Rania Khalek Dispatches from the Underclass
/ December 31, 2014 / Comments Off on Killing 40 civilians in one go is “reasonable,” says Israel army ethicist

Killing 40 civilians in one go is “reasonable,” says Israel army ethicist

Originally published at The Electronic Intifada 

Since the Israeli army killed more than 2,200 Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip last summer, including more than 500 children, a dedicated army of official and unofficial whitewashers has been mobilized on a mission to rescue Israel’s bloodstained public image.

Such was the case on 4 December, when dozens of people, including this writer, filed into the Jewish Community Center (JCC) in Manhattan’s Upper West Side for a panel discussion titled, “Defense with a conscience: Exploring military ethics in Israel.”

Convened by the liberal Zionist New Israel Fund and moderated by Jane Eisner, editor-in-chief of the liberal The Jewish Daily Forward, the event was advertised as a discussion about “‘moral armies’ and the challenges of defensive wars in today’s new Middle East.”

Among the panelists were Israeli military “ethicists” Asa Kasher and Moshe Halbertal, as well as retired US Air Force Major-General Robert Latiff.

Kasher and Halbertal co-authored the Israeli military code of ethics, which has guided the army’s conduct during Israel’s increasingly ferocious military assaults against the Palestinians it occupies as well as its neighbors over the last two decades.

The atmosphere was cozy and intimate, with randomly assigned dinner table seating. Each table was decorated with wine bottles and elegant food platters that aimed to foster “a new kind of conversation about Israel,” according to the program.

As the generally Israel-friendly crowd of mostly older New Yorkers sipped on Merlot and munched on pita chips from the comfort and safety of the JCC, they listened to the ethicists doing what they do best: twisting international law to sanctify Israel’s “right” to inflict limitless suffering on the 1.8 million Palestinians, the vast majority refugees, confined to the Gaza Strip solely because they are not Jews.

The ethicists

Appealing to right-wing Zionist sensibilities, Kasher dominated the discussion, arguing that Palestinian civilians—or as he calls them, “the neighbors of the terrorists”— had to die to protect the lives of Israeli combatants.

In an exclusive interview following the panel, Kasher’s extremism reached new heights. He told me that Givati Brigade commander Ofer Winter was right to carpet bomb the southern Gaza City of Rafah to prevent the capture of an Israeli soldier, an order that killed the soldier and 190 Palestinians in a matter of hours, though Kasher insisted that “only forty” were killed.

“Killing forty civilians” is “reasonable,” he told me.

Moshe Halbertal, a law professor at Hebrew University and visiting professor of law at New York University, was less extreme in his rhetoric and allowed for some criticism of Israel’s behavior in Gaza. But he chalked up Israeli atrocities, like the wiping out of dozens of families in Gaza, to “sporadic” mistakes. “War is messy,” he said.

Despite the pretense of ideological disagreement, Kasher and Halbertal were advancing the same agenda. For two hours, they explained why and how the massacre of defenseless Palestinians who have nowhere to flee is ethical, and in Kasher’s case, a moral imperative. Read More

Uncategorized
, , , , , , ,
/ December 18, 2014 / Comments Off on "Liberation for all”: Why Palestine is a key issue on the streets of Ferguson

"Liberation for all”: Why Palestine is a key issue on the streets of Ferguson

Originally published at The Electronic Intifada

“As a person who supports Israel I was glad to see that there were no signs and conversation about Gaza at all,” said St. Louis-area rabbi Ari Kaiman after participating in a clergy-led protest outside the Ferguson Police Department on 13 October.

It was the final day of the “weekend of resistance” — four days of direct actions organized by Ferguson protesters who asked people of conscience from around the country to join them in St. Louis to demand justice for Michael Brown, the unarmed Black teenager gunned down by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.

Kaiman was right to worry and he is not alone. Israel’s apologists are desperate to neutralize the growing bond between Palestinians and African Americans spurred by the uprising in the small Missouri town in the northern outskirts of St. Louis.

But they are failing miserably.

While Palestine advocacy has traditionally been excluded from progressive and social justice circles in the United States, incredible displays of mutual solidarity between Ferguson and Palestine have been featured regularly in the streets of St. Louis and beyond since Brown’s grisly slaying on 9 August. And the “weekend of resistance” was no exception.

Among the hundreds of people who answered Ferguson’s call that weekend were dozens of Palestine solidarity activists who came as part of the Palestine Contingent.

Progressive except for Palestine

Delivering a statement of solidarity on behalf of the Palestine Contingent at a massive rally in downtown St. Louis on 11 October, Suhad Khatib of the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee said to the crowd, “We recognize that none of us is free until all of us are free. We know Black liberation in this country will lead to liberation for all.”

Ashley Yates, co-founder of Millennial Activists United, a social justice organization created after Brown’s killing, responded, “Palestinians were the first people to reach out in support while we were getting tear gassed. We stand with y’all.”

The crowd thundered with applause.

Powerful moments such as these place liberal and progressive Israel apologists who support Ferguson in the awkward position of having to reconcile their opposition to racist militarized policing in the US with their unbridled support for the Israeli apartheidregime that rules over Palestinians.

Susan Talve, described to me by several activists as “the most progressive rabbi in St. Louis,” embodies this dissonance. Read More

Uncategorized
, , , , ,
/ December 14, 2014 / Comments Off on Podcast: Deconstructing the Torture Report & Its Possible Ramifications with Reprieve Attorney Alka Pradhan

Podcast: Deconstructing the Torture Report & Its Possible Ramifications with Reprieve Attorney Alka Pradhan

On this week’s episode of Unauthorized Disclosure Kevin Gosztola and I spoke with Reprieve’s Alka Pradhan about the Senate intelligence committee’s explosive report on the CIA’s worldwide network of torture dungeons. (Download the episode here or subscribe for free on iTunes here).

Here’s Kevin with the details:

The Senate intelligence committee finally released the summary of its report on the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program this past week. It detailed a criminal conspiracy involving the torture the CIA used against detainees in the global “war on terrorism” and the lengths to which CIA officials and interrogators had gone to cover up and conceal their actions from the Justice Department, Congress, the press and citizens.

Senate intelligence committee staff, which put together the report over a period of three and a half years, reviewed the detention and treatment of at least 119 individuals. At least thirty-nine of them were subjected to what the CIA termed “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

This week’s episode of “Unauthorized Disclosure” features an interview with Alka Pradhan, who is a DC counsel for Reprieve US and primarily represents prisoners who remain in indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay. The organization has represented a number of detainees who were once in CIA custody and tortured.

Pradhan shares her reactions to reading the torture report summary and what details stunned her. She breaks down some of the broader aspects of the report and outlines what effect the new information might have on new efforts to achieve justice for torture victims. She also describes how President Barack Obama’s administration still tortures, especially because he issued an executive order in his first year as president that included a loophole permitting rendition.

The interview is counter-programming to the torture defenders who appeared on all the Sunday morning news programs today—like former Vice President Dick Cheney; former Director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service Jose Rodriguez, former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, who crafted “legal” arguments so the Bush administration could argue torture was permissible, CIA Director John Brennan, and former CIA Director Michael Hayden.

Later in the podcast, Rania Khalek and I continue to dig into what was learned about CIA torture this past week. We confront the grotesque use of “rectal rehydration” on detainees.

We also recorded an additional twenty minutes of material to talk about a USAID contractor trying to help the US government topple the Cuban government by co-opting the hip-hop underground scene. Palestinian American organizer Rasmea Odeh’s release from jail until her sentencing is highlighted as well.

The podcast is available on iTunes for download. For a link (and also to download the episode), go here. Click on “go here” and a page will load with the audio file of the podcast. The file will automatically start playing so you can listen to the episode.

Also, below is a player for listening to the podcast. You can listen to the podcast this way or you can go to iTunes and find the podcast listed there.

“I’ve been working on these issues of rendition and CIA treatment of detainees for a long time,” Pradhan shared. “My colleagues and I thought we had a pretty good handle on how the program worked, how organized it was, etc. But I think what really jumps out when you start to read the summary is how chaotic it actually was. You get a picture of a CIA that has no idea what it is doing,” which was essentially confirmed by CIA director John Brennan in his press conference on December 11.

“The CIA has never been an interrogation or detention agency. It’s not trained to do those things. For them to suddenly setup from scratch prisons in those countries, what you see is them really making it up as they go along.”

Pradhan also asserted that the question for the CIA was not getting permission to torture detainees. “It was really the CIA beginning to use torture and then saying, you know what, we should use these techniques on everyone we detain. Let’s go get legal cover. And then they went to the Department of Justice to get legal authorization for the techniques. It wasn’t the other way around.”

“I was surprised really by a lot of those details. I knew the bare bones, but I was shocked at how disorganized it was, how few people even within the CIA were adequately briefed on it and when you get down to it the brutality of the techniques,” she said.

“People like Dick Cheney, his deputy, David Addington, Michael Hayden, George Tenet, they knew. They knew everything that was going on. They knew that there were secret prisons. Dick Cheney was apparently not briefed on where those prisons were, but they knew that we had prisons and they knew that we were using torture and they approved us using torture,” Pradhan stated.

It is very difficult to believe President George W. Bush didn’t ask the CIA to come into the Oval Office and explain what was happening when rumors started to swirl from 2003-2005.

If it is really true that Bush did not know anything about what the CIA was doing, Pradhan added, “I find that [to be] just a shocking abdication of responsibility for him to now stand up, now that the CIA has admitted that it use these techniques and that at least some members of the White House knew about it” and suggest he knew nothing.

On the CIA’s propaganda campaign to sell the public torture by manipulating media and avoiding Congress, “I think the media is hesitant to use this word, but there’s no other word for it. They lied over and over again.”

President Barack Obama has not ended torture. The practices, according to Pradhan, have just “changed shape.” They have not “changed substance.”

“The administration continues rendition, and it’s actually expanded the tools in their belt through these series of executive orders and through their expanded use of secrecy, both at Guantanamo Bay and with the drones program.”

“This administration, in the past six years, has continued to pick up people abroad and render them to secret prisons that are not administered by the CIA but rather by allies in say Kenya, Somalia, on US naval ships and we find out weeks or months later when they show up in New York City and say guess what? We’re gonna prosecute these guys,” Pradhan said.

Pradhan also explained, “If you look at the procedures for force-feeding today at Guantanamo Bay and what they describe as rectal rehydration in those documents, the only difference is—and I am sorry to be crass about it—the only difference is where that nutrition is going, like which place it is being administered.”

“It is forcibly done, it is extremely painful and it is predicated, preceded by a number of techniques that are absolutely not sanctioned by any medical practice.”

Pradhan said she felt most sorry for men like Maher Arar and Binyam Mohamed, a former Reprieve client, who were victims of the rendition program but not held in CIA-run secret prisons.

Reacting to the roles James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, architects of the torture program who are now indemnified to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by the CIA, Pradhan argued, “You expect bad behavior from the CIA at this point. You really do. You don’t expect this level of criminality from medical providers.

“These were two psychologists who had no knowledge of interrogation, no knowledge of al Qaeda, literally no subject matter knowledge whatsoever. They were the only two people with any bearing, any medical training whatsoever who the CIA could find to sort of sign off so that they could say this is doctor-approved.”

According to Pradhan, the public should expect new lawsuits in the United States and more lawsuits in Europe, particularly with regard to secret prisons that were setup in Eastern Europe. The public should also expect some effects on the military commissions proceedings at Guantanamo because of what was revealed about how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other high-profile detainees were tortured.

Uncategorized
, ,
/ December 10, 2014 / Comments Off on CIA cites Israeli court ruling to “justify” torture program

CIA cites Israeli court ruling to “justify” torture program

Originally published at The Electronic Intifada

The CIA repeatedly cited an Israeli high court decision to justify torture, according to the long-awaited US Senate report on the agency’s torture program.

This latest disclosure comes just months after revelations that the Obama administration relied on an Israeli high court ruling to justify targeted killings of American citizens without trial.

Released Tuesday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence after months of stalling, the nearly 600-page report discloses new details about the atrocities that took place at the CIA’s network of rendition and torture sites created in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks.

The CIA’s torture techniques — which included water-boarding, sleep and sensory deprivation, sexual torture, threats to kill and rape loved ones, mock executions, electrocution and medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” — were far more gruesome and pervasive than the agency let on.

Furthermore, the report explicitly states that the CIA lied about the torture program’s effectiveness, falsely claiming its techniques successfully extracted information that thwarted terrorist plots, including a fabricated attack “in Saudi Arabia against Israel.”

As the CIA engaged in a deceptive propaganda campaign to mislead the American public about the program’s lawfulness and effectiveness, it relied on Israeli precedent as a legal defense.

How to legalize torture

As early as November 2001, CIA officials began brainstorming possible legal justifications for torture techniques they were already employing at black sites around the globe, culminating in a draft memorandum described by the Senate report as follows:

On 26 November 2001, attorneys in the CIA’s Office of General Counsel circulated a draft legal memorandum describing the criminal prohibition on torture and a potential “novel” legal defense for CIA officers who engaged in torture. The memorandum stated that the “CIA could argue that the torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm,” adding that “states may be very unwilling to call the US to task for torture when it resulted in saving thousands of lives.”

According to the corresponding footnote, the November memo “cited the ‘Israeli example’ as a possible basis for arguing that ‘torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm.’”

The “Israeli example” was invoked again the following year in an official memorandum to the White House Office of Legal Council to the President on 1 August 2002, which “include[d] a similar analysis of the ‘necessity defense’ in response to potential charges of torture.”

Israeli loopholes

The “Israeli example” is a reference to the 1999 Israeli high court decision that supposedly outlawed the use of torture — the Israeli euphemism for which is “moderate physical pressure” — to extract confessions from Palestinian prisoners, a longstanding and widespread practice up until that time. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem celebrated the ruling at the time, declaring it a victory for democracy.

In reality, the decision was filled with obvious loopholes and merely limited the circumstances under which torture techniques could be legally employed. (Israel’s high court is also known as its supreme court.)

Till this day Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners remains widespread and no Palestinian is immune, not even children, who are systematically subjected to solitary confinement, sensory deprivation and stress positions in Israeli custody.

Last winter, Israeli cruelty reached new heights when its prison services placed Palestinian child detainees in outdoor cages during one of the most severe winter storms to strike the region in years.

As the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) has argued, not a great deal has changed since the 1999 ruling due in large part to the high court’s inclusion of the “necessity defense” — a loophole that immunizes interrogators who use torture techniques from being held criminally liable based on the argument that they had to do it out of “necessity” to prevent loss of or harm to human life.

Such loopholes have led to absolute impunity for Israeli torturers. Of the more than 800 complaints of torture submitted by Palestinian prisoners since 2001, exactly zero have led to criminal investigations despite the state corroborating at least 15 percent of the torture allegations, according to PCATI.

It is also notable that even the CIA methods revealed in the Senate report bear striking similarity to long-standing Israeli torture techniques documented by human rights organizations, among them sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme cold, confinement in very small spaces and painful “stress positions.” These are techniques that are thought to inflict maximum suffering while minimizing the risk that they will leave tell-tale signs of torture on the victim’s body.

A ticking time bomb fiction

Strangely, even notable anti-torture liberals have been duped into believing that Israel banned torture.

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has cited the Israeli high court decision on torture as an exemplary ban the US should emulate.

“The police think that a suspect they have apprehended knows where and when a bomb is going to go off,” Ginsberg told The New York Times. “Can the police use torture to extract that information? And in an eloquent decision by Aharon Barak, then the chief justice of Israel, the court said: ‘Torture? Never.’”

According to Ginsburg, the Israeli ruling sent the message “that we could hand our enemies no greater victory than to come to look like that enemy in our disregard for human dignity.”

Ginsburg’s takeaway from the Israeli decision is as erroneous as her racist portraryal of a Palestinian “enemy” lacking in “human dignity.”

Far from banning torture altogether, the Israeli decision includes an unambiguous exemption for the hypothetical scenario Ginsburg lays out.

In the event of a “ticking time bomb” scenario, the Israeli decision states that “necessity defense” gives Israeli interrogators discretion to employ torture to extract information to stop an explosive from detonating.

It should be noted that even the Senate report concedes that the “ticking time bomb” so often invoked by torture enthusiasts has no basis in reality.

But even if it did, Article 2 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment states: ”No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Turning to Israel for inspiration

In a desperate bid to keep the torture program alive amid growing (albeit weak) pressure from Congress in 2005, a CIA official once again turned to Israel for inspiration and a legal rationale:

The CIA attorney described the “striking” similarities between the public debate surrounding the McCain amendment [a proposed ban on torture] and the situation in Israel in 1999, in which the Israeli Supreme Court had “ruled that several … techniques were possibly permissible, but require some form of legislative sanction,” and that the Israeli government “ultimately got limited legislative authority for a few specific techniques.”

The corresponding footnote adds:

The CIA attorney also described the Israeli precedent with regard to the “necessity defense” that had been invoked by CIA attorneys and the Department of Justice in 2001 and 2002. The CIA attorney wrote that the Israeli Supreme Court “also specifically considered the ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario and said that enhanced techniques could not be pre-approved for such situations, but that if worse came to worse, an officer who engaged in such activities could assert a common-law necessity defense, if he were ever prosecuted.”

This suggestion was adapted into a 20 July 2007 memorandum authored by then Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Steven G. Bradbury, who argued that based on the Israeli court case, CIA torture is “clearly authorized and justified by legislative authority.”

Sharing values

It should come as no surprise that the US is following Israel’s lead on torture given that the two nations feed off of one another’s atrocities.

When Palestinian prisoners launched a hunger strike earlier this year to protest their indefinite detention, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to push through the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, a bill that would permit the force-feeding of prisoners. According to human rights groups, force-feeding amounts to cruel and inhumane punishment.

To excuse his demand for the implementation of the excruciatingly painful technique, wherein a tube is shoved through the nostril into the stomach, Netanyahu pointed toUS force-feedings at Guantanamo Bay.

When it comes to torture, few people understand the shared values that unite the US and Israel better than Rasmea Odeh.

The 67-year-old Palestinian American activist was convicted last month of immigration fraud for failing to disclose a 1969 Israeli military court conviction based on a confession extracted under weeks of Israeli sexual torture.

At the behest of the Obama administration’s Justice Department, the trial judge barredthe jury from hearing evidence about Odeh’s torture, protecting and ultimately legitimizing Israel’s system of abuse. Meanwhile, Odeh was subjected to further torture, this time at the hands of the US government, which placed her in solitary confinement for twelve consecutive days for no apparent reason until a judge ordered on Mondaythat she could be released on bail.

While the depth of collusion between the US and Israeli torture programs has yet to be fully unearthed there is reason to suspect that some US methods were modeled on Israel’s.

Since the 11 September 2001 attacks, the US has fashioned much of its counterterrorism strategy on Israel’s decades-long suppression of Palestinian resistance to its colonial ambitions.

Invented by Israel for use against Palestinian leaders, extrajudicial targeted killings are now the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policy.

Like its targeted killing policy, Israel has spent decades perfecting torture techniques on Palestinian prisoners, designed to maximize the suffering while leaving behind few visible scars.

So, how much did Israel influence the CIA? Perhaps the answer can be found in the original 6,000-page, still-classified Senate torture report that Tuesday’s release is based on. It makes one wonder what is being left out of the public record.

Uncategorized
, , , ,
/ November 30, 2014 / 17 Comments

White supremacy and Zionism converge in deleted Times of Israel post on Ferguson

Following an uproar on social media, a viciously racist blog post was removed from The Times of Israel. Titled “Nine Parallels between Palestine and Ferguson,” the post attacked African American protestors in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson and Palestinians as violent, “savage,” irrationally “angry” and deserving of the institutionalized state violence wielded against them.

(A web cache of the article can be found here. A copy is also included at the bottom of this post.)

In the now-deleted post, the writer, Robert Wilkes, a member of the advisory board and media response team at StandWithUs, embraces the increasingly popular comparison between Ferguson and Palestine. But Wilkes does so by proudly likening anti-Palestinian Jewish Israelis to American police, the real victims according to him.

The post was removed despite its author being defended as an “amazing guy” by a staffer at StandWithUs, a right-wing group that works closely with the Israeli government.

This is at least the second time in recent months that an offensive article has been deleted from The Times of Israel after coming under fire on social media. A similar scenario played out during Israel’s summertime assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, after The Times of Israel published an item titled ”When Genocide is Permissible.”

“Anger defines them”

Wilkes’ piece is as remarkable as it is vile in its appeal to anti-Palestinian and white American racism.

On African Americans and Palestinians, Wilkes writes, “Anger defines them, and anger keeps both mired in failure. Rather than make better choices they prefer to ride the ‘victim’ train to nowhere.”

He continues, “Both wish to undermine the state’s moral authority by provoking violent reactions, then portraying themselves as victims of oppression.”

Mocking Black American leaders as “con artists” and “race-hustlers in a ‘business’ fueled by anger,” Wilkes decries supposedly irrational Black and Palestinian anger as a product of inferior cultures that teach hate.

“Black problems in America,” he argues, “derive from the breakdown of family and unhealthy aspects of black culture.”

These are some of the most pernicious and cliché tropes long employed by liberal and right-wing racists to blame and pathologize people of color as being responsible for their own oppression and disadvantage.

“In both places, the innocent pay the price” for the supposed Black and Palestinian lust for violence, Wilkes claims. “The businesses destroyed in Ferguson belong to hard-working citizens who had nothing to do with the incident in which a policeman shot a robbery suspect in self-defense,” he says, justifying Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s August killing of Black youth Michael Brown.

But, Wilkes allows, “The Palestinians are, tragically, far more bloodthirsty.”

Wilkes ends his screed by praising the Israeli army and Missouri police for exercising restraint: “Authorities in both places have their hands tied by their high standards of human rights and reverence for the rule of law.” Of course this last point makes sense given that St. Louis-area police departments have received training from the Israeli security apparatus in recent years.

Defending racism

StandWithUs director of Israeli education Hen Mazzig initially praised Robert Wilkes and his article in a tweet that was favorited by the official StandWithUs Twitter account.

Read the rest at The Electronic Intifada

Uncategorized
, , , , , , , , , , ,
/ November 23, 2014 / Comments Off on US media erase Israeli state and settler violence

US media erase Israeli state and settler violence

As Tuesday’s grisly murder of five Israelis in a Jerusalem synagogue by two Palestinian assailants continues to dominate headlines, major media outlets are actively erasing the Israeli violence that preceded the attack and the surging anti-Palestinian assaultsthat have followed.

In typical fashion, The New York Times buried information alluding to Palestinian death and suffering in the fourteenth paragraph, while CNN disappeared Palestinians from the discussion entirely.

The Washington Post went even further, using the synagogue attack as an opportunity to erase Israeli violence against Palestinians both past and present.

Noting that the attack site is located in what used to be Deir Yassin — a Palestinian village destroyed in 1948 after Zionist militias deliberately executed more than one hundred of its inhabitants, including children — the Post rendered the massacre an unproven accusation against Israel.

Following an uproar on social media, the Post quietly removed the reference to Deir Yassin from the piece without issuing an explanation or correction.

These same media outlets are gleefully painting Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip as heartless monsters based on a marginal celebration that took place in Gaza City.

“Residents of the Gaza Strip paraded in the streets singing victory songs, giving out candy, waving flags,” declared The New York Times, eliciting images of widespread jubilation.

An earlier New York Times piece claimed that in Gaza City, “praise for God and the attackers poured from mosque loudspeakers.” That paragraph appears to have been quietly scrubbed without explanation, but not before Zionist ideologues had a chance to exploit it.

Speaking from Gaza where he is currently stationed, journalist and Mondoweisscontributor Dan Cohen told The Electronic Intifada that there was indeed a celebratory rally organized by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Gaza City but the celebrations were far from widespread.

“A small minority celebrated. That’s what being besieged and bombed does to people,” said Cohen, adding that it was hardly representative of the sentiment in Gaza, where residents are desperately preoccupied with escaping what he calls the “catastrophic” deterioration of conditions in the rubble-cluttered enclave.

Cohen also rejected The New York Times’ claim that celebratory praise for the synagogue attack rang out from mosque loudspeakers. There were a couple of cars driving around with megaphones that could be heard expressing joy for the attack, said Cohen, but that’s all. Gaza resident Mohammed Suliman and journalist Jehad Saftawi, who were with Cohen when we spoke, concurred.

While fringe celebrations among Palestinians have been widely reported, the more commonplace right-wing Israeli demonstrations agitating for greater violence and “death to Arabs” have been conspicuously absent from establishment media coverage, even though mainstream reporters are clearly aware of these rallies.

This follows a longstanding pattern that was most apparent during Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, which killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including more than five hundred children.

As Israel mercilessly targeted civilians in the densely populated coastal enclave, western media outlets published scandalous justifications for the mounting atrocities, frequently blaming Palestinians for their own slaughter.

Under this convoluted paradigm, racist Israeli mobs joyfully singing “In Gaza there’s no studying, No children are left there” were virtually ignored in the mainstream press, as was the rampant genocidal incitement in Israeli social media and from high-level Israeli lawmakers.

Amid a rising tide of Israeli fascism, the mainstream media narrative of an Israel under constant and unrelenting attack from wildly violent and murder-celebrating Palestinians is more than just dishonest. It is dangerous propaganda that shields Israel’s unchecked extremism from scrutiny, guaranteeing and inciting further atrocities against the defenseless and disenfranchised Palestinian population, some of whom will respond with violence.

Profiles of the Jewish victims killed in the synagogue attack have appeared in one media outlet after another, interspersed with quotes from heartbroken loved ones. The same cannot be said of the countless Palestinians attacked, maimed and killed by Israeli violence, whose names and photos rarely make it into mainstream news accounts.

Here are some of their harrowing stories from the last two weeks alone, stories that will be replicated thanks in no small part to a mainstream media that sees them as unworthy victims.

Read the rest at The Electronic Intifada

Uncategorized
, , , , , ,
/ November 12, 2014 / 1 Comment

Pentagon denies seeking advice from Israel on limiting civilian deaths

The Pentagon has distanced itself from claims made by a top-ranking military official that the US has received advice from Israel on limiting civilian deaths.

Speaking at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York on 6 November, Martin Dempsey, chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, praised the Israeli army for going to “extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties” during its summertime operation against Gaza.

“In this kind of conflict, where you are held to a standard that your enemy is not held to, you’re going to be criticized for civilian casualties,” said Dempsey in response to a question about the ethics of Israel’s assault on the besieged Gaza Strip, which killed 2,194 Palestinians.

At least 70 percent of those killed were identified as civilians by the United Nations, including at least 519 children. In stark contrast, Palestinian resistance fighters killed 66 Israeli soldiers and seven civilians, making it unclear what unique “standard” Dempsey is holding Israel to.

Dempsey absolved Israel of responsibility for these deaths by accusing Hamas of transforming Gaza into “a subterranean society,” referring to the elaborate network of tunnels that Gaza uses as a lifeline to bypass Israel’s starvation blockade, which amounts to collective punishment — forbidden by the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Dempsey added that the Pentagon was so impressed with the Israeli army’s conduct in Gaza that it sent a “lessons-learned team” to Israel three months ago to study and emulate “the measures they took to prevent civilian casualties.”

“We asked [Israeli army Chief of Staff] Benny [Gantz] if we could send a lessons learned team,” said Dempsey, telling the audience, “We sent a team of senior officers and non-commissioned officers over to work with the [Israeli army] to get the lessons from that particular operation in Gaza.”

But in a statement emailed to the The Electronic Intifada, Commander Elissa Smith, a Department of Defense spokesperson, denied that the US believed Israel did everything it could to spare civilians.

“Deeply troubled”

“Following the conflict, as the chairman [Dempsey] noted, we engaged in a routine military exchange with the Israeli Defense Forces. Representatives from the Joint Staff and services traveled to Israel to receive a briefing from military counterparts on the conflict,” Smith writes. “It is important to note that this exchange was not a commentary or affirmation of Israeli actions in Gaza.”

Asked whether Dempsey’s praise of Israel’s conduct in Gaza reflects the position of the Pentagon, Smith predictably reaffirms Israel’s right to defend itself but clarifies that the Pentagon remains “deeply” troubled by the high civilian death toll.

Read the rest at The Electronic Intifada

Uncategorized
, , , , , , , ,
/ November 10, 2014 / 2 Comments

Billionaire patrons of Democratic and Republican parties united by fanaticism for Israel Primary tabs

The Israeli American Council, a right-wing Israel advocacy organization, kicked off its first ever national conference in Washington, DC this weekend.

Big name speakers included Republican hot shots like former Massachusetts governor and 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney as well as hawkish neoconservative warmonger Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. As was predicted, the mostly rightwing speakers capitalized on the event, using it as an opportunity to mock Obama, brag about the GOP’s midterm victory and pander to the right wing of the Israel lobby.

Billionaire kingpins

The most illuminating spectacle of the conference appears to have been the highly anticipated public conversation between Las Vegas casino billionaire Sheldon Adelsonand Hollywood billionaire Haim Saban.

On the surface the pair could be easily mistaken as ideological rivals.

Adelson, the  person in the world who bankrolls the far right wing of the Republican Party, spent $150 million trying to defeat Obama and unseat Democrats in 2012.

Conversely, Saban is a top donor to the Democratic Party, earning favors and grovelingfrom Obama. In 2002, Saban doled out $7 million to the Democratic National Committee’s construction of the party’s headquarters. It was believed to be the largest single donation in Democratic Party history up to that time.

But when it comes to Israel they share a hawkish obsession with maintaining the state’s settler colonial regime, making the elderly power duo practically indistinguishable.

And they make no secret of their motives.

Saban, who made his fortune building the Power Rangers empire, freely admits that his number one priority is to influence US foreign policy in Israel’s favor through a three-pronged approach that entails donating to political parties, establishing think tanks and controlling media outlets.

“I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel,” he once told The New York Times.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed explaining his transformation from a Democrat to a Republican, Adelson revealed that the main driver was greater Republican sympathy for Israel.

Having expressed regret for serving in the US military instead of the Israeli army, Adelson has said he hopes to see his son “be a sniper for the IDF,” referring to the Israeli military. Adelson’s sectarian zealotry is matched only by his deep-seated hatred for Palestinians, who he routinely labels an invented people.

Meanwhile, Adelson donates more than $30 million annually to Birthright Israel, a program that sends young American Jews on a free ten-day trip to Israel in an attempt to radicalize them into immigrating to bolster the Jewish majority and participate in the dispossesion and ethnic cleansing of the land’s indigenous inhabitants.

Extremists with power

I had hoped to attend the Adelson-Saban event but was denied entry to the conference even though I applied for and was granted press access beforehand. The woman at the registration desk insisted my name wasn’t on the press list and refused to budge even after I pulled up my confirmation email from the Israeli American Council’s press contact.

However, the live tweets from the event candidly show the lust for extremism and violence espoused by the influential speakers.

Read the rest at The Electronic Intifada

Uncategorized
, , , , , , , , ,
/ November 10, 2014 / Leave a comment

Podcast: Going to the UN Committee Against Torture to Call Attention to Rampant Police Violence

On last week’s episode of Unauthorized Disclosure (sorry for posting late) Kevin Gosztola and I interviewed Page May, an organizer with We Charge Genocide, about the “shadow report” her organization submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture (CAT) about deadly police violence. (Download the episode here or subscribe for free on iTunes here).

More from Kevin:

Chicago police officers have shot over three hundred people in the past five years. They have killed at least 89 people, predominantly people of color, in that same period. They have used force and received an astounding number of complaints about brutality from citizens in Chicago. Yet, Chicago police seem to enjoy a stunning level of immunity from accountability and justice.

In response to systematic police brutality and misconduct, a group of young organizers have formed a group called We Charge Genocide, which has submitted a “shadow report” to the United Nations Committee Against Torture (CAT) to call attention to police violence and further expose the issue as a violation of the anti-torture treaty. Organizers will, in fact, be traveling to Geneva in November to present their report to the UN Committee.

Page May, organizer with We Charge Genocide, joined “Unauthorized Disclosure” this week to talk about the group’s “shadow report” to the UN Committee Against Torture and the process of putting it together. She discusses police militarization, sexual assault by police, mass detention and harassment in the context of a system with a history that goes all the way back to the days of slavery in the United States. She also addresses where the name comes from, its historical basis and how it helps frame the group’s organizing efforts.

In the discussion portion, we discuss Israel closing the Al Aqsa mosque, US military plans to deploy“advisers” to the Anbar province in Iraq and the FBI impersonating repairmen and media organization, accused cop killer Eric Frein’s capture, and Josh Rogin and Eli Lake’s new job with Bloomberg.

Uncategorized
, , , , , , , ,
/ October 26, 2014 / 5 Comments

Podcast: Max Blumenthal on Israel’s Gaza onslaught and rising fanaticism among Zionists in the US

On this week’s episode of Unauthorized Disclosure Kevin Gosztola and I spend the entire hour speaking with Max Blumenthal, author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, about his visit to Gaza during Israel’s summertime assault, the out-of-control genocidal racism within Israel and the rising fanaticism of Zionist ideologues in the United States. (Download the episode here or subscribe for free on iTunes here).

As always, Kevin’s got the details:

At New York City’s Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera staged the opening performance of “The Death of Klinghoffer.” It is based on the story of Palestinian militants who hijacked a ship and demanded the release of 50 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails in 1985. Initially, their demands were not met so the Palestinians threw a 69-year-old American Jew in a wheelchair, Leon Klinghoffer, overboard. They eventually managed to negotiate safe passage in return for the release of passengers aboard the ship.

The opera was received fairly well by critics, who acknowledged the nuanced portrayals of Jewish and Palestinian people. But that is exactly what infuriated right-wing Zionists with the Americans for Safe Israel, a far-right pro-settler organization that organized protests against the opera (which, by the way, was first staged in 1991).

Max Blumenthal, journalist and author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, joined “Unauthorized Disclosure” this week to talk about the fanatical protesters he encountered when he went to the Lincoln Center on the opening night, who seek to perpetuate the “spirit of the Holocaust” to maintain their status and preserve their occupation of Palestinians. He also shares his experiences in Israel and Gaza in the midst and aftermath of Israel’s summer assault, which killed over two thousand Palestinians and damaged infrastructure more severely than Israel’s two previous wars on Gaza.

…

Blumenthal describes how the Lincoln Center was surrounded by “fanatics,” who had been incited to a “near-riot frenzy” by the fact that this opera was being performed. Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who is the money manager for George Pataki who once called writer Tony Kushner a “Kapo” or a Jewish concentration camp guard, footed the bill for the protest. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke against this opera.

“They were heckling people going in including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I saw David Remnick, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, and get screamed at by these demonstrators calling him a Nazi pig,” Blumenthal shares. He saw a 90-year-old woman being pushed around in her wheelchair by her African-American “caretaker.” He was recognized walking by a woman, who “tried to summon the worst insult she could” and wound up calling a “disgusting Jew.” She summoned a “geriatric mob” of people to surround him.

“These Zionist fanatics were hurling anti-Semitic insults at me,” Blumenthal states. He managed to get away.

Blumenthal noticed a “strange obsession with beheading.” They had signs imagining that journalist James Foley, who was beheaded by the Islamic State, had been beheaded at the Lincoln Center. “This was part of their phantasmagorical macabre imagery.”

“The most bizarre thing I saw, something I’ve never seen in my life, was yellow badges were distributed,” Blumenthal describes. “Jews living in Nazi-occupied areas in World War II were forced to wear these yellow badges that were shaped like Stars of David and read Juda or Jew on them so the could be racially classified and singled out for discrimination and ultimately extermination. You saw mostly older Jewish people voluntarily walking around with yellow badges that read ‘Never Again,’ singling themselves out on the streets of New York, suggesting that they were victims of a second Holocaust because of like an opera showing at the Lincoln Center.”

There was a lot of media coverage of the protests against the opera in the New York Times, the New Yorker and the New York Daily News. All the New York TV networks were there for the scene. However, the fact that Zionists were handing out yellow badges did not make news reports.

“It was like they went out of their way to avoid showing this sickening symbol that abuses and exploits the memory of the Holocaust. And it suggests that these [Jewish State in Israel in the Levant (JSIL)] fanatics are actually seeking to live the Holocaust in spirit in order to confirm their evanescent identity in a multicultural tolerant society that confers upon them unlimited privilege and entitlement.”

Blumenthal addresses the presence of mobs in Jerusalem, particularly organizing by a group called Lehava, “an anti-miscegenation group dedicated to the prevention of relationships between Jewish women and Arab men. Hundreds of people “besieged a wedding” to protest a Jewish woman marrying an Arab man near Jerusalem.

“I managed to talk to one of the people organizing with them in English,” Blumenthal recounts. “He was obviously a colonist whose parents were from the West, who is an Anglo colonist, and he said that we’re here to tell scum that they’re not wanted in this place. We’re here to fight scum and we’re doing it to make the Jews strong. Basically, that was his message until he was told to stop talking to me by the leadership, top cadres of the organization.”

“What I noticed when I went out with the few leftists willing to protest the war in a really forceful way in Tel Aviv,” Blumenthal adds, was the “sense of fear that the right had created among them. It was kind of a parallel to the fear that Israelis in the south had of Hamas terror tunnels.”

Following a left wing rally in Tel Aviv, organizers called out to everyone to disperse because right wingers were coming to hunt them. Blumenthal remained in the area and no right wingers came. However, the “fear factor was so high” that they believed they would be attacked.

Blumenthal spoke to people in Gaza who survived Israel’s assault. For example, he talks about how Israel unleashed its “full malevolent fury” on Rafah after one of its soldiers was “momentarily captured.” They killed about two hundred people and threatened to bomb the main hospital. Everyone had to evacuate and went to work at a tiny dental clinic in the center of town called the Kuwaiti Hospital, which only had twenty beds. This was where dead children were stored in ice cream coolers because there was nowhere to store the bodies.

“Chief doctor, Dr. Samir Homs, who I met, had to store body parts in meat lockers of nearby butchers. He was doing operations on the floor. He was doing amputations in dental chairs. And that was what Israel did to Rafah on August 1 and it was all under the command of someone named Commander Ofer Winter,” Blumenthal recalls.

Blumenthal mentions that Winter regarded the people of Gaza “not as enemy combatants or civilian enemies, which is bad enough,” but called them “blasphemers of God.” This religious fanatic led a top Israeli infantry division into Gaza during the summer. He embodies the “religious messianism that is overwhelming Israeli society and the genocidal approach to a Palestinian population that is ghettoized and unknown to most Israelis.”

When Blumenthal visited Gaza, he met many Palestinians who had never met someone who was Jewish.

There’s a deliberate conflation of European anti-Semitism, of classical anti-Semitism with Arab anti-Semitism and Palestinian anti-Semitism is an entirely different phenomenon. Palestinian anti-Semitism doesn’t require anti-Semitic textbooks or fanatical Islamist preachers to encourage. All it requires are Israeli combat jets and tanks and soldiers bearing the symbol of the Jewish State in Israel in the Levant on their uniforms to encourage it.”

You go to the Gaza Strip. It’s a literal walled-off ghetto, and the only people there who have met Jews are the older folks cause many of them used to work in Israel. And they don’t have the friendliest attitude either because the Jewish State, which claims to be acting in the name of all Jews in the world, is carpet bombing them but they do have a more tolerant attitude. Then you talk to the younger people who’ve never met a Jew, who didn’t confront them in a tank and they’re not the most philo-Semitic people. And I got to say that’s not their fault.

However, most of them that I met don’t really seem to be that sectarian. Many of the educated people have an understanding that there are other Jews in the world that have different attitudes. And some of them express a yearning to meet Israeli Jews on a neutral field, to meet Israeli Jews who aren’t pointing weapons at them. But that’s been rendered impossible by the militant sectarian leaders of JSIL and it’s really unfortunate.

Blumenthal traveled among the ruins of homes in places that were bombarded and saw Stars of David spray painted on walls or etched into furniture, where soldiers “marked their territory.” Effectively, they are “spreading hatred of Judaism.”

“They are abusing the symbol of the oldest monotheistic religion in the world and narrowing it down to the miserable seventy-year experience of an apartheid state. That is incredibly dangerous and it reflects the attitude that is inculcated in these young people in the Israeli education system, which is that the whole world is against them.”

Uncategorized
Newer Posts
Older Posts