Playing with fire: UN turns Gaza shelling into theatre. By Rory McCarthy

Via: The Guardian.

A show about the fate of an aid warehouse has caused controversy in Israel

There is nothing ordinary about this advocacy campaign for a large UN institution. The lights dim before a packed audience and a slideshow begins: images of Gaza in conflict, people fleeing their homes, buildings on fire.

Then stands Chris Gunness, the chief spokesman of the UN Relief and Works Agency, the organisation responsible for the support and welfare of Palestinian refugees. “I am a warehouse,” he says. “I am a dying warehouse, the victim of an excruciatingly painful fire that burned me down.”

It is the start of a remarkable 20-minute, one-man play intended for Israeli audiences but so far unwelcome in Israeli theatres. It tells the story of the main UN warehouse in Gaza, a storage point for food and aid for a million Palestinians, and how it was hit repeatedly by Israeli artillery shells, some loaded with white phosphorous, during the Gaza war – how it was set ablaze and burnt to the ground.

This is a story that “until now has remained buried, untold,” Gunness said at the debut performance of his show at the French Cultural Centre, east Jerusalem, on Wednesday night.

Significant Changes to Bush-Era Military Commissions Signed Into Law. By Yana Kunichoff

Via: Truthout.

President Barack Obama signed a Defense Department spending bill into law Wednesday, which includes a provision that will change the way military commissions are structured.

Human rights organizations and legal advocacy groups believe these controversial Bush-Era commissions primarily deny defendants the protections that federal caourts provide and have responded with disappointment to their inclusion in defense legislation by a president who, during his presidential campaign, was quoted as saying he would “reject the Military Commissions Act.”

The 2010 National Defense Authorization Act allocates $680 billion for the fiscal year of 2010 to increase military personnel and support the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a move away from defense spending on conventional warfare tactics to funding for smaller wars. It also allows the Pentagon to increase its intelligence services that had been most recently contracted out to private businesses.

AfPak-Iraq: wrong war, right path. By Paul Rogers

Via: Open Democracy.

The United States faces mounting problems in the three leading conflict-zones of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. The escape-route lies not in military escalation but in a change of thinking.

The vocabulary of a “global war on terror” has long since been dropped from the United States’s official vocabulary. The phrase that came to be proposed as a replacement even when George W Bush was still in office, the “long war”, has similarly fallen by the wayside. But however the Barack Obama administration defines the conflict it is involved in, events in recent days in three of its epicentres – Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq – present a bleak picture of its current progress:

* the coordinated suicide-attack and rocket-attack in the early morning of 28 October 2009 on two high-profile civilian targets in Kabul – the Bekhtar guest-house and Serena Hotel – are a sign that the deepening insecurity in Afghanistan reaches even to the heart of the capital. The Bekhtar incident ended in the deaths of twelve people, including six United Nations staff who were helping to oversee the re-run of the presidential election on 7 November

* the devastating market-bombing in Peshawar, also on 28 October, are part of a widening insurgency in Pakistan. The attack killed over ninety people, and coincided with the arrival of United States secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the country for high-level talks with Pakistani leaders

* the suicide-bomb operations against Iraq’s justice ministry and the administrative headquarters of Baghdad’s region on 25 October – which killed at least 155 people and wounded over 500 – are a reminded that violence in Iraq remains endemic and that insurgents retain the capacity to strike close to the heart of power.

It’s All About Demography, Again! By Saed Bannoura

Via: The International Middle East Media Center.

A recent Israeli report based on a study conducted by the Macro Center for Political Economy in Israel states that the aim of Israel in East Jerusalem is to guarantee a Jewish majority by all means in order to prevent any future partition of the city.

The report ‘warns’ that in twenty years, and in spite of land annexation and home demolitions, there will be a Palestinian majority in Jerusalem.
It adds that the Israeli policies in Jerusalem aim at maintaining Jewish majority by all means.

The report was distributed to Israeli members of Knesset in recent days. It says that in spite of the Israeli activities and policies that aim at preventing the Palestinians from becoming a majority in the city, their natural growth continue to ‘pose a threat to the Jewish majority, and if nothing is done about it, Jerusalem would become a bi-national city”.

My own war crime: personal reflections following the Goldstone Report. By Naom

Via: Promised Land.

When the Goldstone report was first mentioned in this blog, one of the readers asked me what is it exactly that makes me think that the IDF could have committed war crimes in Gaza. I was asked the same question in an e-mail exchange I had with Prof. Richard Landes, who is a passionate advocate of the Israeli point of view, and naturally, extremely critical of Goldstone.

In both cases I replied that my answer was based on what I learned from the media: That includes cases that the IDF itself confirmed, like as the white phosphorus bombing, and others where the Palestinians’ account of events seemed reliable; there were also numerous reports that the IDF “eased up” its fire-opening procedures during operation Cast Lead; and there were other, more subtle indications, such as a high rate of friendly fire casualties and a low rate or enemy fire casualties – which might, but not necessarily, indicate a policy of “shoot first, then ask questions”. None of this is solid evidence, of course. But the same goes for the people criticizing Judge Goldstone’s report – they also based their opinions on second hand information (at best).

More than anything, it seems to me that the discussion regarding the Goldstone report drifted very quickly from the legal sphere of war ethics and laws to pure propaganda: those who wanted to criticize Israel jumped on the opportunity to attack it, and Israel’s defenders automatically responded. It looks as though the Allen Dershowitzs of this world never even considered the possibility that Israel – let alone the IDF – could have committed a crime. At best, they thought, there might have been some “mistakes”, but never ever something intentional. This was their assumption before reading the report, and this is the conclusion they reached after reading it – if they ever bothered reading it at all.

(There is something absurd about whole debate regarding “war crimes”, because moving civilian population into an occupied territory, as Israel does for more than forty years, is a violation of the 4th Geneva Convention, but the Goldstone report deals with a different crime: widespread killing of uninvolved civilians, either by intension, or as collateral damage, when ways to avoid or substantially reduce this damage were available.)

This is what separates the two sides and at the same time shapes their approach to the Goldstone report: Israel’s defenders don’t believe such things could have happened, while those who attack Israel think that it could, and probably did. As for me, as I said, I don’t know for sure what happened in Gaza, but I’m certain in one thing: the IDF has no problem in attacking civilian targets on purpose, and it did so on numerous occasions. The reason I know this is simple: I did it myself.

The timeless work of Naji al-Ali

Via: The Electronic Intifada.

Book Review By Toufic Haddad.

Cartoonist Naji al-Ali was a towering figure in the Palestinian cultural and political scene. His daily political drawings were a knife-twisting, gut-wrenching journey into how Palestinians perceived their predicament. Each drawing taps into hidden reservoirs of forbidden ideas and feelings — all somehow related to the unfulfilled expectations of the Palestinian national movement and the larger struggle for Arab self-determination. Hope, injustice, anger, pain and the struggle for dignity bled from al-Ali’s nib in a manner so raw that they captured the imagination of millions. During his life and after his death at the hands of an unknown assassin in 1987, al-Ali was widely admired and respected as a visionary artist and political commentator. Indeed, with few if any amendments, hundreds of his decades-old drawings could be republished today to reflect the miserable state of the contemporary Palestinian and Arab reality.

How does one book explain the weight of such an enormous yet largely silenced cultural and political heritage? It can’t, and the new volume A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali, published by Verso, doesn’t. What it does do however is guide the reader through the background and logic behind many of these ideas. In so doing, the enormous gap between Western perceptions of the Arab world, and how the majority of downtrodden Arabs view themselves and Western policies in the region, is laid bare. In the process, al-Ali is also able to humanize his Arab subjects. He portrays refugees, peasants and members of the Arab working classes, as conscious, politicized and resisting agents, struggling against enormous odds, and engaging in the defense of their dignity and rights.

Why Obama’s Iran Policy Will Fail. By Dilip Hiro

Via: TomDispatch.com.

Stuck in Bush Mode in a Changed World

While the tone of the Obama administration is different from that of its predecessor, and some of its foreign policies diverge from those of George W. Bush, at their core both administrations subscribe to the same doctrine: Whatever the White House perceives as a threat — whether it be Iran, North Korea, or the proliferation of long-range missiles — must be viewed as such by Moscow and Beijing.

In addition, by the evidence available, Barack Obama has not drawn the right conclusion from his predecessor’s failed Iran policy. A paradigm of sticks-and-carrots simply is not going to work in the case of the Islamic Republic. Here, a lesson is readily available, if only the Obama White House were willing to consider Iran’s recent history. It is unrealistic to expect that a regime which fought Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (then backed by the United States) to a standstill in a bloody eight-year war in the 1980s, unaided by any foreign power, and has for 30 years withstood the consequences of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions will be alarmed by Washington’s fresh threats of “crippling sanctions.”

Most important, the Obama administration is ignoring the altered international order that has emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis triggered by Wall Street’s excesses. While its stimulus package, funded by taxpayers and foreign borrowing, has arrested the decline in the nation’s gross domestic product, Washington has done little to pull the world economy out of the doldrums. That task — performed by the U.S. in recent recessions — has fallen willy-nilly to China. History repeatedly shows that such economic clout sooner or later translates into diplomatic power.

The long war: the US and al-Qaida

Via: La Monde Diplomatique.

« Empire » is the series dedicated to questioning global powers. Be they state or corporate, military or economic, their influence is felt everywhere from international security, finance, communications, and even the news itself.

In the latest in Al Jazeera’s Empire series, we focus on al-Qaida. Driven out of Afghanistan and hunted in Pakistan, it would seem that al-Qaida has no place left to hide. Yet the organisation has franchises, from Somalia to Indonesia and North Africa. In Afghanistan, it directs or collaborates in Taliban attacks, whilst in Pakistan, groups linked to al-Qaida are busy plotting. How does the US perceive their real threat now, eight years after the so-called ’war on terror’ began?

Part 1

Part 2

Is Capitalism on the Ropes? Interview with Michael D. Yates and Fred Magdoff. By Mike Whitney

Via: Information Clearing House.

1. Mike Whitney—In your new book, “The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know”, you allude to right wing think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, which promote a “free market” ideology. How successful have these organizations been in shaping public attitudes about capitalism? Do you think that attitudes are beginning to change now that people understand the role that Wall Street and the big banks played in creating the crisis? (“The ABCs of the Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know” By Fred Magdoff and Michael Yates, Monthly Review Press)

Michael Yates: Corporate America began to wage what turned out to be a one-sided war against working people in the mid-to late-1970s, when it became apparent that the post-World War Two “Golden Age” of U.S. capitalism was over. As profit rates fell, businesses began to develop a strategy for restoring them. This strategy had many prongs, and one of them was ideological, that is, a struggle for “hearts and minds,” to use a military term now being applied to Afghanistan. The presumed failure of Keynesian economics, marked by the simultaneous existence of escalating inflation and unemployment, gave the ideological struggle its foundation. Maybe there had been too many restrictions placed on the market, and these restrictions (minimum wages, health and safety regulations, laws facilitating union organizing in labor markets; public assistance in the form of money grants, housing subsidies, and the like; restrictions on the flow of money internationally) had led to results opposite those that liberal Keynesians had thought most likely. If these complex arguments could be tied to simple cliches, like “get the government off our backs,” “the unions have gotten too powerful” (with always a hint that they are too radical thrown into the argument), and “welfare queens” (with that always popular whiff of racism), they could provide ideological cover for what was really a matter of corporate economics, namely the making of money.

Zionist Claims of Solidarity with the Iranian Protesters are Absurd. By Shourideh Molavi

Via: Socialist Project.

On October 27, the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC) held a conference titled “Democracy in Action: The Protests in Iran” in Ottawa. The purpose, according to the CIC website, was to “mobilize political action against the human rights abuses of the Iranian regime and its nuclear agenda.” To meet this goal the conference showcased a lineup of Israeli and Zionist politicians, legal figures, advocates, and military and diplomatic experts, including: Ambassador Miriam Ziv (former Israeli Vice-Consul in Toronto), Irwin Cotler (MP and lawyer), Kenneth Timmerman (published a thriller on Iran, radical Islam, and the bomb, called Honor Killing), Mark Dubowitz (leads the Iran Energy Project, an initiative focused on researching Iran’s energy vulnerabilities and formulating policies to prohibit sales of refined petroleum to Iran), Noam Katz (Israeli Minister for Public Diplomacy in Washington, D.C.), and the CEO of the Canada-Israel Committee, Shimon Fogel.

To balance the heavy dose of Canadian and Israeli political, diplomatic, and military experts, the CIC lineup has two Iranians: so-called Iranian-Canadian “insider” Nazanin Afshin-Jam, singer, actor, former Miss World Canada, and President and co-founder of Stop Child Executions, and lawyer Sayeh Hassan. While the author of this article disagrees with the pro-monarchist, pro-Israeli, and deeply nationalist reading of the situation in Iran by Afshin-Jam and Hassan, it should be recognized that such sentiments do exist within the Iranian diaspora community. However, claiming that the political stances of these two individuals somehow represents Iranians in the diaspora is a stretch, and that they reflect the organized Iranian voices within Iran is simply untrue.

Demolishing Hope for Peace. By Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler

Via: IPS News.

“We knew something bad was about to happen when we saw the roadblocks being thrown up, and police everywhere. It soon came down the grapevine – the Israelis were demolishing more houses.”

Naim Awisat, an East Jerusalem Palestinian community leader and entrepreneur, drove quickly down America Way (the winding old valley road that links the city’ southern neighbourhoods of the Holy Basin with the walled Old City and its holy sites) to Sala’a, a rundown quarter at the heart of the wadi.

The tok-tok-tok of the heavy machinery could be heard “even before I’d rounded the last corner into the dusty square. A ring of troops in full anti- riot gear were in position. I have to admit it was something of a relief when I saw that what they were destroying was only that old derelict building with a corrugated iron roof where our kids used to gather to play pool, and who knows what else – drugs, what have you.”

His friend Mohammed Nakhal, an urban planner, was already there. Before they could exchange thoughts about the latest Israeli action, Mohammed’s cell phone was ringing non-stop – a string of calls from Dahiyat a-Salaam in the northern part of the city, and from Sur Baher just over the hill on the way to Bethlehem.

More demolitions were under way.

No more sighs of relief, though.

“Heart wrenching – that’s what it is when you see 15 people, seven of them children, left homeless out of the blue,” says Naim when he reaches Sur Baher.

The Oil Industry And Its Effect On Global Politics. By James Stafford

Via: Atlantic Free Press.

Over the past century, modern society has developed a near unquenchable thirst for oil and after 100 years of searching and experimenting there is still no reliable replacement.

“Oil is Power!” I don’t just mean power as in “energy,” I mean power, as in being a primary factor in the process of asserting and maintaining political dominance and control. Oil is needed to grow food, build infrastructure, advance technology, manufacture goods and transport them to market. It lubricates the mechanisms of both national and international politics. Those who can consistently get their hands on the most oil, at the best prices … will rule!

So what makes oil so highly valuable that individuals, companies and sovereign states would actually be willing to go to war, if necessary, in order to defend or fight to win their “beloved?”

First, “Oil is Universal!” It is a staple of our very existence! Oil plays a major role in practically every aspect of our lives from technology and transportation to the very food and business necessary for our survival.

Second, “Oil is Unique!” While there may be various alternative energy supplies available for some industrial tasks such as creating electricity, there is currently no reasonable substitute for oil when it comes to transportation.

Third, “Oil is Rare!” According to scientific calculations, oil is a progressively depleting fuel that is disappearing at an exponentially alarming rate. While there are still an undetermined number of rich, untapped oil deposits left to be discovered around the globe, reasonable arguments will continue as to just how quickly the world’s oil supply might run out.