Het Zionistisch Racisme 7

Interview met joods-Israelische historicus Ilan Pappe.

'Zionism, a very clear ideology of exclusion, racism and expulsion' - exiled Israeli academic

by Apostolis Fotiadis - Inter Press Service

ATHENS: Support for an academic boycott of Israeli universities exposed Ilan Pappe to death threats last year, forced him to resign as senior lecturer of political science at the University of Haifa, and leave the country. His argument that the creation of Israel in 1948 was followed by a policy of cleansing Israeli territory of Arabs, his support for the Hamas resistance despite rejecting its political ideology, and the denouncement of Israeli academia for justifying the occupation of Palestine have made him an unwanted person in Israel.

But still he remains a firm believer that the only way to improve this reality is by exposing its worst aspects.

In an interview with IPS, Pappe discusses the current situation in Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict 60 years after it began.

IPS: Can Barack Obama's victory make a difference?

IP: I think people who strive to hold the post of the strongest person in the world are not interested in moral issues, or are really moved by suffering and oppression. Obama is no different, and the morality of the issue or the suffering of the Palestinians would not move him. He would move in a different direction if he and his advisers would feel that showing less support for Israel enhances their political power. So far this is not the case. It is better to be pro-Israeli to win American elections and be re-elected for the second term. If there is any hope, this is from a second term, when the powerful men are brought back to their normal human size again, and may begin to think like you and me about injustice, oppression and occupation.

IPS: Are we today experiencing the worst moment of the Arab-Israeli conflict since it first began?

IP: I still think the worst moment was 1948 and the ethnic cleansing; but it is very bad indeed. It is the final stages of the Israeli unilateral attempt to divide the West Bank into two parts, one annexed to Israel and the other maintained as a big prison camp, or a Bantustan at best. The situation in the Gaza Strip is worse, there the "prison" is already in place, and because of the resistance by the Palestinians to the imprisonment, Israel launches an escalating policy of massive killings. The world seems indifferent, and the Arab world uninterested.

IPS: During his last visit to the region US President George W. Bush described Israel as an example of progress and democracy in the Middle East. How objective do you find his view?

IP: A society that endorses a 40-year occupation of another people cannot be a liberal one. A society that discriminates against 20 percent of its population because they are not Jews cannot be described as progressive. The problem in Israel is not the role of religion or tradition; it is the role of Zionism, a very clear ideology of exclusion, racism and expulsion.

This ideology allows the army to play a significant role in most of the domestic and foreign policies, and it is probably right to say that Israel is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.

IPS: To what extent does the United States follow a policy of aggravating conflicts in the region while simultaneously calling for revival of the peace process? Does something similar happen with Palestinian militants who capitalize on people's rage? Are we experiencing an organized hypocrisy in the Middle East?

IP: I am not sure everyone is hypocritical in the same way or degree. Political elites in general are manipulators of people's tragedies and dreams, but they do differ. The worst is the American administration as in its case the gap between words and actions is the widest.

Talk of peace accompanies acts of war, support for negotiations in Palestine are actually the endorsement of Israel's occupation etc.

Israeli politicians are more transparent, their racism and oppressive plans are quite clear, but nobody in the West, and in particular Europe, is willing to do anything.

On the other hand the Palestinian Authority (PA) is not a paragon of honesty, and in fact this is why the Hamas [Movement] won the election [in 2006], but Hamas is trapped in an abnormality that would disable any political group from behaving differently. This is why the PA has to be dismembered.

IPS: On the other hand do you agree with those who see an advance of radical Islam never seen before in Palestine?

IP: Religion will continue to play for a long time a role in the life of the Palestinians, politically and socially. Whether it would be an aggressive stance or a constructive one depends entirely on the occupation and its oppressive realities. Once they are gone there is a better chance for building a political set-up that includes, rather than excludes, various ideological movements.

The advance of Hamas has a regional and local dimension. In the regional dimension it is part of the overall disappointment with the political regimes and their Western supporters. Locally, it is more directly connected to the occupation and the failure to liberate Palestine by the more secular forces. Most of Hamas support comes from the political vacuum and people's sense of defeat.

IPS: How has the abuse of history influenced the Arab-Israeli conflict up until today, and is there a way back to an objective understanding of what has happened?

IP: History was used especially in Israel to justify past criminal policies. This is the main abuse of history. It is also abused in the way that the historical narratives are employed to educate the next generations in one-dimensional, nationalist, one could say even, racist, mould. The most deplorable part of it is the abuse of the Holocaust memory which is used in Israel to Nazify the Arabs and the Palestinians, and justify criminal policies against them.

IPS: Where will this policy of suffocating Palestinians finally lead? Leaving aside the humanitarian aspect, can it become the reason for a new explosion of the Arab-Israeli conflict?

IP: It will not be a reason for another conflict, as the Arab regimes do not seem to care. But it can lead in the short term to the uprooting of Palestinians from [Gaza], genocide and ethnic cleansing. In the long run, it will make more difficult for future Palestinian generations to forgive and reconcile, and this could endanger the survival of Israel and the Jews living in it, as the Arab world and the Muslim world one day can change and become more effective and united, and Israel may lose its protector: the United States.

IPS: Has peace any chance left after 60 years of war, and if yes, what is the direction?

IP: There is no chance for peace in the near future because the conditions for it are very fundamental changes in the reality, which take time. Israel has to be de-Zionized before peace is possible, and peace has to include the return of the Palestinian refugees, otherwise it would be a futile exercise. However, one can still hope that first from the outside, through pressure, sanctions etc. and then from the inside, led by the growing number of young Israeli activists who are getting organized and effective, new energies would come to allow this transformation to take place. I think it will happen, it is hard to say when, but only working for it can bring it about.

The Daily Star Lebanon

Oil 54

by Derek Thompson

Can the Oil Shock Alone Explain the Financial Crisis?

Yes. That's the astonishing conclusion of a paper presented at the Brookings Institution that I'm still having trouble wrapping my mind around. The author, economist James Hamilton, can hardly believe the conclusions of his economic model, himself (I've got company), but the findings are remarkable, nonetheless.

Hamilton went back to 2003, when crude oil was around $30 a gallon and forecast what an oil shock like the one we experienced in 2007-08 (when oil peaked around $140) would do to GDP. He graphed the result through the end of 2008 and, lo and behold, it was damn close to actual GDP. As though there were no such thing as a collaterized debt obgligation in the first place! Here's the graph (the orange dotted line is Hamilton's projection given oil prices; the black line is actual GDP):

Perhaps you'll join me in thinking: Huh? Are we really to believe that this whole thing was caused by oil shocks? I mean, it certainly makes you appreciate the mess Detroit is in, but really. How anti-climactic. It makes this crisis seem so ... 1970s.

What about real estate, subprime mortgages and defaults? Hamilton says the housing industry had been tightening up long before the recession -- "subtracting 0.94% from the average annual GDP growth rate over 2006:Q4-2007:Q3." And housing is factored into Hamilton's analysis. It was just one of a handful of multipliers that always turn down during oil shocks.

The Real Time Economics Blog at WSJ moves the theory forward with a pretty interesting bit of revisionist history. The grand retelling goes something like this. Cheap gasoline from the 1990s into this decade encouraged families to set up their homes farther from the cities where they worked. But as the price of gas began to increase, it put a big strain of these families' commutes. With gas rising from $2 to $4, the price of these long drives doubled, straining those families' most expensive payments, namely: mortgages. When families realized they could not afford their exurban commutes, they sold their homes for a big loss. Voila: Their mortgage crisis became a bank crisis and the rest is our living history.

Hamilton concludes.

    Eventually, the declines in income and house prices set mortgage delinquency rates beyond a threshold at which the overall solvency of the financial system itself came to be questioned, and the modest recession of 2007:Q4-2008:Q3 turned into a ferocious downturn in 2008:Q4.

My head's still spinning a bit, but it's interesting to think about the political consequences of a report like this being mainstreamed. If the idea somehow stuck that an oil shock was responsible for the financial crisis, it could be a significant catalyzer for the push toward energy reform. Today we're seeing a great national movement to change Wall Street because the general consensus is that Wall Street caused this crisis. Whether Hamilton's theory is wacko or brilliant, just imagine what a national movement to revolutionize America's energy consumption would look like. What if we had oil parties instead of tea parties, demanding more government investment in alternative fuels and subsidies for green technologies. That would really be something.

Lees verder: http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/04/can_the_oil_shock_alone_explain_the_financial_crisis.php

Christenen

Een vraag voor onze christenen: Kan een land heilig zijn? Ik bedoel kan grond heilig zijn? En kan een land heilig worden gemaakt door het met terreur verdrijven van de meerderheid van de oorspronkelijke bewoners, onder wie Palestijnse christenen? Wil de eerste christen opstaan en antwoord geven? Het liefst een christen die aan politiek doet, die lid is van het CDA, de evangelische partij die de liefdevolle boodschap van de Heer zegt te willen verspreiden. Het evangelie, u weet wel, de 'goede (blijde) boodschap' betekent het. Hoe blij moeten de Indianen wel niet zijn, die door de christenen goeddeels werden uitgeroeid, de Afrikanen die door de christenen slaven werden gemaakt, de joden die in de gaskamers van de christenen verdwenen, de islamieten die in woord en beeld weer een kruistocht over zich heen krijgen? Wanneer houden de christenen eindelijk eens op christen te zijn?

Vergeet niet wat D.H. Lawrence schreef: 'Those that are pushed out of life in chagrin come back unappeased, for revenge.' Maar dat wisten de christenen toch al? 

Martelen 100

 Rice, een vrouw, zwart, behorend tot wat Henk Hofland noemt 'de politiek literaire elite.' What is in a name? Indeed.

Rice Gave Early "Waterboarding Green Light"

Thursday 23 April 2009

  Visit article original @ Agence France-Presse 

Washington - The CIA first sought in May 2002 to use harsh interrogation techniques including waterboarding on terror suspects, and was given key early approval by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, a US Senate intelligence document said.

    The agency got the green light to use the near-drowning technique on July 26, 2002, when attorney general John Ashcroft concluded "that the use of waterboarding was lawful," the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a detailed timeline of the "war on terrorism" interrogations released Wednesday.

    Nine days earlier, the panel said, citing Central Intelligence Agency records, Rice had met with then-director George Tenet and "advised that the CIA could proceed with its proposed interrogation of Abu Zubaydah," the agency's first high-value Al-Qaeda detainee, pending Justice Department approval.

    Rice's nod is believed to be the earliest known approval by a senior official in the administration of George W. Bush of the intelligence technique which current Attorney General Eric Holder has decried as "torture."

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/042309A

Martelen 99

Roger Cohen maakt vandaag in The New York Times iets duidelijk wat de NRC-redactie weigert te accepteren: taal kan dodelijk zijn. Martelen aan je lezers verkopen als 'harde verhoren', zoals de NRC doet, is meewerken aan terreur.

No Time for Retribution
By ROGER COHEN
Published: April 22, 2009

Language is lethal. The Bush administration’s legal memos opening the way to torture are a reminder of the intimate link between a bureaucrat’s lawyerly subordinate clause and a man’s near drowning.

Now we all know what “interrogation with enhanced techniques” means: an insect in a human cage.
Don’t say what you mean when you mean to do the unspeakable. That’s an old rule. It was perfected in the 20th century from Moscow to Buenos Aires.
Opacity is the refuge of the faceless tormentor. The constitutions of totalitarian states are always unreadable, impenetrable — and very long. In a thicket of words lies plausible deniability when the time for horror’s accounting arrives. That hour always comes around.
I keep re-reading some of the sentences in the memos from the dark side. Like a labyrinth, they lead back in on themselves: “You have, however, informed us that you expect these techniques to be used in some sort of escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique.”
The “technique” has a “culmination” that is not necessarily an “ending”; and on round again, several hundred times.
To some degree, words failed us all in the aftermath of 9/11, a time of fear and disorientation. Journalists did not meet the challenge of holding the executive branch accountable, politically and morally, in the run-up to the Iraq war. Such failures, it is true, were not gross manipulations of the law in the service of inhumanity, but they were failures nonetheless. And they carried a human price. Lees verder:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23iht-edcohen.html

Martelen 98

Roger Cohen schrijft:

Waterboarding

Waterboarding is a centuries-old practice used to coerce prisoners during interrogations by using water to cut off oxygen and to create both the feeling and fear of drowning. It was approved by the Justice Department under President George W. Bush for use by the Central Intelligence Agency on so-called "high value'' terrorism suspects, then barred by President Obama on his second day in office.

During the Bush administration, waterboarding came to serve as shorthand for a broader debate about the legality of methods being used to interrogate terrorism suspects. Questions about whether the technique constituted torture played a central role in confirmation hearings in the fall of 2007 for former Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, who refused to describe waterboarding as torture. By contrast, Mr. Obama's attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., flatly stated during his confirmation hearings in January 2009 that "waterboarding is torture.''

"We prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam," he said.

The executive orders issued by Mr. Obama after taking office reversed the most disputed counterterrorism policies of the Bush administration. Among Mr. Obama's actions was to require that all interrogations follow the noncoercive methods of the Army Field Manual. He also directed his cabinet to formulate new policies on detaining and interrogating terror suspects.

The immediate practical impact of the orders was limited, in part because military interrogators have been required by law to abide by the Army Field Manual since 2005, and the C.I.A. apparently has not used waterboarding since 2003.

The goal of waterboarding, which has been used in interrogations at least since the time of the Spanish Inquisition, is to create the sensation of drowning without causing death. The subject is strapped to an inclined board, immobilized with his head positioned lower than his feet. In some cases, a piece of cloth or cellophane is placed over the subjects face and water is repeatedly poured over it, triggering a gag reflex and choking the subject. In other cases, the subject's head is submerged under water or his mouth is forced open and water is poured down his throat.

Waterboarding was one of a number of coercive interrogation techniques adapted by the C.I.A. from a military program meant to train personnel to endure brutal questioning of the kind used by the Soviet Union and its allies. Testifying before a House subcommittee on Nov. 8, 2007, Malcolm Wrightson Nance, a former Navy instructor in prisoner of war and terrorist hostage survival programs, explained that he experienced waterboarding while being trained and that he had been involved in the waterboarding of hundreds of other trainees. Mr. Nance said the experience was slow-motion suffocation with water overpowering your gag reflex. Soon, he said, the throat opens and allows pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs. Unless the subject is allowed to expel the water, the result would be death by suffocation.
Lees verder: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/torture/waterboarding/index.html

De Pro Israel Lobby 120

Pelosi Said She Knew Harman Was Wiretapped

Wednesday 22 April 2009

by: Edward Epstein  |  Visit article original @ Congressional Quarterl

    Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that she was first informed in a confidential briefing a few years ago that Rep. Jane Harman had been recorded by spy agencies, but that she couldn't tell Harman or anyone else about it.

    Pelosi said the briefing from intelligence agencies was usual practice in the Capitol, where top congressional leaders are always told when a member of Congress pops up during the course of secret investigations.

    Pelosi wouldn't comment on the substance of the briefing about Harman.

    "I was not in a position to raise it with Jane Harman. All they said was that she was wiretapped," said Pelosi, who said she couldn't remember if the secret briefing took place in 2005 or 2006.

    "When you are briefed on something it isn't your role to share it with anybody else," said Pelosi, who served on the Intelligence Committee for a decade until she entered the House Democratic leadership about six years ago. "Even if I wanted to share it with her I would not have had the liberty to share it with her," she added at a roundtable sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.

    Congressional Quarterly reported April 19 that National Security Agency eavesdroppers heard Harman agreeing in 2005 to an appeal from a suspected Israeli agent to intervene in an effort to reduce espionage-related charges lodged against two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, Washington's most powerful pro-Israel organization.

Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/042309K