Liberation Now!

Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee - International Day of Solidarity with Leonard Peltier

2012-01-10T15:55:00.000-08:00

Leonard Peltier Defense Offense Committee - International Day of Solidarity with Leonard Peltier

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2009 = Great Expectations and Great Disappointments via Peta-de-Aztlan

2009-12-31T23:36:00.001-08:00

http://bit.ly/7ow2bN

New Year's Eve, December 31, 2009

The big news of the year was President Obama's Election, the near meltdown of the U.S. economy, resultant government bailouts and major health insurance reform legislation, minus a public option. Towards the end of this year the escalation of war in Afghanistan and other regurgitations of the Bush War on Terrorism dominated the headlines with regional wars brewing around the globe, including Latin America. It has been another year of troubles upon Mother Earth.

We came into the New Year of 2009 with great expectations for the future. The Fuhrer Bush reign was over and the evil energy emanating from the Oval Office Cabal was dissipated. In U.S. history, White racism and its negative effects has been the major cause of division in U.S. society, after the cleavage of economic classes. White-Americans overcame significant remnants of racism when they cast their ballots for President in November of 2008 and actually elected Barack Obama to be the 44th President of the United States of America.

I had already read Obama's book The Audacity of Hope. He identified himself first and foremost as an authentic American, not an African-American. He consciously and consistently ran his Presidential Campaign as an American in order to represent all Americans, that is, U.S. citizens. I thought the odds against him winning were great, but he won against all odds. After eight ugly years with Fuhrer Bush it was obvious that the country was ready for real fundamental change. His opponent John McCain was not much of an improvement over Fuhrer Bush and his policies.

Obama, being aware of the power of mass psychology, had the positive affirmative slogan of YES WE CAN! SI SE PUEDE! Obama's campaign integrated communications technology via Internet power and mass media into the whole process of local field organizing. He was hip to mass media via Internet power and was able to raise almost a billion dollars for his campaign, though, who will say for sure? Obama had the whole package: intelligence, eloquence, composure and being handsome, plus the self-confidence of a winner's smile! He won my vote!

Big trouble was already brewing in the U.S. economy. In early January President-elect Obama urged Congress to act quickly to pass sweeping economic stimulus measures with an infusion of as much as $800 billion; China had overtaken Germany as the world's third-largest economy; in February, the U.S. government had already pledged more than $11.6 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers; in March, job prospects hit a 26-year low; in April, foreclosure rates rose to a record, affecting one in every 374 housing units; in July, seven banks were shut down by authorities, pushing the tally of failed banks for 2009 to 52, more than double 2008 failures. In essence, the whole U.S. economy of corporate capitalism was threatened with a major global meltdown.

It is to Obama's credit that the whole U.S. economy did not collapse mainly due to sinking the U.S. economy into a huge historic debt running up to the trillions. In connected reality, the whole economy is already bankrupt!

In August, Sonia Sotomayor became the first Latina Supreme Court Justice of Puerto Rican ancestry. Many Latinos and women were thrilled. As Chicanos we actually had hoped that she would usher in significant humane immigration reform. As of New Year's Eve of 2009 this has not come to pass.

We will use the term 'Latinos' for general purposes in reference to Chicanos, Mexicans, Hispanics and others whose ancestry is native to the Americas, especially Aztlan (roughly the U.S. southwest).

What so-called financial experts consider an economic recession for the middle-class worrying about foreclosures is actually a Great Depression for the lower-classes concerned about keeping a roof over their heads.

A lot has happened this year that changed the global social landscape in the world. Good seeds have been planted that will sprout up in 2010. Sadly, there are tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq; the Afghan War has been further escalated and now unmanned drone planes are used on a routine basis. Life is war and the war goes on.

Many progressive elements who voted for and supported President Obama thought that he was going to bring about a lot of major fundamental changes that have not yet come to pass. Red flags should have gone up when he recruited Hilary Clinton for Secretary of State and kept Robert Gates on from the Bush Regime as Secretary of Defense. Politically correct decisions should be made based upon the primacy of humane ethics, spiritual principles and decent morals, not popularity contests.

Thus, after a year that began with great expectations, it has dwindled down to one of great disappointments. The coming year will have deepening and widening social contradictions with great challenges calling for great contributions as we struggle onwards towards total liberation for all of the human family!
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Link: Change.org's 2009 Year in Review
http://blog.change.org/2009/12/31/change-org%E2%80%99s-2009-year-in...
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http://help-matrix.ning.com/profiles/blogs/2009-great-expectations-and

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Tags: Obama, liberation

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Obama's War Speech: The Questions It Raises… And The Answer That Must Be Given By Larry Everest

2009-12-07T21:40:00.001-08:00

http://www.revcom.us/a/185/obama_speech-en.html

By Larry Everest

On Tuesday, December 1, at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, President Barack Obama announced that he would send 30,000 additional troops to

Afghanistan

. He also called for 10,000 more NATO troops, which pushes the total U.S.-led forces to nearly 150,000, and he announced plans to step up the war on a number of fronts including (without being specific) in Pakistan. Obama has now tripled the number of

U.S.

forces in

Afghanistan

since he took office.

These military forces will not be going to

Afghanistan

to set up vaccination programs or conduct literacy classes for Afghan girls. They are going there as part of the most destructive military machine on the planet, to wreak violence. The military machine that has bombed wedding parties, that has held thousands of young Afghan men in Bagram prison without charges, that kicks down doors in the middle of the night—this machine is being strengthened and further unleashed.

The West Point speech is being called the "defining moment" of Obama's presidency. Thus far into his term, at least, that is true. So it is important to look deeply at the questions Obama posed and the answers he gave—and in doing so to get into the real underlying causes of the military escalation now being put into effect.

Why is the U.S. Army in Afghanistan?

Obama began his speech this way: "It is important to recall why

America

and our allies were compelled to fight a war in

Afghanistan

in the first place. We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, nineteen men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers.… As we know, these men belonged to al Qaeda…. Al Qaeda's base of operations was in

Afghanistan

, where they were harbored by the Taliban—a ruthless, repressive and radical movement that seized control of that country after it was ravaged by years of Soviet occupation and civil war, and after the attention of

America

and our friends had turned elsewhere."

Obama later returned to his explanation of why the Taliban and al Qaeda had taken root in

Afghanistan

: "Now, the people of

Afghanistan

have endured violence for decades. They've been confronted with occupation by the Soviet Union, and then by foreign al Qaeda fighters who used Afghan land for their own purposes."

Obama implies that the

U.S.

had nothing to do with the Soviet invasion of

Afghanistan

, and that it bears no responsibility for the growth of the Taliban and al Qaeda there, or the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. According to Obama, the

U.S.

itself therefore played no role in the events that lead to the attacks of 9/11.

The facts are different. The

U.S.

actually helped prompt the Soviet invasion of

Afghanistan

. In July 1979, some five months before the Soviet invasion, the

U.S.

had initiated a covert campaign to destabilize

Afghanistan

's pro-Soviet government by arming and funding the Islamist opposition. The goal, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, was "to induce a Soviet military intervention." When the Soviets did intervene in December, Brzezinski wrote Carter: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the

USSR

its Vietnam War."

The Carter administration undertook this operation because at the time the

U.S.

was locked in a bitter struggle for global supremacy with what was then the Soviet Union.^*After helping trigger the

Afghanistan

invasion, the

U.S.

worked behind the scenes with

Pakistan

and

Saudi Arabia

throughout the 1980s to make the war much longer, more violent, and more destructive. These forces organized, funded, and armed the Mujahideen ("warriors for Islam"). While many other Afghans took up arms against the Soviet invaders, the

U.S.

and its partners worked to build up the reactionary Islamic fundamentalist fighters. Over the next decade, the

U.S.

government funneled more than $3 billion in arms and aid to these fundamentalist forces, and in so doing helped fuel a global Islamist movement. This is where Osama bin Laden got his start. This is where the seeds of al Qaeda and the Taliban were first sown.

During the 1980s there were some Afghans fighting against the Soviet occupation who opposed religious fundamentalism and both

U.S.

and Soviet imperialism. They stood for an entirely different future—a future free of imperialist domination, free of capitalist exploitation, and free of the backward, traditional feudal social relations and ideology that keep most of the Afghan people in shackles—especially women. These forces were led by

Afghanistan

's revolutionary Maoists. Yet these forces were targeted—viciously and murderously—by all the reactionary forces involved in the Afghan conflict—the U.S. imperialists, the Soviet imperialists, the Islamic Mujahideen, and the U.S.-backed warlords.

When the Soviets finally pulled out of

Afghanistan

in 1989, more than a million Afghans (along with 15,000 Soviet soldiers) had been killed and one-third of the population—that's over 7 million people—driven into refugee camps. Just two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. Its defeat in

Afghanistan

had played a major role.

Meanwhile,

Afghanistan

was left in a state of civil war between the existing pro-Soviet regime and different groups of Islamist religious fanatics and reactionary warlords who fought each other while repressing the people. Yet the

U.S.

rulers considered their Afghan gambit a tremendous success. When asked by the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998 (January 15) whether he regretted inducing the Soviet invasion of

Afghanistan

and "having supported the Islamic [fighters], having given arms and advice to future terrorists," Brzezinski replied: "Regret what?... What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"

"What we see in contention here with Jihad on the one hand and McWorld/McCrusade on the other hand, are historically outmoded strata among colonized and oppressed humanity up against historically outmoded ruling strata of the imperialist system. These two reactionary poles reinforce each other, even while opposing each other. If you side with either of these 'outmodeds,' you end up strengthening both."

Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party,

USA

From the talk, "Why We're in the Situation We're in Today… And What to Do About It:A Thoroughly Rotten System and the Need for Revolution"

It is easy, of course, to start the movie on September 11, 2001. But if you press the rewind button you find out that the

U.S.

government had not been innocently minding its business all these years only to find itself the victim of an utterly unprovoked attack.

There is a whole history here of arming and utilizing Islamic fundamentalists, and of being party to destroying a million lives. Indeed, it is hard to overstate the level of horror and needless suffering that was visited on the Afghan people through this superpower dance of death. All of this was done in the interests of preserving and defending

U.S.

imperial domination. None of that justifies what was done on 911—but if we are to understand the actual causes of what is going on, we had best understand the full dimensions of the story.

Is Obama's "Attention Deficit Disorder" Diagnosis True?

Obama said that after the Soviet withdrawal from

Afghanistan

in 1989, "the attention of

America

and our friends had turned elsewhere."

So where was

U.S.

attention focused in the 1990s in this part of the world? Beginning with the first Bush administration (George H.W. Bush) and continuing through the Clinton administration, the

U.S.

moved on a number of fronts to consolidate the tremendous advantage it derived from the fall of the Soviet Union. It aimed in particular to deepen and extend its domination of the Middle East and Central Asia. This included the 1991 invasion and destruction of Iraq, which caused what a U.S. Census Bureau international analyst—Beth Osborne Daponte—estimated to be over 200,000 deaths (another 500,000 at least were killed by UN sanctions during the 1990s), and the basing of massive U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. It also included new overtures to, and increased working through, predominantly Hindu India, which aggravated the rivalry between

India

and

Pakistan

—a rivalry which the

U.S.

has attempted to manipulate and play for its own advantage. All this, along with the continued

U.S.

support for

Israel

in the face of the massive rebellion of the Palestinian people in the late '80s and early '90s, involved tremendous and often horrific levels of violence against Arab and Central Asian peoples and the assertion of open

U.S.

domination.

At the same time, deeper American economic and social penetration of the region modernized certain aspects of the societies there, while undercutting traditional relations. Taken together, all this led to the beginning of open conflict between the

U.S.

and Islamist forces. The same so-called "holy warriors" whom the

U.S.

had initially supported and often pulled together on the basis of reactionary opposition to "modernization" now began to oppose the

U.S.

and to carry out guerrilla operations against it in that region. Meanwhile, by 1996, the Pakistani government had helped install the Taliban in

Afghanistan

to both stabilize the country under extremely repressive Islamic rule, and to use it as a counterweight to Indian ambitions in

Afghanistan

and the region. All these developments led the

U.S.

, by the late 1990s, to once again intensify its attention to

Afghanistan

, in the context of the region as a whole. During this period a consensus emerged (which was solidified by 9/11) among what would become the dominant political forces in the U.S. that Islamic fundamentalism was becoming a prime obstacle to U.S. objectives, that it would need to be defeated, and that a radical restructuring of the whole region was needed to undercut these forces and secure U.S. hegemony.

Much of this history is well-known—certainly to anyone in public office or in the mainstream press. Yet following Obama's speech there was no comment on his "omission" from either.

What Was the U.S. Trying to Accomplish By Invading Afghanistan in 2001?

Obama defends the decision to invade

Afghanistan

and says it brought good results. He notes that Congress "authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and those who harbored them, an authorization that continues to this day"—98-0 in the Senate, 420-1 in the House of Representatives—and that NATO supported the U.S. and that the UN Security Council "endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks.

America

, our allies, and the world were acting as one to destroy al Qaeda's terrorist network and to protect our common security."

"Under the banner of this domestic unity and international legitimacy—and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden—we sent our troops into

Afghanistan

Here we must go deeper into exactly what was done under "this banner of domestic unity and international legitimacy" and why.

The Bush regime had a number of objectives in invading

Afghanistan

in October 2001. First, to quickly and massively attack and conquer

Afghanistan

in order to demonstrate to the world that

America

's will had not been shaken by the September 11 attacks and that it was still willing and able to crush with overwhelming force any who dared challenge it. This is not just macho posturing, but essential to maintaining global "credibility"—i.e., fear—and dominance.

Second, the U.S. wanted to quickly overthrow the Taliban regime and install a loyal client state in Afghanistan as part of an overarching effort to deepen its military control of Central Asia (Afghanistan abuts two of the U.S.'s main potential rivals—Russia and China) and to gain greater access to and control of the region's energy. (During the 1990s the

U.S.

was attempting to build a pipeline across

Afghanistan

that would avoid going through

Russia

Iran

. The

U.S.

oil giant UNOCAL was the prime contractor—one of its consultants was Hamid Karzai, later installed by the

U.S.

as President of Afghanistan.) Doing so was also part of an effort to defeat anti-U.S. Islamist forces across the region.

Simply capturing or killing Osama bin Laden was never the central objective. (Obama's claim that the

U.S.

invaded

Afghanistan

"only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden" is at least open to serious question. According to the Guardian UK (10/14/01), "President George Bush rejected as 'non-negotiable' an offer by the Taliban to discuss turning over Osama bin Laden if the United States ended the bombing in Afghanistan.")

Obama praises the results of the

U.S.

invasion: "Within a matter of months, al Qaeda was scattered and many of its operatives were killed. The Taliban was driven from power and pushed back on its heels. A place that had known decades of fear now had reason to hope," and points to the formation of a U.S.-created regime with Karzai at the head as a positive development "to help bring a lasting peace to a war-torn country."

It was nothing of the kind. The Karzai regime was a regime of

U.S.

lackeys, warlords, drug-dealers and war criminals—many as hated as the Taliban they replaced. Warlord Gen. Abdul Dostom, who has served as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Afghan National Army under Karzai, is responsible for the 2001 Dasht-e-Leili massacre when some 2,000 prisoners of war were forced into boxcars, suffocated to death, and dumped in the desert. And, among other viciously anti-woman policies and laws, the US-installed Afghan government passed a law in February, 2009, which applies to

Afghanistan

's Shia population (10-15 percent of the Afghan people) that explicitly legalizes rape in marriage by banning women from refusing to have sex with their husbands. That law also prevents women from working, going to school, getting access to health care or other services, or even leaving her home without husband's permission. This replacement of one set of oppressors with another—not surprisingly—did nothing to end oppression there. Rather it reinforced the sources of oppression in

Afghanistan

—foreign domination, capitalism and feudalism, religious fundamentalism, and patriarchy.

(It is also important to briefly take note of what else was done under "the banner of domestic unity and international legitimacy." In the days directly after 9/11, the Bush Administration introduced the USA-PATRIOT Act, which tremendously heightened the reach and scope of the repressive apparatus in the U.S. Immigrants were rounded up and held for months without charges and often deported in the dead of night. Massive surveillance programs were begun, beyond even what had been authorized by the PATRIOT Act and without the knowledge of most of Congress. "State secrets" was made an excuse to deny all kinds of information that showed the U.S. in a bad light, even when this meant preventing people who had been detained and tortured "by mistake" from having their day in court. The

U.S.

arrogated to itself the right to kill and capture people anywhere in the world, without trial, if the

U.S.

suspected these people of being "terrorists." Most dramatically, it instituted a widespread regimen of torture—beginning at Guantánamo (where people were detained indefinitely, in violation of international law and of the U.S. Constitution) and then spreading throughout the military, into

Iraq

and

Afghanistan

; and over 100 people were killed as a result of this torture. None of this was even mentioned in Obama's speech—in large part because he has actually continued the great majority of these repressive measures!)

Why is the Taliban Resurgent and the U.S. Occupation in Trouble?

"It is a system of capitalism-imperialism…a system in which U.S. imperialism is the most monstrous, most oppressive superpower…a system driven by a relentless chase after profit, which brings horror upon horror, a nightmare seemingly without end, for the vast majority of humanity: poverty and squalor…torture and rape…the wholesale domination and degradation of women everywhere…wars, invasions and occupations…assassinations and massacres… planes, missiles, tanks and troops of the USA bombarding people in faraway lands while they sleep in their homes or go about their daily lives, blasting their little children to pieces, cutting down men and women in the prime of life, or in old age, kicking down their doors and dragging them away in the middle of the night…while here in the USA itself the police harass, brutalize and murder youth in the streets of the inner cities—over and over again—and then they spit out their maddening insults, insisting that this is 'justified,' as if these youth are not human beings, have no right to live, deserve no respect and no future."

From "The Revolution We Need… The Leadership We Have: A Message, And A Call, From The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA." Revolution #170, revcom.us

How did things get to the current point—with the Taliban resurgent and the

U.S.

occupiers in trouble and losing ground?

Obama claims that after starting out well things started going badly (i.e., for the

U.S.

occupiers) in

Afghanistan

for two reasons. First, "in early 2003, the decision was made to wage a second war in

Iraq

... for the next six years, the

Iraq

war drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention..."

Second, while the Karzai regime is "a legitimate government ... elected by the Afghan people," according to Obama, "it's been hampered by corruption, the drug trade, an under-developed economy, and insufficient security forces."

What about this explanation? Yes, resources were diverted to the war in

Iraq

. But without getting into a full analysis of the trajectory of the

Afghanistan

war, it's important to note that this isn't the essential reason for the Taliban's resurgence and its ability to "control additional swaths of territory in

Afghanistan

" as Obama put it. There are deeper reasons which have to do with what

U.S.

capitalism-imperialism brings to the world and countries like

Afghanistan

The first is the brutality of the

U.S.

occupation. U.S. forces—hailed as heroes by Obama—have committed countless atrocities in Afghanistan—from bombing wedding parties, to murdering civilians, to humiliating Afghans with house-to-house searches, to locking people up in U.S.-controlled dungeons, where torture, illegal detention, and rendition have been in effect.

Here's one example. On August 22, 2008, the people in Azizabad, a small village in western

Afghanistan

, were asleep when

U.S.

forces attacked—first with guns, then air strikes. By the next morning, according to UN investigators, over 90 people had been massacred, including 60 children and 15 women. There have been many such massacres during the course of the war—most recently on September 9 of this year when 100-200 were killed in one attack in Kunduz province. While there are no precise figures for the number of Afghan casualties (in part because the

U.S.

military refuses to release – and perhaps doesn't even count -- them), studies have been done that give a glimpse of the scope of the carnage. Prof. Marc Herold documented 3,000-3,400 civilian deaths, mainly as a result of

U.S.

bombing, during the first six months of the war alone. The Guardian UK (11/19/09) estimates that 6,584 civilians were killed (by both the

U.S.

coalition and the Taliban) between 2006-Oct. 2009. Womens' rights activist and former member of the Afghan Parliament Malalai Joya states that 8,000 civilians have been killed in the war. (Democracy Now!, 10/28/2009)

These crimes have strengthened the Taliban. The Taliban for its part has used a combination of strong-arming people combined with playing upon the nationalist sentiments of the masses (particularly the Pashtun nationality in

Afghanistan

), as well as the appeal of "traditional Islam" in a society that has been deeply shattered, to take advantage of this.

Second, the warlords, landlords, tribal chiefs and pro-U.S. power brokers in

Afghanistan

are widely hated for preying on, exploiting and brutalizing the Afghan people. A prime example is Karzai's own brother—Ahmad Wali Karzai, who was put in charge of Kandahar,

Afghanistan

's second largest city. He's a major warlord and drug trafficker—and also on the CIA payroll.

It was not until 2005 that the Taliban began to mount an offensive against the occupation in earnest; the

U.S.

occupation forces and their hand-picked lackeys had years to show they could improve life for the Afghan people. But they didn't do it. Why? Because the

U.S.

imperialists were not in

Afghanistan

to liberate the people or develop the country; they were in

Afghanistan

to achieve their global objectives: to defeat al Qaeda and to create a pro-U.S. regime that would not destabilize neighboring countries and would be amenable to

U.S.

regional objectives.

And there is a deeper reason here. You cannot "improve life" for the Afghan people without uprooting the traditional social relations, and the class forces that benefit from those relations, which have held the masses in subjugation and darkness for centuries. Imperialism introduces great instability into oppressed nations, driving peasants off land and into the cities, and often introducing education to a broader section of masses (in order to modernize some sectors of the society). This is a byproduct of, and a necessity for, the implantation of capitalist relations in predominantly feudal societies. In doing this, imperialism relies on the former ruling forces and new elites to keep a lid on the upheaval ("to manage the transition," in their words)—that is, to prevent masses from raising their heads and rebelling against the exploitation, the dispossession, and the backward relations and ideas that still hold the society and its people in their grip. Imperialism relies on, and must rely on, the very forces, in other words, that benefit from either the old traditional forms of oppression or the new "market-based" ones—and sometimes both.

The kind of revolution that would decisively move to uproot those relations—the kind of revolution that would rely on and unleash the masses to take destiny into their own hands -- would necessarily directly oppose structures of foreign (including

U.S.

) domination. That's why the

U.S.

must rely on and further entrench and reinforce very oppressive forces, which do in fact stand in the way of a better life for the people, as a bulwark against any such revolution. A force like the Taliban—which does not actually pose the possibility for a real rupture with those relations of domination and dependence and which represents, often very directly, some of the most backward feudal forces in the country—can "gain traction" in that situation; at least to the point where they win a following among a section of people, and can intimidate the rest into acquiescence.

Third, Obama mentioned that al Qaeda and the Taliban had been able to establish havens in

Pakistan

. What he did not mention is that the Pakistani state, long backed and funded by the U.S., has actively promoted Islamic fundamentalism as a pillar of its legitimacy, and funded, supported and probably helps direct Jihadist fighters in Afghanistan and in Kashmir as part of its rivalry with India. This has included tolerating, even supporting, the Taliban and al Qaeda. And many in Pakistan are turning to the fundamentalists out of hatred for the dictatorial rule of the military, and the domination of Pakistan by U.S. imperialism, in league with big landlords and capitalists—a domination that has left the vast majority of the population in deep poverty and deprivation.

(While Obama did not spell out his precise plans for Pakistan, a subject we'll be covering in future issues of Revolution, there are widespread reports that he will be escalating the war there too, including through stepped up attacks by drone or unmanned aircraft. The stability of the Pakistani state is of major concern to the imperialists and one of their main reasons for escalating in

Afghanistan

Again, these are the kinds of relations and regimes the

U.S.

promotes around the world. And Obama is not breaking from this practice—he's escalating it, as we'll discuss below.

How Can Obama Label One Million Deaths a "Success"?

While Obama spoke out against the war in Iraq in 2002, and rode to the White House based in large part on the credibility among the disaffected with which that endowed him, at West Point he hailed this war as a success and job well done: "Today, after extraordinary costs, we are bringing the Iraq war to a responsible end ... we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future, and we are successfully leaving Iraq to its people." And his "surge" in

Afghanistan

is being justified by, and modeled in important ways on, Bush's "successful" surge in

Iraq

Let's take a closer look at what Obama calls "success." The war in Iraq—a war based on lies—cost the lives of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqis; over 4 million have been driven from their homes; the Sunni population—some 20 percent of Iraq's population—has been decimated by the U.S. occupation and a sectarian war of ethnic cleansing unleashed by the reactionary Shi'a forces the U.S. helped empower—an ethnic cleansing with tacit U.S. support. That slaughter, along with cash payments to the defeated Sunni fighters, is at the heart of the "successful" surge in

Iraq

. Yet Obama did not utter a word about the Iraqi victims of this

U.S.

aggression. Apparently the only civilians worth talking about in his view are the 3,000 killed on September 11.

Obama's treatment of

Iraq

is typical of his approach throughout his speech. He repeatedly refers to Americans who have lost their lives, but not to those

America

has killed in its "war on terror," whether in

Iraq

Afghanistan

Pakistan

, or other countries. By doing this, he is rendering totally invisible the enormous toll of people killed by the

U.S.

In sheer numbers, the

U.S.

has so far killed something like 200 to 300 people for every American killed in the attacks of 9/11! By rendering these victims invisible and not even worth mentioning, he is training people in this country to see the world as if only American lives count. He is training them, in other words, in the mindset of imperialism.

And what of this new

Iraq

? The

U.S.

has brought to power an alliance of reactionary, pro-U.S. Kurdish warlords with reactionary Shi'ite religious parties.

Iraq

's military and police are dominated by sectarian death squads. Religious fundamentalism has been strengthened and the abuse and subjugation of women—including enforced veiling and legal discrimination -- has intensified and is actually worse than it was under Saddam Hussein. Meanwhile,

Iraq

is being gradually opened up to foreign exploitation– including its vast oil sector. And

Iraq

's ethnic and religious faultlines have not been healed—and remain volatile and potentially explosive.

Whose Interests—and What "Way of Life"—Are Really Served by Obama's New Strategy?

The strategy Obama laid out at West Point is not less violent or imperial, nor is it more truthful or humane than Bush's strategy.

The core of Obama's argument for why people should support an escalating and ongoing war in

Afghanistan

is the same as Bush's: I'm doing it to protect you and your loved ones:

"If I did not think that the security of the

United States

and the safety of the American people were at stake in

Afghanistan

, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow.... I am convinced that our security is at stake in

Afghanistan

and

Pakistan

. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here we were attacked on 9/11 and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak."

"This is no idle danger, no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of

Afghanistan

and

Pakistan

to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards and al Qaeda can operate with impunity."

Here's the truth. The system Barack Obama is leading cares nothing for human life—whether those living within its borders or those living outside. It has demonstrated this for the 200-plus years of its existence by its actions in every corner of the globe. Its workings have savaged millions upon millions of lives, whether through outright killing or condemning people to lives of exploitation and destitution. The rulers care about people's safety only to the degree that it impacts on their power, legitimacy, and grip on the population.

"Our security" and "way of life" is based on global exploitation and plunder in the interests of a relative handful of imperialists. Crumbs from this plunder are used to pacify and/or retain the loyalty of a large section of the "home" population. The privileges accorded to a large section of Americans are based on the parasitical exploitation of billions. And this parasitical exploitation, in turn, rests on highly repressive, and widely hated, political structures in oppressed or Third World countries—like the Karzai regime in

Afghanistan

—imposed by the

U.S.

to enforce its strategic interests and meet the needs of global capital.

Our "security" and "way of life" also rests on the grinding exploitation of tens of millions of people within the U.S. itself, with millions of immigrants denied any rights whatsoever and declared outlaws and millions of others living in desperate circumstances, seeking jobs and a way to live and often consigned to a life of crime and punishment. This too is reinforced by both raw force carried out by the repressive institutions of the police, prisons and army—the instruments of dictatorship, to be scientific—and by the ideas promoted through the schools, media, religious institutions, etc. So Obama's talk of "we"—as if everyone living within the borders of the

U.S.

shares common interests and a common cause, as if "we're all in this together"—covers over the real divisions in the world and within the

U.S.

It's a framework and way of looking at the world that hides the most fundamental facts about society and how it operates, and instead aims to win people to go against their own most basic interests—which actually consist of a world without one nation dominating another, a world without exploitation, and a world without all the relations and poisonous ideas that flow out of and reinforce those relations-- in short, a communist world.

This "we-have-to-protect-our-way-of-life" outlook is poison—and promoting this outlook among both the most oppressed and more enlightened sectors of society—is Obama's special role, and special talent, for the rulers. If this speech does nothing else, it must serve as a way for those who do know better to break those who should know better out of this outlook.

So people shouldn't join the imperialists in "threat assessments" to their system, much less rally to its defense. But even if you take this selfish and ultimately complicitous standard—the "safety of the American people"—as your own, Obama's strategy—which will greatly increase the violence brought to bear against the people of

Afghanistan

—will further stoke hatred of the

U.S.

and support for Islamic fundamentalism.

How Is U.S. Imperial Domination Different From All Other Imperial Domination?

Toward the end of his speech, summing things up, Obama said: "We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation's resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours." This is double-talk aimed at obscuring how the system operates. First of all, when it suits their needs and interests, the imperialists will massively occupy countries for years, even decades—as they're doing right now with 100,000 troops in

Iraq

and perhaps even more in

Afghanistan

! At the same time, modern empires have many other tools for shaping the destinies of countries and entire regions without direct occupations.

And though the U.S. doesn't try to "claim resources" due to differences in "faith and ethnicity"—it does seek to control key resources (and indeed whole economies!) to further its strategic contention with other rivals and to maintain the functioning of U.S. capitalism—no matter the faith or ethnicity of its victims. And imperialism does enforce national oppression—against oppressed peoples (what Obama refers to as "ethnic" groups) right within its borders, and overall by forcibly perpetuating the national oppression and subordination of most countries in the world to imperialism. The history of the U.S. empire—from its genocide against the native peoples, the use of Africa as a hunting ground for the slaves who built its wealth, the theft of huge sections of Mexico, and its numerous invasions of other countries, clearly illustrates this—and clearly contradicts Obama's assertion. And a key element of the entire "war on terror" has been to seize greater access to crucial energy resources: in

Afghanistan

to further

U.S.

contention with

Russia

in particular over oil and gas pipelines; in

Iraq

to open up the country's vast oil resources to international capital.

Do We Need 9/11-Style "Unity" Again?

Obama ended his speech with a stark assessment of the difficulties confronting the empire, and a call for the kind of support the rulers had following 9/11:

"[W]e as a country cannot sustain our leadership nor navigate the momentous challenges of our time if we allow ourselves to be split asunder by the same rancor and cynicism and partisanship that has in recent times poisoned our national discourse. It's easy to forget that, when this war began, we were united, bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear. I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again."

Unity like we had after 9/11? If you recall, that was a time of a lynch-mob atmosphere of chauvinist hysteria, fear-mongering, and the suppression of any critical thinking about why the 9/11 attacks happened and what should be done about them, and any critical resistance to the crimes the U.S. empire was preparing before our eyes. Wars were launched on the basis of lies. Basic freedoms were severely truncated, and in some cases eliminated. Now, eight years later, after the horrors of what that "unity" and support for America brought to the world—over a million dead in Iraq, legalized torture, and the devastation of Afghanistan—why would anyone with a shred of concern for humanity want to repeat THAT chapter in U.S. history?

But that's precisely what Obama has called on people to do—to blindly get behind the empire as it violently forges ahead in

Afghanistan

and globally. Obama's course is a criminal course; to fall blindly behind this, or to merely express trepidation or opposition and then impotently shrug your shoulders… especially for those who knew better when Bush did the same… is nothing less than complicity.

The Answer That Must Be Given

People need to do just the opposite. We have pointed to the fundamentally antagonistic interests, worldwide and within this country, concealed and obscured by talk of "we the people," and by the chauvinist notion that American lives are more valuable than those of other people. The imperialists are pursuing their interests, and we've had eight years to see where that all leads—whoever the President is. It is time and past time to see that these interests are directly opposed to those of humanity as a whole … and to take up and fight for those larger interests.

Obama spoke the truth when he said

America

was "passing through a time of great trial," and in the midst of "storms." These storms are due to the workings of imperialism and the whole cauldron of contradictions the

U.S.

"war on terror" has set roiling in the Middle East and Central Asia in particular, as well as to the most profound financial crisis since the 1930s.

If anything positive for humanity is going to come out of this "time of trial" it will happen because millions of people refuse to heed Obama's call and refuse to choose between supporting either imperialism or Islamic fundamentalism. It will happen—and it will only happen—if people instead can be led to break out of the entire framework set by this current clash. Humanity does need another way, in the interests of the people. This means revolution and it requires the broadest and most determined possible resistance to this criminal escalation.

With the whole world watching, Obama and the

U.S.

rulers have been openly debating just how much force and violence they should bring to bear against the people of

Afghanistan

. Now the whole world is going to be watching what the people in the

U.S.

do when it's decided to escalate and continue this war of conquest and empire. Will they resist? Or will they passively go along? Will they shed their delusions about Obama—or will they face reality and judge him by what he's actually doing, not his false narratives, his empty promises, and his double-talk?

* The Soviet Union had actually been born through a revolution in 1917, and had embarked on building a socialist society and working toward a communist world. But, through a complex series of struggles, new bourgeois forces within the communist party there seized power and capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union by the mid-1950s. By the time we are referring to, it had become a capitalist-imperialist power and leader of its own bloc, which was clashing very sharply with the

U.S.

for global predominance during the 1960s, '70s and '80s. For more on this see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage, A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party,

USA

, February 2009, available online at revcom.us. [back]

From Oil, Power & Empire:

Iraq

and the

U.S.

Global Agenda on the 1979 Soviet invasion of

Afghanistan

(documentation and endnotes can be found in the book)

Chapter 4: Double-Dealing Death in the Gulf, pp. 88, 89-90

The Soviet invasion, in turn, was motivated by a combination of Moscow's own imperial ambitions and its concern over stepped-up

U.S.

covert operations in

Afghanistan

and possible military action in

Iran

. In his book Iran Under the Ayatollahs, author Dilip Hiro argues that Moscow feared that following the embassy seizure, Washington was preparing a military assault on

Iran

, which in turn would "have encouraged President Hafizollah Amin of

Afghanistan

to loosen his ties with Moscow. Forestalling such a move was one of the main considerations which led Soviet officials to order their troops into

Afghanistan

The Soviet invasion came in the wake of stepped up "competition for influence with the United States throughout the Middle East, Indian Ocean, Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia regions," as the former Reagan NSCstaffer Howard Teicher and his wife put it in their book on U.S. policy in the Gulf. Taking over

Afghanistan

rescued a pro-Soviet government in Kabul, gave Moscow control of a key buffer state between

Iran

and

Pakistan

, and put its forces closer to the Persian Gulf. For the

U.S.

, the fertile crescent had become, as Brzezinski labeled it, an "arc of crisis" stretching from

Afghanistan

through

Iran

Saudi Arabia

—a label that is once again being applied to this region in the wake of the

U.S.

wars on

Afghanistan

and

Iraq

The Empire Strikes Back

Intervention in the Iran-Iraq War was one facet of a multi-dimensioned and aggressive

U.S.

response to the shocking turn of events in 1979. Washington's overarching goals were protecting the Gulf's pro-U.S. oil sheikdoms while preventing the Soviet Union from turning regional turmoil into geopolitical gain.

In July 1979, some five months before the Soviet invasion, the

U.S.

had initiated a covert campaign to destabilize

Afghanistan

's pro-Soviet government by arming and funding the Islamist opposition. The goal, according to Brzezinski, was "to induce a Soviet military intervention." When the Soviets did intervene in December, Brzezinski wrote Carter:

"We now have the opportunity of giving to the

USSR

its Vietnam War."

Over the next decade, the

U.S.

government funneled more than $3 billion in arms and aid to the Islamic Mujahideen, helping create a global network of Islamist fighters, some of whom would form the core of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. When the Soviets finally pulled out of

Afghanistan

in 1989, more than a million Afghans (along with 15,000 Soviet soldiers) had been killed and one-third of the population driven into refugee camps.

*****

U.S.

National Security Strategy

Chapter 1: "Go Massive, Sweep It All Up", pp. 19-21

One World, One Empire

Neither mystical links with al Qaeda, invisible weapons of mass destruction, reflexive posturing, electoral politicking, nor diverting attention from corporate scandals and a weak economy explained why the

U.S.

government was hell-bent on attacking

Iraq

. But the sweep and enormity of its global agenda did.

"They have ambitions of essentially reshuffling the whole deck, reordering the whole situation—beginning with the strategic areas of Central and South Asia and the Middle East that are more immediately involved now—but, even beyond that, on a world scale," Bob Avakian of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA wrote shortly after Sept. 11. "They've set themselves a very far-reaching agenda with gigantic implications."

This momentous shift in

U.S.

global strategy was crystalized in a new National Security Strategy (NSS) published on September 20, 2002. This new NSSechoed and codified previous strategy papers, including the 1992 Pentagon Defense Guidance and the Project for a New American Century's 2000 paper, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," discussed above. Then it went further.

Taking off from the hegemonic vision developed by Reagan and Bush I officials during the 1990s, the NSS argued that the 1991 Soviet collapse had left the U.S. the world's only superpower—with "unparalleled military strength and great economic and political influence"—and that U.S. policy should be to "work to translate this moment of influence into decades of peace, prosperity, and liberty."

What does this really mean? The document's mantra is creating "a balance of power that favors freedom." Like terrorism, "freedom" hasn't been defined by the Bush regime, but the substance of the NSS, as well as the voluminous writings of the imperial strategists who have shaped it, make clear that it means the freedom of

America

's dominant corporate-political elite to impose its values, interests, and economic system on all others. As the NSS baldly put it, "These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society."

The new National Security Strategy claims that the

U.S.

will not seek "unilateral advantage," yet it is a doctrine for just that—militarily, politically and economically. It amounts to an audacious declaration that the

U.S.

aims to remain the world's sole superpower for decades to come. The practical implementation of this new Bush doctrine will no doubt be shaped by internal debates and external events, including the growing unrest and resistance in now-occupied

Iraq

. Nonetheless, its implications are clearly enormous.

A core thesis, which has been a central theme in neo-conservative theorizing for over a decade, is preventing the rise of rival powers which could challenge the

U.S.

regionally or globally. The NSS envisions accomplishing this objective by first maintaining overwhelming military superiority over all other countries and combinations of countries, and second by no longer containing possible opponents, but eliminating them before they can emerge: "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States." Defense Secretary Rumsfeld elaborates that the

U.S.

would deter "potential adversaries not only from using existing weapons but also from building dangerous new ones in the first place," and the

U.S.

would no longer judge states by their actions or intentions, but by their potential "capabilities."

To achieve this staggering goal, the

U.S.

power structure envisions staggering methods, including disarming various countries, toppling defiant regimes, occupying strategic regions, and waging counter-insurgency wars against a variety of political forces standing in the way of

U.S.

control.

Marine General Peter Pace, the Joint Chiefs vice chairman, has stated that "the scope for potential anti-terrorist action included—at a minimum—Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Georgia, Colombia, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and North Korea." Pace knew of what he spoke:The New York Times reported that by January 2003, the Pentagon had drafted a "National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism" which called for 20 to 30 years of war on a variety of states and anti-U.S. groups.

Send us your comments.

http://www.revcom.us/a/185/obama_speech-en.html

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Comment: I thought this was marvelously done. I had been hoping to dissect his speech
but the above is an excellent job. Well done Brother Larry!

Combat Amerikan Fascist Insanity! Venceremos Unidos!
Education for Liberation!
Peta-de-Aztlán, CoordinatorHumanE-Liberation-Party
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com
http://twitter.com/Peta_de_Aztlan
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Where is my independence? ~ by Peter S. Lopez

2009-07-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

http://liberation-now.blogspot.com/2009/07/where-is-my-independence-by-peter-s.html

July 4th, 2009

Independence Day is the national holiday of the United States of America commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 in Philadelphia and its eventual independence as a colony from the British Empire.

Remember: Unknown millions of dark-skinned people were killed during the early colonization of Amerika: Black chattel property slavery was still in existence and the Black man was considered 3/5th of a human being in the U.S. Constitution; the mass genocide of native peoples indigenous to these lands was still going on and the false Manifest Destiny of the United States to conquer North America loomed darkly in the future. Mass genocide was committed in the name of God! Where was true independence for the original peoples killed in the name of a dubious freedom?

“In 1845 John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, referred in his magazine to America's "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." One of the most influential slogans ever coined, "manifest destiny" expressed the romantic emotion that led Americans to risk their lives to settle the Far West.”
Source: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=311

That so-called Far West was home to Mexico at the time. Under the threat of further war and invasion upon the rest of Mexico by the U.S. government a large rich portion of northern Mexico was ceded to the United States in the now infamous 1848 broken Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

“The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave Mexicans the right to remain in United States territory or to move to Mexico. About three thousand chose to move, but the overwhelming majority decided to stay. These people could choose to retain Mexican citizenship or become citizens of the United States. The treaty explicitly guaranteed Mexican Americans "the right to their property, language, and culture."
Source: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/mexican_voices/mexvoice_search.cfm?ID=60

Early Amerika was stolen by the raw brute force of armed violence and open state-sanctioned terrorism carried out by the descendants of foreign invaders from Europe. Are we to have selective amnesia? The history of Amerika is drenched in rivers of bloodshed and oceans of tears. It all made the killings of the Roman Empire seem lightweight in comparison.

Today in these troubled times we really need to remember our past history in order to have a good understanding of where we are at today. Where is my independence? Really, where is my true independence? My people are still not free, still not really independent and still under the torture of corporate capitalism!

We are now free to go starving near-naked, free to be homeless refugees tossed onto sinister streets, free to be thrown into the concentration camps of prisons behind phony drug wars and free to go kill in foreign lands to keep the steel-toed boot of Amerikan Imperialism on the necks of Middle East peoples. We are distracted for one night on the 4th of July by pretty colors emitted by legal fireworks in the sky, while many continue to live in a mass lie under a devious mass deception that we are actually ‘independent’ in the fullest sense of the word.

In truth, we are dependent upon the great cosmos, certain basic universal laws of physics and quantum physics, such as, gravity, space, time, matter, energy and electro-magnetic fields. We are dependent upon the rays of the Sun in the center of our solar system, upon the natural resources of Mother Earth and upon the love we have for each other in order to help make it a better new world for all of us. That is a natural dependence.

However, for those of us who are blessed to be employed, we are still wage slaves dependent upon a corporate capitalist economic system that sucks the life energy and drains the life blood out of us. We are dependent upon the mighty corporate utilities or we go homeless and hungry left in the dark. If we get physically sick many of us are without any kind of decent medical care or health insurance and are left to just die out on our own. This is an unnatural dependence.

To make matters worse, many millions of us are chemically dependent upon alcohol and other street drugs in vain attempts to escape the horrors of our daily lives. Many more are addicted to prescription drugs to help ease the pain of living hand-to-mouth with ailments and illnesses.

These remarks may seem like somewhat vague generalities but the point is that we have definite dependencies that operate in our lives both to our benefit and to our harm. As humane beings, we require true economic independence, that is, complete ownership and control of the land and the social institutions thereon, including the means of mass production, mass distribution, mass transit systems and mass communication networks, including Internet Access. The masses of working class people worldwide are the true creators of the wealth in society, not the profiteers of the big banks who have no loving compassion nor do they shed a single tear over mass suffering and starvation. Yet who do we allow to be bailed out in the billions of dollars?!?!

Ultimately, in conscious communion with the Great Creator, it is up to the people, the vast masses of people worldwide, to seize control of their own world by any means mandatory in order to bring about true independence for all peoples in all lands. We cannot afford the illusions of artificial borders that corporate capitalism travels across constantly around the globe at the speed of light with the click of a mouse in moving their finance capital about, like hiding the pea in a slick shell game. Where are their borders and limitations? Indeed, we create our own connected reality!

Any independence I have today is a mental independence from the mental hold of corporate fascism over my cosmic consciousness. I am now independent from the mass lies I was fed from my childhood years on up by my parents and other authority figures in my immediate environment growing up. Now I have the light of a special solitary spiritual independence of the inner soul that allows me to be free of the dark spirits of ignorance, stupidity and utter insanity.

Nonetheless, I am not completely independent in the fullest sense of the word, especially in an economic sense. Politics springs up out of economics and it is all based upon social realities in the context of connected reality. The truth is none of us are truly independent from hungry, poverty and oppression until we are all independent of the steel stranglehold of corporate capital and its armies of mercenaries. We should come together as one great people upon Mother Earth in order to be free to live our lives in ways that foster and embolden our own collective peace, personal liberty and inner happiness. Then I will celebrate Independence Day with joy among the people in their beautiful billions!

Other than that, today is just a feeble excuse for many folks to get drunk into oblivion across the country who will pretend that they are free and independent while their souls know the very truth will set them free! Not waving a red-white-and-blue flag like pathetic fools while children starve!

http://liberation-now.blogspot.com/2009/07/where-is-my-independence-by-peter-s.html

Update: 7-05-009 @12:23 PM ~ PSL
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On Politics and Humane Ethics ~ by Peta-de-Aztlan

2009-04-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

Good Friday, April 10, 2009 ~

Chairman Mao stated in his Quotations that 'politics is war without bloodshed'. Definitely we can say that politics has a combative nature to it, such as, when political candidates 'fight' political 'battles' in election campaigns for public office or in Congress when they are proposing any controversial legislation and they know they will face 'opposition' from 'the other side'. There are 'war chests' for campaign finances.

Bobby Seale, former Chairman of the now defunct Black Panther Party, use to talk about making politics 'for real' and that politics was relating to the basic survival needs of the people, which in itself can be deemed as controversial for some.

Nowadays, the very words 'politics' and 'politicians' are dirty words that turn people off in an automatic reaction without any cognitive reasoning going on in their heads. Someone may be a concerned citizen and a decent humane being, but the mere mention of 'politics' turns them off, scares them away or makes them shrink back in horror!

When I was growing up my Father and I use to clash a lot. When we had a family get together I was warned by my Mom, along with him, not to discuss 'politics' or religion because it would routinely degenerate into a family argument, leaving my Mother in a quandary as to which side to choose: her husband or her oldest son. Usually we would be drinking booze so that would add fire into the mix. My Father has evolved as lot since those early days and I have become more analytical, reasonable and thoughtful in my communications in general. Plus, as a rule I no longer in indulge in alcohol and my father and I have cordial if distant dialogues.

The Online Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines 'politics' as so:

Main Entry: pol•i•tics Listen to the pronunciation of politics
Pronunciation:\?pä-l?-?tiks\
Function:noun plural but singular or plural in construction
Etymology:Greek politika, from neuter plural of politikos political
Date:circa 1529
1 a: the art or science of government b: the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy c: the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government 2: political actions, practices, or policies 3 a: political affairs or business ; especially : competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power and leadership (as in a government) b: political life especially as a principal activity or profession c: political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices 4: the political opinions or sympathies of a person5 a: the total complex of relations between people living in society b: relations or conduct in a particular area of experience especially as seen or dealt with from a political point of view

Connected reality, which encompasses all objective and subjective realities independently of the mind (which often gets us into trouble with its 'stinkin' thinkin'), connects all of us on the cosmic level. In fact, no one individual exists in-and-of himself independent from any external objective reality.

In a traditional understanding of politics it is often linked with the word 'corruption' and politicians in general are usually seen a 'dirty politicians'. Many times politicians are seen as being on the take, that is, taking money in the form of bribes that may be disguised as lobbying by Special Interests' in order to sway their votes on a given issue or piece of legislation. What is seen as political expediency may be seen as a compromise but the politician easily walks onto shaky ground when a given compromise may involve him or her compromising basic humane ethics.

Life is not all black-and-white and often more complex than a simple YES or NO. Sometimes certain compromises may have to be made in terms of tactics, schedules and priorities, but we enter an area of slimy darkness when we start compromising our own basic humane ethics, our true understanding of what is right versus what is wrong, our gut feelings that often tell us whether a certain matter embraces justice or not.

The truth is we are all impacted by politics and the decisions made by politicians who are elected officials, so no one can play the innocent virgin. Politics today has real deep and far-reaching influences on us that we may not even be aware of yet help shape the way we live our lives. Who knows that new laws came into effect on January 1st of 2009? Imagine a law that if broken can end up with you committing a crime that maybe you did not even know was a law to be broken!!! Remember the saying that ignorance is no excuse for breaking the law?

Thus, people need to be aware and stay aware of what is going on in the realm of politics and not play the flightless dodo bird with their heads in the sand thinking they are invisible so nobody sees them. All of us need to adopt a basic set of humane ethics and core values in relation to what we consider to be right, fair, just and morally correct, not necessarily what is politically correct. Political correctness can easily betray our own basic principles. In essence, we should stick to our guns, in this context, stick to our basic humane principles and let us hope that our principles are indeed ethical and humane.

In life we must often define our terms because many misunderstandings and breakdowns in communications happen because people use the same words yet can have way different personal definitions of those words. What is ethical and what is humane? We need basic ground rules for our general analyzes, social dialogues and personal conversations.

For starters, let us agree on the basics of the Ten Commandments of the Holy Bible (now don't run off and jump to conclusions), especially the ones about 'You Shall Not Kill' and 'You Shall Not Steal'. Right there we can run into trouble because we will give a man of Medal of Honor for his killing in one situation and sentence him to the Death Penalty in another killing situation. Let us utilize that often rarely used notion of common sense and take a leap of faith in order to behold the existence of the 'average reasoning person'.

To strive to keep it simple and not complicate the simple, let us begin with the basic principle that life is sacred and that the taking of a life without valid reason is profane, is wrong, is unjust. Thus, there is such a thing as a justifiable homicide in an extreme situation. We will go further and state that all those ways that support life, that protect life, that enrich life and that better life for all of us are good humane ways. A humane being has care, concern and compassion for all living beings. Let us hope and pray that our politicians have a core set of humane values, of humane ethics and humane principles that govern their souls, their minds and their decisions in ways that are of real benefit to all peoples. In the cosmic analysis, we must not compromise our humane ethics in the arena of politics where wars are fought daily.

Democracy as a political system of government only works well when it is a true participatory democracy, not merely a representative democracy. All citizens of a land should have the basic right to vote, including the condemned prisoner. If democracy is rule by the majority its core essence should be to treasure the humane rights of the individual and thereby the humane rights of all of us.

Once again, we must redefine politics as the means through which we come together, work out our basic differences, govern a society often on the verge of mass mayhem with humane ethics and a body of principles that truly exemplify 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' for all of us. When the rights of anyone are violated by an unjust power this should be seen as a violation against all of us and such violations should be strongly condemned by any means mandatory.

Blessings for A Truly Good Friday! ~ Peta-de-Aztlan
Sacramento, California
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com

http://anhglobal.ning.com/group/worldhealersforum

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Obama Calls for World Without Nuclear Weapons: Wash Post + Comment

2009-04-05T11:21:00.001-07:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/05/AR2009040500021.html

Obama Calls for World Without Nuclear Weapons

By Michael D. Shear and Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 5, 2009; 12:29 PM

PRAGUE, April 5 -- In a speech grimly punctuated by current events, President Obama Sunday called for a world without nuclear weapons shortly after North Korea defied global warnings to fire a long-range rocket.

Speaking in front of the Prague Castle just hours after the North Korean launch, Obama vowed to immediately seek U.S. ratification of a ban on nuclear testing, convene a summit in Washington to stop the spread of nuclear material within four years and create a nuclear fuel bank to allow peaceful development of nuclear power.

"I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," Obama said to a crowd of about 20,000 packed into the historic square in the Czech Republic's capital city. "This goal will not be reached quickly -- perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change."

The president denounced North Korea's launch of a three-stage Taepodong-2 missile, which flew over Japan before apparently falling into the Pacific Ocean, as a provocative act in defiance of the United Nations.

North Korea has called the launch part of a "peaceful" research project, but the United States, Japan and other allies see it as a threat. The missile has the range to reach Hawaii and Alaska.

Obama said Sunday North Korea risks further isolation by pursuing nuclear weapons and the missiles to carry them.

"Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something," he said to loud applause. "The world must stand together to stop the spread of these weapons."

White House officials said it was unclear whether the rocket launch was intended to coincide with the president's speech. But intentional or not, it served as a reminder of the potential dangers of nuclear weapons and the difficulty in restraining nations from developing them.

Obama spoke against a backdrop of the city where Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces crushed a movement of political liberalization in August, 1968. His address put new focus on disarmament and nonproliferation issues, which he had also raised in his foreign policy speeches during the presidential campaign.

The scene of his address, under a hazy sky in one of Eastern Europe's oldest and most beautiful cities, recalled Obama's speech in Germany in the midst of the presidential campaign last year.

Thousands of people waved U.S. and Czech flags and chanted "Obama" as they waited for his arrival, packing Hradcany Square, a hilltop plaza outside Prague Castle, to catch a glimpse of the American president. Unlike Obama's other appearances in Europe, his Prague speech was open to the general public; people started lining up before dawn to get a space on the square.

"It was a historical moment, to have him speak here," said Michaela Dombrovska, 32, a civil-servant from Prague. "He's given us hope that American will lead us to more world peace. He's clearly thought up new and different ideas about how to get rid of nuclear weapons in an effective way."

The president called Prague a "golden city which is both ancient and youthful" and honored the 1968 Prague Spring and the 1989 Velvet Revolution, which peacefully ended the country's domination by the Soviets, by saying that "we are here today because enough people ignored the voice who said the world could not change."

Last week, Obama announced plans to negotiate a new arms reduction treaty with Russia by the end of this year, with the goal of reducing the number of nuclear weapons held by both countries. But the proposals he outlined today go beyond that announcement. Obama pledged a broad effort by his government to convince allies and adversaries to abandon nuclear weapons as a means of security and aggression.

For those worried about a unilateral American disarmament, Obama promised that the country would keep enough nuclear weapons to defend itself and its allies as long as the weapons existed in other nations.

But he made clear that efforts to convince nations such as North Korea and Iran to abandon their nuclear ambitions will not succeed unless the United States and its allies make good on their promises to eventually abandon their own stockpiles of the weapons.

"As a nuclear power -- as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon -- the United States has a moral responsibility to act," he said. "We cannot succeed in this endeavor alone, but we can lead it."

He also reiterated his pledge to install a missile defense system in Eastern Europe as long as Iran poses a possible nuclear threat to the region.

"If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe at this time will be removed," Obama said.

A crucial component of the missile shield -- a radar tracking system -- would be based outside Prague under terms of a treaty signed by the Czech government and the Bush administration last July. But polls show that about 70 percent of Czechs are against the shield, and opponents so far have blocked the Czech parliament from ratifying the agreement.

Dozens of protesters, clad in white hazardous-material protection suits, stood silently outside the Prague Castle grounds to demonstrate against the missile shield.

Senior U.S. officials, discussing Obama's speech, said the administration is "trying to seize the moral high ground" in discussions with countries like North Korea.

"For us to mobilize international pressure against countries like Iran and North Korea, we have to demonstrate that we are committed" to disarmament, said Gary Samore, White House Coordinator for Weapons of Mass Destruction, Security, and Arms Control.

Obama has endorsed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty before, but today pledged to "immediately and aggressively" seek ratification of the treaty in the U.S. Senate. Nearly 148 countries have ratified the treaty, but it still awaits approval by the United States, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and Iran.

Once the United States ratifies the treaty, officials said they expect others could follow quickly.

After the speech, several hundred people marched through central Prague denouncing the shield project. They carried balloons and placards reading, "Yes We Can -- Say No To Missile Shield" and "We Want Democracy -- 70 Percent of Czechs Opposed to U.S. Military Base." An large contingent of riot police kept watch over the march, but no disturbances were reported.

Sabri Djerbi, a 24-year-old university student from Prague, said he was disappointed but not surprised that Obama endorsed the missile shield, after questioning the merits of the project during his presidential campaign.

"The people who tell him what to do are the same people who told George Bush what to do," Djerbi said. "They are just puppets. When Obama won, the American people cried and cried, saying, 'This is the best day of my life.' But no, I knew he wouldn't be any different, really."

Other demonstrators, however, said they were still heartened by part of Obama's speech. While they said they disagreed with his stance on the missile shield, they praised his call for nuclear disarmament and closer relations with Russia and Iran.

"We were really just hoping for a change in rhetoric, and we heard that," said Tanya Sediva, 50, a women's rights activist from Prague. "With Bush, it was only talk about armaments and war. With Obama, it's a breath of fresh air."

Many Czechs who listened to the speech agreed with that sentiment.

Marek Hyl, 24, a business student from Slovakia, said he was pleasantly surprised by Obama's stated willingness to improve relations with Russia and impose deep cuts on both countries' nuclear arsenals. "It's not what you would expect from an American president," Hyl said. "Especially nowadays, given what is going on with Iran and North Korea."

Tomas Poskocil, 28, a genetics researcher from the town of Pisek, said he arrived at Prague Castle at 3 a.m. to get a good perch in the crowd so he could take measure of Obama in person. "We still don't really know who he is," Poskocil said. "Everybody has so many expectations for him, but we need to hear him out and really listen to what he has to say."

Comment: So far, despite his drawbacks in some areas (including the forging of comprehensive humane immigration legislation, failure to constitute a strong housing program for homeless people and his expansion of the War in Afghanistan) he is the most progressive President that the U.S. has ever had. I have always thought that it was the height of hypocrisy for the U.S. to be the shot-caller in relation to nuclear proliferation when it was the only state power who ever actually used the A-Bomb as it did against Japan!

Be under no false illusions, corporate capitalism still rules the global economy and the U.S. military machine is the biggest mass killer in world history, but change has to begin somewhere somehow someway. It begins with us, with our checking our own killer instinct and working on our own character defects embodied in the Seven Deadly Sins! Change is ultimately an inside job that takes place in our own personal lives, in the lives of our own families and in the lives in our local communities! Feel cosmic, think global and work local!

Education for Liberation! Join Up!
Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Humane-Rights-Agenda/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/THIRD-WORLD-NEWS/

http://www.NetworkAztlan.com

Echo: Why Immigrant Workers Will Fill the Streets This May Day by David Bacon + Comment

2009-04-04T20:06:00.001-07:00

http://www.truthout.org/032709A

Friday 27 March 2009

by: David Bacon, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

May Day marchers rally for immigration rights and policy reform. (Photo: jvoves / Flickr)

In a little over a month, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people will fill the streets in city after city, town after town, across the US. This year these May Day marches of immigrant workers will make an important demand on the Obama administration: End the draconian enforcement policies of the Bush administration. Establish a new immigration policy based on human rights and recognition of the crucial economic and social contributions of immigrants to US society.

This year's marches will continue the recovery in the US of the celebration of May Day, recognized in the rest of the world as the day recognizing the contributions and achievements of working people. That recovery started on Monday, May 1, 2006, when over a million people filled the streets of Los Angeles, with hundreds of thousands more in Chicago, New York and cities and towns throughout the United States. Again on May Day in 2007 and 2008, immigrants and their supporters demonstrated and marched, from coast to coast.

One sign found in almost every march said it all: "We are Workers, not Criminals!" Often it was held in the calloused hands of men and women who looked as though they'd just come from work in a factory, cleaning an office building or picking grapes. The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of people have come to the United States to work, not to break its laws. Some have come with visas, and others without them. But they are all contributors to the society they've found here.

The protests have seemed spontaneous, but they come as a result of years of organizing, educating and agitating - activities that have given immigrants confidence, and at least some organizations the credibility needed to mobilize direct mass action. This movement is the legacy of Bert Corona, immigrant rights pioneer and founder of many national Latino organizations. He trained thousands of immigrant activists, taught the value of political independence, and believed that immigrants themselves must conduct the fight for immigrant rights. Most of the leaders of the radical wing of today's immigrant rights movement were students or disciples of Corona.

Immigrants, however, feel their backs are against the wall, and they came out of their homes and workplaces to show it. In part, their protests respond to a wave of draconian proposals to criminalize immigration status, and work itself for undocumented people. But the protests do more than react to a particular congressional or legislative agenda. They are the cumulative response to years of bashing and denigrating immigrants generally, and Mexicans and Latinos in particular.

In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act made it a crime, for the first time in US history, to hire people without papers. Defenders argued that if people could not legally work they would leave. Life was not so simple.

Undocumented people are part of the communities they live in. They cannot simply go, nor should they. They seek the same goals of equality and opportunity that working people in the US have historically fought to achieve. In addition, for most immigrants, there are no jobs to return to in the countries from which they've come. Rufino Dominguez, a Oaxacan community leader in Fresno, California, says, "The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) made the price of corn so low that it's not economically possible to plant a crop anymore. We come to the US to work because there's no alternative." After Congress passed NAFTA, six million displaced people came to the US as a result.

Instead of recognizing this reality, the US government has attempted to make holding a job a criminal act. Some states and local communities, seeing a green light from the Department of Homeland Security, have passed measures that go even further. Last summer, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff proposed a rule requiring employers to fire any worker who couldn't correct a mismatch between the Social Security number the worker had provided an employer and the SSA database. The regulation assumes those workers have no valid immigration visa, and therefore no valid Social Security number.

With 12 million people living in the US without legal immigration status, the regulation would lead to massive firings, bringing many industries and businesses to a halt. Citizens and legal visa holders would be swept up as well, since the Social Security database is often inaccurate. Under Chertoff, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted sweeping workplace raids, arresting and deporting thousands of workers.. Many have been charged with an additional crime - identity theft - because they used a Social Security number belonging to someone else to get a job. Yet, workers using another number actually deposit money into Social Security funds, and will never collect benefits their contributions paid for.

The Arizona legislature has passed a law requiring employers to verify the immigration status of every worker through a federal database called E-Verify, which is even more incomplete and full of errors than Social Security. They must fire workers whose names get flagged. And Mississippi passed a bill making it a felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job, with jail time of 1-10 years, fines of up to $10,000, and no bail for anyone arrested. Employers get immunity.

Many of these punitive measures were incorporated into proposals for "comprehensive immigration reform" that were debated in Congress in 2006 and 2007. The comprehensive bills combined increased enforcement, especially criminalization of work for the undocumented, with huge guest worker programs under which large employers would recruit temporary labor under contract outside the US, bringing workers into the country in a status that would deny them basic rights and social equality. While those proposals failed in Congress, the Bush administration implemented some of their most draconian provisions by executive order and administrative action.

Together, these factors have produced a huge popular response, which has become most visible in the annual marches and demonstrations on May Day. Nativo Lopez, president of both the Mexican American Political Association and the Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, says "the huge number of immigrants and their supporters in the streets found these compromises completely unacceptable. We will only get what we're ready to fight for, but people are ready and willing to fight for the whole enchilada. Washington legislators and lobbyists fear the growth of a new civil rights movement in the streets, because it rejects their compromises and makes demands that go beyond what they have defined as 'politically possible.'"

The marches have put forward an alternative set of demands, which include a real legal status for the 12 million undocumented people in the US, the right to organize to raise wages and gain workplace rights, increased availability of visas that give immigrants some degree of social equality, especially visas based on family reunification, no expansion of guest worker programs, and a guarantee of human rights to immigrants, especially in communities along the US/Mexican border.

At the same time, the price of trying to push people out of the US who've come here for survival is that the vulnerability of undocumented workers will increase. Unscrupulous employers use that vulnerability to deny overtime pay or minimum wage, or fire workers when they protest or organize. Increased vulnerability ultimately results in cheaper labor and fewer rights for everyone. After deporting over 1,000 workers at Swift meatpacking plants, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff called for linking "effective interior enforcement and a temporary-worker program.'' The government's goal is cheap labor for large employers. Deportations, firings and guest worker programs all make labor cheaper and contribute to a climate of fear and insecurity for all workers.

The May 1 actions highlight the economic importance of immigrant labor. Undocumented workers deserve legal status because of that labor - their inherent contribution to society. The value they create is never called illegal, and no one dreams of taking it away from the employers who profit from it. Yet the people who produce that value are called exactly that - illegal. All workers create value through their labor, but immigrant workers are especially profitable, because they are so often denied many of the union-won benefits accorded to native-born workers. The average undocumented worker has been in the US for five years. By that time, these workers have paid a high price for their lack of legal status, through low wages and lost benefits.

"Undocumented workers deserve immediate legal status, and have already paid for it," Lopez says.

On May 1, the absence of immigrant workers from workplaces, schools and stores demonstrates their power in the national immigration debate and sends a powerful message that they will not be shut out of the debate over their status. They have rescued from anonymity the struggle for the eight-hour day, begun in Chicago over a century ago by the immigrants of yesteryear. They overcame the legacy of the cold war, in which celebrations of May Day were attacked and banned. They are recovering the traditions of all working people for the people of the United States.

David Bacon is a writer and photographer. His new book, "Illegal People - How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants," was just published by Beacon Press ~ Click:http://dbacon.igc.org/

+++++++++++++

Comment: The above is a good comprehensive article by Brother David Bacon and I for one appreciate all his nutritional offerings to the creation of a humane consciousness that comprehends the oneness of all of us.

All positive, productive and progressive humane rights activists, groups and organizations should come out onto the streets on May 1st of 2009 to openly demonstrate their solid support for the immediate legal status of undocumented workers, period!

The ideal situation would be a general amnesty for all so-called illegal immigrants in recognition of the sacredness of each and every human being and our right to perform work in order to support ourselves, our families and help support all our loved ones. Imagine a world without borders, nations and false divisions. Imagine a world where people live, love and laugh together in peace, harmony and tranquility.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."
~ Albert Einstein (German born American Physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity. Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. 1879-1955)

Education for Liberation! Join Up on Friday, May 1st of 2009!
Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta

Sacramento, California, Aztlan

Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Humane-Rights-Agenda/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/THIRD-WORLD-NEWS/

http://www.NetworkAztlan.com

c/s

+Re: REVIEW THE CONVICTIONS OF THE “CUBAN FIVE”! + Sand and Rocks + EU: Israel annexing EJ + The Bustan Committee + IDF Vandalism + VP Convoy Updates + Russia + TSS and GAZA + Several Items on Israel + A public stoning in Germany + Cuban and Venezuelan te

2009-03-08T08:41:00.001-07:00

3-08-2009 @8:40 AM - PST

Those of us who possess a humane consciousness must remain interested in relevant news about current events anywhere in the world. I congratulate Companero Enrique for this News Digest. When we begin to comprehend our own individual self in the context of the great cosmos we can come to see that all of objective reality that exists outside our minds and whether our minds admit it or not is ~ on a cosmic level ~ interconnected in the context of connected reality.

Surely 9-11-01 taught the world that in one day in New York City. What happens in a far distant country that you may not even know where it is can have a direct impact on what is happening in your own existential reality. All realities are truly interconnected. Nothing exists in and of itself without a real connection elsewhere. We are all one on the cosmic-quantum field. Today human beings are surely an endangered species of life upon Mother Earth. Corporate capitalism as a sound viable economic system is going through its own heart attacks and its fascist component will do what it can in order to institute some economic reform while still keeping the corporate ruling class 'in power and secure'.

Surely we should open our minds to the tangible relevance of establishing a democratic socialist government and economy by any means mandatory that speaks to the basic survival needs of the people, that ensure their collective safety and guarantees their basic humane rights!

Rise to each day with a commitment to continually raise consciousness, expand consciousness and let consciousness motivate us to interact with connected reality in our own lives. Do you really know what is going on in your life around you from here now? Do you know you neighbors living right next door? Around the block? Up the road?

Armed with a cosmic consciousness go forth and fight in the day, combat evilness whereever it pops up, correct mistaken ideas, criticize with compassion, take the time to teach your brothers and sisters. All of us are one on the cosmic-quantum level and on an individual existential level of existence each of us is a beautiful unique creature bestowed by the Creator with certain gifts, talents and skills that we should wisely use in service to others in order to elevate ourselves out of small selfish individualism.

Any inhumane wrong to any of us attacks the compassionate humanity of all of us. Whether you are in Jerusalem, Baghdad, Bombay or in a barrio/ghetto somewhere inside the continental United States you should have at least a shred of humanity and help out in your local community, help others to become literate, get others online and relate to the people's basic survival needs. If you have a pot of beans offer a bowl to your neighbor!

Education for Liberation! Join Up!
Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Humane-Rights-Agenda/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/THIRD-WORLD-NEWS/

http://www.NetworkAztlan.com

From: Enrique Ferro <ferro.enrique@gmail.com> Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2009 4:04:48 PM Subject: REVIEW THE CONVICTIONS OF THE "CUBAN FIVE"! + Sand and Rocks + EU: Israel annexing EJ + The Bustan Committee + IDF Vandalism + VP Convoy Updates + Russia + TSS and GAZA + Several Items on Israel + A public stoning in Germany + Cuban and Venezuelan te

For Immediate Release March 6, 2009 Contact: Thomas C. Goldstein, Esq.: 202-674-7594; tgoldstein@akingump.com

OUTPOURING OF SUPPORT WORLDWIDE URGING THE U.S. SUPREME COURT TO REVIEW THE CONVICTIONS OF THE "CUBAN FIVE"

In a previously unheard of twelve separate briefs, array of supporters worldwide – including ten Nobel Prize winners who have championed human rights (including East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta and Irish peacemaker Máiread Corrigan Maguire); the Mexican Senate; and Mary Robinson, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Ireland – today filed amicus curiae ("friend of the court") briefs imploring the U.S. Supreme Court to review the Miami convictions of five Cuban government agents, the so-called "Cuban Five."

Those participants in the briefs were joined by hundreds of parliamentarians from the European Parliament and other parliaments around the world, including two former Presidents and three current Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament, as well as numerous U.S. and foreign bar associations and human rights organizations.

This is the largest number of amicus briefs ever to have urged Supreme Court to review a criminal conviction. This extraordinary support for the Cuban Five's case arises from widespread concern in the United States and around the world that their trial was conducted in an atmosphere tainted by prejudice against agents of the Cuban government and fear of retaliation, which amici say prevented the jury from fairly evaluating the charges against the Five.

Among others, the United Nations Human Rights Commission has condemned the Miami trial of the Cuban agents, marking the first and only time in history that that body has condemned a U.S. judicial proceeding. Citing a "climate of bias and prejudice" in Miami, the Commission's Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions concluded that the "trial did not take place in the climate of objectivity and impartiality that is required to conform to the standards of a fair trial."

The amicus briefs filed today ask the Supreme Court to review the fairness of trying the Cuban agents to a Miami jury. "The trial and conviction of the Cuban 5 is a national embarrassment," explained Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the Nobelists in filing their amicus brief. "Our clients, ten Nobel Prize winners, acclaimed for their efforts to advance human rights, believe the trial was an international embarrassment as well. This was a trial that should have never occurred in Miami. There was no way a jury from that Miami, with is history of violence and intimidation against the Cuban government, could have reached a verdict free from retaliation by the anti-Castro community."

Several of the amicus briefs filed by U.S. organizations also ask the Supreme Court to review the prosecution's striking African-Americans from the jury. The prosecutor used seven of nine "peremptory challenges" (where no explanation need be given to strike a juror) to strike black jurors. The Court of Appeals ruled that no inquiry need be made into the prosecutor's motives because three other black jurors, a minority on the 12-person jury, were seated. Amici maintain that this is allows prosecutors to mask their manipulation of the racial make-up of a jury.

The U.S. government's brief in opposition is presently due April 6. The Court is likely to decide whether to grant review before its summer recess in June. The amicus briefs, along with a complete list of the amici, will be posted on SCOTUSblog (www.scotusblog.com) as electronic copies become available today.

Additional background on the case: The United States indicted the five Cubans in Miami in 1998. The indictment focused on the charge that they were unregistered Cuban agents and had infiltrated various anti-Castro organizations in South Florida. One of the Five, Gerardo Hernandez, was also charged with conspiracy to commit murder for providing information to Havana on flights in which the anti-Castro group Brothers to the Rescue would routinely invade Cuba airspace.

On February 24, 1996, two BTTR planes were destroyed after both Cuban and American officials had repeatedly warned the Miami-based group to cease its illegal incursions into Cuban territory. Cuba maintains that it shot the planes down in its territory; the U.S. has maintained that the shootdown occurred a few miles into international airspace, after the planes entered and exited Cuban airspace.

The Cuban Five requested that the trial judge move the trial out of Miami, which is home to a massive Cuban-American exile community that, beyond its ordinary hostility towards the Castro regime, had been whipped into a frenzy of anti-Castro sentiment by the Elian Gonzales debacle that took place just as the Cuban Five's trial got underway. Judge Lenard refused that request to move the trial to a new venue some thirty miles away, and a Miami jury convicted Hernandez and the others of all charges. Judge Lenard imposed the maximum available sentences on the Five, including life imprisonment for Hernandez. On appeal, a three-judge panel of the federal Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the convictions and ordered a new trial because, the court held, a "perfect storm" of community prejudice and pre-trial publicity, exacerbated by the federal prosecutor's inflammatory statements to the jury, deprived Hernandez and the other Cubans of a fair trial. The entire Court of Appeals, however, vacated the panel's decision, finding no error in the government trying the case to a Miami jury. It returned the case to a panel to evaluate the remaining issues in the appeal.

In another key ruling, two of the three judges on the panel refused to reverse the Miami jury's conviction of Hernandez. Judge Kravitch dissented, finding that there was no evidence at all that Hernandez knew there would be a shootdown, let alone an unlawful shootdown in international airspace. - END -

Desert's Sand and Rocks Become Precious Resources in West Bank "Dispute"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/world/middleeast/07westbank.html?_r=1&th=&
emc=th&pagewanted=print

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/07/israel-palestine-eu-report-jerusalem/print

Israel annexing East Jerusalem, says EU

• Confidential report attacks 'illegal' house demolitions
• Government accused of damaging peace prospects

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
The Guardian, Saturday 7 March 2009

40-year-old Palestinian Mahmoud al-Abbasi stands amid the rubble of his home after it was demolished by the Jerusalem municipality in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. Photograph: Gali Tibbon

A confidential EU report accuses the Israeli government of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank barrier as a way of "actively pursuing the

The document says Israel has accelerated illegal annexation" of East Jerusalem.

its plans for East Jerusalem, and is undermining the Palestinian Authority's credibility and weakening support for peace talks. "Israel's actions in and around Jerusalem constitute one of the most acute challenges to Israeli-Palestinian peace-making," says the document, EU Heads of Mission Report on East Jerusalem..

The report, obtained by the Guardian, is dated 15 December 2008. It acknowledges Israel's legitimate security concerns in Jerusalem, but adds: "Many of its current illegal actions in and around the city have limited security justifications."

"Israeli 'facts on the ground' - including new settlements, construction of the barrier, discriminatory housing policies, house demolitions, restrictive permit regime and continued closure of Palestinian institutions - increase Jewish Israeli presence in East Jerusalem, weaken the Palestinian community in the city, impede Palestinian urban development and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank," the report says.

The document has emerged at a time of mounting concern over Israeli policies in East Jerusalem. Two houses were demolished on Monday just before the arrival of the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and a further 88 are scheduled for demolition, all for lack of permits. Clinton described the demolitions as "unhelpful", noting that they violated Israel's obligations under the US "road map" for peace.

The EU report goes further, saying that the demolitions are "illegal under international law, serve no obvious purpose, have severe humanitarian effects, and fuel bitterness and extremism." The EU raised its concern in a formal diplomatic representation on December 1, it says.

It notes that although Palestinians in the east represent 34% of the city's residents, only 5%-10% of the municipal budget is spent in their areas, leaving them with poor services and infrastructure.

Israel issues fewer than 200 permits a year for Palestinian homes and leaves only 12% of East Jerusalem available for Palestinian residential use. As a result many homes are built without Israeli permits. About 400 houses have been demolished since 2004 and a further 1,000 demolition orders have yet to be carried out, it said.

City officials dismissed criticisms of its housing policy as "a disinformation campaign". "Mayor Nir Barkat continues to promote investments in infrastructure, construction and education in East Jerusalem, while at the same time upholding the law throughout West and East Jerusalem equally without bias," the mayor's office said after Clinton's visit.

However, the EU says the fourth Geneva convention prevents an occupying power extending its jurisdiction to occupied territory. Israel occupied the east of the city in the 1967 six day war and later annexed it. The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

The EU says settlement are being built in the east of the city at a "rapid pace". Since the Annapolis peace talks began in late 2007, nearly 5,500 new settlement housing units have been submitted for public review, with 3,000 so far approved, the report says. There are now about 470,000 settlers in the occupied territories, including 190,000 in East Jerusalem.

The EU is particularly concerned about settlements inside the Old City, where there were plans to build a Jewish settlement of 35 housing units in the Muslim quarter, as well as expansion plans for Silwan, just outside the Old City walls.

The goal, it says, is to "create territorial contiguity" between East Jerusalem settlements and the Old City and to "sever" East Jerusalem and its settlement blocks from the West Bank.

There are plans for 3,500 housing units, an industrial park, two police stations and other infrastructure in a controversial area known as E1, between East Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, home to 31,000 settlers. Israeli measures in E1 were "one of the most significant challenges to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process", the report says.

Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said conditions for Palestinians living in East Jerusalem were better than in the West Bank. "East Jerusalem residents are under Israeli law and they were offered full Israeli citizenship after that law was passed in 1967," he said. "We are committed to the continued development of the city for the benefit of all its population."

The Bustan Local Committee

Silwan

Another War Crime

Jerusalem` s municipality decides to demolish 88 buildings

Making 1500 Jerusalemites homeless

lot of anxiety and worry hovers the lives of the people of Silwan, Bustan neighborhood. That emotional strain is the consequence of the occupied municipality's plan in Jerusalem and the plan carries the name

E/J/9 (East Jerusalem and the number of the plan is 9) the plan calls for the demolishing 88 buildings housing 115 family. That will simply make around 1500 Jerusalemites homeless; the number includes women, babies, and elderly people. All will lose houses they inherited from their parents and grandparents; most of which have been built before the Israeli state came to existence.

The coming demolishing campaign for a 115 house in Bustan is not the only expected one, for a similar destiny awaits around 60% of the houses in (Wad Hilwa) in the same village. All those places are facing

the threat of demolishment on grounds that they have been built either without a building permit or on the ground that they have built on archeological sites.

The land Silwan is considered an extension for the Aqsa Mosque and is considered the southern gate for both the Mosque and the Wall of Jerusalem. To the north of Silwan lies the Aqsa Mosque, the wall of Jerusalem and the Magharba neighborhood which was destroyed and removed from the inside of the Old City's Wall after the attack of 1967, from the South lies Beit Safafa and Jabal Al-Mukaber. From the East lie Abu Dees, Eizarieha and AL-Tour. From the West lies Al-Talbiya before the occupation of 1948 or what has become known as the prophet David or the Al-Tour neighborhood.

One of the most targeted neighborhoods in Silwan is the Bustan Neighborhood. That area is considered by the Jews as the sacred garden of King David; the aim of the Israeli authorities is to remove all the signs of humanitarian existence to make the national garden of (David` s City)

The final goal for Israel's action in the area of the Old City of Jerusalem is to impose the Jewish flavor on the whole area and move the Palestinian Jerusalemites. This comes as a fulfillment for the municipality's plan for Jerusalem 2020 that aims to diminish the number of the Palestinian Jerusalemite to only 12%

From here we beseech the international society to respect its decisions and agreements to force Israel to respect those laws and pressure the state of Israel to stop the attack on us and give us the simple right of survival on our homeland and houses safely and in dignity.

For more information please call one of the committee members:

Fakhree Abu Diab: ( 0522-206227) Lubna Masarwa (050-5633044/ 0542351221)

Murad Shafeh ( 05044002926) Abd Al Haleem Al Shalwood ( 0547841528)

Pots of urine, feces on the walls - how IDF troops vandalized Gaza homes

By Amira Hass

Tags: Gaza, Amira Hass

GAZA - We had already visited this house, belonging to the Abu Eida family. It is the only one of the family's nine large houses that remained standing at the eastern edge of the city of Jabalya following Operation Cast Lead. The demolition of the family's houses and its four cement factories spells the loss of 40 years of hard work.

One Hebrew word scrawled on a wall tells the story of the 10 days when young Israeli soldiers became the ostensible prison wardens of five people. The youngest is Suheila Masalha, 55; the eldest is her mother Fatma, who is perhaps 85 or 90 or older. The only man is her brother Mohammed, 65, who is paralyzed and dependent on the women of his family. And there were two more women from the Abu Eida family - Rasmiya, 70, who owns the house, and her sister-in-law Na'ama, 56, who is blind.

"Jail" ("mikhla'a" in Hebrew), wrote the soldiers on the wall of the room where they kept the man and the four women. They did not allow them to use the toilet, but forced them to use all kinds of plastic containers kept in the room, for nine of the days.

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From other graffiti you can conclude that it was the soldiers of the Golani Brigade - who were drafted in August 2007, and in January and March of 2008 - who sketched orientation maps on the walls of nearly every room. For example, "Position: entry. Direction: southeast," and a few squares that indicated the houses in the area. "Us," or "We are here," or just an X marked on square No. 5 - Rasmiya Abu Eida's house that became an Israel Defense Forces base.

The soldiers kept kosher, judging by the words "meat" and "dairy" scrawled in red on the kitchen cabinets. Maybe someone was kidding around, or maybe someone thought this was going to be their base for several more months, because they also wrote "Kosher for Passover" on one of the cupboards. Also in red.

White flags

The Masalha family lived in a kind of tin shack and raised their sheep near the Abu Eida family (the shack and the sheep were destroyed). On the evening of Saturday, January 3, when the Israeli ground incursion began, they fled the shelling and sought refuge with the neighbors in concrete houses that seemed safer. But the shells and shooting from close range only increased and the children were scared; they cried and screamed and members of the extended family decided to head west, on foot, with white flags.

The adults carried the children - without suitcases and clothing, and even without ID cards. There was no one to carry Fatma Masalha and her son Mohammed, who remained behind. Na'ama and her sister-in-law Rasmiya decided to stay with the guests who had sought shelter. That was on Sunday, January 4, at around 3 P.M.

A spacious, well-kept, generously furnished home awaited the soldiers on the following morning, when they arrived. There are other houses like this in Gaza, especially on the agricultural lands in the outskirts, which over the years have become bourgeois areas. These are exactly the places where the signs of shelling and the fires caused by the phosphorous bombs made clear to the civilians that they should leave if they held their lives dear.

On January 18, when the forces pulled out, similar sights awaited people whose homes had become military bases in their absence. There were bullet-pocked walls, ripped-up sofas and armchairs, smashed televisions and computers, shards of glass and porcelain dishes and broken wooden thresholds. Clothing was ripped up. And there were mountains of very Israeli garbage - empty tin cans, cardboard boxes, empty bags of potato chips and chocolate, and full bags of sugar and raspberry-flavored drinking powder. Everything was kosher for Passover under the supervision of the Chief Rabbinate. And there were Hebrew newspapers, including the January 9 issue of the army magazine Bamahane.

In one house they left behind lots of unopened canned goods. The local people assumed that commanding army officers had stationed themselves there, as well as in other houses where there was no racist graffiti and family belongings hadn't been vandalized. Remnants of ammunition and IDF equipment were also found in and around many houses, as well as books of Psalms, the "Wisdom of the Sages" and "Hafetz Chaim," which is about rabbinical laws concerning slander and gossip.

Like ants

In the midst of all of this were plastic bottles of urine and many closed bags - in some houses, olive-colored ones - of excrement. People assumed that the commanders stayed there. There are houses where excrement was smeared on the walls, or where dry piles of it were found in corners. In many cases, the smells indicated that soldiers had urinated on piles of clothing or inside a washing machine. In all the houses the toilets were overflowing and clogged, and there was filth all around. When the Abu Eidas returned to house No. 5 in Jabalya, they discovered pots of urine and excrement in the refrigerator.

"Like ants, so many of them," says Na'ama, an Arabic teacher, of the soldiers who came into their home on January 5. She recalls that the soldiers had to be told that Mohammed could not put his hands up, and that they ordered the residents to strip. (Na'ama refused and one soldier made do with prodding and probing; they told Suheila to strip because they thought she was wearing an explosives belt.) The soldiers were amazed that the house was so large - "For just five people" - and kept saying that "this is Hamas money." They also asked, "Where are the tunnels, where is Hamas, if everyone left why didn't you leave?"

The soldiers ordered the five people to go into one room and stay there. They let them take some food: bread, olives, oil, water. They confiscated the mobile phones when they saw Na'ama holding one: "You want to call your brother to come with Hamas, to shoot at us," said one of the soldiers. "Liar," they said a lot, as well as "shut up, you donkey," in broken Arabic. They imitated her mockingly when she said "Ya Rab" ("Oh God"). The five prisoners could not pray, as they were not allowed to clean themselves up before prayer and were forbidden to stand up. They were given two blankets, which were not enough, especially because the windows were smashed and the door was always open. A soldier always sat next to the door aiming his rifle at them. All five still have colds.

"You'll come out when we leave," was the answer given to Na'ama after she asked them to contact the Red Cross. Apparently, one soldier spoke fluent Arabic, another could speak some and others knew a phrase or two.

Was there anyone among the soldiers who was a little bit nice? "To my regret, no," Na'ama says. In a number of other houses or neighborhoods people who preferred not to flee encountered some soldiers who were somewhat courteous. In none of the other houses were people forbidden to use the toilet, but the men's hands were bound for two or three days. There are houses where the captives had no food for two or three days or no water for hours. "We don't have food either," said the soldiers in Izbet Abed Rabbo.

Soldiers broke down doors of grocery stores and helped themselves to candy and snacks. There were some who handed out candy to children; sometimes soldiers asked a child whom they forced to accompany them, as a human shield, to hand it out.

On the morning of January 14, the Red Cross came to pick up the five inhabitants of the "jail" in house No. 5. A short while beforehand, the soldiers had brought a portable gas burner in so Rasmiya could make hot tea, which they had not let her do before. "Maybe because the officer came," Na'ama says.

The IDF Spokesman's Office said in response that soldiers in Gaza were instructed in advance not to harm personal property unless there was a need to do so for operational purposes. "Not only did the soldiers not prevent the Palestinians from eating," the office said, "but they shared their army rations with them. The IDF has not received any reports about breaking into grocery stores. Concerning the claims about graffiti, the IDF sees this as a very serious matter, which contradicts the values and norms in which the soldiers are educated."

Mudasir Saeed sent a message to the members of Gaza Convoy 2009.
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VIVA PALESTINA CONVOY

Day 21 - Censorship at it's best…..

Friday 6th March
For most of us, Egypt is probably the country along the route we are most familiar with. The Pyramids, Valley of the Kings and of course Cairo. On holiday, thankfully we rarely get to see and experience the internal politics. Unfortunately and as expected, for the convoy this isn't the case. The border crossing was largely smooth albeit time consuming, however some bad news it wasn't so smooth for four of the convoy members including our very own Mr. T (brother Aqueel). Sadly, Egyptian authorities at the border deemed it necessary to throw a spanner in the works and refuse them entry to Egypt. All four lads are safe and well in Bengazi (Libya) and enjoying the hospitality shown by Libya. Reports indicate that even at the border, the Libyans were extremely unhappy at Egypt's decision, however it was not in their destiny to continue any further, they were driven back into Libya and are safe, well and being looked after. Some of the families of these brothers may not yet be aware of their situation, however I want to stress that they are all completely safe and well and Naveed, Abu Bakr, Talhat and others have spoken to them all and apart from the obvious disappointment there is nothing to be worried about. Last night all aid vehicles were directed to a "safe" place and the members of the convoy were transported into the city and to hotels. As a result the "convoy" effect would not have been felt by the locals and instead the "politics" began to kick in again. After speaking to the lads last night, it was clear that the authorities want to control the level of exposure and there has been an extremely heavy, even over the top police and military presence. I spoke to Abu Bakr a few hours ago, he mentions that the convoy is driving towards Alexandria and he described some chaotic scenes. He mentioned that for the last 10 miles, every single house they pass has had two police officers guarding the front with their backs towards the road making sure nobody is watching the convoy, to the extent that even areas of barren land police scatter to make sure children didn't run up towards the vehicles, clearly not for road safety, but censorship. He says quote "we've never seen anything like this, it's crazy, every mosque we've driven past has been barricaded to stop people looking, it's worse than authorities in Tunisia". Again there should be no doubt that local people are very sympathetic, supportive and given the chance welcoming, however the political landscape in Egypt is very complex, I feel in the long run the re-action of the authorities becomes counter-productive for Egypt. It's a shame, and lets hope it improves so the Egyptians can also "see" this awe-inspiring convoy. Again, the main thing is that everyone is safe and well, and Insh'Allah come Sunday will be meeting our beloved brothers and sisters in Palestine and we can only imagine how inspiring and emotional that will be!! --------------------

Day 22 – Are we there yet?? Almost
Saturday 7th March The Souad Viva Palestina convoy is entering the town of El Arich after a long trek of 10 hours on the roads and motorways of Egypt. Gaza is within touching distance and the dreams, aspirations and hope of so many members of this magnificent adventure will be realised tomorrow when they enter Gaza carrying not only aid, but the hopes of the millions to see the siege broken. The convoy members had to endure a hard journey as they were escorted throughout by the Egyptian authorities who dictated the pace which was extremely frustrating. They only stopped on a couple of occasions after setting off from Jamsa and did not stop as planned at the El Salam Bridge. The convoy is now being taken to their accommodation. A press conference and speeches were planned, but as it is very late in the night, this may be shelved. According to the Palestinian information centre bulletin of this evening, the 'Justice for Palestine' Scottish convoy managed to get into Gaza late this afternoon after the Egyptian authorities gave permission for the crossing to take place at Rafah. To our knowledge the convoy includes 20 members in 10 vehicles carrying vital medical aid and equipment for the people of Gaza. This convoy managed to cross into Gaza after 60 female American peace activists managed earlier to cross the Rafah crossing to show their support with the women of Gaza and to call for the lifting of the siege. Many news agencies and reporters are awaiting the arrival of this phenomenal convoy. Al-Jazeera reports that their crew has been prevented from reporting the arrival of the convoy at El Arich. Tonight, El Arich will experience something special when the people of this town will witness at first hand the arrival of the saviours of Gaza. They will see lorries, vans, cars, and hundreds of humble human beings coming in peace carrying vital aid and supplies and answering the critics and sceptics who doubted the aims of this noble mission. Tonight, the western media remains silent in its coverage of this massive story, a story created by the people of Britain, with aid coming from the people of Britain. By ignoring the cries of the people of Gaza, once again, Gaza exposes the hypocrisy, double standards and opportunism of the British media. But the British people can see through this injustice, and like never before, Gaza has broken into many British homes and has touched many British hearts.... --------------------
First Convoy heroes return
The four Viva Palestina convoy members refused entry to Egypt are currently on their way to Tripoli, in Libya. Viva Palestina have booked them flights on KLM to return to the UK via Amsterdam on Sunday 8th March. These four men, who drove so hard and so far for Gaza, only to to turned back at the border, deserve a heroes welcome. Manchester Viva Palestina will be welcoming them back at the Manchester airport tomorrow evening. If you are able to join the welcoming party please come to Terminal 2 for 9..30pm on Sunday evening.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=87829&sectionid=351020202

Russia sees ME solution in Palestine state

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov calls for the formation of a Palestinian state as the only solution to the Middle East problem.

Speaking at a press conference held after the 65-nation UN Conference on Disarmament, Lavrov said talks with the US Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton had convinced him that this would be the "realistic" approach to secure peace in the region.

"The solutions to the problems in the Middle East on the basis of the creation of a Palestinian state in ensuring the peaceful coexistence of this state with another state to the region with Israel is something that is quite realistic," Lavrov told reporters Saturday.

The minister announced plans for Moscow-mediated talks "in near future" that would try to "reset" the peace process and start efforts for a peaceful two state resolution from the beginning.

"We have to determine what steps have to be taken in the future for the strategic goal of the creation of a Palestinian state and the strategic goal of the realization of the concept of states Palestinian and Israel living in peace together and with other states is still the main goal," Lavrov said.

ZHD/MD

The Two-State Solution and the Ruin in Gaza

by Virginia Tilley

Global Research, March 3, 2009

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=12532

For several years, those of us warning that we already face a one-state solution in Israel-Palestine have been regularly dismissed as nay-sayers, ivory-tower intellectuals, and/or utopian crackpots. So it's noticeable when these dismissive comments begin to falter and flicker out.

True, over the same period we've heard rounds of worried agreement that if 'something' is not done, the two-state solution would be dead and one-state solution upon us within three months, or six months, or simply 'soon'. Most of those 'six-month' warnings were issued years ago but never seem to expire. The problem was that most people weren't sure what precise signal would tell them, beyond doubt, that the two-state option is truly defunct. All the diplomatic theatre—the Oslo Accords, the Road Map, Annapolis and the Paris Protocol—gave people such an impression of seriousness that they interpreted every new contradiction, like a doubling of the settlement population in the West Bank, as a mere 'impediment' or 'setback' to the supposed diplomatic process rather than evidence that it was all a sham. Bearing the burden of this increasing unreality show, the two-state project became less a real programme than a tenet of faith: however elusive it appears in reality, the two-state solution must be defended or 'saved', resuscitated as the 'only way'. Lofty rhetoric about 'sacrifice' on both sides added gravitas to this masquerade. No one knew what to do if the two-state notion finally collapsed, so no one wanted to say that it had.

The result has been dithering and delay. And Palestinian deaths. Always more deaths. But now it seems the tide has shifted, for Gaza and the Israeli elections have stripped away these last illusions. For what could failure look like, if not the rubble of Gaza? It is not just the shocking scale of the brutality, which belies any notion of a 'moderate' Israeli government or any good faith whatever on Israel's part. The whole attack was is the direct result, a necessary component, and the final proof of the two-state fraud. How else could Israel have attacked Gaza so horribly, so cruelly, if security for Jewish settlements in the West Bank were not ensured through deals with Mr Abbas's Palestinian Authority? Yet how else could the Palestinian Authority enforce that security--that is, play the increasingly strained part of an 'interim governing authority'--without the two-state fig leaf? Only by ensuring that the PA was in position to suppress any mass uprising by outraged Palestinians in West Bank cities now suffocated by Jewish settlements could Israel dare to strike Gaza the way it did. So the two-state solution/illusion had to be kept alive in order to prop up the PA in order to attack Gaza.

But of course, the basic equation was also holding: Gaza had to be crushed in order to prop up the PA — for again, the last drive of settlement construction that will create Israel's new permanent borders requires security for West Bank settlements that only the PA can deliver, and Hamas threatened that filthy pact by exposing it for what it was. Now that Hamas has survived and the Abbas circle looks even more like tools and fools, we see 'unity' talks in Cairo. But we may be sure that these talks are allowed by Israel only to prop up the Abbas people up a little longer, just as the money is meant to do (e.g., of the US$900 million, not one dollar is for Gaza's reconstruction and all is channelled through PA or Fatah or other non-Hamas hands). Any deal struck in Cairo will fall apart as soon as Hamas again confronts the betrayals certain to follow—which will be quite soon, because Israel will not tolerate any mis-step by the Abbas circle, which for Israel always had only one raison d'être: to serve Israel's annexation of West Bank land.

So the two-state solution has had life only in Israeli government rhetoric and people read into that rhetoric what they wanted to believe. As one still-believing colleague protested to me last year, confronting the absence of any evidence for it, the two-state goal was "understood". After Gaza, such the scales are falling away from people's eyes.

Still, it's worrisome that people are pronouncing the final death of the two-state solution partly because of the imminent ascendance in Israeli politics of Netanyahu and Lieberman. We must be clear about this, too: regarding Palestinians, no shred of difference exists between their policies and those of Livni and Barak. In any case, Netanyahu is an opportunist and says whatever will sell. When the Obama administration pressures him, and the diplomatic climate changes, he will go for whatever new version of Annapolis is cooked up and fill our media with earnest phrases about Israel's eternal innocence and laboured quest for peace. But nothing will change, whether he comes or goes, because Israel's policy goes deeper than Israeli electoral politics. The only change we can anticipate is one of style. The 'yes-but' chicanery of the Peres/Livni/Barak camp will morph into the 'no way' rhetoric of the Netanyahu/Lieberman camp, both presenting their rejectionism as Israel's tragic burden arising from Palestinian failures or betrayals. Whatever Palestinians do, neither camp has the slightest intention to do anything different in the West Bank except build settlements as fast as possible, take the land, shut the Palestinians behind the Wall, and finish the consolidation of Eretz Israel.

In fact, the idea that Livni and Barak ever meant to do anything different about the West Bank only falls for that famous old government ploy—Israel's plausible-deniability myth—that fanatical religious settlers actually drive the settlement's growth. The Israeli government has run the entire settlement operation—mapped, planned, funded, overseen, subsidised, and defended it — from the beginning. So let us not try to recreate that tinsel fiction for ourselves once again: that if only we had 'moderates' in the Israeli government we could 'keep the diplomatic process alive'. The 'moderates' brought us the carnage of Gaza and their intentions remain entirely clear, so let us have no more clinging to their lies and lip service and war crimes.

And let us have no more foolishness about Israel's security. Israel is overwhelmingly secure. It is as secure as the U.S. Army fighting Apaches on the western U.S. plains and crying foul at any white settler death. Where whites/Jews want the indigenous people's land, have overwhelming military power and capacity to take it, and see no reason to stop, what is needed to stop the government from cramming the people into Bantustans/reservations is not 'mediation' so the two sides can gain 'trust' and see each other as human beings, or indigenous collaboration to make whites 'secure', or indigenous recognition that the dominant state has a 'right to exist'. The only solution to such a power imbalance is to eradicate the state's claimed moral authority to destroy and rob and brutalise the outsider by changing the very relationship between state and outsider into something else. Native Americans did this too late, after too much was destroyed and stolen. The Palestinians can do it in time.

But this means getting serious and it means acting now.

The one-state solution is not a 'dream'. It is the only hope for real peace but it is also the grim reality we already face. The Israeli government knows this full well and also knows that the two-state façade is cracking. We see the bloody consequences of that knowledge in Gaza, where Israel deliberately created mayhem partly to derail Hamas and distract the world from the increasing transparency of the two-state lie. So there is nothing 'utopian' about this one-state reality. In South Africa, the one-state solution cost thousands of lives, particularly toward the end when the apartheid regime became desperate. As in South Africa, conditions in the one-state solution in Israel-Palestine are likely to get worse before they get better but also we have no guarantee that the struggle will come out well. It could go to ethnic cleansing and wars. It will come out well only if people shed their myths and get seriously busy.

The Myths That Must Go

Zionists myths are infamous, if increasingly tired and tattered: the Palestinians were not in Palestine when the Zionists arrived; Arab states told the Palestinians to flee in 1948; the Six-Day War was forced on Israel and so Israel has no obligation to withdraw from 'territories seized'; Israel is a nation-state like any nation-state; the occupation is not an occupation. Possibly the most dangerous myth still entertained by Zionists is that Israel can act on its own myths and somehow things will work out: that because the Palestinians have no just grievance in opposing Israel and so must be only backward fanatical (or gullible foolish) savages, Israel can bomb them into giving up their irrational anti-Jewish agendas. Zionists do not yet grasp that this tactic will never work—indeed, the myth is actually reinforced by Palestinian refusal to capitulate—because they must cling to all the other 'founding myths' to make moral sense of their ethnically cleansed state. The dogged public work of discrediting those myths in order to derail that self-deception must and will continue.

But Zionists aren't the only ones with myths. Let us lay ours out now, so that they can finally be identified for what they are and set aside like outgrown games.

The first myth is that Israel ever signed onto a two-state solution. Taking a magnifying glass to the texts of the Oslo Accords, Road Map, Annapolis and Paris Protocol, we find that Israel has not once – never, not in any deal, treaty, accord, or document of any kind – committed itself to a two-state solution. The only moment when it seemed to do so, in signing onto the Road Map, Israel put so many obviously impossible preconditions on the PA that Israel could rest easy that it would never be held to anything. So Israel isn't contradicting any formal commitment it has made by eradicating the basis for it. (Nor did Israel ever promise to abide by United Nations Resolutions 181, 194, 242, and 338, and that magnifying glass reveals that its admission to the UN was not conditioned on its allowing Palestinian refugees to return, either, but those are other issues.)

The second myth is that the US will ever make Israel withdraw from the West Bank. This is partly due to lack of political will and the Zionist lobby, but let's imagine for a moment that the Obama Administration gets serious enough, or desperate enough, to use some real leverage to force, say, a settlement freeze. It won't be enough, and not only because, at this point, a freeze is not enough. A major withdrawal is needed. But any Israeli governmental that attempted seriously to withdraw the big settlements (and mind, no Israeli government has ever agreed even to consider this) would betray whole sets of Zionist constituencies, cast the fragile Zionist pact about Jewish statehood into crisis, and split the Zionist national body down the middle. No external power can make any state willingly destroy its own national cohesion, for that is political suicide, and suicide is precisely what the Zionist dragon tail is now flailing around to avoid. In any case, there's not enough money to pull it off and Israel needs West Bank water desperately.

The third myth is that the Jewish national society that has been created in Israel will ever vanish. It will no more vanish than did Afrikaner society in South Africa (which, by the way, is flourishing today as never before). It is vital that the Palestinian national movement and solidarity movement accept this fact ideologically as well as pragmatically, for otherwise the one-state solution is ethnocidal in its premise and will never work. This might seem obvious but it strikes a deep bell of warning for Palestinian nationalist discourse: just as the 'Jewish state' cannot persist, the 'Arab state' of the Charter and Palestinian rhetoric can never form in Israel-Palestine. What forms must be something else and, as in South Africa, it must liberate all groups from the vicious grip of racism.

The fourth myth is that a one-state solution can march to secular triumph without the great Abrahamic faiths pitching in fully on the project. Religion here will not be shoved off into the private sphere. It must help lead this effort, not float in the background. But a linked myth is that people of those faiths do not have to deal seriously with the internal challenge of sorting out how to live a virtuous religious life in a multi-sectarian society. Christianity, Judaism and Islam can never 'win' in Palestine, or indeed find their greatest spiritual calling, without reaching for their noblest and most universal principles and putting them forward with all the certainty that faith enables, in this land that has suffered so bitterly from their past failures to do so.

The fifth myth is that the world will ever get behind Palestinian self-determination enough to give the Palestinians a viable separate state. This may seem counter-intuitive, especially for those recalling decolonisation in the 1960s or sensing the growth of the boycott campaign. But think: no major global movement has ever pitched in effectively behind someone else's self-determination struggle. (How much sleep have you lost over the Tamils lately?) If the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa had centred on 'Zulu self-determination' or 'Xhosa self-determination' instead of equal rights and anti-racism, apartheid would be operating here today. Apartheid was defeated by making claims on the world's conscience, and this was done by insisting on values shared by all—the fundamental equality of human beings in dignity and rights and the cruelty and illegitimacy of racist rule. We see that kind of real pressure emerging in Palestine at last, as the world views in horror the agony of Gaza. When Palestinians finally invoke those universal values directly, and demand equal rights in their homeland as citizens of a single unified non-ethnic state, they will find themselves tapping into that global force to degrees unprecedented in their political history, gaining not merely world sympathy but world passion.

Ironically, the voice that most forcefully argues this point is Ehud Olmert, who has cautioned that if Palestinians adopt a one-state anti-apartheid strategy, Israel is doomed. In April 2004, he warned that, "More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against 'occupation,' in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle - and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state." In November 2007, he said again: "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished."

No wonder that Olmert and Livni and the whole machinery of Hasbara Zionist solidarity are pounding the table so hard about a two-state solution: it is their only defence against the collapse of ethnic statehood and real democracy. When one's opponent indicates the path to its certain defeat, one should pay attention.

Finally, we must set aside all those myths about the one-state solution itself: that it is easy, utopian, inevitable, impossible, will evolve naturally if we just wait, or – the most common myth -- that 'the Jews' will never accept it. The truth is that the one-state solution is difficult, dangerous, the only workable solution, the necessary solution, will take huge work to prevent it going wrong, and 'the Jews' will accept it. But for that to happen, the Palestinian nationalist vision and mission will have to embrace a new vision of a shared society and the international community must stop fiddling while Palestine burns. Either Israel or the Palestinians will seize and steer the one-state solution. What happened in Gaza tells us what Israel intends to do with that power. It must be taken back.

This new struggle will convey tremendous political strength to the liberation movement. In Palestine we see indeed a real chance to create one of those rare shining moments when humanity briefly transcends itself, such as when Nelson Mandela stood before the Union Buildings in Pretoria and took the oath as president of a new South Africa. But let us not waste more time and energy longing for some 'great man' to come act the part of Mandela in Palestine and lead everyone to national reconciliation. We all carry little Mandelas inside us – that is why we wept when watching that historic moment in South Africa, because it resonated inside us with something universal. Let us all find within ourselves those deeper resources of moral courage to pitch in and help steer Israel-Palestine to a second global triumph against apartheid and lay a foundation for real democracy and justice in the Middle East. God knows the world must to defeat this old ogre of the last century, racial nationalism, in order to confront collectively the great challenges facing us in the next one.

Virginia Tilley is head of the Middle East Project and a chief research specialist in the Democracy and Governance Programme of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, writing in her private capacity. She is author of The One-State Solution (Michigan University Press and Manchester University Press, 2005) and many essays on Israel-Palestine, as well as another book and academic articles on racial nationalism in Latin America and elsewhere. She can be reached at vtilley@mweb.co.za.

http://rabble.ca/print/columnists/israel-apartheid-anti-semites

Published on rabble.ca (http://rabble.ca)

Israel, apartheid, anti-Semites

Created Mar 6 2009 - 10:03am

[1]By Rick Salutin

Story_publish_date:

Globe and Mail, March 6, 2009

summary:

Israel is now a state among nations and must be held to account, not absolved for fear of igniting a new Holocaust.

What is the sound of one side condemning? It's the media rendering of Israel Apartheid Week, now under way. B'nai Brith ran full-page newspaper ads asking universities to "prevent" it and the attendant "anti-Semitism on campus." There were no ads from organizers, so we didn't hear them being anti-Semitic in their own words -- or denying the charge.

Here's the Toronto Star's Rosie DiManno: "That detestable, despicable annual campus hate-fest ... Jew-bashing cloaked in self-righteousness ... students who don't recognize racism when they're spewing it."

I don't know if she meant to be ironic, spewing hate at the spewers. But I've talked with friends, Jewish and non, about these claims. They're disturbed, they don't want to witness the rise of a new horror. Here's my take.

Cabinet minister Jason Kenney calls Israel Apartheid Week "a systematic effort to delegitimize the democratic homeland of the Jewish people" by linking it to racism, a line virtually mouthed by Opposition Leader Michael Ignatieff. That is way too cute. Any "settler state," such as Canada, which took someone else's land, can be seen as illegitimate. But it's an abstract point. "Apartheid" became widely used in this context only when Israel began building what came to be called an apartheid wall, looming over Palestinians, sequestering more land, cutting them off from each other.

The usage grew as Israel expanded settlements, built Israeli-only roads and set up checkpoints so Palestinians would at best be left with "Bantustans," such as those that apartheid South Africa offered blacks, rather than a true state of their own. A small but real Palestinian state would be accepted by almost everyone. The Arab League has offered peace in return for Israel just leaving the West Bank. Even Hamas has a (nuanced) position on living with Israel. You can look it up.

What of the "new anti-Semitism" that Jason Kenney says is "based on the notion that the Jews alone have no right to a homeland"? Well, who are these new anti-Semites? I never see names or quotations. Canada has always had anti-Semites, but they've felt no need to hide their hate behind a screen of anti-Israel criticism. Think of David Ahenakew. A cartoon banned from hallways at the University of Ottawa showed a helicopter marked Israel rocketing a kid in Gaza holding a teddy bear. It's crude, but that's cartooning. There's no anti-Semitism in it. A front-page National Post cartoon showing CUPE Ontario's Sid Ryan offering David Ahenakew a job was far more scurrilous. No one can say Sid Ryan embraces anti-Semites, though he criticizes Israel strongly. Opposition to Israel seems well delineated from anti-Semitism to me.

Most of the specifics come down to shouts at protests. As in: "Cries of 'Die, Jew' and 'Get the hell off campus' were heard." The Canadian Jewish Congress's Bernie Farber says he's "never" seen it this bad "on the streets of Toronto and university campuses." Well, I spend lots of time on streets in Toronto and it doesn't look like Kristallnacht to me. But wait, that's glib. It's these images that scare my friends: They evoke Nazi Germany. I know that.

But Nazi Germany wasn't about name-calling and group hate. Those will persist, perhaps always. The Holocaust occurred largely because anti-Semitism was historically rooted and respectable there: religiously, socially, intellectually, politically. Writers and politicians were proudly anti-Semitic. Here, anti-Semitism is unacceptable in all those ways. This whole debate proves it. We should be glad for that, and keep it in perspective.

Why does perspective matter? Because Israel is now a state among nations and must be held to account, not absolved for fear of igniting a new Holocaust. Israel Apartheid Week should be gauged on its critique of its subject, not anathematized due to shadows and terrors from another time.

Another interesting article. The author Jacques Hersh is professor emeritus of Aalborg University, Denmark and former head of the Research Center on Development and International Relations there.

Ed Corrigan

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/hersh220209.html

A Jewish Glasnost

by Jacques Hersh

Winning the "hearts and minds" of the civilian population, according to counterinsurgency field manuals, is key to defeating the resistance. It is a lesson that imperialists learned a long time ago, but one that they seldom put into practice, let alone successfully impart to their clients. Israel's attack on Gaza is a case in point. The collective punishment visited on the civilians of Gaza by the Israel Defense Forces might be held up as a textbook example of what not to do, if the point of Operation Cast Lead, meticulously planned for at least six months before its commencement, were a counterinsurgency campaign against Hamas and Hamas alone.

But why should we care about Arab and Muslim hearts and minds, the political class of Israel may ask, so long as we have a majority of Western hearts and minds on our side? To be sure, they still do, at least in the United States. Then again, how long? The irony of Operation Cast Lead is that, militarily, it was a cheaper victory than any previous war that the IDF had ever fought, and yet, politically on the world stage, it is, and will probably remain, the costliest in the history of Israel, the war that began to alienate Western hearts and minds from the country that cannot afford to lose them.

And pro-Israeli spin doctors know it. These days, much of their time is occupied by negating comparisons. The attack on the Gaza ghetto is not the same as that on the Warsaw ghetto. What the IDF is doing is not a genocide or holocaust. Etc. No, they are not, as a matter of fact. But, then again, if your defense is reduced to repeating that what you are doing is "not as bad as the Holocaust," it means, well, you are losing.

What Israel is beginning to lose is not just gentile hearts and minds in the West. Its onslaught on Gaza has unleashed an unprecedented wave of Jewish criticisms of Israel, in words (on the Internet, in print, and even on TV) and deeds (participating in, even spearheading, demonstrations, occupations of Israeli consulates, and so on).

That is not surprising.. The Zionist state -- a cross between Sparta (a state ruled by its warrior kings) and Athens (a democracy with a large minority of second-class citizens) -- had long made its progressive Jewish supporters uncomfortable.. Their discomfort grew after Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, which eclipsed the image of the Israeli David facing the Arab Goliath. And it began to snowball as successive Israeli governments, flouting international law and numerous UN resolutions, kept building settlements, at a time (unlike the earliest years of the Zionist state) when anti-colonial movements elsewhere in the world had already decolonized many of the erstwhile colonies of great powers. Meanwhile, its role as an auxiliary to US imperialism even beyond the Middle East (for instance in Central America) also registered in the consciousness of progressive Jews (many of whom, by the way, took part in movements of solidarity with the Central American Left).

What Operation Cast Lead did was to open (or rather bomb) the floodgate, unleashing feelings and opinions thitherto dammed up by the identification with Israel which has been imposed on world Jewry not only by the political class of Israel but also most mainstream Jewish organizations in the disaspora, the organizations that have by and large acted as if they were dogmatic Stalinists doggedly defending all things Soviet Socialist, including the most indefensible, and purging all heretics from their ranks.

It may be said that a Jewish "Glasnost" has begun. This Glasnost, unlike the one that eventually led to the end of the Soviet Union, is not initiated from above by elite reformers, but for the most part from below, by countless ordinary Jews no longer fearful of purges organized by the apparatchiks of the organizations that claim to represent them.

The incipient Jewish Glasnost may meet an untimely end, however, if new anti-Semitism is allowed to grow.

In its early years, Zionism hardly resonated among the Jewish working classes, nor did it attract many supporters among liberal Jewish professionals or traditional religious Jews. Most politically conscious Jews who searched for a movement for self-emancipation found themselves in socialist movements of one kind or another. It was a massive growth of anti-Semitism in the midst of a great capitalist crisis, culminating in Nazism and the Holocaust, that began to shift the fortune of the Zionist movement.

Conversely, it was the actual waning of anti-Semitism in the West after WW2, especially its dramatic decline through an upsurge of movements against racism in the long sixties, that laid the ground for a Jewish Glasnost today. After all, the raison d'être of a Jewish state, as articulated by Theodor Herzl, is the idea that anti-Semitism cannot be eradicated in the West, so Jews could never be citizens equal to others in the West and must therefore emigrate from it. Most Jews, at home in the West, no longer believe that at the bottom of their hearts. Today, anti-Semitism of National Socialist vintage is a residual ideology. The most haunting Other against whom we are exhorted to unite to defend the so-called "Western Civilization" wears not a yarmulke but a turban in the style of the infamous Danish cartoons.

That is not to say that anti-Semitism has already ceased to exist altogether. It is being given a new lease on life by those who, purposely or inadvertently, identify world Jewry with the state of Israel, whether they are for or against the Jewish state. The Jewish Glasnost is the best weapon against the Zionists who endeavor to make all Jews identify with Israel and defend it at all times, whether its conduct is right or wrong. For the Jewish Glasnost to succeed, however, gentiles on the Left must see to it that none among the critics of Israel shall ever conflate world Jewry with the political class of Israel..

Jacques Hersh is professor emeritus of Aalborg University, Denmark and former head of the Research Center on Development and International Relations there.

Excellent article written by a prominent American Jewish academic. Saul Landau is Professor Emeritus, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Ed Corrigan

Progreso Weekly, March 5, 11, 2009

http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=842&Itemid=1

Israeli policy gives Jews a bad name

By Saul Landau

Most Jews I know get little pleasure from the existence of Israel; just the opposite. They feel disgusted by the behavior of their tribal kin toward Palestinians. This antipathy doesn't concern Israel's right to exist, a phony argument still maintained by hard line Zionists. Israel exists, period. Most of the world recognizes that. Anyone wanting to eliminate it belongs in the loony bin or prison.

Israelis have just elected a right wing majority. The number three vote-getting party, Yisrael Beytenu led by Avigdor Lieberman, will occupy a strong place in the new government. Lieberman will become a Minister in the Netanyahu Cabinet. Last year, Lieberman rammed through Israel's Central Election Committee a ban on Arab political parties. The Israeli Supreme Court ruled the ban unconstitutional before the recent election. Lieberman also demanded the Knesset expel Arab Members. He went further. If Arab citizens of Israel don't sign oaths of loyalty to Israel, they should have their citizenship revoked. Disloyalty for Arabs included students wearing keffiyehs to school; Muslim Israelis collecting medicine and aid for Gaza relief also falls into the non-trustworthy category.

During the 2008-9 invasion of Gaza, Lieberman wanted the military operation to continue until Hamas "loses the will to fight." In a speech at Bar-Ilan University, he said Israel's government had "to come to a decision that we will break the will of Hamas to keep fighting." Lieberman concluded in the January 13 Jerusalem Post: "We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II. Then, too, the occupation of the country was unnecessary." In 1945, U.S. Air Force planes dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Japan surrendered unconditionally. Lieberman has acquired a powerful defender in the United States. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, backed Lieberman's plan to require Israeli Arab citizens to sign an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state." (Feb 10, Jewish Telegraphic Agency) Foxman ignored the ADL's mission, opposing racial discrimination and the words of the ADL Charter.

The Anti-Defamation League aims "to secure justice and fair treatment to all." In Israel, it's apparently OK with Foxman to strip an Arab wearing the wrong covering of citizenship. Without citizenship, Arabs can't vote or participate in politics; very old Jews from some European countries may recall similar rules. My grandfather taught me, growing up during the Holocaust, that Jewish tradition teaches each person to strive to become a pillar of ethics, learn the law and behave so as to answer to God for transgressions -- not to rulers of a so-called Jewish state. Ironically, in the name of all Jews, Foxman and colleagues in AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and other Israeli lobby groups along with right wing and centrist political parties in Israel invoke the Holocaust to justify the very behavior embodied by Holocaust initiators. Israel calls itself a Jewish state. Yet, one fifth of Israel's population is non-Jewish. I don't belong to that state and despise its policies of constant war and occupation. Count Israel's wars: 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, plus civil wars against two Intifadas in the 1980s and 2000, and finally the invasions of Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in late 2008, the latter leaving in its wake 1,300-plus dead Palestinians, most of them civilians and less than 20 Israelis, some from "friendly fire."

Condemned by the Red Cross, Amnesty International and a host of organizations for violating human rights of Gaza's people, Israel's new government will almost certainly continue or even harden the policies. They don't care what others say. Dr. Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist, working in Gaza hospitals during the Israeli invasion described his patients' wounds. "It was as if they had stepped on a mine," he says of certain Palestinian. "But there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before." The "focused lethality" weapon, to which Fosse referred, does minimal damage to buildings, but catastrophic harm to humans.

The United States supplied these to Israel. (Conn Hallinan, Foreign Policy in Focus, February 11, 2009) Israeli Defense Forces have also used white phosphorus in Beirut in 1982, and again in Gaza. The intense heat of the metal inflicts appalling damage. The IDF knows international law prohibits its use near populated areas. Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International labeled as "a war crime" the use of phosphorous "in Gaza's densely-populated residential neighborhoods." (Guardian, January 21, 2009) Israel initially denied using the chemical. On January 13, Israeli Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi solemnly declared: "The IDF acts only in accordance with what is permitted by international law and does not use white phosphorus." Gazans and Israelis, however, saw the material and the victims of it.

On January 20, the IDF admitted using phosphorus artillery and mortar shells on "Hamas fighters and rocket launching crews in northern Gaza." On January 15, three shells hit the UN Relief and Works Agency compound. The resulting fire destroyed tons of humanitarian supplies. A phosphorus shell also hit Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City. According to the Guardian, the Israelis claimed Hamas fighters had hidden near the two targets. Witnesses denied the charge. (January 21, 2009) UN officials cited witnesses who claimed Israel killed 31 family members whom Israeli troops had led into a house in Zeitun. Twenty four hours after the IDF warned the Palestinians to remain, the IDF shelled the dwelling. Half of the dead were children.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called it "one of the gravest incidents since the beginning of operations" by Israeli forces in Gaza. (AFP, December 27, 2008). Such facts caused distinguished people like Jimmy Carter and Bill Moyers to question Israeli behavior. Foxman quickly labeled Moyers as anti-Semitic. Those opposing Israel's invasion of Gaza, or her occupying of Palestinian territory (for 40 plus years), or her mistreatment of all Palestinians receive the anti-Semitic label. Any criticism of Israel begets that description. In discussions with Jewish defenders of the recent invasion of Gaza, however, I found more defensiveness. During one argument an ardent pro Israeli changed the subject. "But Israel enjoys free speech and press!" Yes, a small minority vigorously criticize Israeli government policy -- there, not here in the United States, where a Member of Congress characterized an attack by the Israeli lobby as the equivalent of a pit bull biting him in the leg. Israeli's daily Ha'aretz provides an example of such criticism, including articles damning the latest invasion as both a failure and immoral (Gideon Levy, February 19, 2009).

Similar criticism in a U.S. newspaper would cause Foxman and company to call major press conferences to "expose anti-Semitism." When Jimmy Carter published his 2006 book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, critical of Israeli policy, Foxman stopped just short of accusing the former President. "You have been feeding into conspiracy theories about excessive Jewish power and control," he wrote in a letter. "Considering the history of anti-Semitism, even in our great country, this is very dangerous stuff." (Shmuel Rosner, Ha'artez Dec. 20, 2006) When less powerful Jewish American scholars write books or give lectures attacking Israeli policy, they get fired or their tenure withheld.

Norman Finkelstein (son of Holocaust survivors) was denied tenure in 2007 by the President of DePaul University, despite favorable recommendations by faculty and students. In 2000, he published The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. The President of Bard College recently dismissed Joel Kovel, another internationally applauded scholar. Kovel's 2007 book, Overcoming Zionism, triggered the action. In the Finkelstein case, an important Zionist activist, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, demanded the action. He had threatened Finkelstein with lawsuits after Finkelstein accused him of plagiarism and lying -- charges documented in his 2005 book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. (University of California Press) Kovel attacked militant Israeli supporter Martin Peretz, longtime editor of The New Republic. The ADL supported both dismissals. In past decades, ADL vibrated with anger over anti-Semitic signs spray painted on subway bathroom walls. Now, its leader endorses a McCarthyite platform in his beloved Israel. Anyone who does not conform to ADL's fiercely pro Zionist agenda becomes vulnerable to accusations of anti-Semitism. From 1998-2006, I occasionally invited speakers to campus who criticized Israeli policy. Inevitably, I would then receive letters, e-mails (copies to the University President), and phone calls accusing me of bias or being a "self-hating Jew." "How can you say that?" I asked one caller. "You don't know me." "You're all alike, you people who hate Israel," the man responded. "You're the Jew-hating Jew," I responded. "You hate me and don't know me. I wish you could listen to your own voice." "I know anti-Semites when I talk to them," he shouted into the phone and hung up. "Long Live Israel," scream the U.S. fans. "Anyone who doesn't like our team is an anti-Semite." I want to shout: "Go Back to Israel where you didn't come from." Saul Landau is Professor Emeritus, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona..

The Zionists' taboo

By Paul J. Balles 8 March 2009

Paul J. Balles considers how Zionists in positions of authority at academic institutions in the United States are persecuting and defaming anyone who dares to criticize Israel or even mention Palestinian rights.

******************
About the worst thing one can do in America or Europe is to criticize Israel. "Freedom" even in academia doesn't allow critical comments about Israel or Zionism. Those who risk it can lose their jobs and be labelled anti-Semitic bigots. Joel Kovel was terminated from Bard College after 20 years of service because of "differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism". The president of Bard, Leon Botstein, didn't consider Kovel's critiques of Zionism to be protected academic freedom. The worst of the critic bashers is Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. He spearheaded a campaign against Norman Finkelstein's tenure for writing Beyond Chutzpah, documenting in detail the falsifications in Dershowitz's book The Case for Israel.. After being denied tenure, Finkelstein said: "I met the standards of tenure DePaul required, but it wasn't enough to overcome the political opposition to my speaking out on the Israel-Palestine conflict." In his 2008 book, The Case Against Israel's Enemies, Dershowitz defamed many who have been critical of Israel, calling them bigots or labelling them anti-Semitic. Dershowitz has led the pack attacking Israel's critics. On former President Jimmy Carter, Dershowitz wrote: "Whatever the reason or reasons for Jimmy Carter's recent descent into the gutter of bigotry, history will not judge him kindly." Attacking University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer and Harvard University Professor Stephen M. Walt, who together authored The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (2007), Dershowitz wrote: "They are hate-mongers who have given up on scholarly debate and the democratic process in order to become rock-star heroes of anti-Israel extremists." Writing about the British University and College Union (UCU) boycott of Israeli educators and academic institutions, Dershowitz explained how he and others "wrote an op-Ed piece for the Times of London, in which we demonstrated parallels between this boycott and previous anti-Jewish boycotts that were undoubtedly motivated by anti-Semitism". On another front, Roosevelt University of Chicago at Illinois fired a philosophy and religion professor for allowing students in his class to ask questions about Judaism and Islam. The chair of the department, Susan Weininger, fired the professor, Douglas Giles, saying that students should not be allowed to ask whatever questions they want in class. Weininger said that free discussion in world religions could "open up Judaism to criticism". Any such material, she said, was not permissible to be mentioned in class discussion, textbooks or examinations. Further, she ordered Giles to forbid any and all discussion of the "Palestinian issue", any mention of Palestinian rights, the Muslim belief in the holiness of Jerusalem, and Zionism. When Professor Giles refused to censor his students, Weininger fired him. One of the worst types of Zionist harassment involves cases of Muslims generally and Palestinians in particular for speaking out on behalf of their favourite causes. The US government has often been complicit in these cases. One such case involves Dr Sami Al-Arian who taught computer engineering at the University of South Florida before his arrest in 2004. Al-Arian was charged with raising money and otherwise assisting Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group the US government declared a terrorist organization in 1995. At trial in 2005, he was acquitted on eight of 17 counts, and the jury deadlocked on the other counts. All counts were trumped up by Zionist prosecutors who wanted to silence Al-Arian.

If anything could vaguely approach justice in this case, the Israelis who have been slaughtering Palestinians for half a century would have been labelled terrorists and brought to trial for committing much worse deeds than Al-Arian.

The gravest injustice allows Zionists to silence honest critics for violating the Zionist taboo.

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

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http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10375.shtml

THE ELECTRONIC INTIFADA

A public stoning in Germany

Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada, 6 March 2009

Hermann Dierkes is a respected politician with an honorable record of campaigning for social and political justice in the German Rhineland city of Duisburg. He represented his party Die Linke (The Left Party) on Duisburg City Council, campaigning tirelessly on anti-racist and anti-fascist issues. Most recently, he was his party's candidate for the post of Lord Mayor.

On 18 February 2009 Dierkes addressed a public meeting on the question of Palestine. To the question of how to take action against the injustice being suffered by Palestinians, he responded that the recent World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil had proposed an arms embargo, sanctions and the boycott of Israeli exports. He added: "We should no longer accept that in the name of the Holocaust and with the support of the government of the Federal Republic [of Germany] such grave violations of human rights can be perpetrated and tolerated ... Everyone can help strengthen pressure for a different politics, for example by boycotting Israeli products."

A few days later, Dierkes gave an interview to the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ), a conservative paper based in the nearby city of Essen. He explained the demands of the World Social Forum, and requested that the published interview should stress that this had nothing to do with anti-Semitism -- a qualification that invariably needs to be made in Germany, except when there is suspicion of Islamophobia. Predictably, his precautions were in vain; scenting a political coup, the reporter published his article without including the qualification.

All hell broke loose. In the 25 February edition of Bild -- Germany's best-selling and most obnoxious daily paper -- Dieter Graumann, Vice-President of the Central Jewish Council, accused him of "pure anti-Semitism." WAZ editorialist Achim Beer decried Dierke's "careless Nazi utterances," comparing his words to "a mass execution at the edge of a Ukrainian forest." Hendrik Wuest, General Secretary of the CDU (the Christian Democratic Party), warned that "the Nazi propaganda" emanating from Die Linke is "intolerable." Michael Groschek -- General Secretary of the local branch of the Social Democratic Party, which shares power nationally with the CDU -- played electoral politics with the claim that "[a]nyone playing electoral politics with such anti-Israeli utterances sets himself outside the rules of the democratic game."

Worse still, Dierke's own party failed to stand by him unambiguously. Press spokesperson Alrun Nuesslein opined that if Israel is criticized because "the population in the Gaza Strip is collectively punished by the ... closure of border crossings, it is equally impossible for us to punish the Israeli population" by means of a boycott of Israeli goods, particularly "in the context of German history," a mantra with which Germans routinely absolve themselves of their historic responsibility towards the Palestinians.

Other voices within the party took a more strident tone. Petra Pau, Vice President of the Bundestag (German Parliament), said Dierke's words "awake unspeakable associations and employ dubious cliches." Left Party politicians in Dierke's own area condemned his "anti-Jewish endeavors" (Guenter Will) and "anti-Semitic utterances" (Anna Lena Orlowski).

Events took their predestined course, and on 26 February Dierkes resigned his position within Die Linke and withdrew his mayoral candidacy. In an open letter to his party colleagues, pointing out that he had been the victim of "a public stoning" and of a campaign that was "a terrible mixture of the gravest insults and defamation, Islamophobic hatred, hatred of immigrants, and murder threats," he maintained that "[t]he victims of the Shoah and the heroes of the Warsaw Jewish rising would turn away with horror [could they see] with what malice and toward what ends they are being instrumentalized in order to justify ... the undemocratic and murderous politics of the Israeli government."

A quick perusal of the German blogosphere throws up countless repetitions of the phrase "kauft nicht beim Juden!" -- "don't buy from the Jew!" -- a slogan from the Nazi era that no longer serves to defame Jews but rather those who seek justice for the Palestinians. However, Jews aren't entirely immune from this weapon: in the respected weekly Die Zeit (15 January 2009) a certain Thomas Assheuer turned it against the Canadian Jewish author Naomi Klein after the British Guardian published her call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Given that Klein had carefully specified that BDS should be aimed at Israeli institutions and not individuals, this piece of defamation was particularly crass.

It appears that freedom of speech, supposedly one of the proudest acquisitions of post-Fascist Germany, is readily suppressed when exercised to advocate positive action against the racist, politicidal institutions and actions of the Zionist state. Indeed so brutal and venomous was the response to Hermann Dierke's remarks, and so instantaneous and unanimous the recourse, however ironic, to Nazi sloganeering, that it is difficult not to be reminded of the rhetoric promulgated by Julius Streicher's vile paper Der Stuermer between 1923 and 1945 and not to feel that the same atavistic sources that once disgorged Jew-hatred are now being tapped in this virulent and unceasing campaign against the advocacy of Palestinian rights. The Palestinians, after all, stand in the way of the establishment of a racial Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, an eventuality that the German establishment deludedly sees as somehow shriving its own past crimes.

It has to be said that ordinary German people are, by and large, as unimpressed by philosemitic hysteria as they are by anti-Semitism. It remains to be seen how those people who have repeatedly voted for Hermann Dierkes because they see him as an honest and reliable politician -- something as rare in Germany as elsewhere -- will react to being robbed of their representative by such a campaign of hatred and defamation on behalf of a quasi-fascist state.

Finally, it will be interesting to see if this debacle induces Die Linke to reconsider whether it is more appropriate to adopt a principled position on Israel than to continue playing to the gallery of rightist pressure-groups that have taken upon themselves the task of perpetuating unconditional German support for Israel. It is hard to feel optimistic about this.

Raymond Deane is an Irish composer and activist (www.raymonddeane.com).

Anti-Israel protest staged at Sweden tennis match

http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/articleslideshow?articleId=USTRE5261R220090307&channelName=worldNews#a=1

http://uk.reuters.com/article/tennisNews/idUKL747428720090307

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1069179.html

Last update - 01:34 07/03/2009

Mauritania expels Israeli ambassador

By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent, and Agencies

Tags: Israel News, Mauritania, Gaza

The Foreign Ministry said Friday it had closed its embassy after the government of this overwhelmingly Muslim West African nation asked the Israeli ambassador and his staff to leave.

The move came after Mauritania's military junta recalled its own ambassador from Israel last month. In January, Mauritania said it was suspending ties with Israel over its military offensive against Hamas in Gaza.

"Following the Mauritanian government's decision, on January 16th 2009, to freeze diplomatic relations with Israel, and at its request, Israel will close its embassy in Nouakchott as of today," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said in a statement.

Mauritanian authorities had asked the Israeli Embassy to close within 48 hours, according to a Mauritanian government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.

The West African state's Communications Minister said Friday's move was a result of a decision taken at a meeting of Arab leaders in Doha in mid-January.

"We informed them [Israel] of the decision to suspend relations at the time of the summit in Doha, and it is now being executed," El Kory Ould Abdel Mola told Reuters. "The embassy is closed."

Israeli embassy personnel were seen packing up and taking down security cameras on Friday. The Israeli ambassador declined to comment to journalists.

Another official close to Mauritanian military ruler General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz said the decision to expel the Israeli diplomats followed January's decision to freeze relations with the state.

"This is the logical consequence of the freezing of relations between Israel and Mauritania ... there is nothing new," said the official, who declined to be identified.

"This was expected. After General Aziz took the decision at the Doha summit, an envoy from the Mauritanian Foreign Ministry sent a letter to the ambassador of Israel to leave the country," the official said.

Mauritania is one of only three Arab League countries to have diplomatic ties with Israel, alongside Jordan and Egypt. Diplomatic relations between Mauritania and Israel were established in October 1999.

About 1,300 Palestinians ? many of whom civilians - were killed in Israel's three-week Gaza campaign against Hamas militants, Palestinian officials said. 13 Israelis were also killed in the offensive, which Israel launched to combat cross-border rocket fire by Gaza militants.

The Israeli action sparked protests through the Arab and Muslim world, including Mauritania, where tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Nouakchott in protest.

Cuban and Venezuelan terrorists gathered in Miami

By: Jean Guy Allard / Kaos on the net
Publication Date: 07/03/09

. 06de March 2009. - The pamphlet reports El Nuevo País, Caracas, owned by Rafael Poleo, notorious Venezuelan coup and father of Patricia Poleo, an accomplice to the murder of prosecutor Danilo Anderson . Cuban terrorists and mobsters, including the Huber Matos met openly with Venezuelan coup led by military traitors, by the end of February, in Miami - without any interference from the authorities seeking to combat terrorism. . Rioja pamphlet reports El Nuevo País, Caracas, owned by Rafael Poleo, notorious coup and father of Patricia Poleo - a fugitive from Venezuelan justice for the murder of prosecutor Danilo Anderson - who was actively involved in the assembly.

According to the report entitled "exiled Cubans and Venezuelans share experiences," the newspaper in Venezuela, spokesman of the extreme right antichavista underlines the presence of the terrorist Cuban American Huber Matos, the officer traitor whose criminal organization developed over several years, due to CIA margin in relationships with drug traffickers who are to elucidate.

. He was accompanied by Angel De Fana, a terrorist and a frequent collaborator of the CIA counter-leader of an association of former prisoners, all identified with mercenary operations organized by the United States against Cuba.

. De Fana linking with U.S. intelligence services was never a secret: it was confirmed once again in January 2008 when it was exhibited at an event convened in Miami by Czech Ambassador Petr "Peter" Kolar, next Congressman Lincoln Díaz - Balart, the then head of the Bush Plan to annex Cuba, Caleb Mc Carry, Orlando Gutiérrez Boronat, activist billionaire Cuban Democratic Directory and Mauricio Claver Carone, director of the US-Cuba Democracy PAC.

In Miami, De Fana is one of the strongest support of the international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles - whose extradition is sought by Venezuela - and appears regularly in the activities of Alpha 66 terrorist organization tolerated, along with his current boss Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez.

Among the Venezuelan conspirators, participated in the reunion that many who served as aide Pedro Carmona in the coup against President Chavez in 2002, the army colonel Gustavo Diaz. This officer was a traitor ultra reactionary with the military rebels in the Altamira square in Caracas.

. There were also the captain of the National Guard traitor Javier Nieto Quintero, linked in 2004 to a case of Colombian paramilitaries, and Lt. José Antonio Colina Pulido responsible for bomb attacks against diplomatic offices in Spain and Colombia in Caracas in 2003.

On May 23, 2006, the U.S. government refused to extradite Colina Pulido and an accomplice, Germán Rodolfo Varela López, requested by the government of Venezuela.

The same source also appeared at the meeting conspiratorial Juan Fernandez, a former manager of the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA who was the main instigator of the oil strike in Venezuela which caused economic damage of more serious qualified in its history.

Claimed by the justice of his country, Fernandez is also the protection of U.S. authorities.

The event was blessed terror initiated by the self andalusia evangelical pastor Martin Añorga linked to Alpha 66. In May 2008, Añorga also gave his "blessing" at a banquet held in "tribute" to Posada Carriles in the halls of the Big Five Club in Miami.

The meeting was closed by the Poleo

. Qualified star agent for the CIA against the United States from Venezuela, the daughter of Rafael Poleo maintains links with both the Cuban terrorists, right Colombian Venezuelan coup and his family, and behind various operations carried out since the U.S. embassy in Caracas against the Bolivarian Revolution.

Miami remains a sanctuary for excellence in Latin American extreme right.

In this city, have found refuge and cover hundreds of torturers, murderers and dictators of Argentina, Paraguay, Chile and many other countries where U.S. has imposed a fascist governments over the years.

It is the U.S. city where five Cubans have been the victim of a conspiracy of the FBI and the Cuban American terrorist mob and still in prison now ten years have been infiltrated by these same groups that today are associated with the counterrevolution in Venezuela.

__._,_. -- Thanks for your support and commitment, !VENCEREMOS! Enrique

Obama budget: Mammoth deficits but headed lower

2009-02-26T22:12:00.001-08:00

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/02/26/national/w080918S84.DTL&type=politics

Obama budget: Mammoth deficits but headed lower

By ANDREW TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer

Thursday, February 26, 2009

(02-26) 20:00 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --

President Barack Obama charted a dramatic new course for the nation Thursday with a bold but contentious budget proposing higher taxes for the wealthy and the first steps toward guaranteed health care for all — accompanied by an astonishing $1.75 trillion federal deficit that would be nearly four times the highest in history.

Denouncing what he called the "dishonest accounting" of recent federal budgets, Obama unveiled his own $3.6 trillion blueprint for next year, a bold proposal that would transfer wealth from rich taxpayers to the middle class and the poor.

Congressional approval without major change is anything but sure. The plan is filled with political land mines including an initiative to combat global warming that would hit consumers with considerably higher utility bills. Other proposals would take on entrenched interests such as big farming, insurance companies and drug makers.

Obama blamed the expected federal deficit explosion on a "deep and destructive" recession and recent efforts to battle it including the Wall Street bailout and the just-passed $787 billion stimulus plan. The $1.75 trillion deficit estimate for this year is $250 billion more than projected just days ago because of proposed new spending for a fresh bailout for banks and other financial institutions.

As the nation digs out of the most serious economic crisis in decades, Obama said, "We will, each and every one of us, have to compromise on certain things we care about but which we simply cannot afford right now."

Signaling budget battles to come, Republicans were skeptical Obama was doing without much at all.

"We can't tax and spend our way to prosperity," said House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio. "The era of big government is back, and Democrats are asking you to pay for it.."

Obama plans to move aggressively toward rebalancing the tax system, extending a $400 tax credit for most workers — $800 for couples — while letting expire President George W. Bush's tax cuts for couples making more than $250,000 a year. That would raise the top income tax bracket from 35 percent to 39.6 percent for those taxpayers and raise their capital gains rate from 15 to 20 percent as well.

Thursday's 134-page budget submission, a nonbinding recommendation to Congress, says the plan would close the deficit to a a more reasonable — but still eye-popping — $533 billion after five years. That would still be higher than last year's record $455 billion deficit.

And the national debt would more than double by the end of the upcoming decade, raising worries that so much federal borrowing could drive up interest rates and erode the value of the dollar.

Also, to narrow the budget gap, Obama relies on rosier predictions of economic growth — including a 3.2 percent boost in the economy next year — than most private sector economists foresee.

There is already resistance from Democrats who are upset with the budget's plan to curb the ability of wealthier people to reduce their tax bills through deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions and state and local taxes.

That tax hike would raise $318 billion over the upcoming decade toward a down payment on Obama's high-priority universal health care plan. Cuts to the Medicare and Medicaid federal health programs would supply an additional $316 billion, but that still wouldn't provide enough money to guarantee coverage for all, and Obama wants Congress to come up with hundreds of billions of dollars in additional hard-to-raise revenues to pay for the rest.

Then there is the proposed clampdown on the Pentagon budget, which would get a 4 percent boost, to $534 billion next year, but would then get increases of 2 percent or less over the next several years. Domestic programs favored by Democrats would, on average, receive a 7 percent boost over regularly appropriated levels — even as many agencies are already swimming in cash from the just-enacted economic stimulus plan.

Taken together, Obama's plan contains so many difficult-to-digest ideas that it's virtually certain to be significantly redrafted during debates later this year.

"It's going to be a tough row to hoe, but he has large Democratic majorities and a lot of popular support and we're in times of crisis," said Robert Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute. "So his prospects of him getting much of what he is seeking, while not good, are higher than ... we've seen in the past."

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., predicted Congress would pass much of Obama's plan, though with significant revisions. For instance, he's unimpressed with a proposal to reduce payments to farming operations with sales above $500,000 per year and says the plan to curb tax deductions for the wealthy faces uncertain prospects because of opposition from lawmakers from high tax states and universities whose endowments have shrunk.

A plan to devote up to $250 billion to support as much as $750 billion in increased spending under the government's rescue program for banks and other financial institutions landed with a thud.

Republicans scoffed at the idea that Obama's plan calls for much sacrifice on the spending front, citing the big increases for many agencies.. they also pointed to tax increases and hundreds of billions in revenues from a contentious proposal to auction off permits for carbon emissions in a bid to address global warming.

Obama and top aides emphasized that they didn't make the financial mess.

Said the president: "We cannot lose sight of the long-run challenges that our country faces and that threaten our economic health — specifically, the trillions of dollars of debt that we inherited, the rising costs of health care and the growing obligations of Social Security."

"For too long, our budget has not told the whole truth about how precious tax dollars are spent," he said. "Large sums have been left off the books, including the true cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that kind of dishonest accounting is not how you run your family budgets at home. It's not how your government should run its budgets either."

Among the many programs that would receive generous boosts are education and cancer research. The size of education Pell Grants would automatically increase every year by inflation plus 1 percent, while Obama promises to double cancer research over several years. He also wants to put the United States on a path to double foreign aid.

Obama's budget contains almost $1 trillion in tax hikes over 10 years on individuals making more than $200,000 and couples earning over $250,000. About $350 billion more would be raised through a variety of other hikes, including raising taxes on hedge-fund managers by taxing their compensation as income rather than at the 15 percent capital gains rate. Obama would also increase taxes on corporate income earned abroad.

Some $526 billion in revenue from carbon pollution permits would be used to extend the "Making Work Pay" tax credit of $400 for individuals and $800 for couples beyond 2010 as provided in the just-passed economic stimulus bill.

The budget would make permanent the expanded $2,500 tax credit for college expenses that was provided for two years in the just-passed economic stimulus bill. It also would renew most of the Bush tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003, and would permanently update the alternative minimum tax so that it would hit fewer middle- to upper-income taxpayers.

Obama's $634 billion head start on expanding health care could easily double as lawmakers flesh out details in coming months on how to provide medical coverage to all of the 48 million Americans now uninsured while also trying to slow increases in costs. Health care costs now total $2.4 trillion a year and keep rising even as the economy is shrinking.

Thursday's submission was an overview of a more comprehensive plan that will be submitted in April.

___

Associated Press writers Martin Crutsinger, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Anne Gearan contributed to this report.

Comment: Clearly we are dealing with an economy in crisis, but what kind of economy that one based upon the furtherance of corporate profits no matter the real actual cost in terms of human misery, wage-slave exploitation and driving people into dangerous desperation. We should look at the details but in general support Obama's Efforts at recovery. We are HERE NOW in the midst of a great financial depression, in fact, the depression of 2009! Wake up America!!!

In all this we need to consider a complete alternative to the present economic system, that is, a form of democratic socialism that would be fair for all parties concerns, without regard to the greedy in support of the needy! It ain't brain surgery!!!

Education for Liberation! Join Up!
Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta
Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Humane-Rights-Agenda/

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/THIRD-WORLD-NEWS/

http://www.NetworkAztlan.com

Read: shabbat shalom 02.01.09 ~ from Jerusalem

2009-01-11T08:49:00.001-08:00

Domingo/Sunday ~ Diciembre/December 11, 2009 @8:47 AM ~ PST

Greetings All! The below is an Email from a dear close friend of mine whom I have never met in the flesh but hope to do so soon. She has been my online recovery sponsor for several years and more importantly a trusted friend and spiritual sister to me.

In November of the year 2006 I created a blog for her to archive her weekly Shabbat Shalom posts located on the Internet @

http://shabbat-shalom-jerusalem.blogspot.com/

Over the years she has been of critical help for me in understanding the Middle East situation. Perhaps the best analogy she has given me is two dogs fighting over the same bone. As usual most people inside the United States of all political leanings are strapped into the stale and sterile left-wing vs. right-wing thinking and cannot think beyond and outside of this divided narrative. All the good guys are on one side and all the bad guys are on the other. Ol' wild West cowboys and indians thinking. The connected reality is that there is room for gross errors on both sides and the truth is often in the gray areas between two extremes.

Hamas was elected in a democratic fashion, Israel is a military occupying force and treats the Palestinian people as hostages. After decades of being demonized some people may actually miss ol' Yassar Arafat and his PLO, though he was surely no angel.

Related Link: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1994/arafat-bio.html

On an ideal level, both the Israeli and Palestinian people should have two separate states that are respected by each other, especially in terms of their territorial sovereignty. No nation can truly consider itself as a nation if it cannot defend its own borders. A nation must be an independent nation, not a mere cerebral concept. It must exist in connected reality.

This is part of why the concept of an independent Chicano nation is insane inside the United States and Chicano cultural nationalism is a manifestation of social-political insanity.

There is no independent Palestinian state that is recognized and respected by other nations in the region, certainly not by the Israeli government! Unfortunately or not, connected reality is not governed by ideals.

The usual question from folks is: Who started it? Not why it is being fought and what the combatants are fighting for!

Israel and Hamas Vow to Press on With Fighting in Gaza: By Sonja Pace
Jerusalem ~ 11 January 2009
"Israel says it will press on with its military offensive in the Gaza Strip, as Hamas vows to do the same. Hostilities are now into their third week with Gaza medical sources reporting over 860 Palestinians killed, about half of them civilians. Thirteen Israelis have been killed in that time span, including three civilians killed by Hamas rocket fire."
Newslink: http://voanews.com/english/2009-01-11-voa9.cfm

Israel together with Hamas should commence with a cease fire, but it seems that both sides are determined to cause as much killing and damage to the other as possible until actual circumstances on the ground force them to stop. Remember: there has never been any Middle East Peace, certainly not in my lifetime. The war will go on... sometimes people have to fight it out, make war in order to bring about a relative peace, which can only be a short temporary truce in the Middle East condundrum.

In the end we may find that the war that must be fought is a spiritual warfare between the forces of good light and that of dark evil. How much hatred and revenge do we harbor and cherish within our own inner souls? Unless we all end up searching for our loved ones scrambling over the ashes and ruins of a failed war fought by failed states. The war begins and ends in our own souls!

Education for Liberation!

Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta
Humane-Liberation-Party

Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com

Key Link: http://www..NetworkAztlan.com

{Edit by PSL}

From: Linda Whittaker ~ Email: olsvig2000@yahoo.com
Sent: Friday, January 2, 2009 10:18:27 AM
Subject: shabbat shalom 02.01.09

Hi everyone,

2009 begins here on a grim note; once again we are at war. This time Hamas missiles are falling on the Negev and Israel is pounding the shit out of Gaza in an effort to get them to stop. I wonder what the grand strategy might be on either side. What does Hamas want to gain? Is it worth the beating they are taking? What does Israel plan to do? After the bombs, are we going in with tanks, house to house searches, eradicate Hamas on the ground? And then what?

Or is this all just emotional; Hamas running on the Moslem equivalent of apocalyptical vision and pride, and Israel mainly fed up and trying to teach Hamas a lesson it is not capable of learning? Are we playing a high level chess match or just reacting from the gut? (What worries me is the old adage, "Never underestimate human stupidity.")

People are getting injured and killed, and the news is full of dead babies and hysterical adults. That's the human interest face of war, of course, and it is real. But the chessmasters who play these games are not affected by dead babies. Although they spread on on a long scale from sane to crazy, they tend to be quite cold-blooded and rational about reaching their goals. This is true for both sides.

I find myself trying to figure out what is going on in their heads, their goals, their risk assessments. Viewed with detachment, it is fascinating.

Fortunately, I get pulled back from this kind of speculation before I become an inhuman monster, which could happen quite easily. I am listening to Jewish and Christian friends (no Moslems at the moment) who are voices of compassion and reason. They are praying for the innocent victims on both sides, and trying to figure out how to pick up the pieces when this period ends. I'm hearing from Ramallah as well as Jerusalem. These voices are saddened but not in despair. Maybe we moved beyond that. We've been through so much that they know we will be able to pick up the pieces and move on.

If any good comes of all this, it will be the replacement of Hamas by the Palestian Authority in Gaza, and a reunification of the two parts of the Palestinian people. Israel doesn't want to occupy Gaza (jeez, nobody wants Gaza, it is a basket case.) Eradicating Hamas will leave a vacuum which will be occupied by more extremists unless the PA moves in.

Alternatively, the world powers will yank Israels chain and pull us off. Then what, I don't know.

We are noticeably jumpy here in Jerusalem even though we are far from the shooting. My colleagues are snappy and my own impatience threshold is low. I've bit off four heads at work during the last week because they bugged me. Or maybe six. Been there before; this is how I react to a wartime situation. I get mean and short-tempered. Gotta watch it; during the last intafada I had to take time out periodically before I banged someone's nose. My boss is aware of it and told me to relax this weekend. He's also been there before.....

Last week had a lot of rain (good news) and now the sun is out. Typically we have dry weather in January and the winter rains return at the end of the month. It is usually cold and clear with high pressure fronts from the north. Which means also this is fighting weather, with good visibility for bombing. So we are..... (see how it all goes back to the war; even the weather?)

New Year's Eve didn't mean anything to me; I went to bed at 7:30 pm in fact. My planned party was postponed until next week since everyone's schedules got disrupted by you-know-what. Instead, I tried to read and prepare a review article I have to write. Went up to Meggido (that's Armegeddon to you Americans) for a meeting. It is the office for our northern district, and one of my favorite places. They have a good shop for archeology and geography books in English, so I got a few. My budget is tight now while I pay the loans for my car; gotta keep out of bookstores....

Not much more to mention. It is cold, the woodstove is going, the cats are friendly and comfortable. I feel like hibernating.

shabbat shalom,

Linda

Re:GAZA: The Madness Must Stop!

2009-01-10T01:45:00.000-08:00

1-10-2009 ~ Sabado @1:37 AM ~ Full Moon Today!
Let us support the Palestinian people and do what we can from where we are at in order to get to the root of the whole global problem that resonates from Amerikan Empire: Fascism on the domestic level, Amerikan Imperialism on the international level and supported by Amerikan corporate capitalism in the global market place.

Total warfare, including spiritual warfare, is waged from all lines, all angles and from all trajectories by any means mandatory!!!

At the same time, let us be careful to make keen distinctions between governments and regular leadership and the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people who are indigenous to their own lands. We are all indigenous native peoples!

Education for Liberation!

Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta
Humane-Liberation-Party
Sacramento, Califas, Aztlan

Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com

Key Link: http://www.NetworkAztlan.com

{Edited Below}

From: Sergio Hernandez <chiliverde@earthlink.net>

To: NetworkAztlan_Action@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 12:04:33 AM

Subject: Re: [NetworkAztlan_Action] Re: [NetworkAztlan_Arte] Fwd: GAZA... Let the whole world know ! horrible pictures!

Well said!....... ..Serg

On Jan 9, 2009, at 10:07 PM, Bejarano wrote:

> *From Hell, let's boycott MADNESS!

> We should boycott to withdraw from the madness and refuse to cooperate with Israelites' Zionist and Palestinians' Hamas. I feel they will not stop in their opposition to each other, I say, let them go to their destruction.

> The UN can not save them. "Israel and Hamas ignore UN call for cease-fire." We all know their historical misfortunes, and from their faith comes too much terror, fear, despair and casualty of their battles. I feel that we can not bring to them their punishment or protection "arms" that surely would fail and return to us even more disasters. I think of the innocent victims, the poor, oppressed and disenfranchised people that must be helped, to protest a liberation for peace in the Middle East.

> The beast "world capitalism" in its anger and hate that is bent toward more wars, greater expansion of state/private property and profits; willing in torturing people, killing children by the thousands, It's MADNESS.

> We should boycott all nations who provide the machinery of death and destruction and have no part in its' ways. The MADNESS Must Stop!

> G01B

> --- On Fri, 1/9/09, Ron Gochez <mexicanoatucla@ aol.com> wrote:

From: Ron Gochez <mexicanoatucla@ aol.com>

Subject: [NetworkAztlan_ Action] Re: [NetworkAztlan_ Arte] Fwd: GAZA... Let the whole world know ! horrible pictures!

To: NetworkAztlan_ Arte@yahoogroups ..com

Date: Friday, January 9, 2009, 3:04 PM

Of course

Hamas fighters are going to be fighting among children; they

ALL live in a TINY little piece of land called Gaza. FYI,

the Gaza strip is tiny (about the same length as the

distance from Anaheim to Glendale) and totally surrounded by

Israeli terrorists (aka IDF); so where is Hamas (or any

other freedom fighters) supposed to fight from??

The Palestinian freedom fighters have every right to use

any and all forms of struggle (including violence) against

the terrorist state of Israel because brutal force is what

Israel has used against them from the very initial existance

of the state of Israel (please research Irgun, Stern gang).

If Africans and the Indigenous people's had bombs 500+

years ago, would you blame them for using them against the

terrorists who came here on boats from Europe? Would you

call Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Nat Turner, Crazy Horse,

Harriet Tubman, Manuelito and other African/Native leaders

"terrorists" because they showed young Indigenous/African
children how to fight against the the occupier/invader?

Israel is in no moral position to call the Palestinians

terrorists; and neither are we. Hell, we are the ones that

are financing the terrorism (our tax $$$) and most of us are

doing NOTHING about it! So we are in no position to point

fingers.

As Raza, WE ourselves have been occupied (like Gaza is

today) since 1492 and then again in 1848. We should be

totally in support of the brave people of Palestine. They

are doing what most Hispanics today would NEVER do; fight

for their land, dignity and freedom.

War itself is not the problem. Reactionary war is the

problem. There is a HUGE difference between the two.

Revolutionary war and war for freedom is and should always

will be absolutley justified. Oppressed peoples have every

right to free themselves.. .by any means neccessary.

Viva Palestina libre!

Ron Gochez

Social Justice Educator/Community Organizer

-----Original Message-----

From: Sergio Hernandez <chiliverde@ earthlin k.net

To: NetworkAztlan_ Arte@yahoogroups .com

Sent: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 1:54 pm

Subject: Re: [NetworkAztlan_ Arte] Fwd: GAZA.... Let the

whole world know ! horrible pictures!

I'm with you Armando....Carlos sent me some terrible

pictures of death and destruction by the Israeli forces on

the Palestinians. ...then I get a bunch of pictures of Hamas

fighters fighting among children and children being

indoctrinated by Hamas to continue the terror...where does

this madness stop?......I don't think it never will and

it will eventually lead to the destruction of both........

.. possibly the world STOP WAR!......... ....Serg

On Jan 9, 2009, at 12:39 PM, armando baeza

wrote:

Better than that , BOYCOTT WAR.

Children live (die) in every country.

mando

On Jan 9, 2009, at 9:47 AM, armando@artegana s.

com wrote:

It is high time to boycott Israel, it's products

and services. Someone please provide a list of Israel companies doing business in

the U.S.

DO not buy products produced in Israel!

Thank you.

Quoting Carlos Callejo <ccallejo@yahoo.com:

--- On Tue, 1/6/09, Trgunn1@ aol.com <Trgunn1@ aol.

com wrote:

From: Trgunn1@ aol.com <Trgunn1@ aol.com

Subject: Fwd: GAZA... Let the whole world know !

horrible pictures!

To: ccallejo@ yahoo. com, magu4u@hotmail.com

Date: Tuesday, January 6, 2009, 8:35 PM

New year...new news. Be the first to know what is

making headlines.

Get a free MP3 every day with the Spinner.com toolbar. Get

It Now.

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Reflections on Thursday, January 8, 2009

2009-01-08T10:09:00.000-08:00

Thursday Mornng ~ Our CASA Meetings are held every Sunday at 7 PM and open to the public free-of-charge. We do not even pass the basket.

Yes, it is true that it is a great blessing to have strong support from others who support us in our efforts at on-going sobriety, progressive recovery and spiritual healing.

Our personal recovery and personal liberation can sometimes be a very lonely state of existence, especially if we isolate and insulate ourselves and are not open to new ideas and ideals. This is part of why we sometimes meet in group settings with different venues.

I know my Lovely Peach has been a blessing for me and she already has some good sobriety time from prescription drugs for so-called bi-polar disorder, in fact, since September 14th, 2008. I see the need for prescription drugs for some to help them to cross-over into total sobriety from all addictive substances. We do not want to replace chemical addiction with street drugs with lifelong addiction to prescription drugs.

We all need to see the urgent need for daily sane and sober recovery but should be wise and have a vision for working on our spiritual healing. Sobriety is the starting point, but sobriety alone is not enough. We need to recover, repair and rebuild ourselves as triune humane beings living life on life's terms and daily coping with life-problems. We are living entities in the entire mind-body-soul trinity as creatures of the Creator.

We need to comprehend and accept key facts:
1. We are creatures of the Creator. Our Higher Power is the Creator, no one else. The Holy Bible was written by men inspired by the Holy Spirit and the original principles of the A.A. 12-Steps Program came from the Holy Bible!!!
2. Drug addiction and other disorders are manifestations of our divorce from the Creator. Drug addicts are alienated from the Creator God and their true inner selves.
3. Drug addiction is a mental ilness and spiritual disease. This dis-ease causes suffering.
4. We must go beyond the cloak of anonymity, get involved in what is ultimately our own spiritual healing and be sensitive to global humane rights issues, including the persecution of drugs addicts who require wholistic drug treatment programs, not repressive jails, prisons and institutions.
5. At one level of another, all addictions and other disorders require us raising our own personal self-esteem in terms of self-love, self-respect and self-confidence.

These are a few facts and relative conclusions I have obtained from my involvement with homeless refugees at the local Salvation Army Emergency Shelter for well over twelve years both as a client and as a staff member.

No one has cornered the market on truth. Each of us must come to know our own truth in a way that works for us. We merely offer general guidelines. The hard work is for us to inspect ourselves, come to really know ourselves and see our role in the world in relation to a true cosmic consciousness. We must make amends to those we have wronged, go through a true repentence in our spiritual awakening and remember not to take our own selves too seriously. Humor and laughter are natural remedies!

Education for Liberation!

Peter S. Lopez aka: Peta

Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com

http://casa-12steps.blogspot.com/

http://sane-sober.blogspot.com/

http://www.thefourwinds.com/tp-hlb.php

http://www.miguelruiz.com/

Key Link: http://www.NetworkAztlan.com

From: "robertslopez14@yahoo.com" <robertslopez14@yahoo.com>
To: Sane-and-Sober@yahoogroups.com
Cc: John Randolph Engbeck <jengbeck@yahoo.com>; Peta Lopez <peter.lopez51@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 8, 2009 8:49:59 AM
Subject: Re: [Sane-and-Sober] Re: Read: It's all good! ~ from Peta-de-Aztlan

It's good to be reconnected to both of you. Yes the SLE's are actually not part of my recovery program. The NA material as well as my association with the church's Overcomers Program is what has been keeping me sane. The help of this beautiful Flipina in the program and with me in church is a blessing also.

Maybe a meeting at CASA for starters.... .

I hear that guy Peta has a few good words to share....

Robert S. Lopez - "Tata"

--- On Wed, 1/7/09, John Engbeck <jengbeck@yahoo. com> wrote:

From: John Engbeck <jengbeck@yahoo. com>
Subject: [Sane-and-Sober] Re: Read: It's all good! ~ from Peta-de-Aztlan
To: "Robert Lopez" <robertslopez14@ yahoo.com>, "Peter S. Lopez" <peter.lopez51@ yahoo.com>
Cc: "Sane-and-Sober Yahoo-Group" <Sane-and-Sober@ yahoogroups. com>
Date: Wednesday, January 7, 2009, 2:36 PM

Thank you for writing. I would like to be Friends with you, Unlce Joe, and Hermano Roberto. I would probably like to leave the SLE business out of the conversation, as it seems you may as well.

SOCIAL ADVOCACY: I think this is a nearly limitless area that beckons of adventure, and learning, and sharing.

My view is that giving is its own benefit. I enjoy giving, and seek no recompense other than the joy it brings in the "doing". I will like to go to meetings sometimes. I have a new car to carry "Soul-diers" !

Onward!

John Randolph Engbeck

PO Box 536

Garden Valley, CA 95633

(510)703-5856

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