Free Palestine- Free Yourself
August 9th, 2009 § 5 Comments
I’ve probably told this story — orally — hundreds of times in the past nine months. It’s a story I find fascinating, and I ask it of every Israeli I meet: How did you become a dissident?
A Zionist Upbringing
I was born and raised in Israel. A daughter to “Atheist Jews”, secular Zionists, white collar, upper middle class, capitalists, Neo-Liberals, who “built this country”. I’ve had many internal struggles with these values and identity labels. Always self aware, at some point I decided to just accept that I will never be in the mainstream, and to accept the “rebel without a cause” label I’ve been given by my family.
Through the Zionist thicket of my own family’s education, school, and the Israeli media, I found myself rootless, alone, but most of all numb. It seems to me that the biggest achievement of Zionist propaganda is to make the majority of Israelis numb and confused. I would despise school (which I often described as “oppressive”), my army service (“jail with better visiting conditions”), and national ceremony (“disgusting solidarity”).
“Human Beings are Members of a Whole”: Protecting the Iranian Civil Society
August 9th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Statement by 40 Engaged Scholars
Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul.
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.
– A poem by the Persian poet Sa’adi (1210 – 1290)
gracing the entrance of the Hall of Nations of the
United Nations building in New York City
If we speak out against the threat of force against Iran (regarding the nuclear conflict) and warn against a military strike, we cannot be silent on the use of force in Iran itself against its own civil society. For solidarity with the civil society and a peaceful order in the region constitute the primary concern of our efforts. If we condemn foreign sanctions against the Iranian people, we deplore all the more domestic sanctions directed at peaceful demonstrators, journalists, trade unionists, professors, students and others. Thereby the government deprives itself from the domestic basis needed against foreign threats.
Not only as individuals but also conjointly as a group of engaged scholars, we want to announce our resolute protest against the brutal clampdown of demonstrators and against the mass arrests, and strongly advise a peaceful dialogue with the civil society. We call upon the government to release all political prisoners of the last few weeks – amongst them many professors – and to seek dialogue with precisely those persons as moderators of the civil society. Freedom of opinion and the right to demonstrate – cornerstones of the UN Charter of Human Rights to which Iran is a signatory – are being massively violated in today’s Iran.
We strongly remind that the state of siege and the continuing threat of force that have emanated from foreign governments once again fatally demonstrate how thereby the space for a democratic development in Iran are being reduced.
Freedom of Speech Framed
August 8th, 2009 § 4 Comments
Darius Guppy, left, with Earl Spencer
The Independent has offered Darius Guppy the opportunity to write back against the dominant ‘Iran narrative’ in the Western media. Guppy argues that there is no hard evidence for rigging in the recent Iranian presidential elections (an argument made here and here too), and criticises the easy assumption that Ahmadinejad’s victory was fraudulent, as well as, more generally, the West’s usual double standards when it comes to the Muslim world. He questions the complacent expectation that most young Iranians wish to emulate our ‘free’ society, and contrasts the UK unfavourably with Iran in terms of authoritarian surveillance, public ethics, and culture. “Visit Iran and you will see a people polite, hospitable, cultured, noble and brave,” he writes. “Look at Britain’s urban hell and you will see young girls and boys armed with knives, swearing, half naked, vomiting the previous night’s attempt to stifle their pain and their emptiness.” Guppy here is employing the rant genre, as I often do myself. Like all op-ed journalism, his piece is necessarily partial and incomplete. He generalises, and fails to mention, for example, Iran’s galloping heroin problem. But he surely makes some very good points, and makes them very eloquently. The Independent is to be congratulated for giving him the space.
Or is it? Two paragraphs into the online piece, the reader is directed to another article which mocks the author. This framing piece doesn’t engage Guppy’s arguments but simply launches ad hominem attacks against him. It turns out that Guppy was imprisoned for insurance fraud in 1993. This is relevant information, but not so relevant that we need to be informed even before we’ve finished Guppy’s piece. Then the Independent’s omniscient voice implies Guppy is not a genuine enough native informant because he’s only half Iranian. (Guppy does use the rhetorical ‘we’ in his piece, but also describes himself as an old Etonian. He isn’t pretending to be anything he isn’t.) The framing article also subtly distorts Guppy’s perspective, for instance by claiming that he mocks the idea that Iranians long for democracy. In Guppy’s article, democracy is written inside inverted commas – ‘democracy’. In other words, Guppy is not writing against democracy, but against the propagandist use of the word in the West.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Coup generals break silence in hopes that world will understand them
August 7th, 2009 § 2 Comments
First published in Narco News, 6 August 2009
General Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, who contrary to his frequent media appearances has in fact been silent since June 28.
In a Garifuna village on the Caribbean coast of Honduras yesterday, I asked a young man sweeping the floor of the village disco if he favored the return to power of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. The man shrugged and said that as long as there was peace it did not matter who was president, thus indicating a failure to appreciate the link between military coups and peace outlined on page 6 of yesterday’s La Prensa, the headline of which proclaimed that the Honduran armed forces had blocked Hugo Chávez’ expansionist designs.
Untermenschen
August 5th, 2009 § 3 Comments
This is Jana Hannoun. I met her after a Palestine Literature Festival event at the British Council in occupied east Jerusalem. We were at the British Council because our original venue, the Palestine National Theatre, had been closed down by the Israeli occupiers. The British Council is just down the road from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, where Jana lived, and which Israel wants to Judaize.
At five o clock in the morning on August 2nd, the Hannoun and al-Ghawe families were physically thrown out of their homes by Zionist troops. 53 people, including 19 children, were made homeless, and their toys and clothes were strewn in the street. They were made homeless because they are members of the wrong ethnic group – because they are Arabs, the natives of Palestine, and not invading Jews. Their homes were immediately occupied by foreign settlers.
This, of course, is fascism. Because of a myth of national origin (and it is a myth – the vast majority of Jews originate from eastern Europe and north Africa, not from Palestine, not even two thousand years ago), the Canaanite-Arab Palestinians are designated untermenschen to be driven out. The Sheikh Jarrah families have experienced this before, as they are refugees from Haifa and west Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed by Zionist terrorist militias in 1948. The UN built homes for them in east Jerusalem after 1948, and that half of the city fell too in 1967. In this report, Jana is interviewed. More videos of the theft can be viewed here.
An Unholy Alliance
August 4th, 2009 § 11 Comments
I always talk about Israeli pacifists and their inability to see the barriers they place on the Palestinian road to justice, dignity, and human rights. Today I’d like to talk about a much more appalling occurrence; Amnesty International supporting Leonard Cohen’s breach of the boycott of Israel.
The Leonard Cohen Myth
Personally, it’s hard for me to understand the disillusionment of pro-Palestinian Leonard Cohen fans. In the history of his involvement with Israel, Cohen has always sided with Israel, or made statements of officially taking no sides, when his side was rather obvious:
I don’t want to speak of wars or sides … Personal process is one thing, it’s blood, it’s the identification one feels with their roots and their origins. The militarism I practice as a person and a writer is another thing. … I don’t wish to speak about war.
In case I’m misconstruing my information, I’ll repeat the quote I’ve embedded on my front page and have, personally, had no choice but to live by:
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. (Desmund Tutu)
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Mel Zelaya sacrificed by coup resistance in hometown
August 4th, 2009 § 3 Comments
Zelaya’s army of lynchers, however, continues to think he is important. (Photo: AFP)
Last night in the Honduran town of Catacamas, home of ousted President Manuel Zelaya in the department of Olancho, a meeting of coup resistance organizers took place at Colegio 18 de Noviembre. A number of teachers were in attendance, thus confirming the political orientation of the nation’s educators, who had already raised suspicions by repeatedly cancelling Thursday and Friday classes in order to demonstrate.
Further evidence of the squandering of intellectual opportunities by democracy was a stack of cardboard ballot boxes labelled “Encuesta de opinión, 28 de junio de 2009” in the corner of the Catacamas schoolroom where the meeting was held. Not held, of course, was the June 28 poll proposed by Zelaya, as it had coincided with his geographic repositioning by the Honduran military. A rumor has surfaced among certain Honduran sectors that funds squandered by Zelaya in publicity for his poll may have come from Venezuela, although it has not been established why it matters if Zelaya wastes Venezuelan money.
Our Dead Culture
August 3rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges says America is gone. It’s lost to consumer culture and the cult of the self. We’re barreling towards collapse. Hedges points to Michael Jackson’s funeral, made into a maudlin form of entertainment where a celebrity attendee like Magic Johnson could plug his sponsor, A.K.A Kentucky Fried Chicken. In Hedges’ view of this world, lies and manipulation win over truth, as evidenced everywhere from Wall Street to reality television. Over time, says Hedges, corporations have morphed our consumption into a constant, nagging compulsion. One homogenous culture sold to us by large companies has stamped out our nation’s distinct regional differences, and there’s no turning back.
In this talk at Town Hall Seattle, Hedges makes his case against consumerism, celebrity culture, mainstream media and unfettered capitalism. His latest book is “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.” Elliott Bay Book Company co–sponsored his talk on July 22, 2009.
Racist Expropriation in Jerusalem
August 3rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
The Israeli military has forcibily evicted two Palestinian families from an East Jerusalem neighbourhood. The families have lived in Sheikh Jarrah since 1956 but the racist entity’s court ruled that the homes belonged to Jews. Al Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros reports from occupied East Jerusalem.
What Good Intentions Wrought
August 2nd, 2009 § 6 Comments
Sarah Chayes on Bill Moyers Diary
There is that old cliche that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Few of the worst deeds in history have been carried out with intentions that were purely evil. The perceived goodness of intentions being subjective, nothing is usually more dangerous than destructive force armed with moral certitude. In The Irony of American History, theologian Reinhold Neibhur wrote:
“Our moral perils are not those of concsious malice or the explicit lust for power. They are the perils which can be understood only if we realize the ironic tendency of virtues to turn into vices when too complacently relied on; and of power to become vexatious if the wisdom which directs it is trusted too confidently.”
As Tom Hayden had recently pointed out one of Pentagon’s leading backers in its war on Afghanistan has been the Feminist Majority. Having signed an earlier FM petition against the Taliban, Hayden belatedly came to see the ironies of their position:
But I had no idea then that I was joining The Feminist Majority in a coalition with the Pentagon to invade and occupy Afghanistan. Given the respect I have for Ellie Smeal and Kathy Spillar, among others, it’s still hard to believe that they think Afghan women can be liberated by an invading, bombing, imprisoning American army. It’s hard to believe that Predators, drones, Special Forces, detention camps and foreign occupiers are solutions to Taliban fundamentalism….In northern areas under Western occupation, the UN report found that in 39 percent of rapes “that perpetrators were directly linked to power brokers who are, effectively, above the law and enjoy immunity from arrest as well as immunity from social condemnation.”
So it didn’t come entirely as a surprise today to find out that alongside familiar neocon names such as Fred and Kimberley Kagan, one of the people advising the new commander of US forces in Afghanistan is none other than feminist humanitarian Sarah Chayes, formerly of NPR. We can surmise what advice McChrystal might be receiving since about leaving Afghanistan, Chayes had this to say: ‘I don’t think that we can afford to leave this region alone to fester’.
Likewise I notice that in his otherwise excellent piece, Chalmers Johnson also references Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould whose book is full of similar warm feeling for the noble savages who would be so grateful to their Western benefactors if it weren’t for those scheming Pakistanis. (In an interview with Huffington Post, they said all Afghans are happy with the occupation except those in the Pashtun areas. Which is like saying all Iraqis are happy with the occupation except in the Arab areas).
