HRW: Israel accused of indiscriminate phosphorus use in Gaza

White Phosphorus
Palestinian civilians and medics run to safety during an Israeli strike using phosphorus shells at a UN school. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP

Human Rights Watch has released a new detailed report charging the Israeli government with committing numerous and repeated grave violations of the laws of war. The report entitled ‘Rain of Fire’ focuses on the illegal use of white phosphorus in Gaza and is only the latest in a growing series of evidence documenting Israeli war crimes. Additionaly, HRW “found no evidence that Hamas fighters used Palestinian civilians as human shields – a key Israeli claim – in the area at the time of the attacks it researched.” Here is the Guardian’s brief summary of HRW’s main findings:

Israel’s military fired white phosphorus over crowded areas of Gaza repeatedly and indiscriminately in its three-week war, killing and injuring civilians and committing war crimes, Human Rights Watch said today.

In a 71-page report, the rights group said the repeated use of air-burst white phosphorus artillery shells in populated areas of Gaza was not incidental or accidental, but revealed “a pattern or policy of conduct”.

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The Rise of the Machine

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Could this be the machine?

An article in yesterday’s Financial Times reported some interesting (if characteristically deluded) perspectives from the Israeli right in its closing paragraphs.  International condemnation of Israel’s latest atrocities has apparently been blamed on the ‘Palestinian PR Machine’.  At first I thought this ‘machine’ was as subtle and obscure as other figments of the neocon/Likudnik imagination.   However, readers should be aware that according to a security source of mine it is indeed as powerful and frightful as these bizarre statements suggest and furthermore it can be launched within 45 minutes.  Its existence is also confirmed by Emanuele Ottolenghi of St Antony’s College, Oxford (oh yes and the American Jewish Committee’s Transatlantic Institute).

So it’s no laughing matter.  In fact it’s so powerful that it requires an even greater propaganda assault than Israel has already launched (in retaliation naturally).   According to the Financial Times:

To counter these forces and repair Israel’s standing, one rightwing commentator this week went so far as to call for an Israeli ministry for PR. Adi Mintz said the ministry should be fitted out with “many dozens of video teams, editors and producers that would generate materials and immediately distribute them to all media outlets”. Israel’s message, he added, should be heard not just in America, but also “on television screens in Romania and China”.

The American Way of War

The Real News interviews Eugene Jarecki, the maker of the excellent film Why We Fight (watch it on Google Video).

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Edward Said – Culture and Imperialism

edwardsaidThe late Edward Said speaking in 1993 on Culture and Imperialism.

Edward Said – Culture and Imperialism (57:23): MP3

Imperial power is constructed on a bedrock not only of force but of culture as well. Culture provides the underpinning, justification and validation of empire. Its crudest manifestation is perhaps Kipling’s “White man’s burden.” A more refined version is the French “mission civilisatrice,” civilizing mission. Imperialism is often thought of as a European phenomenon of the past. In fact it continues today in new shapes and forms. The US carries out its imperial policies behind the facade of democracy and freedom. Culture and politics produce a system of control that transcends military power to include a hegemony of representations and images that dominate the imaginations of both the oppressor and the oppressed.

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You know, fiction!

I am stealing Glenn Greenwald’s characteristically brilliant post on the incestuous relationship between the elite media and the political class. Bear in mind that Howard Kurtz is the same hack who led the government counteroffensive against Gary Webb (see here and here) — the journalist who had exposed a CIA operation, later confirmed by an internal investigation, that showed that the agency had been funding its covert ops in Central America by aiding the smuggling of crack cocained into California — by destroying his career. Here Greenwald destroys Kurtz and all that he represents.

Howard Kurtz: government and media need a “cease-fire” now and then

(updated below – Update II – Update III – Update IV)

Howard Kurtz makes an extremely funny joke today, showing why he is the “media critic” for both The Washington Post and CNN:

I know the [DC media/political] dinners may project an image that we’re all just a bunch of cozy Washington insiders, but I don’t think they’re that big a deal. There’s such a built-in adversarial relationship between the press and the pols that spending a couple of evenings in a kind of light-hearted cease-fire doesn’t strike me as a terrible thing.

That is some very penetrating media criticism there.  The media and political leaders are at each other’s throats so viciously, they have such sharply conflicting interests, that it’s a wonder they can even be in the same room together without physical confrontation.  For instance, it was the same Howie Kurtz who, in 2004, wrote this about what happened at his own newspaper:
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A Confederacy of Dunces

John Mearsheimer on The dumbing down of US economic and foreign policy elites.

Frank Rich had an excellent column in the Sunday New York Times in which he suggested that President Obama’s economic team is unsuited to deal with the financial crisis. “I fear,” he wrote, “that too many of the administration’s officials are too marinated in the insiders’ culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it.” Let’s hope his fears are proven wrong.

But Rich’s column points to a larger and possibly more disturbing feature of our predicament: very few of the country’s economic experts foresaw the tsunami that is now upon us. Indeed, most of them thought that the global economy was working well and needed nothing more than some tweaking here and there. This is why Obama ended up appointing a team of economic experts who not only failed to see the storm coming, but in the case of Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, promoted policies that helped cause it. Simply put, there were hardly any sagacious business people, economists, or policymakers who he could have turned to for help.

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Palestinian Israelis

We tend to focus on the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza and to forget about their relatives in the refugee camps of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, and especially those inside the 1948 borders of Israel. It is becoming increasingly urgent to learn about the so-called ‘Arab-Israelis’, for two reasons. First, because their plight illustrates that Zionism, even without an occupation, requires some form of apartheid. Second, because as Israel’s Palestinian community grows to more than 20% of the total, and as fascist movements flourish, this community is increasingly at risk of another large-scale ethnic cleansing. Adalah is a good place to start researching the legal, political and economic discrimination against Arabs in Israel. Jonathan Cook’s website and his book, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, are excellent resources. Here is a recent article by Cook on Israel’s denial of basic services to the Bedouin population.

Bedouin Baby’s Power Struggle with Israel
Little Ashimah Abu Sbieh’s life hangs by a thread — or more specifically, an electricity cable that runs from a noisy diesel-powered generator in the family’s backyard. Should the generator’s engine fail, she could die within minutes. Continue reading “Palestinian Israelis”

Israeli authorities ban Palestinian Cultural Festival

An Al-Haq press release reports on one of the many Zionist attempts to eliminate Palestinian cultural identity:

A ceremony celebrating Jerusaelm as the Capital of Arab Culture 2009 in the West Bank city of Tulkarem, 22 March 2009. (Mouid Ashqar/MaanImages)

As an organization dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Al-Haq condemns the repressive actions taken today [Saturday 21 March 2009] by the Israeli authorities in banning peaceful cultural activities organized as part of the Palestinian Cultural Festival marking the declaration of Jerusalem as the “Capital of Arab Culture 2009.”
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Intimidating Muslims

Brian Whitaker writes a good article on New Labour’s intimidatory tactics against British Muslims. And here is an unusually excellent editorial from the Guardian. The branding of the Istanbul Declaration as extremist is designed to ensure that nobody engages with it, and it deserves to be engaged with. Although I don’t identify with the religious language myself, or like the globalising flourish at the end, I don’t see anything terribly objectionable about the declaration, which is posted after the Whitaker article.

Following the recent muddle over Hezbollah, the British government continues to dig itself deeper into the mire with its “anti-extremism” policy.

Hazel Blears, secretary of state for communities and local government, is trying to engineer the resignation of Daud Abdullah, deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain. She may not like Abdullah or agree with his views but, frankly, it’s none of her business. The MCB is not a government body and can appoint whoever it wants as its deputy secretary general.

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Gaza war crimes investigation: Israeli drones

Clancy Chassay asks why Israeli drones with optics capable of seeing the colour of a target’s clothes killed so many Palestinian civilians during the recent Gaza invasion. Part Three of Three. Watch Part One and Part Two.

Mounir al-Jarah slowly takes down the bricks he used to wall up the entrance to his sister’s courtyard. Inside, flesh still clings to the walls; blood-soaked furniture and family items lie broken and mangled.

Mounir’s eyes search around the old house as he recounts the events of 16 January, when a rocket fired from an unmanned aerial vehicle killed his sister, her husband and four of her children.

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