Peter Mclaren

Angela Davis came to KPFA recently to record an interview with Block Report Radio. – Photo: Adalia
Charlottesville, Va. - Walking around the University of Virginia’s Academical Village, activist and philosopher Angela Davis remarked that the Lawn rooms seem as cramped as prison cells.
The feeling made her realize that Thomas Jefferson’s architecture compels the observer to think about his legacy, Davis said in her keynote address for the Carter G. Woodson Institute’s conference, “The Problem with Punishment: Race, Inequality and Justice,” held April 16 and 17.
The connection is no mere coincidence. The rooms on the Lawn provide student residents with the privacy to contemplate knowledge, while prison cells confine the prisoner to give him the privacy to penitently contemplate his crime.
The idea of the penitentiary emerged at the same time as the American Revolution, but it has proven a failed experiment in democracy and an institution of racial injustice when one in 100 Americans is behind bars and half of them are Black, she said.
Davis called for a new movement to abolish what she called “the prison-industrial complex” in the U.S., which has become the largest jailer in the world.
Violent people should be dealt with, she said, in the context of the reasons behind the violence and how it is perpetuated. “Simply dumping these people in prison only has the tendency to reproduce more violence,” she said.
The American-style penitentiary system is spreading internationally and having a devastating effect, she said, with prisons serving as receptacles for people who can no longer find a place in their societies.
This may be an auspicious moment in U.S. history to confront the prison crisis, marked in part by President Obama’s election and the economic crisis, she said.
Davis was one of about 30 scholars and others who participated in the multidisciplinary two-day symposium that aimed to contribute serious discussion to the growing national debate on the growth of the prison-industrial complex and racial disparities in the U.S.
In residency at U.Va. for the week, Davis spoke Thursday night to a packed house in Newcomb Hall Ballroom that included hundreds of students - some even traveling from Charlotte, N.C. - as well as faculty, conference participants and community members, including those who identified themselves as ex-convicts and ‘60s radicals during the question-and-answer period following her talk.
Davis and Deborah McDowell, director of the Woodson Institute, both mentioned that Jefferson designed not only his renowned buildings at the University and Monticello, but also an early penitentiary. He contracted architect Benjamin Latrobe to design the first prison in Virginia, with cells for solitary confinement.
Putting offenders in prison was considered a more enlightened idea than the less humane conditions and practices criminals were subjected to around the turn of the 19th century, Davis said.
The example of Jefferson’s legacy, she said, tells us “to be aware of the histories we inhabit.”
The prevalence of corporal punishment for actions that were considered crimes clashed with ideas for the new democracy. Because of slavery, however, the need for corporal punishment persisted, she said.
For example, Davis recounted what ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass told a British audience in London at the time: Although laws were written to sentence a white man to capital punishment only for the crime of murder, there were 70 crimes that could lead a Black man to his death.
“These are the historical roots we see today. The ideas were incorrect, but the early American government saw prisons as progressive, a move away from retribution,” said Davis, who was active in the Black Power Movement and spent time in jail in the early ‘70s, before being acquitted at trial.
“Prison was supposed to allow people to reform themselves. Incarceration turned out to be far more damaging to the psyche … and could not effect rehabilitation,” she said. “We have to undo past damage.
“Racism fuels the prison-industrial complex,” she said. “The vast disproportion of Black people makes it clear. … Black men are criminalized.”
Law enforcement surveillance determines who gets caught and who goes to prison, Davis explained. Many people commit acts that, if discovered, would result in prison sentences, but they are safe because the police don’t target their communities for surveillance.
‘Racism fuels the prison-industrial complex,’ said Angela Davis. ‘The vast disproportion of Black people makes it clear. … Black men are criminalized.’

The assumption, even among some African-Americans, that Black people have a proclivity to criminal activities is part of the daily working of racism.
“The fear of free Black bodies is contained in the systems and strategies that criminalize racism,” Davis said.
She advocated for more productive modes of addressing people who do harm to others and their communities.
‘The fear of free Black bodies is contained in the systems and strategies that criminalize racism,’ Angela Davis said.

“When we think of 2.3 million Americans being in prison on any given day, and all the resources required to sustain the system, why do we not mobilize to change this?” she asked.
It is because of the fear of confronting persistent racism and its history in the U.S., she said. “We are all infected.”
Davis pointed out there are no great disparities in drug use among the range of people and communities. Recently, law officers have shifted their surveillance to rural white people and, oddly enough, that has subjected them to the same form of racism to which Black men are subjected.
Law enforcement surveillance determines who gets caught and who goes to prison, Davis explained. Many people commit acts that, if discovered, would result in prison sentences, but they are safe because the police don’t target their communities for surveillance.

Americans must develop and negotiate social relations to be able to talk about racism without it being so uncomfortable, she said, adding that a justice system must be created that is not based on revenge, but rather is more restorative.
The political climate seems to be more hopeful, she said, lauding Virginia U.S. Sen. Jim Webb’s recent call for prison reform.
Anne Bromley is on the media relations staff at the University of Virginia - her beat: African-American Affairs. She can be reached at abromley@virginia.edu. This story first appeared at UVaToday.
Angela Davis: ‘Not another prison’

by Pepe Lozano
Chicago - Under the theme “Imagine Justice for All in 2009,” the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR) held its 36th anniversary and annual Human Rights Awards benefit here April 18. The event was held at the Lutheran School of Theology on the city’s South Side in the Hyde Park area.
Dr. Barbara Ransby, a professor in the African American Studies Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, emceed the event.
“As activists, we’re always protesting what we’re against, but tonight we are celebrating people who are long distance runners in this struggle,” said Ransby. “Tonight we’re here to seek inspiration and highlight the fight to forge lasting change,” she said. Ransby also noted the historic election of President Barack Obama last November was a detrimental blow to racism in this country.
Legendary African American activist Angela Davis, a civil rights leader against the racist U.S. prison system and staunch advocate of ending the death penalty, was the program’s keynote speaker.
“The election of Obama was a millennium transformation, and we’re in a new historical conjunction in 2009,” noted Davis. “In a short period of time so much has changed,” she said.
Given the current economy, there is a very serious crisis erupting in the capitalist system, said Davis. “Many assume Obama is going to save capitalism, but a lot of us here have other ideas about changing the system,” said Davis.
Davis talked about the prison industrial complex and the role President Thomas Jefferson played in constructing the first penitentiary in Virginia.
“Penitentiaries were considered at that time the solution to barbaric forms of punishment,” she said. Founders of the prison system felt correction facilities were an outlet where people could reflect on their crimes, develop a relationship with God and become new, changed and reformed citizens in democratic life, said Davis.
“It’s obvious those hopes were not truly reflected,” noted Davis. “Instead we were given the institutions of prisons as an alternative to death and capital punishment,” she said.
Today the fight against the prison system is the same fight abolitionists fought against slavery 200 years ago, said Davis. “And there is a reason why we still have the prison industrial complex and it’s called racism,” she added.
Davis said the death penalty could be imposed on slaves for 70 different crimes, while whites could be put to death for only one crime - murder.
“Today many whites are also victims of the racist reality of capital punishment,” said Davis.
She noted that one out of 33 U.S. adults is under the direct control of the criminal justice system.
“Racism is directly responsible for the fact that the U.S. has become the great incarcerator and more people are incarcerated here than anywhere in the entire world,” said Davis. “And there is a vast over-representation of Blacks in the system.”
Davis acknowledged that President Obama identifies with Black freedom struggles, and that rightfully excites many activists. She said that legacy of Black radicalism has always been a struggle in some form against the state dating back to slavery.
‘Racism is directly responsible for the fact that the U.S. has become the great incarcerator and more people are incarcerated here than anywhere in the entire world,’ said Angela Davis. ‘And there is a vast over-representation of Blacks in the system.’

“So what happens when you have a Black person at the head of that state?” she asked. “It’s almost a contradiction although we have to recognize the new terrain,” said Davis.
Davis said people cannot sit back and think Obama is going to do all the work. Those who voted for him have to play an important role, especially young people, she said.
“As much as we are told today that racism has receded and that Obama’s election was the last major blow to the racial barrier, that simply isn’t true,” said Davis. “We cannot pretend to talk about racism today like it was back in the 1950s or 1960s,” she said.
“The institutions of racism have very long memories and even Blacks and Latinos continue to practice various forms of prejudice,” said Davis.
“The question of race is so essential to the history of this country,” she noted. “And working against the prison-industrial complex and the death penalty will help us to understand the markings and history of U.S. slavery,” she added.
“The fight for justice today is indivisible. Justice for one always means justice for all and it transcends all national and ethnic groups,” said Davis.
The issue of decriminalizing drugs and the question of violent acts especially when it comes to sentencing people to prison deserves more attention and analysis, noted Davis.
“Not another prison should be constructed in this country,” said Davis, “because the solution is not putting perpetrators behind bars. Sending people to jail does not help heal society’s problems.”
Davis added, “We need a system based on healing, not one that focuses on revenge.”
“If we are ever going to abolish the prison-industrial complex, then we need to begin to abolish the social and racial injustices of our educational system,” said Davis.
Davis came to national attention in 1969 when she was removed from her teaching position at UCLA as a result of her social activism and her membership in the Communist Party USA. In 1970, she was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List on false charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. During her 16-month incarceration, a massive international “Free Angela Davis” campaign was organized, leading to her acquittal in 1972.
Soon after, Davis became a tenured professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1994 she was appointed presidential chair in African American and Feminist Studies at the University of California. She has since retired from the University of California, Santa Cruz, but continues to teach classes, working with graduate students and helping to build an activist presence on campus.
Human Rights awards were granted at the event to honorees whose work includes ending the death penalty, overturning wrongful convictions, the fight against racism and efforts to help victims of the prison-industrial complex. The honorees included Patricia Hill, executive director of the African American Police League; Jane Raley, senior staff attorney with the Northwestern Law School; Judith Stuart, an anti-prison activist; Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, retired pastor with the Trinity United Church of Christ; and Karen Yarbrough, Illinois state representative.
The NAARPR works to fundamentally change the prison-industrial complex, including the mass executions of those on death row throughout the U.S. Fifty-three prisoners were executed in 12 states in 2006. There are more than 3,500 people on death row in the U.S., all of them poor and most of them African American or Latino, according to the NAARPR. Most countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice, NAARPR leaders charge. The NAARPR has active chapters in Nevada, Kentucky and Illinois. For more information, go to www.naarpr.org.
Pepe Lozano is a Chicago-based journalist who writes for People’s Weekly World, where this story first appeared, and its blog. He can be reached at plozano@pww.org.

THE HARVARD CRIMSON

When I told a friend, a former section leader in a large Harvard College course, that I had been offered a chance to do an op-ed for The Harvard Crimson on Gaza, she identified two fairly common, understandable undergraduate attitudes: “The situation is too complicated and I can’t make up my mind about it;” and “This is controversial and there are differences of opinion. No side is ‘right.’’”

I hope that the recent war, occurring at the beginning of the Obama presidency, will lead to enough discussion of Israel and Palestine in the Harvard community so that more of us feel able to take positions. With that in mind, I will use my space to present a factual picture one would think controversial, but which surprisingly is a matter of consensus of “informed observers.”

The Israeli “new historian” Benny Morris—a strong Zionist—has documented the “Origins of the Palestine Refugee Problem.” During military operations in 1947 and 1948 against Palestinian resisters and Arab invading armies trying ineffectually to prevent the creation of a Jewish state, Jewish regular and irregular forces, sometimes using carefully calibrated terror tactics, drove somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 Palestinian men, women and children from their villages, which they then leveled. After the war, they used force to prevent any of them from returning. Then the new state summarily confiscated their land and property for redistribution to Jews. The remaining Arab population of Israel—now about 20 percent—eventually received formal legal equality, but live in second-class citizen status similar to that of American blacks in the North before affirmative action and the rise of the new black bourgeoisie.

In 1967, Israel preemptively attacked Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and occupied the West Bank and Gaza, largely populated by refugees of 1948, as well as East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Sinai (later returned to Egypt). This generated another approximately 200,000 Palestinian refugees who were also forbidden to return. Since 1973, Israeli governments have gradually moved about 400,000 Jewish settlers into the West Bank and another 200,000 into East Jerusalem, appropriating about 50 percent of the land (when roads and other infrastructure are taken into account), taking over the water, and alternately exploiting and starving the West Bank and Gaza economies to the point where the Arab population is overwhelmingly dependent on the international “donor community” for subsistence.

Palestinian non-violent and violent resistance to the military occupation is fully legal under international law. On the other hand, many of the specific tactics, especially airplane hijacking, suicide bombing targeting civilians, including children and old people, and indiscriminate rocket attacks, have been widely denounced as criminal.

The Israeli government justifies the wall, check points, the network of access roads, the discriminatory legal regime, the pass laws, arbitrary arrests, house demolitions, targeted assassinations, torture, and everyday military control as necessary for the security of the settlements (viewed as illegal everywhere but in Israel), and to protect against terrorism inside Israel. The international human rights NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations that have denounced Palestinian terror tactics have unanimously condemned Israel on many occasions for violating the human rights of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

After Israel withdrew its settlers from Gaza in 2005, it retained full control of land and sea borders and of the air space. It periodically entered the territory with the goal of suppressing rocket fire aimed indiscriminately at southern Israeli towns. Over the four years before the December 2008 invasion, this rocket fire killed 13 Israeli civilians and made life miserable for tens of thousands of inhabitants of the towns targeted.

After Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, Israel and the U.S. set out to isolate Hamas by cutting off Gaza from the outside world. The justification was that Hamas was a terrorist organization “dedicated to the destruction of Israel.” Israel and its allies persisted in this strategy in spite of repeated indications, reported faithfully in the New York Times, that Hamas, like the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat before it, was looking for face-saving means to alter its position and accept a two-state solution.

The economic and financial sanctions, including stop-and-go electricity and fuel for the people and for institutions like hospitals, along with Israeli restrictions of the movement of goods and persons into and out of Gaza, destroyed what little productive capacity the occupation had left in Gaza. It turned the territory, according to the cliché, into a “prison camp,” where the inmates were dependent on charity and Israeli government whim to keep them precariously one step away from “full fledged humanitarian crisis.” When this did not cause a revolt against Hamas in Gaza, Israel and the U.S., according to an article in Vanity Fair not yet refuted, organized a PLO coup, which failed, and led Hamas to expel the PLO from Gaza. There was eventually a truce between Israel and Hamas.

The Hamas claim, which seems basically sound to me, is that Israel was mainly responsible for its ending: Hamas suppressed almost, but not all rocket fire; Israel retaliated for the residuum by refusing to open the borders, so that Gazan misery continued unabated or worsened, and then carried out an armed incursion in November 2008. When Hamas refused to renew the truce and recommenced rocket fire, Israel invaded.

Numerous observers have charged Israel with committing war crimes during the war. Without downplaying that aspect, I think it is important to understand the 1,300 Palestinian casualties, including 400 children as well as many, many women, versus 13 Israeli casualties, as typical of a particular kind of “police action” that Western colonial powers and Western “ethno-cratic settler regimes” like ours in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Serbia and particularly apartheid South Africa, have historically undertaken to convince resisting native populations that unless they stop resisting they will suffer unbearable death and deprivation. Not just in 1947 and 1948, but also in Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, Israel used similar tactics.

Causing horrific civilian deaths is often perfectly defensible under the laws of war, which favor conventional over unconventional forces in asymmetric warfare. The outright “crimes,” like the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib, or Russian massacres in Afghanistan and then in Chechnya, are less important for the civilian victims than the daily tactics of air assault, bombardment, and brutal door-to-door sweeps, meant to draw fire from the resisters that will justify leveling houses and the people in them.

Can this picture be right? If so, what is to be done? If not, what is to be done? If you are not already clear about what you think, it is crucial to try to find out for yourself. If the situation is as bad as I have painted, you might consider some small step, perhaps just a contribution to humanitarian relief for Gaza, or e-mailing the White House, or something more, like advocating for Harvard to divest.

Duncan Kennedy ’64 is the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=526273

Statement on Gaza Cease-Fire:
Our Work Is Not Over

This weekend, Israel and Hamas agreed separately to a cease-fire and Israel has begun to withdraw its troops from the occupied Gaza Strip. Since December 27, Israel killed more than 1,250 Palestinians, more than half of whom were civilians according to the UN, medical sources, and human rights organizations, and injured more than 5,000.

13 Israelis were killed, including 10 soldiers, four of whom died in a ‘friendly fire’ incident. As of this morning, Israel is closing border crossings into the Gaza Strip, thereby preventing the unimpeded access of humanitarian goods in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1860.

Since Israel’s war on the occupied Gaza Strip began, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has called for:
1) An immediate an unconditional cease-fire.

2) Unimpeded humanitarian access to the occupied Gaza Strip and an end to Israel’s blockade of it.

3) Accountability for Israel’s misuse of U.S. weapons in violation of the Arms Export Control Act and the imposition of the required sanctions for violating this law.

Tens of thousands of people in the United States took action-marching in the streets, distributing educational materials, contacting Congress, the White House, and State Department, and making your voices heard in the media-to help bring about this cease-fire.

While the weapons have fallen silent momentarily, we cannot let up in our activism. Please visit our “End Israel’s War and Siege on Gaza” web section for suggested ideas and ways to continue to be involved.

In fact, we still have a lot of work to do to ensure that Israel lifts its illegal blockade of the occupied Gaza Strip, which is a form of collective punishment of its 1.5 million residents outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. Returning to the pre-December 27 status quo in the occupied Gaza Strip is not acceptable. As the Occupying Power of the Gaza Strip, Israel is obligated under the Geneva Conventions to provide for the well-being of its residents. This includes ensuring full and unimpeded access of humanitarian goods, and opening the borders of the Gaza Strip for normal trade and for freedom of movement. Israel must also be held accountable for its destruction of Palestinian infrastructure and be forced to pay reparations for the human and infrastructural damage it inflicted. These immediate demands must be followed by a diplomatic process with all interested parties which results in an end to Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as required by UN Security Council Resolution 242.

Israel must also be held accountable for its violations of the Arms Export Control Act through its wanton killing and injuring of civilians; its targeting of civilian infrastructure such as police stations, schools, universities, mosques, hospitals, humanitarian aid providers, and UN compounds; and its indiscriminate use of white phosphorous and uranium oxide munitions in civilian areas. As we have documented, Israel’s war and siege on the Gaza Strip would not have been possible without U.S. weapons provided to Israel with our tax dollars. It is our job to demand of our politicians that Israel is held accountable for its violations of this law and that sanctions, including ending military aid, are imposed as required by law. Rep. Dennis Kucinich has already demanded a State Department investigation into Israel’s violations of the Arms Export Control Act and we must collectively build momentum to ensure the investigation is complete and accurate and that Congress acts on the results of the investigation.

Today our office is buzzing with dozens of volunteers from all over the country who have come to Washington, DC for President-Elect Obama’s inauguration. We are organizing teams of volunteers to cover the National Mall tomorrow collecting signatures on postcards to end military aid to Israel.

Beginning Wednesday, we will be calling upon you to take action from day one of the Obama Administration to demand an end to Israel’s illegal blockade of the occupied Gaza Strip and for accountability and sanctions on Israel for its violations of U.S. law and human rights abuses of Palestinians.

In the meantime, please visit our website for more ways to take action right now.
US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation

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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-wherever-i-go-i-hear-the-same-tired-middle-east-comparisons-1297595.html

Robert Fisk’s World: Wherever I go, I hear the same tired Middle East comparisons

On both sides of the Atlantic the experience has been weirdly repetitive

Saturday, 10 January 2009

It all depends where you live. That was the geography of Israel’s propaganda, designed to demonstrate that we softies – we little baby-coddling liberals living in our secure Western homes – don’t realise the horror of 12 (now 20) Israeli deaths in 10 years and thousands of rockets and the unimaginable trauma and stress of living near Gaza. Forget the 600 Palestinian dead; travelling on both sides of the Atlantic these past couple of weeks has been an instructive – not to say weirdly repetitive – experience.

Here’s how it goes. I was in Toronto when I opened the right-wing National Post and found Lorne Gunter trying to explain to readers what it felt like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. “Suppose you lived in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills,” writes Gunter, “and people from the suburb of Scarborough – about 10 kilometres away – were firing as many as 100 rockets a day into your yard, your kid’s school, the strip mall down the street and your dentist’s office…”

Getting the message? It just so happens, of course, that the people of Scarborough are underprivileged, often new immigrants – many from Afghanistan – while the people of Don Mills are largely middle class with a fair number of Muslims. Nothing like digging a knife into Canada’s multicultural society to show how Israel is all too justified in smashing back at the Palestinians.

Now a trip down Montreal way and a glance at the French-language newspaper La Presse two days later. And sure enough, there’s an article signed by 16 pro-Israeli writers, economists and academics who are trying to explain what it feels like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. “Imagine for a moment that the children of Longueuil live day and night in terror, that businesses, shops, hospitals, schools are the targets of terrorists located in Brossard.” Longueuil, it should be added, is a community of blacks and Muslim immigrants, Afghans, Iranians. But who are the “terrorists” in Brossard?

Two days later and I am in Dublin. I open The Irish Times to find a letter from the local Israeli ambassador, trying to explain to the people of the Irish Republic what it feels like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. Know what’s coming? Of course you do. “What would you do,” Zion Evrony asks readers, “if Dublin were subjected to a bombardment of 8,000 rockets and mortars…” And so it goes on and on and on. Needless to say, I’m waiting for the same writers to ask how we’d feel if we lived in Don Mills or Brossard or Dublin and came under sustained attack from supersonic aircraft and Merkava tanks and thousands of troops whose shells and bombs tore 40 women and children to pieces outside a school, shredded whole families in their beds and who, after nearly a week, had killed almost 200 civilians out of 600 fatalities.

In Ireland, my favourite journalistic justification for this bloodbath came from my old mate Kevin Myers. “The death toll from Gaza is, of course, shocking, dreadful, unspeakable,” he mourned. “Though it does not compare with the death toll amongst Israelis if Hamas had its way.” Get it? The massacre in Gaza is justified because Hamas would have done the same if they could, even though they didn’t do it because they couldn’t. It took Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times’s resident philosopher-in-chief, to speak the unspeakable. “When does the mandate of victimhood expire?” he asked. “At what point does the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews cease to excuse the state of Israel from the demands of international law and of common humanity?”

I had an interesting time giving the Tip O’Neill peace lecture in Derry when one of the audience asked, as did a member of the Trinity College Dublin Historical Society a day later, whether the Northern Ireland Good Friday peace agreement – or, indeed, any aspect of the recent Irish conflict – contained lessons for the Middle East. I suggested that local peace agreements didn’t travel well and that the idea advanced by John Hume (my host in Derry) – that it was all about compromise – didn’t work since the Israeli seizure of Arab land in the West Bank had more in common with the 17th-century Irish Catholic dispossession than sectarianism in Belfast.

What I do suspect, however, is that the split and near civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority has a lot in common with the division between the Irish Free State and anti-treaty forces that led to the 1922-3 Irish civil war; that Hamas’s refusal to recognise Israel – and the enemies of Michael Collins who refused to recognise the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the border with Northern Ireland – are tragedies that have a lot in common, Israel now playing the role of Britain, urging the pro-treaty men (Mahmoud Abbas) to destroy the anti-treaty men (Hamas).

I ended the week in one of those BBC World Service discussions in which a guy from The Jerusalem Post, a man from al-Jazeera, a British academic and Fisk danced the usual steps around the catastrophe in Gaza. The moment I mentioned that 600 Palestinian dead for 20 Israeli dead around Gaza in 10 years was grotesque, pro-Israeli listeners condemned me for suggesting (which I did not) that only 20 Israelis had been killed in all of Israel in 10 years. Of course, hundreds of Israelis outside Gaza have died in that time – but so have thousands of Palestinians.

My favourite moment came when I pointed out that journalists should be on the side of those who suffer. If we were reporting the 18th-century slave trade, I said, we wouldn’t give equal time to the slave ship captain in our dispatches. If we were reporting the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, we wouldn’t give equal time to the SS spokesman. At which point a journalist from the Jewish Telegraph in Prague responded that “the IDF are not Hitler”. Of course not. But who said they were?

Chris Hedges’ Columns

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090112_the_language_of_death/?ln

The Language of Death

Fire and smoke from Israeli miltary operations light up the night sky over Gaza City.

By Chris Hedges

The incursion into Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel. It is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use the lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase of the decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. The assault on Gaza is about creating squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos where life for Palestinians will be barely sustainable. It is about building ringed Palestinian enclaves where Israel will always have the ability to shut off movement, food, medicine and goods to perpetuate misery. The Israeli attack on Gaza is about building a hell on earth.

This attack is the final Israeli push to extinguish a Palestinian state and crush or expel the Palestinian people. The images of dead Palestinian children, lined up as if asleep on the floor of the main hospital in Gaza, are a metaphor for the future. Israel will, from now on, speak to the Palestinians in the language of death. And the language of death is all the Palestinians will be able to speak back. The slaughter—let’s stop pretending this is a war—is empowering an array of radical Islamists inside and outside of Gaza. It is ominously demolishing the shaky foundations of the corrupt secular Arab regimes on Israel’s borders, from Egypt to Jordan to Syria to Lebanon. It is about creating a new Middle East, one ruled by enraged Islamic radicals.

Hamas cannot lose this conflict. Militant movements feed off martyrs, and Israel is delivering the maimed and the dead by the truckload. Hamas fighters, armed with little more than light weapons, a few rockets and small mortars, are battling one of the most sophisticated military machines on the planet. And the determined resistance by these doomed fighters exposes, throughout the Arab world, the gutlessness of dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who refuses to open Egypt’s common border with Gaza despite the slaughter. Israel, when it bombed Lebanon two years ago, sought to destroy Hezbollah. By the time it withdrew it had swelled Hezbollah’s power base and handed it heroic status throughout the Arab world. Israel is now doing the same for Hamas.

The refusal by political leaders from Barack Obama to nearly every member of the U.S. Congress to speak out in the major media in defense of the rule of law and fundamental human rights exposes our cowardice and hypocrisy. Those who openly condemn the Israeli crimes, including Israelis such as Yuri Avnery, Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe, Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, as well as American stalwarts Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich, Norman Finkelstein and Richard Falk, are ignored or treated like lepers. They are denied a platform in the press. They are rendered nearly voiceless. Falk, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied territories and a former professor of international law at Princeton, was refused entry into Israel in December, detained for 20 hours and deported. Never mind that nearly all these voices are Jewish.

I called Avnery at his home in Israel. He is Israel’s conscience. Avnery was born in Germany. He moved to Palestine as a young boy with his parents. He left school at the age of 14 and a year later joined the underground paramilitary group known as the Irgun. Four years afterward, disgusted with its use of violence, he walked away from the clandestine organization, which carried out armed attacks on British occupation authorities and Arabs. “You can’t talk to me about terrorism, I was a terrorist,” he says when confronted with his persistent calls for peace with the Palestinians. Avnery was a fighter in the Samson’s Foxes commando unit during the 1948 war. He wrote the elite unit’s anthem. He became, after the war, a force for left-wing politics in Israel and one of the country’s most prominent journalists, running the alternative HaOlam HaZeh magazine. He served in the Israeli Knesset. During the 1982 siege of Beirut he met, in open defiance of Israeli law, with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He has joined Arab protesters in Israel the past few days and denounces what he calls Israel’s “instinct of using force” with the Palestinians and the “moral insanity” of the attack on Gaza. Avnery, now 85, was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in 1975 by an Israeli opponent, and in 2006 the right-wing activist Baruch Marzel called on the Israeli military to carry out a targeted assassination of Avnery.

“The state of Israel, like any other state,” Avnery said, “cannot tolerate having its citizens shelled, bombed or rocketed, but there has been no thought as to how to solve the problem through political means or to analyze where this phenomenon has come from, what has caused it. Israelis, as a whole, cannot put themselves in the shoes of others. We are too self-centered. We cannot stand in the shoes of Palestinians or Arabs to ask how we would react in the same situation. Sometimes, very rarely, it happens. Years ago when Ehud Barak was asked how he would behave if were a Palestinian, he said, ‘I would join a terrorist organization.’ If you do not understand Hamas, if you do not understand why Hamas does what it does, if you don’t understand Palestinians, you take recourse in brute force.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-do-they-hate-the-west-so-much-we-will-ask-1230046.html

Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask

Wednesday, 7 January 2009

So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night’s work in Gaza by the army that believes in “purity of arms”. But why should we be surprised?

Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?

What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. “Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties,” yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night’s butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.

What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I’m afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against “international terror”. The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.

I’ve reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.

The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel’s right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel’s own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin’s government accused the world of a blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn’t even apologise.

Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.

And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we’ll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We’ll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we’ll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn’t. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.

Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/1108/Palin_waiting_for_crack_in_the_door.html
“You know, I have — faith is a very big part of my life. And putting my life in my creator’s hands — this is what I always do. I’m like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I’m like, don’t let me miss the open door. Show me where the open door is. Even if it’s cracked up a little bit, maybe I’ll plow right on through that and maybe prematurely plow through it, but don’t let me miss an open door. . .”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80xxPvvfd5U

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Just released:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/10/17/2393795.htm

Leahy Concerned about NorthCom’s New Army Unit

By Matthew Rothschild, October 7, 2008
Senator Patrick Leahy is concerned about the Pentagon’s decision to designate an Army unit to Northern Command.

On October 1, the Pentagon, for the first time ever, dedicated an Army force specifically to NorthCom, which is in charge of securing not some foreign region but the United States of America.

The unit it assigned is the 3rd Infantry, First Brigade Combat Team, which has spent three of the last five years in Iraq. It was one of the first units to get to Baghdad, and it was active in retaking and patrolling Fallujah. One of its specialties is counterinsurgency.

This marks a change for NorthCom, which was established on October 1, 2002. Its website still says it “has few permanently assigned forces,” and that “the command is assigned forces whenever necessary to execute missions, as ordered by the President and the Secretary of Defense.”

Leahy “asked for a briefing from his staff” on this development and “wants to monitor the situation,” an aide to Leahy said.

Leahy was instrumental in getting Congress to repeal the “Insurrection Act Rider” in the 2006 defense appropriations bill. That rider had given the President sweeping power to use military troops in ways contrary to the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act. The rider authorized the President to have troops patrol our streets in response to disasters, epidemics, and any “condition” he might cite.

Leahy said last December that this rider “made it easier for the President to take over the Guard and to declare martial law.” In a Senate statement on April 24, 2007, he cautioned against inserting the military “into domestic situations.” As he put it: “One of the distinguishing characteristics of the United States is that we do not use the military to patrol our communities and neighborhoods.” A few months before that, he warned that we must ensure that “the military is not used in a way that offends and endangers some of our most cherished values and liberties.”

The repeal of the rider was signed by Bush on January 28, though Amy Goodman reports that “Bush attached a signing statement that he did not feel bound by the repeal.”

The roles the 1st Brigade Combat Team will take on at NorthCom are a bit unclear.

“They may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control,” said the Army Times when it first reported on it. These duties would be in addition to dealing with “potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.”

Soldiers in the unit “also will learn how to use ‘the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has field,’ 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them,” the article noted.

Cloutier even bragged to the Army Times: “I was the first guy in the brigade to get Tasered.”

The Army Times has since issued a correction, stating that the “non-lethal crowd control package” is “intended for use on deployments to the war zone, not in the U.S.”

NorthCom’s own press release of September 30 says, “This response force will not be called upon to help with law enforcement, civil disturbance, or crowd control.”

The unit will have its regular weapons, however. It will store other weapons in “containers,” and will have access to tanks, as Amy Goodman has reported and the Pentagon has confirmed.

The Army is taking a strong interest in this deployment.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey personally observed the combat team’s training exercise, entitled “Vibrant Response,” which was held at Fort Stewart, Georgia, last month. According to NorthCom’s public affairs department, Gen. Casey “pointed out that being part of the new force requires a shift in thinking for soldiers who are accustomed to taking charge.”

One soldier in the exercise said he learned that the troops should “preposition containers and equipment.”

NorthCom’s website, in a section on frequently asked questions about Joint Task Forces—Civil Support, cites “DoD Directive 3025.1” as laying out the criteria for how the Pentagon will respond in domestic situations.

That directive talks about “military support in dealing with the actual or anticipated consequences of civil emergencies.” Those civil emergencies could be “arising during peace, war, or transition to war.”

While it states that such support “does not include military support to local law enforcement,” there is a provision in the directive for the military to take over functions of the civilian government.

Military personnel “shall not perform any function of civil government unless absolutely necessary on a temporary basis under conditions of Immediate Response. Any commander who is directed, or undertakes, to perform such functions shall facilitate the reestablishment of civil responsibility at the earliest possible time,” the document states.

Under this “Immediate Response” exception, local military commanders can even act without prior approval from their superiors. “Imminently serious conditions resulting from any civil emergency or attack may require immediate action by military commanders, or by responsible officials of other DoD agencies, to save lives, prevent human suffering, or mitigate great property damage,” it says. “When such conditions exist and time does not permit prior approval from higher headquarters, local military commanders and responsible officials of other DoD Components are authorized by this Directive, subject to any supplemental direction that may be provide by their DoD Component, to take necessary action to respond to requests of civil authorities.”

The Pentagon’s decision to dedicate the First Brigade Combat Team to NorthCom has raised alarms, especially in the context of the current economic crisis. In Bush’s National Security Presidential Directive 51, he lays out his authority in the event of a catastrophic emergency. In such an emergency, “the President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government” and will coordinate with state, local, and tribal governments, along with private sector owners of infrastructure.

NSPD 51 defines a catastrophic emergency as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function.”

Notice the use of the word “or” above. In our current circumstances, it might be more relevant to read the definition this way: “any incident . . . that results in extraordinary levels of . . . disruption severely affecting the U.S. . . . economy.”

President Bush could declare a catastrophic emergency today. And he’d have the 3rd Infantry, First Brigade Combat Team, well trained from its years patrolling Iraq, at his disposal here at home.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Matthew Rothschild was on Democracy Now! on October 7 debating Army Col. Michael Boatner, USNORTHCOM future operations division chief.

dear readers, my hard drive crashed a month ago and, not being very technologically savvy, i lost a decade’s worth of data. so it’s taken me this long to get to my messageboard. in the weeks to come, i will start posting again.
i have been traveling extensively, as well, and this has interfered with me getting those posts out. so i will be back in business soon companera/os.
peter

dear readers, my hard drive crashed a month ago and, not being very technologically savvy, i lost a decade’s worth of data. so it’s taken me this long to get to my messageboard. in the weeks to come, i will start posting again.
i have been traveling extensively, as well, and this has interfered with me getting those posts out. so i will be back in business soon companera/os.
peter