Gilad Atzmon

Judge Oded Gershon’s ruling earlier this week that the state of Israel is not to blame for the death of Rachel Corrie, came as no surprise. In fact it reaffirms everything we know about the Jewish state - its politics, legal system and spirit. Israel is surely a most peculiar state - it is impervious to ethical thinking and humanist thought. Accordingly, Judge Gershon gave this week a kosher stamp to a cold-blooded murder and by so doing, he proved, once again, that Israeli criminal actions are consistent with the most vile interpretations of Old Testament and Talmudic Goy-hating.

As one would predict, Judge Gershon, restricted himself to legalism and litigation as opposed to ethical thinking - he actually blamed Corrie for not ‘behaving reasonably’. Yet, one may wonder what is this ‘reason’ or more precisely, what does an Israeli mean when he or she refers to ‘reason’.

Rachel Corrie was bulldozed to death by an Israeli military D9 Caterpillar on 16 March 2003. She was part of ISM (International Solidarity Movement), a non-violent pro-Palestinian peace activist group. Being an American youngster, Corrie mistakenly believed that Israeli soldiers were humanely driven. Being a reasonable person she must have believed that an Israeli bulldozer driver would never drive over her body. She was wrong. Corrie clearly failed to grasp that Israeli ‘reasoning’ was lethally fuelled by psychosis and fantasies of destruction.

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Finian Cunnigham

General view of the opening of the15th Foreign Ministerial Con-
ference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran. (AFP/B.Mehri)

’When the Cold War between the US and Soviet superpowers ended 20 years ago, some analysts believed that the Non-Aligned Movement would become redundant, an organization no longer with purpose. Two decades on, the NAM is rising to the occasion with more relevance than ever and is perhaps realising its true moment of merit for the cause of world peace and solidarity.’

When the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement convenes in the Iranian capital this weekend, it promises to be the greatest show on earth - a show of international solidarity and peaceful coexistence - in the face of imperialist aggression and threat of all-out world war.

The 16th summit of the NAM since the organization’s inception in 1961 could hardly come at a more crucial moment in world affairs.

Never before, it seems, have the words of Fidel Castro resonated with such urgency, when the Cuban leader declared at a previous summit in 1979 that the international movement stood for “national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries” in their “struggle against imperialism and all forms of foreign aggression”.

Fifty-one years after the NAM’s foundation in Belgrade, the world may have survived the spectre of mutually assured destruction of the Cold War. But in the unipolar world that has since emerged - dominated by the United States and its elitist allies - we are witnessing a grotesque rebirth in wars, aggression and, ironically, a renewed threat of nuclear war - the very causes of malevolence that first motivated the formation of the NAM.

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Kevin Carson

One might wonder, reading the American “national security” community’s pronouncements, if they refer to the same world we live in. Things make a little more sense when you realize that the Security State has its own language: Securityspeak. Like Newspeak, the ideologically refashioned successor to English in Orwell’s “1984,” Securityspeak is designed to obscure meaning and conceal truth, rather than convey them. As an example, take these 2010 remarks to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Ambassador Jaime Daremblum, Senior Fellow and Director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Latin American Studies.

Daremblum, after praising Senators Lugar and Dodd for their promotion of “national security and democracy” in Latin America over the years, warned of the threat of “radical populism, which has taken root in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.” Perhaps most alarmingly, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has formed an alliance with Iran, “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.” The Nicaraguan government, having “returned to its old ways,” occupies a Costa Rican river island in defiance of an OAS resolution.

Chavez’s alliance with Iran, in particular, is “the biggest threat to hemispheric stability since the Cold War.” The Chavez regime poses a “serious threat to U.S. security interests.”

Wow! Sounds like a lot of bizarro-world gibberish, right? But if we break it down and translate it a bit at a time, we can actually distill some sense from it.

First, we have to remember that in Securityspeak, “democracy” doesn’t mean what it does in English. You probably think of democracy as meaningful control by ordinary people of the decisions that affect their daily lives. The false cognate Securityspeak term “democracy” sounds the same, but can cause great confusion. It actually refers to a society in which the system of power is disguised by the existence of periodic electoral rituals in which the public chooses between a number of candidates, all selected from the same ruling class. These candidates may argue a lot, but it’s all about the 20% or so of secondary issues on which the different factions of the ruling class are divided among themselves. The 80% of primary issues, on which the ruling class agrees — issues that define the basic structure of power — never come up for debate.

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