Author: alannahpriestley

Robin Yassin-Kassab: Too late for two states

Reporting for Al Jazeera, writer and PULSE co-editor Robin Yassin-Kassab writes:

I saw Haneen al-Zoabi giving a lecture. She is the knesset member who sailed with the Gaza Flotilla and was so shabbily abused while attempting to give her account of events to Israel’s parliament. In Nablus, she spoke emotionally about the situation of Palestinian-Israelis, the descendants of those few who escaped ethnic cleansing in 1948.

Citizens but not nationals of the state (nationality is for Jews only), Palestinian-Israelis receive a fraction of the services offered to Jews, are forbidden from teaching Palestinian history in schools and are as likely to be victims of land confiscation as fellow Palestinians in the West Bank. Ninety-three per cent of Israel’s land is off-limits to non-Jews and half of Palestinian-Israeli families live below the poverty line.

I heard Jamal Hwayil speak. He was the leader of the Fatah-affiliated al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin at the time of Israel’s 2002 massacre there and now he is an independent member of the Palestinian parliament. He took a clear position on Palestinian division: “Political arrests are wrong. Wrong in Gaza and wrong in the West Bank. Political arrests have no place in a liberation struggle.”

A little later he added: “There can be neither meaningful negotiations nor productive armed resistance so long as the political leadership is divided.”

Read all of Yassin-Kassab’s “Too late for two states” here.

Valley of the Wolves: Palestine

Israel-Turkey relations may survive the Flotilla flap, but lets see if they can survive this. Kurtlar Vadisi is the immensely popular Turkish series which was first turned into a Rambo-style big budget film attacking the US occupation of Iraq (at a time when relations between the US and Turkey were otherwise cordial). In the forthcoming film, the same Turkish team infiltrates Israel (or Palestine, as the film’s hero insists on calling it) to exact revenge for the flotilla murder. Here’s the trailer:

Politics of terror threats

Riz Khan Show with Robert Baer and Amitava Kumar. Baer is refreshingly forthright about the terrorism industry, and its investment in amplifying fear.

Is Terrorism being used to erode free speech rights?

Glenn Greenwald predictably shines in this panel discussion at the NYU Law School along with NYU Law Professor Burt Neuborne, Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone, and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force Supervisory Agent Niall Brennan, moderated by Time‘s Barton Gellman. See Greenwald’s post here.

 

London student revolt a sign of things to come

by Andy Worthington

They came from all over the country, creating a 50,000-strong throng of students and University lecturers that filled Whitehall. Peaceful but vocal, the protestors were armed only with banners and placards, but at times the noise, as they chanted their opposition to the government’s planned £2.9 bn cut in university funding, was deafening.

I attended the demo for about an hour and a half, and was heartened that so many had turned up. To be frank, every single student in the country should have been there, or they might as well have had ministers turning up at their door asking them to agree that, from today, they will start paying up to £9,000 a year in fees — as opposed to the current rate of £3,290.

There was anger too, as some protestors smashed up Tory HQ on Millbank, while others took to the roof of the building. Some were students, others were not, but predictably, the violence overshadowed the main events of the day in the majority of media reports, and in much of the hand-wringing commentary today. In truth, however, both the massive peaceful demo and the considerably smaller group of violent protestors were indicative of much more unrest to come — and for good reason.

On university education, as on welfare, the coalition government is mounting nothing less than a full-scale assault on the State and on fundamental notions of how British society operates. Critics — either the usual suspects whining about students’ privileges, or the new breed of middle class hypocrites ignoring the fact that their own university educations were subsidized — seem content to accept that university education is not something that contributes to the good of society as a whole, and also to accept, without a murmur, that as a result the axemen of Downing Street should be allowed to impose the most swingeing cuts imaginable.

Continue reading “London student revolt a sign of things to come”

UK students protest over university fees

Finally, something stirs.

Tens of thousands of students are protesting against plans by the British government to raise university tuition fees, smashing windows and lighting fires in London, the capital. Wednesday’s protest near the houses of parliament is the largest street demonstration in the country since the government announced tough austerity measures to curb public deficit. Students attempted to force their way into the party headquarters of David Cameron, the prime minister, forcing the building to be evacuated.

Coup University: SOUTHCOM and FIU Team Up on Counterinsurgency

by Adrienne Pine

As it has done with great success throughout the past century, the U.S. military continues to find ways to use the academy and anthropological concepts to whitewash its imperialist actions in the service of U.S. corporate profits. In Latin America from 1963-1965, Project Camelot set a dark precedent for the use of social science to abet and legitimate counterinsurgency operations including psychological warfare. Now, the U.S. Military’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the Pentagon’s arm in Latin America and responsible for all U.S. bases the region, and Florida International University (FIU) have partnered in the creation of a so-called “Strategic Culture” Initiative, a center that hosts workshops and issues reports on the “strategic culture” of different Latin American countries. At present, reports have been issued from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Peru, and Venezuela.

On its website, the FIU-SOUTHCOM initiative defines strategic culture as “the combination of internal and external influences and experiences – geographic, historical, cultural, economic, political and military – that shape and influence the way a country understands its relationship to the rest of the world, and how a state will behave in the international community.” However, from a look at their reports it is clear that a more accurate definition would be “strategic propaganda for the creation of hegemonic political ideology favorable to U.S. economic and military interests.” Here is an excerpt from the Peru report:

The elements of the new strategic culture, if it continues to emerge, will be to end or reduce the plaintive note of victim-hood in discussion of the nation’s role in world affairs. Ironically, Chile will become the model for the new Peruvian strategic culture – focused on the successes of economic growth, political stability, and an honest effort to incorporate peripheral regions and marginal groups into national life. Peru, more than Chile, can base its national pride on multi-ethnic assimilation. This new national integration, along with the openness to trade and investment will be the principal components of Peru’s new soft power…Peru will join Brazil and Chile as bulwarks of democracy and open economies, set as an example against the archaic rhetoric and self-defeating economic autarchy of the Bolivarian alliance.

Young Jews disrupt Netanyahu speech in New Orleans

Young Jews disrupted Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the General Assembly of Jewish Federations.

Also see this interview with the protestors, Matan Cohen, Matthew Taylor, Emily Ratner, Eitan Issacson and Antonia House.

For more, visit: YoungJewishProud.org

The CPCCA and the New McCarthyism

Intelligent activism by Jewish Canadians who advocate against the fictional notion of a “new anti-semitism” which is used as a pressure tactic by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League and Harvard’s McCarthyite-in-Chief Alan Dershowitz against anyone who criticizes Israeli policies. Video by Independent Jewish Voices.

Gitmo and the American Way

by Chase Madar

Graffiti by Banksy

When I was down in Guantánamo a few months ago, a veteran German journalist let it slip that she didn’t much care for the place.  “This,” she confided in me, and many of the other journalists there as well, “is the worst place I have ever visited in my entire career.”

It’s not hard to see why my superlative-loving friend felt this way: we were covering the case of Omar Khadr, a 15-year-old Canadian captured after a firefight with U.S. forces outside Kabul in July 2002, tortured and interrogated for a few months at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, then transported to Guantánamo.  He just reached a plea agreement that will avoid a trial before a military commission at Gitmo for five “war crimes.”  Four of them, freshly invented for the occasion, are not recognized as war crimes in any other court on the planet.  (Khadr pled guilty to all charges and will get at least one year more at Gitmo — in solitary — then perhaps be transferred to Canada for a remaining seven years.)

Aside from Khadr and about 130 other prisoners who may one day see a trial, Guantánamo also holds 47 more War on Terror prisoners who are expected to be “detained” indefinitely without being tried at all.  This was one of the radical policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that is now cheerfully defended by the human rights grandees in Barack Obama’s State Department.

Gitmo and all other places without habeas corpus rights are indeed dismal places — and there is certainly something disgusting about the first conviction of a child soldier since World War II.  All the same, I couldn’t help but wonder if my vehement Kollegin had ever visited a homegrown federal prison like the one in Terre Haute, Indiana (whose maximum security wing was copied down to the smallest detail at Gitmo’s Camp 5), or even your run-of-the-mill overcrowded state lock-up, the kind you pass on the highway without even noticing that you’ve done so, or one of the crumbling youth detention facilities in New York State which, as we lawyers who have represented youth offenders know, are hellish.

Continue reading “Gitmo and the American Way”