Stephen Lendman

"Along with the Infiltration Prevention Bill, potential mass Palestinian deportations and/or imprisonments takes Israel a step closer to full-blown fascism. It's already well along like its close Washington ally."

International law protects refugees and asylum seekers, Article I of the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees calling them:

"A person who owning to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country."

Post-WW II, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established to help them.

To gain legal protection, they must:

-- be outside their country of origin;
-- fear persecution;
-- be harmed or fear harm by their government or others;
-- fear persecution for at least one of the above cited reasons; and
-- pose no danger to others.

The Knesset's 1950 Law of Return grants every Jew worldwide the right to live in Israel as a citizen. Yet no refugee law exists, despite Israel being a signatory to the 1951 UN Convention. Instead, unpublished Ministry of Interior procedures and secret inter-ministerial determinations are made on a case-by-case basis.

As a result, Israel has the lowest percent of requests granted (for temporary, not permanent status) compared to western states - 1% in 2005, under 0.5% in 2006, and in 2007, 350 refugees got temporary protection, 805 others were denied, and 863 were under review, after which most were rejected.

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Gilad Atzmon

In case you didn’t know, in Britain the Holocaust is part of the National Curriculum. Thanks to the ‘The Holocaust Educational Trust’ our children are guaranteed to learn how bad the Nazis were. This is probably much easier for our kids to acknowledge than to look into the ways in which the embarrassing legacy of the British Empire reverberates throughout almost every contemporary disastrous conflict on this planet. It is deemed far easier for our kids to learn about Anne Frank than to absorb the fact that Britain is directly responsible for the robbery of Palestine and the Palestinian ordeal. Learning about Auschwitz is also far easier than accepting the devastating reality created by Britain’s latest illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a colossal crime which has cost more than 1.5 million innocent lives so far. Thanks to The Holocaust Educational Trust we can brush history and our current crimes aside. Learning about the bad Nazis is far easier on our children than learning about the complicity of Britain in the holocaust. I guess that toughening British immigration laws to stop Jews escaping to Britain in the 1930s is not a prominent chapter in our kids’ text books. The Holocaust Educational Trust was established in 1988 says their official website. “Our aim is to educate young people from every background about the Holocaust and the important lessons to be learned for today.”

Wonderful, I think to myself. My 9 year old son told me that a Shoaguru visited his school recently to talk about the holocaust. My son raised his hand, he wondered whether the lesson of the holocaust could be applied to the Palestinian ordeal. “We are not here to talk about politics” answered the ‘trusted’ trained Shoa mentor. For my son the message was clear: The Jewish people's suffering is universal, other people's suffering is ‘politics’.

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Marc W. Herold

KANDAHAR, Aug 5, 2009 : Villagers look at the bodies of three
children after they were killed in an airstrike by foreign troops in
Arghandab district of Kandahar, south of Kabul, on Wednesday.
Four local civilians including three children were killed in the last
night bombing. (Photo: PAN/Bashir Nadim)

What needs first to be clearly understood is that is that Obama’s Pentagon has been much more deadly for Afghan civilians than was Bush in comparable months of 2008.

Buried in the public relations blather of U.S. Marine legions “liberating” Helmand and Afghan (sham) “elections” as democracy-restored (1) is an unspoken trade-off over who disproportionately dies in America’s modern wars in the Third World. Under George W. Bush, U.S politico-military elites chose to fight the Afghan war with minimal regard for so-called collateral casualties. But the soaring toll of killed Afghan civilians swayed world public opinion and stoked the Afghan resistance as grieved Afghan family members sought revenge. Enter Barack Obama. Faced with the prospect of NATO forces being withdrawn as restless NATO country citizens mobilized against the war, the Obama war machine took the decision to trade-off (mostly) lower-class U.S. “volunteer” soldiers from rural America (2) for fewer rural Afghan civilians killed. The decision had nothing to do with valuing Afghan lives and everything to do with a careful political calculation. In outlying areas such as in the Pakistan borderlands or in isolated rural areas of Afghanistan, Obama’s war machine cavalierly slaughters innocent civilians with the same impunity and at the same rate as his maligned predecessor did as drone strikes in Pakistan and U.S air strikes in Farah and Logar have demonstrated.

What has also changed is the public face of the war as one might expect from a President skilled in diction and possessed with the persuasion skills of a well-trained lawyer. On the other hand, behind the soothing words, the rationales are identical: in Phoenix recently, Obama reiterated the Bush of September 2001,

"This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. This is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.” (3)

So much for the current U.S. rationale for war. So much for “Change We Can Believe In.”

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Stephen Walt

If you would like to read a textbook example of a dust-kicking operation, please look at Robert Satloff's heated response to my recent post explaining the problems that can arise when top-level foreign policy officials have strong attachments to a foreign country. I seem to have struck a nerve.
There are only two important issues here, and Satloff ignores both of them. First, do some top U.S. officials -- and here we are obviously talking about Dennis Ross -- have a strong attachment to Israel? Second, might this situation be detrimental to the conduct of U.S. Middle East policy?

Regarding the first question, there is abundant evidence that Ross has a strong -- some might even say ardent -- attachment to Israel. These feelings are clearly on display in his memoir of the Oslo peace process, and they are confirmed by his decision to accept a top position at the Washington Institute of Near East Policy (WINEP) -- an influential organization in the Israel lobby-upon leaving government service in 2000. As Middle East historian Avi Shlaim put it in his own review of Ross's book:

Ross belongs fairly and squarely in the pro-Israel camp. His premises, position on the Middle East and policy preferences are identical to those of the Israel-first school. Indeed, it is difficult to think of an American official who is more quintessentially Israel-first in his outlook than Dennis Ross.

Furthermore, Ross served in recent years as chairman of the board of the Jewish People's Policy Planning Institute, a think-tank established by the Jewish Agency, which is headquartered in Jerusalem. Satloff does not mention this key fact, but the implications are unmistakable. Why would anyone take such a job if they did not have a deep-seated commitment to Israel?

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