| Islam and the West | |
| 08 Jan 2009, NewAgeIslam.Com | |
| The Real Estate War in Gaza: The History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing | |
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The Real Estate War in Gaza: The History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing By VICTORIA BUCH Propaganda, Perception, and Trut: Consider the Realities of Gaza By WILLIAM COOK "If I Die, I Want to Die Here in My Country": Phoning Home to Gaza By SOUSAN HAMMAD To be Free, From a Night Without Bombs: Longing in Gaza By MATS SVENSSON No Child in Gaza is Safe: Abeer's Baby By JEN MARLOWE "They Made Us Do It": The Madness Among Us By Dr. TRUDY BOND Despite the Bloodshed, Israel is Failing: What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel? By SAREE MAKDISI A Galaxy of Partisan Propagandists: Israel is Immune From Criticism By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY "If I Die, I Want to Die Here in My Country": Phoning Home to Gaza By SOUSAN HAMMAD ------------------------------------------------------- January 6, 2009 The Real Estate War in GazaThe History and "Morals" of Ethnic CleansingBy VICTORIA BUCH I arrived in Israel 40 years ago. It took me many years to understand that the very existence of my country, as it is today, is based on an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The project started many years ago. Its seed can be traced to the basic fallacy of the Zionist movement, which set out to establish a Jewish-national state in a location already inhabited by another nation. Under these conditions, one has, at most, a moral right to strive for a bi-national state; establishing a national state implies, more or less by definition, ethnic cleansing of the previous inhabitants. "(a) The New York Times quoted Prime Minister Menachem Begin`s (1977 - 83) August, 1982 speech saying: `In June, 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that (President Gamal Abdel) Nasser (1956 - 70) was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.` (b) Two-time Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1974 - 77 and 1992 - 95) told French newspaper Le Monde in February, 1968: `I do not believe Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.` (c) General Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War said in 1978: `Sixteen years of planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it.` (d) General Haim Barlev, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief told Ma`ariv in April 1972: `We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never thought of such a possibility.`" So: instead of "thwarting an existential danger", in 1967 the State of Israel carried out an effective military operation to acquire some real estate. There is nothing new about that "existential danger" propaganda. Acquisition of real estate by conquest has been already called pleasing names by various other conquerors and occupiers, throughout the old and new history: such as "manifest destiny", "white man's burden", "spreading true religion / culture / democracy", whatnot. "Just as I do not see the proposed Jewish state as a final solution to the problems of the Jewish people, so I do not see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question. Those who reject partition are right in their claim that this country cannot be partitioned because it constitutes one unit, not only from a historical point of view but also from that of nature and economy". "After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the [Jewish] state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of the Palestine". I wonder if at any point in history there was any association of people who acquired goodies by brute force, and who viewed themselves candidly as such. Times and again, conquerors considered themselves unwilling victims of circumstances, and the barbarians (their own victims!) against whom they have to regretfully protect their rights. Consider the following pronouncements of Benny Morris, a historian who documented the 1948 ethnic cleansing. In a 2004 interview with Morris which was published in Haaretz one reads[6]: Q: The title of the book you are now publishing in Hebrew is "Victims." In the end, then, your argument is that of the two victims of this conflict, we [Israelis] are the bigger one. Morris: "Yes. Exactly. We are the greater victims in the course of history and we are also the greater potential victim. Even though we are oppressing the Palestinians, we are the weaker side here. We are a small minority in a large sea of hostile Arabs who want to eliminate us. The above opinion is representative of the Israeli mainstream. It has been raised to the status of axiom over the years, and no reasonable peace offers (such as the latest Saudi one) are likely to put a dent in it. Israelis are using this slogan to exempt themselves from normal human decency towards Palestinians. Most Israeli Jews have convinced themselves that they have a moral right to expropriate and expel Palestinians because Palestinians are such barbarians, who did not respond to Israel's"generous peace offers" and "only wanted to throw us to the sea". Because we are a nation of Holocaust survivors. My compatriots imagined themselves starring in a modern version of Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" - starring as beautiful elves, of course, who were forced by sad fate to fight ugly goblins the Palestinians (goblins = "terrorists"). Human mercy does not apply to "terrorists". You do not make territorial compromises or peace agreements with "terrorists".
--- January 5, 2009 Propaganda, Perception, and TruthConsider the Realities of GazaBy WILLIAM COOK "How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be" -- Oedipus Rex, Scene I As the Israeli military launched an "all out war" with Hamas in the Gaza strip, as casualties mounted to 400 dead and another 1450 wounded, as tanks and troops massed in the area just outside the wall that imprisons the people of Gaza, as preparations for a ground assault into the "closed military zone" around the Gaza strip moved forward, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Saturday the 27th "… instructed the Foreign Ministry to take emergency measures to adapt Israel's international public relations to the ongoing escalation in the Gaza Strip." (Haaretz, 12/28/08). "An aggressive and diplomatic international public relations campaign" needed to be launched simultaneously with the estimated "60 raids" that now pummel Gaza each day, raids that, in human terms, have taken the lives of five children, all girls, of the Ba'losha family killed in Bait Lahia City north of Gaza and three children from the Al Absi family in Rafah refugee camp as Israeli rockets collapsed their roof. (freepalestine.ps, Sameh, Habeeb). I provide names and locations of these families to give reality to the statistics that numb the mind; multiply the suffering of these families as 400 lie dead from this "turkey shoot" against fenced in civilians launched by this compassionate Olmert administration that closes out its criminal tenure in office awaiting the election of yet another militaristic administration. Unfortunately some ministry officials had to interrupt their vacations to return immediately to their posts abroad. Their purpose, like Livni's, to "explain the rationale for the expanded IDF operations in the Gaza Strip." (Haaretz, 12/28/08). The ministry also seeks speakers of foreign languages, especially Arabic, Italian, Spanish, and German to ensure that its message is received by all. An international media broadcast outlet opened on Sunday in Sderot, the hapless Israeli town that has been the recipient of most of Hamas' rockets over the past 8 years. Tours are planned for "foreign media and diplomatic figures." Livni noted that "Israel expects the support and understanding of the international community, as it confronts terror, and advances the interest of all those who wish the forces of peace and co-existence to determine the agenda of this region." (Haaretz) Not mentioned by Livni, though reported in the same newspaper on the same day, was an article by Barak Ravid, "Disinformation, secrecy and lies: How the Gaza offensive came about." Ravid discloses that Olmert had "instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas." Interesting how propaganda precedes perception and negates reality. In 1958 Aldus Huxley commented in "Brave New World Revisited" that "truth is great" but "silence about truth is greater still." Hitler used just this "silence about truth" to imprison the minds of his civilians by silencing his actions in the media and creating instead a "new" truth from fabricated lies that cloaked reality in acceptable clothing by redefining actuality. The world has been and is again being told how the people of Israel are victims of Hamas' rockets that "pour" or "shower" their villages. Let's consider the reality rather than the propaganda. Israel sets up Sderot as the suffering example of this terrorist action and provides tours for journalists and diplomats including Barak Obama. One step into Gaza and you will see real devastation, not remains of rockets that landed in fields or hit a building causing no deaths. Both Gaza and the West Bank speak vividly the results of military incursions, home demolitions, bulldozed farm land and fruit trees, and the most insidious icon of human brutality, the Wall of Fear erected by Ariel Sharon. So let's consider the reality not the propaganda. In 8 years an estimated 6000 rockets have been shot at Israel. That's a slightly exaggerated number but one that will allow for increased attempts by Hamas or others to send additional rockets into Israeli towns. That means that on average 750 have been hurled at Israel each year, or 62.5 per month or 2 per day. In all that time 23 Israeli or non-Israelis living in Israel have been killed. That represents about 2.8 a year. This past week, as Israel "showers" Gaza with $300,000 precision missiles that unfortunately do not distinguish in their accuracy civilians from resistance fighters, more rockets have been launched per day by Hamas and other factions at Israel and at least 4 more have died. Now we can see how numbing statistics are. Those twenty three should never have been killed nor the four who died this week. But for Israel to use the rockets as the basis for this past weekend's horrific slaughter of Palestinians is inexcusable by any measure. Four hundred and fourteen dead in (Guardian, UK, 1/2/2009) as Israeli missiles hammer civilian neighborhoods with, as they claim, precision, is nothing short of outright murder and the slaughter continues beyond the 325 sites struck in those first days by land sea and air, a true "rain" of death, devastation and psychological trauma. Consider the conditions on the ground, the reality not the propaganda, as Israel attacks the residents of Gaza: for the past two years Israel has put Gaza under constant siege closing all gates thus preventing egress and ingress; it has destroyed the infrastructure of Gaza including sewage, electricity and water; it has barred international shipments of humanitarian goods and fuel; and it has maintained, even during the agreed upon cease fire, constant daily incursions into Gaza killing randomly and destroying at will. (PCHRGAZA Weekly Reports). Little or none of this is reported in American papers or on TV news broadcasts, only reference to terrorists and rockets constantly threatening the existence of Israel. Consider as well the irony of this situation not the propaganda offered by Israel apologists. The people of Gaza are collectively refugees of Jewish forces driven from their homes, like Ashkelon, that is now hit randomly by Gazan rockets. They fire at their own land, at homes they used to live in before well equipped and trained, "unofficial" military of the Jewish Agency during the Mandate years ethnically pushed them into Gaza. The Israelis, of course, do not mention that they stole Ashkelon from the very people who now send rockets into it. Consider the reality, not the propaganda: the Palestinian people can go no where; they cannot escape through the Israeli controlled gates; they can not flee by car, rail, air, boat or on foot; they are caged in a steel enclosed land area blocked on the west by Israeli gunboats. This is comparable in its way to the "highway of death" that slaughtered thousands of Iraqis as they fled from Kuwait in the 1991 war, surrounded and at the mercy of those hurling missiles from the air and the hills that overlooked their death throes. Consider Livni's public relations campaign, the reality not the propaganda, as it thunders forth the desperate condition the Israelis face as Hamas builds its strength in imitation of Hizbullah. Estimates reported in Ynet News (4/10/08) by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center place Hamas' "military-security force" at 20,000, up from an estimated 13,000 in 2007 as reported in Haaretz (7/21/07). These numbers threaten the Israeli military despite the fact that Israel can field an estimated two million troops; despite its state of the art military that is considered the fourth largest in the world; and despite its possession of 200 to 400 nuclear weapons. All of this force against weapons smuggled into Gaza through tunnels; there's no other way to bring them in since they are under constant guard by the IDF. Consider as well the Israeli effort to claim victim hood based on Hamas' terrorism against its civilians; consider the reality not the propaganda. The following statistics come from B'Tselem as recorded bywww.ifamericaknew.org: 4,897 Palestinians killed since 9/29/00 to 11/30/08; 1062 Israelis killed during that same time period. Of these numbers, 1050 were Palestinian children and 123 Israeli; 2,227-3149 were Palestinian civilians and 727 were Israeli civilians. Since June28, 2008, in Gaza, the start of the cease fire, a total of 247 were killed up to October 6, 2008, 155 of these were civilians and 57 were children. Add to these horrific numbers the tally the Israeli's accumulated on December 27th, approximately a week ago, of 251 Palestinians killed, most civilians including 20 children and 9 women with another 584 wounded 130 of them children (PCHR). The death toll for Palestinians has exceeded that of the American casualties in Iraq, and continues to climb above 5200 as each day passes with no end in sight. And so we must ask, why? What drives this merciless military machine that is the government and armed forces of Israel? Can it be true as Livni attests that "Israel expects the support and understanding of the international community, as it confronts terror, and advances the interest of all those who wish the forces of peace and co-existence to determine the agenda of this region." What is terror if not the forced imprisonment of 1.5 million people locked behind gates and walls of steel while a state of the art military including land, air and sea forces pummel the people day and night in a merciless barrage of devastation and mayhem? What civilized state in this community of nations could believe that Israel "advances the interest of all" by such devastation of a helpless neighbor? What civilized state could support, what Livni, without blushing, calls the "forces of peace and co-existence" that determine the agenda in the mid-east? Consider the reality not the propaganda. Why? In July of 2004, Khalid Amayreh, writing inwww.infoimagination.org, in a study of Israeli military strategy, noted the following: "Israel's hawkish Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon last week lashed out at the Knesset's influential committee on defense and foreign affairs, accusing some members of disclosing 'classified army secrets.'" The reason for the tongue lashing? That the Israeli occupation army "provoked the Palestinians into escalating the violence during the first few months of the second intifada in order to give the army a pretext to hit hard on the Palestinian society and bully it into unconditional surrender." How was this done? 1,300,000 bullets were fired by "occupation soldiers on Palestinian population centres and other targets." "This massive firepower, which had no operational justification … showed that the Israeli army was interested more in decimating and harming Palestinians and less in ending the violence." Compare this newest incursion with its massive firepower against a people that have no where to go, but must live through the agony of a rain of death, a people that have had to endure a merciless siege for two years that has left them physically weakened, emotionally drained, psychologically distraught, and personally humiliated by unemployment, and helpless to alter the situation imposed on them. Before he was "extra-judicially executed," Abd al-Aziz Rantisi, former Hamas Gaza leader, made this observation, "Israel is offering us two choices, either to die a meek lamb's death at the slaughter house or as martyr-bombers." Consider the reality not the propaganda. Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/cook01052009.html William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of Tracking Depception: Bush's Mideast Policy. He can be reached at: cookb@ULV.EDU January 5, 2009 "If I Die, I Want to Die Here in My Country"Phoning Home to GazaBy SOUSAN HAMMAD My family was in Denver for the holidays when we awoke to peddling images of bombardment. Gaza was on fire. 250 people dead. From our television set we quickly tuned into the perversions of war, watching reports from both American and Arab media. We are safe. We do not smell burned flesh, hear cries of agony or see before us military planes. We view from a distance, but feel none of the anxiety and melancholy that the rest of our family feels in the besieged coastal strip. Scattered throughout the refugee camps of Khan Younis, Beit Lahya and Jabalya, my relatives are living through another war. We try to call each and every relative to ascertain their safety, but mostly to see whether or not they are still living. The telephone networks were either busy or not working at all. We forgot that Gaza only gets electricity for six hours a day. After failed attempts to contact my family in Jabalya (due to Israel's bombing of the Jawal towers, which is Gaza's only mobile provider), we get through the landline network to my cousin Anan. He had no desire to speak, mentioning only that the Israeli army was 3 km away from the camp. He then passed the phone to his wife, but she too did not feel at ease on the phone, she was distressed, her children constantly crying, the youngest only 6-weeks-old. Thirteen years ago my father moved back to Gaza and bought a home in Beit Lahya. He died two years ago, leaving the house to his nephew. Now my cousin and his family live in the house. We call Beit Lahya. No answer. Finally, we decide to call our family in Khan Younis. My cousin's mobile is working. The Jawal towers appear to be intact in Khan Younis. Mohamad, a 26-year-old father of two, works as an executive director for the Palestinian Student Care Association, a non-profit organization that promotes formal education to Palestinians in Gaza. Comforted to hear my voice, like a prisoner receiving a call from the outside world, he asks me how I am doing. Baffled by his question, I don't know: is he is being earnest or polite? I answered by repeating his question. 80 percent of Gazans cannot support themselves and are dependent on humanitarian assistance, according to a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). "Right now, flour and sugar are not available," Mohamad is weary, "If we want bread we have to be at the bakery by 5 am, and all we get is 1 or 2 loaves." Food supplies are depleting and with Israel's complete restriction over movement into and out of Khan Younis, many residents are coping with what little they have, resorting to tediously baking their own bread using the taboon, an oven made of clay, which requires long hours of watching the bread to make sure each side is equally cooked. Thinking of Mohamad's children I ask him how they are coping with sights and sounds of death. Mohamad said his 6-year-old son Munir stands at the window and pretends to shoot down Israeli apaches and fighter jets that fly overhead. His two-year-old daughter Saja cries every time she hears renewed sounds of bombardment and runs to hide. "Yesterday we got electricity at 8 p.m. and we immediately turned on the television to watch the news. My children are frightened not just by the sounds of the bombing and gunfire, but by the images they see on the news. They see the Israeli tanks in the camp and they correlate the tank with death." Mohamad says he doesn't believe that any outside government will intervene, especially that of Arab countries. "They [Arab governments] have never helped in the past, so why would they help us now? This is something natural that we have come to accept. The Egyptian government won't even open Rafah for Palestinians in need of urgent medical care without permission from Israel." I asked him if he would leave Gaza if the Rafah border were to miraculously open. Mohamad laughs into the phone. He asks me if I know why he is laughing. Though I said nothing, there was the thought that maybe war hysteria had finally begun to set in. "I'm laughing because this is a very complex situation," he says, "Every party wants to govern Palestinians, whether it's Hamas, Fatah or Islamic Jihad. They all look out for their own self-interests. Palestine as a whole has never been their priority. The Israelis are different. Their priority is focused on the Jewish State, and this is why they are successful." I turn off the phone and turn to the news frenetically searching for some sort of meaning to all this bombardment. With the help of the press displaying the war as something needed to create security or harmony for Israel, giving justification to Israel's rocket rhetoric and dubious claims that this war is a war on Hamas, I become more disenchanted with the docility of the press. This war has only created more chaos for Palestinians, a chaos intended to lead Palestinians to give up their fight against the Zionist state, to becoming subservient to the collaborative Palestinian president. What victory do Israel and the Palestinian Authority seek in Gaza. A place with no food, no army, no state. Sousan Hammad is a writer, and coordinator for the Houston Palestine Film Festival. She can be reached at sousan.hammad@gmail.com --- To be Free, From a Night Without Bombs Longing in GazaBy MATS SVENSSON I am hanging my first photo exhibition in Ramallah at the Sakakini Gallery. It consists of large photographs of the wall, photos from Gaza, the sea and Rafah. There are also some photos of the golden dome in the Old City of Jerusalem. A young woman helps me. We began the day before. Cleaned away some litter. Drunk many cups of coffee. Hung photos up in one place and then switched them around. Everything had to be in tune. Light photos in the darker room and dark photos in the room that had daylight flowing through the small windows. After two days, eighty photos are hanging on the beautiful white sandstone walls. The gallery was earlier a dwelling house and has been redone into a gallery. We are just about done when I suddenly see the woman sitting on the floor. She starts to cry and says: - I long for the sea! - What do you mean? I ask. - I can see the houses, the skyscrapers in Tel Aviv from my apartment on the sixth floor. But I can't see the sea. I always long for it. I want to show my daughter the sea. - When were you there last? I ask. - 1998, she replies. And now I can't get there. * * * - I long for the red and white bird, says the girl who since three weeks sits in a refugee camp in northern Gaza. Three weeks earlier, bulldozers crushed her family's house. Now she longs for the little bird that used to come every morning to the small balcony. - Every morning, my mother gave me breakfast and the bird got crumbs from me. * * * - We had a dream about establishing a life here in my parents' building in Al Ram. My loved one comes from Haifa, she is an Israeli Arab. Last week, the wall was closed. Everything suddenly became impossible. Every day, my six-year-old son has to pass by arbitrary, young soldiers.
* * * - Yesterday my youngest daughter gave birth to her first child. When I was going to visit her in the hospital in Nablus I was stopped by a young Israeli girl. I felt sorry for her, she was so young. She was just a girl, a soldier who in one day had left the longing of youth and happiness for the masquerade of death. 22 years ago, I gave birth to my daughter at the hospital in Nablus. Now I wanted to see my grandchild. Now I was not allowed. I long to see my grandchild. * * * - I will never again be able to see the olive hill to which my father used to bring me. It is on the other side of the wall. It was there that he taught me everything about animals. It was there that he used to sit and think and yearn for another time. It was there that we had the best view of the Old City in Jerusalem, of the Dome of the Rock. The grey dragon, the wall has now come in between. It kills everything. It even kills the dream. I long to be able to walk the fifty meters up to the olive hill. * * * - We long to be able to celebrate Easter in Jerusalem. Every year we apply for a permit. Every year we have the same dream. We have four children. We apply early, five months before Easter. Now the wall is complete. We are confined. It is more difficult for a Christian from Bethlehem to walk on Via Dolorosa than for a Swedish tourist. We need permits from the military, the Swedish tourist does not. * * * -We long for a calm night, says the woman in Gaza; a night without bombs, without children screaming, without helicopters, without ambulances, one single night. * * * Everybody is longing, everyone longs after something. The occupation has ensured that longing fills everyone's day. Everyone speaks about it, speaks about what has been lost, about what was recently possible. It is not about the big dreams, but about being able to go to the sea, dip feet into the salty water, to be able to see the red and white bird, to look into the eyes of a grandchild, to be able to walk onto the father's olive hill, to be able to celebrate Easter with the family, a night without bombs, to be free. Mats Svensson, a former Swedish diplomat working on the staff of SIDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, is presently following the ongoing occupation of Palestine. He can be reached at isbjorn2001@hotmail.com. --- January 5, 2009 No Child in Gaza is SafeAbeer's BabyBy JEN MARLOWE Abeer was excited when I called her today. I was reluctant to mention my fears to Abeer. If she wasn't already worried herself, what good could it possibly do? A thin and wiry 24 year old woman with dark, smoldering eyes, a warm voice, fierce laugh and a tight hug, Abeer is, above all else, extremely strong. This will not be the first baby in the world born with bomb blasts in the background. It certainly wouldn't be the first baby born with no guarantee of medical care during delivery. Chances are, Abeer will give birth to a healthy baby and be fine herself. Jen Marlowe, a Seattle-based documentary filmmaker and human rights activist, is the author of Darfur Diaries: Stories of Survival (Nation Books). She is now directing and editing her next film, Rebuilding Hope, about South Sudan, and writing a book about Palestine and Israel. Her most recent film was Darfur Diaries: Message from Home. She serves on the board of directors of the Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre and is a founding member of the Rachel's Words initiative. Her email address is: jenmarlowe@hotmail.com --- January 5, 2009 "They Made Us Do It"The Madness Among UsBy Dr. TRUDY BOND The current simplistic mantra of the Israeli government as they bomb and maim and kill and destroy in Gaza is "They made us do it." Similar posturing is found in decisions and actions by the U.S. government and military during the last eight years, too numerous to mention. Why did our government pay bounties for hundreds of Muslims, lock them up in a prison by the sea, and eliminate all their human rights? "They made us do it." Yet after an 18-month investigation of detainee abuse by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Committee's Executive Summary and Conclusions states that, rather than finding the actions of the government and military toward detainees justified, the investigation determined culpability. The Committee's Summary and Conclusions both places the responsibility for torture directly in the White House, as Dick Cheney has proudly affirmed, and connects the participation and responsibility of psychologists in that torture. Bush's team has focused on justification and rationalization of torture, (or as Doug Feith said, "The problem with moral authority [was] people who should know better . . . siding with the assholes, to put it crudely."), while the American Psychological Association has practiced deception and misinformation in attempts to evade the reality of their involvement in torture. According to the recently-released findings of the Senate Committee: At about the same time, a dispute over the use of aggressive techniques was raging at GTMO over the interrogation of Mohammed al-Khatani, a high value detainee. Personnel from CITF and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) had registered strong opposition, to interrogation techniques proposed for use on Khatani and made those concerns known to the DoD General Counsel's office. Despite those objections, an interrogation plan that included aggressive techniques was approved. The interrogation itself, which actually began on November 23, 2002, a week before the Secretary's December 2, 2002 grant of blanket authority for the use of aggressive techniques, continued through December and into mid-January 2003. It was psychologist and APA member John Leso who was instrumental in developing and implementing the above-referenced interrogation plan as detailed in documents released by the Senate hearings in June, 2008. Minutes of a Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting on 10/2/02 document Major John Leso and Major Burney as the Behavioral Science Consultation Team describing for others present at the meeting the reversed-engineered SERE Psychological Training, which included a specific discussion of al-Qahtani, "recalling how he has responded to certain types of deprivation and psychological stressors." Notably, the date of 10/2/02 indicates that APA member Leso and cohorts had already been abusing and torturing al-Qahtani (spelled Khatani in the Senate report) months before the Defense Secretary's grant of blanket authority. The Committee's Conclusions continue: That same day, GTMO suspended its use of aggressive techniques on Khatani. While key documents relating to the interrogation remain classified, published accounts indicate that military working dogs had been used against Khatani. He had also been deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end, stripped naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks. In a June 3, 2004 press briefing, SOUTHCOM Commander General James Hill traced the source of techniques used on Khatani back to SERE, stating: "The staff at Guantanamo working with behavioral scientists [John Leso], having gone up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques which our lawyers decided and looked at, said were OK." General Hill said "we began to use a few of those techniques ... on this individual..." [Mohammed al-Qahtani] On May 13, 2008, the Pentagon announced in a written statement that the Convening Authority for military commissions "dismissed without prejudice the sworn charges against Mohamed al Khatani." The statement does not indicate the role his treatment may have played in that decision. Charges were dismissed without prejudice as it became very clear that Leso and Burney, the psychologist and psychiatrist who formed the Behavioral Science Consultation Team charged with developing the Special Interrogation Plan for Mohammed al-Qahtani, had crossed the line into torture and no charges could be proven. Thus Stephen Behnke, attorney, psychologist and director of ethics for the American Psychological Association since 2000, has spent much of the last six years falsifying APA's position. He has yet to explain in any of his many interviews and letters why Dr. Leso has been allowed to create, collude and condone the abuse of al-Qahtani and remain a member of APA without any sanctions or accountability. In a letter to Harper's on November 22, 2007, he wrote, "The position of the American Psychological Association is unequivocal: For more than 20 years, the association has absolutely condemned any psychologist participation in torture . . ." The utter lack of action by APA to ethical complaints against John Leso and other APA members is evidence that APA's position does not meet the definition of "unequivocal." Better adjectives might include equivocal, imprecise, inexact, unclear, cryptic, enigmatic and ambivalent, as Behnke continued in his letter to Harper's: " . . . Given the concerns that have been expressed let me state clearly and unequivocally [he likes that word] the 2007 Resolution should never be interpreted as allowing isolation, sensory deprivation and over-stimulation, or sleep deprivation either alone or in combination to be used as interrogation techniques to break down a detainee in order to elicit information." More recently, in a radio broadcast on WHYY "Radio Times" on October 30, 2008, Dr. Behnke stated: "Well, an ethical interrogation is one in which fully protects (sic) the human rights of the detainee, and that is what the American Psychological Association has been fighting with policies that allow torture or abuse. Our position has been called by the national media a rebuke of the Bush administration interrogation policy. So what we have been doing is fighting any policy that permits torture or abuse and that does not fully protect the human rights of the detainees." 27 November 2002 1000: Control puts detainee in swivel chair at MAJ L's [Major Leso's] suggestion to keep him awake and stop him from fixing his eyes on one spot in booth . . . Control used 'onion' analogy to explain how detainee's control over his life is being stripped away. Control gives detainee three facts: we are hunting down Al Qaida every day, we will not stop until they are captured or killed, we control every aspect of your life. Postscript: After leaving Guantanamo, John Leso was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Austria for a time. As recently as 2007, John Leso was back in the U.S. and stationed at Fort Rucker, Alabama, which includes the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school (SERE) for Army Aviation. Mohammed al-Qahtani remains in a cell at Guantanamo, in limbo, having all charges against him dropped. Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/bond01052009.html Dr. Trudy Bond is a psychologist in Toledo, Ohio. She can be reached at ar_mordilo@yahoo.com. --- January 7, 2009 Despite the Bloodshed, Israel is FailingWhat Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?By SAREE MAKDISI Israel has killed and wounded almost four thousand men, women and children so far in its assault on Gaza; it has entombed whole families together in the ruins of their homes. As I write these words, news is breaking that Israeli bombs have killed at least 40 civilians huddling in a UN school which they mistakenly thought would be safer than the homes from which Israel's relentless barrage—and its deliberately terrorizing "warning" leaflets and prerecorded phone calls—had already driven them. (I still have one of the leaflets the Israelis dropped on besieged Beirut in 1982 and the language is exactly the same—"flee, flee for your lives!"). Mosques, schools, houses, apartment buildings, have all been brought down on the heads of those inside. All this death and destruction comes supposedly in retaliation for rocket attacks that had not inflicted a single fatality inside Israel in over a year. What happened to "an eye for an eye?" As horrific as the toll of dead and injured already is, the scale of Israel's bombing, and its targeting of ambulances and medical and rescue crews—several doctors and paramedics have been killed or wounded so far—means that the true totals are actually unknown. Countless numbers of victims have bled to death in the streets or in the ruins of their smashed homes. Calls for help aren't getting through Gaza's phone networks, battered to pieces along with the rest of the civilian infrastructure—its water, sewage, electricity systems, all already crumbling as a result of the years of siege. The victims that are evacuated—as often, these days, in civilian cars as in the remaining ambulances—make it to hospitals that are overwhelmed; many will die that might have otherwise been saved. Any hospital would be overwhelmed under the circumstances: how then for a hospital that has already been cut off by the three year old Israeli blockade of Gaza from urgently needed supplies, medicines, drugs, anesthetics, spare parts, fuel for generators? In fact, the true story of what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza is to be seen in the besieged territory's hospitals: the smashed, burned, dusty bodies of children being carried in on makeshift blankets (there aren't enough stretchers to go around); the morgue drawers full of bodies; the emergency rooms with badly hurt, crying people scattered on stretchers, on beds, on the blood-washed floors, as the doctors run from one to another trying to figure out who can be saved and who must be attended to first—the boy with his feet blown off? the old woman with the huge gash in her head? the young man with his guts hanging out of his stomach? the anguished little girl thrashing about in pain, in fear, in agony and begging for her mother who vanished in some monstrous explosion? And outside, on the crowded sidewalks, the other side of the human suffering that Israel has chosen to inflict on an entire population: the wailing mothers, fathers and children; the weeping young men; the panicked people rushing around trying to find loved ones after each new Israeli bombing. All this to make Israelis feel secure? What security is this kind of barbarism ever likely to gain them? These are the scenes that every Palestinian and every Arab around the world sees every single day on the uncensored, unedited, unfiltered and relentlessly, brutally honest coverage broadcast on the Arabic Al-Jazeera channel. Unlike the US and UK networks, Al-Jazeera has correspondents and camera crews all over Gaza; they are Arabs, some of them are Palestinians, and they all live among the people whose suffering they record for the whole world to see; they can communicate with them in their own language and in the language of the audience as well. The coverage continues continuously 24 hours a day. Ordinary people around the rest of the world are seeing the version of events that gets filtered through the editing suites, the cutting rooms, the editorializing of foreign media, and that, in the case of the US, finally makes it to their living room largely (if not entirely) sanitized, and packaged to them in two-minute sound bites by correspondents posted safely outside of Gaza and inside Israel. The coverage broadcast from Israel is heavily monitored, controlled and censored. The Israeli army found in 2006 that its panicked soldiers in Lebanon were using cell phones to call home for help; this time it made sure to inspect all of its soldiers to make sure that none takes a phone with him into Gaza. The army imposes a smothering control over the flow of information; nothing that is reported from or datelined Israel can be read at face value or taken for granted. If you get your news from an American television network, no matter how horrible you think what's happening in Gaza is, the reality that you are not seeing is much, much, much worse. (Perhaps that's why the English-language Al-Jazeera channel, widely followed in the rest of the world, is unofficially banned here—not a single cable or satellite provider carries it). And yet even with this imperfect coverage it must be said that people all over the world, including in the US, are protesting what they are seeing. Huge, million-person demonstrations have been held, from Melbourne to Jakarta, from Calcutta to Istanbul, and from Vienna to London, not to mention the huge popular protests in Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Amman, across the length and breadth of the West Bank, and in some of the largest protests ever held in Palestinian communities inside Israel. Across the US, too, people have been protesting, holding vigils, writing letters to the editors of the newspapers demanding more balance to the warped coverage of the events that we see here, especially in papers like the New York Times. And the internet has been a major source of information for all those millions who have figured out that they will never learn what they need to learn from the New York Times or the Washington Post or ABC or CNN. Sites like Counterpunch, Electronic Intifada, Alternet, Truthdig, Huffington Post, Salon and many others besides have carried extraordinarily intelligent and detailed pieces by a range of commentators whose sense of what is happening far exceeds what is made available by professional journalists in the mainstream press—including many superb pieces by Jewish Americans who give the lie, once and for all, to the absurd notion that their community is solidly behind Israel's violence. Indeed, it seems clear that the writing now being posted on alternative media outlets is also starting to outweigh the clumsy efforts still being churned out by America's army of paid and unpaid cheerleaders for Israel, who have forsaken what little remained of their own humanity and blinded themselves to suffering that ought to move any rational, caring, sentient human being to tears—the Dershowitzes and Foxmans, the Orens and Boots, the Krauthammers and Peretzes, the Bards and Goldfarbs, the cynical apparatchiks of CAMERA and AIPAC and the mindless busybodies and shuffling zombies of Stand With Us, the Israel Project and the Israel on Campus Coalition—who persist with their stubborn, craven defense of the indefensible. About these misanthropes there is much to be said, most of it too unpleasant to print, so I'll shift the burden here to those memorable closing lines of Wilfred Owen's war poem "Insensibility:" But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns, As for Israel itself: once again it has revealed its true nature to the world. It was only after the first reports came in of their own serious fatalities—soldiers caught in an ambush, though the censored news reports from Israel claim that it was all friendly fire—that the Israeli media suddenly started carrying reports wondering whether things have gone too far. "The Price of Stubbornness over Gaza Exit is Dead Soldiers," write Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff in Ha'aretz. "For the first time, Israeli TV broadcasts raised the question of whether it was worthwhile for the operation to continue." Until this point, the Israeli media—and most of the country's liberal intelligentsia, never mind the militant right wing—had been moralistically defending the bombing, and sometimes actually cheering it on. Starting the attacks on a Saturday was a "stroke of brilliance," the Guardian's Seamus Milne quotes the country's biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot as saying; "the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed." The daily Ma'ariv agreed: "We left them in shock and awe." The rational and genuinely ethical voices of Amira Hass and Gideon Levy have never seemed more isolated. The brute fact of the matter is that, as long as their air force is killing an entirely defenseless people, the Israeli public and media do cheer them on. As soon as they start paying any kind of price—no matter how grotesquely out of proportion to the level of damage their soldiers are inflicting on unarmed and innocent people—their bloodlust quickly cools. In Gaza, the Israeli infantry won't take a single step forward unless the ground in front of them—and everything and everyone in it, armed, unarmed, whoever and whatever they are—has been safely cleared away for them by the air or by artillery. "These are 'Georgia rules,' which are not so far from the methods Russia used in its conflict last summer," write Harel and Issacharoff in Ha'aretz. "The result is the killing of dozens of non-combatant Palestinians. The Gaza medical teams might not have reached all of them yet. When an Israeli force gets into an entanglement, as in Sajaiyeh last night [where three Israeli soldiers were killed], massive fire into built-up areas is initiated to cover the extraction. In other cases, a chain of explosions is initiated from a distance to set off Hamas booby-traps. It is a method that leaves a swath of destruction taking in entire streets, and does not distinguish military targets from the homes of civilians." I'm not sure where the "Georgia" reference comes from: the Israelis used the very same tactics in Jenin and Nablus in 2002, and in southern Lebanon in 2006 and 1982. And it would be an act of futility to point out—for the millionth time—that the Israeli method of warfare takes place in sweeping disregard for the principles of international humanitarian law, not to mention total contempt for innocent human life. This is not to mention that most of the casualties pouring into Gaza's morgues and hospitals are the victims of the sheer indiscriminate unleashing on densely populated civilian areas of high explosive ordnance from land, sea and air that has been characteristic of Israel's military style since at least the 1970s. Israel's disregard for innocent human life is not motivated only by a desire to forestall the political consequences—especially during an electoral campaign—of Israeli military casualties. It is also a clear indicator of the contempt that Israel has for Palestinian life in general. The cold, hungry, tired, desperate, and terrified men, women and children that Israel is now sweeping away by the dozen in balls of fire and showers of shrapnel are the very same people that it had already reduced to what one UN official months ago warned was "a subhuman existence," the deliberate product of the siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza for over three years, beginning in 2005, before the election of Hamas. They are the same people whose political and human rights Israel has been stifling since the occupation of 1967—twenty years before the creation of Hamas. They are the same people who were ethnically cleansed from their land in 1948 because, as non-Jews, they were inconveniently cluttering up the land that European Zionists wanted to turn into a Jewish state, no matter what the land's actual population had to say about it. Israel's disregard for Palestinian life in Gaza today is, in short, a direct extension of its disregard for Palestinian life since 1948, and what is happening in Gaza today is the continuation of what happened six decades ago. Eighty percent of the people crammed into Gaza's hovels and shanties are refugees or the descendants of refugees that armed Zionist gangs, which eventually coalesced into the infant Israeli army, terrorized from their homes elsewhere in southwestern Palestine in 1948. They have been herded, penned, and slaughtered by a remorseless power that clearly regards them as subhuman. If you think I'm stretching the point, I'm not. Listen to the words of Professor Arnon Sofer, the government consultant who did so much to help plan the isolation and imprisonment of Gaza, in a interview with the Jerusalem Post in 2004: "When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe," Sofer predicted. "Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure on the border is going to be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day." Sofer admitted only one worry with all the killing, which will, he says, be the necessary outcome of a policy that he himself helped to invent. "The only thing that concerns me," he says, "is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings." Meticulously and clinically thought through even before the first rocket from Gaza claimed a life inside Israel, the slaughter in Gaza today has nothing to do with rockets or with Hamas. As Sofer himself explains, it is the purest and most distilled expression of Zionist ideology. "Unilateral separation doesn't guarantee 'peace,'" Sofer says in that same interview; "it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews." And that—taken right from the horse's mouth—is what the slaughter of innocents in Gaza is fundamentally about: the people being killed today are the ones for whom there is no room in the Zionist vision of the state. They are regarded as an excess population. Not even Malthus thought that a redundant population should just be lined up and shot, or bombed into the ground. But, clearly, times have changed since 1798. This inhuman madness will end only with the end of the violent ideology that spawned it—when those who are committed to the project of creating and maintaining a religiously and ethnically exclusivist state in what has always been a culturally and religiously heterogeneous land finally relent and accept the inevitable: that they have failed. Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/ Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA and the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. ---- January 5, 2009 A Galaxy of Partisan PropagandistsIsrael is Immune From CriticismBy BRIAN CLOUGHLEY The state of Israel has descended – plummeted – to one of the lowest levels of conscious barbarity that is currently evident in this horrible world. Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/cloughley01052009.html Brian Cloughley's book about the Pakistan army, War, Coups and Terror, has just been published by Pen & Sword Books (UK) and will be published in the US in May by Skyhorse (New York). January 5, 2009 "If I Die, I Want to Die Here in My Country"Phoning Home to GazaBy SOUSAN HAMMAD My family was in Denver for the holidays when we awoke to peddling images of bombardment. Gaza was on fire. 250 people dead. From our television set we quickly tuned into the perversions of war, watching reports from both American and Arab media. We are safe. We do not smell burned flesh, hear cries of agony or see before us military planes. We view from a distance, but feel none of the anxiety and melancholy that the rest of our family feels in the besieged coastal strip. Scattered throughout the refugee camps of Khan Younis, Beit Lahya and Jabalya, my relatives are living through another war. We try to call each and every relative to ascertain their safety, but mostly to see whether or not they are still living. The telephone networks were either busy or not working at all. We forgot that Gaza only gets electricity for six hours a day. After failed attempts to contact my family in Jabalya (due to Israel's bombing of the Jawal towers, which is Gaza's only mobile provider), we get through the landline network to my cousin Anan. He had no desire to speak, mentioning only that the Israeli army was 3 km away from the camp. He then passed the phone to his wife, but she too did not feel at ease on the phone, she was distressed, her children constantly crying, the youngest only 6-weeks-old. Thirteen years ago my father moved back to Gaza and bought a home in Beit Lahya. He died two years ago, leaving the house to his nephew. Now my cousin and his family live in the house. We call Beit Lahya. No answer. Finally, we decide to call our family in Khan Younis. My cousin's mobile is working. The Jawal towers appear to be intact in Khan Younis. Mohamad, a 26-year-old father of two, works as an executive director for the Palestinian Student Care Association, a non-profit organization that promotes formal education to Palestinians in Gaza. Comforted to hear my voice, like a prisoner receiving a call from the outside world, he asks me how I am doing. Baffled by his question, I don't know: is he is being earnest or polite? I answered by repeating his question. 80 percent of Gazans cannot support themselves and are dependent on humanitarian assistance, according to a report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). "Right now, flour and sugar are not available," Mohamad is weary, "If we want bread we have to be at the bakery by 5 am, and all we get is 1 or 2 loaves." Food supplies are depleting and with Israel's complete restriction over movement into and out of Khan Younis, many residents are coping with what little they have, resorting to tediously baking their own bread using the taboon, an oven made of clay, which requires long hours of watching the bread to make sure each side is equally cooked. Thinking of Mohamad's children I ask him how they are coping with sights and sounds of death. Mohamad said his 6-year-old son Munir stands at the window and pretends to shoot down Israeli apaches and fighter jets that fly overhead. His two-year-old daughter Saja cries every time she hears renewed sounds of bombardment and runs to hide. "Yesterday we got electricity at 8 p.m. and we immediately turned on the television to watch the news. My children are frightened not just by the sounds of the bombing and gunfire, but by the images they see on the news. They see the Israeli tanks in the camp and they correlate the tank with death." Mohamad says he doesn't believe that any outside government will intervene, especially that of Arab countries. "They [Arab governments] have never helped in the past, so why would they help us now? This is something natural that we have come to accept. The Egyptian government won't even open Rafah for Palestinians in need of urgent medical care without permission from Israel." I asked him if he would leave Gaza if the Rafah border were to miraculously open. Mohamad laughs into the phone. He asks me if I know why he is laughing. Though I said nothing, there was the thought that maybe war hysteria had finally begun to set in. "I'm laughing because this is a very complex situation," he says, "Every party wants to govern Palestinians, whether it's Hamas, Fatah or Islamic Jihad. They all look out for their own self-interests. Palestine as a whole has never been their priority. The Israelis are different. Their priority is focused on the Jewish State, and this is why they are successful." I turn off the phone and turn to the news frenetically searching for some sort of meaning to all this bombardment. With the help of the press displaying the war as something needed to create security or harmony for Israel, giving justification to Israel's rocket rhetoric and dubious claims that this war is a war on Hamas, I become more disenchanted with the docility of the press. This war has only created more chaos for Palestinians, a chaos intended to lead Palestinians to give up their fight against the Zionist state, to becoming subservient to the collaborative Palestinian president. What victory do Israel and the Palestinian Authority seek in Gaza. A place with no food, no army, no state. Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/hammad01052009.html Sousan Hammad is a writer, and coordinator for the Houston Palestine Film Festival. She can be reached at sousan.hammad@gmail.com URL: http://newageislam.com/Controlpanel/AddArticles.aspx?Article_ID=1104
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