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Gaza: The Untold Story
Ramzy Baroud
Conquerors came and went, and Gaza stood where it still stands today. This was the recurring lesson for generations, even millennia. Its modern conquerors are as unpitying as its ancient ones. But its people are defiant as they have always been, hell-bent on surviving, says Ramzy Baroud.
It’s incomprehensible that a region such as the Gaza Strip, so rich with history, so saturated with defiance, can be reduced to a few blurbs, sound bites and reductionist assumptions, convenient but deceptive, vacant of any relevant meaning, or even true analytical value.
The fact is that there is more to the Gaza Strip than 1.5 million hungry Palestinians, who are supposedly paying the price for Hamas’s militancy, or Israel’s ‘collective punishment’, whichever way the media decide to brand the problem.
More importantly, Gaza’s existence since time immemorial must not be juxtaposed by its proximity to Israel, failure or success in ‘providing’ a tiny Israeli town – itself built on conquered land that was seen only 60 years ago as part of the Gaza Province – with its need for security. It’s this very expectation that made the killing and wounding of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza a price worth paying, in the callous eyes of many.
A brief Hate statement...
Layla Anwar
I really hate America, Americans, their culture, their ways, their accent, their politics, their arrogance, their stupidity, their ignorance...
I really can't stand Americans. I can't stand their men, their women, their country, everything they represent...
I truly, deeply, sincerly hate them.
I will elevate this hatred to an Art form.
What colors do you think I should use ? I love colors and I find them to be a colorless people...
So what colors should I use ? Gray, Black or Red ?
Or maybe just White ?
I have this idea of taking an old sheet, a dirty sheet...burn the edges, stab it with knifes and make holes in it, over a million holes, then throw in some bright red, like rain drops...
Who are the fools that reward Israel's criminal behaviour?
Stuart Littlewood
Members of the European Parliament recently took a critical view of proposals to upgrade the EU-Israel Association Agreement and put down amendments designed to toughen up the conditions. "It's time for the Israeli Government to stop considering itself above the law and start respecting it,” warned Luisa Morgantini, the Parliament’s vice-president.
As a result the vote was postponed – “a political stunt”, said the frustrated Israel lobby. In the meantime all 27 EU ministers voted unanimously to approve the upgrade. However it is not a done deal just yet. The EU Parliament still has to vote on this.
Light REDD: The Looming Tragedy of Carbon Markets Paying to Destroy Ancient Forests
Dr. Glen Barry
Using carbon funds, the world's governments are poised to subsidize ancient forest logging, claiming it benefits the Earth's climate. REDD's potential support of "low impact" logging of ancient forests, and conversion of natural forests to tree farms, fails the climate, biodiversity and biosphere.
Plans to pay for rainforest protection using funds from carbon markets progressed during this week's UN climate talks. I have long promoted the deceptively simple idea of paying to keep rainforests standing, yet am far from jubilant with the results. It appears first time, industrial logging of ancient forests -- through so-called low-impact and certified logging, and the conversion of these and other natural forests to plantations -- is falsely considered as having carbon benefits, and will be paid for with our tax dollars and carbon offsets.
Electric cars will not cure environmental woes
Diana Furchtgott-Roth
The world is falling in love with plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars. President-elect Obama wants to put 1 million on the road by 2015. GM features them, particularly the Chevy Volt, in its new business plan for a debut in 2010. The EU wants them to shrink greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 by 20% from 1990 levels. This week the Chinese auto company BYD began selling the world’s first commercially-available plug-in hybrid sedan.
No matter that these cars are not widely available; that they are priced far above traditional models; that many have a short range, making them useful only for local trips; that batteries may be prone to catching fire; and that many motorists park on the street, where charging is impractical.
For some, these issues pale in importance to saving the planet from harmful emissions of carbon, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide—all of which are released from internal combustion engine vehicles. If battery powered cars reduce emissions, environmentalists argue, they should be produced and consumers should be enticed to buy them.
Israel hosts anti-Islam conference
From Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem.
Israel on Sunday, 14 December, hosted a virulently anti-Islam conference in Jerusalem, with a number of fascist-minded speakers from Israel and abroad taking part in the one-day event.
The conference was addressed by notorious Islamophobes such as Daniel Pipes, Dutch Legislator Greet Wilders and right-wing Israeli lawmaker Aryeh Eldad.
Wilders, a self-confessed hater of Islam, praised Israel for holding the conference in occupied Jerusalem, saying that it was the time for such an event to take place in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe.
He added, however, that the “cost of security would be much higher in Holland than in Israel.” After making characteristically venomous remarks about Islam, the Quran and Muslims, Wilders received a standing ovation, reflecting growing fascist trends in Israel.
Blair – For Virtue, Vibrio and God
David Halpin
David Halpin considers the life and crimes of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair whose blood-stained imprints continue to wrack the lives of innocent Palestinians and Iraqis.
The paramount war criminal used more tons of aviation fuel flying to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington 10 days ago. The CFR sounds like one of the more benign “think” tanks among the hundreds out there. On its board sits Mrs “The Price is Worth It” Albright and General Plutonium Powell. The gist of the speech given by the envoy for the Quartet was two fold.
Firstly the natives in the ineptly named West Bank (the west side of the Jordan Valley having been robbed from them) have been pacified in Jenin by Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces. The quisling nature of these forces, who were trained by the CIA in Jericho and Jordan, escaped mention of course. So too did the fact that these forces often go for Palestinian "targets" provided by Israel. Ord Wingate trained the "special night squads" in the 1930s and they included trainee Zionist terrorists. The brutal methods spawned by the British mandate have bore fruiting bodies in Israel. Now, the PA has taken the bloodied baton.
Stripping Israel of Its Blanket Immunity
Joharah Baker
[PHOTO: Despite the Israeli High Court decision on 6 September 1999, outlawing the use of arbitrary torture as an interrogation method, methods of torture are still applied by Israeli interrogators of Palestinian detainees (photo by TRC).]
Politics is a funny game, and as the popular saying goes, also makes strange bedfellows. That is why, when well-known adversaries become unlikely allies, most people are not necessarily fazed or even remotely surprised. Human rights, however, is a different story. Designed to be clear-cut, human rights are supposedly universally applied across the board, regardless of political considerations, race, religion or gender. That is why, when Israel's closest friends are also the world's most democratic ones, Palestinians and their supporters chalk up the inconsistencies to politics. However, when the issue comes to basic human rights, even the most unfazed of us is shocked at just how much Israel can get away with.
On December 14, UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur to the Palestinian Territories, Richard Falk, was deported from Israel after arriving at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport from Geneva. Falk, an elderly Jewish American professor, was forced to spend the night in one of Ben Gurion's infamous holding cells before being transported back to Switzerland.
Zeitgeist: The Withering Away of Europe's Anti-War Spirit
Gaither Stewart
Sarkozy, War and the Grandeur of La Douce France
“Non, rien de rien, je ne regrette rien!” (As sung by Edith Piaf from the Eiffel Tower to celebrate the end of World War II)
(Paris) After the slaughter of World War II, the cry of “Never Again War” echoed across Europe. That war had cost over 70,000,000 lives, half of whom civilians, and—lest one forget—nearly half of them were Russians. So intense was the anti-war spirit then that the new Republic of Italy born from the ashes of Fascism, a nation which lost nearly 500,000 lives, wrote into its new Constitution: “Italy repudiates war.” That article is more than a political consideration. Modern Italy’s Constitution put the anti-war position in an ethical-moral framework. One reason for the anti-war spirit on the Continent was that the chain of wars and colonial adventures had injected into the veins of Europe a poison that led also inevitably to Auschwitz.
In later times that path led also from Hiroshima to Baghdad, a degradation and an atmosphere that civilized man must reject and abhor. Yet the President Elect of the failing US empire is already hemming and hawing. Preventive war is apparently still OK, certainly not repudiated. Someday—not within the promised sixteen months of “change and hope”—someday US troops just might leave Iraq. Moreover, the unending war in Afghanistan must be won, and that, Washington insists, with Europe’s help.
Robert Kagan’s Mythology of U.S. Exceptionalism
Jim Miles
Overview
Robert Kagan is a difficult subject to analyze. At times his writing seems to be very honest and directly critical of U.S. intentions as well as being clearly honest about the sometimes “dangerous nation” aspect of its history and foreign policy. Underlying it all however is his own patriotic blindness that ends up always supporting U.S. exceptionalism and uniqueness, always expressing the egocentric viewpoint that the U.S. is the indispensable nation. The U.S. is not indispensable.
Nor is it a bastion of “democratic capitalism” that is the only way forward from here, here being a point in renewed history – according to Kagan – in which there are either “democrats” or “autocrats.” Kagan does not see in shades of gray, countries and politicians are either one or the other. His arguments, while seemingly coherent at certain points tend to dissolve into self-contradiction, the main contradiction being the solid criticism that “what you do speaks so loud I can’t hear what you say.” For all that Kagan tries to present as the positives of the U.S., of the underlying good intentions of the U.S. - at the same time recognizing its sometimes hard handed methods of interfering in other countries - he really does not understand that perceptions built on those hard handed actions over-ride all the rhetoric and jingoism about the greatness and indispensability of the U.S. as the world’s guide to a better world.
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