Meet one of the human rights workers who broke the blockade of the Gaza Strip on August 23, 2008. Paul Larudee, is a piano tuner from El Cerrito. He says what he saw from his trip is something he’ll never forget. Currently, about 1.5 million Palestinians are stranded in Gaza after the Israeli government blocked them from crossing the seas. Israeli authorities say the blockade is in reaction against security threats made by Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza. Richgail Enriquez has the full report (via).
Last week a friend of mine told me that she’d been invited to a debate at her University about the “Palestinian Mickey Mouse” Farfour, which is a Hamas-created children’s show that was broadcast on the Al-Quds TV in Gaza. The show was accused of conveying messages of hate by Israel, the US and a number of European countries. I never saw the show, but I remember the storm that was created because of it on a number of American and European networks. I remember also reading that there was some sort of mistranslation of what was being said on the show, which in a way had lead to the misinterpretations, and that none of these networks attacking the show “bothered to get independent verification of the translation“(1). This reminded me of the several occasions where I was confronted with questions about the Palestinian textbooks, and that they were breeding and spreading hate and Anti-Semitism.
Today’s vote in the Iraqi parliament related to the bilateral relationship between the United States and Iraq is likely to be reported in the Western media as a case of “Shiites” giving certain concessions to “Sunnis” in exchange for their support for a deal on the withdrawal of US forces. That is not an accurate account of what has been going on in the Iraqi parliament over the past few days.
What has taken place is that various Iraqi opposition forces inside the parliament have discovered the concept of leverage. Since 25 November there have been persistent reports that groups often critical of the Maliki government such as Tawafuq (Sunni Islamist), al-Hiwar al-Watani, al-Iraqiyya (secularist) and Fadila (Shiite Islamist) were demanding a “reform charter ” (wathiqat al-islah) in return for their support of the government regarding the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the US. Among the key demands was a pledge by the government to work to reform the constitution and the political system of the country more generally, as well as committing to revisit the laws relating to the general amnesty law and the treatment of former Baathists and to work for the reintegration of the awakening councils (al-sahwat) in the Iraqi security forces.
The prosecution succeeded, and that is the only way I can lead off on this embarrassing report. A jury of twelve Dallas residents believed a prosecution that I also witnessed, and handed down a conviction on all counts – of Muslim charities being directly supportive of Hamas after that group was declared a terrorist operation. I cannot say the defendants, including the Holy Land Foundation itself, were found guilty.
As I have reported, the courtroom procedure included allowing witnesses to testify without being identified because they were Israeli agents, allowing hearsay testimony in addition to both testimony and redirect that ranged into the territory of phantasmagorical, and a prosecution wrap-up that told jurors that they should rely on their memories instead of testimony and evidence, and that freedom of speech wasn’t allowed if that speech showed bad feelings. Demonstrations against Israeli occupation were the main focus of the U.S. prosecution.
When Mairead Maguire, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Northern Ireland, called me and asked me to join the sea-voyage of the humanitarian delegation from Larnaca (Cyprus) to Gaza to break the Israeli closure and to bring medicine to the besieged city, I answered positively without hesitation. It was to be the second sea-voyage to Gaza, the first having arrived in August.
I oppose the closure of Gaza because it is a collective punishment of a million and a half residents, including babies, children, women and old people, not to speak of sick people whom the siege prevents from getting medicine; a completely innocent population that is suffering because of no crime it has committed. Therefore I had no difficulty in agreeing to the invitation to be part of the international delegation. I also considered my participation to be important because I am a journalist, whose duty is to report from places to which most people do not have access.
A man sleeps inside the ruins of a Mogadishu building. The depopulated Somali capital is awash in threats, intimidation and political assassinations. (Tribune photo by Kuni Takahashi / October 7, 2007)
America’s hidden war in Somalia
By Paul Salopek, Chicago Tribune, 24 November 2008
BERBERA, Somalia – To glimpse America’s secret war in Africa, you must bang with a rock on the iron gate of the prison in this remote port in northern Somalia. A sleepy guard will yank open a rusty deadbolt. Then, you ask to speak to an inmate named Mohamed Ali Isse.
Isse, 36, is a convicted murderer and jihadist. He is known among his fellow prisoners, with grudging awe, as “The Man with the American Thing in His Leg.”
Four cheers for the feisty Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of our special Middle East envoy, Tony Blair. But what exactly is he doing? Desperately searching for his legacy I suppose, like the weapons of mass destruction hidden in the sands somewhere, waiting to be unearthed.
Meanwhile Booth is emerging as one of the few voices in the wilderness bringing up the plight of Gaza as Israel efficiently chokes and suffocates the tiny strip of land, the hellish home to Palestinians, of which 60 per cent of its inhabitants are children. This summer Booth joined activists on a ship – including an 80-year-old Catholic nun from the United States and an Israeli peacenik – to take aid to these sick and hungry. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused them of “supporting the regime of a terrorist organisation in Gaza”. This week, Booth has been once again speaking passionately in public about what she witnessed.
Chicago — President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden officially announced key members of their economic team today, naming Timothy Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury and Lawrence Summers as Director of the National Economic Council. Obama and Biden also named Christina Romer as Chair of the Council of Economic advisors, and named Melody Barnes and Heather Higginbottom to serve as Director and Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council.
Obama and the Derivatives Merchants
Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report, 15 October 2008
“…in many respects, working with [Barack Obama] will be very much like working with President Clinton…. I think he will be just fine.” – Top Obama adviser Robert Rubin, former Clinton Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs chair, currently an executive with Citigroup, August 28, 2008.
[...]
How bizarre it is to observe Obama playing the people’s crusader in the morning and colluding with his top economic advisers, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, in the afternoon. In February 1999, Rubin and Summers flanked Fed Chief Alan Greenspan on the cover of Time magazine, heralded as, “The Committee to Save the World.” Summers was then Secretary of the Treasury for Bill Clinton, having succeeded his mentor, Rubin, in that office. Together with Greenspan, the trio had in the previous year labored successfully to safeguard “derivatives,” the exotic “ticking time bomb” financial instruments, from federal regulation. Less than a decade later, unregulated derivatives would expand – like the Mother of All Bubbles – to notional values 10 to 15 times greater than the world’s total economic output. The global order would be brought to its knees, in a financial conflagration that has just begun to show its full dimensions and destructive potential. (See New York Times, October 9, “Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy,”)
Related: Netanyahu hires 2 of Obama’s advisors: After designing website similar to that of US president-elect, Likud chairman recruits Obama’s consultants to help him in his election campaign
Related: Bibi Netanyahu ranks high … as racist demagogue
By Larry Derfner, The Jewish Journal, 18 January 2007
By rights, Binyamin Netanyahu, which every poll says is by far the most popular politician in Israel, should be ranked with Jean Le Pen, Jorge Haider and the rest of the Western world’s racist demagogues.
But he won’t be, because anti-Arab racism in Israel is either supported or strategically ignored by the mainstream of the Jewish world and pretty much taken for granted by the non-Jewish world.
The pro-Obama, self-described Marxist left has a tough job on its hands. Well before taking office, Obama has made it painfully obvious that his administration will be in effect Clinton’s third term. With Mrs. Clinton about to assume the office of Secretary of State, a perfect symbol of the kind of bellicose foreign policy that the dovish President-elect campaigned against, one wonders whether the primary was just some kind of elaborate deception foisted on a gullible public yearning for change.
This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s White House
By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet, 20 November 2008
Michele Flournoy: Flournoy and former Clinton Deputy Defense Secretary John White are co-heading Obama’s defense transition team. Flournoy was a senior Clinton appointee at the Pentagon. She currently runs the Center for a New American Security, a center-right think-tank. There is speculation that Obama could eventually name her as the first woman to serve as defense secretary. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported: “While at CNAS, Flournoy helped to write a report that called for reducing the open-ended American military commitment in Iraq and replacing it with a policy of ‘conditional engagement’ there. Significantly, the paper rejected the idea of withdrawing troops according to the sort of a fixed timeline that Obama espoused during the presidential campaign. Obama has in recent weeks signaled that he was willing to shelve the idea, bringing him more in line with Flournoy’s thinking.” Flournoy has also worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century.
[...]
“Twenty-three senators and 133 House members who voted against the war — and countless other notable individuals who spoke out against it and the dubious claims leading to war — are apparently not even being considered for these crucial positions,” observes Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy. This includes dozens of former military and intelligence officials who spoke out forcefully against the war and continue to oppose militaristic policy, as well as credible national security experts who have articulated their visions for a foreign policy based on justice.
Barry and his cabinet will provide a valuable lesson in the rise and fall of American war criminals.
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