the Biblical term, Israel was the kingdom without prophesy. I realized that the three founding narratives of the national idea of Israeliness were over: the mass immigration to the land, aliyah; the security of the land; and the settling of the land. All three had served their purpose and were no longer the core of the nation’s narratives. I asked myself what was the alternative. This was a long process of thought. I didn’t feel that the political system in Israel was trying to renew its thinking.”

Read the whole article...

French philosopher Alain Badiou gave this interview to Le Monde last week. The original title was about the crisis of the intellectual Left. While the first two questions focused on the crisis of the French Left, most of the interview was about the particularisms lying at the foundations of Israel as a Jewish only state. Badiou speaks with clarity on matters which appear to be complexe in the news, using fundamental philosophical concepts like Truth, History, Universals, and Universalism (as opposed to Particularisms and exceptionnalism).

Le Monde: You are, since the publication of Circonstance, 3. Portées du mot "Juif" (The Uses of the word "Jew"), at the heart of an intellectual controversy because of your position on Israel, a position some believe is favourable to the disappearance of Israel as a state. What is your opinion on this ?
Alain Badiou: I believe this controversy, if taken at its highest and most coherent level, is about the existence of universals. What is the relation between the word "jew", in its entire extension, its historical and intellectual resonance, and the liberating and emancipating effect of universalism? Universalism is attacked from the Right, which maintains that we should return to the values of Nations, Traditions, Religion, Family values, etc. Universalism is also under attack from the Left which maintains that abstract Universalism is a form of intellectual Imperialism or an abstraction of the global market (or global economy) against which sexual, racial, and communautarian identities should be defended. In this debate, I stand in the middle, even if I am considered as a radical. I oppose the traditionalist defence of moral, national, and religious identities, but I oppose the modernist position on this matter which pretends to defend identities by making them the center and the principal player in the political opposition to international Capitalism. It is in this context that I consider the word "jew".

Le Monde: Why reduce the whole question to a word ? Isn't a reality ?
Alain Badiou: Certainly ! It is the same with the word "French"... However "being French" does not prevent me from being from a Moroccan origin, or a hereditary aristocrat, or half German, having this or this idea about my country, inheriting the French revolution or on the contrary a fetichistic vision of the land... Under a word, of variable value, we can find an infinite multiplicity. My problem is that I am against those who think that "jew" is a name, and not a word, those who insist that this word forms a homogenous and unified assembly non reductible to something else. In my opinion, their position can only be tenable in the case of divine transcendance. In this case, and in this case alone, we can argue that "jew" is a name and not a word, because it is bound to an elective space: "jew" is the name of the alliance. I argue, as Lévinas did before me in a coherent way, that it is impossible to maintain this nominal exception without the support of religion.
My target in this critique is not Zionism, neither the existence of Israel, not even a certain type of relation between the identity and the state. My target is the ideological manipulation of the word "jew" in the intellectual controversy you mentioned, especially in France where it serves some goals linked to the reactionary wave in which we have been immersed for about thirty years now.
It would be terrible for the Jews, this living multiplicity, to let the word that defines them - which has a close relationship, going on for so many years before, with the formidable question of the universals and the adventures of universalism - to become the symbol of modernised Capitalism, anti-Arab or anti-African xénophobia, and US wars. I notice, with a real sorrow, that many people to whom I was close, sometimes dear friends, who in the 70s used to gravitate around revolutionary Maoism (he is talking probably about André Glucksman, staunch supporter now of Sarkozy), have started slowly using the reference to the word "jew" and to Israel as a support for something politically and intellectually more large, that can be identified as an attempt to reintegrate the West. By "West" I mean the group of developped and "democratic" countries, their power, their way of life, which are judged superior. The unprecedented trauma that was the extermination of Europe's jews in the Nazis gaz chambers has rendered this manipulation redoutable because it strikes the thought and immobilises it in a conservative memory.

Le Monde: You are accused of attacking the memory of the Shoah, or at least its usage. Is it because it served the itinerary you just denounced ?
Alain Badiou: I think that the promotion of massacres and victims as the only interesting contents to History is linked to a profound process of depolitisation. To examine all historical situations exclusively through moral categories results in political impotence. On the other hand, I don't think memory is a good category if we want the non repetition of disasters, because the non repetition assumes a rational judgement about what happened. An emotional memory based on horror and its images is ambivalent. Discerning between what follows from a repulsive emotion and an emotion of fascination is very difficult. Yes, I mistrust memory, the memory of colonial atrocities, or the memory of Stalinism, as much as the memory of Nazism. Political and historical knowledge should universally become the alternatives for doubtful memory that is a designated prey for propaganda.

le Monde: Is it in this same vein that you suggest in Circonstances, 3 that we forget the Holocaust ?
Alain Badiou: This sentence, which appeared in an interview I gave to Haaretz, was, as you may suspect, a carefully designed imprudence: it cannot be understood outside the context specific to the conditions of a possible dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis. My next sentence, that you don't cite here, made it clear that the forgetting is, in fact, impossible.

Le Monde: Isn't Israel's legitimacy, at least in the West, tied to the memory of the Shoah ?
Alain Badiou: Things must be clear. I never thought that the destiny of Israelis is to be pushed into the sea. Moreover, I don't think that the question of Israel's frontiers is at the heart of the problem. From the internal perspective of an assumed de facto situation, in other words, the settlement of hundred thousands of jews in this place being irreversible, I still think that the regulating idea for a future for the region cannot be anything else than a common life and destiny for Palestinians and Jews on the same land. I always thought that the formula of a "jewish state" is perilous. Today, the politic of emancipation dictate that national identities and states should not be defined exclusively in terms referring to identity and race. We should have a minimal requirement here, the land right against the blood right. Israel will have to deal with the prospect of universalism retaking the places where particularisms used to strive, if it has to deal with its own future.

Le Monde: Does this contribute to put into question the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state ?
Alain Badiou: You see, I have certainly written things against France which are more violent than things I have written against Israel! Zionism can be listed both in the colonialist and the revolutionary dimensions. It combines these two aspects and that what makes it a rare and singular phenomenon. That some people inside European communities who used to designate themselves as a particular minority with a national characteristic - the jewish minority - wanted a place to achieve their identity, in a territorial way, under the form of a state, is a historic reality that, like any other reality of the sort, is neither legitimate nor illegitimate. But I believe it unreasonable to consider this adventure as an exception, somehow different from other nationalistic adventures.

Comment:
What Badiou is stating is simple. 1) We cannot forget the Shoah but we must forget it in the political context of setting goals for peace in the Middle East. 2) The memory of the Shoah as the main content for the history of Jews should be questioned from the perspective of an objective history that looks at the non repetition of horrors because there is no possible objective categorical discrimination within an affective memory between indignation at horror and fascination for it. I must admit that this is a very strong point that was developped at lenght for the case of terrorism by Jean Baudraillard in 'L'esprit du terrorisme'. 3) "Jew" is not a name, it is a word. It does not designate a particular homogenous entity, it designates something more universal than the meaning given to it by zionists. It designates a multiplicity. Unless, of course, the word is tied to religion, transcendance, and divinity. Here Badiou challenges secular liberal zionist Jews while at the same time creating a contradiction in their use of the word as a name. Being a Jew is not a name, is not a fixed entity immobilised in the project of zionism, unless the word rallies the religion where it becomes, once again, universal, and not particular related to one experience of the world and one narrative, the zionist narrative. In discussing the use of the word, Badiou wants to refute the particularisms and the exceptionnalism which lie at the heart of the use of the word by zionists. 4) Finally, Badiou states clearly his preference for a one state solution. Refuting all the particularisms which are at the heart of the foundation of Israel, he takes the existence of Israel as a historical fact, neither legitimate nor illegitimate, and calls for a right of the land against the right of the blood if we are to dismiss the non ethical particularisms of the state of Israel as it is now. These particularisms are unethical because they do not have a correspondance in the philosophical equation for Truth, which is always universal.

Badiou is stating the obvious, and Israel must confront the obvious if it has to build a future for its citizens, unless international Zionism (Neoconism) continues to reshape reality to the extent every one of us will forget in the future what Truth and Facts mean.

Disclaimer: This post appeared also at Les Politiques in a slightly different form. It can be linked to but it cannot be copied entirely from neither blogs, Sabbah's and Les Politiques, without the authorisation of its author.

Thanks as well as a hat tip to the great ladies at Jordan Journals for making this article available. (Unless you have a print subscription to the Jordan Times, this article is not freely available online, the only other site that has it requires subscription). Cross-posted at Reclaiming Space at http://peoplesgeography.com by Ann El Khoury.

Why Palestine Matters By Roger H. Lieberman

Jordan Times | 20 June 2007

In driving around central New Jersey of late, I have observed a great many signs on schools and houses of worship proclaiming the urgency of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. This is perfectly right and natural. The deteriorating situation in that beleaguered region of western Sudan certainly deserves concern and assistance from people worldwide.

What is troubling, however, is how little concern seems evident, at similar venues, for a political and humanitarian crisis far older and far more attributable to US foreign policy — indeed made possible by American taxpayers. Where, among the schools, churches, synagogues and libraries of suburbia, are the expressions of grief and outrage over the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land?

Fifty-nine years after Israel was established by force on 78 per cent of Mandate Palestine, and 40 years after its armies occupied the remaining 22 per cent in the Six-Day War, the majority of Americans outside progressive and intellectual circles seem divided between those who are disturbingly apathetic about the conflict and those who blindly adhere to the Israeli narrative.

As long as this status quo persists, hopes for a just peace in the Holy Land will elude fulfilment.

What accounts for this baffling indifference or antipathy to basic Palestinian rights? Why, in God’s name, should the right of human beings to live in freedom and dignity in their native land be seen by any serious person as “controversial”? And why does the preponderance of US politicians, irrespective of their views on other matters, invariably adhere to the Zionist Party line when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict?

The usual explanation for this sad state of affairs is the inordinate influence of the pro-Israel lobby on American politics and media, and the fear of running afoul of its banal taboos. But this does not account for why such propaganda has consistently found so receptive an audience, and why such taboos are taken so seriously by so many people.

Verily, America’s abject failure to support the fulfilment of Palestinian aspirations for freedom derives from the curious fact that Israel’s ideological milieu found early on a receptive audience, for rather different reasons, at both ends of the American political mainstream. As a result, many ordinary Americans, both Christian and Jewish, have grown up and lived much of their lives believing that Israel somehow embodies the values, liberal or conservative, they admire in the United States. But this is a fabrication, and recognising that Israel’s behaviour conforms to no healthy manifestation of American ideals is essential for the constructive reformation of US Middle East policy.

Liberals have consistently maintained their support for Israel on the premise that it is a “democracy”, in contrast to the supposedly intractable “dictatorial” nature of “Arab regimes”. While seemingly accurate in describing the status quo inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, this conception ignores the ugly reality that Israeli “democracy” has, from day one, been subordinated to religious and ethnic chauvinism. Israel, according to long-standing Zionist precepts, can only function democratically by maintaining an overwhelming Jewish majority in the country.

From this policy stemmed the mass-expulsion of Palestinian Muslims and Christians in 1948, and the denial of the right of return and restitution to them and their descendants ever since. It further entailed the imposition of martial law over the remaining “Israeli Arabs” until 1966, and their marginalisation as second-class citizens to the present day. Finally, it inspired the aggressive confiscation of erstwhile Palestinian lands by the Israeli state, and an all-consuming quest for Jewish immigrants from every conceivable source — lately going so far as to include obscure tribes from the Himalayas and South America who only recently adopted the Jewish faith. Such policies bear scant resemblance to the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers, but do recall the Old World tyrannies they so despised — as well as totalitarian states of more recent times.

American rightists, for their part, have tended to extol Israel as a model of “pioneer” achievement and as a vanguard of “Western civilisation” battling “barbarism” and “backwardness”. This boilerplate rhetoric derives largely from fundamentalist Protestant dogma about “manifest destiny” that figured prominently in American culture during the settlement of the western frontier in the 19th Century. It attempts to cast Palestinians in a role equivalent to the Native American tribes who were “swept aside” to “make way” for “progress” in the days of the Gold Rush, the Cattle Boom and the Trans-Continental Railroad.

Although no one should trivialise the wrongs done to Native Americans during the westwards expansion of the United States, only a rudimentary knowledge of Palestinian life in the centuries prior to the advent of Zionism is necessary to understand that such comparisons are ludicrous in the extreme. While few indigenous peoples north of Mexico had advanced beyond a Neolithic, or even Mesolithic, cultural stage by the time Europeans arrived, Palestinians had maintained for centuries a sophisticated economy and culture based on agriculture and vibrant mercantile traditions. Palestine remained throughout the Mediaeval and Ottoman periods a crossroads of Asia, Europe and Africa, supporting important religious and scholarly institutions of Muslim, Christian and Jewish affiliation.

Far from being an “empty land” awaiting settlers to “make the desert bloom”, pre-Zionist Palestine was a land full of its own possibilities, blessed by enterprising people with high hopes for the future. Indeed, no one in recent times has done quite so effective a job in making the Holy Land barren and deprived of a promising future as the Israeli occupation forces with their bewildering, Kafkaesque matrix of closures, walls and checkpoints.

Having dispelled the twin illusions that have persistently stymied American understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict, it becomes much easier to conceive of a time — very soon, God willing — when a broad, emphatic consensus will exist in America that upholds the equality of Palestinians and Israeli Jews in all matters of civil, economic and national rights.

One can perceive without difficulty the many benefits, both international and domestic, that will result from such a fundamental paradigm shift. First, and most obviously, it will turn back the tide of extremism and communal fragmentation that is engulfing the Middle East from Baghdad to Beirut and Gaza.

Supporting Israel’s occupation and subjugation of Palestine has put America on a disastrous collision course with near-universal sentiment in the region, fuelling ever widening wars that jeopardise American lives and foretell a dark future of mutual fear and loathing for all concerned. Ending that occupation promptly and without equivocation, in accordance with the Arab Peace Initiative, is the indispensable first step to restoring sanity in the Middle East and America’s role there.

For Americans at home, there are further gains to be realised. Grassroots support for justice and reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis will provide a powerful moral force in American life based on dialogue and cooperation between Christians, Jews and Muslims. Such a development is essential to counter the divisive influence of rightwing ideologues who denigrate Islam and relentlessly push for racial profiling and other assaults on civil liberties.

As in many societies throughout history, the decline of rituals and family values in contemporary America has created a vacuum which irresponsible bigots and militarists have exploited as a path to personal aggrandisement. The only antidote for this dire problem is an authentic sense of American morality rooted in the quest for peace and understanding. There is no better place to begin this all-out effort than the struggle for justice in Palestine — the land that gave rise to the ethical traditions which unite Islam and the West. When the words “End the Israeli occupation” hang in front of schools and houses of worship in every middle-class American town, when teachers, ministers and rabbis feel free to speak with passion about Palestinian rights, America will begin the rediscovery of its soul, and its moral bequest from civilisations past.

The writer is a graduate of Rutgers University. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007

This blog needs an urgent resuscitation ... a sentence which is an oxymoron in itself as every resuscitation is urgent.

I am tired of posting articles exclusively, interesting and up to date as they may be - I need something more alive. I like interaction with people, feedback - I hate having monologues. Talking to a wall might produce an echo if one does it long enough but I sure don't have the patience for that. From now on there will be some changes ...

I mentioned here and there that I was a pro-Palestinian activist for a timespan of about six years and will from now on start writing about my activities, the people, the places, occasions ... what REALLY happened. I will refer as well more to current issues, Middle East as well as elsewhere.

To anyone who might be tempted to doubt my words I am saying upfront already "spare me the headache"! I will report what I saw, where I went, what happened, I won't deduct things nor add anything untruthful. Kind of a postponed eyewitness report. I vouch for the content ... these will be MY stories.

Robin posted an article about Mohammad Bakri, the filmmaker and creator of the film "Jenin, Jenin". He is being persecuted for having made this film and, so it is said, falsifying facts. I was in Jenin a bit longer than a week after the horrid bombardement in April 2002 and will tell you MY story. I leave it to you afterwards to compare ...

I was anxious to go to Jenin to see for myself!

Horrible news came out of the tormented city and having been fortunate enough to have had a presscard issued by "Washington Report for Middle East Affairs", I had the possibility to go. Just - I didn't know anyone there and was unsure as to what to do .. how to go about.

One day I went to see Bassem Eid, a Palestinian human right activist with an office in East Jerusalem. During the time I sat with him discussing an issue, the phone rang ... it was Gideon Levy, a well-known Israeli journalist writing for Ha Aretz and good friend of Bassem. To make a long story short, after a few sentences with his friend he turned around and asked "didn't you want to go to Jenin?" and less than an hour after the call, Bassem and I were on the way.

Here's the comment I left on Robin's blog, minor adjustments only ... it pretty much says it all.

Khalas, enough!! WHY is Mohammad Bakri persecuted? For telling the TRUTH??

I have been to Jenin probably some 8-10 days after this horrid massacre - together with the well-known Israeli journalist Gideon Levy and his cameraman, the German film-maker Rene Schulthoff of "Deutsche Welle TV" and Bassem Eid, an Palestinian human right activist. NOBODY can come and tell me what is shown in this film is NOT the truth as we ALL have seen it with our own eyes!!

After a short stop at the governor'soffice and a talk with him, we were taken to "ground-0". While Gideon was walking around together with his cameraman and talking with the people and the Rene stood somewhat apart, I was walking around observing quietly, in shock trying to get to terms with what I was looking at! Suddenly a local man came to me pointing to where I was standing, telling me " do you know that you are standing in the second floor?" I looked around, baffled, and said "a second floor?" He nodded his head and explained me with a sad voice, the place where I was standing USED to be a house which was blown up .. and collapsed in itself. There was no stone anymore on the other, it was only rubble. The whole area somewhat resembled a lunar landscape.

The items around me suggested to him that I was indeed standing where a short while before there was the second floor of a house ... I have memories carved into my brain which will never leave me ... pictures and scenes I NEVER thought I would have to look at one day. I clearly remember a Coca-Cola bottle filled with pickled olives ... a woman, most likely a wife and mother, had pickled them in order to have some stock for her family (the Palestinian olives are the BEST I have ever eaten .. but that only nearby), closeby there was a copybook of a student, it's pages flying in the wind, neatly written lines in Arabic which, of course, I was unable to read, with pictures in the rubble on the ground.

I stared at these two items and my heart almost broke - I asked myself HOW ON EARTH can HUMANS do that to HUMANS??

Before and after the visit at "ground-0" were guests of the back-then Governou of Jenin, Zuheir al-Manasreh, who had made sure were were safe by sending his people who lived right inside the camp with us. Polite young folks, helpful in every possible way!

I want to tell you some more things I saw there which I will NEVER forget: it was the first time I ever saw flags of Palestinian factions .. I remember the green of Hamas, black of Fatah and a yellow one of Istlamic Jihad. They were propped on top of makeshift-tents right at the edge of the worst-destroyed area. Middle aged to elderly men were lying in there, watching us quietly.

I saw women who highly impressed me -instead of being broken psychologically and looking depressed, they were walking straight with their heads high .. proud, telling everyone without words "you will NOT defeat us"!

And there there was this girl ... maybe 10 years old. She was holding papers in her hand - and came to us. With a smile on her face she handed me one of them - it showed lines written in large Arabic letters. Somewhat bewildered though very curious I turned to our guards/guides for ... interpretation: what was written by those children meant "We will not forgive and not forget!" It was signed "The children of Jenin refugee camp." I fought back tears ...

After some two or three hours we left the camp and went for a short while back to the governour's house to vent our impressions. I sat there very quietly and only listened ... still overwhelmed I was trying to digest what I had just seen. On the way out we passed the tent-city which is shown in the video though it appeared to be deserted at that time.

A while after this horrid attack I read the report of a soldier who was the operator of a caterpillar inside the camp flattening EVERYTHING in his way. He mentioned, very apparently without any remorse, he was like in a frenzy of destruction for close to 36 hours in a row and didn't want to stop before everything in his way was destroyed. His own hateful words were "They should have their soccer-place ..." meaning he would not stop till not all the area in the center would be bulldozed. He even admitted that in order to keep on bulldozing more and more, he drank alcohol and went into a frenzy of destruction.

I was trying to find this article again to give the link but couldn't .. I suppose some people became alert and pulled it off the net - it would certainly have opened a NUMBER of eyes of what REALLY happened!

It was a day I will never forget, hours, minutes and seconds which are burned into my soul, went under my skin. I salute the wonderful people of Jenin refugee camp, highly respect their strength, resilience, dignity, perseverence and courage! I met them, watched them, talked with a few ... they highly impressed me! I

I wish them only the BEST ... I pray they will find REAL PEACE and JUSTICE! I pray their children will be able to be just what they are, have a normal childhood and not grow up too fast, too early while being confronted almost on a daily basis by death, fear and horror!

I wish all that will happen soon, I pray - insh'allah!

* This post was originally published here!

Iran is the latest country to sign up to "wall building" borders - in this case along the Iranian Pakistan border in the Baluchistan region. Iran's justification for the wall is a familiar one. To prevent smuggling of drugs and guns and movement of illegal immigrants.

Whilst the Apartheid wall being built by the Israelis is probably the most well known there are other walls that have been built, are being built and will be built in the future.

Morocco built one in the 1980s during the war of independence with the Polisario Front. To maintain their occupation of Western Sahara the Moroccan government built a wall of 2700 kilometres with mines, across the desert with the help of their good friends the Israelis. The wall prevents the Saharawi from crossing back into their lands from the refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria.

Then there are the new fences recently built between the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco. Here Morocco acts as a proxy police force for Europe to prevent migrants from West Africa and Morocco from entering Spain. The fences are barbed wire with razor edges. Recently Spanish PM, Zapartero announced a third parameter fence as the present two are proving insufficient to stop people climbing over despite the dangers.

This 3rd parameter fence will be "equipped with state-of-the-art infrared cameras, sensor pads and sound detectors" and be able to detect potential jumpers from a distance and prevent them from "swarming" over the fences - presumably by shooting at them or how else will they do this? The mostly West Africans and Moroccans trying to enter Europe have circumvented Morocco after a series of horrendous vicious acts by the Moroccan security forces when they dumped 100s of West Africans in the Sahara without food or water. They were found because they were able to sms their friends in the cities to alert human rights organisations. Crossings from Africa to Spain have now moved to Mauratania where the migrants cross in small wooden boats to southern Spain and Grand Canaries

Despite the anti-immigration rhetoric coming from the Spanish government the reality is that it is the cheap migrant labour that supplies the food for the supermarkets of most of northern Europe. When you see Spanish tomatoes, strawberries etc it is from the toil of Moroccans and West Africans (Nigerians and Ghanaians) working on the plastico green houses of southern Almeria. The second largest group of Africans are Senegalese but they mainly work as hawkers trying to sell on the streets of Spain in between being harassed by local police. When I first arrived the hawkers used to work the bars and restaurants of Granada but this has almost stopped due to police harassment but it does not stop people from coming. There is always some work to be found. The South Americans work in the kitchens and look after the elderly as well as work as hawkers - all for a pittance. Many Senegalese, Nigerians, Moroccans and Ecuadorians also work on the coasts serving the never ending construction industry that again supplies Northern Europe with their cheap holiday destinations in poorly built accommodation where corruption between local governments and local builders is high.

What will the Spanish and Italians do to stop crossings over the Mediterranean? Build a water wall? A couple of weeks ago Dibussi's Scribbles reported the 27 African migrants left in the water for three days holding on to a tuna fishing net whilst the ship's captain refused to allow them on board after their boat had sunk. That too is a kind of wall - a wall of water. The boats used to cross are too flimsy so the water becomes the wall to climb and hundreds have drowned crossing to Italy and Spain.

In Europe the Schengen agreement together with Europol are the two main instruments used to keep out or detain non-white migrants, asylum seekers, homeless, travellers, Romas and any other group considered undesirable by the white Euro nations. Apart from the walls, there are the prison camps in the UK, France and Germany (many run by private contractors) where "illegal people" are kept often for months and in violation of their human rights and UN refugee laws they are held as criminals. New laws across Europe are being implemented giving migrants short term entry permits so that they work as long as the state needs them then they are thrown back into the sea or desert like disposable nappies. Whilst in the "host" country they live in sub standard accommodation sometimes in tents sometimes outside under plastic covers, no medical care, no access to the community in which they live and at the mercy of their employers whims. Drive along any coastal back roads in southern Almeria and you will see groups of North and West Africans huddled together. People have told me that the working conditions in the plasticos are horrendous where in the desert summer temperatures reach 45c - the heat mixed with the fertilizers causes chest and breathing problems.

Carlos Castillo has an excellent diagram that spells out the policies of the North towards the South

African and other non-white migrants and asylum seekers have yet to organise themselves like their counterparts in the US. But it is only a matter of time. For countries like Spain and Italy this is just the beginning. The children of migrant workers born in Europe and now reaching their teens are not going anywhere nor do they feel they have to eat chorizo just because they have Spanish passports. Neither will they accept the cheap labour that their parents worked for. In just 5 years in Andalucia, Spain the demographics have changed and are continuing to change. The arrogance, disdain and racism of the Spanish towards Africans, Latinos and Gitanos will not be tolerated by the youth living on the margins of Andalucian society.

The US government that supposedly opposed the building of the wall by Morocco but supports Israel's Apartheid wall has now passed a Bill that will enable the government to build a wall along it's Mexican border.

$2.2 billion worth of fences along part of the southern border. The Secretary of Homeland Security was required to provide for least 2 layers of reinforced fencing, the installation of additional physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors at five locations:

Another wall being built by the Americans is the Baghdad wall Adhamiyah wall to separate and to use the US language "to protect" Sunni and Shia from each other.

A doctor in Adhamiya, Abu Hassan, said the wall would transform the residents into caged animals.

"It's unbelievable that they treat us in such an inhumane manner," he said in a telephone interview. "They're trying to isolate us from other parts of Baghdad. The hatred will be much greater between the two sects."

The wall is 3.5 meters high and like all the walls emphasise difference and create even more hostility as people are physically separated, everyone affected as movement for all is restrained and controlled. Kuwait has built an electric fence on it's 200 kilometre border with Iraq and Saudia Arabia is planning to build an 800k fence.

India too is in the process of building a 4000k wall on its Pakistan and Bangladesh borders. Again the same language is used, smugglers, terrorists and trafficking but the borders divide people, exclude people.

The mentality of barriers of barbed wire and obsession with concrete and metal is extending itself as Europe creates fences to keep thousands of insiders out. The latest fence to be built is the 7 mile one around the G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany built with a solid steel underground to prevent tunnelling.

Insiders, outsiders anyone from a different world or who is trying to make a different world. Will you be inside the wall living as a caged animal or outside, excluded and destitute? The G8 wall has shown that WALL BUILDERS are capable of constructing internal walls - walls that criminalise the poor, migrants, unwanted people and to keep them away from the the acceptable amongst their nations. The walls are symbols of a concrete and metal apartheid as nation after nation seeks to divide those who are legal and those who are illegal; those who are the right religion, colour, class, gender, have the right sexual preference. For the preferred insiders there is the superiority of knowing you are inside looking out. You have what THEY, the other, want as in Castillo's diagram. The newer walls include sophisticated surveillance technology that can sense people approaching the fence/wall and prepare for attack. One wonders if the Spanish walls in Ceuta and Melilla will be able to pick up the colour of the approaching people and trigger some sort of automated reaction of bullets to shoot would be wall jumpers? In a sense Spain has taken it's wall ideology to the source. It has made an agreement with Senegal to jointly patrol the seas of Senegal and stop migrants before they even leave their own waters. Maybe I am moving into the realms of fantasy but I can imagine a time when the wall builders with all their military surveillance and metallic power will find themselves locked inside their self imposed cages as the economic gap between the insiders and outsiders grows and the great storm of people begins. Remember there are insiders who are outsiders so the wall builders will be trapped...

More obsessions with wall building: I just found this cyber "Wall around the World"

Well, let's start off by saying that this site really isn't about us; IT'S ABOUT YOU. The "Wall to Eternity" really has no limits. As the Eternal Wall grows, we hope to provide businesses and people, both big and small with the perfect vehicle to promote their websites; a visual search engine of sorts. We envision a wall without an end, a wall where every person and company in the world can lay their own bricks and contribute their own ideas. Picture the Great Wall of China extending right through your own backyard and going on for miles until fading away into the horizon.

- Originally published at Black Looks

A warning to readers, the below article contains graphic passages.

In January of this year, my teenage daughter and I went to an event in Los Angeles sponsored by Women in Black at which Hedy Epstein^*, a Holocaust survivor, ardent anti-Zionist, human rights worker spoke. Hedy did not speak of her own biography today, but from her website I garnered the following information: Hedy was born August 14, 1924 in Freiburg, Germany. After Hitler came to power, Hedy's family tried unsuccessfully to leave Germany. She spoke today of remembering her parents saying they would go anywhere, but never to Palestine because they were ardent anti-Zionists. In May 1939 Hedy went to England on a children's transport, 500 children were on that transport, part of the almost 10,000 children that England took in between December 1938 and September 1939. Hedy never saw her parents again. Her parents were eventually sent to concentration camps. After the war, Hedy returned to Germany and worked for the US government. She became a participant in the Nuremburg Medical Trial at which the doctors who had experimented on humans were tried. Part of why she went back to Germany was to find her family. She was unsuccessful, her entire family had been sent to Auschwitz where they had been killed. In May 1948 she came to the US and became active professionally and personally in the causes of civil and human rights and social justice.

Hedy told us that day that when she was younger, she had mixed feelings about the state of Israel. On one hand she said, she was glad there was a place the Jews could go after the Holocaust. But always weighing on her thoughts, were the memories of her own parents anti-Zionism. Her mother, Hedy said, always said, "Zionism will come to no good". As the years passed by, Hedy worked in the field of human rights, but, she said, Israel was on the "back-burner of her mind". That changed for Hedy in 1982 when she heard of the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla. Shortly after this Hedy began a chapter of Women in Black in St. Louis, Missouri where she resides.

Five years ago a dear friend asked her, "Hedy, have you ever thought about going to Palestine?" Up til that moment she said, she had never put her desires in words or actions, but when asked this question by her friend, she immediately said, "Yes, I am going". Hedy did not know where the response came from, but at that very moment, Hedy set her mind on going to Palestine, and the manner in which she would venture there at age 78 would be as an ISM (International Solidarity Movement) volunteer.

Hedy spoke to us of her experience becoming an ISM worker, the vigorous training the volunteers must undergo in order to perfect non-violent protest. If a volunteer cannot perfect this art, then they are simply not accepted. In total, Hedy has been to the Occupied Territories four times, the first two times as an ISM volunteer, the third as a representative of her congressman, and the last time for the international meeting of Women in Black this last year in Jerusalem.

Hedy spoke of her first impressions of Palestine, how when she arrived, the ISM volunteer simply called a Palestinian family on the spot and said, "I have four women here, and they need a place to stay". Hedy told us this is normal for ISM, it works because there is NEVER a problem finding a home to take the volunteers in. No matter how poor the host family is, they welcome the volunteers with open arms, willing to share all they have. Hedy wanted us to know, she wanted to tell us, this is the culture and hospitality of the Palestinian people. From her own experience, her gentle voice, Hedy put the audience in that place.

She attended MANY protests, and was tear-gassed and shot at by the IOF many times. The first demonstration she attended, the IOF opened fire upon the crowd and her friend, an Israeli who had only four weeks before been released from the army but who himself felt he must stand against his own government's actions, was shot, only a few feet away from her. Her friend who came with her from the States, standing directly next to her was hit by shrapnel. Both the Israeli who had stood with ISM and Hedy's friend were taken by an old rickety car to the nearest hospital. Hedy's Israeli friend until this day cannot walk due to the wounds he sustained that day. Hedy attended many demonstrations, in Ramallah, Belin, Hebron, Beit Umar and other places in her two visits as an ISM volunteer. She also lost her hearing due to a sound bomb which exploded at her feet. But what happened to Hedy, at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, is almost impossible for her to speak about.

On returning home to the States after her second trip, Hedy and her friend were to fly out of Tel Aviv. When Hedy and Diane approached security, something happened, the officer split them up, Diane in one line, Hedy in another. Hedy didn't know what was happening at first. She thought to herself, "Well, Diane is Christian and I am Jewish, maybe they have separate lines for each". She was pulled aside as an officer flipped through her passport. Then, as if they came up out of the ground next to her, stood two men saying they were security and she must follow them. She was frightened, but when she went to pick up her bag the officer said, "No, we will carry that for you".

Hedy replied (because she was trying to make light of the situation) "Oh you are porters, I thought you said you were security." Sternly they led Hedy to a room in which she was interrogated about her time in the Occupied Territories for five hours.

Then the officer said to Hedy, "You must take off your clothes, we need to search you".

"No, I will not take off my clothes, I need to speak to an attorney" Hedy replied.

"What, you want to call an attorney? There is no phone. Take off your clothes NOW"

"No I will not do that, please, I won't do that" But then Hedy thought, "I need to get out of here, I need to cooperate to get out of here" So Hedy removed her clothes.

"Bend over" said the officer.

"What for, why do I need to bend over?"

"BEND OVER, it is for security!"

Afraid for her life, Hedy Epstein bent over to be searched, naked, in an interrogation room in Ben Gurion Airport.

What followed on the trip home was a fog for Hedy. She and Diane missed their flight. The next day they flew home on Elal which was not the airline they had reserved on. Hedy does not remember much of her flight home. Diane told her that the flight attendants treated Hedy very badly. Hedy does not remember this. All Hedy remembers is taking the magazines from the pocket in front of her and writing on every page, "I am a Holocaust survivor and I will NEVER return to Israel"

Hedy spent the next year receiving the counseling she needed to recover from the dehumanizing abuse she received in Israel. She has since been back twice, once as an aid to her congressman's office and again this last summer for the International Conference of Women in Black. Palestinians who receive this treatment on a constant basis do NOT receive counseling, nor do they have anywhere else to go.

When Hedy began to speak, she said, "First a little house keeping". Please reserve all questions for when I am done speaking. At the end, you may raise your hands and you can wait until I call on you. If you are disrespectful or try to make statements rather than asking questions, I will turn around and face my back to you. I have been speaking for many years now on this subject, and I find this is what works best for me"

My daughter and I were sitting in the middle of the room. In the row behind us, sat some people who could not stop speaking amongst themselves as Hedy spoke. Under their breath, but clearly audible to my ears I heard them over and over say, "Liar, liar, you are lying, you are an anti-Semite, you are a self-hating Jew, you love terrorists, you are a f--g bitch, you will die in hell for your lies". As my tears ran from Hedy's story, they were assaulted by the ugly voices behind me. I turned to them several times and glared. I turned and said "PLEASE be quiet and let her speak". I received nasty nasty glares in return. The hatred was seething behind my own back.
The very minute the moderator stood to say, "Now we are ready to...."

The man sitting directly behind me jumped into the aisle and shouted:

"You have said what you want to say, now I will say what I have to say. The Women in Black raised their voices for him to sit down but he shouted, "My fourteen year old son was involved in a double suicide bombing. He had to carry his friend out in his arms. His friend almost died from these TERRORISTS. Israel does NOT want to occupy, Israel NEEDS Security. You are a LIAR. You are here to LIE to these people and I will not let you do this'

Some men went over to him and ushered him back to the seat directly behind me. Hedy then addressed him, "I am against violence of any sort, no matter who does it. I did not come here to talk about what you are talking about, I came here to talk about my experiences in the Occupied Territories and what I had happen to ME and what I saw, how Israel treats the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. The world knows of your story and I am VERY sorry for what happened to you. I will never condone violence of any sort, and I also will not listen to shouting. The world will hear me TOO".

The words are not coming to my fingers of how I felt myself at that moment. Why did this man want to silence Hedy Epstein? I know why he did, because this is what they do best, try to silence people. Try to shout, try to intimidate, hell, the intimidation I felt at my own back as he sat there was absolutely chilling. I looked at my teenage daughter and she was visibly frightened from the venom released from these people surrounding us. It was TENSE.

More shouts from the audience in back of me came as Women in Black called on polite people willing to raise their hands to ask questions. The row in back of me kept muttering, "Liar, liar, she is a f----g liar"

Then Women in Black said that the questions were closed. Pretty much all hell broke loose as one woman yelled loudly, "You will NOT shut us up. This is America!! Go to hell, you are a LIAR!!"

Several people ushered her to the back corner as she continued to yell, "This is AMERICA, we do NOT live by SHARIA law here. You WILL NOT SHUT ME UP!!"

Eventually some people were able to quieten her as the rest of the audience got to go forward and speak to Hedy personally.

By the time I reached Hedy, I had already talked to Pat from Women in Black who I have been corresponding with the last week. I asked her if this was normal, since the last event they sponsored for Mohammed Omer was nothing like this. Pat told me "Yes, there is a group of them who come to most everything. We know who they are, and we know what to expect" I did NOT expect this. Call me naive, call me just a person who expects civilized behavior, but today was one of the most emotionally frightening two hours I have spent. And that was just here in a public library in Beverly Hills. For GOD's SAKE, what is it like to experience this on a daily basis. To be despised like the Palestinians are themselves by the Zionists. I cannot begin to put into any words, only tears streaming from my own eyes, even as I write. This is the gravest injustice, the GRAVEST injustice.

When I reached Hedy, I said, "Hedy, you are an angel"
She replied, "No I'm just Hedy"
I said, "Just Hedy, God bless you and may angels always be with you"

Palestine, one day soon, Inshallah, you WILL be free. May God lift you up to where you rightfully belong, and protect you from all harm. May you hold in your arms, YOUR people in YOUR land.

^*Hedy Epstein is also a member of Deir Yassin Remembered.

- Under the Holly Tree is where this post first appeared.

- About the author: I am a person who likes to make friends around the world and get to know other cultures. I lived in the Middle East from 1975-1980 and that is very much a part of the person I am today. My philosophy is to be open and respectful to others and to offer my own friendship to them. I truly believe that where there is a strong will there is a way to meet in mutual respect. Where there is suffering, I believe each one of us has the responsibilty and the gift of compassion from our creator to lend our help, from an open ear, to an open hand to lift up. Peace is my goal, and peace begins with me. My only request is for you to treat others and me the way you yourself wish to be treated. Robin's blog can be found here!

I've been thinking a lot about Nadia's post about sexual violence and historical trauma. In the post, Nadia states:

Reading this article makes me think about the types of historical trauma we as Palestinians, and Arabs in general, are carrying around with us. When Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart speaks about sobbing uncontrollably after viewing a photograph of her ancestors, it reminds me of the way I feel when viewing photos like the one at the top of this post. It reminds me of last summer in Italy, driving through mountains and valleys on our way home to Gagliano. After viewing miles of olive trees out the car window, the same trees we passed every time we went into Sulmona, I burst into tears and felt sad, as if in mourning, the rest of the day. I was mourning, mourning all the things that were taken away from my ancestors, all the things that continue to be taken away, the things we can’t ever get back. This is something that makes me find fault with the term “historical trauma”–it’s not just historical, it’s current. While I am experiencing historical trauma, others are experiencing the trauma firsthand. I guess this is what makes historical trauma secondary trauma, especially in our case. But how does that relate to our conception of ourselves as Palestinians? How much does this legacy of suffering affect our self perceptions, and how willing are we to be defined by it?

Nadia's words brought me back to a time, about two years ago, when I was at a fruit market. I was standing in front of a pile of bananas, and suddenly, for what appeared to be no reason, I almost threw up. I got very shaky and dizzy and almost started crying--I had to go sit out in the car while the family finished up the shopping.

At the time, I sensed what was wrong, but I didn't have the words to articulate it. I spoke of the incident to one other person--I told her how the voices of the mostly Mexican migrant workers in the shop had come together with the warm smell of the huge pile of bananas, and suddenly, I could see the brown hands that hacked the bananas off the trees, I could feel the hunger in his stomach, the heat of the sun on his skin, sucking the sweat out of his body--and I couldn't touch the bananas--i couldn't touch them because what I wanted to touch were the hands, the brown callused hands, that had made it possible for me to feed my newly born baby.

The person I told this to said nothing--just nodded with a soft look on her face.
That is what I needed at the time.

***

Money was always an issue for my family. But it's important to note that even though I come from a chronically working class poor household, my life wouldn't have been much different if I had come from a well off household. Work was admired in my family--in my community.

I worked in the fields from the time I was about 11 until I was about 13. At that point I switched to a job as a news paper delivery person. And eventually, when I was old enough, I worked at Mc Donalds.

And their were two common factors running through my experiences at each of these jobs. First, I was never the only Chicana/Mexicana at the particular job. Especially while working in the fields, there was always an overwhelming amount of brown people (of all ages, mothers, grandmothers, children as young as 2 or 3) working there.

The other factor was that I always *wanted* to be working. I didn't see anything wrong with being 11 years old and working 8-10 hours a day with one break for lunch. I *embraced* the feeling of tired, the feeling of independence, the self-assurance that now, no matter what happened, I would have the power to take care of myself.

And I wasn't alone in that feeling. In working class Chicano communities, work is how you prove yourself to be an adult. In general, nobody really much cared when 15 year-olds got pregnant, because they were working and/or they had a spouse that was working and it was just understood--once you had the power to live on your own, you had the power to make your own decisions. Similarly, when boys came home and said they dropped out of school to get a job, there may have been some angst--but mostly, there was ambivilence or even admiration for the boy. He was a man now.

***

I enjoyed the feelings that hard physical labor brought about in my body. The deep dreamless sleep the came after hours and hours of picking, the clean empty way your brain feels when your whole body is concentrating on not passing out--I even enjoyed the tenderness of my skin, puffy and red, as it recovered from multiple burns, bruises and cuts from spattering oil, hot grills, and tomato slicers. Physically--to move your body to the point of sweat--it just feels good.

It wasn't until I was a 19-year-old living on my own, working at a popular restaurant chain that this changed. I had left home for a good shortly before my graduation. I had nobody except myself to rely on in any way--and as a result, I was working anywhere from 50-80 hours a week, often as much as 20 hours a day. And as the lone female working in a position that required lots of physical labor (grill cook), I got endless flak from male grill cooks for needing help with lifting or things like that. So I pretty much figured out how to do it myself.

And eventually, the sexual harassment began--lots of touching, rubbing against, grabbing every single day. Touching, rubbing and grabbing that I was forced to make a decision about every time it happened. Did I want to make a big deal out of this? Did I want to further cement my reputation as an incorrigible troublemaker with my bosses? Did I want to be alienated from the guys even further for 20 hour work shifts? The one time my breasts were grabbed in front of several people, I was told by my managers that I shouldn't have been in the position where I was--that I shouldn't have been joking around with the guy who grabbed me. And because the guy was black and I was white and it was Flint, the ensuing racial strife and tension in the place where I spent up to 80 hours of my life was almost unbearable.

But I couldn't leave.

I had worked my way up to making 8$'s an hour--and I knew if I quit and went to a different resturant, I would have to start all over again back at 5.00$ an hour. And I also knew that there would be no guarantee that I would get my 20-40 hours of over time. Overtime was where I made the money to pay for hospital bills and to keep my ass off the streets.

So I stayed. And I took it. My body took the abuse, the extreme physical labor, the mental strain--and eventually also took the asthma and anxiety attacks, the arm and hip trauma that resulted from constant repetition, the mental breakdowns that left me locked in my apartment on days off, alternatively sobbing and staring at the wall.

I took it because if I didn't I would be on the streets. And if I didn't--I would be a failure. I was not able to make it on my own. I was not a real grown up. I was not a real Mexican. And for somebody who already didn't qualify as a real Mexican on other physical levels (my pale skin, my inability to speak Spanish), the idea that there was another way I could prove I wasn't real--it was intolerable. Self preservation and cultural identity were all tied up into one messy physically disintegrating body.

***

It wasn't until I was pregnant with my first child that the disintegration began to become obvious to me. Due to extreme health problems, I was forced to spend most of my pregnancy lying down doing nothing. The movements of the television made me sick, the sound of W*'s breathing made me sick, the smell of tap water made me sick, rolling over too quickly made me sick. I was in and out of the hospital and given pretty much *no* help by condescending doctors who told me "Every woman feels like shit when she's pregnant."

So I spent most of my day doozing in and out and thinking. Thinking about how shitty I felt because I wasn't working. W* and I have never been well off. We were only able to survive on one income because we lived in a one bedroom apartment in the middle of Flint Michigan. I knew he was working his ass off, I knew he was worried--and there was nothing I could do to help because I was so busy being sick.

And even more so--It was the first time since I was 11 years old that I wasn't working. The first time in almost 15 years that I wasn't earning an income of some sort. The first time I had to confront the way my body had been trained--the way my muscles and blood and brain had been trained by the demand to work.

I noticed how my muscles twitched involuntarily when a visitor needed a glass of water or a towel. The way blankets and blankets of guilt forced my body to crawl out of bed and try to help make dinner or take the dog out for a walk. The way, even 2 years after quitting my restaurant job, dreams would still invade my brain at night--dreams where I got handful after handful of orders to cook, dreams where I couldn't keep up, and I knew I was going to get fired and goddamn it I need this job, what am I going to do?

I couldn't rest and heal my body from pregnancy related sickness because I was so busy unraveling and recognizing for the first time the sense of desperation that had motivated almost my entire life.

I swung in and out of severe depressions that only alleviated once I was finally able to go back to work.

***

Although feminism saved my life on so many levels--at the same time, feminism also helped me to overlook the deeper more traumatic aspects of my life up until that point. The first feminist book I ever read was The Feminine Mystique. And while I am forever grateful to Betty Friedan for helping me to see I was not alone, her solution to the depression, pain, violence, of staying at home (get a job, basically) was not my solution. How could it be? The women she talked to had never worked, had never felt the inescapable heat of the sun beating on their heads for 8 hours a day, had never felt guilty for playing with toys rather than working, had never felt like a trapped animal day in and day out for 80 hours a week. I identified very strongly with the lack of humanity the women Friedan discussed felt and internalized. But they and I were not the same. And so our solutions could never be the same. But I didn't figure that one out for a long time.

***

Mexicans have bought into the myth as much as anybody else. We are hard workers--we are better than blacks because we work and they don't. We will do the work nobody else wants to, we will leave our children and loved ones to get them a better life. We will scavenge through deserts and risk being raped and shoot just for a 8$ an hour job. We patently ignore the violence this love of work does to our physical bodies and to our families.

And I understand why. When you have nothing else, when you have already been shamed in so many different ways, when your own English speaking children are embarrassed of your Spanish accented English, their eyes and ears judging you with the mind of that which hates you--what other choice to do you have? What other way do you have to make your children proud of you?

And really, all of us know that in spite of how much everybody beats education education education into our brains as the solution to our problems--things just aren't that easy. Not when schools are war zones. And Spanish speaking students are shoved into the back of the class and ignored until they teach themselves English. And college loans have a way of being bigger than the house loan. And nobody ever hires the spic anyway.

It's so much more complicated than even we allow ourselves to consider. Immigration reform will not help our children no longer feel lonely when they don't see us for 18 hours at a time. Getting paid more and eliminating sexism on the job will not give a childhood to children who migrate every year and must work in the fields after school. And indulgently looking away while mothers and fathers risk the desert to find a job does nothing to keep the lonely children back home from killing themselves.

It's so complicated--but we don't have the time to work through it all. We're busy trying avoid deportation, keep food on the table, keep our children off the streets, and keep our bodies from disintegrating into a pile of bruised mush, our minds no longer strong enough to push the mush to where it needs to go.

***

Nadia said in comments:

i have little choice but to support systems of oppression in everything i buy and eat. there are so few alternatives to it. that is an added dimension to secondary trauma; not only do you experience the trauma, but you are also in the position of having little choice but to force that trauma on others in your group. we have to pay taxes, and those taxes go towards military action against our people. we have to buy food and clothes, resulting in us financially supporting industries that exploit our people.

Even as my body recovers itself, even as my muscles learn how to move for their own reasons, I am participating in the exploitation of my own people--of mi raza. The bananas I eat to empower my body, keep me strong, are the same bananas that I know steal away the life of other brown workers. My road to recovery is based on the continued violence against my community.

Which is why I found myself standing in front of a pile of bananas ready to vomit. I know what the body's of those pickers look like, I know what their hands feel like, I know how their shoulders ache and how their skin burns to a dark red tomato color. I know because their bodies are mine.

And when I reach out to pick up bananas what I really want is to reach for the hands of my fellow worker, to hold his hands and tell him, promise him, that my health will not come at the cost of his health. That it will not come at the cost of his children's health.

But I can't do that.
And it destroys me.

***

I started keeping a garden about three years ago. And W* has been very patient with me--I get out and work for a few days, and then abandon the thing for weeks, forcing him to pick up the slack. At the same time, when he gets overwhelmed and decides he's going to stop working on it, I cry and beg and plead for him stick with it. I promise I'll help, and even do so diligently for a few weeks until I drop off again.

Because even though I've never been able to articulate it, I've always known that our little garden is liberatory to my community. Besides the fact that our little garden makes it so that we don't have to waste gas going to the store, makes it a few less bananas that children need to pick, etc etc--our little garden allows me a space to see what it feels like to have hard work stem from love, to have sweat result in nurturing and healing. It allows me the space to teach my children traditions on their terms--my son knows death is not forever, that death brings life. He and I have discussed it quite a bit while scattering dead leaves and mulch over our plants.

And my daughter, who is like me, and inclined to do things in bursts, plays off to the side of the garden, listening intently while she plays, coming over occasionally to ask questions and get clarification. She figured out all by herself that bombs destroy the earth, makes it impossible for new life to grow in a healthy and safe way. Something many full grown environmentalists haven't quite figured out.

It's just one garden. Just like the South Central garden was just one garden. And the Esperanza garden was just one garden. And the Avenue A was just a garden. All just gardens that teach the bodies of brown people, many times for the first time, what it feels like to create for oneself, what it feels like to move and sweat and breath all for oneself.

To make choices we have never been allowed to make.

To love ourselves the way we've never been allowed to.

New life arising from the disintegration.

~En Lucha~