The Death of the Liberal Class
December 22nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Chris Hedges discusses his new book The Death of the Liberal Class. The Q&A is over the fold. Produced by The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy NY, this event was co-sponsored by Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace.
The Reut Report: Taking Over the World – One Antisemite at a Time
December 21st, 2010 § 1 Comment
The Reut Blog banner - The image of "beautiful, tolerant, modern, iconic Israel"
The Reut Institute sent their “National Security Team” for a whole year in London; conducted interviews with over 150 people (“experts and activists from a range of fields”); Studied biology, economics, terrorism, the internet and Frank Sinatra. All this in order to investigate the BDS movement. They wrote a report, mouthfully titled “Building a Political Firewall against the Assault on Israel’s Legitimacy: London as a Case Study” and this is their conclusion:
Hamas Did It Because They Want to Destroy Israel!
Deck London’s Walls II
December 21st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Yesterday we wrote about photojournalist William Parry’s Christmastime project in London: projecting images of Israel’s apartheid wall in Bethlehem onto monuments and buildings in the British capital.
The goal, says Parry, is to “provide a stark political backdrop to the frantic Christmas shopping rush, to remind Britain and the West that Israel’s illegal occupation and separation wall are strangling Bethlehem – and Palestine – the birthplace of Christ and Christmas.”
The images used in the projections are primarily of Palestinian children from the Aida refugee camp who have decorated a portion of the wall with a Christmas message to the world. Click here for yesterday’s overview of the project and to see the original images taken by Parry in Bethlehem.
Over the fold are pictures from last night’s projections at Marble Arch, the National Portrait Gallery, and Parliament, where Parry reports his group was nearly arrested.
WSJ’s Mary O’Grady Rewrites WikiLeaks
December 21st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Prior to being obsessed with WikiLeaks, Hillary Clinton was obsessed with Honduras
In preparing for her article “WikiLeaks, Honduras and the U.S.”, published today by The Wall Street Journal, WSJ editorial board member and patron saint of the Latin American far right Mary Anastasia O’Grady presumably had a number of approaches to choose him.
One option was to announce that Julian Assange is an agent of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and that confirmation has been obtained from the laptops impounded during the 2008 Colombian raid on a FARC camp in Ecuador, which coincidentally appear to contain incriminating evidence about all of O’Grady’s regional enemies.
Another option was to use the cable from the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa following last year’s coup against President Mel Zelaya, which states that “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”, to further her argument that U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens is a communist sympathizer who deserves relocation to a diplomatic post in Cuba. This may be the gist of a forthcoming article.
Zapping and Groping are Bad Enough Already; Emulating Israel Will Only Make Them Worse
December 20th, 2010 § 4 Comments
About a month ago, one of my colleagues was describing to me a forthcoming trip, when he paused and reflected, “I’m still not sure whether I want to be groped or zapped.” It is a question many Americans have contemplated in recent weeks, “groping,” of course, being the instantly-infamous “enhanced pat downs” airport travelers can opt for if they refuse a “zapping,” the new X-ray backscatter or millimeter-wave machines that provide TSA shockingly clear body images. Both types of machine are known as Advanced Imaging Technology [AIT].
A few days ago I traveled internationally and had some opportunities to experience these notorious new security measures. Because AIT, according to Congressional testimony by Columbia University biophysicist David Brenner, delivers radiation at a rate of “20 times the average dose that is typically quoted by TSA and throughout the industry,” I leaned toward being groped rather than zapped. The TSA has been lying about other things, after all, proclaiming that the AIT machines don’t record or store images when in fact they can and sometimes do.
Exhausted after entering customs in Detroit after a fourteen hour flight, however, I was in no mood to have my privates jostled, so I opted for a zapping. It seemed innocuous enough. I cleared my pockets, stood in the transparent cylinder, and raised my arms as the panels rotated and emitted a flash of light. Not even Aldous Huxley was imaginative enough to have predicted the scene. While I was in the cylinder awaiting the zap, I rolled my eyes at a skeptical woman who seconds earlier had flatly proclaimed to the agent, “I’m not getting in that thing.” She grinned at me, a favor I was able to return a minute later after I had gathered my belongings and passed her as she stood in an area designated for miscreants, a TSA agent’s hands down the back of her pants.
Deck London’s Walls with Bethlehem’s Calls
December 20th, 2010 § 11 Comments
Image of Israeli separation wall in Bethlehem projected onto London monument
Two dozen children, aged 5-17, from the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem, cut out stencils of letters, stars and Christmas trees and sprayed painted ‘MERRY CHRISTMAS WORLD FROM BETHLEHEM GHETTO’ on Israel’s illegal separation wall. Photographed by UK-based photojournalist William Parry, images of the children and their message – along with powerful images of checkpoints and life under occupation – will temporarily ‘hijack’ prominent wall spaces in central London throughout the week leading up to Christmas, with the help of projection artist, Beverley Carpenter. (photographs of Bethlehem and of the projection project in London can be found over the fold!)
Says Parry:
The idea is to provide a stark political backdrop to the frantic Christmas shopping rush, to remind Britain and the West that Israel’s illegal occupation and separation wall are strangling Bethlehem – and Palestine – the birthplace of Christ and Christmas. We’re bringing the reality of Bethlehem to London this Christmas.
The children who painted the message on the wall are third and fourth generation refugees, at risk of being made refugees again because of the wall’s devastating impact. We are complicit in suspending their rights to justice and freedom through our governments’ biased support of Israel.”
The French in Algeria
December 20th, 2010 § 1 Comment
The French in Algeria pioneered many of the torture techniques that were subsequently used in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. French ‘counterinsurgency’ specialists, who had already fought the Vietnamese, trained American soldiers and interrogators throughout the 1960s.
Al Jazeera examines the bitterness still provoked by France’s colonial war in Algeria and how it fuels resentment between France and its Muslim community.
Gaza Youth Breaks Out
December 20th, 2010 § 1 Comment
The following is the statement of Gaza Youth Breaks Out. It was posted on facebook and there’s no website to be found (yet?), note there are contact links at the bottom. So for everyone’s benefit and with much respect, I repost it here in full:
GAZAN YOUTH’S MANIFESTO FOR CHANGE
Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA!
We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli F16’s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us because of this fucking situation we live in; we are like lice between two nails living a nightmare inside a nightmare, no room for hope, no space for freedom. We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes; sick of innocent farmers getting shot in the buffer zone because they are taking care of their lands; sick of bearded guys walking around with their guns abusing their power, beating up or incarcerating young people demonstrating for what they believe in; sick of the wall of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land; sick of being portrayed as terrorists, homemade fanatics with explosives in our pockets and evil in our eyes; sick of the indifference we meet from the international community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel, beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world.
Lynne Stewart’s Letter to Supporters
December 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
The courageous US civil and human rights lawyer, Lynne Stewart, sentenced to 10 years in prison for distributing press releases on behalf of her client Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, wrote a letter to her supporters a month ago yesterday. Like brave Bradley Manning, Stewart (who is 70 years old and a recent breast cancer survivor) will be spending Christmas in a prison cell, silenced and institutionalized for standing up against the American war machine.
Here is Stewart’s letter, first published on her support network website.
Good to Bridge the Distances once again. With cyberspace, we are all closer now than ever before. As the evil empire continues to reveal itself in ever more horrifying ways, we are all called upon to resist and make a record. I can write letters, read the Times and moan, groan and gnash my teeth on the phone to Ralph but you guys are the “boots on the ground” for righteousness. I love you all.
War in the Borderlands
December 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Derek Gregory is professor of geography at the University of British Columbia, and author of excellent The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. He discusses the evolving character of conflicts in the borderlands of former empires and the blurring of the conceptual borders of war itself.
