We can wait no longer to restart the peace process. The human suffering demands urgent relief

Dec 19, 2009 - 11:25 - WAM Abu Dhabi, Dec 19th, 2009 (WAM) -- Genocide and ethnic cleansing were not the only objective of the Israeli war on Gaza, it had more heinous goals that included the annihilation of the future Palestinian generations, stressed a local Arabic daily newspaper in its editorial today.

Based on new revelations about the Israeli aggression on the Mediterranean strip, 'Al-Khaleej' daily said that the main objective of the warfare was to target fertility and embryos of Palestinians by way of planting carcinogens in the weapons to wipe out the new generation as Israel had failed in the face of Palestinian resistance.

The effects of those cancer causing weapons will retard the population growth of the Palestinians, who fight for their homeland, said the paper.

Al Khaleej went on to express its belief that all international resolutions on Arab rights were not for implementation, but for procrastination and delay, after which they are buried in the archives of the United Nations for use as reasoning and citation whenever necessary.

The editorial entitled 'Prison for Goldstone Report' said that the report on war crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip was released before a month and a half. At that time UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon promised to refer the report to the Security Council in "as soon as possible" after the General Assembly decided to submit it to the Council.

But the expression "as soon as possible," seems to have a meaning different from what is commonly understood, especially when it comes to the Zionist entity which is not subject to the laws and principles. Accordingly, whenever such resolutions and international reports pertaining to it are released, time stops at the borders of that entity, without regard to international justice, international legitimacy and international law, said the paper.

The paper added that the international resolutions issued against the Zionist entity since its inception until now on the occupation, aggression and racism, have been shelved and any one of them did not find its way into implementation.

At the same time, any resolution abiding by international law was issued; it was implemented with immediate effect if the party in question were the Arabs.

The worse is that the Arabs themselves were pioneers in the implementation of these resolutions and commitments even if they were implemented against sister Arab countries. They expressed this keenness in order to assert their respect for resolutions of international legitimacy; some thing which applies to them only, said Al Khaleej.

But "the ironic fact is that there is no a single Arab state who has asked the Secretary-General of the United Nations any thing about the fate of the Goldstone Report and when the time of the "as soon as possible" will come.

The paper concluded its editorial opining that the report, which awaits its 'as soon as possible time', will finally land its abode to serve a life term imprisonment.

WAM/AB

Nick Pell

December 19, 2009 "'Mer'ca doesn't torture." - His Imperial Majesty, George Bush II "I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture. And I'm gonna make sure that we don't torture." - Barack Mud'dib Jesus Christ Obama The end of judicially sanctioned torture was one of the most progressive advances of the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Under most medieval law, a person could not be convicted of a crime unless they confessed to it. Thus, torture was perfected as a means of both punishment, but more importantly interrogation. It's not that torture ever entirely went away. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, who spearheaded the French fight against torture used it against his political opponents when in power. However, there is something to be said for the de jure prohibition of torture. It is certainly much better to live in a world where such actions are reviled as being worse than murder than one where they are seen as legitimate means of punishment or extracting confession. Indeed, the return to torture by the imperialist governments of the world (either under their own name or by proxy) is perhaps the most disturbing turns toward barbarism since that use of atomic weapons against civilians. First, a definition of torture is in order. One of the means by which defenders of the previous and current regime weasel their way out of talking about torture in a frank manner is not having a firm definition of what torture is. The Geneva Convention of 1949's definition of torture works as well as any other: For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions. In other words, torture is a punitive, coercive, or interrogative technique where inflicting suffering is the main method of punishment, coercion, or interrogation. The Cheney / Bush regime became famous for their use of "not" torture, coining the cute phrase "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques." The core of these techniques were taken from the Royal Ulster Constabulary's so-called "five techniques" used against alleged Irish terrorists in the 1970s. In a case before the European Court of Human Rights, Ireland lost to the United Kingdom on the subject of whether or not stress positions, sleep deprivation, or hooding among others were "torture" per se- which in 1978 would be a bit like a woman who was raped while working for Halliburton by other employees losing in a court owned by Halliburton. Of course, the most famous of these techniques is waterboarding, described by Rush Limbaugh as resembling a fraternity prank. While a number of these techniques (including waterboarding) were explicitly prohibited by Barack Obama, that doesn't much matter for a couple reasons. First, there are more contractors in Afghanistan than there will be actual military personnel even after the escalation of troop levels there. These are people who are not beholden to Defense Department directives, or really any other rules except "whatever you can get away with is legal." Private contractors were implicated in the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib which included such harmless fraternity pranks as pissing on detainees, gang rape of a 14 year old girl, and dragging detainees across the floor by a rope attached to their dick. Stay classy, U.S. military. The other reason why Obama's platitudes about ending Bush-era torture don't much matter is because of the practice of rendition, a practice more accurately described as torture by proxy. This is where the United States under the auspices of the CIA kidnaps someone and has them shipped halfway around the world to a country that tortures with gusto and aplomb. This sometimes includes such ostensible American adversaries as Syria. More frequently, however, the U.S. uses some former Warsaw Pact country desperately in need of brownie points from America or calls on one of their go to guys to vote against resolutions condemning human rights abuses in Israeli. Put simply, the United States doesn't need to torture. It has plenty of willing accomplices who will do it for them, and more viciously. No reports of waterboarding yet, but there was a fairly vigorous program of child sexual abuse and other torture in Afghanistan on Big O's watch. Further, his directive does not undermine the legal framework of torture and indefinite groundless detention pioneered by the Bush Administration. Obama's Administration does not merely refuse to prosecute those who tortured under President Bush, they have consistently and vehemently defended Bush-era torturers and their legal accomplices. Other than things like concern for humanity and the rule of law, why should we care? Well, you'll remember that weapons used in Iraq were later used on protesters here in the United States. As the social inequality and unresponsiveness of our elected officials begins creating the perfect storm of social unrest, what do tools do you think the Administration- be it Democrat or Republican- will use in their repression. Indeed, the chances are great that things like waterboarding will look like a picnic next to what we have coming to us. Advances in psychological, neurology, and other sciences can be used for good or for ill. We are now living in a world where 1984 style torture is a reality for some halfway around the world. It only seems a matter of time before it's used on troublemakers at home. _______ Nick Pell Grandmaster, Black Sun Gazette www.blacksungazette.com

Western illusions that vilify Arabs and glorify Israel

By Paul J. Balles

18 December 2009

Paul J. Balles looks at Western illusions about the Arabs – illusions created by media that vilify Arabs and portray Israel in the most favourable light and compounded by Westerners' "failure to recognize the deceptiveness of the chimera and subterfuge manufactured by Hollywood and the TV studios of New York and London".

”The propagandists have known there was little chance of their myth-making becoming exposed, primarily because few Westerners live among Arabs long enough or close enough to discover the reality.”

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. (Daniel Boorstin)

Many people think they know something about Arabs; but many of those thoughts are as divorced from reality as genies emerging from bottles. Not many Westerners, other than expatriates who have lived in the Arab world, know much about the customs, traditions, language or cultures of the Arab world.

When I first travelled to the Middle East for a university teaching job, I knew very little about Arabs. That trip into a land of mystery happened more than 40 years ago; and Kuwait and Bahrain have been my hosts since.

During that time, I learned a great deal about many Arabs. I also learned that it’s dangerously misleading to think that Arabs are alike. Yet, many Westerners do just that. I remember how easy it was, as a child, to develop standardized images of people belonging to a particular ethnic group or culture. Part of this comes from the illusionists.

Magicians perform as masters of illusion, and artists have fascinated viewers with optical illusions. Filmmakers qualify as experts at creating illusions. As illusory as the magician's trick and the optical mirage, the history of both film and TV has been as full of deception as a dry desert lake appearing full of water.

The problem with the illusions created by the media comes from our failure to recognize the deceptiveness of the chimera and subterfuge manufactured by Hollywood and the TV studios of New York and London.

My first illusion: that Arabs and Israelis were more alike than different in expressing their antagonism toward each other. One of each happened to be in a class I was teaching in Los Angeles, California. Each would sidle up to me, separately and at different times, to explain what was wrong with the other.

The Israeli would tell me how Arabs wanted to drive Israelis into the sea. The Arab would tell me how Arabs and Jews lived in harmony for centuries in Palestine; and he couldn't understand why the Israelis were stealing their land.

Assuring me that they were threatened, the Israeli reminded me of how six million Jews suffered the horrible fate of the holocaust. He complained that Israel was under constant threat from millions of Arabs surrounding his people.

Telling me how groups called the Stern Gang and Irgun were terrorists who slaughtered both British and Palestinians, the Arab explained that thousands fled their lands after hundreds of Palestinians were massacred in the village of Deir Yassin.

So it has evolved for years, with most Israelis under the illusion that they have an absolute right to Palestine, and many Arabs under an illusion that America or Europe will put things right some day.

To make matters worse, the Western media has presented a distorted view of the story. Arabs have been vilified in the media for decades, while Israel has been generally portrayed in the most favourable light.

The Arabs’ adversaries include men and women in powerful and influential positions. Many in the highest ranks of US government have the ears of both the American administration and the Congress. No Arabs have such positions.
The propagandists have known there was little chance of their myth-making becoming exposed, primarily because few Westerners live among Arabs long enough or close enough to discover the reality.

Experience has revealed some of the truths that the illusionists have hidden or glossed over. Hopefully, expatriates with experience in the Arab world will learn enough to expose some of the deceptive illusions.

---

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

by Jack A. Smith / December 17th, 2009

President Barack Obama delivered a rather odd speech Dec. 10 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize at ceremonies in Oslo. In the name of peace, he sought to justify former President George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, as well as his own decision Dec. 1 to vastly expand this unnecessary and essentially lost endeavor by ordering another 30,000 troops to the war zone.

In the process, Obama misinterpreted the “Theory of Just War,” the subject of this article, which argues it is not a just war.

Most Republicans, especially the neoconservatives, strongly approved of the speech, largely because of its bellicosity and its justification for Bush’s foray into Afghanistan. Sarah Palin “liked what he said.” Newt Gingrich “thought the speech was actually very good.” Karl Rove defined it as “superb,” “tough” and “effective.” The pro-war Wall Street Journal offered a “Congratulations, Mr. President.”

Antiwar Democrats and the peace movement were critical, but many liberal Democrats praised it, though seemingly less for its rationalization of war and imperialism and more for its smooth intellectual style and philosophical wanderings, as when Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of the liberal flagship weekly The Nation, focused on the president’s “humility and grace.”

Salon commentator Glenn Greenwald put it this way: “Much of the liberal praise for Obama’s speech yesterday focused on how eloquent, sophisticated, nuanced, complex, philosophical, contemplative and intellectual it was. And, looked at a certain way, it was all of those things — like so many Obama speeches are. After eight years of enduring a president who spoke in simplistic Manichean imperatives and bullying decrees, many liberals are understandably joyous over having a president who uses their language and the rhetorical approach that resonates with them. But that’s the real danger. Obama puts a pretty, intellectual, liberal face on some ugly and decidedly illiberal policies.”

Obama had little option but to express humility in accepting the Nobel Committee’s award that he himself knew was entirely undeserved and an embarrassment, coming as it did just after his big move to widen the Afghan war. Under the circumstances, he carried off the necessary humility sequence quite well, noting that “Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize — Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight.”

About half the Nobel speech was devoted to justifying the Afghan war, while most of the rest was a spirited, idealized, and mendacious defense of the U.S. role in foreign affairs since the end of World War II. Obama’s foreign policy resembles a combination of that put forward by Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush (the elder). It continues the dubious tradition embraced by American presidents since 1945 consisting of seeking hegemony and world supremacy based on overwhelming military power.

In attempting to legitimize Bush’s Afghan war, Obama declared:

Over time, as codes of law sought to control violence within groups, so did philosophers, clerics and statesmen seek to regulate the destructive power of war. The concept of a ‘just war’ emerged, suggesting that war is justified only when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional; and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence…. The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense…

I believe that all nations, strong and weak alike, must adhere to [just war] standards that govern the use of force…. Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe that the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength.

President Obama is incorrect when he suggests that the Afghan war conforms with the theory of just war. Here’s why:

Over the last 1,500 years, secular and religious ethicists have developed the theory of just war. The Roman Catholic Church is a major organizational upholder of the just war concept, but the theory enjoys universal application and is embraced in international law and the UN Charter. This is not a pacifist theory because it finds some wars just and some unjust. For instance, U.S. participation in World War II against German and Japanese imperialism is considered just, but its role in Iraq is termed unjust. Justness, not nonviolence, is the international criterion.

There are nuanced differences in the interpretation of just war theory, but there is general agreement on its six principal stipulations — all of which be must honored for the resort to war to be considered just. Four of the points are relevant to Afghanistan, the most important being “Just Cause.” This means war is permissible to confront “a real and certain danger” — either an attack or imminent attack from another country — and includes self-defense or the defense of others from external aggression.

Afghanistan neither attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, nor was it threatening an imminent attack. This rules out the just cause of self-defense. We will explain this before moving to the other three points.

Al-Qaeda, a small decentralized fundamentalist religious organization on the fringes of Islam was responsible for the attack, not the state or government of Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda was formed in Afghanistan by Osama bin-Laden, a Saudi exile, in 1988. Its members were drawn from foreign Muslim jihadist fighters taking part in the Afghan civil war (1979-1996) against a left wing government in Kabul that was being defended by Soviet troops, followed by a war between the various Afghan factions after the left was overthrown in 1992. The U.S. financed the anti-government civil war, as did Pakistan and Saudi Arabia on a lesser scale. Al-Qaeda was among the beneficiaries of Washington’s support.

Most al-Qaeda recruits returned to their own countries in the Middle East and Europe after the war. Some set up small branches of the organization where they lived. A sector of al-Qaeda, including bin-Laden, remained in Afghanistan with the approval of the fundamentalist Taliban government, which emerged victorious from the civil war in 1996.

No Afghan was among the 19 Al-Qaeda suicide operatives, armed with box cutters, who hijacked four airliners on 9/11 and slammed one of them into the Pentagon and two others into New York’s World Trade Center, killing about 3,000 people.

Much of the planning for the attack evidently took place in Europe and then in the U.S. There has never been any proof that Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar was aware of the Sept. 11 plan, much less a party to it. Just hours after the Washington and New York City destruction, the Taliban authorities denounced the attacks. At the same time, Afghanistan’s Taliban ambassador to Pakistan stated to the media “We want to tell the American children that Afghanistan feels your pain. We hope the courts find justice.”

President Bush immediately rejected suggestions for a major international police effort to apprehend the leaders of the attack. Instead, after conferring with his neoconservative advisers, he defined this small-group terrorist raid as an act of war carried out from Afghan territory with the connivance of the Taliban government. This allowed Bush to declare an open-ended “War on Terrorism,” paving the way for his Oct. 7 bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, and then Iraq in March 2003.

Another of the just war points is “Last Resort. This means a country may resort to war only after exhausting every other possible alternative. This is reflected in the UN Charter, which calls for serious efforts to resolve differences nonviolently through diplomacy or the courts, before the resort to military means. Bush rejected an offer by the Taliban to produce bin-Laden if the U.S. wouldn’t invade. Its only stipulation was that Washington provide proof that the al-Qaeda leader actually committed the crime, as would any country asked to surrender a suspect to another country. Bush swiftly refused, ruled out any negotiations, and began a bombing campaign and invasion. President Obama said in Oslo that “America did not seek” the Afghan war, but war was Bush’s first resort, not last, as was the case 18 months later when he attacked Iraq.

A third stipulation is “Right Intention” — i.e., fighting only on behalf of an expressed just cause without a trace of ulterior motivation such as the acquisition of power, land, resources, riches, etc. Bush’s ulterior motivations were to interject U.S. military power into Central Asia in proximity to Russia, China and resource-rich former Soviet republics, and also to occupy a territory adjacent to Iran, another neoconservative target for regime change at the time.

The last point is “Proportionality,” meaning that the quantity of violence, damage and costs is proportionate to the expressed reason for resorting to war. Given the violation of the Just War standards of just cause, last resort, and right intention, the disproportion involved in Bush’s bombing, invasion, occupation and continuing warfare is self-evident. In any event, Bush’s expressed reason for war was that the Afghan authorities did not hand over bin-Laden, but that was compromised by the U.S. refusal to provide the evidence required for extradition or to even discuss with the Kabul government the question of the Taliban’s alleged complicity in the terror attacks.

Thus, despite President Obama’s efforts to define Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan as just, he has decided to send another 30,000 troops, on top of approximately 30,000 sent earlier in this year, to fight in a manifestly unjust war.

Rhys Blakely in Mumbai

Between 400 and 500 Hamas supporters are being held in the West Bank by the PSF and GI Palestinian security agents who have allegedly tortured Hamas supporters in the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA, the UK's Guardian newspaper has reported. The US Central Intelligence Agency has co-operated with the Preventive Security Force (PSF) and General Intelligence Service (GI) in the Palestinian territory, the report on Friday said. "The [Central Intelligence] Agency consider them as their property, those two Palestinian services," a western official told the Guardian. Most of the detained Hamas supporters are held without trial and allegedly tortured by the Palestinian agencies in the West Bank. Hamas backed the Guardian's findings on Friday during a press conference, and blamed Keith Dayton, the US General commanding the Palestinian National Security Force in the West Bank, for the arrest and torture of its supporters. Hamas called on Barack Obama, the US president, to remove Dayton from his position and said Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and Fatah leader in the West Bank, was responsible for the "crimes" against Hamas in the West Bank. Human rights organisations say it is common for detainees to be badly beaten and subjected to "shabeh", where they are shackled and held in painful positions for long periods. Hamas, which has de facto control of the Gaza Strip, has faced allegations that its own forces have detained and tortured people allied with Fatah, a rival Palestinian group that is a member of the Palestinian Authority. Hundreds held Between 400 and 500 Hamas supporters are currently being held by the PSF and GI, officials from the PA have said. But Adnan Aldenari, a Palestinian police spokesman, denied that the security forces in the West Bank were abusing detainees. "We have nothing to hide; or nothing to be ashamed of. When we had mistakes [they] were individual as committed by some officers and not expressive of our policy. "The CIA ... only supports, and is interested in, lawful methods that produce sound intelligence." Paul Gimigliano, CIA spokesman "Our prisons and detention facilities are open and not secret as they are in some other countries. They are open to the media and human rights organisations." The Guardian reported that at least three detainees have died in custody this year due to being mistreated. The most recent was Haitham Amr, a 33-year-old nurse from Hebron, who died four days after he was detained by GI officials last June, the newspaper said. Shawan Jabarin, the general director of al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organisation, told the Guardian: "The Americans could stop it any time. All they would have to do is go to [prime minister] Salam Fayyad and tell him they were making it an issue. "Then they could deal with the specifics: they could tell him that detainees needed to be brought promptly before the courts." A regional diplomat told the newspaper that "at the very least" US intelligence officers were aware of the torture and were not doing enough to stop it. The CIA does not deny working with the PSF and GI in the West Bank, but Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, said that the US agency does not hold a supervisory role. "The notion that this agency somehow runs other intelligence services ... is simply wrong," he told the Guardian. "The CIA ... only supports, and is interested in, lawful methods that produce sound intelligence."

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

December 18, 2009 at 8:11 am

Debunking anti-Semitism studies and Yehuda Bauer in particular

By Gilad Atzmon

19 December 2009

Gilad Atzmon questions the foundations of Israeli Holocaustist Professor Yehuda Bauer’s pseudo-theories on the causes of anti-Semitism and his belief that Jews must always seek influence and domination.

”Judaism and Zionism are both saturated with racism. [Prof. Yehuda] Bauer is right to argue that Jews are not a race, but Jewish ideology – both secular and religious – is racist and supremacist to the bone."

Holocaust studies is an emerging pseudo-intellectual, academic trend. It basically allows rabid Zionists to elevate their discussions about “what is really wrong with the Goyim [Gentiles] into a university qualification. I recently learned about the “Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of anti-Semitism”. I also learned about a similar institute at the University of London.

“anti-Semitism studies” has the potential to be a valuable field of research if it could, for example, elaborate and scrutinize Jewish culture and history in order to grasp what it is that evokes anti-Jewish feelings. It could try to establish if there is a Jewish ideological, political or cultural pattern that may be amended.

In fact, early Zionists¹ tried to dwell on the subject. They tried to diagnose the “cause” of anti-Semitsm so that they might learn why it invariably and repeatedly matured into host cultures regarding Jews as a parasitic force. Early Zionists insisted that aliya would bring about a new productive, ethical and civilized new Jew.

However, contemporary anti-Semitism scholars have a very different agenda in mind. They build their research on the axiom that Jews are categorically innocent. They then try to understand why the Goyim behave immorally and even murderously.

The Gentile – a pathological case?

But here is a clear, embarrassing catch: given that humanity is comprised of Goyim, anti-Semitism scholars who attempt to grasp “what is wrong with the Goyim” actually ask “what is wrong with humanity?” This is in fact a legitimate question, unless we leave one conspicuous group out. As things stand, in the new Judaeo-centric “academic” field, namely “anti-Semitism studies”, a Zionist is there to review the Goy as a pathological case. This is slightly odd, to say the least. It is even peculiar that such departments exist at Yale and London universities. However, since academic institutes thrive on corporate donations and other funding sources, we can no longer expect the academic world to lead intellectual discourse or even commit itself to any form of ethical integrity.

One of the leading scholars of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust is Yehuda Bauer, a professor at Jerusalem University and a director of Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum. Prof. Bauer is a world expert in the hatred and destruction of one people, namely the “chosen one”. I have recently found this video and I would urge every humanist to watch it. It is a lecture about the origin of anti-Semitism given by Professor Bauer in Hawaii in 2005.

Yehuda Bauer’s talk starts about 16 minutes and 30 seconds into the video

Bauer initially comes across as a charming and open-minded person. He even makes some crucial observations. For the first 20 minutes it is possible to believe that one is witnessing a genuine, authentic intellectual.

“Anti-Semitism,” says Bauer, is a “wrong term” – there is no such a thing because “there are no Semites”. For Bauer, there are no Semitic people and he acknowledges that the Jews are not exactly a homogenous racial group anyway. He agrees that the ideology that was brought to life by Wilhelm Marr in the late 19th century is confusing. Anti-Semitism is nothing but “anti-Jewish” feelings or practice.

Where does anti-Semitism start? Interestingly enough, Bauer goes back to the Book of Esther. He suggests that it is an “allegory of fear of annihilation of the Diaspora Jew”. Esther, according to Bauer, is a tale of Jewish fear of their surrounding environment. “The origin of anti-Jewishness is the fact that Jewish civilization and culture is different to its surroundings”. I myself would take it further and argue that the Book of Esther is where Jewish lobbying and Jewish power matures into a vivid cultural paradigm. The moral of the story is quite clear. If Jews want to survive, they had better infiltrate the corridors of power. With Esther in mind, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Lord Levy and the Labour Friends of Israel look like embodiments of a deep Biblical and cultural ideology.

Yet, Bauer, the exemplary Judaeo-centric intellectual, fails to enlighten us on the specific ways in which Jewish civilization and culture are different. After all, if anti-Semitism is a unique form of hatred, then Jews must be uniquely different from all the other minorities that have endured prejudice across the centuries. I would expect an anti-Semitism scholar to elaborate on this crucial issue and suggest some answers. Bauer fails to do so. The reason is simple. Bauer is a Zionist and Zionism is a solution for the Diaspora Jews. If you do not want to be different, just come home and dwell with us on stolen Palestinian land.

Jews as a “unique race”

Bauer then moves on and asks: what are the types of crises that lead towards anti-Semitism? Christian anti-Semitism is not too problematic to grasp. “Christianity had to differentiate itself from Judaism,” says Bauer. However, Christianity is not a major problem. “Christianity doesn’t like Jews, it discriminates against Jews, yet due to its theology, it prevents genocide.” In fact, according to Bauer, the genocidal tendency in Europe emerged with the secularization of Christian communities. One is left with Christian anti-Semitism minus the theology that curtails murderous inclinations. Again, in Bauer’s trivial world, the Jews are innocent. It is always the Goyim who fail morally and ethically.

Racism wasn’t born in 19th-century Europe, says Bauer. “There is some evidence of racism in the Iberian Peninsula from the 15th century,” he says. Someone had better remind Bauer that, as far as Judaism is concerned he can trace evidence of racism in every religious source whether it is the Torah or the Talmud.

“Racism turned against the Jews,” says Bauer “because we are a different race”, because we are the “paradigmatic Other.” But then, contradicting himself, he also insists on dismantling the notion of race in general. “There is no such thing as race – humanity comes from Africa; we are all Africans.”

Let’s for a second agree with Bauer that race is a “pseudo-scientific concept”. Yet, the problem with race is not the attempt to divide the world into racial groups or trace people's anthropological origins. Race becomes a problematic issue when racism is introduced. Racism is the belief that one group of people is better than another. Devastatingly enough, Judaism and Zionism are both saturated with racism. Bauer is right to argue that Jews are not a race, but Jewish ideology – both secular and religious – is racist and supremacist to the bone.

“The Israel-Palestine conflict, how important is it?” “Very important,” says Bauer. Would a resolution of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict reduce anti-Semitism? Yes, concludes Bauer, but anti-Semitism won’t disappear. Bauer is probably correct. According to his philosophy, anti-Semitsm is the product of Jewish otherness and this fact may never change. As long as Jews maintain their chosen tribal identity they will always preserve their “difference”.

Bauer is rather concerned with the “anti-Semitism of the chattering classes – the media, intelligentsia, universities, doctors". He contends that we have seen a “sudden rise of it along with the second Intifada”. Obviously, the chances of Bauer winning an argument in intellectual circles is rather limited. However, it is pretty reasonable that thinkers within the media, the intelligentsia and academic circles would oppose the Jewish state, especially when evidence of Israeli genocidal barbarism is mounting.

Rules for criticizing Israel

It takes a few good minutes before Bauer, the proud owner of a rabid Zionist mind, shows his real colours. “Is it okay to criticize Israel?” Yes, for sure, says Bauer. The Israeli press are the first to criticize Israeli politics. Condemnation of Israel is not anti-Semitic unless one describes Israel as a “Nazi state”. This is exactly where Bauer relinquishes his last drop of intellectual integrity. Are there any rules that we must employ when criticizing the “Jewish State”? Is there any intellectual obligation that we have to take into consideration when referring to a racist Jew-only, expansionist, murderous state? Surely, the 45 per cent of Europeans who regard Israel as an exterminatory state do so for a reason. Israel and the Zionists had better learn to take responsibility for their actions. They may then understand why almost half of the Europeans equate them with Nazis.

Bauer says political criticism is legitimate yet when you turn the attack on the people and the state you then shift into “genocidal territory”. The truth of the matter is very simple. Within the Palestinian and anti-Zionist discourse no one I can think of suggests annihilating any Jews. Many of us argue that the Jewish state doesn’t have the right to exist at the expense of other people. Yet, we do not talk about or suggest the “extermination” of anyone. We are talking about a change of political setting that will mature into a “state of its people”. We believe in equal rights. We believe in the Palestinian right of return. If Jews want to form a Jew-only state, they should find a desert island to do so, or even better, a different planet.

Fighting anti-Semitism through influence and domination

How do you fight anti-Semitism? “The ADL and the AJC are doing excellent work,” says Bauer. But what about a hypothetical case of rising anti-Semitism in a different territory, for instance Russia? Could the ADL influence the Russian Federation? Bauer thinks not but Jews could make an impact “together with non-Jews”. Things changed in the Soviet Union because the USA mounted pressure on the USSR. “The Jews have to find allies and the allies will come when they understand that anti-Semitism just starts with the Jews.”

In some very simple words Bauer explains the current Zionist ideology. Jews must find new allies. They must bond with emerging powers. It is almost amusing that Bauer, an expert on anti-Semitism, fails to see that this is exactly the root cause of resentment of Jewish power. This endless seeking of influence and domination is exactly where Jews buy enemies.

Bauer ends his talk with a fierce attack on “radical Islam”. “Radical Islam is not just anti-Semitic, it is anti-Semitic in a genocidal way.” He then reads the famous Hamas Charter². He brings to life the quotes about Jewish power, world domination and so on. Some of the quotes are facts. Others sentences are accepted views. Some ideas are slightly over the top. But there is one thing Bauer fails to do: provide a single genocidal quote.

Bizarrely enough, Bauer ends his talk by saying that “since 1982 I have tried to convince the Israeli government to find allies to fight that thing. Only now things start to happen.” In fact, Yehuda Bauer himself proves that the Hamas Charter is a genuine description of Jewish tribal activism. The “seeking allies” which Bauer pushes for is exactly what the Hamas Charter refers to in the following lines:

They took advantage of key elements in unfolding events, and accumulated a huge and influential material wealth which they put to the service of implementing their [Zionist] dream. (Hamas Charter, 1988)

Is not finding “new allies” a reference to seeking influence via the media and political movements? The Hamas Charter describes it eloquently indeed:

...take over control of the world media such as news agencies, the press, publication houses, broadcasting and the like. [They also used this] wealth to stir revolutions in various parts of the globe in order to fulfill their interests and pick the fruits.” (Hamas Charter, 1988)

Considering the lecture was given in 2005, four years into the “war on terror” and two years into the Iraq war where American and British soldiers ended up fighting Zionist wars and combating the enemies of Israel, I think that by now we all have a glimpse of understanding of what Prof. Bauer refers to when he talks about “allies”.

Prof. Yehuda Bauer is an academic adviser to the Israeli Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem. Perhaps Bauer should reflect on the fact that the Holocaust Institute he represents is located on Mt Herzl on the land of the Palestinian village of Ein Karem, 1,400 metres south of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, the scene of a Jewish atrocity against the native Palestinians. If Bauer contemplates this fact alone he will understand why as many as 37.4 per cent of Europeans would find it hard to buy an old car from him, let alone his disingenuous Judaeo-centric, pseudo academic ranting.³

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Notes

1. Here are a few examples of early Zionists’ take on anti-Semitism: Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau and Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

2. “The enemies have been scheming for a long time, and they have consolidated their schemes, in order to achieve what they have achieved. They took advantage of key elements in unfolding events, and accumulated a huge and influential material wealth which they put to the service of implementing their dream. This wealth [permitted them to] take over control of the world media such as news agencies, the press, publication houses, broadcasting and the like. [They also used this] wealth to stir revolutions in various parts of the globe in order to fulfil their interests and pick the fruits.

“They stood behind the French and the communist revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like. All of them are destructive spying organizations. They also used the money to take over control of the imperialist states and made them colonize many countries in order to exploit the wealth of those countries and spread their corruption therein.

“As regards local and world wars, it has come to pass – and no one objects – that they stood behind World War I, so as to wipe out the Islamic caliphate. They collected material gains and took control of many sources of wealth. They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations in order to rule the world by means of that organization. They also stood behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading with war materials and prepared for the establishment of their state. They inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule the world by their intermediary.” (Article 22, Hamas Charter)

3. According to new research conducted by Bielefeld University, “about 37.4 per cent (Europeans) agree with the following statement: Considering Israel’s policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews.”

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Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli-born musician, writer and anti-racism campaigner. His latest jazz album, "In loving memory of America", was released on 1 March 2009 and can be purchased here.

Gilad Atzmon

December 16, 2009 Senior officials in Israel confirmed reports on Monday that a British court issued a warrant against opposition leader Mrs. Tzipi Livni for her role in orchestrating Israel's military offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip last December. British sources reported  that though a British court had issued an arrest warrant for Livni over war crimes committed in Gaza, it annulled it upon discovering she was not in the U.K. As many of us predicted for more than a while the tide is changing. Now Israeli political and military leaders are finally being chased. Haaretz reported today that Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the man who last week appointed a Zionist Jew to be the next British Ambassador to Israel, announced today that Britain would "no longer tolerate legal harassment of Israeli officials in this fashion." Miliband maintained that "the British law permitting judges to issue arrest warrants against foreign dignitaries without any prior knowledge or advice by a prosecutor must be reviewed and reformed". I find myself puzzled, why exactly this law is to be 'reviewed’ or 'reformed’. Is it because Britain decided to give up on its ethical tradition? Or is it because Miliband needs the support of the Labour Friends of Israel so he can be re-elected. Or is he just revealing an ever-present hidden cronyism? Miliband said that "the British government was determined that arrest threats against visitors of Livni's stature would not happen again." And I find myself bewildered again, what does he mean by "Livni’s stature’? Does he really mean that 'Livni like’ genocidal murderers are now welcome on British soil? "Israel is a strategic partner and a close friend of the United Kingdom. We are determined to protect and develop these ties," Miliband said. This obviously brings to mind the old saying 'tell me who your friends are, and I'll tell you who you are’. Considering Labours recent history (aka Illegal wars and foreign invasions) it is far from surprising that Miliband has so many friends in the Jewish state. And not just ordinary Israelis but actually the leading mass murderers. According to Haaretz,  Miliband called Livni to express his shock over the arrest warrant and pledged to address the matter immediately. Years ago, when we were young and naive our lecturers on politics insisted on telling us that judicial independence is crucial to the democratic process. Seemingly this principle is not highly regarded by Miliband who professes to spread democracy around the world. Miliband may benefit from spending some time with my son’s primary school teachers so he grasps what democracy stands for. Livni clarified that she "doesn't view the arrest warrant as a personal offense, but rather one that affects Israel as a whole." She is obviously right. The Israeli society is regarded by the growing European masses as a criminal exterminatory state. The arrest warrants against Israeli leaders are indeed just a symbolic act. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday issued a statement saying "We will not agree to a situation in which Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni will be summoned to the defendant's bench…We will not agree that IDF commanders and soldiers, who - heroically and in a moral fashion - defended our citizens against a brutal and criminal enemy, will be condemned as war criminals. We reject this absurdity outright." It is pretty obvious where Netanyahu is coming from, yet, the Israeli PM must fail to see that dropping white phosphorous on civilians is not exactly what Europeans and cultured people regard as 'heroism’ or 'moral fashion’. The Israeli Foreign Ministry is almost as amusing as its bigot Minister Avigdor Liberman. In an official statement the Ministry declared "We appreciate the British government's desire to play a central role in the Middle East peace process, and thus we expected it to translate the importance it gives its relations with Israel into actions." Let’s face it, intimidating is a common Israeli tactic. Yet, the fact that Israelis want us to believe that they are heading towards peace is less than comical, it is downright treacherous. Britain is not going to play a part in the 'peace process’ because there is no such process.   In response to the warrant, Livni deflecting personal guilt said Tuesday that "she would not accept any accusation that compared Israel Defense Forces soldiers to terrorists." She is actually correct. The so-called 'terrorists’ are in fact freedom fighters. Israel on the other hand is a racist expansionist state. Its military forces are engaged in a continuous crime against humanity. Israel is as vicious as Nazi Germany but in practice, it is far worse for it is a 'democracy’. Its murderous practices are a direct reflection of its peoples wishes expressed in a democratic vote. At the peak of the IDF's brutal Gaza campaign 94% of the Israelis supported the lethal measures against the Palestinian population. Israelis are not terrorists, they are actually the embodiment of terror.

Chris Marsden

WSWS, 17 December 2009

The issuing of a British arrest warrant for former Israeli Foreign Minister and current leader of the opposition Tzipi Livni is only the latest event confirming an international body of legal opinion that Israel should be tried for war crimes over its treatment of the Palestinians.

Livni was a member of the war cabinet during Operation Cast Lead, the offensive against Gaza between December 27, 2008 and January 18 this year. Some 1,400 Palestinians—the majority of them civilians, including 400 women and children—were killed, at least 5,000 people were injured, and 21,000 homes and other vital infrastructure were destroyed.

In October, the United Nations Human Rights Council endorsed a report by South African Judge Richard Goldstone stating that the war was "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability."

The warrant against Livni was issued by Westminster Magistrates' Court at the request of lawyers acting on behalf of 16 Palestinian plaintiffs. Livni was due to address the Jewish National Fund conference on December 13, but it is claimed she had cancelled her appearance some time ago due to a "scheduling conflict." However, the New York Times reported Thursday that Livni was tipped off about the warrant and the threat of arrest.

This is far from the first time that an Israeli political or military figure has faced the threat of prosecution. In 2001, a warrant was issued in Belgium for the arrest of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, former Army Chief-of-Staff Raphael Eitan and former head of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Northern Command, Amos Yaron, for their roles in the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982.

In September 2005, former head of IDF Southern Command Doron Almog faced arrest in the UK for ordering the demolition of 59 civilian Palestinian homes. The arrest warrant was supposedly issued secretly under UK law, but Israeli diplomats were tipped off and Almog refused to leave his plane for two hours until it took off again for Israel.

An arrest warrant was also issued by Spain for seven Israelis involved in the July 2002 bombing of an apartment building in Gaza City that killed Hamas military leader Salah Shehadeh and 14 civilians, including his wife and several children. Moshe Ya'alon, the Israeli deputy prime minister and strategic affairs minister, and the former defence minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, were amongst the accused.

In September, the Westminster Court was asked to issue an arrest warrant for Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, under the 1988 Criminal Justice Act, for his involvement in the Gaza War. The court accepted the assertion by the Foreign Office that he was a serving minister who would be meeting his British counterparts and therefore enjoyed immunity under the State Immunity Act of 1978.

Ex-ministers, not on official business, such as Livni, enjoy no such immunity. For this reason both Ya'alon and Avi Dichter, the public security minister and head of the Shin Bet security agency, have turned down invitations to events in Britain.

The government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has mounted a campaign to end all possibility of future arrests under universal jurisdiction provisions of the Geneva Conventions and other international laws. As far as Israel’s allies are concerned, however, Tel Aviv is kicking against an open door.

Whenever there has been a prosecution threatened against an Israeli official, Washington has brought pressure to bear to prevent it. This led to the dropping of Belgium’s charges against Sharon, et al and changes to Belgian law to lessen the possibility of similar prosecutions in the future. In June this year, a Spanish court shelved its investigation into the Gaza City bombings. In addition, the US led a block of six nations that voted against acceptance of the Goldstone report, while Britain and France abstained.

Britain’s response to Israel’s official protests against the warrant issued for Livni was more than merely fawning. It led to promises by Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Prime Minister Gordon Brown to change the law allowing non-citizens to be brought before British courts.

In the naked language of imperialist realpolitik, Miliband declared, "Israel is a strategic partner and a close friend of the United Kingdom. We are determined to protect and develop those ties." So much for Western claims to uphold international law and democratic rights!

As with the position taken by the US, much more is involved in the UK’s response than mere loyalty to an ally. There is a basic issue of self-preservation.

Time and again Israeli spokesmen have warned that the leaders of the major powers—including George Bush and Tony Blair over Iraq and Brown and President Barack Obama over Afghanistan—are threatened with prosecutions under universal jurisdiction provisions. Netanyahu himself warned, regarding Goldstone’s report, "It’s not just our problem… If they accused IDF officers, IDF commanders, IDF soldiers, IDF pilots and even leaders, they will accuse you too. What, NATO isn’t fighting in various places? What, Russia isn’t fighting in various places?"

The concept of universal jurisdiction allows prosecution by international or national courts when the case is deemed to be a crime against humanity and not likely to be tried in the allegedly guilty party’s own state. It underlies the creation of a range of institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC), established in 2002, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The US and other major powers have been happy to see these bodies utilized against those regimes they have targeted as hostile to their interests, such as Serbia. But like Israel, the US opposes universal jurisdiction over itself and therefore endorses neither the ICC nor the ICJ.

When Obama gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize last week, he argued explicitly for war as an instrument of US foreign policy, defending military action whose purpose "extends beyond self-defense or the defense of one nation against an aggressor." He insisted that such pre-emptive imperialist wars—of the kind already conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan—were essential to the US maintaining its position at the centre of the "architecture to keep the peace" set up in the aftermath of World War II.

This supposedly included abiding by "certain rules of conduct" and the US acting as "a standard bearer in the conduct of war." To this end, he made great play of having personally reaffirmed "America's commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions" and "other international laws of war."

This is one lie amongst many. Some newspapers have claimed that Spain and Britain pioneered the concept of universal jurisdiction, with the 1998 extradition warrant by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. In point of fact, the concept is rooted in the Geneva Conventions, adopted on August 12, 1949.

Regarding war crimes, the Conventions require signatory nations, such as Britain and the US, to pass the necessary laws and "provide effective penal sanctions" for persons "committing, or ordering to be committed" any "grave breaches" of the Conventions. Article 129 goes on to state that each signatory "shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts."

That is why the Goldstone report made an explicit call to countries that are signatories to the Conventions to use their "universal jurisdiction" to search for and prosecute those Israelis, as well as leaders of Hamas, it accused of war crimes.

In reality, the imperialist powers and their allies operate as a de facto international league of war criminals—dedicated to their mutual defence and self-preservation. That is why the US rejects universal jurisdiction when it comes to its friends, as well as its own politicians and military personnel.

Now Brown and Miliband have made clear that they too will abrogate the independence of the courts in order to prevent any prosecution for war crimes that runs contrary to the strategic interests of British imperialism. In doing so, they may hope to save themselves from the possibility of being brought to justice. But they should know that some crimes are too great for prosecution to be avoided forever.

Chris Marsden

By Huma Yusuf

In this courtroom drawing David Coleman Headley, left, pleads not guilty before U.S. District Judge Harry Leinenweber on December 9 in Chicago to charges that accuse him of conspiring in the deadly 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Verna Sadock/AP December 17, 2009 The Indian press is abuzz with news that Indian Home Ministry officials are investigating whether a terror suspect in the Mumbai attacks, David Headley from Chicago, was working as a 'double agent' with the US. The Indian press is abuzz with news that Indian Home Ministry officials have said they are investigating whether Pakistani-American terror suspect David Coleman Headley was working as a "double agent." Indian officials reportedly raised questions about Mr. Headley’s links with US intelligence agencies – even as another terror suspect accused of involvement in the 2008 Mumbai attacks was denied bail by a US federal court. These latest and widely-publicized accusations against Headley are expected to put pressure on India’s ruling Congress Party, which has emphasized closer ties with the US as part of its foreign policy. The US has not allowed Indian authorities to interrogate Headley over the Mumbai attacks, much to India's consternation. According to he Hindustan Times, Indian Home Ministry officials raised questions about Headley’s involvement with the American intelligence agency. India is investigating whether a Chicago man accused of helping plan the deadly 2008 Mumbai siege was a double agent working for the United States and a Pakistan-based militant group, an official said on Wednesday. "India is looking into whether Headley worked as a double agent. That is one of the many angles we are probing," a home ministry official said …. Indian media reported that New Delhi was suspicious because the United States had not shared vital information about Headley's movements prior to his arrest…. Headley could have been a member of the US Drug Enforcement Agency which allowed him to make frequent trips to Pakistan and gain access to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) militant group. The Times of India reports that Indian officials suspect that the CIA knew about Headley’s link with the banned Pakistani militant outfit, Lashkar-e-Taiba, one year before the Mumbai attacks, but did not alert Indian agencies. The [Indian] investigators believe that the US agencies kept away the information from India and never allowed the Pakistani-origin Headley to get "exposed". The 39-year old terror suspect, arrested by FBI for his role in Mumbai attacks, had visited India in March 2009 – four months after Mumbai attack carried out by LeT – but FBI still did not inform India that Headley is a LeT operative, apparently fearing he could be arrested in India. According to the Times of India, Indian officials will also be investigating how Headley’s credit card bills were settled in American banks while the suspect was traveling through India. The Hindu, an Indian daily, reports that "highly placed government sources said if [Headley] was given lesser punishment in a U.S. court, it would only strengthen India’s suspicion that he was a 'double agent'." As Indian officials debate the role played by Headley in carrying out terror attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, a federal US court has ruled that Headley’s alleged accomplice, Tahawwur Rana, is to remain in detention, reports The New York Times. A judge denied Pakistani-Canadian Mr. Rana bail on the ground that he is a 'flight risk’ with substantial resources and immigration expertise. According to the Hindustan Times, Rana is to be charged with a direct link to a terror conspiracy, and, if convicted, could face life imprisonment. But Indian analysts fear that US agencies will want to tap Rana for more intelligence on terrorist movement rather than allowing him to go to jail in Mumbai, which many Indians want. Some are speculating that having trapped Headley and turned him approver, the prosecution will use the 26/11 link in Monday's memorandum to do the same with Rana. He clearly dealt with retired Pakistani army officer Abdur Rehman Hasim Syed, alias "Pasha", a conduit to Ilyas Kashmiri, one of Pakistan's most-wanted terrorists. US may be more interested in forcing Rana, who ran an immigration service, to tell them if he used it to facilitate the movements of terrorists, and who and where they are. Headley's alleged involvement in the Mumbai attacks has recently strained US-India relations, a cornerstone of the ruling Congress Party's foreign policy. Last week, Indian authorities announced that they would be changing visa regulations for American tourists, requiring them to take a 60-day break between each exit and re-entry to India, reported the Hindustan Times.

By Jeremy Scahill

December 17, 2009

Contrary to popular belief, the US actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now—and that number is quickly rising.

By Jeremy Scahill

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, "the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history." That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff, "From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan.  During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000."

At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that’s right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.

The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.

Despite the massive number of contracts and contractors in Afghanistan, oversight is utterly lacking. "The increase in Afghanistan contracts has not seen a corresponding increase in contract management and oversight," according to McCaskill’s briefing paper. "In May 2009, DCMA [Defense Contract Management Agency] Director Charlie Williams told the Commission on Wartime Contracting that as many as 362 positions for Contracting Officer’s Representatives (CORs) in Afghanistan were currently vacant."

A former USAID official, Michael Walsh, the former director of USAID’s Office of Acquisition and Assistance and Chief Acquisition Officer, told the Commission that many USAID staff are "administering huge awards with limited knowledge of or experience with the rules and regulations." According to one USAID official, the agency is "sending too much money, too fast with too few people looking over how it is spent." As a result, the agency does not "know … where the money is going."

The Obama administration is continuing the Bush-era policy of hiring contractors to oversee contractors. According to the McCaskill memo:

In Afghanistan, USAID is relying on contractors to provide oversight of its large reconstruction and development projects.  According to information provided to the Subcommittee, International Relief and Development (IRD) was awarded a five-year contract in 2006 to oversee the $1.4 billion infrastructure contract awarded to a joint venture of the Louis Berger Group and Black and Veatch Special Projects.  USAID has also awarded a contract Checci and Company to provide support for contracts in Afghanistan.

The private security industry and the US government have pointed to the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker(SPOT) as evidence of greater government oversight of contractor activities. But McCaskill’s subcommittee found that system utterly lacking, stating: "The Subcommittee obtained current SPOT data showing that there are currently 1,123 State Department contractors and no USAID contractors working in Afghanistan." Remember, there are officially 14,000 USAID contractors and the official monitoring and tracking system found none of these people and less than half of the State Department contractors.

As for waste and abuse, the subcommittee says that the Defense Contract Audit Agency identified more than $950 million in questioned and unsupported costs submitted by Defense Department contracts for work in Afghanistan. That’s 16% of the total contract dollars reviewed.

Gilad Atzmon

December 17, 2009 Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe (Bogi) Yaalon told Ynet yesterday that "when the Arabs realized they cannot defeat us with their armies, they turned to terrorism and rockets." But they didn’t stop just there, "now they are realising that they cannot defeat us this way either, so they are taking the path of de-legitimization." Yaalon, is a retired  veteran IDF chief of staff. He knows pretty well that as things stand it is  the IDF that didn’t win a single war since 1967. Yes it killed many, it starved millions but it didn’t win a single war. As if this is not enough, in 2006 the IDF was humiliated in Lebanon by a tiny para-military organisation namely the Hezbollah. In its last Gaza campaign, the IDF failed to achieve any of its military targets (destroying the Hamas leadership,  dismantling its rocket launching capacity anf freeing a captive Israeli soldier). Considering the damage Operation Cast Lead inflicted on Israeli public relations, the IDF initiative better be seen as a total  disaster. Yaalon and his fellow retarded Hasbara campaigners better internalise the obvious fact: it is Israel's actions that de-legitimize the Jewish state and the Zionist cause. It is the Israeli actions and Israel’s Jewish supportive lobbies that bring the level of Jew hatred to a new height. Israel is not that young anymore. It is 61 years old and it better start to take responsibility for its actions. Addressing the recent arrest warrant issued against former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in England, Yaalon said he warned former British Prime Minister Tony Blair more than two years ago about the "flawed policy in respect to arrest warrants against myself and other senior Israeli officials." Yaalon probably doesn’t realise how vulnerable Blair’s situation in Britain is at the moment. Blair is not exactly a name that buys legitimacy in this country at this point in time. In his interview Yaalon maintained "we need to tell the Brits that we're in the same boat, as their commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan clearly say." Yaalon is partially correct. If to be precise Blair, Ehud Barak, Olmert, Yaalon, and Livni are indeed pushed together in the same symbolic boat, the boat that may eventually dock in The Hague for a very long while. However Yaalon is totally mistaken thinking that Brits and Israelis are in the same boat or sharing the same fate. The truth of the matter is obvious: while 94% of the Israelis supported IDF brutality in Gaza, the Brits are extremely unhappy with the presence of their soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. This includes the general public, British military generals, politicians, cabinet ministers, intellectuals and artists. Tony Blair indeed launched an illegal war. He sent British soldiers to fight a Zionist war. At the time his NO 1 fund-raiser was  Lord Cashpoint Levy. Blair's  support in the media came from Hasbara Author David Aaronovitch and the enthusiastic interventionist Nick Cohen. Day by day we learn more about Tony Blair’s pretext for war. We read the revelations of aides coming forward at the Chilcot Inquiry. I am not an expert in naval matters but looking at the mounting evidence against Blair, the Jewish Lobby and the Israeli leadership, I start to think that the boat may be just too overcrowded with so many rich Zionists, Israeli politicians and officers and one British PM. We may need a seriously big sea vessel, just to make sure we schlep them to justice in safety.

by Ernest Partridge / December 18th, 2009

Today, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and nineteen years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the military budget of the United States is larger than at any time during the Cold War and roughly equal to the total of all other military budgets throughout the world.

Why, in the midst of the greatest economic emergency in seventy years, with the public sector of the U.S. economy starved for funds required for economic recovery, and with urgent global climate and energy crises directly before us, have we failed to benefit from a “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War? Why are we instead engaged in two wars in nations that pose no threat to us?

It appears that Einstein was right: everything has changed except our modes of thinking, and thus, as he warned, “we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

The good news is that we have the means to avoid catastrophe. The far worse news is that there is little evidence that the political and economic structures in place will allow us to escape that catastrophe

TIT FOR TAT

Last September, President Obama announced that the United States was cancelling plans to establish a ballistic missile defense system (BMD) in Poland and the Czech Republic. This decision, which appalled Republicans and neo-cons in the U.S., along with many Czech and Polish politicians, delighted peace activists both in the U. S. and throughout the world.

Also delighted were the Russians, who had regarded the missile defense shield, first proposed by George Bush (the lesser), as a provocation, aimed at neutralizing the Russian strategic missile capability. The Russians were unconvinced by Bush’s assurance that the BMD was designed as a defense against a missile attack from Iran, a skepticism that was shared by many American critics.

Obama’s decision to cancel the BMD was shortly followed by a Russian announcement that it would not deploy missiles in the Baltic city of Kaliningrad, along with an indication that this decision was in response to Obama’s announcement regarding the bases in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Thus began the first two moves of a de-escalation strategy known to game-theorists and political scientists as “Tit for Tat,” whereby an initiation of a conciliatory act is responded to in kind, and so on reciprocally, until one player elects to take advantage of the cooperating opponent (i.e., “defects”).

This particular game came to an abrupt halt the following month when Vice President Biden, in a visit to the Czech Republic, assured the Czech President that the U.S. would, after all, install a “modified” missile defense shield.

One can only speculate as to what might have happened had the American/Russian Tit For Tat game continued. Following the Kaliningrad announcement, it was Obama’s “turn.” Instead of reneging on the original BMD decision, Obama might have announced that ICBMs would henceforth be equipped with in-flight “abort” mechanisms, to minimize the chance of an accidental nuclear war (which, as I have argued elsewhere, is the most likely cause of a global thermonuclear catastrophe).                                             More................................

by John Walsh / December 15th, 2009

I agree with Obama. Force is necessary at times to fight evil.

But what is “necessary” or “just” or justifiable force? Obama raises this in his Oslo speech, and we would do well to consider it. Justifiable force, most of us can probably agree, is that used in self-defense or to stop an assault on ourselves and our loved ones. And such assault we can define as evil.

By that definition Occupation is evil. And hence Obama the Occupier is evil.

We can fight back with violence if necessary against evil, and often that is the only way to win. Hence the Iraqis and Afghanis are in the right to use force against the American Occupation. Just as the Palestinians now and the Black South Africans earlier were in the right when they used violence against their Occupiers and Apartheid. And the Chinese revolution was in the right when it used force against the Western and Japanese Occupiers and against the murderous landlord class, which were killing Chinese by the millions. And so too the Indigenous peoples were right to fight back against the Europeans who conquered their lands, and the slaves of America were right to rise in rebellion against their masters. The American colonists were justified when they violently threw off the arbitrary rule of King George and his army of Occupation, in the same way as are Iraqi and AfPak freedom fighters today. Our Declaration of Independence, which recognizes this right, is not a pacifist document, and the anti-Empire movement cannot be pacifist either. Nor is the average American a pacifist, simply because pacifism does not mesh with the common sense idea of self-defense.

Let us add to that a rejection of the fiction that the US is in Central Asia to fight terrorism. The failure of liberals and the Democratic Party left, like Progressive Democrats of America, is that they accept this premise, a premise which figures prominently in Obama’s speech and a premise which is clearly a lie. Iraq did not have WMD, and the perpetrators of the war on Iraq knew that very well. So why the war? Many strands contributed to the war — the ambitions of the puppet master of much U.S. foreign policy, Israel, to wreak as much destruction as possible on Muslim lands; the desire to control energy resources so as to deprive the Empire’s economic competitors,¹ principally China, of these energy supplies; and the desire to control Central Asia militarily and hence to encircle China and to a lesser extent Russia. In sum these wars are all about maintaining and extending the U.S. Empire’s world domination as dictated by official, public U.S. policy to allow no nation to eclipse it as number one. The war on Iraq was never about terrorism; and it is not believable that the war on AfPak is about that either. Both are directed at the Empire’s economic adversaries, especially China.

So Obama is not fighting evil. Obama is the leader of an Evil that must be fought. Evil on a grand scale like war is not something built into men’s brains but can emerge from great power which is given to certain men, notably the President of the U.S. at this point in history, by virtue of social and political arrangements. This view of things is that of the radical Left or that of a strict Jeffersonian. But it is also consistent with Libertarianism since Libertarianism views force justifiable against those who assault us or otherwise do us grievous or mortal harm.²

The U.S. Empire has set itself not just against the Muslim peoples but against many of the peoples of the world — including the people of the US itself. If all else fails in curbing this Empire, the peoples of the world are entirely justified in rising up against it. The “left” wing of the Democratic Party, Obama’s disappointed supporters, has proved useless or worse in curbing Empire. The next step will surely be an independent anti-imperial electoral effort, and we shall see whether that works. If it does not, the Declaration of Independence tells us what is likely to follow.

1. Note that this is an economic not military competitor since there is no military power which can now compete with the US. [↩]
2. This is not so surprising since the Marxist view of the state and the Libertarian view are very much the same, no matter how much the two diverge on economic matters. [↩]

by Dr. Elias Akleh / December 16th, 2009

The Two States Solution (Israeli and Palestinian states) to the Zionist-Arab conflict has been, lately, revived as the only practical solution to the conflict. This solution, with all its embedded dangers, had been unjustly and illegally imposed by the UN in 1948 giving the Zionists a foot hold in the Arab World. It was, then, welcomed by the Zionists but rejected by the Arabs. Ironically, after 61 years and due to the changing balance of power, reviving this solution, now-a-days, is welcomed and sought for by the Arabs, but is rejected by Zionist Israel.

The 1993 Oslo Accords were supposed to be the solution of the conflict between the two parties. The Accords provided for the creation of a Palestinian Authority as a first step towards statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip side by side with Israeli state. A Palestinian state, in one form or another, would have been achieved in 1996, after which permanent agreements would have been negotiated leading to the Israeli withdrawal from the 1967 occupied territories. But Israeli intransigence, land confiscations, and colonial expansions had sabotaged all negotiations.

The Two State Solution has been used by late American administrations (Bush and Obama) as a sedative and a future-to-look-forward-to as a reward to neutralize any Arab opposition to American military adventurism in Afghanistan, Iraq, and possibility in Syria and Iran. Israel, meanwhile, takes the opportunity to expand its colonies at Palestinian expense.

Finally, after 18 years of fruitless peace negotiations, the Palestinian Authority recognized and officially declared the fact which every Palestinian knew, namely that the so-called peace negotiations were only meant for Israel, the stronger party, to impose its own solutions on the weaker Palestinian party while at the same time expanding its illegal colonies. Mahmoud Abbas, the President of Palestinian Authority, whose presidency expired last January, has petitioned the UN to recognize the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders the same way it recognized the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. Abbas and his entourage were seen visiting important countries trying to garner political support for the declaration of a Palestinian state.

The definition of a state includes, among others, a contiguous piece of land with internationally recognized borders, a free people, who can exercise their own will within an organized social, political and economical structures, with a free government that exercises total control over its natural resources, its borders, its air, and its sea, and can secure inner peace and protect, through arms when necessary, the security of its citizens from any invading party, and most importantly a thriving economy that can sustain such a state. Does this definition apply to the would-be Palestinian state?

Israel exercises total control over all aspects of Palestinian life: land, air, sea, water, and economy. Israel controls the movement of virtually every Palestinian and specifically the Palestinian Authority. To put it bluntly, Palestinian officials cannot even fart without Israeli permission. One wonders, then, what form would a Palestinian state take. Would it be viable or decaying? Sovereign or subservient? Free or besieged? Emancipated or dependent? Above all, would the establishment of a Palestinian state, at this time, solve or exacerbate the conflict?

Palestinian Authority envisions a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders (West Bank and Gaza Strip) with east Al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital, and a “just solution” to the Palestinian refugees’ situation. This is a huge change in the goals of the Fatah’s liberation program. Fatah’s present leadership, headed by the rigged elected Abbas, had degraded its honorable goals from liberating the whole Palestine down to accepting the establishment of a teratogenic state on less than 18% of Palestine proper, for Israel has annexed 80% of Palestine, has taken all of Jerusalem, and the separation wall is taking 42% of the rest of the land. Leaders of Palestinian Authority are still hoping to keep on serving their Western employers by playing the role of policing, subjugating, and containing Palestinians within their major cities. It seems that they have forgotten that Palestinians are struggling not only for a mere dwarfed state, but also for justice, for freedom, for equality, for return to their homeland, and for independent sovereignty.

It behooves Abbas and his gang, and the rest of the Arab leaders who have abandoned Palestinians, to remember that the Palestinian Cause does not belong only to Palestinians, but also to all Arabs. Legitimizing the right of existence of an expansionist colonial foreign entity in the heart of the Arab World is not a decision to be taken by few puppet leaders. Every Arab citizen has a stake in this decision.

Israeli leaders, on the other hand, although pretending to accept the Two State Solution, are introducing all kinds of unattainable conditions in order to sabotage the solution. They want to keep the unbalanced negotiations to milk as much would be internationally recognized political concession as they could from the weak Palestinian representatives. They are adhering to the main policy of their Zionist founders which states a “Jewish state is unthinkable without the compulsory transfer of Palestinians to other Arab states”. The Zionist project of establishing a Jewish-only Greater Israel is based, initially, on the expulsion of Palestinians out of Palestine into the neighboring Arab countries in order to implant Jews in the land. Then, while expanding Israel into the Greater Israel dream, drive the Palestinians and the rest of the Arabs, living within the area between the Nile and Euphrates, into far away countries. Zionists are taking the American model as their road map, where the so-called “American pioneers and forefathers” had annihilated the Indigenous peoples to establish the good old USA.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu expressed this policy eloquently: “Israel is not a bi-national state. It is the homeland of ANY JEW. And there is a broad consensus in Israel that the Palestinian refugee problem should be resolved outside Israel’s borders. Jews will come here and Palestinians will go there. That is the bases of a solution. Palestinians should have to make a final peace deal with The Jewish State of Israel.”

Zionists will never accept east Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. They want Jerusalem to be the eternal capital of Israel. In their final scheme Jerusalem is planned to become the Zionist capital of the whole world after the destruction of the al-Aqsa Mosque and the building of a Jewish temple in its place. This plan was hinted to in Ben Gurion’s statement: “There is no meaning to Israel without Jerusalem, and there is no meaning to Jerusalem without the temple.”

The Two State Solution is a dangerous and an unjust solution. It gives legitimacy to the law of the jungle; might is right. It takes the land and the homes of the Palestinians and gives them to armed-to-the-teeth Zionist terrorists. It vindicates the Zionists’ war crimes, crimes against humanity, their massacres of civilians, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as well as their war crimes against Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, and Lebanese. It denies those victims any right to pursue justice, their right of return to their homes, and their right for full reparations. It recognizes and legalizes the rogue state of Israel as a racist Jewish only state. It wipes all the history and cultures of the land before the times of Abraham, and recognizes only the shorter Jewish history and their so-called religious right to the land.

The proponents of the Two State Solution claim that it is the only practical and logical solution due to the present balance of power and due to the facts on the ground. Balance of power is represented in the WMD Israel possesses and has used against Palestinians, and in the American blind unconditional political, financial, and military support to Israel. The facts on the ground are represented by the Israeli illegal occupation of all Palestine, and the illegally scattered Israeli militarized colonies (settlements) in the West Bank. It is claimed that it is impractical to uproot already resident Zionist colonists (settlers) and to dismantle the illegal colonies.

It is worth mentioning that history demonstrates that the balance of power has never been fixed and is always changing. Today belongs to you, tomorrow belongs to your brother. As for facts on the ground, they are in daily flux. In 1947, facts on the ground showed Palestinian existence all over the land and no Zionist colonies. No one knows what facts on the ground will be in the future.

Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer of Palestinian descent, born in the town of Beit-Jala and now living in the US. He can be reached at: eakleh@ca.rr.com. Read other articles by Dr. Elias, or visit Dr. Elias's website.

by Gareth Porter / December 16th, 2009

WASHINGTON (IPS) — The Barack Obama administration is refusing to acknowledge an offer by the leadership of the Taliban in early December to give “legal guarantees” that it will not allow Afghanistan to be used for attacks on other countries.

The administration’s silence on the offer, despite a public statement by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton expressing scepticism about any Taliban offer to separate itself from al Qaeda, effectively leaves the door open to negotiating a deal with the Taliban based on such a proposal.

The Taliban, however, has chosen to interpret the Obama administration’s position as one of rejection of its offer.

The Taliban offer, included in a statement dated Dec. 4 and e-mailed to news organisations the following day, said the organisation has “no agenda of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and is ready to give legal guarantees if foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan”.

The statement did not mention al Qaeda by name or elaborate on what was meant by “legal guarantees” against such “meddling”, but it was an obvious response to past U.S. insistence that the U.S. war in Afghanistan is necessary to prevent al Qaeda from having a safe haven in Afghanistan once again.

It suggested that the Taliban is interested in negotiating an agreement with the United States involving a public Taliban renunciation of ties with al Qaeda, along with some undefined arrangements to enforce a ban al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan in return for a commitment to a timetable for withdrawal of foreign troops from the country.

Despite repeated queries by IPS to the State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley and to the National Security Council’s press office over the past week about whether either Secretary Clinton or President Obama had been informed about the Taliban offer, neither office has responded to the question.

Anand Gopal of the Wall Street Journal, whose Dec. 5 story on the Taliban message was the only one to report that initiative, asked a U.S. official earlier that day about the offer to provide “legal guarantees”.

The official, who had not been aware of the Taliban offer, responded with what was evidently previously prepared policy guidance casting doubt on the willingness of the Taliban to give up its ties with al Qaeda. “This is the same group that refused to give up bin Laden, even though they could have saved their country from war,” said the official. “They wouldn’t break with terrorists then, so why would we take them seriously now?”

The following day, asked by ABC News This Week host George Stephanopoulos about possible negotiations with “high level” Taliban leaders, Clinton said, “We don’t know yet.”

But then she made the same argument the unnamed U.S. official had made to Gopal on Saturday. “[W]e asked Mullah Omar to give up bin Laden before he went into Afghanistan after 9/11,” Clinton said, “and he wouldn’t do it. I don’t know why we think he would have changed by now.”

In the same ABC interview, Defence Secretary Robert Gates suggested that the Taliban would not be willing to negotiate on U.S. terms until after their “momentum” had been stopped.

“I think that the likelihood of the leadership of the Taliban, or senior leaders, being willing to accept the conditions Secretary Clinton just talked about,” Gates said, “depends in the first instance on reversing their momentum right now, and putting them in a position where they suddenly begin to realise that they’re likely to lose.”

In a statement issued two days after the Clinton-Gates appearance on ABC, the Taliban leadership, which now calls itself “Mujahideen”, posted another statement saying that what it called its “proposal” had been rejected by the United States.

The statement said, in part, “Washington turns down the constructive proposal of the leadership of Mujahideen,” and repeated its pledge to “ensure that the next government of the Muhajideen will not meddle in the internal affairs of other countries including the neighbours if the foreign troops pull out of Afghanistan.”

The fact that both the State Department and the NSC are now maintaining silence on the offer rather than repeating the Clinton-Gates expression of scepticism strongly suggests that the White House does not want to close the door publicly to negotiations with the Taliban linking troop withdrawal to renunciation of ties with al Qaeda, among other issues.

Last month, an even more explicit link between U.S. troop withdrawal and a severing by the Taliban of its ties with al Qaeda was made by a U.S. diplomat in Kabul.

In an article published Nov. 11, Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin, who was then visiting Kabul, quoted an unnamed U.S. official as saying, “If the Taliban made clear to us that they have broken with al Qaeda and that their own objectives were nonviolent and political — however abhorrent to us — we wouldn’t be keeping 68,000-plus troops here.”

That statement reflected an obvious willingness to entertain a negotiated settlement under which U.S. troops would be withdrawn and the Taliban would break with al Qaeda.

A significant faction within the Obama administration has sought to portray those who suggest that the Taliban might part ways with al Qaeda as deliberately deceiving the West.

Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution, who headed the administration’s policy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan last spring, recently said, “A lot of smoke is being thrown up to confuse people.”

But even the hard-liner Riedel concedes that the Pakistani Taliban’s attacks on the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) threaten the close relationship between the Afghan Taliban and ISI. The Pakistani Taliban continue to be closely allied with al Qaeda.

The Taliban began indicating it openness to negotiations with the United States and NATO in September 2007. But it began to hint publicly at its willingness to separate itself from al Qaeda in return for a troop withdrawal only three months ago.

Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s message for Eid al-Fitr in mid-September assured “all countries” that a Taliban state “will not extend its hand to jeopardise others, as it itself does not allow others to jeopardise us… Our goal is to gain independence of the country and establish a just Islamic system there.”

But the insurgent leadership has also emphasised that negotiations will depend on the U.S. willingness to withdraw troops. In anticipation of Obama’s announcement of a new U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan, Mullah Omar issued a 3,000-word statement Nov. 25 which said, “The people of Afghanistan will not agree to negotiations which prolongs and legitimises the invader’s military presence in our beloved country.”

“The invading Americans want Mujahidin to surrender under the pretext of negotiation,” it said.

That implied that the Taliban would negotiate if the U.S. did not insist on the acceptance of a U.S. military presence in the country.
The day after the Taliban proposal to Washington, Afghan President Hamid Karzai made a public plea to the United States to engage in direct negotiations with the Taliban leadership.

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Karzai said there is an “urgent need” for negotiations with the Taliban, and made it clear that the Obama administration had opposed such talks.

Karzai did not say explicitly that he wanted the United States to be at the table for such talks, but said, “Alone, we can’t do it.”

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006. Read other articles by Gareth, or visit Gareth's website.

Boycott Apartheid Israel

by Labor for Palestine / December 16th, 2009

Sanctions alone cannot eradicate apartheid; that task is ultimately left to the people of South Africa themselves. But economic pressure and political isolation of the South African government can hasten the day when justice and freedom reign in that troubled land.

–Richard L. Trumka, June 23, 1987

We call on other workers and unions to … do all that is necessary to ensure that they boycott all goods to and from Israel until Palestine is free.

–Congress of South African Trade Unions, February 3, 2009

We urge all international trade unions to heed the call of Palestinian civil society, including the trade union movement, by endorsing BDS. We further urge all trade unions and trade union federations to sever their links with the Histadrut, a Zionist organization that has always played a key role in perpetuating Israel’s occupation, colonization and system of racial discrimination, and that has justified and applauded Israel’s war crimes in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009.

–Palestinian Trade Union Movement Unanimously Confirms Support for BDS, November 25, 2009

*****

Dear Brother Trumka:

As labor and anti-apartheid activists, we strongly disagree with your October 27 speech denouncing the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

The BDS campaign was initiated in 2005 by Palestinian civil society — including its entire labor movement. Inspired by the international boycott that helped topple apartheid South Africa, it demands Palestinian self- determination, including an end to Israeli military occupation, the right of refugees to return to the land from which they have been ethnically cleansed since the Nakba of 1947-1948, and equal rights for all throughout historic Palestine.

Support for BDS has grown rapidly, especially since December 27, 2008, when Israel broke a truce with the democratically-elected Palestinian government and attacked Gaza. In the resulting massacre, Israel killed more than 1400 Palestinians, hundreds of them children; maimed and wounded thousands more; and utterly devastated Gaza’s infrastructure, including the Gaza headquarters of the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions.

In the best tradition of labor solidarity, South African and Australian dockworkers responded by refusing to handle Israeli cargo, and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) “call[ed] on other workers and unions to follow suit and to do all that is necessary to ensure that they boycott all goods to and from Israel until Palestine is free.”

Their action echoes the West Coast dock-workers who refused to handle cargo for Nazi Germany (1934) or fascist Italy (1935); those in Denmark and Sweden (1963), the San Francisco Bay Area (1984) and Liverpool (1988), who refused shipping for apartheid South Africa; those in Oakland who refused to load bombs for the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1978); and those at all twenty-nine West Coast ports who held a May Day strike against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (2008).

Since Gaza, the 2005 BDS call also been endorsed or reaffirmed by numerous other labor bodies around the world, including the trades union congresses of Ireland, Scotland and the UK; UNISON (UK); Transport and General Workers’ Union (UK); L’Union syndicale Solidaires Industrie (France); Canadian Union of Postal Workers; Canadian Union of Public Employees-Ontario; six Norwegian trade unions; and Intersindical Alternativa de Catallunya.

It is no accident that South African workers play a leading role in the BDS movement. They remember that Israel was apartheid South Africa’s closest ally. They agree with Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s observation that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is “worse than apartheid.” They recognize that the Gaza massacre mirrors the infamous Sharpeville massacre of 1960, which gave birth to an international boycott against South African apartheid.

This rising tide of labor support for BDS has only been further vindicated by Israel’s rejection of the war crimes indictments issued against it by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN’s Goldstone Report and numerous other bodies — many of them Israeli.

The BDS campaign is particularly relevant to workers in the United States.

In the past ten years alone, U.S. military aid to Israel was $17 billion; over the next decade, it will be another $30 billion. As in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. aircraft, white phosphorous and bullets kill and maim on behalf of the occupiers, while both Democratic and Republican politicians condone the slaughter. Amidst deepening economic crisis, workers in this country pay a staggering human and financial price for U.S.-Israeli war and occupation throughout the region.

Despite all of this, however, many U.S. labor officials — often without the knowledge or con-sent of union members — have ignored Palestinian appeals for justice. Instead, they continue to collaborate with the Histadrut, the Zionist labor federation that not only supported Israel’s war on Gaza, but which has spearheaded — and whitewashed — racism, apartheid, dispossession and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians since the 1920s.

They have invested billions of our union pension funds and retirement plans in State of Israel Bonds. They have actively encouraged the U.S. to provide the money and weapons that oppress Palestinian workers, and to ensure Israel’s role as watchdog for U.S. domination over the oil-rich Middle East.

The Jewish Labor Committee has exploited its carefully groomed “progressive” image by hurling hurls false accusations of “anti-Semitism” against those who challenge racism in the U.S. labor movement, who support affirmative action for workers of color, who criticize notorious “AFL-CIA” support U.S. war and empire, and — above all — who oppose apartheid Israel.

Thus, it was the JLC that in July 2007 mobilized top AFL-CIO and Change to Win officials to condemn British union support for BDS. It is the JLC that seeks to deflect outrage over the Gaza massacres by launching Trade Unions Linking Israel and Palestine, whose stated purpose is to sabotage the BDS campaign, while demanding boycotts against Iran, which — unlike Israel — receives no U.S. aid and has no “weapons of mass destruction.”

In the 1980s, as president of the United Mine Workers, you rightly argued that, “economic pressure and political isolation of the South African government can hasten the day when justice and freedom reign in that troubled land.” Two decades later, the cause of “justice and freedom” for Palestinians requires no less of you as president of the AFL-CIO. As trade unionists, we must immediately and completely:

1. Divest from State of Israel Bonds.

2. Support workers’ refusal to handle Israeli cargo.

3. Break ties with the racist Histadrut.

4. Oppose U.S. military and economic aid for Israel.

Initial Signers
(List in formation — *For identification only)

Monadel Herzallah, President, Arab American Union Members Council, California
Larry Adams, Co-Convener, New York City Labor Against the War; Former President, NPMHU L. 300*
Michael Letwin, Co-Convener, New York City Labor Against the War; Former President, UAW L. 2325/ALAA*; Al-Awda NY; International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network/Labor
Brenda Stokely, Co-Convener, New York City Labor Against the War; Former President, AFSCME DC 1707*; Co-Chair, Million Worker March Movement
Sam Weinstein, Former President, UWUA L. 132*; International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network/Labor
Stanley Heller, AFT L. 1547*, Delegate, CT Central Labor Council*
Marty Goodman, Former Executive Board Member, TWU L.100*
Fred Mason, Maryland AFL-CIO*
Clayola Brown, A. Philip Randolph Institute, AFL-CIO*
Frank Rosen, General Vice President (retired), UE*
Steve Zeltzer, Producer, Labor Video Project
Anthony Arnove, National Writers Union/UAW L.1981*
Mike Gimbel, Chair, Labor-Community Unity Committee, AFSCME DC 37 L. 375*; Delegate, NYC Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO*
Dave Welsh, Delegate, San Francisco Labor Council*
Lee Sustar, Chicago Labor Against the War
Timothy Kaminski, UAW L. 110* (ret.)
Janice Rothstein, AFSCME L. 3299*
Andy Griggs, UTLA*; LA Palestine Labor Solidarity Committee, Cafe Intifada
Emma Rosenthal, UTLA*; LA Palestine Labor Solidarity Committee, Cafe Intifada
Pete Nowicki, AFSCME L. 145*
Jim Crampton, 1199SEIU/UHWE*
Allan Fisher, AFT L. 2121, SF Community College*
Alan Benjamin, OPEIU L. 3*
Sharon Black, AFT L. 2*; Bailout the People Movement
Bill Balderson, Oakland Education Assn.*
Sarah Ringler, AFT L. 1936, PVFT*
Frank Pinto, UPTE-CWA L. 9119*
Steve Desavouret, TCU/IAM 6608*
Louis LaFortune, AFT L. 1936, PVFT*
Azalia Torres, Former Executive Bd. Member, UAW Local 2325/ALAA*
Patrick Langhenry, UAW Local 2325/ALAA*
Lucy Herschel, Delegate 1199SEIU/UHWE*
Carol Seligman, South San Francisco California Teachers Association*

International Endorsers

Rubina Jamil, Working Women Organization; All Pakistan Trade Union Federation*
Tony Leon, Secretary General, Venezuelan Union of Oil Industry Workers*