Stephen Lendman

Borrowing the opening line from Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities:"

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...."

He referred to the French Revolution, promising "liberté, égalité, fraternité." Inspired by America's, it began in 1789, ending 1,000 years of monarchical rule, benefitting the privileged only. A republic replaced it.

That was the good news. The bad was the wrong people took power. The moderate Jacobins lost out to extremists, ushering in a "reign of terror."

Change doesn't always work out, but when intolerable conditions exist, trying for something better is key. It holds for Palestinians wanting freedom from Israel's repressive occupation. Statehood and full de jure UN membership is step one toward it, though no guarantee.

Palestinians have many global supporters, including Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Israeli crimes he opposes drew him closer, and he's not shy about saying it and more.

On September 13, Turkey's Today's Zaman headlined, "Erdoğan calls on Arab nations to unite, raise the Palestinian flag," addressing a Tuesday Arab League meeting in Cairo.

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Gilad Atzmon

[The title of this article alludes to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, first published in 1927. This important and influential philosopher was a Nazi. More recently the philosopher Simon Critchley asked: How did he get there? What can we learn from him? We might do well to keep these questions in mind when we read Gilad Atzmon's articles too.]

(A talk given at the 'Palestine, Israel, Germany- The Boundaries of Open Discussion Conference’, Freiburg 11th September 2011)

Dear ladies and gentlemen.

I will begin my talk with an unusual confession. Though I was born in Israel, in the first thirty years of my life I did not know much about the Nakba, the brutal and racially driven ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in 1948 by the newly born Israeli State. My peers and myself knew about a single massacre, namely, Deir Yassin but we were not at all familiar with the vast scale of atrocities committed by our grandparents. We believed that the Palestinians had voluntarily fled. We were told that they had run away and we did not find any reason to doubt that this had indeed been the case.

Let me tell you that in all my years in Israel, I have never heard the word Nakba spoken. This may sound pathetic, or even absurd to you -- but what about you? Shouldn’t you also ask yourself -- when was the first time you heard the word Nakba? Perhaps you can also try to recall when this word settled comfortably into your lexicon. Let me help you here -- I have carried out a little research amongst my European and American Palestinian solidarity friends, and most of them had only heard the word Nakba for the first time, just a few short years ago, whilst others admitted that they had only started to use the word themselves three or four years ago.

But isn’t that a slightly strange state of affairs? After all, the Nakba took place more than six decades ago. How is it that only recently it found its way into our symbolic order?

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Andy Worthington

Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil

On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Washington Post provided a powerful insight into the human cost of Guantánamo, and the problems created in Afghanistan through the intelligence failures that led to innocent people being seized by mistake, and even through the unforeseen knock-on effects of America’s reconstruction efforts.

In Kabul, Staff writer Ernesto Londoño met two former prisoners, Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil (discussed below) and Haji Shahzada, a village elder in Kandahar province. About 50 years of age, Shahzada, who is a father of six, was seized in a raid on his house in January 2003, with two house guests, and held at Guantánamo for over two years until his release in April 2005.

Shahzada’s story (and that of the men seized with him) was one that had struck me as particularly significant when I was researching my book The Guantánamo Files, as it was a clear demonstration of how easily US forces in Afghanistan were deceived, seizing innocent people after tip-offs from untrustworthy individuals with their own agendas. In Shazada’s case, it has not been confirmed whether the tip-off came from a rival or from members of his family seeking to seize his assets, but the entire mission was a disgrace.

One of the men seized with him, Abdullah Khan, had sold Shahzada a dog, as both men were interested in dog-fighting, but he was regarded by the soldiers involved in the raid (and, subsequently, by US interrogators) as Khairullah Khairkhwa, a senior figure in the Taliban. The problem with this scenario was not only that Khan was not Khairkhwa, but also that Khairkhwa had been in US custody since February 2002 and was held at Guantánamo (where he remains to this day).

In addition, Shahzada, a landowner who had never liked the Taliban, endured numerous aggressive interrogations in which he was obliged to repeat, over and over again, that his friend Khan was not a Taliban commander, and that he had not been supporting the Taliban. He was also particularly eloquent in warning his captors that seizing innocent people like him was a sure way of losing hearts and minds in Afghanistan.

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Adnan Al-Daini

The people of the US and Britain have become victims of the corruption of their democratic institutions that are no longer serving the interests of ordinary people. Democracy as a system of government has been subverted to serve multinational corporations, powerful lobbyists and the military-industrial complex. The corporate media, with some notable exceptions, is recruited to keep the truth from the people and to sanitize endless wars led by the US with Britain acting as its outrider. Public discussions, and the questions asked, are manipulated as if by an invisible hand to leave the ordinary person constrained into accepting solutions that entrench the interests of such groups and enhance their profit margins. These powerful entities that perch above politics are in control regardless of which party or president is in power. If this is not an abuse of democracy, I don't know what is.

John Pilger, in the New Statesman, urges the people to develop a healthy cynicism towards the media thus:

“This acute skepticism, this skill of reading between the lines, is urgently needed in supposedly free societies today. Take the reporting of state-sponsored war. The oldest cliché is that truth is the first casualty of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognized in the United States, Britain and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose power is such that, in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries, such as Iraq".

Progressives, and those on the left of politics, need to find the language that resonates with ordinary people, to open their eyes to the corruption that is diminishing their lives and those of future generations. The manipulation of public opinion by the powerful in the US and Britain is corruption. Its aim is to transfer hundreds of billions of tax dollars, from the poor and middle classes, to voracious corporations and the Military-Security-Industrial complex through endless immoral senseless carnage called "the war on terror". 

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