Amen.
Reblog this today.
“‘I am told the people who push the buttons to fire the missiles call these strikes “bug-splats”. It is beyond my imagination how they can lack all mercy and compassion, and carry on doing this for years. They are not human beings.’ In this, however, Mr Khan is wrong, and therein lies the tragedy: the people who killed his brother and thousands of other innocents, and have carried on doing it for years, are indeed human beings — all too human. The lack of mercy and compassion they exhibit is one of our endemic human traits — and one that has been assiduously, relentlessly, deliberately — and profitably — cultivated for years by our bipartisan elites, who sow fear and hatred and dehumanization to advance their agenda of domination, playing upon — and rewarding — what is worst in our common human nature, while mocking, denigrating and punishing what is best.”
Chris Floyd, Blood is Their Argument: The Real Campaign Trail (via theamericanbear)
(via theamericanbear)
“[TW: Torture] But here’s what we do know. Many of those “disappeared” into the CIA’s black sites were tortured and/or illegally subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, were waterboarded 83 and 183 times, respectively. They and other detainees were stripped naked, doused with water, beaten about the face and stomach, slammed into walls, deprived of sleep for days on end, forced into painful stress positions, and confined in small dark boxes for hours at a time. And these were just the “authorized” torture tactics, given a green light by a secret memo written in August 2002 by John Yoo and Jay Bybee from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and specifically okayed by President Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, among others.”
David Cole, Rewarding Impunity via Foreign Policy
We also know, thanks to the CIA’s own Inspector General, that CIA interrogators in the black sites went beyond even the illegal brutality authorized by high-level officials. One detainee was threatened with a handgun and a power drill. A mock execution was staged next to a detainee’s cell. Interrogators threatened to kill the children of another detainee if he didn’t tell them what they wanted to know.
We also know that in 2005, CIA higher-up Jose Rodriguez ordered the destruction of videotapes of two of those interrogations, shortly after the Washington Post revealed the existence of the CIA secret prisons where the interrogations took place, and while the tapes were under request from several courts and a Senate committee looking into charges of abuse.
(via jayaprada)
(via prosveshcheniye)
Graffiti sprayed on a church in Latrun in September reads “Jesus is a monkey” and the names of two West Bank settlements. (Menahem Kahana / AFP/GettyImages)
[TW: Racism] Israeli settlers increase their attacks on Palestinian Christian sites
via The Electronic IntifadaAt the same time that thousands of Christian Zionist tourists descended on Jerusalem last week to display their unequivocal support for Israel, local Christian leaders say they fear a recent increase in attacks on their holy sites signals the potential for future, more extreme violence.
A Franciscan monastery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem was vandalized in early October, as derogatory words about Jesus were painted on the entrance gate alongside the words “Price tag” in Hebrew. “Price tag” violence is the term used to describe acts of vandalism usually carried out by Jewish-Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank in response to Israeli government decisions with which they disagree.
The Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries in the Holy Land expressed its dismay at the incident. “More than anything, the Assembly again asks, that radical changes be made in the educational system, otherwise the same causes will produce the same effects over and over,” it said in a statement (“Franciscan convent on Mount Zion desecrated, ACOHL dismayed,” Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, 2 October).
To date, Israeli police have yet to arrest anyone in connection with the vandalism.
In recent years, Israeli extremists have vandalized Muslim holy sites throughout the West Bank and in so-called “mixed” Jewish-Palestinian cities in Israel.
In October 2011, for instance, a mosque was set on fire in the northern Bedouin town of Tuba Zangariya and the words “Death to Arabs” and “Price Tag” were spray-painted on headstones in a Muslim cemetery in Jaffa.
Despite being condemned by most Israeli politicians, these violent acts have largely gone unpunished. In fact, according to a report by the Alternative Information Center, the Israeli police commander in the West Bank won’t prosecute the individuals responsible for four mosque arsons, despite having DNA evidence to convict them.
“We know, in at least four cases of mosque arson, whom the perpetrators are. We even got a DNA match from a matchbox near one of the mosques set on fire — but it appears this is insufficient for charges,” Major General Amos Yaakov reportedly told Hebrew news website Walla (“Police chief: we have DNA of mosque arsonist, but he won’t be charged,” Alternative News, 9 October).
Suspected Israeli extremists also burned the door of a monastery in Latrun — halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv — in September, and scrawled the words “Jesus is a monkey” on the wall. The attack was likely carried out in connection to a recent evacuation of an illegal Israeli settlement outpost in the West Bank a few days earlier.
In July, Israeli Knesset (parliament) member Michael Ben-Ari tore up a copy of the New Testament. “This abominable book brought about the murder of millions of Jews in the Inquisition,” Ben-Ari reportedly said, adding, “This book and those who sent it belong in the garbage can of history.”
“This is one of the phenomena that we as Armenians who live in this part of the Old City have been facing for many years,” explained Archbishop Aris Shirvanian, Director of the ecumenical and foreign relations department of the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem.
Last November, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that a Jerusalem court threw out an indictment against an Armenian priesthood student who punched an ultra-Orthodox man in the face after the latter spat on him in Jerusalem’s Old City.
“Putting the defendant on trial for a single blow at a man who spat at his face, after suffering the degradation of being spat on for years while walking around in his church robes is a fundamental contravention of the principles of justice and decency,” the judge wrote in his ruling (“Ultra-Orthodox spitting attacks on Old City clergymen becoming daily,” Ha’aretz, 4 November 2011).
According to Archbishop Shirvanian, while spitting incidents have declined in recent months, the Israeli authorities need to do more to stem the problem. “We know that when reports are being made, [the police] sometimes arrest people, detain them for a short while and they release them. Once in a while they may restrain the guilty side from entering the Old City for a week, or two, or a month. But that’s not a real punishment.”
According to Kairos’ Rifat Kassis, attacks on Christian holy sites are only one part of the daily attacks carried out by right-wing Israelis against Palestinians throughout the area.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, settler attacks resulting in physical harm and property damage to Palestinians increased by 32 percent in 2011 compared to 2010 (“Israeli settler violence in the West Bank,” November 2011 [PDF]).
More than 90 percent of complaints filed by Palestinians to the Israeli police in recent years regarding settler violence have been closed without an indictment being filed, the UN agency also found.
(via prosveshcheniye)
“Attacks on Palestinian farmers aren’t always about theft though, sometimes they are just about spite, as 162 complaints have been filed with Israeli police about settlers chopping down or otherwise uprooting olive trees and other fruit orchards. Of the 162 complaints, only one ever led to an actual indictment, and settlers continue to believe, quite correctly it seems, that they can attack Palestinians with virtual impunity.”—
Settlers Continue to Attack Palestinian Farms, Orchards With Impunity
Allegations of stolen land are as old as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, particularly in the occupied West Bank. Some settlers are taking this to ridiculous extremes, however, renting tractors and literally stealing dirt by the ton from Palestinian farmers.
To understand how something like this is even possible, we need to look at the meandering Israeli military “barrier of separation” built across the West Bank. In many cases, the giant wall cuts directly through Palestinian-owned lands, leaving a farmer’s home on one side of the wall and his fields on the other, leaving the fields unworked, unguarded.
In these cases, it is trivial for the settlers to “steal land” by the truckfull, and carry it off elsewhere. Practically, it is cheaper than buying fill dirt, and the Israeli military virtually never follows up on complaints from PalestiniansSee more:
Even Israeli agency warns of wall’s damage to Battir, historic West Bank village via The Electronic Intifada
Seam Zones Turn 50,000 Palestinians into “Internally Stuck Persons”
Take Action: Free Palestinian farmers and agricultural workers targeted for imprisonment
(via prosveshcheniye)
Colonised and coloniser, empire’s poison infects us all | George Monbiot
Over the gates of Auschwitz were the words “Work Makes You Free”. Over the gates of the Solovetsky camp in Lenin’s gulag: “Through Labour – Freedom!”. Over the gates of the Ngenya detention camp, run by the British in Kenya: “Labour and Freedom”. Dehumanisation appears to follow an almost inexorable course.
Last week three elderly Kenyans established the right to sue the British government for the torture that they suffered – castration, beating and rape – in the Kikuyu detention camps it ran in the 1950s.
Many tens of thousands were detained and tortured in the camps. I won’t spare you the details: we have been sparing ourselves the details for far too long. Large numbers of men were castrated with pliers. Others were raped, sometimes with the use of knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels and scorpions. Women had similar instruments forced into their vaginas. The guards and officials sliced off ears and fingers, gouged out eyes, mutilated women’s breasts with pliers, poured paraffin over people and set them alight. Untold thousands died.
The government’s secret archive, revealed this April, shows that the attorney general, the colonial governor and the colonial secretary knew what was happening. The governor ensured that the perpetrators had legal immunity: including the British officers reported to him for roasting prisoners to death. In public the colonial secretary lied and kept lying.
Little distinguishes the British imperial project from any other. In all cases the purpose of empire was loot, land and labour. When people resisted (as some of the Kikuyu did during the Mau Mau rebellion), the response everywhere was the same: extreme and indiscriminate brutality, hidden from public view by distance and official lies.
Successive governments have sought to deny the Kikuyu justice: destroying most of the paperwork, lying about the existence of the rest, seeking to have the case dismissed on technicalities. Their handling of this issue, and the widespread British disavowal of what happened in Kenya, reflects the way this country has been brutalised by its colonial history. Empire did almost as much harm to the imperial nations as it did to their subject peoples.
In his book Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist shows how the ideology that led to Hitler’s war and the Holocaust was developed by the colonial powers. Imperialism required an exculpatory myth. It was supplied, primarily, by British theorists.
In 1799 Charles White began the process of identifying Europeans as inherently superior to other peoples. By 1850 the disgraced anatomist Robert Knox had developed the theme into fully fledged racism. His book The Races of Man asserted that dark-skinned people were destined to be enslaved and then annihilated by the “lighter races”. Dark meant almost everyone: “What a field of extermination lies before the Saxon, Celtic and Sarmatian races!”
Remarkable as it may sound, this view soon came to dominate British thought. In common with most of the political class, W Winwood Reade, Alfred Russell Wallace, Herbert Spencer, Frederick Farrar, Francis Galton, Benjamin Kidd and even Charles Darwin saw the extermination of dark-skinned people as an inevitable law of nature. Some of them argued that Europeans had a duty to speed it up: both to save the integrity of the species and to put the inferior “races” out of their misery.
These themes were picked up by German theorists. In 1893 Alexander Tille, drawing on British writers, claimed that “it is the right of the stronger race to annihilate the lower”. In 1901 Friedrich Ratzel argued in Der Lebensraum that Germany had a right and duty, like Europeans in the Americas, to displace “primitive peoples”. In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained that the German empire’s eastward expansion would mirror the western and southern extension of British interests. He systematised and industrialised what imperial nations had been doing for five centuries. The scale was greater, the location different, the ideology broadly the same.
I believe that the brutalisation of empire also made the pointless slaughter of the first world war possible. A ruling class that had shut down its feelings to the extent that it could engineer a famine in India in the 1870s in which between 12 million and 29 million people died was capable of almost anything. Empire had tested not only the long-range weaponry that would be deployed in northern France, but also the ideas.
Nor have we wholly abandoned them. Commenting on the Kikuyu case in the Daily Mail, Max Hastings charged that the plaintiffs had come to London “to exploit our feeble-minded justice system”. Hearing them “represents an exercise in state masochism”. I suspect that if members of Hastings’ club had been treated like the Kikuyu, he would be shouting from the rooftops for redress. But Kenyans remain, as colonial logic demanded, the other, bereft of the features and feelings that establish our common humanity.
So, in the eyes of much of the elite, do welfare recipients, “problem families”, Muslims and asylum seekers. The process of dehumanisation, so necessary to the colonial project, turns inwards. Until this nation is prepared to recognise what happened and how it was justified, Britain, like the countries it occupied, will remain blighted by imperialism.
“Injection wells have proliferated over the last 60 years, in large part because they are the cheapest, most expedient way to manage hundreds of billions of gallons of industrial waste generated in the U.S. each year. Yet the dangers of injection are well known: In accidents dating back to the 1960s, toxic materials have bubbled up to the surface or escaped, contaminating aquifers that store supplies of drinking water. There are now more than 150,000 Class 2 wells in 33 states, into which oil and gas drillers have injected at least 10 trillion gallons of fluid. The numbers have increased rapidly in recent years, driven by expanding use of hydraulic fracturing to reach previously inaccessible resources.”
Abrahm Lustgarten, The Trillion-Gallon Loophole: Lax Rules for Drillers that Inject Pollutants Into the Earth via Common Dreams (via arielnietzsche)
(via prosveshcheniye)
“The Bush administration sent 44 drone strikes to Pakistan; the Obama administration sent over 300. The intended target is the Taliban, which has been hit, but the drones also have killed an appalling number of civilians. Between 500 and 900 civilians have been killed, over 1000 injured. The democratic government looks like a joke for legislating against drone strikes and having no power to do anything about them. And what is the stated purpose of drone strikes in Pakistan? Spreading democracy.”
From the drug war to the war on terror, the United States is wreaking havoc around the globe.
Obama’s drone strikes involve CIA’s tactic of attacking rescuers, funerals and weddings. I once met a young man from one of the federally administrated tribal agencies (where the US drone strikes occur) and he said something (in Pashto) I’ll never forget: “No one cares if we’re killed today or tomorrow. No one.”
I have nothing else to add.
(via mehreenkasana)
Democratic Leaders Undermine Israeli-Palestinian Peace and Their Own Procedures
In a stunning violation of its own rules, the wishes of the majority of delegates at its national convention, and positions taken by the United Nations and virtually every country in the world, the Democratic Party leadership pushed through an amendment to its platform early during its proceedings on Wednesday, with barely half the delegates present and without allowing for any discussion or debate, stating that Jerusalem “is and will remain the capital of Israel” and should be “undivided.”
The language, as foreign policy analysts noted, is in “in direct opposition to longstanding U.S. policy on Jerusalem” that the status of the city should be determined by talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, both of whom desire Jerusalem as their capital, and that the city should not be unilaterally recognized as the capital of either Israel or Palestine until then. Most observers have recognized that a workable two-state solution would include having Jewish-populated western Jerusalem recognized as the capital of Israel and the predominantly Arab part of eastern Jerusalem—currently under Israeli military occupation—as the capital of a Palestinian state.
The amendment to the platform, however, ignores Palestinian claims to the city completely, which—combined with the insistence that the city be “undivided”—could be interpreted as a call for exclusive Israeli control. By contrast, a recent poll showed that Democrats by a nearly 2:1 margin believe that Jerusalem should be divided between Israelis and Palestinians rather than controlled exclusively by Israel.
Virtually no country currently recognizes Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. Neither the United States nor any other country currently has its embassy in Jerusalem—nearly all foreign embassies are located instead in Tel Aviv.
Convention chairman and Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa put the amendment to the floor, along with another amendment to include mention of God in the platform, for a voice vote, noting that a two-thirds majority was necessary for adoption of the amendment. He looked surprised when the “nay” votes appeared to outnumber the “aye” votes. He called the motion a second time with the same results. He then called the motion a third time, still way short of the required two-thirds majority and probably still short of even a simple majority, but he claimed that the motion had somehow received at least two-thirds vote anyway and declared the motion carried.
Outraged delegates in the majority started booing at the chair for his extraordinary abuse of power. The media jumped on the unprecedented discord in what had until then been a very unified and orderly convention, while leading Republicans and conservative commentators began claiming that Democrats were “booing God and Jerusalem.”
As an illustration of the depth of the dishonesty in the Democratic Party leadership, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman and Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed that the vote was “absolutely two-thirds” and that “there wasn’t any discord.” Afterwards, CNN’s Anderson Cooper observed that the DNC chair must live in an “alternate universe.”
Pushing through the amendment was in part a reaction to Republican criticisms that the Obama administration—despite providing record amounts of taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel’s rightist government and blocking the United Nations from challenging Israeli violations of international humanitarian law—was somehow not supportive enough of Israel. It appears, then, that President Obama and other Democratic leaders were more concerned about assuaging right-wing Republicans than honoring the beliefs of members of their own party or following their own convention rules.
Indeed, the Democratic leadership was so desperate to push through this right-wing amendment that the chair was willing to lie in front of a nationally televised audience that an amendment had passed by a two-thirds majority voice vote when it was obvious to any viewer or listener that, despite three separate attempts, it had not. And they did so despite the likelihood that it would create a chaotic and angry scene on the convention floor that the media and the Republicans would exploit to the fullest.
It was also a demonstration of just how determined the Democratic Party leadership is to undermine the Middle East peace process and weaken international law, even if it means running roughshod over their members and thereby hurting their chances in November.
The craven way in which the Jerusalem amendment was pushed through demonstrates that the Democratic Party is not a democratic party. It has shown to the world an essentially authoritarian mindset, both in terms of its willingness to undermine international law in its support of the expansionist goals of allied right-wing governments as well as its willingness to ignore its own rules and overrule the majority of the elected delegates at its national convention.
This raises some critical questions for Democrats as we move into the final three months of the 2012 campaign: If the leadership refuses to respect party members, why should party members respect the leadership? And why should ordinary Democrats work to re-elect leaders who put their own right-wing agenda ahead of the beliefs of the party’s more progressive majority?
