Year: 2010

After the riots: Where is the justice for Peru’s indigenous?

Digging up an issue I have watched for some time, the IPS reported yesterday that justice is still elusive for the indigenous of the Peruvian Amazon. In June of last year, tribal opposition to the government’s trade liberalization policies erupted in rioting. Sixty people were killed in what has been described as the worst fighting Peru had seen in a decade and a revolution that should inspire the world.

While the Peruvian government was forced to hold off on FTA-mandated plans to open large swaths of tribal land to oil, mineral, and timber extraction, it has not been a total victory.

From the IPS report:

Although the technical investigations cleared two of the indigenous demonstrators accused in the murders of 12 policemen during a bloody June 2009 clash between native protesters and the security forces near the northern Amazon jungle town of Bagua, they are still behind bars.

Feliciano Cahuasa and Danny López have been in prison for over eight months, despite the fact that technical crime scene investigations showed that neither of them fired a single shot, and that they are thus innocent of the Jun. 5 killings of the police officers.

On the other hand, no police are in prison for the Jun. 5 shooting deaths of at least 10 indigenous protesters, which occurred when the police were ordered to clear their roadblock on the main highway near Bagua.

This comes on the heels of another report from Indian Country Today concerning the corruption of the official investigation into the riots.

So while the elusive “official story” is likely to pin quite a bit of blame on “foreign provocateurs” and shrug off the actions of law enforcement, we can at least remember Danny and Feliciano.

Artwork by Favianna Rodriguez.

Friday Night Lights: American and Israeli human rights activists disrupt ballet performance in Vermont

BURLINGTON, VT- Greetings from the Green Mountain State! I want to give a shout out to those who participated in a successful night of activism. Several activists leafleted 249 people attending last night’s Israeli Ballet performance at the Flynn Theater.

The leaflet asked “Would you like some information about Don Quixote and the Israel Ballet?” — which was an accurate presentation of last night’s performance. “Israel’s ‘Golden Helmet of Mambrino’ — which makes one invisible, thus capable of all actions — is slowly turning into Don Quixote’s version of it — a upside-down shaving bowl plopped on the head — incapable of nothing but making its wearer more obvious and actionable to the world. Brand Israel will continue to call forth increasing protests as audiences realize they are being used,” said author and activist Marc Estrin.

The headline said “A Modern Don Quixote.” Estrin said almost all ballet-goers accepted it, even those glancing at the opening before continuing into the theater. There are no trash cans inside the actual theater, so he assumes most flyers made it to people’s seats for reading before the show began. Estrin said one elderly man “came all the way out again to present us with a crumpled up ball with instructions to ‘shove this up your ass,’ but the other 249 copies all made it in.”

The other highlight was one Israeli and three Vermonters unfurled a banner during the performance. Check out the YouTube Vimeo below the fold!

Continue reading “Friday Night Lights: American and Israeli human rights activists disrupt ballet performance in Vermont”

So How Do I Look? – Zionist Self-Righteousness in the Face of Delegitimization

Sabra and Shatila / Gaza 2009

In 1982 Ariel Sharon enabled the massacres in refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila. To Israel, this was a disaster. Not because innocent human beings, already victims of a mass ethnic cleansing, were brutally murdered, but because, for the first time, Israel was suffering a major wave of criticism from the international community. How does one untangle from such a nasty debacle? No! One does not apologize, compensate, and bring the guilty parties to justice! Instead, one creates one of the most successful and unscrupulous PR systems in the 20th century.

Lately, however, it seems there are cracks in the system. One might conclude, that Hasbara isn’t as airtight as it used to be, and maybe it needs a bit of a facelift. Either that, or we could say, one may be overlooking some facts. Continue reading “So How Do I Look? – Zionist Self-Righteousness in the Face of Delegitimization”

Raymond Deane’s Open Letter to the Heinrich Böll Foundation on Norman Finkelstein

UPDATE: It now appears that the Rosa Luxemburg House has also cancelled the lecture. For shame.

Raymond Deane, renowned composer and founding member and former chairperson of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, sent this open letter to the Heinrich Böll Foundation after they cancelled Norman Finkelstein’s scheduled lecture in Berlin under the pretense that Finkelstein is a “controversial” figure.  PULSE is the first site to publish this letter in English.  The letter is also being translated into German, and will be appearing on several German websites shortly.  Finkelstein’s talk will still take place, but will be hosted by the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation.

Continue reading “Raymond Deane’s Open Letter to the Heinrich Böll Foundation on Norman Finkelstein”

BDS: Calling all Geographers

What follows is an open letter in response to the International Geographical Union’s (IGU) refusal to relocate its July 12 – 16, 2010 regional conference outside of Tel Aviv in support of the internationally supported Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign aimed at Israel.  The IGU was initially confronted by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel in November 2009.  This letter was printed on the US Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel’s website today.

Geographers and other academics can sign the letter here.

As geographers, faculty, students, and people of conscience, we are profoundly dismayed by IGU’s decision to hold its July 2010 regional conference in Tel Aviv, in violation of the widely endorsed Palestinian civil society call for Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. We are equally troubled by IGU’s response [1] to the open letter issued by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), which urged the Executive Committee to relocate the upcoming regional conference out of Israel [2].

Continue reading “BDS: Calling all Geographers”

Murderers at Large

These people murdered the Palestinian leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. According to British officials, the death squad was sent by the Israeli spy agency Mossad. An international arrest warrant is out for them. Report them to your nearest police station if you come across them.

Offensive in Marja directed at US public opinion

The reported arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar by US forces in cooperation with Pakistan is significant. He was a key member of the Quetta Shura, the central command of the Afghan Taliban. Pakistan sees the Afghan Taliban as a strategic asset in its struggle against regional rivals. It would be odd therefore to hand over such a key figure to US forces. I therefore suspect three possible scenarios: 1) The reported negotiations that Baradar had been conducting with  coalition forces were unauthorized by the shura, and therefore they chose to throw him under the bus with Pakistani cooperation to preempt any possible betrayal; 2) Baradar has already cut a deal and the ‘arrest’ is staged to make his coming in from the cold appear more respectable; 3) Pakistan is trying to signal its indispensability to the Taliban who in recent months had been growing increasingly recalcitrant. Either way, it is unlikely that Baradar’s arrest will do much to diminish the gains that the Taliban have been making in recent year. Here I would also like to recommend one of the best, most comprehensive, books on the Afghan Taliban: Antonio Guistozzi’s Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan 2002-2007.

In related news, one of the world’s finest investigative reporters, Gareth Porter of the Inter Press Service is just back from Afghanistan. He notes that the attack on Marja is meant to prepare Americans to accept negotiations with Taliban.

Mughniyeh Martyred

Imad Mughniyeh

It’s two years now since the assassination of top Hizbullah operative Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus. Hizbullah is still promising retaliation ‘at a time of its choosing’. Meanwhile, Israel’s assassinations of resistance figures continue – most recently Hamas’s Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was murdered in Dubai. The Emirati regime has taken no retaliatory action. I wrote the following in the immediate aftermath of Mughniyeh’s killing.

In this post I will jettison my chances of ever being granted an American visa (update: I have since been granted an American visa), by committing imperially-defined thought crime and supporting the strategy, if not all the tactics, of the martyred resistance leader Imad Mughniyeh. In today’s sad world you can be demonised, even prosecuted, for refusing to sing the ideological chorus with Israel (specifically Danny Yatom) that assassinations of resistance fighters represent “a great achievement for the free world in its fight against terror.” But I believe it is important not to be cowed by such hypocrisy and intimidation.

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The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 12.2.2010

Bil’in makes big waves, locally and worldwide, with their reenactment of Avatar, creatively edited by popular committee members into this short:

Continue reading “The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 12.2.2010”

National mission

Commenting on the proposed building of a “Jews-only” building in Jaffa, the head of the development company in question was reported as saying: “We will continue to build throughout the Land of Israel. The national mission today is to bring rabbis and educators to every city in Israel, in order to strengthen Jewish identity in Israel.”

The phrase ‘national mission’ felt familiar – here are just a few other examples of this kind of language.

In the Negev

“After the cornerstone laying ceremony, in which Joseph Hess of JNF America participated, Mr. David Raisch, the local CEO, said that he was very excited to see the guests from the USA: “When we were evacuated from Gush Katif, we insisted on staying together as a community. We asked the government for a national mission, we told them we wanted a place no one else wanted to live in, and that’s how we ended up in Shomeria. It’s exciting for me to see you here today, because it makes me realize that building the eastern Negev is not just our personal goal, you are our partners to this task…””

“The significance of the Disengagement Plan is not only the evacuation of the Gaza Strip – it is also an increased effort to develop the Negev, the Galilee and greater Jerusalem. The Government of Israel, which I head, considers developing the Negev, the Galilee and greater Jerusalem a primary national mission – and views settlement as the number-one tool for doing so.” [PM Ariel Sharon] Continue reading “National mission”