Archive for September 2009
Israel Social TV Presents: Olives Under Occupation
Operating since 2006, Social TV was established out of deep concern from the ability of Israeli Media to perform its duty as democracy’s “watch dog”. In the last two decades three major corporations have gained control over most of Israel’s television channels, newspapers, radio channels and popular news sites. As a result Israel’s media has become quite homogenous and pluralism of opinion declined… Today Social TV is the only independent on-line TV channel in Israel.
In just 1 Day, 200 Protesters were Killed in Guinea
On Monday, September 29th, Guinean soldiers opened fire in a stadium filled with 50,000 people and murdered an estimated 200 in the capital city of Conakry. More than a thousand people were injured. Eyewitness reports allege that soldiers also sexually assaulted female demonstrators and beat them in their genitals. Several people who tried to escape from the building were finished off by soldiers with bayonets. The protesters were demonstrating against Captain Moussa Dadis Camara’s military-led government. In a show of disapproval, former colonial power France announced that it would be suspending military aid to the country. This may lead some to wonder why France was militarily aiding a military junta in the first place.
How many people were already aware of this recent clampdown on political dissent?
How many people care?
Lessons for the Young Activist – BDS Do’s and Don’ts
I’m very satisfied that the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement conducts itself with the utmost ethical consistency and respect to international law (if it didn’t, I wouldn’t advocate it). It’s true that it’s following the South African model, but at the same time it’s setting an example of its own. As a young activist, it’s a pleasure learning from its outspoken leaders. In my involvement in the movement, every step presents us with an ethical challenge. Avoiding the pitfall of a sweeping, uncommunicative action, the Global BDS movement, led by the Palestinian people, is employing guidelines of a “smart boycott”, differentiating institutions from individuals and Zionists from Jews. It’s never simple and dedicated research and much debate goes into every initiative. As a student of the boycott tactic, it’s just as important for me to learn what not to do, and examples are ample.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Library of Congress report determines Honduran coup was constitutional despite having unconstitutional aspects; Golpistas oppose rewriting Honduran Constitution but don’t understand the current one either
The most prevalent argument in favor of the June 28 coup that ousted Honduran President Mel Zelaya is that Zelaya intended to accumulate more than the single presidential term currently permitted him by the Honduran Constitution. This argument fails to take into account the question that was to be posed in the nonbinding public opinion survey slated to take place on the day Zelaya was removed to Costa Rica, which was not “Do you want the president to remain in power forever?” but rather “Are you in favor of installing a fourth ballot box at the general elections [in November] where the public can vote on whether or not a National Constituent Assembly should be convened to rewrite the Constitution?” The Honduran Constitution consists of 375 articles, most of which do not concern presidential reelection – suggesting that Hondurans wishing to rewrite the document might have complaints other than their inability to have the same leader for more than 4 years.
Article 374, which states that Constitutional articles concerning presidential limits cannot be amended, has been incessantly invoked to prove Zelaya’s culpability in the matter of the intended survey. Not invoked are articles seemingly more applicable to the situation, such as Article 45, which declares as punishable any act impeding or limiting civil participation in the political life of Honduras and which might thus prove useful in an analysis of the survey’s thwarting; additional analysis might be offered to Article 60, which claims there are no clases privilegiadas in Honduras. Article 63 stating that “the declarations, rights, and guarantees listed in this Constitution will not be understood as a denial of other declarations, rights, and guarantees that are not specified but arise from the ideals of independence, representative democracy, and the dignity of man” might meanwhile be applied to prospects for a National Constituent Assembly, as the rewriting of the Constitution is not addressed in any declarations, rights, or guarantees but appears to coincide with the required ideals. As for the ideals of coup president Roberto Micheletti, we are left with the question of why he sought to suspend Article 374 in 1985 in order to prolong the presidency of Roberto Suazo Córdoba.
On Palestinian Civil Disobedience — Neve Gordon
Kobi Snitz: "Even ten Israelis at a demonstration can make a real difference. We know from the army's own declarations that their open fire regulations change as soon as they think there are Israelis around."
A simple google search with the words “Palestinian violence” yields over 86,000 pages, while a search with the words “Palestinian civil disobedience” generates only 47 pages.
Sometime in 1846, Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail because he refused to pay his taxes. This was his way of opposing the Mexican-American War as well as the institution of slavery. A few years later he published the essay Civil Disobedience, which has since been read by millions of people, including many Israelis and Palestinians.
Kobi Snitz read the book. He is an Israeli anarchist who is currently serving a 20 day sentence for refusing to pay a 2,000 shekel fine.
Thirty-eight year-old Snitz was arrested with other activists in the small Palestinian village of Kharbatha back in 2004 while trying to prevent the demolition of the home of a prominent member of the local popular committee. The demolition, so it seems, was carried out both to intimidate and punish the local leader who had, just a couple of weeks earlier, began organizing weekly demonstrations against the annexation wall. Both the demonstrations and the attempt to stop the demolition were acts of civil disobedience.
The Police are Rioting – David Rovics
Protesters face riot police in downtown Pittsburgh, Friday Sept. 25, 2009. Thousands of protesters marched through the streets during the Group of 20 summit of world leaders. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Singer, songwriter and activist David Rovics reflects on freedom of speech in the United States amidst the context of the G-20 summit protests, which took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania over the course of last week.
If any elements of the corporate media have been paying any attention to what’s been happening on the streets of Pittsburgh over the past few days I haven’t noticed, so I thought I’d write my own account.
There is a popular assumption asserted ad nauseum by our leaders in government, by our school text books and by our “mainstream” media that although many other countries don’t have freedom of speech and freedom of assembly – such as Iran or China – we do, and it’s what makes us so great. Anybody who has spent much time trying to exercise their First Amendment rights in the US now or at any other time since 1776 knows first-hand that the First Amendment looks good on paper but has little to do with reality.
Dissent has never really been tolerated in the USA. As we’ve seen in recent election cycles even just voting for a Democratic presidential candidate and having your vote count can be quite a challenge – as anyone who has not had their head in sand knows, Bush lost both elections and yet kept his office fraudulently twice. But for those who want to exercise their rights beyond the government-approved methods – that is, their right to vote for one of two parties, their right to bribe politicians (“lobby”) if they have enough money, or their right to write a letter to the editor in the local Murdoch-owned rag, if it hasn’t closed shop yet – the situation is far worse.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Coup supporters march in Tegucigalpa; consulate of Kingdom of Jordan steals the show
As they occasionally do in order to show that members of the Honduran anti-coup resistance are not the only ones that can walk, coup supporters marched this morning in Tegucigalpa, clad mainly in white shirts or Honduran soccer jerseys. Their chants ranged from the very banal, such as “Elecciones, elecciones, elecciones” and “Honduras, Honduras, Honduras”, to the less banal, such as “Lula, llevate esa mula”, an appeal to the president of Brazil to transfer “that jackass” – i.e. Honduran President Mel Zelaya – from the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa to Brazil proper.
According to a middle-aged marcher named Jorge Antonio in a Honduran flag hat that tied under his chin, Brazil’s adoption of Zelaya was one of two ways to rectify the current crisis; the other was for Brazil to simply hand him over to the coup government of Roberto Micheletti. He expressed his doubt at the latter option, as Lula was rapidly becoming a clone of Hugo Chávez, and – dragging me over to a parked pickup truck on the side of the road – encouraged me to stand in the back such that I might witness the extent of the golpista multitudes, which nonetheless did not appear to consist of 85 percent of the population as Jorge Antonio claimed. (March organizers claimed 60,000 marchers; local media counted the size at 10,000). He sighed when I hesitated to occupy a vehicle whose owner had not been identified and yanked me up, whereupon I asked if he believed in the concept of communal property; laughing: “No, no!”, he drew my attention to the current chant suggesting that people who did harbor such notions could go to Caracas.
Who Needs Clean Water?
Correctly characterizing the Gaza strip in a typology of repressive institutions isn’t easy. Without question, it’s a refugee camp, but a quite developed refugee camp, and some of its inhabitants have been there for 60 years. When refugees stay refugees for six decades, they’re still refugees, but they’re locked in a “prison for the stateless.”
Actually, in Gaza, “zoo” used to be the more precise descriptor: the sole goal was to keep the inhabitants, or most of them “alive, with an eye to how outsiders might see them.” Freedom was never at issue. Amidst the savagery of Cast Lead and its mounting consequences, zoo may now be a passé metaphor. It’s hard to argue that Israel’s overwhelming concern is how the outside world sees Gaza. Concern for outsiders’ opinions doesn’t lead one to call a massacre “impressive… [its] timing brilliant” in your country’s leading liberal newspaper. Nor to chants calling for the slaughter of Palestinians in city squares.
Concentration camp could no longer be polemical but rather descriptive. In a concentration camp one herds a population into a dense, tightly controlled space. Human beings come to serve instrumental purposes. One controls survival by controlling inputs—food, water, caring only slightly about the inhabitants, sometimes not at all. Some will surely die, and that’s hardly a concern. They’ll die of disease, as at Andersonville. Sometimes they die because one kills them. Sometimes “sometimes” becomes often.
Disease is a convenient form of slaughter for an ostensibly liberal state. “We didn’t mean to,” state officials can demur; “it was unimaginable that when we destroyed their water supply and their sewage treatment facilities, typhoid and salmonella poisoning would break out!” The inevitable feigned ignorance is even less believable in the case of Gazan water than in other socially-forced humanitarian crises. This has been a long time coming. Gaza has the lowest-per-capita capacity of freshwater in the world other than Kuwait, which subsists on desalinated salt-water, the privilege of an ultra-wealthy oil statelet. Desalinization plants aren’t an option for Gaza, which has to physically import shekels, dinars, and dollars.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Channel 10 owner breaks news of men hugging men on floor of Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa
Rodrigo Wong Arevalo, CEO of Channel 10.
The September 22 edition of the Honduran evening news program Abriendo Brecha kept a running tally of the day’s mobile phone survey, trademark of Channel 10. The question was whether viewers thought the coup government of Roberto Micheletti had done well not to storm the Brazilian embassy currently housing reappeared Honduran President Mel Zelaya, and the responses hovered between 93 and 94 percent positive. According to newscaster and Channel 10 owner Rodrigo Wong Arevalo, the unconvinced 6 or 7 percent emphasized the need for a quick resolution to the political crisis, which could be brought about in one of three ways: through Zelaya’s abandonment of Honduran territory, Zelaya’s renunciation of claims to the presidency, or Zelaya’s appearance before a tribunal.
At the start of the program Wong had outlined the evening’s upcoming highlights, such as a photo of the interior of the Brazilian embassy – which he promised would demonstrate that despite the lack of bedrooms Zelaya was extremely comfortable – and proof of Brazilian distress that Zelaya was in their embassy. The latter highlight consisted of testimony by a single official in Brazil; the former consisted of a photograph of Zelaya sleeping fully clothed with his feet across a chair and his cowboy hat over his face. Wong specified that the hat was positioned so as to keep out the sunrays but did not specify whether Zelaya’s pajamas had been left in Costa Rica; lest the accommodations did not appear overly luxurious, Wong reminded the audience that at least the embassy had electricity, a statement that often depended on the embassy’s generator when the military cut power to the building. The photo was meanwhile followed by a letter from a viewer asking whether incitement by other media outlets – which had raised the possibility that the Honduran armed forces would enter the Brazilian embassy – really qualified as journalism.
Learning about Zionism the Goldstone Way
Richard Goldstone in Gaza
I waited a bit to have a complete picture of Ha’aretz (“the elite left”) coverage of the Goldstone lead UN report on Gaza. Israeli citizens could have learned something about the government and themselves through this report. Instead, I learn, yet again, how corrupted the media, the government and the people are, by the Zionist mythos.
Keeping the Myth Alive
The first Ha’aretz article (and all the subsequent articles that weren’t written by Amira Hass or Gideon Levy) about the report plays on the myth that both sides of this “conflict” (a.k.a. “occupation”) are on equal footing:
UN probe: Israel, Palestinians both guilty of Gaza war crimes
This title is, of course, misleading, as anyone who’s taken the time to read just the table of contents of the report, can see a clear ratio that puts Israel to shame. But the sillies don’t stop there; Not only is the title misleading, when reporting about the mission, it’s misleading in characterization of the article it heads! The article mentions the main points (I’ve rephrased, in order to avoid linguistic bias, such as calling a massacre “war”):
