An Eyewitness’ Letter to Macy Gray
January 27th, 2011 § 5 Comments
Dear Macy,
Border Police officers arresting Ouday Tamimi. Picture credit: Bilal Tamimi from Joseph Dana's blog
I’ll say it again, I truly appreciate that you took your contemplations public. I can tell by what you write that you’ve been thrown into a world that its intensity is unknown to you. I write to you consistently because your heart is on your sleeve, and even though you seem to have made up your mind, I feel the doubt in every public utterance you make.
I’ll introduce myself; My name is Tali Shapiro. I’m an Israeli citizen and I just came back from the village of Nabi Salleh in the West Bank and read your latest blog post. I’m an activist that joins the weekly demonstrations in the village. There are weekly demonstrations in many villages. Though it’s a part of a movement for Palestinian human rights, each village wakes to dissent for individual reasons. Nabi Sallah has had its land annexed by the near by Halamish settlement and its water spring closed off from them by military force. Ever since then, they’ve been demonstrating.
Demonstrations in the occupied Palestinian territories come with a heavy price. Whether its the wounded and dead, or the constant harassment. Nabi Saleh has been subject to military closure, houses sprayed with putrid water (another method of “crowd dispersal”), night raids, arrests of activists (regardless of age), and torture which includes threats, beatings and contorted body positioning.
I write to you as I come back from one of these night raids. I live in Tel Aviv by choice. I choose to come to a war zone at night, to witness exactly what is being done in the name of my security:
Forcing young men into atrocities: Israeli troops told to ‘cleanse’ Gaza
January 27th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Israeli soldiers tell Channel 4 News (UK) they were ordered to “cleanse” Palestinian neighbourhoods in a documentary by Israeli filmmaker Nurit Kedar. A quibble with the introduction: it suggests that Operation Cast Lead was started because of ineffectual Palestinian rockets, which were merely a pretext.
A 24-year-old tank commander remembers being told that the Israeli soldiers entry into Gaza was intended to be “disproportionate”:
We needed to cleanse the neighbourhoods, the buildings, the area. It sounds really terrible to say “cleanse”, but those were the orders….I don’t want to make a mistake with the words.
Shihab Rattansi lays bare US hypocrisy on Egypt
January 27th, 2011 § 8 Comments
Al Jazeera International is head and shoulders above all competitors in the MSM and Shihab Rattansi is by far the best news anchor currently on air. There is much journalists could learn from him. In the following interview with PJ Crowley watch Rattansi straitjacket the usually slick US State Department spokesman with relentless questions about the difference in US responses to Tunisia and Egypt and the applicability of pronouncements made in one instance to the other. Crowley appears disappointed that Rattansi is unwilling to abide by the convention of Western MSM which requires a newsman to take an evasion as a cue for moving on to a different subject.
US Palestine Solidarity Activists Refuse to be Silenced
January 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Journalist and Palestine solidarity activist Maureen Murphy (also managing editor of the Electronic Intifada) reads a statement on behalf of the 9 activists (herself included) who have been subpoenaed to appear before the Grand Jury in Chicago after being targeted by the FBI for expressing solidarity with Palestinian victims of Israeli repression.
Reads Murphy:
Those of us subpoenaed in December were ordered to appear before the grand jury on January 25th. This is the same grand jury that was impaneled by US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in order to indict people from among those whose homes and offices were raided in September. We have made our decisions to stand strong with the other 14 subpoenaed activists from Illinois, Minneapolis and Michigan. We WILL NOT take part in this fishing expedition.
Mish Ayazeenu
January 27th, 2011 § 2 Comments
Photo by Adam Makary
Egypt’s anti-regime protests are unprecedented in size, frequency and ferocity. In Shubra, Dokki, Mohandaseen and Bulaq, Cairenes chanted ash-sha’ab yureed isqaat an-nizam, or The People Want the Fall of the Regime, and braved tear gas and baton-wielding thugs in the central Tahrir Square. Alexandria, Tanta, Suez, and the labour stronghold of Mahalla al-Kubra have also demonstrated. A government building has been burnt in Suez. Posters of Mubarak have been ripped down and burnt in several locations. Mish ayazeenu, the people shout: We Don’t Want Him.
When January 25th’s Day of Anger started, police at first allowed protesters to move freely in the streets. This was unusual, and suggests fear on the authorities’ part, as does the abrupt shift back to traditional methods as night fell. At the time of writing, at least a thousand people have been arrested, several killed, and hundreds beaten. (Here’s an audio recording of Guardian journalist Jack Shenker’s experience being trucked into the desert with other protesters.) Uniformed police are backed up by plainclothes goons, many armed with iron bars. (One hopes that someone is collecting photographs of these people in order to identify and shame them.)
Palestinian Authority stonewalled the Goldstone Report; it’s now at war with Al Jazeera
January 26th, 2011 § 4 Comments
Spiritual Alchemy
January 26th, 2011 § 1 Comment
M. Shahid Alam
Resetting broken bones is easy: if
it’s done right. Mending broken hearts
is harder: only time’s passage
remedies this. Fixing heedless hearts
is hardest: this takes spiritual alchemy.
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M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of Israeli Exceptionalism (Palgrave, 2009) and Poverty from the Wealth of Nations (Macmillan, 2000). Visit his website at Qur’anic Reason.
Human Rights in the Rear View Mirror: Colombian Commandos Training Mexican Military and Police
January 26th, 2011 § 1 Comment
by Cyril Mychalejko
In another misstep of the historic failure of Plan Colombia and the U.S.-supported War on Drugs, Colombia is training thousands of Mexican soldiers, police and court officials in an effort to boost Mexico’s fight against drug cartels.
Trainings have mostly taken place in Mexico, but now Mexican troops and police are traveling to Colombia to receive training from “Colombia’s battle-tested police commandos,” The Washington Post reported on Saturday. The article also suggests that, in addition to asserting itself as a regional power, Colombia is acting as a proxy for Washington because increased U.S. military presence in Mexico is not politically viable.
White House Drug Policy Director Richard Gil Kerlikowske, while meeting with Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos Calderón in Bogotá on January 18, said that Colombia “serves as a beacon of hope for other nations struggling with the threat to democracy posed by drug trafficking and related crime.”
A Beacon of Hope?
Kerlikowske’s deceptively rosy assessment of Colombia and the effectiveness of Plan Colombia is severely undermined by the facts on the ground.
Palestinian Authority’s war on Palestine
January 25th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
How the PLO leadership assisted Israel in the killing of other Palestinians, including members of its own militia.
Mike Hanna reports from Gaza on what The Palestine Papers reveal about the assassination of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade member Hassan al-Madhoun.
Egypt Awakes
January 25th, 2011 § 3 Comments
UPDATE: See Al Jazeera’s reports below and read Ahmed Moor (who recorded the video below)’s account of today’s events at MondoWeiss.
Led by what appears to be a girl and a boy, a group of Egyptian protesters chase the riot police.
Helena Cobban of Just World News asks if the Arab world is finally waking from 40-year sleep:
In Egypt, the long-entrenched, US-backed-to-the-repressive-hilt Mubarak regime is facing one of the most serious challenges yet to its control.In Tunisia, the long-entrenched, strongly US-backed Ben Ali regime is history, and citizens on the streets and in their gathering places are right now determining how their country will governed in the future.
