Stephen Lendman

Established in 1999, G20 finance ministers, central bank governors, and, at times, heads of state meet semi-annually to "discuss key issues in the global economy," the initial 1999 meeting in Berlin, hosted by German and Canadian finance ministers.

G20.org calls its itself "the premier forum for our international economic development that promotes open and constructive discussion between industrial and emerging-market countries on key issues related to global economic stability," saying it "support(s) growth and development across the globe," or does it?

The reality suggests otherwise about a political power elite gathering to review past achievements, challenges, and prospects for greater exploitation of world markets, resources, and people everywhere. In other words, to support power and privilege over beneficial social change, a consideration not addressed, discussed, or thought about, except with regard to instituting policies leading to the disintegration and elimination of social democracies, replacing them with the worst elements of developing world harshness, tolerating no opposition.

What economist Michael Hudson suggested in his recent article titled, "Europe's Fiscal Dystopia: The 'New Austerity' Road to Financial Serfdom," saying:

Europe is committing fiscal suicide - and will have little trouble finding allies at this weekend's G-20 meetings," attendees "calling for cutbacks in public spending" when economic recovery requires stimulus, job creation, and public investment, not global wars, banker bailouts, or other counterproductive measures.

Hudson called the meeting "a carefully orchestrated financial war against the 'real' economy," initiated in America, Obama having "stacked his White House Deficit Commission....with the same brand of neoliberal ideologues who comprised the notorious 1982 Greenspan Commission on Social Security 'reform,' " a topic this writer addressed earlier in a "maestro of misery" article about a man who wrecked the lives of millions for the rich, now cashing in big late in life, claiming no responsibility for decades of harm, a legacy others won't let him forget.

Now it's going global, why Hudson sees Europe "dying....succumb(ing) to a financial coup d'etat rolling back the past three centuries of Enlightenment social philosophy." In lock step, America is erasing its New Deal and Great Society gains, planning mass impoverishment, human misery, and fascist harshness, the hidden G20 agenda not reported in the mainstream, sticking to its party line propaganda, the usual rubbish top officials preach to conceal their real plans from hell.

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Khalid Amayreh reporting from occupied East Jerusalem

Palestinian children play in the ruins of a house demolished by Israeli
bulldozers in Silwan in east Jerusalem. (UPI)

The recent decision by the Israeli government to banish four Palestinian lawmakers from Jerusalem to areas in the West Bank run by the Palestinian Authority (PA) is another repugnant expression of the Israeli policy of ethnic cleansing in the city, holy to Muslims, Christians and Jews.

This undeclared but clear policy aims to minimize as much as possible the city's non-Jewish population so that Israel can realize its routinely-invoked mantra of Jerusalem being "Israel's eternal and undivided capital."

The four Arab lawmakers, Muhammad Abu Tir, Ahmed Atwan, Mohammed Totah and Khalid Abu Arafeh, didn't violate any laws, committed no crimes and certainly did nothing to warrant extirpation from their natural homeland, the city of their birth.

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Gilad Atzmon

Discussion with Gilad Atzmon by Miriam Cotton

Introduction by Miriam Cotton

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

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

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

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Alisa Roth & Hugh Eakin
The New York Review of Books

An Iraqi agricultural engineer holding a photograph of his now blind sister,
Damascus, Syria, 2008. They fled Iraq after he was stopped at a roadblock in
Baghdad, tortured by a militia group, and left for dead while on his way to a
hospital to obtain medicine that might have helped save her eyesight. Both
unemployed, they live in poverty without hope of returning to Baghdad.
Gabriela Bulisova

Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East
by Deborah Amos
Public Affairs, 230 pp., $25.95

1
Among the many consequences of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the plight of millions of Iraqi refugees is seldom mentioned. The stories of such people as Burhan Abdulnour, whom we met in Sweden in 2008, have hardly been told. Abdulnour, a doctor, was director of a Baghdad hospital for chest diseases. His wife, Sahar, also a physician, was teaching physiology at Baghdad University’s medical school. They lived in al-Riyadh, a mixed neighborhood in central Baghdad, with their three children. “We had jobs, we had homes, we had cars, we had normal lives,” Abdulnour recalled. They were members of Iraq’s Christian minority. Although life under the Baathist dictatorship had been tolerable for them, they assumed that the arrival of the Americans would bring new freedoms and much-needed economic development. “We were expecting to have new devices, new equipment for the labs, X-rays, operations, everything,” Abdulnour said.

The new technology never arrived. Instead, Iraq descended into horrific violence; Christians were among those targeted by armed gangs and Islamic militias. By 2006, there were frequent attacks near their house. That spring, their twelve-year-old son was home alone when a car bomb exploded so close that it broke the windows. Then came the death threats. “My wife was threatened in her medical school—they were threatened, the dean of the college, the head of the department also. One of her colleagues was killed in his own clinic,” Abdulnour said. That August, he moved his wife and children to Jordan. He returned to his job in Baghdad, where he had only a few months left until he could claim his pension. But before he could finish, armed men came looking for him. He fled too. Today, Abdulnour and his family have settled in Sweden; their lives in Iraq are over.

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