Stephen Lendman

Dr. Ilan Pappe

Born in Haifa, the son of German-Jewish immigrants who fled during the Nazi period, noted historian Ilan Pappe left Israel in summer 2007, telling London Guardian writer Chris Arnot he began "feeling for a while like public enemy No. 1" for his anti-Zionist views and supporting a boycott against Israeli universities, saying:

"I supported (it) because I believe that without pressure, Israel will not end the occupation....I believe that things would change only if Israel receives a strong message that as long as the occupation continues it would not be a legitimate member of the international community, and that until then its academics, doctors and authors would not be welcome. A similar boycott was imposed on South Africa. It took 21 years, but it eventually led to the end of Apartheid."

Now chairing Britain's Exeter University's history department, he explained by the time he left, the Knesset publicly condemned him and Israel's education minister, Yuli Tamir, wanted him sacked.

In addition, death threats came by mail, email and phone, and his picture once appeared in Israel's "biggest-selling newspaper at the centre of a target," the caption reading: "I'm not telling you to kill this person, but I shouldn't be surprised if someone did."

An environment this hostile got him to leave, the same one today afflicting other Israeli academics, opposing policies they don't accept, nor should anyone respecting the rule of law, democratic freedoms, and equal justice, endangered species in Israel for Jews - non-existent for Occupied Palestinians and Israeli Arab citizens.

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Ian Williams
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

In the West Bank village of Bil’in, where nonviolent protests against Israel’s
apartheid wall are held every Friday, a foreign journalist wearing a gas mask
throws an Israeli soldier to the ground near a model of a Gaza Freedom Flotilla
ship, June 4, 2010. (AFP photo/Abbas Momani)

THE FIRST week in May saw a media storm in Israel when the Hebrew tabloid Yediot Ahronot broke the news that, while he was an appeals court judge in apartheid South Africa, Richard Goldstone was in some way linked to rejecting the appeals of 28 death sentences.

As one of Napoleon's generals said of the emperor's kidnapping and execution of a member of the royal family, "It's worse than a crime—it's a blunder." Even more than the 2008-9 Operation Cast Lead, Israel's attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was a self-inflicted diplomatic disaster, which it seems to be determined to exacerbate. One of the problems for the Israeli worldview is that it tends to use Capitol Hill as a mirror: if the suckers there will swallow the big lies, the reasoning goes, so will everyone else.

And it is true, the suckers did some impressive swallowing. To see so-called progressives like New York City Reps. Charles Rangel and Jerry Nadler standing in Times Square calling upon the State Department to deny entry to witnesses of the attack on the flotilla was almost as nauseating as the cold-blooded murder of the nine crew members. As Patrick Buchanan teasingly pointed out (see p. 14), it is as if they supported the gunning down of the Freedom Marchers in the South, or the summary execution of Rosa Parks for sitting in the wrong part of the bus.

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Vilani Peiris
WSWS

After a two-day session of the UN General Assembly ended yesterday, the amount of international aid pledged for Pakistani flood victims still fell well short of the $US460 million in emergency aid that the UN has appealed for. For all of the cynical displays of concern for the fate of the Pakistani people at the UN meeting, the issue of aid was dominated by the narrow self-interest of the major powers.

Addressing the UN on Thursday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the US would contribute an additional $60 million in aid to Pakistan, bringing its total to more than $150 million, of which about $92 million would go to the UN. In calling for other countries to do more, she declared: “I realise that many countries, including my own, are facing tough economic conditions and very tight budgets … But we must answer the Pakistani request for help.”

Washington’s aid effort, however, is not motivated by concern for the estimated 20 million Pakistanis impacted by the floods. Rather the Obama administration is driven by the need to prop up the Pakistani government of President Asif Ali Zardari, on which the US relies to wage a proxy war on Islamist insurgents in areas bordering Afghanistan. US officials have warned that organisations sympathetic to the Islamist fighters might gain in influence as a result of government and international inaction on the floods.

As for “very tight budgets”, the Obama administration’s offer of aid is a pittance compared to the trillions of dollars spent to fund the bailouts of US banks, financial institutions and corporations during 2008-09. In fact, the White House is implementing austerity measures against working people in the US and provides limited aid to Pakistani flood victims precisely because it has taken massive corporate bad debts onto the government’s books. At the same time, Obama can find tens of billions of dollars to escalate the US-led war in Afghanistan.

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John Pilger
johnpilger.com

On 26 July, Wikileaks released thousands of secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan. Cover-ups, a secret assassination unit and the killing of civilians are documented. In file after file, the brutalities echo the colonial past. From Malaya and Vietnam to Bloody Sunday and Basra, little has changed. The difference is that today there is an extraordinary way of knowing how faraway societies are routinely ravaged in our name. Wikileaks has acquired records of six years of civilian killing for both Afghanistan and Iraq, of which those published in the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times are a fraction.

There is understandably hysteria on high, with demands that the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is “hunted down” and “rendered”. In Washington, I interviewed a senior Defence Department official and asked, “Can you give a guarantee that the editors of Wikileaks and the editor in chief, who is not American, will not be subjected to the kind of manhunt that we read about in the media?” He replied, “It’s not my position to give guarantees on anything”. He referred me to the “ongoing criminal investigation” of a US soldier, Bradley Manning, an alleged whistleblower. In a nation that claims its constitution protects truth-tellers, the Obama administration is pursuing and prosecuting more whistleblowers than any of its modern predecessors. A Pentagon document states bluntly that US intelligence intends to “fatally marginalise” Wikileaks. The preferred tactic is smear, with corporate journalists ever ready to play their part.

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Jonathan Cook
Antiwar

"[The] documents suggested that heavily armed Jewish forces had expelled and dispossessed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians before the Jewish state had even been declared and a single Arab soldier had entered Palestine [...] One document in particular, Plan Dalet, demonstrated the army’s intention to expel the Palestinians from their homeland. Its existence explains the ethnic cleansing of more than 80 percent of Palestinians in the war, followed by a military campaign to destroy hundreds of villages to ensure the refugees never returned."

History may be written by the victors, as Winston Churchill is said to have observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten a nation every bit as much as the unearthing of mass graves.

That danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to extend by an additional 20 years the country’s 50-year rule for the release of sensitive documents.

The new 70-year disclosure rule is the government’s response to Israeli journalists who have been seeking through Israel’s courts to gain access to documents that should already be declassified, especially those concerning the 1948 war, which established Israel, and the 1956 Suez crisis.

The state’s chief archivist says many of the documents "are not fit for public viewing" and raise doubts about Israel’s "adherence to international law," while the government warns that greater transparency will "damage foreign relations."

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Wayne Madsen
Online Journal

Dolphin-class Israeli submarine, capable of launching cruise missiles car-
rying nuclear warheads. (Israel stations nuclear missile subs off Iran.)

Chinese and Japanese intelligence agencies, which closely monitor events in the Persian Gulf due to the dependence of both countries on oil from the region, report that Israeli Navy commandos have recently been active in creating maritime incidents in the Gulf that could be blamed on Iran.

The five incidents that have Israel under the scrutiny of the intelligence services of China and Japan, the world’s second and third largest economic powers, respectively, are the “robbery” attacks on four merchant ships off Basra, Iraq on August 8 and the July 28 explosion on the Japanese supertanker MV M. Star in the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Last month, the Israeli Navy deployed older U-209 and newer U-212 Dolphin-class diesel submarines, obtained from Germany, to the Persian Gulf. The submarines are known to have on board a number of Shayetet 13 naval commando squadrons trained to carry out sabotage against sea and shore targets.

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

© Frank Strategies LLC

"No one in the military or foreign policy establishment believes that the December 2011 deadline will see a withdrawal of all US forces. [...] US State Department is implementing plans to field its own army of up to 7,000 civilian “security contractors.” These mercenaries are to man colonial-style fortress bases and organize “quick reaction forces,” using military gear that the State Department has asked the Pentagon to leave in place."

The White House and the Pentagon, assisted by a servile media, have hyped Thursday’s exit of a single Stryker brigade from Iraq as the end of the “combat mission” in that country, echoing the ill-fated claim made by George W. Bush seven years ago.

Obama is more skillful in packaging false propaganda than Bush, and no doubt has learned something from the glaring mistakes of his predecessor. Bush landed on the deck of the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003 to proclaim—under a banner reading “Mission Accomplished”—that “major combat operations” in Iraq were over. A captive audience of naval enlisted personnel was assembled on deck as cheering extras.

Obama wisely did not fly to Kuwait to deliver a similar address from atop an armored vehicle. He merely issued a statement from the White House, while leaving the heavy lifting to the television networks and their “embedded” reporters, who accompanied the brigade across the border into Kuwait and repeated the propaganda line fashioned by the administration and the military brass.

When Bush delivered his speech, a total of 139 US troops had been killed. Nearly 4,300 more have died since. Iraq, mauled by the “shock and awe” bombardment and invasion of March 2003, was turned into a slaughterhouse, with estimates of over a million lives lost as a result of the US war, many more wounded, some four million people turned into homeless refugees and thousands imprisoned and tortured in US-run detention centers like Abu Ghraib.

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Thomas Geoghegan
In These Times

Demonstration in Ireland. Photo: ICTU

How Europe builds better products for better lives.

Americans may believe the United States is set up for the middle class, and Europe is set up for the bourgeois. Or let’s put it this way: America is a great place to buy kitty litter at Wal-Mart and relatively cheap gas. But it is not designed for me, a professional without a lot of money. That’s who Europe is for: people like me.

OK, as a union-side lawyer, Europe’s really set up for people like my clients, or those who used to be my clients before the unions in America collapsed. Let’s put my own self-interest aside: Where would my clients, who are not poor, who make $30,000 to $50,000 a year and yet keep coming up short, maybe by $100, $200 a month, really be better off?

That’s easy: Europe. I can answer that as their lawyer, the way a doctor could answer about their health. The bottom two-thirds of America would be better off in Europe. I mean the people who have not had a raise (an hourly raise in real dollars) in maybe 40 years, and who do not even have a 401(k), nothing but Social Security, and either have no health insurance or pay deductibles of $2,000 or more. Sure, they’d be better off in Europe. When unemployed, they’d certainly be better off in Europe. Over there, even single men can get on welfare. And in much of Europe, contrary to what we hear, unemployment is much lower than over here.

One of the ways Europe is set up for the bourgeois — including, perhaps, many readers of this magazine — is the very fact that it is also set up for people who make $50,000 or below. Since it’s set up for these people too, the bourgeois — me, maybe you — get the political cover to have it set up for them. What the people-in-the-unions get, people-from-the-good-schools also get. (And indeed, in Europe people-in-the-unions are often people-from-the-good-schools.) They get the six weeks of vacation each year and the pension like a golden parachute. And the higher up we are in terms of income, the more valuable these things are. In America, they don’t tell us: Social democracy, or socialism, or whatever Europe has, pays off biggest for people in the upper middle class, those just below the top.

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Stephen Lendman

The WE!

Imagine the following:

You're ruthlessly oppressed in an occupied country under a system of institutionalized racism, affording rights solely to Jews. You have no recognized nation, no right of citizenship, no democratic freedoms or civil liberties, including no power over your daily life.

You live in constant fear, collectively punished, politically denied, and economically strangled in a continuing cycle of violence. Military orders deny free expression and movement, enclose population centers, close borders, and impose curfews, checkpoints, roadblocks, separation walls, electric fences, dispossessions, land seizures, and domination over all aspects of life under draconian military orders like the following:

● No. 92 giving Israel control of all West Bank and Gaza water;

● No. 158 stipulating that Palestinians can't construct water installations without (nearly impossible to get) permit permission and those built will be confiscated or demolished;

● No. 1015 requiring Palestinians get permission to plant trees on their own land;

● No 128 authorizing the IDF to take over any Palestinian business not open during regular business hours;

● No. 107 prohibiting Arabic grammar, Crusades history and Arab nationalist publications;

● No. 101 banning gatherings of more than 10 people without advance notice with names of participants;

● Nos. 811 and 847 letting Jews buy land from Palestinian owners with or without their consent;

● No. 998 requiring Palestinians get permission to withdraw funds from their bank accounts;

● No. 818 authorizing how Palestinians can plant decorative flowers;

●- No. 329 preventing the right of return; and

● Nos. 1649 and 1650 turning all West Bank residents (including native born ones) potentially into "infiltrators," making them vulnerable to deportation, fines or imprisonment without IDF-issued permits.

Overall, your land is occupied, communities isolated, homes invaded, friends and relatives arrested, neighborhoods attacked, homes bulldozed, land stolen, fields uprooted and burned, businesses closed, and livelihoods denied. You're impoverished, unemployed, starved, tortured, murdered, punitively taxed and fined, and demonized for being Muslims in a Jewish state. You endure it daily on your own unaided, yet you go on, hoping others later will do better.

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Jerrold Kessel & Pierre Klochendler
IPS

A family looks on as Israeli forces raze al-Araqib village, 27 July 2010.
(ActiveStills)

"We are not invaders, nor squatters," said Sheikh Sayyah. "It is the state that has invaded us."

JERUSALEM, Aug 18, 2010 (IPS) - On the eve of the start of Ramadan last week, Israeli police demolished the Bedouin village of al-Araqib in the Negev desert. It was the third time within two weeks that the village had been razed.

Unfazed, the Bedouin villagers immediately began rebuilding.

"We have already put back up some 20 of our huts, and we're putting up more every day -- despite the fast," village leader Sheikh Sayyah Abu Drim told IPS when reached by telephone a week after the last police action.

"We have nowhere else to go," said the Sheikh. More than 40 families live in al-Araqib.

At dawn last Tuesday, Israel Land Administration (ILA) officials, accompanied by a large police detail including over 100 border guards and mounted police, began their operation with the support of two bulldozers.

The police removed water tanks and the remains of several dozen makeshift structures that had been erected since the previous demolition only last week. Dozens of families including infants and elderly people were forcibly removed. In a non-violent protest, a score of Israeli Jewish activists who had slept in the village in solidarity tried unsuccessfully to stay the police action.

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Jonny Abo & Abdul Jalil Mustafa

Surviving 17 gunshot wounds was a feat in itself, but enduring life as a refugee was a second battle for al- Mortaji Abdel-Moneim al-Kaabi, a displaced Iraqi in Syria.

'I still suffer from a lot of diseases, but thank God I'm alive, although I feel like I am psychologically bleeding because I cannot forget the painful memories,' said al-Kaabi, an Arabic language teacher.

The violent incident in 2007 was never solved by police. It came after the slaying of his brother the previous year, prompting al- Kaabi and his wife and flee their homeland - like so many other refugees - for a long journey and clandestine entry into Syria.

The trip saw the two go far south to Basra , along the Gulf, then north-west to Amman in Jordan and further north to Damascus, where they found shelter in one of the teeming refugee neighbourhoods of the Syrian capital.

Ill with breast cancer, his wife requires treatments that cost about 24,000 dollars, of which the United Nations has agreed to pay about 40 per cent. The rest al-Kaabi must conjure from thin air, as his status as a refugee does not grant him the right to work.

'We are still advocating for refugees to have access to employment and livelihood,' said Andrew Harper of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) programme in Iraq.

Millions of Iraqis have been uprooted in seven years of war as they fled sectarian violence and an insurgency that at its 2006-07 height claimed 3,000 civilian lives a month. Leaving behind property, homes, businesses and most of their personal belongings, many also suffered the loss of family members.

An estimated 2.2 million Iraqis have been displaced within their native land, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. Hundreds of thousands are believed to have to fled to Syria, a similar number to Jordan, and 40,000-50,000 to Lebanon. The UNHCR website says there are 1.8 million Iraqi refugees in the Mideast, but UN officials have recently down-pedalled on that number.

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Franklin Lamb
Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, Beirut

SHATTERED LIVES: Families live among ruins, with little
hope of ever leaving. Photograph for Time: Kate Brooks.
From: Palestinians in Lebanon: A Forgotten People

Part XI of a series on securing civil rights for Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon

“Palestinian guests in Lebanon are working with total freedom. First of all we do not refer to them as “refugees”. They are our brothers who are suffering and in a very difficult situation that they did not cause and they have lost their country. They sought our help in Lebanon as brothers. You Americans really need to understand that in our Arab, Muslim, and Christian culture, you help your brother. You share with him your loaf of bread. You split it in half and give half to your brother. So out of this sacred tradition, out of the long history that binds us with our Palestinian brothers we host them in Lebanon temporarily until they can go back to their country. But while they are here, of course Lebanon is living through a difficult situation ourselves but our Palestinian brothers are enjoying everything.”

(Lebanese Member of Parliament on August 4th explaining why Parliament must not “precipitously rush into the unchartered waters of civil rights for Palestinian Refugees”.)

At 3:02 p.m. on 8/17/10 Lebanon’s Parliament began to deliberate on granting basic civil rights to its Palestinian refugees and within four minutes agreed to alter Article 50 Lebanon’s 1964 Labor Law to theoretically make it easier for Palestinian refugees to obtain a work permit and a job.

There was no discussion of other draft bills to grant Palestinian refugees elementary civil rights, and fifteen minutes later, by 3:17 p.m. Parliament had agreed on the next bill involving excavating for oil, which may bring millions to some well placed members. Many MP’s hadn’t studied either bill.

Thus did the bell ring on Round One of the fight in Lebanon for elementary civil rights for Palestinians refugees.

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Jeff Halper

Shocking footage of the abuse of Palestinian residents, by settlers
and Israeli soldiers, has been exposed by these cameras. (Intifada
-Voice of Palestine)

On the day before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, at 2:30 in the morning, workers sent by the Israeli authorities, protected by dozens of police, destroyed the tombstones in the last portion of the Mamilla cemetery, an historic Muslim burial ground with graves going back to the 7th Century, hitherto left untouched. The government of Israel has always been fully cognizant of the sanctity and historic significance of the site. Already in 1948, when control of the cemetery reverted to Israel, the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry recognized Mamilla “to be one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin’s] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars. Israel will always know to protect and respect this site.” For all that, and despite (proper) Israeli outrage when Jewish cemeteries are desecrated anywhere in the world, the dismantlement of the Mamilla cemetery has been systematic. In the 1960s “Independence Park” was built over a portion of it; subsequently an urban road was built through it, major electrical cables were laid over graves and a parking lot constructed over yet another piece. Now some 1,500 Muslim graves have been cleared in several nighttime operations to make way for…..a $100 million Museum of Tolerance and Human Dignity, a project of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. (Ironically, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Wiesenthal Center’s Director, appeared on Fox News to express his opposition to the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, because the site of the 9/11 attack “is a cemetery.”)

The month-long period between Netanyahu’s July 6th visit to Washington and the start of Ramadan has provided Israel with a window to “clear the table” after a frustrating hiatus on home demolitions imposed by the “old,” mildly critical Obama Administration – although there is no guarantee that Israel will not demolish during Ramadan, especially if it wants to exploit the period until the November elections, knowing that until then Obama will not overtly oppose anything it does in the Occupied Territories. In fact, the process of demolishing Palestinian homes never ceased. On June 6th, for example, a year after the demolition of more than 65 structures and the forced displacement of more than 120 people, including 66 children, nine families of Khirbet Ar Ras Ahmar in the Jordan Valley, totaling 70 people, received a new round of “evacuation orders.” A week later the Israeli High Court ordered the Civil Administration to “step up enforcement against illegal Palestinian structures” in Area C, the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control.

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Stephen Lendman

The Germans came, the police, and
they started banging houses: "Raus,
raus, raus, Juden raus..."

Located at the European University Institute (EUI), the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies (RSCAS) conducts "inter-disciplinary and comparative research (on) major issues facing the process of integration and European society."

Prepared by Asem Khalil, its new report is titled, "Impact of Israeli Military Order No. 1650 on Palestinians' Rights to Legally Reside in Their Own Country," accessed through THIS link.

Taking effect in April 2010, it defined all West Bank residents as "infiltrators" (including native born ones), requiring they get IDF-issued permits.

Order No. 1650 (Prevention of Infiltration) and Order No. 1949 (Security Provisions) were issued in October 2009 as amendments to a 1969 Order No. 329 (Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration), declaring "infiltrator" state enemies from Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon would be imprisoned and/or deported.

Potentially, all West Bank and East Jerusalemites risk dispossession and expulsion, part of Israel's longstanding policy to seize all parts of Palestine it wishes, removing indigenous Arabs from their homeland illegally, controlling those remaining under an oppressive apartheid system critics call worse than South Africa's with good reason.

It's a sophisticated form of social, economic, political and racial discrimination, strangulation, and genocide, incorporating the worst elements of colonialism and apartheid as well as repressive dispossession, displacement, and state terrorism to separate Palestinians from their land and heritage, deny them their civil and human rights, and gradually remove or eliminate them altogether.

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Bill Van Auken

Right-wing loonies & mob hysteria against a proposed Islamic cultural
center in lower Manhattan. They want to keep the 9/11 wound open in
order to use it as a platform for authoritarian aggression. They are bigots,
xenophobes and outright racists. Thermite was found at ground zero...

[With his speech and speedy backtracking,] “Obama managed to collect all the political damage for taking an unpopular stand without gaining credit for political courage.” ~ Michael Gerson

With the US mid-term elections less than three months away, the issue that has become the focus of this campaign season is a telling indicator of the intensely reactionary character of official politics in America and of both big business parties.

Employing unbridled hypocrisy and cynicism, right-wing forces centered in the Republican Party, but aided and abetted by leading Democrats, have attempted to whip up mob hysteria against a proposed Islamic cultural center that has been approved by local authorities for construction in lower Manhattan.

The center, the Cordoba House, is to include a swimming pool, a gym, an arts center and a memorial to the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. While its supporters have stressed its inter-faith character, it has been almost universally dubbed as the “Ground Zero mosque.”

Semi-fascist elements have denounced the proposed center—to be built two and a half blocks from where New York City’s World Trade Center once stood—as a desecration of the “sacred ground” where over 2,700 people were killed on 9/11. Former House Speaker and probable Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has compared the backers of the project to Nazis protesting outside the Holocaust museum.

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