No hope or change from Obama-Netanyahu meeting
May 21st, 2009 § 1 Comment
President Barack Obama talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in the Oval Office, 18 May 2009. (Pete Souza/White House Photo)
The Lobby has spoken once again, as in ’76 when Gerald Ford’s threat to ‘reassess’ US relation with Israel were preempted by an AIPAC letter signed by more than seventy Senators advising against such move, Obama has been served with a similar letter even though in his case there hasn’t even been a hint of any departure from US policy. Notice that he did not use the word ‘occupation’ once. As Ali Abunimah reveals, behind all the hype about alleged differences beween the two leaders, it appears little has changed.
Seldom has an encounter between an American and Israeli leader been as hyped as this week’s meeting between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As expected, Obama committed himself to diplomacy with Iran and pledged an enormous effort to achieve a two-state solution. Netanyahu continued to incite confrontation with Iran and refused to commit himself to a Palestinian state.
On the surface it may seem there are real differences and that the forces arrayed on each side — including the formidable Israel lobby — are gearing up for an epic battle to determine the fate of US-Israeli relations.
Obama’s Foreign Policy Failures: Diplomacy, Militarism and Imagery – James Petras
May 21st, 2009 § 7 Comments
James Petras enumerates how the Obama administration’s policies constitute more continuity than change, and thus continue and compound Bush-era failures.
President Obama’s greatest foreign policy successes are found in the reports of the mass media. His greatest failures go unreported, but are of great consequence. A survey of the major foreign policy priorities of the White House reveals a continuous series of major setbacks, which call into question the principal objectives and methods pursued by the Obama regime.
These are in order of importance:
1) Washington’s attempt to push for a joint economic stimulus program among the 20 biggest economies at the G-20 meeting in April 2009;
2) Calls for a major military commitment from NATO to increase the number of combat troops in conflict zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan to complement the additional 21,000 US troop buildup (Financial Times April 12, 2009 p.7);
3) Plans to forge closer political and diplomatic relations among the countries of the Americas based on the pursuit of a common agenda, including the continued exclusion of Cuba and isolation of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador (La Jornada (Mex. D.F.) April 20, 2009);
4) Weakening, isolating and pressuring Iran through a mixture of diplomatic gestures and tightening economic sanctions to surrender its nuclear energy program (Financial Times, April 16/17, 2009 p. 7);
‘Work for us or we will say you are a terrorist’
May 21st, 2009 § 3 Comments
Mohamed Aden, 25, who was approached by a fake postman (TERI PENGILLEY)
Robert Verkaik, Law Editor for the Independent reveals ‘How MI5 blackmails British Muslims‘.
Five Muslim community workers have accused MI5 of waging a campaign of blackmail and harassment in an attempt to recruit them as informants.
The men claim they were given a choice of working for the Security Service or face detention and harassment in the UK and overseas.
They have made official complaints to the police, to the body which oversees the work of the Security Service and to their local MP Frank Dobson. Now they have decided to speak publicly about their experiences in the hope that publicity will stop similar tactics being used in the future.
Intelligence gathered by informers is crucial to stopping further terror outrages, but the men’s allegations raise concerns about the coercion of young Muslim men by the Security Service and the damage this does to the gathering of information in the future.
G20, the Financial Crisis and Neoliberalism
May 21st, 2009 § Leave a Comment
An in-depth interview with Professor David Harvey, the famous Marxist geographer and one of the most compelling critics of the neoliberal architecture of the global economy. His brilliant book A Brief History of Neoliberalism is key to understanding the complex historical and ideological origins of the present economic crisis and the global consolidation of the political project of neoliberalism since the late 1970s.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is the—what is being proposed by the G20 leaders? And what needs to be done in this country?
DAVID HARVEY: I think Tony Benn was exactly right in the earlier segment, and it’s a great pleasure to be here after him. I was always an admirer of his.
What they’re trying to do is to reinvent the same system. And I think this is a collective concern, and
there’s a lot of squabbling on the details, as it were. But the fundamental argument they are making is, how can we actually reconstitute the same sort of capitalism we had and have had over the last thirty years in a slightly more regulated, benevolent form, but don’t challenge the fundamentals? And I think it’s time we challenge the fundamentals.
AMY GOODMAN: What are those fundamentals?
The Plot Against Hamas and Khalid Mishal
May 20th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Khalid Mishal, leader of Hamas' political wing
Paul McGeough’s Kill Khalid on the rise to prominence of the Hamas leader Mishal is examined in The London Review of Books this month. This astute analysis by Adam Shatz helps to dispel some of the myths propagated towards the Palestinian resistance group and its leader as a mindless Islamist entity hellbent on eradicating world Jewry, instead portraying Mishal as a shrewd realist politician. For instance, it is often circulated by Israel and its western backers that Hamas is “committed to the destruction of Israel”, making reference to its renowned 1988 charter. Much like the misquoted and possibly misinterpreted words attributed to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad towards Israel, the charter in fact makes calls to ‘raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’, which certainly falls short of a complete annihilation of Jews in the region that is often suggested. However even if this early manifesto does imply such extreme measures, Shatz notes that its fails to reflect the contemporary thinking of the group, with Mishal reportedly viewing that particular article as an embarrassment. Other important aspects of the group (often absent in the rhetoric of the mainstream western narrative towards Israel-Palestine) is Mishal’s announcement in Mecca in 2007 that the group would be willing to begin negotiation over a peace settlement based on a pre-1967 borders two-state solution (which would not necessarily be the permanent solution). Another is and the offering of a ‘Hudna’, a truce lasting as long as 30 years. Although the Obama administration’s language has softened, the relative isolation towards Hamas remains. While Hamas retains such popular support amongst Palestinians in occupied lands, the legitimacy of any peace talks will be questionable.
In early September 1997, Danny Yatom, the head of Mossad, arranged a special screening for Binyamin Netanyahu, who was then prime minister. The film, shot on the streets of Tel Aviv, presented the plan for the assassination of Khalid Mishal, the head of Hamas’s political bureau in Amman. Twenty-one Israelis had died in Hamas suicide attacks in the previous two months, and Netanyahu was eager for revenge. The peace process might be undermined, but that would be just as well: Netanyahu shared Hamas’s hostility to Oslo, and had compared trading land for peace to appeasement with Hitler. Mishal, Paul McGeough writes in Kill Khalid, his gripping account of the plot, was selected from a list of targets by Netanyahu not only because he was suspected of orchestrating the suicide bomb campaign, but because he made an articulate case for Hamas’s position, in a suit rather than clerical robes: ‘he was too credible as an emerging leader of Hamas, persuasive even. He had to be taken out.’ « Read the rest of this entry »
Harman’s plan for the disintegration of Iran
May 20th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Jane Harman, the US congresswoman who was caught on an FBI wiretap scheming with an Israeli agent, has not only kept her job, she now goes to AIPAC to thumb her nose at the US justice system and proposes a new war for Israel. Drawing on Ben Gurion’s old strategy for a Greater Middle East, Harman is proposing the disintegration of the Iranian state into its ethnic constituents. Here is what she told the AIPAC gathering on 3 May 2009:
The Persian population in Iran is not a majority, it is a plurality. There are many different, diverse, and disagreeing populations inside Iran and an obvious strategy, which I believe is a good strategy, is to separate those populations.
Obama’s Prison
May 20th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Various forms of water torture including what is now known as waterboarding were used during the infamous Spanish Inquisition trial process.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky argued that the “degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” What does it mean when certain prisons are located on occupied territory and the treatment of prisoners are reminiscent of torture techniques used during the Spanish Inquisition?
President Obama inherited the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp as just one among the many follies of the Bush Administration. Not only is “Gitmo” terrible for Public Relations, it is also illegal according to international law and symbolic of the failure of the Bush Administration’s policies as a whole. Indeed, although this prison supposedly holds what former VP Dick Cheney refers to as “really bad men,” the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden are still unknown and America’s farcical “War on Terror” has only succeeded in creating more terrorists. That propagandistic argument that is used to justify torture is void for this reason too, for even if torturing one person could help save the lives of many people, how useful is that when you are simultaneously enraging thousands more into becoming your enemy?
Even though the Bush Administration has been added to the pages of America’s dark past of foreign policy, Obama’s failure to gain leverage on his celebrated move to begin the process of shutting down the illegal detention centre continues to baffle even his most ardent supporters. Besides facing stark opposition from Republicans, even his fellow Senate Democrats have resisted his attempts.
It’s a Miracle
May 20th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Roger Waters is a prophet. This is from Amused to Death, an album that was inspired by Neil Postman’s classic book Amusing Ourselves to Death. (gracias Judith)
It’s A Miracle — by Roger Waters
Torture Continues at Guantánamo Bay
May 20th, 2009 § 4 Comments
Steve Bell on Military Commissions
An important piece of investigative journalism by Jeremy Scahill exposing the brutal practices of the ‘Immediate Reaction Force’ - better known to the prisoners as the ‘Extreme Repression Force’ – at Guantanamo. Based on new evidence obtained by the Spanish court which initiated criminal proceedings against John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith several weeks ago, prisoners speak of routine terror which include breaking bones, gouging eyes, squeezing testicles, and “dousing” them with chemicals. The repression is said to have only intensified since Obama got into office, who reinstated the use of ‘military commissions‘ last week, deemed unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.
As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.
More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.
The Disease of Permanent War
May 20th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Cold War relic: An F-111 fighter jet on display at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, Calif. (AP photo / Rich Pedroncelli)
A stirring warning from Chris Hedges on the perils of permanent war.
The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy. The liberal, democratic forces, tasked with maintaining an open society, become impotent. The collapse of liberalism, whether in imperial Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Weimar Germany, ushers in an age of moral nihilism. This moral nihilism comes is many colors and hues. It rants and thunders in a variety of slogans, languages and ideologies. It can manifest itself in fascist salutes, communist show trials or Christian crusades. It is, at its core, all the same. It is the crude, terrifying tirade of mediocrities who find their identities and power in the perpetuation of permanent war.
It was a decline into permanent war, not Islam, which killed the liberal, democratic movements in the Arab world, ones that held great promise in the early part of the 20th century in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Iran. It is a state of permanent war that is finishing off the liberal traditions in Israel and the United States. The moral and intellectual trolls—the Dick Cheneys, the Avigdor Liebermans, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads—personify the moral nihilism of perpetual war. They manipulate fear and paranoia. They abolish civil liberties in the name of national security. They crush legitimate dissent. They bilk state treasuries. They stoke racism.
“War,” Randolph Bourne commented acidly, “is the health of the state.”
