NOT THE BBC
If like me, you're British - you may like to know that despite the BBC's seemingly spineless hypocracy over Iraq, there are Journalists now calling for the BBC to be called to account for contributing to war-crimes.
After reading their head-lines over the last week, concerning Palestine and the Lebanon, I'm not suprised.
Here's some reading matter on the current situation that comes under-
NOT THE BBC
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The Real Reasons for Israel's Invasion of Gaza: An Experiment in Human Despair
By JONATHAN COOK
Counterpunch
July 5, 2006
One needed only to watch the interview on British television this week with Israel's ambassador to the UK to realise that the Israeli army's tightening of the siege on Gaza, its invasion of the northern parts of the Strip today, and the looming humanitarian crisis across the territory, have nothing to do with the recent capture of an Israeli soldier -- or even the feeble home-made Qassam rockets fired, usually ineffectually, into Israel by Palestinian militants.
Under questioning from presenter Jon Snow of Channel Four news on the reasons behind Israel's bombing of Gaza's only power station -- thereby cutting off electricity to more than half of the Strip's 1.3 million inhabitants for many months ahead, as well as threatening the water supply -- Zvi Ravner denied this action amounted to collective punishment of the civilian population.
Rather, he claimed, the electricity station had to be disabled to prevent the soldier's captors from having the light needed to smuggle him out of Gaza at night. It was left to a bemused Jon Snow to point out that smugglers usually prefer to do their work in the dark and that Israel's actions were more likely to assist his captors than disadvantage them.
The Alice Through the Looking Glass quality of Israeli disinformation over the combined siege and invasion of Gaza -- and its widespread and credulous repetition by the Western media -- is successfully distracting attention from Israel's real goals in this one-sided war of attrition.
The current destruction of Gaza's civilian and administrative infrastructure is reminiscent of the Israeli army's cruel rampages through the streets of West Bank cities in the repeated invasions of 2002 and 2003, and the Jewish settlers' malicious attacks on Palestinian farmers trying to collect their olive harvests.
The relative absence of these horror stories today is simply a reflection of the terrible success of the wall Israel has built across Palestinian farmland and around Palestinian population centres in the West Bank. Settlers no longer need to plunder the olive harvest when the fruit is being left to rot on the trees because farmers can no longer reach their groves.
In the case of the West Bank invasions, Israeli tanks rolled easily into Palestinian cities that had already been isolated and crippled by the stranglehold of checkpoints and roadblocks all over the territority. Israeli heavy armour knocked down electricity pylons as though they were playing a game of ten-pin bowling, snipers shot up the water tanks on people's roofs, soldiers defecated into office photocopiers and the army sought out Palestinian ministries so that their confidential records and documents could be destroyed or stolen.
Notably, only in the warren of alleys in the overcrowded refugee camps of Jenin and Nablus did the army find the going far tougher and suffer relatively high casualties.
Which may explain the military caution that has been exercised by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in regard to the ground invasion of Gaza. The tiny Strip, besieged on its land borders by the Israeli army behind an electronic fence and on the seafront by the Israeli navy, is one giant, overcrowded refugee camp. The past week has seen Gaza "softened up" with airstrikes on its infrastructure and government ministries. Today, land forces began wreaking more death and destruction -- fourteen killed at the time of writing -- in "mopping up" exercises in the pattern established earlier in the West Bank.
Three long-standing motives are discernible in Israel's current menacing of Gaza.
First, Israel is determined to continue its campaign of impairing the Palestinian Authority's ability to govern. This has nothing to do with the recent election of Hamas to run the Palestinian Authority. Israel's official policy of unilateralism -- ignoring the wishes of the Palestinian people -- began long before, when Yasser Arafat was in charge. It has continued through the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, a leader who is about as close to a quisling as Israel is likely to find.
Hamas's electoral success has merely supplied Israel with the pretext it needs for launching its invasion and the grounds for demanding international support as it chokes the life out of Gaza. Israel doubtless hopes that at the end of this process it will be left with Abbas, a figurehead president backed into a corner and ready to put his name to whatever agreement Israel imposes.
Second, the attack on Gaza -- as ever -- is partly a distraction from the real battle. It was widely recognised that Ariel Sharon's dogged pursuit of his Gaza disengagement policy last year was designed to free his hand for the annexation of large chunks of a greater prize, the West Bank, and for securing the biggest prize of all, East Jerusalem. Nothing has changed on this front.
As Israel keeps all eyes directed towards the suffering in Gaza, it is starting to make significant moves in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
It is preparing for the much-delayed evacuation of a handful of illegal West Bank hilltop settlements -- known in Israel as "outposts" -- demanded as the first stage of the implementation of the almost-forgotten US-sponsored peace process called the Road Map.
These outposts are tiny, often just a few caravans. It will be much to Israel's advantage if the world fails to examine too closely the miserly act of evacuating these places, which doubtless will later be presented both as Israel having made a huge sacrifice for peace and as having satisfied its side of the Road Map's conditions.
The loss of these outposts and a few larger settlements will pave the way for international acceptance of Olmert's convergence plan, his unilaterally imposed expansion of Israel's borders at the expense of a viable Palestinian state.
Equally significant are the overlooked manoeuvres Israel is undertaking in East Jerusalem as it beats a warpath towards Gaza. Last week Israel stripped four Hamas MPs of their right to live in East Jerusalem, effectively expelling them to the West Bank. It also showed that it could lock up them and dozens of other democratically elected Palestinian representatives with barely a peep from the international community.
In yet another dose of Alice in Wonderland, Israel's policy of making hostages of these MPs was referred to as "arrests" by the Western media. Few bothered to report that the MPs are being deprived of even their most basic rights, such as meeting with their lawyers.
As the four Jerusalem MPs' lawyers have argued, it is a nonsense that Israel allowed these Hamas politicians to stand in the recent elections and now, after their victory, it calls their membership of the party "support for terrorism". It is also a disturbing sign of how easily Israel will be able to begin ethnically cleansing East Jerusalem of its Palestinian inhabitants using the flimsiest of excuses.
And third, and perhaps most significantly of all, Israel is using the siege and invasion of Gaza as a laboratory for testing policies it also intends to apply to the West Bank after convergence. Gazans are the guinea pigs on which Olmert can try out the "extreme action" he has been boasting of.
The destruction of Gaza's power plant and loss of electricity to some 700,000 people; the consequent scarcity of water, build-up of sewage that cannot be disposed of, and inevitable spread of disease; the shortages of fuel and threats to the running of vital services such as hospitals; the sonic booms of Israeli aircraft that terrify Gaza's children and unpredictable air strikes that terrify everyone; the inability of Palestinian officials to run bombed ministries and provide services; the constant threat of invasion by massed Israeli troops on the "border"; and the breakdown of law and order as Fatah and Hamas gunmen are encouraged to turn on each other. All these factors are designed to one end: the slow demand by Palestinians, civilians and militants alike, to clear out of the hell-hole of Gaza.
The traffic through the tunnels that once served Gaza's smugglers will change directions: where once cigarettes and arms came into Gaza, the likelihood is that soon it will be people passing through those underground passages to leave Gaza and seek a life outside.
If this experiment in human despair works in the small Gaza Strip, its lessons can be applied to much bigger effect in the West Bank ghettoes left behind after convergence. This is how ethnic cleansing looks when it is designed not by butchers in uniforms but by technocrats in suits.
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Jonathan Cook is a British writer and freelance journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.
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Palestine: A war on children
15 Jun 2006
In a cover piece for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how the US and Israel have finally resolved the problem of the Palestinians, who voted for the "wrong" government. They are to starve them while missiles are fired at their homes and picnickers on a beach.
Arthur Miller wrote, "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."
Miller's truth was a glimpsed reality on television on 9 June when Israeli warships fired on families picnicking on a Gaza beach, killing seven people, including three children and three generations. What that represents is a final solution, agreed by the United States and Israel, to the problem of the Palestinians. While the Israelis fire missiles at Palestinian picnickers and homes in Gaza and the West Bank, the two governments are to starve them. The victims will be mostly children.
This was approved on 23 May by the US House of Representatives, which voted 361-37 to cut off aid to non-government organisations that run a lifeline to occupied Palestine. Israel is withholding Palestinian revenues and tax receipts amounting to $60m a month. Such collective punishment, identified as a crime against humanity in the Geneva Conventions, evokes the Nazis' strangulation of the Warsaw ghetto and the American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s. If the perpetrators have lost their minds, as Miller suggested, they appear to understand their barbarism and display their cynicism. "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet," joked Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert.
This is the price Palestinians must pay for their democratic elections in January. The majority voted for the "wrong" party, Hamas, which the US and Israel, with their inimitable penchant for pot-calling-the-kettle-black, describe as terrorist. However, terrorism is not the reason for starving the Palestinians, whose prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, had reaffirmed Hamas's commitment to recognise the Jewish state, proposing only that Israel obey international law and respect the borders of 1967. Israel has refused because, with its apartheid wall under construction, its intention is clear: to take over more and more of Palestine, encircling whole villages and eventually Jerusalem.
The reason Israel fears Hamas is that Hamas is unlikely to be a trusted collaborator in subjugating its own people on Israel's behalf. Indeed, the vote for Hamas was actually a vote for peace. Palestinians were fed up with the failures and corruption of the Arafat era. According to the former US president Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Centre verified the Hamas electoral victory, "public opinion polls show that 80 per cent of Palestinians want a peace agreement with Israel".
How ironic this is, considering that the rise of Hamas was due in no small part to the secret support it received from Israel, which, with the US and Britain, wanted Islamists to undermine secular Arabism and its "moderate" dreams of freedom. Hamas refused to play this Machiavellian game and in the face of Israeli assaults maintained a ceasefire for 18 months. The objective of the Israeli attack on the beach at Gaza was clearly to sabotage the ceasefire. This is a time-honoured tactic.
Now, state terror in the form of a medieval siege is to be applied to the most vulnerable. For the Palestinians, a war against their children is hardly new. A 2004 field study published in the British Medical Journal reported that, in the previous four years, "Two-thirds of the 621 children . . . killed [by the Israelis] at checkpoints . . . on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half the cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound." A quarter of Palestinian infants under the age of five are acutely or chronically malnourished. The Israeli wall "will isolate 97 primary health clinics and 11 hospitals from the populations they serve."
The study described "a man in a now fenced-in village near Qalqilya [who] approached the gate with his seriously ill daughter in his arms and begged the soldiers on duty to let him pass so that he could take her to hospital. The soldiers refused."
Gaza, now sealed like an open prison and terrorised by the sonic boom of Israeli fighter aircraft, has a population of which almost half is under 15. Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children's community health project, told me, "The statistic I personally find unbearable is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma . . . 99.2 per cent had their homes bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shooting; a third saw family members or neighbours injured or killed."
These children suffer unrelenting nightmares and "night terrors" and the dichotomy of having to cope with these conditions. On the one hand, they dream about becoming doctors and nurses "so they can help others"; on the other, this is then overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experience this invariably after attacks by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes are no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".
That these children are now to be punished further may be beyond human comprehension, but there is a logic. Over the years, the Palestinians have avoided falling into the abyss of an all-out civil war, knowing this is what the Israelis want. Destroying their elected government while attempting to build a parallel administration around the collusive Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, may well produce, as the Oxford academic Karma Nabulsi wrote, "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society . . . ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and broken into ethnic and religious tribalism, and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Ariel Sharon] had in store for us."
The struggle in Palestine is an American war, waged from America's most heavily armed foreign military base, Israel. In the west, we are conditioned not to think of the Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" in those terms, just as we are conditioned to think of the Israelis as victims, not illegal and brutal occupiers. This is not to underestimate the ruthless initiatives of the Israeli state, but without F-16s and Apaches and billions of American taxpayers' dollars, Israel would have made peace with the Palestinians long ago. Since the Second World War, the US has given Israel some $140bn, much of it as armaments. According to the Congressional Research Service, the same "aid" budget was to include $28m "to help [Palestinian] children deal with the current conflict situation" and to provide "basic first aid". That has now been vetoed.
Karma Nabulsi's comparison with Iraq is apposite, for the same "policy" applies there. The capture of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a wonderful media event: what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called "action as propaganda", and having little bearing on reality. The Americans and those who act as their bullhorn have their demon - even a video game of his house being blown up. The truth is that Zarqawi was largely their creation. His apparent killing serves an important propaganda purpose, distracting us in the west from the American goal of converting Iraq, like Palestine, into a powerless society of ethnic and religious tribalism. Death squads, formed and trained by veterans of the CIA's "counter-insurgency" in central America, are critical to this. The Special Police Commandos, a CIA creation led by former senior intelligence officers in Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, are perhaps the most brutal. The Zarqawi killing and the myths about his importance also deflect from routine massacres by US soldiers, such as the one at Haditha. Even the puppet prime minister Nouri al-Maliki complains that murderous behaviour of US troops is "a daily occurrence". As I learned in Vietnam, a form of serial killing, then known officially as "body count", is the way the Americans fight their colonial wars.
This is known as "pacification". The asymmetry of a pacified Iraq and a pacified Palestine is clear. As in Palestine, the war in Iraq is against civilians, mostly children. According to Unicef, Iraq once had one of the highest indicators for the well-being of children. Today, a quarter of children between the ages of six months and five years suffer acute or chronic malnutrition, worse than during the years of sanctions. Poverty and disease have risen with each day of the occupation.
In April, in British-occupied Basra, the European aid agency Saving Children from War reported: "The mortality of young children had increased by 30 per cent compared with the Saddam Hussein era." They die because the hospitals have no ventilators and the water supply, which the British were meant to have fixed, is more polluted than ever. Children fall victim to unexploded US and British cluster bombs. They play in areas contaminated by depleted uranium; by contrast, British army survey teams venture there only in full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. Unlike the children they came to "liberate", British troops are given what the Ministry of Defence calls "full biological testing".
Was Arthur Miller right? Do we "internally deny" all this, or do we listen to distant voices? On my last trip to Palestine, I was rewarded, on leaving Gaza, with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children are responsible for this. No one tells them to do it. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and one or two climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it, believing they will tell the world.
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John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s.
He regards eye-witness as the essence of good journalism.
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The world turned upside down
Lindsey German
Monday, July 17, 2006
Are we in the world of Alice Through the Looking Glass or 1984? I can't quite believe how bad are the responses to Israel's attack on Lebanon, and wonder why we have entered a world where lies are truth, where everything is the opposite of what it should be.
My increasing sense of disbelief began with Tony Blair's statement a couple of weeks ago that the Muslim community in Britain had grievances against the West which were 'false'. You might not agree with those grievances, but they are based on fact: Britain did invade Afghanistan and Iraq; the situation does go from bad to worse in both countries; Britain does back Israel as a key ally in the Middle East and does little to help the plight of the Palestinians; and Britain does support some of the worst dictatorships in the Middle East.
The feeling has come back to me in recent days. The BBC news website reports today that Tony Blair and UN secretary general Kofi Annan have called for an international force (aka Britain and the US) to be sent to Lebanon..to stop attacks on Israel. Tony Blair explained this is to 'stop the bombardment coming over into Israel and therefore gives Israel a reason to stop its attacks on Hezbollah'.
Sorry? Hezbollah kidnapped 2 Israeli soldiers and Israel responded by bombing Lebanon, blockading its ports and airports, bombing its roads, and killing so far more than 130 Lebanese civilians.
Yet the main news channels in Britain led yesterday on 8 Israelis killed by a rocket in Haifa, only then going on to mention 16 Lebanese dead in Tyre, bombing of civilian convoys and the fact that Lebanese/Israeli deaths are running at a ratio of more than 5:1.
This painting of Hezbollah as the aggressors against 'plucky little Israel' is sickening enough. But then there's the accusation that Iran is arming Hezbollah. And who's arming Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East and the one possessed of the largest and most deadly arsenal? Israel is the biggest recipient of US military aid, and the only state in the world that can buy arms directly from US arms corporations without the oversight of the US government.
No wonder then that the G8 gathering of the world's largest powers meeting in St Petersburg issued a statement effectively allowing Israel to continue its state terror against its northern neighbour. It contains the following: 'The immediate crisis results from efforts by extremist forces to destabilise the region and to frustrate the aspirations of the Palestinian, Israeli and Lebanese people for democracy and peace.'
Well, the Palestinians' aspiration for democracy and peace was expressed through the democratic election of a Hamas government earlier this year, which the Israelis are trying to destroy. Hezbollah is in the Lebanese government and has mass support. So who exactly is attacking democracy?
We're in a new phase now with this war. As one person put it at our Stop the War steering committee on Saturday, the attack on Iran has already begun. That's why Israel, the US and Britain are so keen to go for Hezbollah, because it makes it easier for them to attack Iran. The threat as they see it of a greater Iran stems from the failure of the occupation of Iraq. And we may be witnessing the changeover from the main reason for war being Iran's nuclear capability to the main reason being its role in terrorism.
Don't expect anything good.
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Lindsey German
Convenor, Stop the War Coalition
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http://www.jkcook.net/Articles2/0254.htm#Top
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=401
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/lindsey/
One thing stands out for me:
"Since the Second World War, the US has given Israel some $140bn, much of it as armaments."
John Pilger
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I posted this up to try and put some balance in this thread. Ignore or read. Reply if you wish - but don't expect any answers from me personally - I know only too well how very little most people understand or even care about what war does to both the victim and the aggressor.
One thing I do believe....
Iran is surrounded and being provoked. They are a dangerous nation to be inciting - and Bush is a dangerous man for edging the west towards a show down.
WWIII is looming for us all - if we don't stop this esculation - and the media will be as accountable as those two criminals Bush and Blair.
Kennedy, weak bastard that he was, would have had no trouble selling this to the American public. Damn it Rove; feed Bush.
