Michele Bachmann told supporters in Iowa on Wednesday of her lofty plans for American diplomacy, claiming that a Bachmann presidency would mean no U.S. embassy in Iran.
Considering the recent hostility in the Iranian capital of Tehran against the British embassy, the comment might not seem particularly out of place -- if not for the fact that the U.S. hasn't actually had a functioning embassy in Iran since 1980.
Decades of terrorist attacks may have cemented the Palestinian cause in the world's consciousness, but they never delivered the Palestinians' national dream -- a state of their own. More than anyone else, politician and human rights activist Mustafa Barghouti has pioneered an alternative path that emphasizes nonviolent tactics to delegitimize the Israeli occupation and demands that the Palestinian national movement live up to its ideals. He was the only political figure to contest Yasir Arafat's anointed successor, Mahmoud Abbas, in the 2005 Palestinian presidential election, and he won a seat in the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006 on a platform that promoted an alternative to Arafat's Fatah and the militant group Hamas.
Barghouti has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Palestinians' bid this year for member-state status at the United Nations, framing the move as part of the "diplomatic resistance" to Israel. At the same time, he has pressed the Palestinian Authority to revitalize its often-ignored democratic institutions and provide a transparent accounting of its budget, while urging Fatah and Hamas to set aside their deep differences. "Democracy was the first victim of the split," he told Foreign Policy. "That's wrong for internal life in Palestine, it's wrong for the future of our kids, and it's wrong for peace."
Joseph Dana
The noted liberal Zionist writer, Bernard Avishai, has a longish piece on the Palestinian right of return in this month’s edition of Harper’s Magazine (no online version yet). Before I discuss its content, I believe it crucial to note one general aspect of this piece. We must ask ourselves why an openly Zionist thinker who happens to be a Canadian immigrant is writing about Palestinian right of return without a Palestinian counter article. His penmanship of the article speaks volumes about the ability of the press in the United States on the ability to allow Palestinians to speak for themselves. His voice might be an important one, but the absence of a Palestinian view on an issue of such weight such as the right of return should be taken as a sign of how far the American press must go in changing the way it covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Iceland has become the first western European country to recognise Palestine as an independent state.
The Icelandic parliament said in a statement on its website that it had passed a motion with 38 of 63 votes in favour of a resolution to recognse Palestine "as an independent and sovereign state" based on borders predating the six-day war of 1967.
From onions, to milk, to shoe polish bombs, protesters in Cairo are coming up with new ways to counter the regime’s new weapons of stifling dissent.
The Egyptian revolution carries on with an unparalleled creative spirit. A rebellious and vibrant imagination is pushing up against a stultifying and authoritarian military regime.
The Egyptian youth are honing their resistance skills daily in the face of the oppressive and violent machinery of power.
The young revolutionaries waged the battle of Mohamed Mahmoud Street, home of the ministry of interior, with inventiveness and spontaneous innovation.
While the state had previously unleashed horses and camels to crush protesters, it is using a new lethal poisonous gas this time around.
In the days following the January 25 uprising, uninitiated protesters discovered that it is possible to counter the effect of tear gas by washing one’s face with soda, vinegar, and onions.
In recent clashes, however, these old methods did not work, because the riot police resorted to using an internationally banned type of gas against the protesters. It was necessary therefore to come up with new and unconventional solutions.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society struggling to uphold Palestinian rights, recently discovered that the Israeli Ministry of Education was claiming to be organizing a youth conference in Jerusalem “in cooperation with UNESCO (United Nations),” as the Ministry’s website claims. Specifically, the conference is to be held in an Israeli venue in occupied East Jerusalem, in clear violation of international law.
Since the involvement of any UN agency with the Israeli government in organizing projects in occupied Jerusalem would amount to complicity in Israel’s violations of international law and implicit, de facto recognition of Israel’s claim of sovereignty over the occupied city, the BNC brought this urgent matter to the attention of the PLO and the Fatah International Relations Commission, both of which acted immediately to obtain clarifications from the UN.
After intense communication with ranking UN officials, UNESCO issued the following public statement and posted it on the Organization’s website, distancing itself from the Israeli conference — effectively exposing Israel’s fabrication of such cooperation with UNESCO – and reiterating UNESCO’s long-standing position which regards East Jerusalem as an inseparable part of the occupied Palestinian territory.
Readers of Dawn newspaper, commenting online, were in no doubt how the Pakistani government should respond to Saturday's killing by US forces of 24 soldiers on Pakistan's side of the Afghan border. "Pakistan should acquire anti-aircraft defence systems ... so that in the future Pakistan can give Nato forces a proper reply," said Ali. "This is outrageous," wrote another reader, Zia Khan. "We should cut off all ties with the US. As long as we are getting US [anti-terror] aid ... Pakistan will be attacked in such a manner. They can never be trusted." Another, Obaid, turned his wrath on the Pakistani authorities: "Our self-centred establishment with their fickle loyalties can't even demand that the killers be tried in a neutral court ... What is the ability of our armed forces? If they can't repel or intercept an attack of this intensity, then what's their purpose? This is not a time to get mad. It's time to get even."
Turkish Minister of Foreign Affair, Ahmed Dawud Aghlo, reconfirmed that relations between Turkey and Israel won't be normalized till the latter issues an official statement, apologizing for Israeli attacks on the Turkish “Freedom Flotilla” in bound to Gaza and lifting Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip, the Maan News Agency reported Friday afternoon.His statement came after talks held with his Italian Counterpart, Giulio de Tertisa Santagata, on Friday in the Turkish Capital of Istanbul.
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| The UN could establish a Nuclear-Free Middle East Zone with the help of the US that is busy securing oil supplies [EPA] |
The attack on a military checkpoint in northwest Pakistan also wounded at least a dozen soldiers.
A spokesman for the NATO-led alliance in Afghanistan confirmed on Saturday that it was "highly likely" the alliance's aircraft killed Pakistani soldiers.
The “reintegration” programme, which has the full support of Nato, is intended to keep them from attacking troops from the International Stabilisation and Assistance Force (ISAF).
Those who have attacked and killed British forces are also effectively given an amnesty, which means they will never be put on trial.
The amnesty extends to all Taliban fighters, including those who have taken part in atrocities, such as murdering children, beheadings and hanging women.
Israel plans to uproot Bedouin communities from 60% of the West Bank and forcibly transfer them into controlled enclosures. If this is allowed to happen, 27,000 people will be evicted from their homes and land - they will be forced to live in ghettos, with no land on which to make a living. This cruel and shocking new development represents the acceleration of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Bedouin communities from the West Bank, since it illegally colonised the area in 1967, and they aim to complete this plan within the next 3 – 6 years.
The first phase of this racist, apartheid strategy is scheduled for January 2012, with the forced removal of Bedouin communities from the land around East Jerusalem into a camp/ghetto next to a landfill site by Abu Dis in East Jerusalem. Work on constructing the ghetto has already started.
The second phase will be the expulsion of Bedouin communities from the Jordan Valley into a separate ghetto – the Israeli Civil Military Administration has not yet openly declared where this will be, but it is thought that an area close to Jericho is being considered.
"Amos Schocken, owner of Haaretz, writes in Israel (not here, no way) that the settler movement Gush Emunim is building an "apartheid regime" in Israel and Palestine and that it is supported by the "Jewish lobby" in the U.S. That lobby is "totally addicted" to settler policies; and this explains Obama's collapse.
In trying to understand Obama's reversal of his declaration in Cairo in 2009, Schocken does what Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations swears never to do; he ascribes political influence on the Democratic Party to American Jews. Mead would classify Schocken as an anti-semite for saying this."
Private Palestinian investment in Israel, as of 2010, amounted to $2.5 billion in a conservative estimate, and according to a more optimistic estimate this investment possibly even amounts to $5.8 billion. For purposes of comparison, private Palestinian investment within the West Bank, as of 2011, was only $1.5 billion.
This is the surprising conclusion reached by Issa Smeirat, who for his master's thesis in economics has done the first research of its kind into this phenomenon, its extent and its implications - issues that until now have not been discussed in the professional literature.
Read more-Haaretz
NOAM CHOMSKY: My general feeling is that this kind of question can't be answered in a meaningful way when it's abstracted from the context of particular historical concrete circumstances. Any rational person would agree that violence is not legitimate unless the consequences of such action are to eliminate a still greater evil. Now there are people of course who go much further and say that one must oppose violence in general, quite apart from any possible consequences. I think that such a person is asserting one of two things. Either he's saying that the resort to violence is illegitimate even if the consequences are to eliminate a greater evil; or he's saying that under no conceivable circumstances will the consequences ever be such as to eliminate a greater evil. The second of these is a factual assumption and it's almost certainly false. One can easily imagine and find circumstances in which violence does eliminate a greater evil. As to the first, it's a kind of irreducible moral judgment that one should not resort to violence even if it would eliminate a greater evil. And these judgments are very hard to argue. I can only say that to me it seems like an immoral judgment.
Al Masry alYoum
On a hospital floor where three people risk losing sight in at least one eye, the injured and their loved ones projected a positive attitude as they celebrated the return of protesters in large numbers to Tahrir Square.
“How is Tahrir?” asked Ahmed Abdel Fattah, an Al-Masry Al-Youm video journalist who was struck in the eye by a rubber bullet as he awoke from anesthesia. He immediately struggled to open his intact eye to check Twitter for news from the square.
Abdel Fattah was shot Saturday while filming on the front lines of the battle on Mohamed Mahmoud Street.
He had an initial surgery to close the rip in the eye and is expecting to undergo another surgery later this week to remove the bullet that is still lodged in it.
“I am a videographer, my eye is my most precious asset,” Abdel Fattah said. “But we will never stop. This is our job, it’s what we know how to do best and we’ll keep doing it.”
(Thanks Abu Zuhair)
The Swedish government yesterday announced that it had thrown its support behind a new book, Colonialism and Apartheid - the Israeli occupation in Palestine, by providing funds for the project as a humanitarian aid project. A joint Swedish-Palestinian collaboration, the book accuses Israel of practising a system of apartheid and calls for an international boycott - as South Africa was isolated before the apartheid regime collapsed.
Egypt's revolution entered a dangerous phase of confrontation on Sunday after the army attacked thousands of anti-junta protesters in Cairo, putting the viability of imminent parliamentary elections in serious doubt.
Several political parties and individual candidates said they were suspending their electoral campaigns after a weekend in which at least five people were killed and almost a thousand injured in some of the fiercest clashes seen since the heady days of February when Hosni Mubarak was ejected from power.
It seems the Israel lobby has not always been held in such high esteem within the White House. The AP reports on newly released documents regarding lobbying in the early 1970s on the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union:
A White House official, Leonard Garment, saying he was flooded with letters and phone calls with Jewish appeals, asked Kissinger for help and guidance. The late Alexander Haig, Nixon's national security adviser, sent him Mrs. Meir's letter and said "We will have to consider the best means by which to proceed."
According to transcripts released by the State Department, Kissinger, who was Haig's deputy, said to Garment: "Is there a more self-serving group of people than the Jewish community?" Kissinger is Jewish.
Garment, also Jewish, replied: "None in the world."
As elections near in Egypt, the American-Gulf-Israeli counter-revolution gathers strength across the Mediterranean and the Middle East: overwhelming Libya, threatening to beat back the Bahraini upsurge, and vying for power in Egypt, as right wing parties prepare to take power in the face of the irrepressible and amazingly effervescent spirit of struggle that keeps erupting between the cracks in the Egyptian “transition” – a transition increasingly lubricated with the blood of the Egyptian people.
There has been a lot of it over the last month. On 9 October 2011 the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) murdered 28 civilians, killing Copts and Muslims alike in a state-orchestrated massacre intended to “manufacture a discourse of conspiracy and sectarianism,” and split the Egyptian working-class along religious lines. The SCAF is learning well from its backers, the American and Israeli governments that are attempting to shatter the region into a jagged mosaic of statelets over which Israel and the Saudi-centered Gulf Cooperation Council can rule unhindered, the Eastern and Western islands of “stability” in a chaos they themselves brought into being.
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| Arafats Road to Olslo began in the 1970s with the large scale funding pouring in from the Gulf countries [EPA] |
Education event schedule at Occupy Wall Street.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the influential pro-Israel lobby group headed by Abraham Foxman, is in a panic about support for Palestinian rights at Occupy Wall Street protests across the United States.
Seeking to delegitimize US popular solidarity with Palestinians suffering under US-financed Israeli occupation, apartheid and brutal violence, the ADL charged in a release on its website that, “Anti-Israel Groups Attempt to Co-Opt Occupy Wall Street Message.”
As the history of past movements all make clear, nothing terrifies those running America more than the danger of true democracy breaking out. As we see in Chicago, Portland, Oakland, and right now in New York City, the immediate response to even a modest spark of democratically organised civil disobedience is a panicked combination of concessions and brutality. Our rulers, anyway, seem to labor under a lingering fear that if any significant number of Americans do find out what anarchism really is, they may well decide that rulers of any sort are unnecessary.
Read more- The Guardian
Bedouin in the occupied West Bank and in Israel's Negev desert say they fear for their future as new reports circulate that the Israeli authorities plan to relocate them. International aid and Bedouin groups say tens of thousands of people could ultimately be affected.
Bedouin to the east of Jerusalem expect attempts will soon be made to move them against their will. They live in an area that is controlled by Israel's Civil Administration, part of the Defence Ministry that governs the West Bank.
The above image is part of a protest Jewish Voice for Peace is planning tomorrow in solidarity with the Palestinian Freedom Rides. The artist, Ethan Heitner, explains in a post on the Just Seeds Artists Cooperative website how the images fit into the protest:
Twenty-one high-profile Hollywood actors, producers and film and television industry leaders are taking part in a delegation to Israel organized by The Creative Coalition (TCC), a New York-based arts and education non-profit, in conjunction with the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), which is affiliated with AIPAC, the US’ most powerful pro-Israel lobby group.
In a press release dated 13 November, TCC announced that the delegates will travel “through Israel to meet with Israeli and Palestinian policy leaders, members of the arts, culture and business communities, and representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs).”
Craig Murray – Taking on the Zionist lobby head-on is well nigh impossible.
I have written a stunning piece on Werritty, Israel and a neo-con plot to attack Iran. It contains information not published anywhere, even here. I have circulated it to several national newspapers, for each of which I have written many times. I have never had a piece refused before.
Several national papers have checked out my story factually and nobody has found a single hole in it. But nobody will publish it. I reproduce below every email I have received from any of these papers in reply. They show what a hot potato a serious anti-Zionist is – and I strongly suspect that the repeated inability of editors to make decisions which emerges from these emails shows they need on this subject to consult their proprietors.
Sales of Marx's Capital are reportedly soaring as the world realises that this was where he prophesied how capitalism will destroy itself. So it's time for a Capital primer, time to talk fetishism (yay!) of commodities (d'oh!).
Tom Engelhardt ( TomDispatch )
"Bush’s American Dream was a kind of apotheosis of this country’s global power as well as its crowning catastrophe, thanks to a crew of mad visionaries who mistook military might for global strength and acted accordingly. What they and their neocon allies had was the magic formula for turning the slow landing of a declining but still immensely powerful imperial state into a self-inflicted rout, even if who the victors are is less than clear.
Despite our panoply of bases around the world, despite an arsenal of weaponry beyond anything ever seen (and with more on its way), despite a national security budget the size of the Ritz, it’s not too early to start etching something appropriately sepulchral onto the gravestone that will someday stand over the pretensions of the leaders of this country when they thought that they might truly rule the world."
Richard Goldstone on Israel and apartheid
I write as an Israeli Jew who was brought up and molded at the very center of secular, Zionist Israel. My parents, Reuven and Shulamit Aloni, exemplify everything that is good and just about Israel for humanistic Jews like Judge Richard Goldstone, the noted South African jurist, who in a recent New York Times Op-Ed, denied the practice of apartheid in Israel.
My mother founded the Civil Rights Movement in Israel, was a member of the Knesset and a Minister of Education in Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s cabinet. She fought for equal rights for women, gays and lesbians, and, of course, Palestinian Arabs too. My father helped create the Israel Land Administration and managed all government lands.
The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, described the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, as a "liar" in a private exchange with Barack Obama at last week's G20 summit in Cannes that was inadvertently broadcast to journalists.
"I cannot stand him. He's a liar," Sarkozy told Obama. The US president responded by saying: "You're fed up with him? I have to deal with him every day."
Neither leader apparently realised that microphones that had been attached for a press conference had already been switched on, allowing journalists waiting for a press conference to hear the conversation.
"i had a reality check and I stated that I definitely would not have played there if I had known even the little that I know now."
"They have forgotten their own history. They have forgotten what their own prophets have said about our God," Tutu said in his opening address to the International Russell Tribunal on Palestine.
"We worship a God that is naturally biased in favour of the suffering, the underdog, those who are suffering underfoot... God is always on the side of the oppressed. In the Holy Land, the Palestinian people are the ones suffering."
Tutu said it pained him that a people who went through great suffering could in turn cause others to suffer.
"There is a great deal of preventable suffering being caused by people who themselves suffered so deeply... who have gone through a crucible of suffering.
"Those of us who are Christian have been influenced very greatly by what one might call the Jewish scriptures. The biased God of the past is the biased God of the present... and if God is to be God, watch out," he added.
The meeting was organized as a traditional jirga. In Pashtun culture, a jirga acts as both a parliament and a courtroom: it is the time-honored way in which Pashtuns have tried to establish rules and settle differences amicably with those who they feel have wronged them.
On the night before the meeting, we had a dinner, to break the ice. During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate.
Rachid Ghannouchi, leader of the Islamist Ennahda movement, smiles as he meets supporters in Tunis.
Tunisia’s Islamist-led government will focus on democracy, human rights and a free-market economy in planned changes to the constitution, effectively leaving religion out of the text it will draw up, party leaders said.
The government, due to be announced next week, will not introduce sharia or other Islamic concepts to alter the secular nature of the constitution in force when Tunisia’s Arab Spring revolution ousted autocrat Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January.
Freedom Waves to Gaza organizers have not yet had any direct communication with the delegates from the ships Tahrir and Saoirse. Organizers are demanding that Israel immediately free the remaining people they have kidnapped and are illegally detaining; that they be able to speak with their families; that they receive immediate medical attention for all injuries inflicted by the Israeli military and that they are not harmed further.
“We have heard indirectly from our governments' ministries of foreign affairs (in Canada and Ireland), but that is simply not good enough. We want to speak with our people directly,” says Wendy Goldsmith, organizer with the Canadian Boat to Gaza. “Why will our governments not demand the delegates be able to speak to their families? We do not trust the Canadian government on this - as they have shown time and time again that they are complicit in Israel's violations of international law and gross human rights abuses.”
Former Mossad Chief Ephraim Halevy warned against an Israeli strike on Iran, saying that the results of a confrontation could be devastating for the Mideast.
The growing haredi radicalization poses a bigger risk than Ahmadinejad," Halevy said, adding that "the ultra-Orthodox extremism has darkened our lives."
Even as official campaigning for the November 28 national elections began, the talk of the town here in Cairo has been the controversial framework put forward by the government to guide the drafting of the new constitution. The proposal to give the military a dominant role has provoked an intense outcry across the political spectrum.
On the eve of the upcoming Russel Tribunal in Cape Town, dedicated to the apartheid imposed on Palestinians, one of the initiators Nurit Peled-Elhanan (a woman I admire for not ever mincing her words) reports on how racist laws imprison a nation:
"Palestinian blood is dispensable with impunity in Israel and in the occupied territories. Palestinian every day existence is impossible. Cruelty, humiliation, starvation, torture and death define their relationships with their masters, their occupiers, and their governors.
The question that has been bothering me for a long time is how do Israeli citizens, including the children who at the age of 18 join the torture machine – the IDF – cope with such a discrepancy between the values they are raised on and the practices of oppression against their neighbours?
The answer to this question lies in education. Because apartheid is not only a bunch of racist laws, it is a state of mind, fashioned by education.
Israeli children are educated from a very tender age to see “Arab” citizens and “Arabs” in general as a problem that must be solved, eliminated in one way or another."
The victory of the Al-Nahda (Renaissance) Party was all but predictable. Official results showed that the party won more than 41 per cent of the vote, providing it with 90 seats in the 217-member new Constituent Assembly, or parliament.
To quell fears of Islamic resurgence, leading party members seemed to direct their message to outsiders (the US and Western powers), rather than the Tunisian people themselves. Al-Nahda Secretary General Hamadi Jebali, slated to be the next prime minister, laboured to "reassure secularists and investors, nervous about the prospect of Islamists holding power in one of the Arab world's most liberal countries, by saying it would not stop tourists wearing bikinis on the beaches nor impose Islamic banking".
The US, acting on reflexive legislation passed in the 1990s has frozen payment of US$60 million to UNESCO for the month of November. Close to US$70 million, or 22% of UNESCO’s annual budget comes from the US. The US will remain in UNESCO, but without paying its dues – a stance it can only maintain for two years before it must resume payments or leave UNESCO entirely.
If Congressional Republicans have their way, when that two-year deadline comes, the US will be out of UNESCO. Few in Congress today would shed any tears over that.
They would also shed few tears over the withdrawal of the US from other UN organizations such as UNICEF or the World Health Organization. Foreign aid – excluding defense spending – is on the Beltway chopping block for the foreseeable future. The US might stick it out with commercially-oriented bodies in the UN such as the World Intellectual Property Organization, or security-related ones like the IAEA (though there are many in the US who wish to wipe their hands of the latter)."
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| ICAHD says it is virtually impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits in occupied East Jerusalem |
Israel is forcing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem as part of a deliberate policy that might constitute a war crime, a prominent Israeli non-governmental organisation said, a charge rejected by Jerusalem's mayor.
The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) has presented the United Nations with its findings on Monday and demanded an inquiry, saying Israel targeted Palestinians by demolishing homes, revoking residency and eroding quality of life.
"We are witnessing a process of ethnic displacement," said Michael Sfard, a lawyer who helped draw up a 73-page report into the issue. "Israel is manifestly and seriously violating international law ... and the motivation is demographic."
The cheers that rang across the hall of the Unesco meeting when Palestine became a member on Monday are being echoed in surprising quarters.
The Obama administration has perversely given a big boost to the Republican right's antipathy to the UN and all it stands for. Ironically, it was George W Bush who brought the United States back into Unesco 20 years after Reagan withdrew. Equally ironically, driving the engine in this diplomatic train wreck was Barack Obama, whose speeches in Turkey and Egypt during the early months of his presidency had deceptively signalled a new opening to the Muslim world.
More images here
