British Ministers were accused last night of deliberately driving poor people out of wealthy inner cities as London councils revealed they were preparing a mass exodus of low-income families from the capital because of coalition benefit cuts.
Representatives of London boroughs told a meeting of MPs last week that councils have already block-booked bed and breakfasts and other private accommodation outside the capital – from Hastings, on the south coast, to Reading to the west and Luton to the north – to house those who will be priced out of the London market.
Councils in the capital are warning that 82,000 families – more than 200,000 people – face losing their homes because private landlords, enjoying a healthy rental market buoyed by young professionals who cannot afford to buy, will not cut their rents to the level of caps imposed by ministers.
The controversy follows comment last week by Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, who said the unemployed should "get on the bus". Another unnamed minister said the benefit changes would usher in a phenomenon similar to the Highland Clearances in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when landlords evicted thousands of tenants from their homes in the north of Scotland.
In a sign that housing benefit cuts are fast becoming the most sensitive political issue for the coalition, Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, last night accused the government of deliberate social engineering.
"It is an exercise in social and economic cleansing," he said, claiming that families would be thrown into turmoil, with children having to move school and those in work having to travel long distances to their jobs. "It is tantamount to cleansing the poor out of rich areas – a brutal and shocking piece of social engineering," Cruddas added.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
E.U. MONEY REGULATION
IT IS TIME WE READ THIS AGAIN:
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Published: 5:25PM GMT 02 Feb 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/7139497/Threat-to-City-of-London-as-EU-Parliament-seeks-to-whittle-away-power-to-veto.htmlas-EU-Parliament-seeks-to-whittle-away-power-to-veto.html
The Euro-MPs in charge of drafting the rules for oversight bodies covering banking and markets aim to make it much harder for Britain or other states to use an "emergency brake" to block decisions on regulation, and perhaps to strip them of their veto altogether.Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, thought he had secured a safeguard clause in a deal with fellow EU ministers late last year. The agreement stipulates that states can take their case to the European Council - the supreme EU body made up by heads of government - where decisions are taken by unanimity, if they think that a ruling by a trio of EU supervisory authorities "impinges on in any way on the fiscal responsibilities of the member states."
That is not end of the matter, however, since the European Parliament has broad legislative powers and can rewrite the text. All the major blocs in the assembly vowed last November that they would not agree to "water down" the original plans for the new bodies, which are to have "binding powers" to impose decisions.Sven Giegold, a German Green MEP and 'rapporteur' in charge of markets regulation, said the veto on fiscal matters is so vague and sweeping that it enables states to block almost anything. "A European supervisory system in which each government could veto decisions would be rather silly. This veto - as defined - has to go," he said.While the drafting process is confidential, it is understood that the Spanish 'rapporteur' in charge on banking regulation, also favours limiting the veto.
The Parliament is drawing up its version for a planned 'First Reading' by early summer. If the text clashes with Mr Darling's Council version - as it undoubtedly will - the two sides must thrash out a final compromise.
Mats Persson, director of the think tank Open Europe, said the move by Euro-MPs to unpick Mr Darling's deal is a threat to Britain's financial industry. "If MEPs manage to win support for this plan, it will add further momentum to what is already a significant transfer of powers from national regulators to the EU level. These plans will leave the UK Government completely without safeguards against proposals which could hurt the City of London. Crucially, accountability will fall into a black hole between EU regulators and the states. If the crisis taught us anything, it is the importance of holding both regulators and finance ministers to account," he said. Mr Persson added that even if the veto survives for "crisis decisions" the proposals still allow the three regulatory bodies to make binding decision on day-to-day matters by simple majority vote (SMP), with an appeals process also by majority vote. Whatever happens, the EU apparatus will have the final say on how the City runs itself, ending a 300-hundred year tradition of self-rule at a single stroke.Peter Skinner, a UK Labour MEP drafting a report on the insurance part of the three-legged structure, said he doubted that matters would ever reach the point where Britain would be overruled, adding that it would be absurd if a majority of states with no real financial industry were to impose decisions on a global financial hub such as London.Mr Skinner is pushing for a system that gives the Financial Service Authority and other regulators a stronger say, but ultimately the conclusions of all the MEPS involved in the process will be moulded together into one position that must reflect the will of European Parliament. That body is in no mood to do favours for Britain or the City of London.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - Published: 5:25PM GMT 02 Feb 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/7139497/Threat-to-City-of-London-as-EU-Parliament-seeks-to-whittle-away-power-to-veto.htmlas-EU-Parliament-seeks-to-whittle-away-power-to-veto.html
The Euro-MPs in charge of drafting the rules for oversight bodies covering banking and markets aim to make it much harder for Britain or other states to use an "emergency brake" to block decisions on regulation, and perhaps to strip them of their veto altogether.Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, thought he had secured a safeguard clause in a deal with fellow EU ministers late last year. The agreement stipulates that states can take their case to the European Council - the supreme EU body made up by heads of government - where decisions are taken by unanimity, if they think that a ruling by a trio of EU supervisory authorities "impinges on in any way on the fiscal responsibilities of the member states."
That is not end of the matter, however, since the European Parliament has broad legislative powers and can rewrite the text. All the major blocs in the assembly vowed last November that they would not agree to "water down" the original plans for the new bodies, which are to have "binding powers" to impose decisions.Sven Giegold, a German Green MEP and 'rapporteur' in charge of markets regulation, said the veto on fiscal matters is so vague and sweeping that it enables states to block almost anything. "A European supervisory system in which each government could veto decisions would be rather silly. This veto - as defined - has to go," he said.While the drafting process is confidential, it is understood that the Spanish 'rapporteur' in charge on banking regulation, also favours limiting the veto.
The Parliament is drawing up its version for a planned 'First Reading' by early summer. If the text clashes with Mr Darling's Council version - as it undoubtedly will - the two sides must thrash out a final compromise.
Mats Persson, director of the think tank Open Europe, said the move by Euro-MPs to unpick Mr Darling's deal is a threat to Britain's financial industry. "If MEPs manage to win support for this plan, it will add further momentum to what is already a significant transfer of powers from national regulators to the EU level. These plans will leave the UK Government completely without safeguards against proposals which could hurt the City of London. Crucially, accountability will fall into a black hole between EU regulators and the states. If the crisis taught us anything, it is the importance of holding both regulators and finance ministers to account," he said. Mr Persson added that even if the veto survives for "crisis decisions" the proposals still allow the three regulatory bodies to make binding decision on day-to-day matters by simple majority vote (SMP), with an appeals process also by majority vote. Whatever happens, the EU apparatus will have the final say on how the City runs itself, ending a 300-hundred year tradition of self-rule at a single stroke.Peter Skinner, a UK Labour MEP drafting a report on the insurance part of the three-legged structure, said he doubted that matters would ever reach the point where Britain would be overruled, adding that it would be absurd if a majority of states with no real financial industry were to impose decisions on a global financial hub such as London.Mr Skinner is pushing for a system that gives the Financial Service Authority and other regulators a stronger say, but ultimately the conclusions of all the MEPS involved in the process will be moulded together into one position that must reflect the will of European Parliament. That body is in no mood to do favours for Britain or the City of London.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The Handstand October Issue 2010
Press Release 10/19/2010
Dutch police raided the offices of a company leasing cranes for building the West Bank Separation Fence and settlements. Company executives, including the Israeli Doron Livnat, may face trial for violating International Law. Dutch government warned the Riwal Company two years ago not to engage in construction in the Occupied Trritories. Gush Shalom: another warning sign of the abyss of international isolation into which the Government of Israel leads us
A few days ago, the Dutch police's National Crime Squad raided the offices of the Riwal Holding Group in the city of Dordrecht, confiscating computers documents relating to the leasing of cranes owned by the the company's Israeli branch for the construction of the "Separation Wall" and of settlements in the Occupied Territories. Police findings have been passed on to the Dutch State Prosecution, which should decide whether or not to prosecute the corporate executives - including the Israeli businessman Doron Livnat – on charges of violating International Law.
The affair started with the 2004 ruling by the International Court in The Hague, which determined that construction of the "Separation Wall" within the West Bank territory constituted a violation of International Law, and that if Israel wants to build a border fence to prevent infiltration into its territory it should have been placed on the border, i.e. on the Green Line. Accordingly, the International Court judges called for upon all UN member states and Geneva Convention signatories not to cooperate with erection of the Wall and to prevent their citizens from any such cooperation.
In 2006, a Dutch television crew filmed cranes active in construction of the Separation Fence and of settlements, which bore the Riwal Company logo. Dutch Labour Party MP's raised the issue and addressed parliamentary questions to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. As a result, the Dutch Government in 2008 warned the Riwal company not to engage in activities at the Occupied Territories. But the organization "United Civilians for Peace" in Amsterdam found evidence that the company ignored the government warning and continued this activity.
Last year the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq of Ramallah engaged the Dutch law firm Bohler. On its behalf, Adv. Liesbeth Zegveld lodged this year a complaint to the legal authorities. The raid on the Riwal Dordrecht offices is a tangible result of this activity.
from ADAM KELLER
Dutch police raided the offices of a company leasing cranes for building the West Bank Separation Fence and settlements. Company executives, including the Israeli Doron Livnat, may face trial for violating International Law. Dutch government warned the Riwal Company two years ago not to engage in construction in the Occupied Trritories. Gush Shalom: another warning sign of the abyss of international isolation into which the Government of Israel leads us
A few days ago, the Dutch police's National Crime Squad raided the offices of the Riwal Holding Group in the city of Dordrecht, confiscating computers documents relating to the leasing of cranes owned by the the company's Israeli branch for the construction of the "Separation Wall" and of settlements in the Occupied Territories. Police findings have been passed on to the Dutch State Prosecution, which should decide whether or not to prosecute the corporate executives - including the Israeli businessman Doron Livnat – on charges of violating International Law.
The affair started with the 2004 ruling by the International Court in The Hague, which determined that construction of the "Separation Wall" within the West Bank territory constituted a violation of International Law, and that if Israel wants to build a border fence to prevent infiltration into its territory it should have been placed on the border, i.e. on the Green Line. Accordingly, the International Court judges called for upon all UN member states and Geneva Convention signatories not to cooperate with erection of the Wall and to prevent their citizens from any such cooperation.
In 2006, a Dutch television crew filmed cranes active in construction of the Separation Fence and of settlements, which bore the Riwal Company logo. Dutch Labour Party MP's raised the issue and addressed parliamentary questions to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. As a result, the Dutch Government in 2008 warned the Riwal company not to engage in activities at the Occupied Territories. But the organization "United Civilians for Peace" in Amsterdam found evidence that the company ignored the government warning and continued this activity.
Last year the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq of Ramallah engaged the Dutch law firm Bohler. On its behalf, Adv. Liesbeth Zegveld lodged this year a complaint to the legal authorities. The raid on the Riwal Dordrecht offices is a tangible result of this activity.
from ADAM KELLER
Sunday, October 17, 2010
THE HANDSTAND October Issue 2010
Chile's Ghosts Are Not Being Rescued
By John PilgerOctober 15, 2010
"Information Clearing House" --- -The rescue of 33 miners in Chile is an extraordinary drama filled with pathos and heroism. It is also a media windfall for the Chilean government, whose every beneficence is recorded by a forest of cameras. One cannot fail to be impressed. However, like all great media events, it is a façade.The accident that trapped the miners is not unusual in Chile and the inevitable consequence of a ruthless economic system that has barely changed since the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Copper is Chile’s gold, and the frequency of mining disasters keeps pace with prices and profits. There are, on average, 39 fatal accidents every year in Chile’s privatised mines. The San Jose mine, where the m en work, became so unsafe in 2007 it had to be closed – but not for long. On 30 July last, a labour department report warned again of “serious safety deficiencies ”, but the minister took no action. Six days later, the men were entombed.For all the media circus at the rescue site, contemporary Chile is a country of the unspoken. At the Villa Grimaldi, in the suburbs of the capital Santiago, a sign says: “The forgotten past is full of memory.” This was the torture centre where hundreds of people were murdered and disappeared for opposing the fascism that General Augusto Pinochet and his business allies brought to Chile. Its ghostly presence is overseen by the beauty of the Andes, and the man who unlocks the gate used to live nearby and remembers the screams.I was taken there one wintry morning in 2006 by Sara De Witt, who was imprisoned as a student activist and now lives in London. She was electrocuted and beaten, yet survived. Later, we drove to the home of Salvador Allende, the great democrat and reformer who perished when Pinochet seized power on 11 September 1973 – Latin America’s own 9/11. His house is a silent white building without a sign or a plaque.Everywhere, it seems, Allende’s name has been eliminated. Only in the lone memorial in the cemetery are the words engraved “Presidente de la Republica” as part of a remembrance of the “ejecutados Politicos”: those “executed for political reasons”. Allende died by his own hand as Pinochet bombed the presidential palace with British planes as the American ambassador watched.Today, Chile is a democracy, though many would dispute that, notably those in the barrios forced to scavenge for food and steal electricity. In 1990, Pinochet bequeathed a constitutionally compromised system as a condition of his retirement and the military’s withdrawal to the political shadows. This ensures that the broadly reformist parties, known as Concertacion, are permanently divided or drawn into legitimising the economic designs of the heirs of the dictator. At the last election, the right-wing Coalition for Change, the creation of Pinochet’s ideologue Jaime Guzman, took power under president Sebastian Piñera. The bloody extinction of true democracy that began with the death of Allende was, by stealth, complete.Piñera is a billionaire who controls a slice of the mining, energy and retail industries. He made his fortune in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup and during the free-market “experiments” of the zealots from the University of Chicago, known as the Chicago Boys. His brother and former business partner, Jose Piñera, a labour minister under Pinochet, privatised mining and state pensions and all but destroyed the trade unions. This was applauded in Washington as an “economic miracle”, a model of the new cult of neo-liberalism that would sweep the continent and ensure control from the north.Today Chile is critical to President Barack Obama’s rollback of the independent democracies in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela. Piñera’s closest ally is Washington’s main man, Juan Manuel Santos, the new president of Colombia, home to seven US bases and an infamous human rights record familiar to Chileans who suffered under Pinochet’s terror.Post-Pinochet Chile has kept its own enduring abuses in shadow. The families still attempting to recover from the torture or disappearance of a loved bear the prejudice of the state and employers. Those not silent are the Mapuche people, the only indigenous nation the Spanish conquistadors could not defeat. In the late 19th century, the European settlers of an independent Chile waged their racist War of Extermination against the Mapuche who were left as impoverished outsiders. During Allende’s thousand days in power this began to change. Some Mapuche lands were returned and a debt of justice was recognised.Since then, a vicious, largely unreported war has been waged against the Mapuche. Forestry corporations have been allowed to take their land, and their resistance has been met with murders, disappearances and arbitrary prosecutions under “anti terrorism” laws enacted by the dictatorship. In their campaigns of civil disobedience, none of the Mapuche has harmed anyone. The mere accusation of a landowner or businessman that the Mapuche “might” trespass on their own ancestral lands is often enough for the police to charge them with offences that lead to Kafkaesque trials with faceless witnesses and prison sentences of up to 20 years. They are, in effect, political prisoners.While the world rejoices at the spectacle of the miners’ rescue, 38 Mapuche hunger strikers have not been news. They are demanding an end to the Pinochet laws used against them, such as “terrorist arson”, and the justice of a real democracy. On 9 October, all but one of the hunger strikers ended their protest after 90 days without food. A young Mapuche, Luis Marileo, says he will go on. On 18 October, President Piñera is due to give a lecture on “current events” at the London School of Economics. He should be reminded of their ordeal and why.www.johnpilger.com
By John PilgerOctober 15, 2010
"Information Clearing House" --- -The rescue of 33 miners in Chile is an extraordinary drama filled with pathos and heroism. It is also a media windfall for the Chilean government, whose every beneficence is recorded by a forest of cameras. One cannot fail to be impressed. However, like all great media events, it is a façade.The accident that trapped the miners is not unusual in Chile and the inevitable consequence of a ruthless economic system that has barely changed since the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Copper is Chile’s gold, and the frequency of mining disasters keeps pace with prices and profits. There are, on average, 39 fatal accidents every year in Chile’s privatised mines. The San Jose mine, where the m en work, became so unsafe in 2007 it had to be closed – but not for long. On 30 July last, a labour department report warned again of “serious safety deficiencies ”, but the minister took no action. Six days later, the men were entombed.For all the media circus at the rescue site, contemporary Chile is a country of the unspoken. At the Villa Grimaldi, in the suburbs of the capital Santiago, a sign says: “The forgotten past is full of memory.” This was the torture centre where hundreds of people were murdered and disappeared for opposing the fascism that General Augusto Pinochet and his business allies brought to Chile. Its ghostly presence is overseen by the beauty of the Andes, and the man who unlocks the gate used to live nearby and remembers the screams.I was taken there one wintry morning in 2006 by Sara De Witt, who was imprisoned as a student activist and now lives in London. She was electrocuted and beaten, yet survived. Later, we drove to the home of Salvador Allende, the great democrat and reformer who perished when Pinochet seized power on 11 September 1973 – Latin America’s own 9/11. His house is a silent white building without a sign or a plaque.Everywhere, it seems, Allende’s name has been eliminated. Only in the lone memorial in the cemetery are the words engraved “Presidente de la Republica” as part of a remembrance of the “ejecutados Politicos”: those “executed for political reasons”. Allende died by his own hand as Pinochet bombed the presidential palace with British planes as the American ambassador watched.Today, Chile is a democracy, though many would dispute that, notably those in the barrios forced to scavenge for food and steal electricity. In 1990, Pinochet bequeathed a constitutionally compromised system as a condition of his retirement and the military’s withdrawal to the political shadows. This ensures that the broadly reformist parties, known as Concertacion, are permanently divided or drawn into legitimising the economic designs of the heirs of the dictator. At the last election, the right-wing Coalition for Change, the creation of Pinochet’s ideologue Jaime Guzman, took power under president Sebastian Piñera. The bloody extinction of true democracy that began with the death of Allende was, by stealth, complete.Piñera is a billionaire who controls a slice of the mining, energy and retail industries. He made his fortune in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup and during the free-market “experiments” of the zealots from the University of Chicago, known as the Chicago Boys. His brother and former business partner, Jose Piñera, a labour minister under Pinochet, privatised mining and state pensions and all but destroyed the trade unions. This was applauded in Washington as an “economic miracle”, a model of the new cult of neo-liberalism that would sweep the continent and ensure control from the north.Today Chile is critical to President Barack Obama’s rollback of the independent democracies in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela. Piñera’s closest ally is Washington’s main man, Juan Manuel Santos, the new president of Colombia, home to seven US bases and an infamous human rights record familiar to Chileans who suffered under Pinochet’s terror.Post-Pinochet Chile has kept its own enduring abuses in shadow. The families still attempting to recover from the torture or disappearance of a loved bear the prejudice of the state and employers. Those not silent are the Mapuche people, the only indigenous nation the Spanish conquistadors could not defeat. In the late 19th century, the European settlers of an independent Chile waged their racist War of Extermination against the Mapuche who were left as impoverished outsiders. During Allende’s thousand days in power this began to change. Some Mapuche lands were returned and a debt of justice was recognised.Since then, a vicious, largely unreported war has been waged against the Mapuche. Forestry corporations have been allowed to take their land, and their resistance has been met with murders, disappearances and arbitrary prosecutions under “anti terrorism” laws enacted by the dictatorship. In their campaigns of civil disobedience, none of the Mapuche has harmed anyone. The mere accusation of a landowner or businessman that the Mapuche “might” trespass on their own ancestral lands is often enough for the police to charge them with offences that lead to Kafkaesque trials with faceless witnesses and prison sentences of up to 20 years. They are, in effect, political prisoners.While the world rejoices at the spectacle of the miners’ rescue, 38 Mapuche hunger strikers have not been news. They are demanding an end to the Pinochet laws used against them, such as “terrorist arson”, and the justice of a real democracy. On 9 October, all but one of the hunger strikers ended their protest after 90 days without food. A young Mapuche, Luis Marileo, says he will go on. On 18 October, President Piñera is due to give a lecture on “current events” at the London School of Economics. He should be reminded of their ordeal and why.www.johnpilger.com
Friday, October 15, 2010
THE HANDSTAND October Issue 2010
MIDEAST: Dreaming of Fish, and Flowers
Mohammed Omer
GAZA CITY, Sep 16 (IPS) - As the many colours of the fish andflowers slowly disappear from the Gaza landscape, the alreadygrim prospects of the besieged residents begins to look evenbleaker.Fishing was a profession that used to keep thousands offishermen and their families fed, but with Israel restrictingthe movements of fishermen, the catches are diminishing.The same fate has overtaken the local flower farmers whosecarnations were the delight of lovers and loved ones acrossEurope. Gaza used to export 75 million flowers to the EU dutyfree, before Israel embargoed all export.There is little movement on the harbour during the day. Only afew fishing boats line the piers of the Gaza Strip."The fish are waiting, but the fishermen are being kept away,"says Zaki Al- Habeel, 33- year-old, father of seven. But justbefore sunset, he is ready to go fishing.Al-Habeel is not allowed to go as far out as he used to. Thefishermen have been set a limit of three miles. "But it is notreally three full miles," he says.Often he is only a mile-and-a-half out before the Israeli navyfires at him. Al-Habeel and his brothers who are all fishermenrisk injuries and damage to equipment every time they sail out.Over the last decade, the Israeli navy has increasinglyrestricted Palestinian access to fishing zones along the Gazabeach, a UN report revealed last month.The United Nations Office for the Coordination of HumanitarianAffairs (UNOCHA) compiled the report in cooperation with theWorld Food Programme (WFP).The report said Palestinian fishermen have been barred from 85percent of the naval territory to which they are entitled underthe Oslo Agreement of 1993 between Israel and the PLO.The report also focused on the buffer zone between Israel andGaza where farmers are shot at for tilling their own lands. Thereport mentions 22 Palestinians killed and 146 wounded in suchincidents since January 2009.Yet the farmers and fishermen continue to access theseprohibited areas, risking their life and limb.As Al-Habeel says, he and his brothers "have to feed ourfamilies". The last time, the Israeli navy shot out the fuellines that are connected to his boat. Al-Habeel was justrelieved they did not hit the small fuel tank, which isexpensive and hard to find.Last month, a 22-year-old fisherman was hospitalised withgunshot injuries, when he was perhaps a little more than twomiles from the shore, other fishermen said.The plight of the flower growers is just as wretched.Gaza-grown carnations, marketed under the brand name Coral,were popular all over Europe. But the situation has been goingdownhill for a while. In 2008, IPS had interviewed the carnationfarmer Majed Hadaeid when his situation was quite desperate.He had owned a 130-dunam (32-acre) farm yielding 16-17 millioncarnations a year in 30 different varieties and colours. Thisyear he has lost his entire four-million-dollar business, and isburdened with debts amounting to 1.5 million dollars.There is a faint hope though. The European Campaign to Breakthe Siege on Gaza announced in July that more than 9,000delegates have applied to take a 'freedom flotilla' to Gaza.They are raising 100,000 euros to send an Irish ship thisautumn.Hadaeid hopes these aid boats from Europe will help the otherfarmers to survive. "We need the flotillas to keep upcontinuous pressure on Israel," he said.The fishermen nostalgically remember that day in August 2008when the first flotilla arrived and members of the Free GazaMovement joined them on their boats.Al-Habeel says, "We were then able to get as far as six milesto fish."Everyone cheers the news of another flotilla. Fatima Subhi, a49-year-old, schoolteacher said, "I welcome such delegations."The news has not all been positive though. In May this year,Israelis attacked the Turkish aid boat Mavi Marmara killingmany people on board, including a Turkish-American passenger.Turkish flags are seen at almost every street corner. Adish-seller is wearing a Turkish flag as a T-shirt. "They shedtheir blood for us, so we wear their flag over our hearts," hesays.This summer, quite a few Turkish names have appeared on shopfronts. There is the Marmara Restaurant, the Istanbul Café anda ladies cosmetics shop simply called Istanbul.Samir Al-Ejjel, who owns a shop selling carnations, hasdesigned a bouquet he calls Erdogan in honour of the TurkishPrime Minister and has a Turkish flag flying outside his shop.There was a report in the Israeli daily Maariv last week thatthousands of activists from Western nations, as well as fromArab countries and even Israeli citizens, were preparing to senda flotilla of 30 ships.Al-Habeel likes to think that the many different people whocame by land or sea were just like the wide varieties of fishhe used to catch.As he waits hopefully for the flotillas to return, a youngerfisherman talks about the "beautiful ladies" who were on board."The Israelis do not dare to shoot at (European) women," he sayswith a smile."Those flotillas gave us hope that rights can be protected -even under gunfire," he added.In the past, the fishermen and flower farmers have appealed tothe EU for support. But with governments turning a deaf ear,they call on humanitarian activists from around the world. Theyhold on to the hope that by Christmas there will be morevarieties of fish on the table here, and colourful Gazacarnations in the markets of Europe. (FIN/2010)
Mohammed Omer
GAZA CITY, Sep 16 (IPS) - As the many colours of the fish andflowers slowly disappear from the Gaza landscape, the alreadygrim prospects of the besieged residents begins to look evenbleaker.Fishing was a profession that used to keep thousands offishermen and their families fed, but with Israel restrictingthe movements of fishermen, the catches are diminishing.The same fate has overtaken the local flower farmers whosecarnations were the delight of lovers and loved ones acrossEurope. Gaza used to export 75 million flowers to the EU dutyfree, before Israel embargoed all export.There is little movement on the harbour during the day. Only afew fishing boats line the piers of the Gaza Strip."The fish are waiting, but the fishermen are being kept away,"says Zaki Al- Habeel, 33- year-old, father of seven. But justbefore sunset, he is ready to go fishing.Al-Habeel is not allowed to go as far out as he used to. Thefishermen have been set a limit of three miles. "But it is notreally three full miles," he says.Often he is only a mile-and-a-half out before the Israeli navyfires at him. Al-Habeel and his brothers who are all fishermenrisk injuries and damage to equipment every time they sail out.Over the last decade, the Israeli navy has increasinglyrestricted Palestinian access to fishing zones along the Gazabeach, a UN report revealed last month.The United Nations Office for the Coordination of HumanitarianAffairs (UNOCHA) compiled the report in cooperation with theWorld Food Programme (WFP).The report said Palestinian fishermen have been barred from 85percent of the naval territory to which they are entitled underthe Oslo Agreement of 1993 between Israel and the PLO.The report also focused on the buffer zone between Israel andGaza where farmers are shot at for tilling their own lands. Thereport mentions 22 Palestinians killed and 146 wounded in suchincidents since January 2009.Yet the farmers and fishermen continue to access theseprohibited areas, risking their life and limb.As Al-Habeel says, he and his brothers "have to feed ourfamilies". The last time, the Israeli navy shot out the fuellines that are connected to his boat. Al-Habeel was justrelieved they did not hit the small fuel tank, which isexpensive and hard to find.Last month, a 22-year-old fisherman was hospitalised withgunshot injuries, when he was perhaps a little more than twomiles from the shore, other fishermen said.The plight of the flower growers is just as wretched.Gaza-grown carnations, marketed under the brand name Coral,were popular all over Europe. But the situation has been goingdownhill for a while. In 2008, IPS had interviewed the carnationfarmer Majed Hadaeid when his situation was quite desperate.He had owned a 130-dunam (32-acre) farm yielding 16-17 millioncarnations a year in 30 different varieties and colours. Thisyear he has lost his entire four-million-dollar business, and isburdened with debts amounting to 1.5 million dollars.There is a faint hope though. The European Campaign to Breakthe Siege on Gaza announced in July that more than 9,000delegates have applied to take a 'freedom flotilla' to Gaza.They are raising 100,000 euros to send an Irish ship thisautumn.Hadaeid hopes these aid boats from Europe will help the otherfarmers to survive. "We need the flotillas to keep upcontinuous pressure on Israel," he said.The fishermen nostalgically remember that day in August 2008when the first flotilla arrived and members of the Free GazaMovement joined them on their boats.Al-Habeel says, "We were then able to get as far as six milesto fish."Everyone cheers the news of another flotilla. Fatima Subhi, a49-year-old, schoolteacher said, "I welcome such delegations."The news has not all been positive though. In May this year,Israelis attacked the Turkish aid boat Mavi Marmara killingmany people on board, including a Turkish-American passenger.Turkish flags are seen at almost every street corner. Adish-seller is wearing a Turkish flag as a T-shirt. "They shedtheir blood for us, so we wear their flag over our hearts," hesays.This summer, quite a few Turkish names have appeared on shopfronts. There is the Marmara Restaurant, the Istanbul Café anda ladies cosmetics shop simply called Istanbul.Samir Al-Ejjel, who owns a shop selling carnations, hasdesigned a bouquet he calls Erdogan in honour of the TurkishPrime Minister and has a Turkish flag flying outside his shop.There was a report in the Israeli daily Maariv last week thatthousands of activists from Western nations, as well as fromArab countries and even Israeli citizens, were preparing to senda flotilla of 30 ships.Al-Habeel likes to think that the many different people whocame by land or sea were just like the wide varieties of fishhe used to catch.As he waits hopefully for the flotillas to return, a youngerfisherman talks about the "beautiful ladies" who were on board."The Israelis do not dare to shoot at (European) women," he sayswith a smile."Those flotillas gave us hope that rights can be protected -even under gunfire," he added.In the past, the fishermen and flower farmers have appealed tothe EU for support. But with governments turning a deaf ear,they call on humanitarian activists from around the world. Theyhold on to the hope that by Christmas there will be morevarieties of fish on the table here, and colourful Gazacarnations in the markets of Europe. (FIN/2010)
Thursday, October 14, 2010
THE HANDSTAND October Issue 2010
Linda Norgrove - her murder by logger "Xymphora"
I'm sure many may say this is just a 'conspiracy theory', and at best we can never know what happened. I seriously beg to differ. Consider:
local negotiators were certain they could gain her release through negotiations and the payment of ransom (as they had done in other situations), but the Americans rushed the 'rescue' on the bogus excuse, with no evidence whatsoever and in the face of established local practice, that she was about to be smuggled to Pakistan where she would be killed by 'al Qaeda';
the grenade thrown in a hostage 'rescue' by 'crack' American special forces;
the elaborate lies piled on to describe the evil Taliban and how they slaughtered this poor defenseless aid worker;
the fact that the Taliban denied being involved, and were even being paid protection money to lay off the aid workers;
the control of the area by warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, associated with drug smuggling and the CIA, whose people would be by far the most likely to be in a position to grab anyone in the area. I know this was murder. By Americans. Probably to protect CIA drug smuggling operations.
at 10/12/2010
I'm sure many may say this is just a 'conspiracy theory', and at best we can never know what happened. I seriously beg to differ. Consider:
local negotiators were certain they could gain her release through negotiations and the payment of ransom (as they had done in other situations), but the Americans rushed the 'rescue' on the bogus excuse, with no evidence whatsoever and in the face of established local practice, that she was about to be smuggled to Pakistan where she would be killed by 'al Qaeda';
the grenade thrown in a hostage 'rescue' by 'crack' American special forces;
the elaborate lies piled on to describe the evil Taliban and how they slaughtered this poor defenseless aid worker;
the fact that the Taliban denied being involved, and were even being paid protection money to lay off the aid workers;
the control of the area by warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, associated with drug smuggling and the CIA, whose people would be by far the most likely to be in a position to grab anyone in the area. I know this was murder. By Americans. Probably to protect CIA drug smuggling operations.
at 10/12/2010
THE HANDSTAND October Issue 2010
from www.juancole.com
Top Ten Questions about Chile Mine Collapse: Was it Nixon-Kissinger’s Fault?
Posted on October 14, 2010 by Juan
102Share
The corporate mass media (especially television) did not treat the Chilean mine collapse as a labor story but rather as a feel-good human interest story. It not only avoided asking hard questions about why the near-disaster occurred and why the mine workers could be treated like guinea pigs by their employers, it actively obscured these questions. I saw a psychobabbling guest of Tony Harris on CNN actually talking about how the Chilean government is the father figure for the miners and their supporters and people are turning to it for succor and inspiration. I threw up a little in my mouth.
So here are the questions that a social historian would ask about the sorry episode, and which I never heard anyone on television news ask during all the wall to wall coverage:
1. What were the miners mining? (A.: Gold and copper).
2. Did the high price of gold and the fact that the mining company was close to bankruptcy cause the company executives to cut corners?
3. Are the mine owners guilty of criminal negligence?
4. Why did the San Estaban mining company reopen the mine so quickly after an earlier tunnel collapse severed the leg of a mine worker?
5. Why is there no accountability for the mine owners?
6. Is George W. Bush-style deregulation of the mining industry by the Chilean government part of the problem here?
7. [pdf] What is the influence of big gold and copper corporations over US policy?
8. Are copper and gold mine owners stronger in relation to workers and have they escaped government regulation because the US engineered a coup in 1973 to destroy the Chilean Left?
9. Was the San Estaban mining company’s ability to marginalize the union and to disregard input from the workers rooted in American-imposed corporate privilege?
10. In other words, was the trapping of these workers in the first place Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s fault?
Top Ten Questions about Chile Mine Collapse: Was it Nixon-Kissinger’s Fault?
Posted on October 14, 2010 by Juan
102Share
The corporate mass media (especially television) did not treat the Chilean mine collapse as a labor story but rather as a feel-good human interest story. It not only avoided asking hard questions about why the near-disaster occurred and why the mine workers could be treated like guinea pigs by their employers, it actively obscured these questions. I saw a psychobabbling guest of Tony Harris on CNN actually talking about how the Chilean government is the father figure for the miners and their supporters and people are turning to it for succor and inspiration. I threw up a little in my mouth.
So here are the questions that a social historian would ask about the sorry episode, and which I never heard anyone on television news ask during all the wall to wall coverage:
1. What were the miners mining? (A.: Gold and copper).
2. Did the high price of gold and the fact that the mining company was close to bankruptcy cause the company executives to cut corners?
3. Are the mine owners guilty of criminal negligence?
4. Why did the San Estaban mining company reopen the mine so quickly after an earlier tunnel collapse severed the leg of a mine worker?
5. Why is there no accountability for the mine owners?
6. Is George W. Bush-style deregulation of the mining industry by the Chilean government part of the problem here?
7. [pdf] What is the influence of big gold and copper corporations over US policy?
8. Are copper and gold mine owners stronger in relation to workers and have they escaped government regulation because the US engineered a coup in 1973 to destroy the Chilean Left?
9. Was the San Estaban mining company’s ability to marginalize the union and to disregard input from the workers rooted in American-imposed corporate privilege?
10. In other words, was the trapping of these workers in the first place Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s fault?
THE HANDSTAND October Issue 2010
10/12/2010
Interview With Conductor Kurt Masur
'The Spirit of 1989 Has Been Exhausted'
Carlo Lannutti
Renowned German conductor Kurt Masur, a former music director of the New York Philharmonic, talks about his part in the peaceful revolution of 1989, East German leader Erich Honecker's understanding of culture and the contents of the file the East German Stasi secret police kept on him.
Kurt Masur, 83, is considered one of Germany's most important conductors. In a SPIEGEL interview, he discusses his role in the peaceful revolution of 1989, his troubled dealings with officials in Communist East Germany and how German reunification has left many eastern Germans in despair.
SPIEGEL: Professor Masur, you're credited with being one of the people who kept the Monday demonstrations held in Leipzig in 1989 to protest the East German government from turning bloody. As the situation was threatening to escalate, loudspeakers in Leipzig broadcast your appeal, in which you asked the city's inhabitants: "We urgently request that you remain calm so as to make peaceful dialogue possible." And, as it turned out, the demonstrations did remain peaceful. What's left of the spirit of that era?
Kurt Masur: I'm reluctant to answer this question. The spirit of those days has pretty much been exhausted, and things haven't turned out well for everyone. In fact, for many people, reunification has meant more suffering than gain. And many are quite desperate.
SPIEGEL: What do you mean by desperate?
Masur: I know of people who decided to kill themselves because they'd lost everything dependable in their lives. Just look in the eyes of the young people: Just one year after reunification, most had lost their sparkle. On the one hand, there's unemployment and the feeling of being superfluous. On the other hand, many in this generation never even try to find a job. They figure out that they can live fairly well off government benefits and earning a little extra money on the side.
SPIEGEL: You sound disappointed. Were your hopes really so high in 1989?
Masur: It was heaven on Earth. I've never seen so many happy faces as I did on that October 9 (the day of the largest protest). It was a peaceful revolution. And it was proof that people in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had learned to act in a very politically deliberate way. I'm still impressed by how smart they were -- and by the way the security forces remained calm. On that day, not even a single window was broken.
SPIEGEL: Did you really see those events as a revolution?
Masur: In a certain sense, yes. When 17- and 18-year-olds said goodbye to their parents that day, it was like they were heading off to war. But everyone had had enough. All of them -- all 70,000 of them -- were able to overcome their fears.
SPIEGEL: Military units were deployed around Leipzig, ready to respond to the protests.
Masur: We could only make guesses about that. We'd read in the paper that, if necessary, the protests would be broken up by force of arms. When they heard that, representatives from the New Forum (editor's note: a reform movement started in 1989) got in touch with me. My office at the Gewandhaus became something of a communications center that day. I called Kurt Meyer, the party's cultural representative. When he called back two hours before the demonstration was supposed to get underway, a small group gathered at our house and rushed to draft the appeal, which I then went on to record onto a tape.
SPIEGEL: A total of six people signed the appeal: a theologian, a cabaret performer, three district secretaries for the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) and you.
Masur: Yes, I wasn't the only hero. We were a miniature version of the people, and we had to agree on consistent wording. The three comrades from the party hadn't received specific instructions from Berlin, so they were constantly telephoning back and forth.
SPIEGEL: Did it feel like you were making history?
Masur: At the time, we weren't thinking about changing the world. The most important thing was to act. For weeks, the public mood had been at breaking point. At a certain point, the Gewandhaus Orchestra had to call off a recording we were making. The oboe soloist apologized, saying: "Mr. Masur, I can't do it anymore. I just passed by the church, and they were throwing a young girl onto a truck by her hair."
SPIEGEL: You led a performance on the night of October 9. How did the concert go?
Masur: Well, the demonstration was over, and no shots had been fired. But, just in case, I put on my tailcoat. The orchestra manager came and said: "The house is full; all the musicians are here. We can begin." That was the strangest part about this revolution: The revolution was Monday evening and, by Tuesday morning at the latest, everyone went back to work as usual. I will never forget that concert.
SPIEGEL: As part of your job, you had to deal not only with intellectuals and artists, but also with members of the Communist Party. Was your loyalty ever questioned?
Masur: Only someone who hadn't lived in the GDR would see a contradiction there. Leipzig is one of Europe's music centers. Bach, Mendelssohn, Brahms, they all worked there, and the Gewandhaus belongs to the heart of the city. As its director, of course I had to work with the people who ran the country and the city. I welcomed Mr. Honecker (the GDR's leader from 1971 to 1989) to my concert hall just as graciously as I would have kissed the Queen of England's hand if she had come there. I was the host.
Doing Something for the Common Good
SPIEGEL: You succeeded in convincing Honecker to let you have a new building -- and one that attracted a lot of attention. It's located right in the heart of the old city and was the only dedicated concert hall built during the GDR era. What did you have to do to get it?
Masur: I wrote to him. Our 200th anniversary was approaching, in 1981. And, since the end of the war, the orchestra had been temporarily housed in a convention hall near the zoo. When the music was quieter, you could hear the lions roar. We were on the verge of embarrassing ourselves in front of the entire world. So, having first figured out how I was supposed to address him, I shared this with "Comrade Honecker."
SPIEGEL: And what was his response?
Masur: He addressed me as "Comrade Masur," which was incorrect, since I wasn't in the party. But the respect he showed the orchestral tradition was remarkable. For example, every year, all of the orchestras in the GDR had to perform a world premiere of a commissioned work by a young composer. I only wish some of the politicians today could have similar foresight when it comes to these kinds of things.
SPIEGEL: You brought a lot of public criticism on yourself by writing a thank-you letter to Honecker after his political career came to an end. Were you a supporter of his?
Masur: No, but there were reasons for me to thank him. In the case of the Gewandhaus, he used his position to do something for the common good.
SPIEGEL: The GDR also saw people shot and killed for trying to cross the border, an economy of scarcity, political prisoners and a secret police, the Stasi, that spied on ordinary citizens. Were you living in an unjust state?
Masur: That's not an easy question to answer. The basic idea behind Communism wasn't dictatorial in nature. And the premise of socialism -- that every individual is of equal worth -- was also fine. But, of course, everything that came after that was a dictatorship, and it reached its high point under Stalin. There were moments when it curtailed my own freedom, as well.
SPIEGEL: How?
Masur: Until 1964, I worked at the Komische Oper Berlin under Walter Felsenstein. For the next three years, I was unemployed, so to speak. I didn't have an orchestra, and I wasn't allowed to travel to the West for guest-conducting engagements. In political terms, they wanted to starve me out a bit.
SPIEGEL: Why?
Masur: There had been a number of incidents. I was part of a group of people who worked in the arts who had been invited to meet with the Central Committee. Walter Ulbricht (editor's note: then the general secretary of the SED, the East German communist party) gave an impassioned speech about an artist's duties in the GDR. Wolfgang Langhoff, who had directed the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, had fallen out of favor, apparently because he hadn't done enough to put himself at the service of socialist realism. Ulbricht really thundered at us. A few days later, there was another talk and a request for us to enter into a dialogue. I responded: "After your displays, discussion is no longer possible." After that, things got rough for me.
SPIEGEL: How did you navigate your way back into favor?
Masur: It wasn't a matter of favor. I had been invited to conduct "Lohengrin" in Venice. And even though I was banned from traveling, I accepted. Then I contacted the minister of culture and explained that, if necessary, I would make the trip even if I didn't have a visa, and that if anything happened to me at the border, he would share in the blame. I had my authorization by noon the next day.
SPIEGEL: Compared to most people in the GDR, you enjoyed a privileged position, like those of athletes.
Masur: That's true. And I was famous enough that I could afford to speak the truth. They knew there was something not quite right about Masur. And, what's more, I was a Christian…
SPIEGEL: …in an atheist regime.
Masur: My religious practices were closely monitored. I once put money in the collection plate after an organ concert at the Church of the Cross (in Dresden) and a minister in the audience asked me: "You support the church?" I replied that the organ was out of tune and the congregation needed money to fix it. The next day, the organ builder contacted me, and he was very unhappy. The Stasi must have told him what I had said.
SPIEGEL: What is in your Stasi file?
Masur: It contains a comprehensive character profile, including my supposedly "strong inclination toward the fairer sex." But all of the entries made around the time of reunification seem to have been destroyed. The file also shows that one of my long-time employees provided the Stasi with details about my friendship with Alfred Schnittke, the Russian composer. Another employee was told to spy on me while we were on tour abroad, but he refused to do so.
SPIEGEL: Did anything happen to you if any of your musicians defected while touring abroad?
Masur: I had to come up with an excuse. And I'm sorry to say that I wasn't the one to coin the best one. That honor goes to the former chief conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic. A Soviet party functionary once asked him: "Mravinsky, what's the matter! A few of them abandon you every time!" And he responded: "They're not abandoning me; they're abandoning you!"
Interview conducted by Joachim Kronsbein and Katja Thimm
Interview With Conductor Kurt Masur
'The Spirit of 1989 Has Been Exhausted'
Carlo Lannutti
Renowned German conductor Kurt Masur, a former music director of the New York Philharmonic, talks about his part in the peaceful revolution of 1989, East German leader Erich Honecker's understanding of culture and the contents of the file the East German Stasi secret police kept on him.
Kurt Masur, 83, is considered one of Germany's most important conductors. In a SPIEGEL interview, he discusses his role in the peaceful revolution of 1989, his troubled dealings with officials in Communist East Germany and how German reunification has left many eastern Germans in despair.
SPIEGEL: Professor Masur, you're credited with being one of the people who kept the Monday demonstrations held in Leipzig in 1989 to protest the East German government from turning bloody. As the situation was threatening to escalate, loudspeakers in Leipzig broadcast your appeal, in which you asked the city's inhabitants: "We urgently request that you remain calm so as to make peaceful dialogue possible." And, as it turned out, the demonstrations did remain peaceful. What's left of the spirit of that era?
Kurt Masur: I'm reluctant to answer this question. The spirit of those days has pretty much been exhausted, and things haven't turned out well for everyone. In fact, for many people, reunification has meant more suffering than gain. And many are quite desperate.
SPIEGEL: What do you mean by desperate?
Masur: I know of people who decided to kill themselves because they'd lost everything dependable in their lives. Just look in the eyes of the young people: Just one year after reunification, most had lost their sparkle. On the one hand, there's unemployment and the feeling of being superfluous. On the other hand, many in this generation never even try to find a job. They figure out that they can live fairly well off government benefits and earning a little extra money on the side.
SPIEGEL: You sound disappointed. Were your hopes really so high in 1989?
Masur: It was heaven on Earth. I've never seen so many happy faces as I did on that October 9 (the day of the largest protest). It was a peaceful revolution. And it was proof that people in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had learned to act in a very politically deliberate way. I'm still impressed by how smart they were -- and by the way the security forces remained calm. On that day, not even a single window was broken.
SPIEGEL: Did you really see those events as a revolution?
Masur: In a certain sense, yes. When 17- and 18-year-olds said goodbye to their parents that day, it was like they were heading off to war. But everyone had had enough. All of them -- all 70,000 of them -- were able to overcome their fears.
SPIEGEL: Military units were deployed around Leipzig, ready to respond to the protests.
Masur: We could only make guesses about that. We'd read in the paper that, if necessary, the protests would be broken up by force of arms. When they heard that, representatives from the New Forum (editor's note: a reform movement started in 1989) got in touch with me. My office at the Gewandhaus became something of a communications center that day. I called Kurt Meyer, the party's cultural representative. When he called back two hours before the demonstration was supposed to get underway, a small group gathered at our house and rushed to draft the appeal, which I then went on to record onto a tape.
SPIEGEL: A total of six people signed the appeal: a theologian, a cabaret performer, three district secretaries for the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) and you.
Masur: Yes, I wasn't the only hero. We were a miniature version of the people, and we had to agree on consistent wording. The three comrades from the party hadn't received specific instructions from Berlin, so they were constantly telephoning back and forth.
SPIEGEL: Did it feel like you were making history?
Masur: At the time, we weren't thinking about changing the world. The most important thing was to act. For weeks, the public mood had been at breaking point. At a certain point, the Gewandhaus Orchestra had to call off a recording we were making. The oboe soloist apologized, saying: "Mr. Masur, I can't do it anymore. I just passed by the church, and they were throwing a young girl onto a truck by her hair."
SPIEGEL: You led a performance on the night of October 9. How did the concert go?
Masur: Well, the demonstration was over, and no shots had been fired. But, just in case, I put on my tailcoat. The orchestra manager came and said: "The house is full; all the musicians are here. We can begin." That was the strangest part about this revolution: The revolution was Monday evening and, by Tuesday morning at the latest, everyone went back to work as usual. I will never forget that concert.
SPIEGEL: As part of your job, you had to deal not only with intellectuals and artists, but also with members of the Communist Party. Was your loyalty ever questioned?
Masur: Only someone who hadn't lived in the GDR would see a contradiction there. Leipzig is one of Europe's music centers. Bach, Mendelssohn, Brahms, they all worked there, and the Gewandhaus belongs to the heart of the city. As its director, of course I had to work with the people who ran the country and the city. I welcomed Mr. Honecker (the GDR's leader from 1971 to 1989) to my concert hall just as graciously as I would have kissed the Queen of England's hand if she had come there. I was the host.
Doing Something for the Common Good
SPIEGEL: You succeeded in convincing Honecker to let you have a new building -- and one that attracted a lot of attention. It's located right in the heart of the old city and was the only dedicated concert hall built during the GDR era. What did you have to do to get it?
Masur: I wrote to him. Our 200th anniversary was approaching, in 1981. And, since the end of the war, the orchestra had been temporarily housed in a convention hall near the zoo. When the music was quieter, you could hear the lions roar. We were on the verge of embarrassing ourselves in front of the entire world. So, having first figured out how I was supposed to address him, I shared this with "Comrade Honecker."
SPIEGEL: And what was his response?
Masur: He addressed me as "Comrade Masur," which was incorrect, since I wasn't in the party. But the respect he showed the orchestral tradition was remarkable. For example, every year, all of the orchestras in the GDR had to perform a world premiere of a commissioned work by a young composer. I only wish some of the politicians today could have similar foresight when it comes to these kinds of things.
SPIEGEL: You brought a lot of public criticism on yourself by writing a thank-you letter to Honecker after his political career came to an end. Were you a supporter of his?
Masur: No, but there were reasons for me to thank him. In the case of the Gewandhaus, he used his position to do something for the common good.
SPIEGEL: The GDR also saw people shot and killed for trying to cross the border, an economy of scarcity, political prisoners and a secret police, the Stasi, that spied on ordinary citizens. Were you living in an unjust state?
Masur: That's not an easy question to answer. The basic idea behind Communism wasn't dictatorial in nature. And the premise of socialism -- that every individual is of equal worth -- was also fine. But, of course, everything that came after that was a dictatorship, and it reached its high point under Stalin. There were moments when it curtailed my own freedom, as well.
SPIEGEL: How?
Masur: Until 1964, I worked at the Komische Oper Berlin under Walter Felsenstein. For the next three years, I was unemployed, so to speak. I didn't have an orchestra, and I wasn't allowed to travel to the West for guest-conducting engagements. In political terms, they wanted to starve me out a bit.
SPIEGEL: Why?
Masur: There had been a number of incidents. I was part of a group of people who worked in the arts who had been invited to meet with the Central Committee. Walter Ulbricht (editor's note: then the general secretary of the SED, the East German communist party) gave an impassioned speech about an artist's duties in the GDR. Wolfgang Langhoff, who had directed the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, had fallen out of favor, apparently because he hadn't done enough to put himself at the service of socialist realism. Ulbricht really thundered at us. A few days later, there was another talk and a request for us to enter into a dialogue. I responded: "After your displays, discussion is no longer possible." After that, things got rough for me.
SPIEGEL: How did you navigate your way back into favor?
Masur: It wasn't a matter of favor. I had been invited to conduct "Lohengrin" in Venice. And even though I was banned from traveling, I accepted. Then I contacted the minister of culture and explained that, if necessary, I would make the trip even if I didn't have a visa, and that if anything happened to me at the border, he would share in the blame. I had my authorization by noon the next day.
SPIEGEL: Compared to most people in the GDR, you enjoyed a privileged position, like those of athletes.
Masur: That's true. And I was famous enough that I could afford to speak the truth. They knew there was something not quite right about Masur. And, what's more, I was a Christian…
SPIEGEL: …in an atheist regime.
Masur: My religious practices were closely monitored. I once put money in the collection plate after an organ concert at the Church of the Cross (in Dresden) and a minister in the audience asked me: "You support the church?" I replied that the organ was out of tune and the congregation needed money to fix it. The next day, the organ builder contacted me, and he was very unhappy. The Stasi must have told him what I had said.
SPIEGEL: What is in your Stasi file?
Masur: It contains a comprehensive character profile, including my supposedly "strong inclination toward the fairer sex." But all of the entries made around the time of reunification seem to have been destroyed. The file also shows that one of my long-time employees provided the Stasi with details about my friendship with Alfred Schnittke, the Russian composer. Another employee was told to spy on me while we were on tour abroad, but he refused to do so.
SPIEGEL: Did anything happen to you if any of your musicians defected while touring abroad?
Masur: I had to come up with an excuse. And I'm sorry to say that I wasn't the one to coin the best one. That honor goes to the former chief conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic. A Soviet party functionary once asked him: "Mravinsky, what's the matter! A few of them abandon you every time!" And he responded: "They're not abandoning me; they're abandoning you!"
Interview conducted by Joachim Kronsbein and Katja Thimm
The HANDSTAND October Issue 2010
Scientists have found the oldest known land plants, a discovery that pushes the colonization of land by plants back to 472 million years ago. According to a report published in the New Phytologist, the newly found plants are liverworts, very simple with no stems or roots. Researchers from the Department of Paleontology at the Argentine Institute of Snow, Ice and Environmental Research in Mendoza, collected samples of sediment from the Rio Capillas in northwest Argentina and processed them by dissolving them in strong acids. Led by Claudia Rubinstein, the team found hardy fossilized spores from five different types of liverwort, which is known as a primitive plant and said to have evolved from freshwater multi-cellular green algae. "Spores of liverworts are very simple and are called cryptospores," Dr Rubinstein told the BBC. "The cryptospores that we describe are the earliest to date." The spores which date back to between 473 and 471 million years ago come from plants belonging to five different groups of species. "That shows plants had already begun to diversify, meaning they must have colonized land earlier than our dated samples," Dr Rubinstein explained. The discovery surprised many scientists as it took place at least 5000km, from the Saudi Arabia and the Czech Republic, where previous earliest traces of land plants, small liverwort cryptospores, were found. TE/MGH
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/146719.html
Scientists have found the oldest known land plants, a discovery that pushes the colonization of land by plants back to 472 million years ago. According to a report published in the New Phytologist, the newly found plants are liverworts, very simple with no stems or roots. Researchers from the Department of Paleontology at the Argentine Institute of Snow, Ice and Environmental Research in Mendoza, collected samples of sediment from the Rio Capillas in northwest Argentina and processed them by dissolving them in strong acids. Led by Claudia Rubinstein, the team found hardy fossilized spores from five different types of liverwort, which is known as a primitive plant and said to have evolved from freshwater multi-cellular green algae. "Spores of liverworts are very simple and are called cryptospores," Dr Rubinstein told the BBC. "The cryptospores that we describe are the earliest to date." The spores which date back to between 473 and 471 million years ago come from plants belonging to five different groups of species. "That shows plants had already begun to diversify, meaning they must have colonized land earlier than our dated samples," Dr Rubinstein explained. The discovery surprised many scientists as it took place at least 5000km, from the Saudi Arabia and the Czech Republic, where previous earliest traces of land plants, small liverwort cryptospores, were found. TE/MGH
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/146719.html
Monday, October 11, 2010
THE HANDSTAND October Issue 2010
Monday Oct.11th
The Palestinian Authority's top negotiator refutes the Israeli premier's offer which obliged the Palestinians to recognize Israel in return for a settlement freeze. "I hope he will stop playing these games and will start the peace process by stopping settlements," Saeb Erekat said on Monday. His reply came after Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier offered to extend the 10-month partial moratorium on settlement projects, should the Palestinians recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." "If the Palestinian leadership would say unequivocally to its people that it recognizes Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people, I will be willing to ask for an additional suspension," Netanyahu told the parliament on Monday. Erekat was also quoted as saying by the Associated Press that there was no connection between Netanyahu's obligations and his efforts to define the nature of Israel. The Israeli leader has repeatedly made similar demands in the past, though he has never explicitly linked it to the settlement issue. The Palestinians refuse to accept Israel as a "Jewish state," saying it discriminates against Israel's Arab minority and violates the rights of millions of Palestinian refugees scattered around the world. AGB/AKM/MMN
from PressTV http://www.presstv.com/detail/146267.html
Monday Oct.11th
The Palestinian Authority's top negotiator refutes the Israeli premier's offer which obliged the Palestinians to recognize Israel in return for a settlement freeze. "I hope he will stop playing these games and will start the peace process by stopping settlements," Saeb Erekat said on Monday. His reply came after Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier offered to extend the 10-month partial moratorium on settlement projects, should the Palestinians recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." "If the Palestinian leadership would say unequivocally to its people that it recognizes Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people, I will be willing to ask for an additional suspension," Netanyahu told the parliament on Monday. Erekat was also quoted as saying by the Associated Press that there was no connection between Netanyahu's obligations and his efforts to define the nature of Israel. The Israeli leader has repeatedly made similar demands in the past, though he has never explicitly linked it to the settlement issue. The Palestinians refuse to accept Israel as a "Jewish state," saying it discriminates against Israel's Arab minority and violates the rights of millions of Palestinian refugees scattered around the world. AGB/AKM/MMN
from PressTV http://www.presstv.com/detail/146267.html
THE HANDSTAND OCTOBER ISSUE 2010
Ariha unveils massive carpet mosaic
Mon Oct 11, 2010 2:59PM
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The ancient city of Ariha (Jericho) has unveiled one of the largest carpet mosaics of the Middle East dating back to some 1,200 years ago. The 900-square-meter mosaic is adorned with geometric and floral patterns and has been unveiled as part of Ariha's 10,000th birthday celebrations. The mosaic comprising of small red, blue and ocher square stones covers the floor of the main bath house of an Ariha Islamic palace which was destroyed in an eighth-century earthquake. Since being excavated in the 1930s and 1940s, the mosaic has been hidden under layers of canvas and soil to protect it against sun and rain. Archeologists have estimated that at least USD 2 million is needed to build a roof above the mosaic. Award-winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has proposed a shield which looks like a large upended wooden crate and has presented a model of his design at the site. The colorful carpet will be displayed for a week and covered up again until a roof is built to protect it against rain, Palestinian archaeologist Hamdan Taha said. A smaller mosaic in the audience room has also attracted lots of attention with its beautiful pattern of two gazelles nibbling at the leaves of an apple tree, the Associated Press reported. Ariha is located near the Jordan River in the West Bank in the occupied Palestinian territories and is known as the lowest permanently inhabited site on earth. TE/CS/MMN
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The Handstand Sept.Issue
"The Millionaire's Music is Pleasant Though he Plays on a Jawbone" BreughelTHE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ISRAEL'S OCCUPATION by Sher Hever
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay, and we're in Jerusalem. Now joining us is Shir Hever. He's an economist at the Alternative Information Center and author of the upcoming book Political Economy of Israel's Occupation. Thanks for joining us Shir.
SHIR HEVER, ECONOMIST, ALTERNATIVE INFORMATION CENTER: Hello.
JAY: So, in talking to people in Israel, one thing I hear constantly is the fight here is about national identity, it's about the defense of the Jewish state. I don't hear very much about economics of Israel or the economics of occupation. So how does national identity relate to the economics here?
HEVER: Well, the economic reality of Israel, of course, plays a part in every aspect of Israel's existence—in the politics, in the society, and, of course, also in identity issues as well. The occupation of the Palestinian territories defines Israel's economy in a large way. About two-thirds of Israel's history, it has been occupying power, controlling Palestinian territories. But even before that occupation, Israel has created a very particular system of economic control, which is designed to promote the idea of a Jewish state. The Jewish state is not merely a cultural idea; it's not merely a symbolic idea; it's a material reality which is designed to redistribute wealth in order to draw as many Jews as possible to this area and to maintain a sustainable control of the Jewish population over a piece of land which is by nature binational.
JAY: Now, in terms of the Israeli economy, what percentile at the top controls the majority of the Israeli economy in terms of ownership?
HEVER: Israel is very centralized in terms of capital, far more than most developed economies in the world. About 18 families in Israel control roughly 60 percent of the equity value of all companies in Israel. So it's concentrated in the hands of 18 families. Of course, there are other rich people in Israel who control some more of that other 40 percent.
JAY: So what are we talking about? What kind of things do they control, in terms of what makes up the bulk of the Israeli economy and the ownership?
HEVER: The Israeli economy has a very strong banking sector and financial sector, which also includes insurance companies, so that's a very big part of the Israeli economy. But Israel's also one of the world's biggest exporter of diamonds, Israel is one of the world's biggest exporters of chemical fertilizer, and there are a lot of high tech industries. Much of that high-tech industry actually ties with a very large and very famous industry in Israel, which is the arms trade, the arms industry. A lot of the high-tech development in Israel is actually for what is known as homeland security technology. And so a lot of companies, especially companies set up by former military officers, specialize in developing homeland security products designed to track individuals and to help governments or corporations—.
JAY: Which we know have been sold in the past to South Africa, to Colombia, to Honduras.
HEVER: Yeah. Well, until the year 2000, Israel was about the tenth biggest arms exporter in the world, but the fourth biggest arms exporter to the developing world, because Israel was willing to sell weapons to clients, to customers which other countries were reluctant to sell to, such as South Africa during the apartheid and so on. But after September 11, after the attacks, there was a famous quote by Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently Israel's prime minister. He said these attacks are good for Israel; they show the world that Israel fighting terrorism—or fighting Islam, basically—is a good thing.
JAY: So these 18 families, we're talking families that are all billionaires, then, in terms of, amongst the families, the wealth that's been accumulated. In terms of the size of the fortunes on a global scale, are they significant fortunes?
HEVER: Well, they are significant in those sectors. In the diamonds sector and the weapons sector and in the fertilizer sector Israel is a global player. In the high-tech sector not so much, but definitely in the homeland security sector.
JAY: So, then, these families, in terms of the Israeli politics, political parties, and the various governments that come and go, are the families split? Or are they involved in all the parties?
HEVER: Well, all the Zionist parties in Israel, starting from the so-called Zionist left or the liberal parties and all the way to the extreme right-wing, almost fascist parties, are almost indistinguishable from each other. And the controlling—the wealthy families, they know that. They contribute about equally to the centrist parties, or the so-called centrist parties, because they know that it doesn't really matter whether it's going to be Likud or Labor or Kadima. These parties have the same agenda, the same strategy, and the same platform.
JAY: Now, to what extent does the struggle with the Palestinians take attention off the 18 families? Or how visible are the 18 families in terms of popular perception?
HEVER: Well, they are visible. I think people know to a certain extent that there are these people who own the companies that they pay money to every day. You know that your cellular phone comes from a very large and powerful company that you see their signs every day. And so they do know about these companies. Many people also know even the names of the owners of these companies. But when you want to tie it to the struggle with the Palestinians, then, of course, that plays a role through different ways. You hinted that perhaps the struggle with the Palestinians helped to draw attention from the centralized capital in the year 2002. The chairman of the Manufacturers Association in Israel said that because of the struggle with the Palestinians, because of the intifada, Israelis have to learn that they cannot expect an increase in the minimum wage, or perhaps even they should expect a decrease in the minimum wage, meaning that the security constraints are used as a justification to stifle social struggle.
JAY: So 18 families, you said, own 60 percent of capitalization in Israel?
HEVER: Yeah.
JAY: Now, in terms of general social programs, social safety net, how much redistribution takes place amongst Israeli citizens?
HEVER: Well, Israel is the most unequal country in the developed world, second only to the United States. In the year 2009, Israel bypassed Mexico for the first time as more unequal than Mexico, making Israel indeed one of the most unequal countries in the world. And that is because while most countries in the developed world spend some of their budgets in redistributive efforts such as health care, unemployment benefits, infrastructure, creating jobs, that sort of thing, Israel actually spends about 75 percent less, in ratio comparisons, with most of these countries, with OECD countries, and that is because Israel spends so much on security, on the military.
JAY: Well, how much is it because they spend so much on security, and how much is it because of the accumulation of the 18 families? I guess, let me ask the question the other way: how taxed are the 18 families?
HEVER: Well, they are slightly less taxed than in most developed countries, mostly because Israel created a system of loopholes which allow, especially, wealthy Jewish people from around the world to bring their property to Israel with no questions asked. So there have been many cases of very wealthy Jews coming to Israel with their property, saying they're doing a Zionist act, but in fact there were standing lawsuits against them in other countries. Israel will not extradite them, stating against the Zionist argument. And that was one of the reasons that Israel was able to draw a lot of capital in the past two decades.
JAY: So if great concentration of ownership and wealth in the top tier, not that much taxation, not very much social safety net—so to what extent is there a social movement demanding more economic justice for Israelis?
HEVER: Well, Israel historically had a very strong social movement and was considered an almost socialist state. In 1965 there was a survey of all countries in the world in terms of equality, and Israel was ranked between the Netherlands and Finland—one of the most equal countries in the world. Today, as I said before, Israel is one of the most unequal countries in the world. So something did happen.
JAY: Okay. So in the next segment of our interview let's find out what happened. Please join us for the next segment of our interview with Shir Hever.
End of Transcript
DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
The Handstand reports horror of horrors - from Iraq to Honduras...
Political Assassins
from: http://niqnaq.wordpress.com Rowan Berkeley's excellent news blog.
global gangstersAugust 31, 2010CIA in Honduras: the Practice of Selective TerrorNil Nikandrov, Strategic Culture Foundation, Aug 31 2010President of Honduras Manuel Zelaya was displaced slightly over a year ago in a coup staged by the local oligarchy and the US intelligence community. The coup came as a punishment for Zelaya’s alignment with Hugo Chavez and other populist Latin American leaders. Since that time, the news flow from Honduras abounds with stories of political assassinations, the victims being activists of trade unions, peasant and student organizations, and the National Popular Resistance Front opposing the pro-US regime of Porfirio Lobo. Ten journalists who expressed support for the ousted Honduran president have been killed this year alone. The most recent case of the type was the murder of Israel Zelaya, 56, who was kidnapped by an armed group which easily crossed by car numerous police checkpoints set up as a part of the security-tightening campaign. The journalist was taken to a secluded location, tortured, and shot two times in the head and once in the chest. Dozens of similar incidents show that a program of ”political cleansing” is underway in Honduras. Killers selectively target potential leaders capable of galvanizing protesters. Peasant leader Maria Teresa Flores, 50, was the coordinator of the Council of Peasant Organizations of Honduras and a proponent of an agrarian reform including the abolition of latifundias and the establishment of rural cooperatives. She was kidnapped, and a week later her bullet-ridden body with numerous traces of machete strikes and one hand cut off was found by the roadside in the Comayagua department. Only a fraction of the cases of political assassinations in Honduras become widely known. The operations are carried out in secrecy by specially trained and lavishly paid death squads staffed by police agents, bandits, and professional killers of Honduran origin or brought in from Columbia. These days, mass graves of opponents of the current regime are discovered in Honduras increasingly often.It is an established pattern that political murders become widespread wherever the US “helps restore democracy.” Berta Oliva, president of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared of Honduras, told the media a few days ago about the discovery of another mass grave with the bodies of over 100 people reported missing in Jun-Aug, that is, after the coup that propelled Lobo to power. Leader of the National Popular Resistance Front Reyes charges that the decisions to kill opposition leaders are made at the top level of the Honduran administration with direct involvement of key US embassy officers. It is no overstatement, considering that preemptive terror implemented by the state is a practice openly endorsed by Washington. Invoking cases of assassinations of foes of the US in Asia and Africa, the NYT maintained on Aug 15 that the geography and scale of the CIA secret wars “against terrorists” expanded under Obama compared to what the agency was allowed to do under Bush 43. The article contained no mention of the assassinations in Latin America, but it is an open secret that CIA operations targeting the regimes unfriendly to the US in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador are at full swing. Serious efforts are being made to strengthen the subversive terrorist networks in the above countries, where agents are receiving intense on-site training. Fighting against the Central American insurgencies and guerrilla groups in the 1960s–1980s, the Pentagon and the US intelligence community developed efficient approaches of the “struggle against terror.” Priority used to be given to decapitating the groups and neutralizing their support bases. In that epoch, peasants and Indians were routinely intimidated, forced to flee or even killed en masse in the regions of heightened guerrilla activity. The methods were later borrowed by the Columbian army and applied under the guidance of US advisers in the country’s internal conflict to undermine the potentials of FARC and ELN.So far there are no guerrilla groups in Honduras, and the Honduran administration noiselessly relies on the omnipresent death squads, which act under the US embassy staff’s supervision, to bleed the opposition. The bloated US mission in Tegucigalpa functions as a de facto parallel Honduran government, largely overshadowing the official one. US ambassador Llorens, appointed under Bush 43, is artistically playing the role of an honest diplomat totally uninvolved in the coup that led to the ouster of the legitimate president of Honduras. Llorens can count on Lobo’s understanding, as the new Honduran president is highly receptive to Washington’s initiatives and readily distances himself from the Latin American populist regimes. And, of course, Lobo rejects the ALBA integration project and Chavez’s “21st century socialism,” and for Washington’s peace of mind even shies away from discount energy deals with Venezuela, the resulting damage suffered by the Honduran economy notwithstanding. US military diplomats Defense Attaché Col Swisher, Special Tactics Group commander Col Rodriguez, Palmerola Airbase liaison officer Argenthal, and others are known to contribute a lot to the governance in Honduras. Several dozen US military intelligence officers are spying on the Honduran National Popular Resistance Front jointly with other US intelligence community staff operating under the cover of the US embassy, the Peace Corps, DEA, etc. The CIA station in Honduras headed by US embassy political counselor Eiriz is at the helm of the activity.There are obvious reasons behind Washington’s involvement in the Honduran crisis. Toppling Zelaya stopped the drift of Honduras towards a strategic alliance with the Latin American populist regimes, but the intensifying resistance mounted by the supporters of the ousted president is likely to confront Lobo’s administration with serious problems. Zelaya’s Patriotic Alternative and the threat of nation-wide strikes highlight the ineptitude of the current Honduran government. For Washington, the return of Zelaya would mean a new headache. OAS Sec-Gen Insulza hopes to see Zelaya reinstated, to prevent the emergence of a precedent allowing rightists to throw a legitimate president out of his own country. Zelaya is doing what he can to stage a comeback: he submits appeals to Honduran media nearly on a daily basis calling for unity of protesters and disproving the allegations leveled at him by the US media. At the moment the official and the shadow administrations of Honduras are bombarding Zelaya with charges. Allegedly, he misappropriated millions of dollars handed out to Honduras by Venezuela as economic aid. There is no clarity what happened to his personal presidential Lexus and to portions of the budget of his administration. Zelaya is aware that in the case of his return to Honduras he will have to defend himself in court. The surge of terror in Honduras is also a factor Zelaya has to reckon with. He is the number one target for the death squads, and threats are relayed to him via various channels that going back home would be a major risk.At present, Zelaya has guest status in the Dominican Republic. For Washington, the optimal scenario would be Zelaya’s consent to stay where he is, at the fancy La Romana resort frequented by millionaires and pop idols. Zelaya does not give in, though, keeps in touch with the populist leaders, and ignores Washington’s displeasure. With Chavez’s help, Zelaya became the Petrocaribe coordinator responsible for safeguarding independence and democracy. Holding the post makes it easier for him to travel around the region and to promote the National Popular Resistance Front. CIA agents in the Dominican Republic are watching Zelaya day and night, sending reports with details of his meetings, phone calls, and e-mails to Langley. The US embassy’s political section, Messrs Margulis, Fitzgibbons, and Norman, put collecting information about Zelaya and about his contacts with Chavez high on their agenda. Zelaya is surrounded by CIA agents and sophisticated surveillance systems, and the Dominican police readily shares information with the US. Chief of Dominican police Gen Gusman is regarded by the CIA as a partner and enjoys the agency’s sponsorship. In a couple of decades, journalists will probably unearth facts about the CIA personal donations to Gen Gusman. Some findings are already in the media: the police will get $3m to fight drug trafficking and other types of crime, plus $250,000 to buy computers and various equipment. The CIA would readily dispense even greater sums of money to make sure Zelaya is debarred from Honduras. The US double standards in countering terrorism are common knowledge, and for Washington wars and provocations are acceptable instruments in political games. Chances are Zelaya has already got a Black Spot from the CIA and a team of cleaners is waiting for the moment.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Sept.Issue the Handstand
Part Tinker Bell, Part Predator Drone: The Fantasy of the Presidency as Deus ex Machina
August 20, 2010 The devices employed in US election cycles and its national politics, in general, are akin to the dramatic conventions of children's theatre. Every two to four years, voters are instructed to clap their hands and believe in Tinker Bell. "Children, you have to believe -- you really, really have to believe in Tinker Bell." But behind the stagecraft is oligarchy. President Obama took millions from Goldman Sachs, et al. If there is a Captain Hook in this show, it is those Wall Street pirates who threw the global economy to the crocodiles for their ill-gotten gains.
Of course, this is a tired, old show, riddled with shopworn devices, performed by a rotating cast of hacks. Ronald Reagan set the fool's gold standard of a president playacting the role of populist, matinee hero -- Clinton, Bush, and Obama all learned from him -- as, all the while, he, in reality, went about the business of protecting and enhancing the holdings of the moneyed elite.
In Reagan's case, this con game was both an act of inspired career advancement and banal casuistry. Reagan, b-grade actor that he was, was never deep enough to harbor any belief he wasn't paid to evince. By professional necessity, he convinced himself he believed those bright and shining lies and polished platitudes he pitched to a public of credulous marks; for this is the mode of mind of effective salesmen and good showmen ... having the ability to conflate shallow self interest with the good of all.
Such self-deception -- played out as public legerdemain and state stagecraft -- is now the modus operandi of media age presidencies. The effect of this transformation, from executive gravitas to virtual playacting, has been somewhat less than salubrious for the health of the republic. When, for example, an American city drowns in floodwater and Americans are drowning in economic woes, US presidents know how to act like a president -- but not act as president. The soundbites make the man; not the man makes the soundbites.
Thus far, Obama's role has been to front the status quo. Whose interest do you think he had in mind when he picked Larry Summers and Tim Geithner as his top economic advisors? Hint: not those who clutch a subway strap nor sit stranded in freeway traffic, in bank-financed motor vehicles, on their daily commute to and from work.
Presidents, as is the case with all people, internalize the social and cultural architecture of their times. Reagan, the actor, had to find a way to believe what movie industry scriptwriters and film directors wanted from him insofar as the creation of character -- and, during the cold war and McCarthy era witchhunts, when G.E. and other defense industry giants started writing his checks (after his movie career died a lackluster death) he performed his role as resolute cold warrior as requested. And he, as has every president since, became a shill and enabler of the national security state.
Barack Obama's transformation from progressive hope-monger to status quo water-carrier should not come as a shock. It would be nearly impossible for the US populace, chief executives included, not to have internalized the tenets of the corporate capitalist/consumer empire. This corporate structure is as pervasive internally as it is extant. It exists as both outer architecture and inner psychological imprinting. Therefore, corporatism is as real to us as the deep forests and its woodland gods were to European pagans and The Church and its dogma was to the peasants of the Dark and Middle Ages.
The circumstances of the present era, like the ancient belief in the acts of self-involved gods whose doings were heedless to the fate of mere mortals, are larger than us and will not cede to our demands to behave with compassion or even sanity. To name but one example: The earth's oceans are suffering, many oceanographers say dying, due to the death cult calculus of runaway capitalism. In essence, we are confronted by a situation in which we experience abject powerlessness. An aura of unease and anomie prevails.
This unease contributes to a desperate fantasy of the presidency as deus ex machina. The right's deification of Reagan cast the fantasy into the realm of bughouse raving: The dead president as savor zombie. The belief that Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union with 1940's era movie jibes and bromides is such a preposterous fantasy ... that it evokes one of my own: Ronald Reagan, endlessly imprisoned in a soundbite loop in Hell, throwing back his shoulders, doing that portrayal of manly resolve he wore out during his time in office ... then bandying into the indifference of eternity, this variation of his patented platitude, "Mr. Devil, tear down this wall of fire."
What is the emotional toil taken by the reality that in life, unlike theatre, there will be no sudden plot reversal brought about by a device of deus ex machina? In these desperate imaginings, we demand our president both lay on hands to heal the wounds inflicted by capitalism and smite our perceived enemies abroad. We insist he be not only a steely eyed warrior-king but our collective killer Christ.
Democratic presidents, and their handlers and advisers, become possessed of this errant archetype as well. Hence, according to the fantasy, to be viable as commander-in-chief, they are driven to prove their toughness, preferably, in some he-man display of resolute stupidity. They must prove they have a pair of killer/redeemer god balls -- which might be termed, Christesticles -- by bombing somebody -- anybody. At present, it appears this fraternity of hubris-blinded killer clowns has Iran in their cross hairs.
The act of imagining enemies serves as distraction from the angst arising from the vast economic inequities of life in the contemporary US. This is the good versus evil, dramatic conventions of the children's theatre of our politics: We boo the villains -- and are instructed to clap our hands to bring about an intervention by supernatural forces ... In this case, in the form of an action hero/magical being to do our killing: a deity -- who is part Tinker Bell, part predator drone.
But our situation is closer to that of the flawed protagonists in Waiting For Godot -- Samuel Becket's brilliant take on the self-deception at work within the alienated hearts of those who believe their suffering will be assuaged by the arrival of a god-like being. The last lines and final stage instructions of the play are emblematic of the Obama presidency:
VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.
(Stage direction: They do not move.)
Obama and the Democrats do not move. They do not act. They do not govern. They do not serve their constituents.
Although, in reality, they do serve their true constituents ... the corporate elite -- the forces behind the rising level of authoritarian control over the lives of the people of the nation, both of ordinary citizens and the political class. In situations of veiled coercion, where unspoken threats to one's economic security and social standing are the primary motivating factors determining an individual's response to an exploitive system, there is no need to threaten potential dissenters with crude, old school totalitarian methods of repression such as forced deportment to labor and reeducation camps. In the class stratified, debt shackled US work force, where the personal consequences of financial upheaval are devastating, the implicit threat of being cast into the nation's urban gulag archipelago of homelessness coerces most into compliance with the dictates of the corporate oligarchs.
The effects are insidious. In such an environment, there is no call for the Sturm und Drang of mass spectacle, replete with blazing torches and blown banners hoisted by serried ranks of jut jawed, jack-booted ubermensch: corporatism establishes an authoritarian order by way of a series of overt bribes and tacit threats. This social and cultural criteria causes an individual to become cautious. A Triumph of the bland reigns. Obama's bland, non-threatening charm was cultivated in this hybrid, corporate soil.
As is the case with Obama, corporatism demands employees (and Obama is first among us underlings) render themselves fecklessly pleasant. This is the mandatory mode of being demanded of corporate hires -- self-annihilation by habitual amiability. And Barack Obama has perfected the form.
In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama stated that he learned early: Never scare old, white people ... that is a good description of how he has dealt with BP and the banksters, and all the other old white men in their perches of privilege and power.
Obama, as was the case with Bill Clinton, will not challenge the corporate oligarchs. Both he and Clinton are gifted, intelligent men, but are products of their time. They are men of, what was once termed, "modest birth" who -- out necessity to rise past the circumstances of their origins -- studied, internalized, and made allegiance to the corporate structure. Why? Because, in the age of corporate oligarchy, they knew the only way to rise to power would be to serve its interests. In contrast, FDR came from the ruling class; he knew their ways ... wasn't tempted by the rewards and adulation that come with privilege. He was born into it, could never lose its advantages, and it held no novelty for him.
I'm not positing Clinton was simply a shallow narcissist, as was a fashionable invective aimed at his hulking frame and over-sized persona during his tenure as POTUS ... such palaver was so much shadow projection on the part of the vampiric careerists of the Washington-New York nexus of blood-sucking media undead. Rather, Clinton was a big talent. He was Byronic in his expansive nature. And like Byron he could claim, in all honesty, he could love a thousand women (and not only women, but varieties of constituents) in a thousand different ways, all at once. He was a romantic at heart in an age of crackpot realists. He was a large presence in a small-minded time. And this is how his trouble in the 1990s, and ours, in the present time, began.
When the Cold War ended, and the arrogant fantasies of neoliberal capitalism were ascendant, virtuoso of the zeitgeist that Clinton was, his prodigious wings caught those heady updrafts and he took the nation on an Icarian flight of Reaganesque economic deregulation, that would, later, contribute to the spiraling fall -- known, at present, as "the economic downturn."
Clinton could have used some saturnine apprehension regarding the dark side of capitalism, rather than the intoxication gained from the provisional, mutually serving alliances he made with his Wall Street bubble salesmen buddies, Rubin, Summers, and Geithner.
Clinton's periodic, erotic contretemps were not the problem; it was his and his advisor's flights of economic fancy that had real consequences for those of us who live at ground level among the debris and ash resultant from the inevitable fiery crash of their vanity and cupidity.
Enter Obama when the bubble burst. The stage is set for sweeping reform. Instead, we have received faux populist bromides, as all the while, behind the scenes, he has gone about the business of accommodation, capitulation, and general lickspittle boot-buffing of the corporate class.
If you listen closely, you might hear, all the way from the realm of the damned below, Ronald Reagan cackling in glee over it with his lower order demon companions from within their eternal prison of flames.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499com/profile.php?id=100000711907499
The Handstand Sep. Issue continued below
Obama Wins No-Balls Prize; Nobel Committee Regrets
"Tragic Typo" That Mistakenly Awarded U.S. President 2009 Peace Prizeby Michael K. SmithLegalienation News, Oslo
In a dramatic announcement that drew gasps of pleasure and cries of "it's about time," President Barack Obama today won the "No-Balls" Prize for "spinelessness above and beyond the call of duty," while retroactively losing the 2009 Nobel Peace prize, which the awards Committee confessed had been mistakenly granted due to a "tragic typographical error." The five-member Norwegian delegation explained that it had never intended to award Obama the Nobel prize, ironically named after Alfred Nobel, the inventor of gunpowder, but rather, the "No-Balls" prize, named after Nobel's brother-in-law Alfred Noballs, inventor of the white flag."President Obama's unparalleled record of evasions, cave-ins, and sell-outs is truly awesome," said Committee-member Erik Wahl. "We have never seen a more immense consistency of cowardice." Obama won handily over second-place finisher Morris "Yellow Belly" Butler, who stole money from orphans and spent it on liquor and prostitutes. Gracefully conceding defeat, Butler pronounced Obama "a champion invertebrate with few peers and no superiors."Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa reacted with unrestrained delight: "From throwing Reverend Wright under the bus to increasing the slaughter of innocents with pilotless drone attacks, Obama has proven himself a great mass of cowardly energy time and again," he said.Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi in Afghanistan also applauded the Nobel committee's decision, confirming that Obama was responsible for escalating war and had "the blood of countless innocents on his hands." Few can doubt that this is the stuff of which "No Balls" winners are made.Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said,"It's difficult to think of a more deserving recipient than a man who sustains simultaneous wars against defenseless populations in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."Orlando Sosa, a recent addition to the Nobel Committee, said the selection was intended to honor not just Obama's swan dive into the lap of Big Business, but also his incredibly multi-faceted cowardice, including: (1) peerless command of euphemism and double-think; (2) outstanding capacity to orate for hours without saying a thing; (3) artful evasion of every moral point; (4) proven ability to see nuance where none exists; (5) capacity to cave-in faster than an avalanche.Obama conceded he was "deeply humbled" by the honor, and launched a cruise missile attack on Yemen to celebrate. The No-Balls Laureate promised to "stay the course" in Afghanistan, where he has killed more U.S. troops in 19 months than George W. Bush did in 7 years, and accelerate his extraordinary achievements in torture, environmental catastrophe, bankster bailouts, HMO fascism, and imperial wars from Colombia to Palestine.As a gesture of good will, he pledged the $2 million cash award that comes with his prize to a deserving death squad that preys on children. Source: http://legalienate.blogspot.com/
Part Tinker Bell, Part Predator Drone: The Fantasy of the Presidency as Deus ex Machina
By Phil Rockstroh
August 20, 2010 The devices employed in US election cycles and its national politics, in general, are akin to the dramatic conventions of children's theatre. Every two to four years, voters are instructed to clap their hands and believe in Tinker Bell. "Children, you have to believe -- you really, really have to believe in Tinker Bell." But behind the stagecraft is oligarchy. President Obama took millions from Goldman Sachs, et al. If there is a Captain Hook in this show, it is those Wall Street pirates who threw the global economy to the crocodiles for their ill-gotten gains.
Of course, this is a tired, old show, riddled with shopworn devices, performed by a rotating cast of hacks. Ronald Reagan set the fool's gold standard of a president playacting the role of populist, matinee hero -- Clinton, Bush, and Obama all learned from him -- as, all the while, he, in reality, went about the business of protecting and enhancing the holdings of the moneyed elite.
In Reagan's case, this con game was both an act of inspired career advancement and banal casuistry. Reagan, b-grade actor that he was, was never deep enough to harbor any belief he wasn't paid to evince. By professional necessity, he convinced himself he believed those bright and shining lies and polished platitudes he pitched to a public of credulous marks; for this is the mode of mind of effective salesmen and good showmen ... having the ability to conflate shallow self interest with the good of all.
Such self-deception -- played out as public legerdemain and state stagecraft -- is now the modus operandi of media age presidencies. The effect of this transformation, from executive gravitas to virtual playacting, has been somewhat less than salubrious for the health of the republic. When, for example, an American city drowns in floodwater and Americans are drowning in economic woes, US presidents know how to act like a president -- but not act as president. The soundbites make the man; not the man makes the soundbites.
Thus far, Obama's role has been to front the status quo. Whose interest do you think he had in mind when he picked Larry Summers and Tim Geithner as his top economic advisors? Hint: not those who clutch a subway strap nor sit stranded in freeway traffic, in bank-financed motor vehicles, on their daily commute to and from work.
Presidents, as is the case with all people, internalize the social and cultural architecture of their times. Reagan, the actor, had to find a way to believe what movie industry scriptwriters and film directors wanted from him insofar as the creation of character -- and, during the cold war and McCarthy era witchhunts, when G.E. and other defense industry giants started writing his checks (after his movie career died a lackluster death) he performed his role as resolute cold warrior as requested. And he, as has every president since, became a shill and enabler of the national security state.
Barack Obama's transformation from progressive hope-monger to status quo water-carrier should not come as a shock. It would be nearly impossible for the US populace, chief executives included, not to have internalized the tenets of the corporate capitalist/consumer empire. This corporate structure is as pervasive internally as it is extant. It exists as both outer architecture and inner psychological imprinting. Therefore, corporatism is as real to us as the deep forests and its woodland gods were to European pagans and The Church and its dogma was to the peasants of the Dark and Middle Ages.
The circumstances of the present era, like the ancient belief in the acts of self-involved gods whose doings were heedless to the fate of mere mortals, are larger than us and will not cede to our demands to behave with compassion or even sanity. To name but one example: The earth's oceans are suffering, many oceanographers say dying, due to the death cult calculus of runaway capitalism. In essence, we are confronted by a situation in which we experience abject powerlessness. An aura of unease and anomie prevails.
This unease contributes to a desperate fantasy of the presidency as deus ex machina. The right's deification of Reagan cast the fantasy into the realm of bughouse raving: The dead president as savor zombie. The belief that Ronald Reagan brought down the Soviet Union with 1940's era movie jibes and bromides is such a preposterous fantasy ... that it evokes one of my own: Ronald Reagan, endlessly imprisoned in a soundbite loop in Hell, throwing back his shoulders, doing that portrayal of manly resolve he wore out during his time in office ... then bandying into the indifference of eternity, this variation of his patented platitude, "Mr. Devil, tear down this wall of fire."
What is the emotional toil taken by the reality that in life, unlike theatre, there will be no sudden plot reversal brought about by a device of deus ex machina? In these desperate imaginings, we demand our president both lay on hands to heal the wounds inflicted by capitalism and smite our perceived enemies abroad. We insist he be not only a steely eyed warrior-king but our collective killer Christ.
Democratic presidents, and their handlers and advisers, become possessed of this errant archetype as well. Hence, according to the fantasy, to be viable as commander-in-chief, they are driven to prove their toughness, preferably, in some he-man display of resolute stupidity. They must prove they have a pair of killer/redeemer god balls -- which might be termed, Christesticles -- by bombing somebody -- anybody. At present, it appears this fraternity of hubris-blinded killer clowns has Iran in their cross hairs.
The act of imagining enemies serves as distraction from the angst arising from the vast economic inequities of life in the contemporary US. This is the good versus evil, dramatic conventions of the children's theatre of our politics: We boo the villains -- and are instructed to clap our hands to bring about an intervention by supernatural forces ... In this case, in the form of an action hero/magical being to do our killing: a deity -- who is part Tinker Bell, part predator drone.
But our situation is closer to that of the flawed protagonists in Waiting For Godot -- Samuel Becket's brilliant take on the self-deception at work within the alienated hearts of those who believe their suffering will be assuaged by the arrival of a god-like being. The last lines and final stage instructions of the play are emblematic of the Obama presidency:
VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?
ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.
(Stage direction: They do not move.)
Obama and the Democrats do not move. They do not act. They do not govern. They do not serve their constituents.
Although, in reality, they do serve their true constituents ... the corporate elite -- the forces behind the rising level of authoritarian control over the lives of the people of the nation, both of ordinary citizens and the political class. In situations of veiled coercion, where unspoken threats to one's economic security and social standing are the primary motivating factors determining an individual's response to an exploitive system, there is no need to threaten potential dissenters with crude, old school totalitarian methods of repression such as forced deportment to labor and reeducation camps. In the class stratified, debt shackled US work force, where the personal consequences of financial upheaval are devastating, the implicit threat of being cast into the nation's urban gulag archipelago of homelessness coerces most into compliance with the dictates of the corporate oligarchs.
The effects are insidious. In such an environment, there is no call for the Sturm und Drang of mass spectacle, replete with blazing torches and blown banners hoisted by serried ranks of jut jawed, jack-booted ubermensch: corporatism establishes an authoritarian order by way of a series of overt bribes and tacit threats. This social and cultural criteria causes an individual to become cautious. A Triumph of the bland reigns. Obama's bland, non-threatening charm was cultivated in this hybrid, corporate soil.
As is the case with Obama, corporatism demands employees (and Obama is first among us underlings) render themselves fecklessly pleasant. This is the mandatory mode of being demanded of corporate hires -- self-annihilation by habitual amiability. And Barack Obama has perfected the form.
In his memoir, Dreams From My Father, Obama stated that he learned early: Never scare old, white people ... that is a good description of how he has dealt with BP and the banksters, and all the other old white men in their perches of privilege and power.
Obama, as was the case with Bill Clinton, will not challenge the corporate oligarchs. Both he and Clinton are gifted, intelligent men, but are products of their time. They are men of, what was once termed, "modest birth" who -- out necessity to rise past the circumstances of their origins -- studied, internalized, and made allegiance to the corporate structure. Why? Because, in the age of corporate oligarchy, they knew the only way to rise to power would be to serve its interests. In contrast, FDR came from the ruling class; he knew their ways ... wasn't tempted by the rewards and adulation that come with privilege. He was born into it, could never lose its advantages, and it held no novelty for him.
I'm not positing Clinton was simply a shallow narcissist, as was a fashionable invective aimed at his hulking frame and over-sized persona during his tenure as POTUS ... such palaver was so much shadow projection on the part of the vampiric careerists of the Washington-New York nexus of blood-sucking media undead. Rather, Clinton was a big talent. He was Byronic in his expansive nature. And like Byron he could claim, in all honesty, he could love a thousand women (and not only women, but varieties of constituents) in a thousand different ways, all at once. He was a romantic at heart in an age of crackpot realists. He was a large presence in a small-minded time. And this is how his trouble in the 1990s, and ours, in the present time, began.
When the Cold War ended, and the arrogant fantasies of neoliberal capitalism were ascendant, virtuoso of the zeitgeist that Clinton was, his prodigious wings caught those heady updrafts and he took the nation on an Icarian flight of Reaganesque economic deregulation, that would, later, contribute to the spiraling fall -- known, at present, as "the economic downturn."
Clinton could have used some saturnine apprehension regarding the dark side of capitalism, rather than the intoxication gained from the provisional, mutually serving alliances he made with his Wall Street bubble salesmen buddies, Rubin, Summers, and Geithner.
Clinton's periodic, erotic contretemps were not the problem; it was his and his advisor's flights of economic fancy that had real consequences for those of us who live at ground level among the debris and ash resultant from the inevitable fiery crash of their vanity and cupidity.
Enter Obama when the bubble burst. The stage is set for sweeping reform. Instead, we have received faux populist bromides, as all the while, behind the scenes, he has gone about the business of accommodation, capitulation, and general lickspittle boot-buffing of the corporate class.
If you listen closely, you might hear, all the way from the realm of the damned below, Ronald Reagan cackling in glee over it with his lower order demon companions from within their eternal prison of flames.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499com/profile.php?id=100000711907499
SEPTEMBER issue of The Handstand
I NEVER USE WIKIPEDIA - How can I admit to such an omission ?- I don't use Facebook or any other social website either...
Gilad ATZMON on the editing problem in Wikipedia, sent me the following shock discovery.....Gilad has followed up a Guardian article
Editor Joc Braddell.
UNITED AGAINST KNOWLEDGE
FRIDAY, AUGUST 20, 2010 GILAD ATZMON
The Guardian reported today that two Israeli groups have set up training courses in subversive Wikipedia editing aiming to 'show the other side' of the Jewish State.
Those who lend their pen to the Palestinian cause know aboutWikipedia Jews, a term that was coined a few years ago. It refers to a bunch of rabid and crypto Zionists who constantly vandalise encyclopaedia entries to do with Palestine, Palestinian activists and Israeli atrocities.
According to the Guardian two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in "Zionist editing".
Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to ‘rewrite’ and ‘revise’ some of the most “hotly disputed pages of the online reference site.”
The Wikipideia project is a phenomenal humanist and universalist initiative. Hence, it should not take us by surprise that its biggest opponents are tribal operators, amongst them Zionists, crypto Zionists and the so called ‘Jewish anti Zionists’.
One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, told the Guardian that publicising the new Zionist conspiratorial initiative might not be such a ‘good idea’. "Going public in the past has had a bad effect," she says. "There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground."
One may be surprised to discover that chief amongst ‘Wikipedia Jews’ is alleged ‘Anti Zionist’ Roland Rance. Rance, is a London based Jewish Marxist who spends most of his time peppering Wikipedia entries with Judeo-centric context. Roland Rance was also one of the leading opponents of Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), probably the most successful Palestinian solidarity operation in the UK. Here is a snapshot of Rance’s relentless attempt to vandalise Israel Shamir’s Wikipedia entry last week.
Wikipedia Jews have history behind them. According to the Guardian, in 2008, members of the hawkish pro-Israel watchdog Camera who secretly planned to edit Wikipedia were banned from the site by administrators. There is a war going on my own Wikipedia entry. More than once Wikipedia Administrators have been called in just to remove contamination by Rance and other Zionists.
The Wikipedia project is all about knowledge and the availability of knowledge. Is it a coincidence that political Jews in the right and in the left are united to subvert this project? I do not think so. Once again we come across what seems to be Zionist continuum. They are all united against knowledge.
Apparently The organisiers of the Zionist Wikipedia courses, are already planning a competition to find the "Best Zionist editor", with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel. I guess that by now we know who should be the candidate for the blue & white air balloon adventure.
COMMENT : from NimrodDate: 21.08.2010 02:31 AM
Part of the rationale for the WikiSpooks site concerns the impossibility of Wikipedia providing effective coverage of deep political issues which have the potential to seriously jeapardise key 'official narratives'. To expect balanced coverage on such matters is akin to expecting the encyclopedias of the day to have provided rigorous coverage of Gallileo's evidence on 'Heliocentism' when to do so was to invite excommunication or worse by the Catholic Church power structure of the day. In similar fashion, and in company with the rest of the Mainstream Media, stable articles on Wikipedia largely reflect the consensus view of 'experts' whose continued rank, position and place as 'experts' among their peers and society at large, is dependent upon them keeping criticism and questioning of 'the official narrative' within clearly understood (if unwritten) bounds. Coverage outside such bounds is permissible, but only if relegated to the category of 'conspiracy theory', an inane and ! meaningless pejorative but one which has a life of its own. Its sole purpose is to pigeon-hole anything and anyone anointed with it to the equivalent of a lunatic asylum and thus better kept both out of sight and out of mind.
Zionist Shenanigans
There are sub-sets of this global self-censoring mechanism which may manifest when a well organised group of Wikipedia monitors, authors and editors set out to influence content in pursuit of an agenda. In its third month of operation, WikiSpooks has stumbled upon a fascinating example of just such a sub-set in action. The evidence is of a group of Wikipedia editors rapidly coalescing around a carefully researched and properly referenced article, and using all the tools available to experienced senior Wikipedia people to remove and/or dramatically reduce coverage of events seen as damaging to Zionist Israel
For full information see:
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Wikipedia
And:
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/2001_Israeli_Nerve_Gas_Attacks
The related articles were provided by their original Wikipedia author. "The Israeli Art Scam" article is preceded by referenced details of its Wikipedia history.
Wikispooks does not have a view on the significance of the 'Art Scam' article beyond posing the question: "Would such blatant airbrushing of Israeli involvement really be warranted if the intent was merely to cover-up a relatively trivial financial scam?"
The lessons:
* If you want to know the truth about deep political issues - don't rely on Wikipedia.
* If you want to know the truth about Zionist Israel - don't expect to find it at Wikipedia.
* For pretty much anything else, Wikipedia probably IS your best option as a 'first-port-of-call' introduction to a subject.
Information for editors:
WikiSpooks is a collaborative project aimed at building a comprehensive reference source of deep political structures and events, together with the people and organisations connected to them. In company with 'Wikipedia' and other wiki-based projects, knowledgeable involvement with the site is invited.
WikiSpooks enforces an editorial policy designed to compensate for the blind-spots of Wikipedia and other mainstream media. Principle tenets of the policy are:
* The veracity and accuracy of official announcements, documents, press releases etc should be treated as inversely proportional to the power, wealth, statutory - or other claimed - authority of their source.
* Any such information should be assumed to be in furtherance of a hidden - if more or less obvious - agenda and thus designed to mislead rather than to inform.
* Reputation, Position, Rank, Place etc., in Establishment hierarchies and protocols should be treated as pretentious conceits serving Establishment agendas (hidden or otherwise) and thus deserving of ridicule, satire and other forms of literary attack.
WikiSpooks also provides a secure anonymous file upload facility for whistleblowers wishing to put information into the public domain without revealing their identity.
The Wikispooks site is hosted in the Irish Republic.
WORDS - by the angry arab
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/
"I love that line: “We have to surprise them.” I was watching the movie on an airplane and scribbled that line down on my napkin because it summarizes what is missing today in so many places: leaders who surprise us by rising above their histories, their constituencies, their pollsters, their circumstances — and just do the right things for their countries. " Thomas Friedman
I bet you love that line. You like everything that is superficial, shallow, and vapid. I bet that you scribbled that silly line from a silly movie. That is your level of analysis and observations. You are somebody whose mind is only formed by silly anecdotes and popular cultures, and not by books or big ideas. And you not only scribbled that silly line: you also scribbled other silly line on that plane ride of your because you cite other silly lines from that silly movie. I mean, you have been writing for years and I can't for the life of me remember one original idea that you came up with on any subject. You think that silly catch phrases take the place of ideas, and some silly readers agree with you because they like to not use their brains. Lastly, tell me your position on the Iraq war: that is your only achievement. How you went from wholeheartedly endorsing the American invasion of Iraq, to pretending that you were a critic of the way, only when it became clear that your original idea was so dumb. At least stick to a position: aside from consistently serving Zionist interests.
I NEVER USE WIKIPEDIA - How can I admit to such an omission ?- I don't use Facebook or any other social website either...
Gilad ATZMON on the editing problem in Wikipedia, sent me the following shock discovery.....Gilad has followed up a Guardian article
Editor Joc Braddell.
UNITED AGAINST KNOWLEDGE
FRIDAY, AUGUST 20, 2010 GILAD ATZMON
The Guardian reported today that two Israeli groups have set up training courses in subversive Wikipedia editing aiming to 'show the other side' of the Jewish State.
Those who lend their pen to the Palestinian cause know aboutWikipedia Jews, a term that was coined a few years ago. It refers to a bunch of rabid and crypto Zionists who constantly vandalise encyclopaedia entries to do with Palestine, Palestinian activists and Israeli atrocities.
According to the Guardian two Israeli groups seeking to gain the upper hand in the online debate have launched a course in "Zionist editing".
Yesha Council, representing the Jewish settler movement ran their first workshop this week in Jerusalem, teaching participants how to ‘rewrite’ and ‘revise’ some of the most “hotly disputed pages of the online reference site.”
The Wikipideia project is a phenomenal humanist and universalist initiative. Hence, it should not take us by surprise that its biggest opponents are tribal operators, amongst them Zionists, crypto Zionists and the so called ‘Jewish anti Zionists’.
One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, told the Guardian that publicising the new Zionist conspiratorial initiative might not be such a ‘good idea’. "Going public in the past has had a bad effect," she says. "There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground."
One may be surprised to discover that chief amongst ‘Wikipedia Jews’ is alleged ‘Anti Zionist’ Roland Rance. Rance, is a London based Jewish Marxist who spends most of his time peppering Wikipedia entries with Judeo-centric context. Roland Rance was also one of the leading opponents of Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), probably the most successful Palestinian solidarity operation in the UK. Here is a snapshot of Rance’s relentless attempt to vandalise Israel Shamir’s Wikipedia entry last week.
Wikipedia Jews have history behind them. According to the Guardian, in 2008, members of the hawkish pro-Israel watchdog Camera who secretly planned to edit Wikipedia were banned from the site by administrators. There is a war going on my own Wikipedia entry. More than once Wikipedia Administrators have been called in just to remove contamination by Rance and other Zionists.
The Wikipedia project is all about knowledge and the availability of knowledge. Is it a coincidence that political Jews in the right and in the left are united to subvert this project? I do not think so. Once again we come across what seems to be Zionist continuum. They are all united against knowledge.
Apparently The organisiers of the Zionist Wikipedia courses, are already planning a competition to find the "Best Zionist editor", with a prize of a hot-air balloon trip over Israel. I guess that by now we know who should be the candidate for the blue & white air balloon adventure.
COMMENT : from Nimrod
Part of the rationale for the WikiSpooks site concerns the impossibility of Wikipedia providing effective coverage of deep political issues which have the potential to seriously jeapardise key 'official narratives'. To expect balanced coverage on such matters is akin to expecting the encyclopedias of the day to have provided rigorous coverage of Gallileo's evidence on 'Heliocentism' when to do so was to invite excommunication or worse by the Catholic Church power structure of the day. In similar fashion, and in company with the rest of the Mainstream Media, stable articles on Wikipedia largely reflect the consensus view of 'experts' whose continued rank, position and place as 'experts' among their peers and society at large, is dependent upon them keeping criticism and questioning of 'the official narrative' within clearly understood (if unwritten) bounds. Coverage outside such bounds is permissible, but only if relegated to the category of 'conspiracy theory', an inane and ! meaningless pejorative but one which has a life of its own. Its sole purpose is to pigeon-hole anything and anyone anointed with it to the equivalent of a lunatic asylum and thus better kept both out of sight and out of mind.
Zionist Shenanigans
There are sub-sets of this global self-censoring mechanism which may manifest when a well organised group of Wikipedia monitors, authors and editors set out to influence content in pursuit of an agenda. In its third month of operation, WikiSpooks has stumbled upon a fascinating example of just such a sub-set in action. The evidence is of a group of Wikipedia editors rapidly coalescing around a carefully researched and properly referenced article, and using all the tools available to experienced senior Wikipedia people to remove and/or dramatically reduce coverage of events seen as damaging to Zionist Israel
For full information see:
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Wikipedia
And:
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/2001_Israeli_Nerve_Gas_Attacks
The related articles were provided by their original Wikipedia author. "The Israeli Art Scam" article is preceded by referenced details of its Wikipedia history.
Wikispooks does not have a view on the significance of the 'Art Scam' article beyond posing the question: "Would such blatant airbrushing of Israeli involvement really be warranted if the intent was merely to cover-up a relatively trivial financial scam?"
The lessons:
* If you want to know the truth about deep political issues - don't rely on Wikipedia.
* If you want to know the truth about Zionist Israel - don't expect to find it at Wikipedia.
* For pretty much anything else, Wikipedia probably IS your best option as a 'first-port-of-call' introduction to a subject.
Information for editors:
WikiSpooks is a collaborative project aimed at building a comprehensive reference source of deep political structures and events, together with the people and organisations connected to them. In company with 'Wikipedia' and other wiki-based projects, knowledgeable involvement with the site is invited.
WikiSpooks enforces an editorial policy designed to compensate for the blind-spots of Wikipedia and other mainstream media. Principle tenets of the policy are:
* The veracity and accuracy of official announcements, documents, press releases etc should be treated as inversely proportional to the power, wealth, statutory - or other claimed - authority of their source.
* Any such information should be assumed to be in furtherance of a hidden - if more or less obvious - agenda and thus designed to mislead rather than to inform.
* Reputation, Position, Rank, Place etc., in Establishment hierarchies and protocols should be treated as pretentious conceits serving Establishment agendas (hidden or otherwise) and thus deserving of ridicule, satire and other forms of literary attack.
WikiSpooks also provides a secure anonymous file upload facility for whistleblowers wishing to put information into the public domain without revealing their identity.
The Wikispooks site is hosted in the Irish Republic.
WORDS - by the angry arab
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/
"I love that line: “We have to surprise them.” I was watching the movie on an airplane and scribbled that line down on my napkin because it summarizes what is missing today in so many places: leaders who surprise us by rising above their histories, their constituencies, their pollsters, their circumstances — and just do the right things for their countries. " Thomas Friedman
I bet you love that line. You like everything that is superficial, shallow, and vapid. I bet that you scribbled that silly line from a silly movie. That is your level of analysis and observations. You are somebody whose mind is only formed by silly anecdotes and popular cultures, and not by books or big ideas. And you not only scribbled that silly line: you also scribbled other silly line on that plane ride of your because you cite other silly lines from that silly movie. I mean, you have been writing for years and I can't for the life of me remember one original idea that you came up with on any subject. You think that silly catch phrases take the place of ideas, and some silly readers agree with you because they like to not use their brains. Lastly, tell me your position on the Iraq war: that is your only achievement. How you went from wholeheartedly endorsing the American invasion of Iraq, to pretending that you were a critic of the way, only when it became clear that your original idea was so dumb. At least stick to a position: aside from consistently serving Zionist interests.
PALESTINE
A Terrible Disease of the Mind
By Zaid Nabulsi
"My family and I long to return to the Gardens of Cordoba (Qurtuba). We agonize with every breath to re-inhabit the castles of Seville (Ishbeelyah). In our veins, there runs an eternal longing to walk again in the footsteps of our forefathers in Zaragoza (Saraqusta). We yearn to once again cultivate the orchards of Valladolid (Balad Al Waleed). We shall strive, by military means if necessary, to see the blessed day when we can tread along the rose-scented pathways of the splendid palace of Al Hambra (Al Hamra’a) in Granada (Ghirnata). Every stone and every particle of sand in that Iberian holy land belongs to me and to my people, exclusively. No Spaniard terrorist has the right to obstruct the will of God and deny my family the legal title to the land of our ancestors. It is God who had given us Andalucía (Al Andalus), and it is God who promised us that we, the exiles, shall ingather in it once again. "
I would indeed have to be a certified lunatic if I had meant a word of the above. Yet, the only difference between my disease of the mind and that of the millions of Jews who claimed to have “returned” to Palestine, is that in my case, at least the monuments and Arab names I am referring to are real and do actually exist today, and it is not contestable that the direct ancestors of my people did actually build that great civilisation.
On the other hand, all Zionist archaeologists have failed – after digging up every conceivable corner of Palestine for the last 62 years – to come up with a single credible Jewish teapot or tablespoon, let alone excavate an alleged Jewish temple remotely matching the grandeur of any of the visible relics of Andalucía.
Not only that, but they needn’t have bothered digging. Two years ago, Israeli Professor Shlomo Sand argued, with meticulous scholarship in his earth-shattering book, The Invention of the Jewish People, that the claim that the Jews of today are the ethnic offspring of the biblical Jews is yet another Zionist myth, because all records tell us that the current Jews are the descendants of Khazar tribes who converted to Judaism, and have no genetic link whatsoever to the Jews who lived in Palestine during Roman times. The latter, he concludes, are, most ironically, none other than the Palestinians of today who converted to Islam (or Christianity), because the Romans apparently never exiled anybody. Moreover, Sand demolishes the myth of the kingdoms of David and Solomon by proving they are pure legends that never existed. What is astonishing is that, to date, no Israeli historian has been able to debate, let alone refute, any of Sand’s devastating findings.
Yet, not only would I need to be in a straitjacket if I was serious about reclaiming Spain for the Arabs – irrespective of our real history there – but the Spanish people would have the right to laugh at the sheer absurdity of my hallucinations, if not get gravely offended by their audacity.
I cannot, for example, visit the magnificent Hall of Abencerrajes (Ibn Sarraj) in Al Hambra and then, after explaining to my children that it was Muslim Arabs who constructed these wondrous architectural miracles, go on and indoctrinate them that this piece of real estate should belong to them. I cannot do that any more than an Italian tourist can visit Jerash in Jordan, and thereafter decide to build a settlement and live there because, he says, it really belongs to his great uncle, a certain Mr Julius Caesar.
This is the case simply because, in this modern world, we do not go around stealing other people’s land by attributing our crime to an ancient historical link to such land, or because we believe that we belong to the same race or religion of the people who once lived there.
But the Zionists get away with it the whole time, and have been doing so for far too long – despite the total lack of any real historical connection to the land of Palestine (not that it matters or makes it any more legitimate if they did have such pre-historic connection).
For who can, in their of heart of hearts, credibly deny the blatant repugnancy of the whole underlying premise of Zionism, the very madness upon which Israel was founded? Indeed, any person who happens to support the immorality of the theft of the land of Palestine under such religious or forged historical pretexts would in reality be making up excuses for blatant colonisation that are far more ridiculous than my demented ranting about returning to the gardens of Cordoba.
So why do these Zionists get away with such a ludicrous monstrosity?
We all know why. The hegemony over world media exercised by Jews is crucial so that no one can ever challenge the Zionist narrative or point out the naked, unadulterated lunacy of the whole Zionist enterprise. Coupled with a world conscience shrouded in a cloud of Holocaust guilt, an event that is forbidden to even debate, you get an oppressive atmosphere that has suffocated the ability of Western civilisation to deconstruct Zionism down to its most basic insanities.
For how is it conceivable for otherwise rational populations to even entertain, let alone accept and adopt, the twisted Zionist logic about the Jews “returning” to a promised land after so many thousands of years of supposed separation? And how can these same people acquiesce to Israeli politicians openly using such religious nonsense as a justification for the contemporary and ongoing catastrophe inflicted upon the millions of guiltless Palestinian inhabitants of that land?
Take for example, José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister, who recently gave a solemn warning on the pages of the London Times:
“anger over Gaza is a distraction. We cannot forget that Israel is the West’s best ally in a turbulent region … if Israel goes down, we all go down…”.
Well, Mr Aznar, we do not advocate for Israel to disappear or go down anywhere, because, despite the evil deeds accompanying its creation, Israel is a fact that we have to live with today. Likewise, the Israelis are fellow human beings upon whom I do not wish to impose the televised barbequing of the eyes and flesh of their children using white phosphorus, nor shall I ever tolerate such horrendous barbarity to be inflicted upon them.
But, hey José, if you see nothing wrong with what Israel is, and regard its Goldstone-documented war crimes as a mere “distraction”, while ignoring that it is the source of all the “turbulence” of the region you mentioned, then you might as well give us back Malaga and Marbella. After all, in Andalucía, no Christian or Jew was ever persecuted or burnt at the stake, nor had his bone marrow fried by any other means.
Yet, the travesty continues unabated. Take this most recent manifestation of the mental illness enveloping the racist state of Israel (branded by Jewish US Media Inc. as “the only democracy in the Middle East”). Hillary Rubin is a US Jew from Detroit who decided to move to Israel in 2006, something millions of Palestinian refugees can only dream of. But that is not the story. Rubin happens to also be the niece of Zionist leader, Nahum Sokolow, so you would’ve supposed that she is a Jewish notable, revered in Israel for her noble lineage. Last month, she fell in love and wanted to get married to a nice Jewish boy from Herzliya. According to Ha’aretz newspaper, after filing for a wedding licence, she was refused and was told that she needed to prove the Jewishness of her maternal lineage for – listen to this – four entire generations. This is not 1933 Germany, but modern day Israel. So she got letters from four Conservative rabbis and one Chabad rabbi attesting to her Jewishness. But the Herzliya Rabbinate still wouldn’t have it. To allow her to marry her sweetheart, these men of God stipulated she comes up with the birth or death certificates of her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, something she of course failed to do. This is not an isolated incident, but the official applicable Israeli law on the books. Oh yes, Adolf Hitler is turning in his grave at this news. “And they dared crucify me for the Nuremberg laws?”, the Führer is muttering to himself.
Well, there you have it, Ladies and Gentlemen. Didn’t I tell you that Zionism is nothing but a terrible, incurable disease of the mind?
Israel has imposed tough restrictions on entry to al-aqsa mosque(Jerusalem)27.Aug.2010
Israel has imposed tough restrictions on entry to al-Quds (Jerusalem), preventing many Palestinians from attending Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque. Hundreds of Israeli troops were deployed and further checkpoints were installed in and around al-Aqsa Mosque on Friday to restrict the entry of Palestinian worshipers for the third Friday prayers of holy month of Ramadan. Women under the age of 45 and men under 50 are barred from entering the holy city. The move has angered many Palestinians, who believe Israel is illegally restricting access to the mosque. Palestinians say Israel, which occupied east al-Quds during the 1967 Six-Day War and annexed it in a move not recognized by the international community, has no right to deny them access to the mosque. Restricting access to al-Quds is only one of various limitations imposed by the Israeli army on Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank. The mosque compound, which is called Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary), contains the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. It is the third holiest site in Islam after Saudi Arabia's Mecca and Medina. HM/SAR/MMN http://www.presstv.com/detail/140248.html
two recent comments by Asad Abukhalil - The Angry Arab
Balfour Declaration
"According to Schneer, the Arabs were as invisible to the early Zionists as Africans had been to Boers in South Africa, or Indians to the French and English colonists in North America. But in fact, some of the first Zionists were well aware of the Arabs’ vehement objection to their national aspirations. As early as 1899, Theodore Herzl himself, the father of political Zionism, corresponded with the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi, who urged him to find a national home for the Jews somewhere else in the world. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to have had its origins at the very beginning of Zionism." Posted by As'adhttp://angryarab.blogspot.com/
Plus: George Will"Asad Abukhalil has already nailed Will for getting the date of the Peel Commission report wrong. It was 1937, not 1936. And the Arab Revolt broke out in Palestine before the Peel Commission introduced its findings. I would also add that David Ben Gurion privately accepted the Peel Commission’s recommendations because he saw them as the basis for a later partition that would gift the Zionist settler minority with major port cities like Jaffa and Haifa and throw the Palestinian Arabs back to the hinterlands." Max is right. Ben Gurion only grudgingly accepted the Peel in the hope of later change. And as he wrote to his son (see Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs) he talked about population exchange when he talked about whole-sale expulsion of Arabs (the trade off was between more than 100,00 in Jewish designated areas in return for no more than 3000 Jews in Arab designated areas). http://angryarab.blogspot.com/
Kristol, Father and SonBy Maidhc Ó Cathailhttp://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2009/12/17/kristol-clear-the-source-of-americas-wars/
'One reason neocons have been able to sow so much mischief is that they feed into deeply embedded American beliefs about democratism and 'chosenness.'" -- Paul Gottfried.
Americans feeling let down by Barack Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan should take careful note of those who welcomed yet another “surge.” It might help them to identify the source of their seemingly endless wars. For instance, in a recent Washington Post opinion piece, William Kristol described Obama’s West Point speech as “encouraging.” It was “a good thing,” he said, that Obama was finally speaking as “a war president.” But if the comments on the Post website are anything to go by, few ordinary Americans take Kristol’s armchair warmongering seriously anymore. After all, as one poster quizzically asked, “A column by William Kristol the neocon that was wrong about everything from 2000-2008?” Although Kristol, like the rest of the neocons, “erred” about Iraq’s WMDs and Saddam’s links to Al Qaeda and 9/11, it would be a fatal error indeed to dismiss him as a fool. In order to understand what motivates Bill Kristol’s professed hyper-patriotism, with its consistently disastrous prescriptions, it’s worth recalling how his father, Irving Kristol, reacted to Vietnam War critic Senator George McGovern. The presidential contender’s proposed cut in U.S. military expenditure would, according to the “godfather” of neoconservatism, “drive a knife in the heart of Israel.” “Jews don’t like big military budgets,” the elder Kristol explained in a Jewish publication in 1973. “But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States ... American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”Following his father’s advice, William Kristol has been a fervent supporter of massive U.S. military spending. In 1996, he co-authored with Robert Kagan an influential neocon manifesto titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” It recommended that “America should pursue a vision of benevolent hegemony as bold as Reagan’s in the 1970s and wield its authority unabashedly. “The defense budget should be increased dramatically, citizens should be educated to appreciate the military’s vital work abroad, and moral clarity should direct a foreign policy that puts the heat on dictators and authoritarian regimes.” In response, another influential opinion-maker, Charles Krauthammer, hailed Kristol and Kagan as “the main proponents of what you might call the American greatness school.” It is hardly a coincidence, however, that all three advocates of “American greatness” care passionately about what Irving Kristol euphemistically referred to as “the survival of the state of Israel.” Or that many of those “dictators and authoritarian regimes” just happened to stand in the way of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The following year, Kristol and Kagan co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a pressure group which sought to advance their “neo-Reaganite” vision. In the late 1990s, they did this mainly by writing letters to Bill Clinton, urging him to oust Saddam Hussein. In September 2000, PNAC published “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” in which they famously acknowledged that “the process of transformation ... is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” One year later, they got their wished for “new Pearl Harbor” on September 11. The mass murder of almost 3,000 Americans was, as Benjamin Netanyahu indelicately put it, “very good” for Israel.
Immediately, Kristol’s Weekly Standard began linking Iraq to the attacks. Writing in The American Conservative, Scott McConnell explained the strategy: “Their rhetoric – which laid down a line from which the magazine would not waver over the next 18 months – was to link Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in virtually every paragraph, to join them at the hip in the minds of readers.” The “Saddam must go” campaign, begun in a Kristol and Kagan editorial as far back as 1997, became so relentless that Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen dubbed it “Kristol’s War.” The Iraq War has, of course, also been called “Wolfowitz’s War.” But it could just as aptly have been named after Perle, Feith, Libby, Zelikow, Lieberman, or any of the other pro-Israeli insiders who took America to war by way of deception. In “Irving Kristol RIP,” Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo described Kristol’s legacy as “war, war, and yet more war, as far as the eye can see.” Unless Americans soon realize that they’ve been deceived by those for whom “American greatness” is merely a means to advance “the survival of the state of Israel,” that legacy promises to be an enduring one.
- Maidhc Ó Cathail is a freelance writer. He has written for Antiwar.com, Dissident Voice, Foreign Policy Journal, Khaleej Times, Palestine Chronicle and many other publications. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
Photo:Irving Kristol, the father of Neo Cons (neo-conservatism), his son William "FOX 'news'" Kristol, and PNAC signers Robert Kagan and Charles Krauthammer
A Terrible Disease of the Mind
By Zaid Nabulsi
"My family and I long to return to the Gardens of Cordoba (Qurtuba). We agonize with every breath to re-inhabit the castles of Seville (Ishbeelyah). In our veins, there runs an eternal longing to walk again in the footsteps of our forefathers in Zaragoza (Saraqusta). We yearn to once again cultivate the orchards of Valladolid (Balad Al Waleed). We shall strive, by military means if necessary, to see the blessed day when we can tread along the rose-scented pathways of the splendid palace of Al Hambra (Al Hamra’a) in Granada (Ghirnata). Every stone and every particle of sand in that Iberian holy land belongs to me and to my people, exclusively. No Spaniard terrorist has the right to obstruct the will of God and deny my family the legal title to the land of our ancestors. It is God who had given us Andalucía (Al Andalus), and it is God who promised us that we, the exiles, shall ingather in it once again. "
I would indeed have to be a certified lunatic if I had meant a word of the above. Yet, the only difference between my disease of the mind and that of the millions of Jews who claimed to have “returned” to Palestine, is that in my case, at least the monuments and Arab names I am referring to are real and do actually exist today, and it is not contestable that the direct ancestors of my people did actually build that great civilisation.
On the other hand, all Zionist archaeologists have failed – after digging up every conceivable corner of Palestine for the last 62 years – to come up with a single credible Jewish teapot or tablespoon, let alone excavate an alleged Jewish temple remotely matching the grandeur of any of the visible relics of Andalucía.
Not only that, but they needn’t have bothered digging. Two years ago, Israeli Professor Shlomo Sand argued, with meticulous scholarship in his earth-shattering book, The Invention of the Jewish People, that the claim that the Jews of today are the ethnic offspring of the biblical Jews is yet another Zionist myth, because all records tell us that the current Jews are the descendants of Khazar tribes who converted to Judaism, and have no genetic link whatsoever to the Jews who lived in Palestine during Roman times. The latter, he concludes, are, most ironically, none other than the Palestinians of today who converted to Islam (or Christianity), because the Romans apparently never exiled anybody. Moreover, Sand demolishes the myth of the kingdoms of David and Solomon by proving they are pure legends that never existed. What is astonishing is that, to date, no Israeli historian has been able to debate, let alone refute, any of Sand’s devastating findings.
Yet, not only would I need to be in a straitjacket if I was serious about reclaiming Spain for the Arabs – irrespective of our real history there – but the Spanish people would have the right to laugh at the sheer absurdity of my hallucinations, if not get gravely offended by their audacity.
I cannot, for example, visit the magnificent Hall of Abencerrajes (Ibn Sarraj) in Al Hambra and then, after explaining to my children that it was Muslim Arabs who constructed these wondrous architectural miracles, go on and indoctrinate them that this piece of real estate should belong to them. I cannot do that any more than an Italian tourist can visit Jerash in Jordan, and thereafter decide to build a settlement and live there because, he says, it really belongs to his great uncle, a certain Mr Julius Caesar.
This is the case simply because, in this modern world, we do not go around stealing other people’s land by attributing our crime to an ancient historical link to such land, or because we believe that we belong to the same race or religion of the people who once lived there.
But the Zionists get away with it the whole time, and have been doing so for far too long – despite the total lack of any real historical connection to the land of Palestine (not that it matters or makes it any more legitimate if they did have such pre-historic connection).
For who can, in their of heart of hearts, credibly deny the blatant repugnancy of the whole underlying premise of Zionism, the very madness upon which Israel was founded? Indeed, any person who happens to support the immorality of the theft of the land of Palestine under such religious or forged historical pretexts would in reality be making up excuses for blatant colonisation that are far more ridiculous than my demented ranting about returning to the gardens of Cordoba.
So why do these Zionists get away with such a ludicrous monstrosity?
We all know why. The hegemony over world media exercised by Jews is crucial so that no one can ever challenge the Zionist narrative or point out the naked, unadulterated lunacy of the whole Zionist enterprise. Coupled with a world conscience shrouded in a cloud of Holocaust guilt, an event that is forbidden to even debate, you get an oppressive atmosphere that has suffocated the ability of Western civilisation to deconstruct Zionism down to its most basic insanities.
For how is it conceivable for otherwise rational populations to even entertain, let alone accept and adopt, the twisted Zionist logic about the Jews “returning” to a promised land after so many thousands of years of supposed separation? And how can these same people acquiesce to Israeli politicians openly using such religious nonsense as a justification for the contemporary and ongoing catastrophe inflicted upon the millions of guiltless Palestinian inhabitants of that land?
Take for example, José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister, who recently gave a solemn warning on the pages of the London Times:
“anger over Gaza is a distraction. We cannot forget that Israel is the West’s best ally in a turbulent region … if Israel goes down, we all go down…”.
Well, Mr Aznar, we do not advocate for Israel to disappear or go down anywhere, because, despite the evil deeds accompanying its creation, Israel is a fact that we have to live with today. Likewise, the Israelis are fellow human beings upon whom I do not wish to impose the televised barbequing of the eyes and flesh of their children using white phosphorus, nor shall I ever tolerate such horrendous barbarity to be inflicted upon them.
But, hey José, if you see nothing wrong with what Israel is, and regard its Goldstone-documented war crimes as a mere “distraction”, while ignoring that it is the source of all the “turbulence” of the region you mentioned, then you might as well give us back Malaga and Marbella. After all, in Andalucía, no Christian or Jew was ever persecuted or burnt at the stake, nor had his bone marrow fried by any other means.
Yet, the travesty continues unabated. Take this most recent manifestation of the mental illness enveloping the racist state of Israel (branded by Jewish US Media Inc. as “the only democracy in the Middle East”). Hillary Rubin is a US Jew from Detroit who decided to move to Israel in 2006, something millions of Palestinian refugees can only dream of. But that is not the story. Rubin happens to also be the niece of Zionist leader, Nahum Sokolow, so you would’ve supposed that she is a Jewish notable, revered in Israel for her noble lineage. Last month, she fell in love and wanted to get married to a nice Jewish boy from Herzliya. According to Ha’aretz newspaper, after filing for a wedding licence, she was refused and was told that she needed to prove the Jewishness of her maternal lineage for – listen to this – four entire generations. This is not 1933 Germany, but modern day Israel. So she got letters from four Conservative rabbis and one Chabad rabbi attesting to her Jewishness. But the Herzliya Rabbinate still wouldn’t have it. To allow her to marry her sweetheart, these men of God stipulated she comes up with the birth or death certificates of her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, something she of course failed to do. This is not an isolated incident, but the official applicable Israeli law on the books. Oh yes, Adolf Hitler is turning in his grave at this news. “And they dared crucify me for the Nuremberg laws?”, the Führer is muttering to himself.
Well, there you have it, Ladies and Gentlemen. Didn’t I tell you that Zionism is nothing but a terrible, incurable disease of the mind?
Israel has imposed tough restrictions on entry to al-aqsa mosque(Jerusalem)27.Aug.2010
Israel has imposed tough restrictions on entry to al-Quds (Jerusalem), preventing many Palestinians from attending Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa Mosque. Hundreds of Israeli troops were deployed and further checkpoints were installed in and around al-Aqsa Mosque on Friday to restrict the entry of Palestinian worshipers for the third Friday prayers of holy month of Ramadan. Women under the age of 45 and men under 50 are barred from entering the holy city. The move has angered many Palestinians, who believe Israel is illegally restricting access to the mosque. Palestinians say Israel, which occupied east al-Quds during the 1967 Six-Day War and annexed it in a move not recognized by the international community, has no right to deny them access to the mosque. Restricting access to al-Quds is only one of various limitations imposed by the Israeli army on Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank. The mosque compound, which is called Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary), contains the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque. It is the third holiest site in Islam after Saudi Arabia's Mecca and Medina. HM/SAR/MMN http://www.presstv.com/detail/140248.html
two recent comments by Asad Abukhalil - The Angry Arab
Balfour Declaration
"According to Schneer, the Arabs were as invisible to the early Zionists as Africans had been to Boers in South Africa, or Indians to the French and English colonists in North America. But in fact, some of the first Zionists were well aware of the Arabs’ vehement objection to their national aspirations. As early as 1899, Theodore Herzl himself, the father of political Zionism, corresponded with the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi, who urged him to find a national home for the Jews somewhere else in the world. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to have had its origins at the very beginning of Zionism." Posted by As'adhttp://angryarab.blogspot.com/
Plus: George Will"Asad Abukhalil has already nailed Will for getting the date of the Peel Commission report wrong. It was 1937, not 1936. And the Arab Revolt broke out in Palestine before the Peel Commission introduced its findings. I would also add that David Ben Gurion privately accepted the Peel Commission’s recommendations because he saw them as the basis for a later partition that would gift the Zionist settler minority with major port cities like Jaffa and Haifa and throw the Palestinian Arabs back to the hinterlands." Max is right. Ben Gurion only grudgingly accepted the Peel in the hope of later change. And as he wrote to his son (see Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion and the Palestinian Arabs) he talked about population exchange when he talked about whole-sale expulsion of Arabs (the trade off was between more than 100,00 in Jewish designated areas in return for no more than 3000 Jews in Arab designated areas). http://angryarab.blogspot.com/
Kristol, Father and SonBy Maidhc Ó Cathailhttp://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2009/12/17/kristol-clear-the-source-of-americas-wars/
'One reason neocons have been able to sow so much mischief is that they feed into deeply embedded American beliefs about democratism and 'chosenness.'" -- Paul Gottfried.
Americans feeling let down by Barack Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan should take careful note of those who welcomed yet another “surge.” It might help them to identify the source of their seemingly endless wars. For instance, in a recent Washington Post opinion piece, William Kristol described Obama’s West Point speech as “encouraging.” It was “a good thing,” he said, that Obama was finally speaking as “a war president.” But if the comments on the Post website are anything to go by, few ordinary Americans take Kristol’s armchair warmongering seriously anymore. After all, as one poster quizzically asked, “A column by William Kristol the neocon that was wrong about everything from 2000-2008?” Although Kristol, like the rest of the neocons, “erred” about Iraq’s WMDs and Saddam’s links to Al Qaeda and 9/11, it would be a fatal error indeed to dismiss him as a fool. In order to understand what motivates Bill Kristol’s professed hyper-patriotism, with its consistently disastrous prescriptions, it’s worth recalling how his father, Irving Kristol, reacted to Vietnam War critic Senator George McGovern. The presidential contender’s proposed cut in U.S. military expenditure would, according to the “godfather” of neoconservatism, “drive a knife in the heart of Israel.” “Jews don’t like big military budgets,” the elder Kristol explained in a Jewish publication in 1973. “But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States ... American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.”Following his father’s advice, William Kristol has been a fervent supporter of massive U.S. military spending. In 1996, he co-authored with Robert Kagan an influential neocon manifesto titled “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.” It recommended that “America should pursue a vision of benevolent hegemony as bold as Reagan’s in the 1970s and wield its authority unabashedly. “The defense budget should be increased dramatically, citizens should be educated to appreciate the military’s vital work abroad, and moral clarity should direct a foreign policy that puts the heat on dictators and authoritarian regimes.” In response, another influential opinion-maker, Charles Krauthammer, hailed Kristol and Kagan as “the main proponents of what you might call the American greatness school.” It is hardly a coincidence, however, that all three advocates of “American greatness” care passionately about what Irving Kristol euphemistically referred to as “the survival of the state of Israel.” Or that many of those “dictators and authoritarian regimes” just happened to stand in the way of Israeli hegemony in the Middle East. The following year, Kristol and Kagan co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a pressure group which sought to advance their “neo-Reaganite” vision. In the late 1990s, they did this mainly by writing letters to Bill Clinton, urging him to oust Saddam Hussein. In September 2000, PNAC published “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” in which they famously acknowledged that “the process of transformation ... is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” One year later, they got their wished for “new Pearl Harbor” on September 11. The mass murder of almost 3,000 Americans was, as Benjamin Netanyahu indelicately put it, “very good” for Israel.
Immediately, Kristol’s Weekly Standard began linking Iraq to the attacks. Writing in The American Conservative, Scott McConnell explained the strategy: “Their rhetoric – which laid down a line from which the magazine would not waver over the next 18 months – was to link Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in virtually every paragraph, to join them at the hip in the minds of readers.” The “Saddam must go” campaign, begun in a Kristol and Kagan editorial as far back as 1997, became so relentless that Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen dubbed it “Kristol’s War.” The Iraq War has, of course, also been called “Wolfowitz’s War.” But it could just as aptly have been named after Perle, Feith, Libby, Zelikow, Lieberman, or any of the other pro-Israeli insiders who took America to war by way of deception. In “Irving Kristol RIP,” Antiwar.com editor Justin Raimondo described Kristol’s legacy as “war, war, and yet more war, as far as the eye can see.” Unless Americans soon realize that they’ve been deceived by those for whom “American greatness” is merely a means to advance “the survival of the state of Israel,” that legacy promises to be an enduring one.
- Maidhc Ó Cathail is a freelance writer. He has written for Antiwar.com, Dissident Voice, Foreign Policy Journal, Khaleej Times, Palestine Chronicle and many other publications. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
Photo:Irving Kristol, the father of Neo Cons (neo-conservatism), his son William "FOX 'news'" Kristol, and PNAC signers Robert Kagan and Charles Krauthammer
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