Counterpunch @ MindSay 
You might recall my mentioning on 23 November the Jerusalem Post’s report on the new Human Rights Watch report accusing Palestinians of war crimes for protecting individual houses with ‘human shields’. Then, on 29 November, Norman Finkelstein (reprinted immediately on CounterPunch) came out against the report and called for letters to HRW demanding a retraction. This morning there was a press release from the International Solidarity Movement citing the relevant sections of the Geneva Conventions and establishing quite convincingly that HRW’s accusation was completely groundless, in their own terms. Finkelstein’s page provides links for those who want to write to Kenneth Roth and Sarah Whitson, which I encourage you to do. There are also letters from other readers on that page.
Now, Jonathan Cook has also made an impressive contribution to the discussion of the issue, which you should read in full. Among his observations,
Women volunteering to surround a mosque become the equivalent of the notorious incident in January 2003 when 21-year-old Samer Sharif was handcuffed to the hood of an army Jeep and driven towards stone-throwing youngsters in Nablus as Israeli soldiers fired their guns from behind his head.
A few days ago I wrote that Gaza residents traumatized by projectiles falling on their homes didn’t have the option of fleeing because ‘of course departure is not an option for them’. A correspondent has written casting doubt on this assertion, ‘From what I've read, it seems that Israel is perfectly willing to let Palestinians leave for other countries. If that is true, that means departure is an option’. On reflection, I wrote, ‘I have heard that, too. In fact I think foundations exist, possibly run out of Yisrael Beitenu, that will pay their way and even give them a little grant. But I'm not real sure how it works and frankly, I can't imagine anyone in Gaza being able to avail themselves of such an opportunity, as there are no Israeli officials there to entertain an application and the borders are closed.’ If you can shed any light in the issue, please let me know and I’ll post an update.
Hot on the heels of their recent military intervention in Tonga to protect the monarchy from prodemocracy ‘rioters’, in the interests of stability and democracy, Ha’aretz reports that New Zealand has now humiliated itself again by withdrawing a warrant for the arrest of Moshe Ya’alon for war crimes.
The warrant names Ya'alon for ordering an Israel Air Force attack on the home of senior Hamas official Salah Shehada in the Gaza Strip in 2002. Shahada, the founder of Hamas' military wing, and one of his aides were killed in the attack along with 13 civilians.
This morning’s mail also brought an interesting ‘cogitation’ from MediaLens’s David Edwards, where he discusses some of the mechanisms that the educational system deploys in turning us into compliant ‘responsible’ members of society, regardless of considerations of what I think he would call ‘compassion’, and I would call ‘solidarity’. Among the specific ploys that teacher John Taylor Gatto mentions in his book Dumbing Us Down,
The point is that a child who accepts the label ‘not very bright’ will, in his or her own mind, deem risible the notion that he or she might seek to understand the world, much less to challenge the assumptions accepted by the society by which he or she has been labelled. For a ’failure’ who has been successfully undermined in this way, to reject the labelling system itself will seem like the most obvious and wretched sour grapes. How can this one individual be right against a whole world of opinion? And from where can we gain the confidence that has been stripped away from us by the very system we are presuming to challenge?
On the other hand, the ‘bright’ child will feel a sense of affirmation and belonging that will make him or her disinclined to challenge the fundamental legitimacy and wisdom of the source of his or her own self-esteem. These are the ’winners’ who populate our public [i.e. private] schools, Oxbridge universities and corporate media offices.
Edwards also points out that ‘a lot of ’dim’ children are too ’bright’, or at least too true to themselves, to tolerate the trivia imposed on them as ’education’. To be indifferent to what is of minimal human significance is not a sign of stupidity.’
When I was a kid, maybe 6 or 7 years old, my grandmother took me to see a western and after some gripping scene I discovered to my horror that M&Ms actually do melt in your hand. This was a seminal event in my life, to which I attribute my low tolerance for bullshit. My mother recently reminded me of it out of the blue, so I’m pretty sure it’s not just my fevered imagination. Nevertheless, I did well in school until I dropped out in grade 10 - a decision I have never had cause to regret. I wish I’d been allowed to do it earlier. One of the many advantages was that they never got around to teaching me to hate Shakespeare.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how disappointed I was not to have run into the socialists at the secularism rally I attended. Well, I finally found them yesterday selling papers in Kızılay. I anticipate that this is going to have a significant positive impact on my energy level and my motivation to learn Turkish. It’s also possible that it will also impact on the time available for my cyberlife.
I’m going to post this before it gets too long, but I’m currently writing something about Jimmy Carter’s speech broadcast Thursday, Democracy Now!, and the DN interview with Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abunimah. I may post it later today.
According to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour in an interview with The Jerusalem Post Thursday,
"In one case you could have, for instance, a very objectionable intent - the intent to harm civilians, which is very bad - but effectively not a lot of harm is actually achieved," she said. "But how can you compare that with a case where you may not have an intent but you have recklessness [in which] civilian casualties are foreseeable? The culpability or the intent may not sound as severe, but the actual harm is catastrophic."
Believe it or not, she is attributing the objectionable intent to those firing Qassam rockets. I suppose it should be welcome that she at least recognizes that the IOF is culpable for the foreseeable, but of course unintentional, Palestinians who just happen to be accidentally killed and injured by Israeli artillery barrages, missiles, bullets and other obviously harmless projectiles.
On CounterPunch the other day, Kathleen Christisson issued a moral challenge,
…any Jew anywhere who allows Israel to commit these acts and pursue these policies in the name of all Jews -- for Israel does claim to act in the name of Jews everywhere -- without speaking out against Israel, without screaming protests, must be ashamed. Any American who allows the United States to support Israel -- to support it militarily with infusions of arms in the billions of dollars every year and to sustain it morally and psychologically -- without loud protest should be ashamed.
Further on the Gemayel assassination, Charles Glass writes,
So, what can the United States do? I can tell you what it has done. In 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger approved the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. In 1982, his successor, Al Haig, encouraged Israel's invasion. Then, in 1990, another American secretary of state, James Baker, gave the go-ahead for the Syrian army to return to the parts of Lebanon from which it had been excluded in 1982. Neither Syria nor Israel entered Lebanon without an American okay. An American diktat could keep them both out, if the US cared as much about Lebanon as its politicians claim.
Jonathan Cook, as always worth a read, makes a convincing, if admittedly inconclusive, case that the Syrians are not necessarily the ones with most to gain from the assassination,
Gemayel's death, and Syria's blame for it, strengthens the case of the neoconservatives in Washington -- Israel's allies in the Administration -- whose star had begun to wane. They can now argue convincingly that Syria is unreformed and unreformable. Such an outcome helps to avert the danger, from Israel's point of view, that White House doves might win the argument for befriending Syria.
For all these reasons, we should be wary of assuming that Syria is the party behind Gemayel's death -- or the only regional actor meddling in Lebanon.
In much the same vein, Robert Fisk writes,
That little matter of the narrative - and who writes it - remained a problem yesterday, as the Western powers pointed their fingers at Syria. Yes, all five leading Lebanese men murdered in the past 20 months were anti-Syrian. And it's a bit like saying "the butler did it". Wouldn't a vengeful Syria strike at the independence of Lebanon by killing a minister? Yes. But then, what would be the best way of undermining the new and boastful power of the pro-Syrian Hizbollah, the Shia guerrilla army which has demanded the resignation of Siniora's cabinet? By killing a government minister, knowing that many Lebanese would blame the murder on Syria's Hizbollah allies?
For another take on the NYT coverage of the assassination, Chris Marsden writes in WSWS,
What the Times presents as an accidental result of Gemayel’s assassination provides a more convincing argument for anti-Syrian forces being responsible than its own efforts to blame Hezbollah or Syria.
As the Times predicted, Hezbollah has been forced to put the planned anti-government rallies announced earlier by its leader Sheik Hasan Nasrallah on hold. Instead, Gemayel’s funeral yesterday was the focus of a massive demonstration by anti-Syrian and pro-government forces.
In today’s Times, Steven Erlanger, always ready to cast a critical eye on events in Palestine, writes,
After another surge of violence in and around the Gaza Strip over the past month, Israel and the Palestinians moved gingerly on Friday toward reinstating an often-broken cease-fire between them.
Not worth mentioning in the newspaper of record is that the surge of violence has been perpetrated by the occupying military force. Not worth mentioning is that artillery and firearms are discharged with an intent to cause harm. And above all, it is not only not worth mentioning, but forbidden to mention, that the ‘often-broken cease-fire’ was unilateral, that Hamas refused to respond to Israeli provocation for over a year and a half.
True to form, history in the NYT’s view, began on 25 June,
Israel re-entered Gaza in late June in response to the capture of a soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, by a group of Palestinian militants that included Hamas.
That the Israeli military kidnapped two Palestinian civilians the previous day, civilians, not coincidentally, whose names the NYT will not publish, couldn’t possibly have anything whatever to do with Shalit’s capture. Once again, small mercies. At least Mr Erlanger has managed to temper his language – usually, Shalit is ‘kidnapped’ or ‘abducted’, as if his tank crew were not a legitimate military target. As if it was some kind of crime. Which of course it was. By definition. What the occupied and oppressed do is criminal, what the occupiers and oppressors do is anticipatory retaliation, or the like.
Sometimes I feel like it must be tiresome reading about the cynical bullshit I see in the media. But people read the bullshit itself every day, day in day out – I know people who actually subscribe to the hard copy of the Times, so I guess I’ll just keep it up.
In an uncharacteristically sensible opinion, considering the auspices under which it was carried out, Leandro Despouy, the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers ‘voiced “strong objections” regarding the conduct of the trial’, as reported on the UN website.
Despouy cogently observes,
The tribunal has been established during an occupation considered by many as illegal, is composed of judges who have been selected during this occupation, including non Iraqi citizens, and has been mainly financed by the United States.
…lack of observance of a legal framework that conforms to international human rights principles and standards, in particular the right to be tried by an independent and impartial tribunal which upholds the right to a defence… risks being seen as the expression of the verdict of the winners over the losers…Since its beginning one of the judges, five candidate judges, three defence lawyers and an employee of the tribunal have been killed.
Furthermore, the body had no mandate to address “the war crimes committed by foreign troops during the first Gulf war (1990), nor the war crimes committed after 1 May 2003, date of the beginning of the occupation.”
He also discouraged Saddam’s execution which would be an open contradiction to the growing international tendency to abolish capital punishment.
Perhaps more importantly, it lets Saddam’s main backers entirely off the hook, as Robert Fisk chronicled in yesterday’s CounterPunch, citing US and British supply of a range of biological and chemical agents that they were perfectly well aware were being used against the Iranian conscripts in the first Gulf War in the 1980s, as well as the Halabja massacre, which the US cynically tried to blame on Iran when Saddam was their buddy. Norman Solomon provides a list of compelling accusations specifically against US Secretary of ‘Defense’ Donald Rumsfeld.
Indeed, a really thorough investigation would have to go right back to the late Fifties and examine how the Ba’ath came to overthrow the Qassem government in the first place, and how Saddam rose to preeminence in that august institution. And it might even determine who needs to stand trial for the crimes against humanity of the UN sanctions regime, characterized by its administrators, Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, as ‘genocide’.
If Saddam doesn’t live to testify in all those trials and help bring his backers to justice, it will be, if possible, even more obvious that the principal function of this kangaroo court has been to protect the guilty.
Spot the loonie
‘You imposed a group of terrorists ... on the region…It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals... This is an ultimatum. Don't complain tomorrow…. Today, with the grace of God, the efforts to establish this fake regime have failed totally.’ Ahmadinejad, as reported in Ha’aretz.
‘Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime… this is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom… The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.’ George W Bush
Ha’aretz, in the same article, after reiterating the discredited ‘face of the map’ remark, reports ‘Iran is accused of seeking to develop nuclear weapons.’ Accused of seeking to develop – now that’s something that demands that tens of millions of Iranians must suffer.
And while on the topic of loonies, check out who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Alex Cockburn writes:
As the economist Robert Pollin put it pithily when I asked him what he thought of the award to Younus , "Bangladesh and Bolivia are two countries widely recognized for having the most successful micro credit programs in the world. They also remain two of the poorest countries in the world."…
P. Sainath, author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought and India's most outstanding journalist on rural destitution and the consequences of economic policy,…points out that …"They are paying between 24 and 36 per cent on loans for productive expenditures while an upper class person can finance the purchase of a Mercedes at 6 to 8 per cent from the banking system."
The average loan of the Grameen bank is $130 in Bangladesh, lower in India. Now, the basic problem of the poor in both countries is landlessness, lack of assets. In the Indian province of Andhra Pradesh, where there are thousands of microloan groups, land costs 100,000 rupees an acre, poor land maybe 60,000 rupees--over $2000. $130 doesn't buy you the ranch, not even a good cow or buffalo.
If capitalism could solve the problems it creates, it would have done so by now, wouldn’t it?
As for the Nobel Peace Prize, in case some have forgotten, here is a partial list of some of those so honoured for their contribution to world peace: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Henry A. Kissinger, Mohamed Anwar Al-Sadat, Menachem Begin, Elie Wiesel, Óscar Arias Sánchez, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, Frederik Willem de Klerk, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, The United Nations and Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter.
