Get Out of My Vagina, You Filthy Zionist!
September 15th, 2009 § 2 Comments
This image was not taken in Petah Tiqva.
In woman’s womb, reposes the people’s future and in her soul the heart of a nation.
~ Frau Siber of the Ministry of the Interior (Germany 1933)
I know, I know, the Nazi comparison has been sooo done to death, but so has my statement that if the swastika fits- choke on it. Books have been devoted to the study of racial purity theories and practices, and what you’ll usually find is not only racism, but chauvinism, restricting women to mere purity producers.
Keeping Petah Tiqva Girls Pure
Many people find it insulting when I say Israel is a chauvinist state and nation. “Compare it to your beloved muslim regimes!” They spit venomously, as they tell me that “if all women were like [me], [they’d] turn gay”. Institutionalized chauvinism and racism has been prevalent in the Israeli government and institutions, since its inception. Municipal racism certainly isn’t new (definitely not to the city of Petah Tiqva); Palestinian citizens of Israel have been discriminated against for 61 years.
« Read the rest of this entry »
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: History repeats itself
September 15th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
In mid-August of this year, a contingent of Honduran policemen gathered near the headquarters of the Coalition of Honduran Banana and Agroindustrial Unions – COSIBAH – in the town of La Lima in northwestern Honduras. Founded in 1994, COSIBAH is a federation of seven unions, three of which are heavily involved in the resistance to the June 28 coup that overthrew Honduran President Mel Zelaya. According to the leaders of the organization, the police had intended to arrest them but had changed their minds after noting the large number of people present at the headquarters for a meeting; the staff nonetheless continued to take extra safety precautions such as monitoring suspicious vehicles in the area and keeping the front door of the building locked.
As for recent police endeavors that had not been thwarted, Iris Munguía – Secretary of Women at COSIBAH – described her experience at an anti-coup roadblock in San Pedro Sula on July 2, when after fleeing tear gas she had been shoved into the back of a police pickup truck and taken to jail. Subsequent analysis of such incidents had led Munguía and her colleagues to conclude that police repression in Honduras was gender-specific and that men were generally beaten on their heads and backs while women were beaten on their legs and rear ends. Munguía outlined additional forms of treatment the police reserved for females, such as yelling “¿Por qué no estás en la casa cocinando?” – “Why aren’t you at home cooking?” – and putting their tongues in the ears of nuns.
Peeling away the “Obama phenomenon”: An interview with Paul Street
September 15th, 2009 § 2 Comments
How progressive is Barack Obama? It’s a question pundits, bloggers, and journalists have trouble grappling with. But one individual goes beyond the Obama phenomenon andinvestigates who Obama is and what he’s all about. In Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, author Paul Street cuts to the chase and takes a closer look at the man who became the 44th president of the United States. What Street uncovers is a man crafted by campaign consultants with political beliefs consistent with elite party interests.
Street is an independent journalist, policy adviser, and historian. He is a former vice-president for research and planning at the Chicago Urban League, and author of Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: a Living Black Chicago History and Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era.
I caught up with Street to discuss his new book by Paradigm Publishers.
Peace propaganda and the Israeli consensus
September 15th, 2009 § 6 Comments
George Mitchell is in Israel/Palestine as the White House’s special envoy, in a visit described as “a final push to revive Middle East peace talks”. The focus remains on Israel’s so –called settlement ‘freeze’, with Mitchell reported as saying that there was still work to be done on the “Israeli-American dispute over construction in the West Bank”. Ahead of his meeting with Mitchell today, Netanyahu has confirmed that there will not be a “complete halt to building” in the settlements, telling a Knesset committee that “a reduction on building in Judea and Samaria will only be for a limited period”.
The ‘freeze’ is the latest warmed-up gimmick to be offered by the international community’s peace process’, though even by the standards of previous efforts such as the ‘Road Map’ and ‘Annapolis’, the settlement freeze is transparently lacking in seriousness. The Israeli government’s definition of a ‘freeze’ excludes: settlement activity in occupied East Jerusalem; 2,500 housing units already under construction; and, hundreds of new units just recently announced.
That the ‘freeze’ will last in the region of six to nine months is rather academic, given that it will make no difference to this year’s total settlement housing consolidation compared to previous years. As Ha’aretz pointed out, “instead of construction permits being given gradually throughout the year, the government intends to issue hundreds of permits within a few days, before the official announcement of the “freeze” is made”.
Even the PM’s spokesperson Mark Regev has found it hard to spin what Deputy PM Eli Yishai has called merely a “strategic delay”. The new construction in West Bank colonies ahead of the ‘freeze’ Regev argued was a case of doing something now to “actually make progress possible tomorrow”. MK Nissim Ze’ev, visiting a settlement outpost, felt no need to resort to such contortions, encouraging the settlers that there is “no one in the government who doesn’t want more and more construction throughout Judea and Samaria”, but that owing to tensions with the US, there are currently “limitations”. « Read the rest of this entry »
Sabra And Shatila: On massacres, atrocities and holocausts
September 15th, 2009 § 7 Comments
In honour of the victims of the Sabra Shatila massacre, we are republishing this piece by Sonja Karkar from 2007. May we never forget this Israeli-enabled Phalangist crime. Warning: the following article depicts the horror of a massacre and should be read by mature readers — details of the atrocity appear over the fold.
Sabra And Shatila
On massacres, atrocities and holocausts
by Sonja Karkar, Women for Palestine and Australians for Palestine
The Massacre
It happened twenty-five years ago – 16 September 1982. A massacre so awful that people who know about it cannot forget it. The photos are gruesome reminders – charred, decapitated, indecently violated corpses, the smell of rotting flesh, still as foul to those who remember it as when they were recoiling from all those years ago. For the victims and the handful of survivors, it was a 36-hour holocaust without mercy. It was deliberate, it was planned and it was overseen. But to this day, the killers have gone unpunished.
Sabra and Shatila – two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon – were the theatres for this staged slaughter. The former is no longer there and the other is a ghostly and ghastly reminder of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children – more specifically, Israel’s inhumanity, the inhumanity of the people who did Israel’s bidding and the world’s inhumanity for pretending it was of no consequence. There were international witnesses – doctors, nurses, journalists – who saw the macabre scenes and have tried to tell the world in vain ever since.
Why Illegal Settlement Money Laundering is still “Off the Table”
September 14th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Last week District Attorney Robert Morgenthau announced pursuit of a bank allegedly involved in Iranian assets transfer. The ninety year old Manhattan District Attorney already prosecuted Lloyds TSB over the transfer of $300 million in Iranian cash. Morgenthau’s tight coordination with a secretive new US Treasury unit led by Stuart Levey follows a pattern of highly selective Israel lobby tag team law enforcement that began back in the 1940s.
Zionism is a long running current of New York’s Morgenthau family. Robert’s father Henry Morgenthau Jr. was Secretary of Treasury during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. His grandfather Henry Morgenthau Sr. was US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Henry Jr. thought nothing of supporting Irgun terrorists with US government resources as he fought an intense and vicious bureaucratic battle to wrest policy over Displaced Persons from the US State Department during WWII. When President Roosevelt dragged his feet over policy takeover demands, Henry Morgenthau Jr. threatened to turn the State Department into an election year scandal. Anti-Semitism at State, he threatened, was a charge that “will require little more in the way of proof for this suspicion to explode into a nasty scandal.”
Chomsky and Ian Williams Engage in a Battle Royale
September 14th, 2009 § 1 Comment
It looks like Chomsky and Ian Williams have been having a tiff. At the words “Chomsky” and “tiff,” the first question is: what’s the body count? The expected has occurred, but Williams has opted for a peculiar sort of posterity. Call it the walking dead. Like most zombies, Williams’s mental capabilities aren’t so keen—but in his case it’s a state he’s been in since 1999, when Tony Blair and Bill Clinton claimed that we could save Kosovo by bombing it. Williams notoriously signed on, his integrity and mental faculties swiftly collapsed, and he’s been a bit of a mess ever since.
Anyway, here’s the deal. Chomsky said something perfectly sensible about the R2P [Responsibility to Protect] doctrine, pointing out that “A…principle is that virtually every use of force in international affairs has been justified in terms of R2P, including the worst monsters.” Referring to what is frequently described as an exception to a pretty uniformly crummy historical record—the NATO assault on Yugoslavia, described by Blair as the fight “for a world where dictators are no longer able to visit horrific punishments on their own peoples” under the legend “A New Generation Draws the Line,” Chomsky added the following:
The NATO bombing did not end the atrocities [in Kosovo] but rather precipitated by far the worst of them, as had been anticipated by the NATO command and the White House. The conclusions that are so richly documented by the Western records are reinforced by the indictment of Miloševic, issued by the International Tribunal at the height of the bombing. With a single exception, the crimes charged follow the bombing.
The states of the global South, having a bit of experience with imperial violence, roundly condemned the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as illegal and having no justification in international law. It’s a bit obvious to point out, but Chomsky didn’t write that all interventions are a priori wrong, noting that some regions of the world would benefit from R2P: the Gaza strip, for example. More generally, he observed that “R2P can be a valuable tool.”
All of this is perfectly true and utterly sensible. What does Ian Williams say in response? He resorts to casuistic and verbose hyper-ventilation: noting of Chomsky that “he claimed that the NATO air raids on Serbia actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo. This latter claim isn’t only untrue but morally unpalatable in its spurious causality.” Now Williams can craft a beautiful copy of a drink-sodden Christopher Hitchens, no doubt about that. But is that something to aspire to? [We all remember what happened when Hitchens picked a fight with Chomsky].
Chomsky responded thusly:
I Apologize for Being Black
September 13th, 2009 § 5 Comments
Oscar Brown Jr.: "I wanted to present a picture of black culture to anyone who could hear it."
Oscar Brown Jr. never retired. He began performing in 1941 at the age of 15 in Chicago, Illinois where he was born and raised. He worked tirelessly for art and social justice until his death in 2005. Brown was a civil rights activist, a writer, a singer and much more. Many contend that he did not receive the recognition he deserved during his lifetime and he has still not been properly honored now, years after his death.
I came across two clips of him performing as I was browsing through HBO’s Def Poetry Jam on YouTube. His words are particularily poignant today as heated debates about race continue to simmer in the United States while commentators attempt to suppress or bypass the difficult realities at their core by using ridiculous phrases like “post-racial.”
Yes, a close majority of voters in the United States elected an African-American president, but the White House Barack Hussein Obama now lives in was built with the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves. Meanwhile, Obama continues to also be accused of not being an American citizen by racist hatemongers who are actually awarded with air-time on prominent mainstream news outlets. How does one reconcile these opposing realities? Where is the “post” in a society like this where so much time is spent on the “racial?”
Brown’s recital of “I Apologize” and “Children of Children” can be watched below. His words have been reprinted under each clip. Unlike the majority of the performers who the masses honor today, all of Brown’s work provides food for thought.
Shoe Jihad: A Satire
September 12th, 2009 § 2 Comments
The time has come, the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax—
Of cabbages—and kings…
Lewis Carroll
M. Shahid Alam
These kleptocrats throw themselves at the feet
of Western plutocracies: they spurn
the real source of power – their own people –
seeking clientage under Western boots.
Lesser rogues gravitate to bigger ones:
this is the law of global hegemony.
This tendency emerges again and again
as long as its victims stay hidebound.
These lesser rogues – Zardari, Karzai,
Abdullah, Mubarak, Abbas –
will get their marching orders from DC,
hold down their own people for a fee,
unless the people, every one of them,
pick up their shoes, sandals, chappals
(any old footwear will do),
and point them at these scoundrels,
a shot across the bow of their kleptocracies.
If this does not work (and it might not),
ask the shoe-throwing Iraqi.
He knew better what to do with a shoe.
Harry Belafonte on Fault Lines
September 11th, 2009 § 2 Comments
James Forman, Martin Luther King Jr., and Harry Belafonte. (UPI/File 1965)
The legendary Harry Belafonte who publicly referred to George W. Bush as the “greatest terrorist in the world” in 2006 during a meeting with Venezulan president Hugo Chávez discusses race, politics and culture on Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines.
In Part 2 Belafonte makes the following statement which should be considered by all those who believe art should be kept seperate from politics. His words are especially relevant now as debates rage over the question of whether or not Israel should be subjected to a cultural boycott:
There is in all of our systems (I’m talking about globally) one important ingredient that has never been fully exploited and that is the whole issue of culture. I believe that art is the most powerful force on the face of the earth, more powerful than politics and more powerful than the church. And I think that we as artists or those of us that call ourselves artists have never used ourselves in the full measure of our power and the differences we could make…
Watch Avi Lewis’ two part interview with Belafonte below.
