Sugar: The Bitter Truth

The processed foods industry knew that their products would cause an epidemic of obesity among their customers, but they also realized that their bottom line would see a huge boost. The FDA and USDA provided all the cover needed and then some by pointing the finger in the wrong direction. The "low fat" foods fad was a complete hoax.

UCtelevision
July 30, 2009

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Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to ...

Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin. Series: UCSF Mini Medical School for the Public.

Honduran Coup Myths Dispelled

New Reports Demolish Justifications for Ouster of Zelaya

By STEWART J. LAWRENCE - October 27, 2009

Two new reports dealing with the June 28 military coup in Honduras have demolished the arguments of the current de facto government and its foreign apologists that the coup was consistent with the Honduran constitution and that most Hondurans welcomed the illegal ouster of the country’s democratically elected president, Mel Zelaya.

In a recent commentary published on the Forbes Magazine web site, two veteran human rights lawyers, Juan Mendez and Viviana Krsticevic, take to task the authors of a recent analysis prepared for the US Congress that suggested that the Honduran constitution allowed the Honduran Congress to remove Zelaya from office. In fact, the Honduran Congress has no formal impeachment power and the vote to remove Zelaya was merely a legislative decree that was of dubious legality, the authors note. In 2003, the Honduran Supreme Court had struck down the efforts of the Honduran legislature to assert its independent authority – but according to the authors, that didn’t keep the legislature from invoking this same authority to try – wrongly - to justify legal action against Zelaya..

The Honduran Supreme Court was also complicit in violating the Honduran Constitution, Mendez and Krsticevic note. Most notably, the Court ordered the armed forces to capture Zelaya and search the presidential residence, despite the fact that article 293 of the Constitution explicitly establishes that the national police, not the army, execute all legal decisions and resolutions, in accordance with the principle of civilian rule. There were also due process violations that occurred throughout the criminal proceedings against Zelaya. Zelaya was never read his rights, informed of the charges against him, or provided access to his lawyers while being detained, then forcibly expelled from the country.

And then there is the matter of the expulsion itself, which as Mendez and Krsticevic note, has no grounding whatsoever in Honduran law. In theory, Zelaya should have been held for trial, or arrested and then released, pending trial. Amazingly, the Supreme Court cited the threat of a “flight risk” to justify an indefinite detention of Zelaya – as if Zelaya had any interest in leaving office, much less the country.

The only “flight” that occurred, in fact, was the airplane trip that Zelaya took into exile courtesy of the armed forces. They rousted him at night in his pajamas and at the point of a bayonet, demanded that he leave – or else. Some “democracy.”

The aftermath of the coup has also given rise to speculation, and charges, that whatever the legality of Zelaya’s ouster, most Hondurans were fed up with his rule, and were happy to see him go. Conservatives have noted that protests on Zelaya’s behalf have been fairly limited, while Zelaya’s supporters, and international human rights observers, have pointed to post-coup military repression, including extra-judicial killings, and other military abuses, as the primary reason for cautious popular protest.

Now, a recent polling survey conducted by the highly respected polling firm Greenberg, Quinlan and Rosner thoroughly debunks the latest conservative propaganda. According to the poll, conducted just two weeks ago, 60% of Hondurans still oppose Zelaya’s ouster, and just 38% support it. 19% say Zelaya had performed “excellently” in office while 48% say his performance was “good” (a total of 67%).

By contrast, by a margin of 2-1, Hondurans say they have a negative opinion of the coup plotter who supplanted Zelaya, Roberto Micheletti, the current de facto president.

The survey also found that contrary to conservative propaganda, most Hondurans (by a 53% to 43% margin) support amending the country’s Constitution to allow the president to be re-elected – the very issue that became the pretext for Zelaya’s illegal ouster. Zelaya, of course, never actually tried to stand for re-election. He was accused of “high treason” and overthrown merely for suggesting that ordinary Hondurans be polled on the matter in a strictly non-binding referendum.

Therefore, the pollsters at Greenberg, Rosner and Quinlan polling should probably consider themselves lucky. In the US, clients sometimes fire you when a poll brings them bad news. In Honduras, they throw you in jail, tear gas you – or worse.

Stewart Lawrence is a recognized specialist in Latino and Latin American affairs, and author of numerous policy reports and publications. He can be reached at stewlaw2009@gmail.com

Source

IRGC says no guards arrested in Pakistan

Press TV - October 26, 2009 15:54:42 GMT

After media reports claimed that 11 members of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps were arrested for crossing into Pakistan, the IRGC moves to reject the allegation.

Earlier in the day, reports claimed that Pakistani forces detained members of the IRGC inside Pakistani borders, linking the incident to an earlier request by top IRGC commander Mohammad-Ali Jafari for permission for his forces to confront Jundullah terrorists in Pakistan.

Reacting to the report, head of the public relations office of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps Brigadier General Sharif told Press TV that the detainees were not members of the IRGC.

"That part of the report related to Sepah [IRGC] lacks credibility and is not true," Brig. Gen. Sharif said on Monday.

Another informed source told a Press TV correspondent that those arrested were Iranian border police who were hunting down fuel smugglers.

"In line with efforts to fight fuel smugglers, a number of Iranian border police forces chasing fuel smugglers entered Pakistani soil by mistake," he explained.

AGW has most of the characteristics of an “urban legend”

by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D. - October 24, 2009

Urban legend? Gators don't really live in the sewer.

About.com describes an “urban legend” as an apocryphal (of questionable authenticity), secondhand story, told as true and just plausible enough to be believed, about some horrific…series of events….it’s likely to be framed as a cautionary tale. Whether factual or not, an urban legend is meant to be believed. In lieu of evidence, however, the teller of an urban legend is apt to rely on skillful storytelling and reference to putatively trustworthy sources.

I contend that the belief in human-caused global warming as a dangerous event, either now or in the future, has most of the characteristics of an urban legend. Like other urban legends, it is based upon an element of truth. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, and since greenhouse gases warm the lower atmosphere, more CO2 can be expected, at least theoretically, to result in some level of warming.

But skillful storytelling has elevated the danger from a theoretical one to one of near-certainty. The actual scientific basis for the plausible hypothesis that humans could be responsible for most recent warming is contained in the cautious scientific language of many scientific papers. Unfortunately, most of the uncertainties and caveats are then minimized with artfully designed prose contained in the Summary for Policymakers (SP) portion of the report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This Summary was clearly meant to instill maximum alarm from a minimum amount of direct evidence.

Next, politicians seized upon the SP, further simplifying and extrapolating its claims to the level of a “climate crisis”. Other politicians embellished the tale even more by claiming they “saw” global warming in Greenland as if it was a sighting of Sasquatch, or that they felt it when they fly in airplanes.

Just as the tales of marauding colonies of alligators living in New York City sewers are based upon some kernel of truth, so too is the science behind anthropogenic global warming. But there is a big difference between reports of people finding pet alligators that have escaped their owners, versus city workers having their limbs torn off by roving colonies of subterranean monsters.

In the case of global warming, the “putatively trustworthy sources” would be the consensus of the world’s scientists. The scientific consensus, after all, says that global warming is…is what? Is happening? Is severe? Is manmade? Is going to burn the Earth up if we do not act? It turns out that those who claim consensus either do not explicitly state what that consensus is about, or they make up something that supports their preconceived notions.

If the consensus is that the presence of humans on Earth has some influence on the climate system, then I would have to even include myself in that consensus. After all, the same thing can be said of the presence of trees on Earth, and hopefully we have at least the same rights as trees do. But too often the consensus is some vague, fill-in-the-blank, implied assumption where the definition of “climate change” includes the phrase “humans are evil”.

It is a peculiar development that scientific truth is now decided through voting. A relatively recent survey of climate scientists who do climate research found that 97.4% agreed that humans have a “significant” effect on climate. But the way the survey question was phrased borders on meaninglessness. To a scientist, “significant” often means non-zero. The survey results would have been quite different if the question was, “Do you believe that natural cycles in the climate system have been sufficiently researched to exclude them as a potential cause of most of our recent warming?”

And it is also a good bet that 100% of those scientists surveyed were funded by the government only after they submitted research proposals which implicitly or explicitly stated they believed in anthropogenic global warming to begin with. If you submit a research proposal to look for alternative explanations for global warming (say, natural climate cycles), it is virtually guaranteed you will not get funded. Is it any wonder that scientists who are required to accept the current scientific orthodoxy in order to receive continued funding, then later agree with that orthodoxy when surveyed? Well, duh.

In my experience, the public has the mistaken impression that a lot of climate research has gone into the search for alternative explanations for warming. They are astounded when I tell them that virtually no research has been performed into the possibility that warming is just part of a natural cycle generated within the climate system itself.

Too often the consensus is implied to be that global warming is so serious that we must do something now in the form of public policy to avert global catastrophe. What? You don’t believe that there are alligators in New York City sewer system? How can you be so unconcerned about the welfare of city workers that have to risk their lives by going down there every day? What are you, some kind of Holocaust-denying, Neanderthal flat-Earther?

It makes complete sense that in this modern era of scientific advances and inventions that we would so readily embrace a compelling tale of global catastrophe resulting from our own excesses. It’s not a new genre of storytelling, of course, as there were many B-movies in the 1950s whose horror themes were influenced by scientists’ development of the atomic bomb.

Our modern equivalent is the 2004 movie, “Day After Tomorrow”, in which all kinds of physically impossible climatic events occur in a matter of days. In one scene, super-cold stratospheric air descends to the Earth’s surface, instantly freezing everything in its path. The meteorological truth, however, is just the opposite. If you were to bring stratospheric air down to the surface, heating by compression would make it warmer than the surrounding air, not colder.

I’m sure it is just coincidence that “Day After Tomorrow” was directed by Roland Emmerich, who also directed the 2006 movie “Independence Day,” in which an alien invasion nearly exterminates humanity. After all, what’s the difference? Aliens purposely killing off humans, or humans accidentally killing off humans? Either way, we all die.

But a global warming catastrophe is so much more believable. After all, climate change does happen, right? So why not claim that ALL climate change is now the result of human activity? And while we are at it, let’s re-write climate history so that we get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice age, with a new ingenious hockey stick-shaped reconstruction of past temperatures that makes it look like climate never changed until the 20th Century? How cool would that be?

The IPCC thought it was way cool…until it was debunked, after which it was quietly downgraded in the IPCC reports from the poster child for anthropogenic global warming, to one possible interpretation of past climate.

And let’s even go further and suppose that the climate system is so precariously balanced that our injection of a little bit of that evil plant food, carbon dioxide, pushes our world over the edge, past all kinds of imaginary tipping points, with the Greenland ice sheet melting away, and swarms of earthquakes being the price of our indiscretions.

In December, hundreds of bureaucrats from around the world will once again assemble, this time in Copenhagen, in their attempts to forge a new international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. And as has been the case with every other UN meeting of its type, the participants simply assume that the urban legend is true. Indeed, these politicians and governmental representatives need it to be true. Their careers and political power now depend upon it. And the fact that they hold their meetings in all of the best tourist destinations in the world, enjoying the finest exotic foods, suggests that they do not expect to ever have to be personally inconvenienced by whatever restrictions they try to impose on the rest of humanity.

If you present these people with evidence that the global warming crisis might well be a false alarm, you are rewarded with hostility and insults, rather than expressions of relief. The same can be said for most lay believers of the urban legend. I say “most” because I once encountered a true believer who said he hoped my research into the possibility that climate change is mostly natural will eventually be proved correct.

Unfortunately, just as we are irresistibly drawn to disasters – either real ones on the evening news, or ones we pay to watch in movie theaters – the urban legend of a climate crisis will persist, being believed by those whose politics and worldviews depend upon it. Only when they finally realize what a new treaty will cost them in loss of freedoms and standard of living will those who oppose our continuing use of carbon-based energy begin to lose their religion.

Source

Where is this heading? Read:

US Climate Change Bill Promotes Nuclear Industry

"A new era for the nuclear industry"

Dr. Chu's Energy Bait and Switch

and

(Nuclear) Energy bill moves to the Senate

International day of climate change funded by.....

Kenny's Sideshow
October 24, 2009

Anytime there are world wide organized demonstrations urging action on global warming/climate change, my first question is who funds them and who really benefits.

The Wanaka Wastebusters gather at a local ski mountain in New Zealand to call for 350 to protect their snow.

From seabeds to mountaintops, people around the world were staging a day of demonstrations Saturday to call for urgent action on climate change.

The events were being coordinated by a group called 350.org, whose name refers to the parts per million of carbon dioxide it considers the safe upper limit for our atmosphere.

The group said it wants to "inspire the world to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis" ahead of the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December.

In all, more than 5,400 rallies and demonstrations were scheduled to take place around the world, all of them centered on the number 350, the group said. {more -CNN}

So if you guessed the name Rockefeller as the major known backer of 350.org, you would be correct.

'350' is a subsidiary of the Sustainable Markets Foundation, an offshoot of The Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

In 2006, David Rockefeller Sr. made a $225 million bequest to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a foundation he formed with his four siblings.

This is the same David Rockefeller whose quotes have been well publicized and have exposed his agenda.

We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto determination practiced in past centuries.-- David Rockefeller in an address to a Trilateral Commission meeting in June of 1991

This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long - We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order. Sept. 23, 1994

"For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will.

If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it." from David Rockefeller's autobiography 'Memoirs'

So I'm thinking that anything that has to do with Rockefeller's money is never in the best interests of people or the earth. Do these tens of thousands participating in the '350' social engineering 'events' really understand the background of their financial leaders or are they, as Rockefeller's buddy Kissinger might say, 'useful idiots?'

Question: Where are you at the antiwar rallies? The pentagon is the largest polluter on the planet.

A comprehensive list of Rockefeller Brothers Fund grants over $200,000 which in some way aim at “Combating Global Warming”:

Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, Inc. 6/18/2009 $200,000 Sustainable Development New York City
1Sky Education Fund 6/18/2009 $250,000 Sustainable Development United States
Center for Climate Strategies, Inc. 6/18/2009 $350,000 Sustainable Development United States
Evangelical Environmental Network 6/18/2009 $200,000 Sustainable Development United States
American Council on Renewable Energy 6/18/2009 $350,000 Sustainable Development United States
Sustainable Markets Foundation 3/12/2009 $200,000 Sustainable Development United States
Rockefeller Family Fund, Inc. 3/12/2009 $200,000 Sustainable Development United States
Aspen Institute, Inc., The 11/20/2008 $600,000 Sustainable Development Global
American Council on Renewable Energy 11/20/2008 $250,000 Sustainable Development United States
President and Directors Georgetown College (Georgetown University), The 11/20/2008 $700,000 Sustainable Development United States
Center for American Progress 11/20/2008 $250,000 Sustainable Development United States
Center for Climate Strategies, Inc. 10/7/2008 $350,000 Sustainable Development United States
Resource Media A Nonprofit Corporation 6/19/2008 $200,000 Sustainable Development United States
Corporate Ethics International 6/19/2008 $200,000 Sustainable Development United States
Earth Island Institute 3/13/2008 $350,000 Sustainable Development United States
2030 Inc. 3/13/2008 $250,000 Sustainable Development United States
Better World Fund 3/13/2008 $400,000 Sustainable Development United States
Ceres, Inc 3/13/2008 $500,000 Sustainable Development United States
International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives U.S.A. Inc. 3/13/2008 $650,000 Sustainable Development United States
Regional Plan Association, Inc. 3/13/2008 $200,000 Sustainable Development New York City
1Sky Education Fund 12/13/2007 $1,000,000 Sustainable Development United States
American Council on Renewable Energy 12/13/2007 $500,000 Sustainable Development United States
Corporate Ethics International 12/13/2007 $250,000 Sustainable Development Canada
Public Interest Projects, Inc. 12/13/2007 $350,000 Sustainable Development United States
Center for Climate Strategies, Inc. 12/13/2007 $400,000 Sustainable Development United States
Better World Fund 10/11/2007 $200,000 Sustainable Development United States
Rocky Mountain Institute 6/14/2007 $300,000 Sustainable Development United States
National Environmental Trust 6/14/2007 $300,000 Sustainable Development United States
Regional Plan Association, Inc. 6/14/2007 $200,000 Sustainable Development New York City
National Wildlife Federation 6/14/2007 $250,000 Sustainable Development United States
Rainforest Action Network 6/14/2007 $200,000 Sustainable Development United States
Arabella Legacy Fund 6/14/2007 $300,000 Sustainable Development United States
Clean Energy Group 3/15/2007 $200,000 Sustainable Development United States
SmartPower Connecticut, Inc. 3/15/2007 $200,000 Sustainable Development United States
National Religious Partnership for the Environment Inc. 12/14/2006 $400,000 Sustainable Development United States
Center for Climate Strategies, Inc. 12/14/2006 $550,000 Sustainable Development United States
National Environmental Trust 10/12/2006 $300,000 Sustainable Development United States
Center for Climate Strategies, Inc. 10/12/2006 $350,000 Sustainable Development United States
Resource Media A Nonprofit Corporation 6/15/2006 $300,000 Sustainable Development United States
Earth Island Institute 3/9/2006 $350,000 Sustainable Development United States
Ceres, Inc. 3/9/2006 $500,000 Sustainable Development United States
Better World Fund 3/9/2006 $400,000 Sustainable Development United States
American Council on Renewable Energy 3/9/2006 $500,000 Sustainable Development United States
ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA, Inc. 3/9/2006 $400,000 Sustainable Development United States
Climate Change Organisation, The 12/15/2005 $300,000 Sustainable Development Global
Center for Climate Strategies, Inc. 12/15/2005 $250,000 Sustainable Development United States
Rainforest Action Network 6/9/2005 $200,000 Sustainable Development United States
Center for Climate Strategies, Inc. 12/16/2004 $225,000 Sustainable Development United States
World Resources Institute 12/16/2004 $200,000 Sustainable Development Europe
SmartPower Connecticut, Inc. 12/16/2004 $200,000 Sustainable Development United States
Clean Energy Group 12/16/2004 $200,000 Sustainable Development Canada
Climate Change Organisation, The 6/9/2004 $750,000 Sustainable Development Global
National Environmental Trust 12/11/2003 $400,000 Sustainable Development United States
WWF-UK 10/9/2003 $400,000 Sustainable Development Global
Climate Institute 3/13/2003 $200,000 Sustainable Development Caribbean

Link

See also:

Dr. Chu's Energy Bait and Switch

and

US Climate Change Bill Promotes Nuclear Industry
"A new era for the nuclear industry"

and

(Nuclear) Energy bill moves to the Senate

Venezuela, Honduras, Peru, Ecuador: Media Lies and "Oversights"

By Eric Toussaint
October 23, 2009

It may be useful to assess the dangers of the systematically hostile attitude of the overwhelming majority of major European and North American media companies in relation to the current events taking place in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela. This hostility is only matched by an embarrassed, complicit silence with regard to those involved in the putsch in Honduras or the repression enacted by the Peruvian army against the indigenous populations of the Amazon.

In order to demonstrate this statement, here are a few recent facts:

1) On 5 June 2009, the Peruvian army massacred over 50 Amazonian Indians who were protesting against the land concessions made by Alan Garcia’s government for foreign, mainly European transnational companies. The repression aroused no disapproval among the major global media groups. [1] These groups gave almost exclusive priority to the protests occurring in Iran. Not only did the press fail to condemn the repression in Peru; it did not even bother to cover the story. And yet in Peru, so great was public discontent that the government had to announce the repeal of the presidential decree which the Amazonian Indians had fought against.

Once again, media coverage of the government’s backtracking was almost non-existent. We must ask ourselves the following question: if a Venezuelan or Ecuadorian army or police intervention had caused the deaths of dozens of Amazonian Indians, what kind of media coverage would such events have received?

2) When the constitutionally elected president Manuel Zelaya was ousted by the military on 28 June, the overwhelming majority of media groups declared, in total contradiction of the truth, that the soldiers were reacting to Zelaya’s attempt to modify the constitution, thus ensuring he could remain in power. Several other media groups added that he was following the example of Hugo Chavez, who is presented as an authoritarian populist leader. In fact, Manuel Zelaya was proposing to the Honduran citizens that they vote in favour of the organization of general elections for a Constituent Assembly, which would have represented real democratic progress being made in this country. This is well explained by Cécile Lamarque and Jérôme Duval on their return from a CADTM mission in Honduras:

“The coup d’Etat was carried out on the same day Manuel Zelaya had organized a non-binding “consultation” asking the Hondurans whether or not they wanted to convene a National Constituent Assembly, after the elections which were due to take place on the 29 November 2009. The question went like this: “Do you agree that at the next general elections of 2009, a fourth ballot box be installed so as to allow for the people to express their point of view on the convocation of a national Constituent Assembly? YES or NO?” If this consultation had resulted in the majority voting “yes”, the president would have issued a decree of approval before Congress so that, on 29 November, the Hondurans would formally make known their decision on the convocation of a Constituent Assembly through this “fourth ballot box” (the first three ballot boxes would be for the election of a president, deputies and mayors, respectively). In order to give an air of legality to the coup, Congress and the Supreme Court, associated with the putsch, deemed the ballot box to be illegal and asserted that president Zelaya had “violated the Constitution” by trying to modify it “so as to set his sights on serving a new mandate”, in the manner of an “apprentice Chavist dictator”. And yet, Manuel Zelaya, through this consultation with the people, was not seeking to renew his presidential mandate of four years which cannot be renewed. Zelaya would therefore be unable to be a candidate for his own succession.” [2]

Whilst the popular movements opposing those involved in the Putsch increased, with protests and strikes in July, August and September, the big media names only dedicated a couple of lines to these events. On the rare occasions when the leading daily newspapers dedicated a feature article to the situation in Honduras, they adopted a policy of slander against the constitutionally elected president by presenting the military’s actions as a democratic military coup. This is the case with The Wall Street Journal, which in its editorial on 1 July 2009 wrote, “the military coup d’Etat which took place in Honduras on June 28th and which led to the exile of the president of this central American country, Manuel Zelaya, is strangely democratic.” The editorial adds, “the legislative and judicial authorities will remain intact” following military action. On its part, perhaps in a more subtle manner, the famous French newspaper Le Monde participated in a smear campaign against Manuel Zelaya. Here is one example. On 12 September 2009, Jean-Michel Caroit, the paper’s special correspondent in Honduras, quoted the words of a French expatriate living in the country and then associated these words with the systematically repeated lie regarding Zelaya’s supposedly sinister intentions, “ ‘For the Hondurans, Zelaya’s return is unacceptable as that would mean there would be twenty years of a Chavez-style dictatorship,’ states Marianne Cadario in reference to the Venezuelan president who - as his ally Manuel Zelaya tried to do (underlined by me) - modified the Constitution in order for him to be allowed to be re-elected. Marianne Cadario, a Frenchwoman who has lived in Honduras for over thirty years states that she is “very shocked by the reaction of the international community who condemned the putsch.” [3] The tone of newspapers like Le Monde and Libération began to change at the end of September after those involved in the putsch began to increase their repressive measures. The tone became more critical of those involved in the putsch. Having said this, the daily newspaper Libération deserves a prize for its use of euphemisms. In fact on 28 September 2009 (3 months to the day after the coup) the title “The Scent of Dictatorship” (underlined by me) of a paragraph explaining how the government involved in the putsch had declared, “‘the banning of “any public unauthorized meeting,” the arrest of “anyone putting their lives or anyone else’s in danger” “evacuation” of areas where there are protesters and those who interfere with “any broadcasting of programmes by any media that endanger public order.” [4]

3) At the beginning of August 2009, the Venezuelan authorities’ intention to question the right of 34 radio and television channels made the headlines in the international press: “It is further proof of the almost total disappearance of the right to expression and criticism in this authoritarian country.” The way in which the major news publications treat the subject of the media in Venezuela is one of unilateral hostility, despite the fact that 90% of the Venezuelan media is privately owned, a large number of which actively support disinformation campaigns. Globovisión, one of the main privately-owned TV channels, actively participated in the military coup d’Etat against Chavez on 11 April 2002. A documentary made by Globovisión made its way around the world on 11 April 2002 and the days following the military coup. It was actually a set-up, designed to distort the truth. One can see people posing as Chavez supporters on a bridge, firing their guns in an unidentifiable direction. The voice-over of the Globovisión journalist states that the Chavez supporters are about to kill opposition protesters who were protesting peacefully in the streets below the bridge. The Venezuelan prosecution has been able to reconstruct the exact chain of events, having analysed the reports and photographs made by certain individuals on the day of 11 April. In fact the pro-Chavez militants, who, according to Globovisión, were shooting at protesters, were actually responding to gunfire coming from an armoured vehicle of the metropolitan police, allied to the putsch. The opposition protesters were no longer in the streets when those guns were fired. Several sources can prove without a doubt that the assassination of the anti-Chavez protesters was used as a set-up so as to attribute these crimes to Chavez, thus justifying their coup. On 11 April 2008, the Venezuelan viewers were able to see again the images of the press conference given by the military involved in the putsch at a time when no protester had been killed yet. And yet the military announced at that time that they were taking power following the murders carried out by the Chavez supporters. This clearly supports the theory that these murders were planned deliberately so as to be able to justify their seditious plan.

In the days following the putsch, on 12 and 13 April 2002, when hundreds of thousands of unarmed citizens surrounded the barracks of the putschists to demand the return of Hugo Chavez, then in prison, Globovisión failed to broadcast any coverage of these protests, explaining that the country was back to normal and that Hugo Chavez had tendered his resignation and was on his way to Cuba. During the last hours of the putsch, this channel broadcast only cartoons and variety shows [5]. Globovisión in fact connived with the putschists on several critical occasions, a fact which led the parents of victims and injured survivors’ associations to demand the channel’s conviction. Up to now the Chavist government has refused this demand in order to prevent further escalation of the international smear campaign being waged against him. Several human rights associations are dissatisfied with the passive attitude of the Venezuelan authorities in this matter.

More recently, Globovisión has been sympathetic towards the authors of the 28 June putsch in Honduras. Several programme presenters at Globovisión have supported the putsch from the very beginning, at the same time accusing the Chavez government of interference in condemning it. For example, Guillermo Zuloaga, the president of Globovisión, stated on 17 July that “the government of Micheletti complies with the Constitution, and we would like, indeed we would be delighted, if here in Venezuela, the Constitution was respected in the same way that it is in Honduras”, thus making clear his support for the putschist government.

Globovisión has never been prohibited from broadcasting. What major European or North-American media has even mentioned this fact? What major European or North-American media has ever informed the public that the overwhelming majority of Venezuelan media are controlled by the private sector? Or that they account for over 90% of the viewing audience? Or that they are extremely aggressive towards the government, presenting it as a dictatorship, or that some of them played an active part in ousting a constitutionally elected president, and have continued to broadcast freely for seven years? Can one imagine General de Gaulle failing to take repressive measures against a newspaper, radio or TV station that was seen to actively support an OAS coup during the Algerian war? Would it not be considered normal for the Spanish government to take measures against the media that actively supported – in real time – Colonel Tejero when he burst into the Cortes [6] with a group of military putschists and held (up) at gunpoint the MPs who were there? If Manuel Zelaya were restored to office as constitutional president, would he and his government not be in their right to demand accountability and take measures against the Honduran media owners who deliberately supported the putschists by systematically deforming the truth and covering up the many human rights violations committed by the military?

4) Arms spending. When you read the European or North American papers, you have the distinct impression that Venezuela is indulging in huge arms expenditures (particularly by way of Russia), which poses a serious threat in the region. Yet according to the CIA [7] the situation is quite different: the Venezuelan military budget ranks 6th in the region, after the budgets of Brazil, Argentina, Chile (far less populated than Venezuela and regarded as a model), Colombia and Mexico. In relative terms, taking the GDP of each country, the Venezuelan military budget comes 6th in Latin America! Is any of this published in the leading news publications?

On another front, in August 2009 we read in the papers that Sweden took Venezuela to task after the Colombian government once again denounced its neighbour for supplying arms to the FARC guerrillas. Sweden had in fact informed Colombia that SAAB missiles found in a FARC camp had been supplied by Venezuela. But for those who read Chavez’ detailed response it became clear that the missiles in question had been stolen from a Venezuelan harbour in 1995, four years before Chavez became president.

Conclusion

One needs to be aware of the one-sided manner in which the leading media report the news, and adopt a highly critical approach when appraising it. The discrediting of Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa and Evo Morales is so excessive that it poses the risk of numbing international public opinion in the event of another coup d’Etat, or of lulling the public into approving aggressive measures taken by a government such as the US. Among the many insidious and unfounded accusations, we can read in the Spanish papers (for example in El Pais) that Rafael Correa’s election campaign was financed by the FARC. We can also read that the Venezuelan authorities do nothing to fight drug trafficking. In the case of the Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, the discredit heaped on him is intended to prevent international opinion mobilizing in favour of his return to power as head of State.

Translated by Francesca Denley and Judith Harris

Eric Toussaint is the president of CADTM Belgium (Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, www.cadtm.org), has a PhD in political science from the University of Liège (Belgium) and the University of Paris VIII (France). He is the author of Bank of the South. An Alternative to the IMF-World Bank, VAK, Mumbai, India, 2007; The World Bank, A Critical Primer, Pluto Press, Between The Lines, David Philip, London-Toronto-Cape Town 2008; Your Money or Your Life, The Tyranny of Global Finance, Haymarket, Chicago, 2005.

1. See http://www.cadtm.org/Le-CADTM-est-pleinement-solidaire and http://www.cadtm.org/Perou-le-massacre-de-Bagua

2. Cécile Lamarque and Jérome Duval, « Honduras : Why the Coup d’Etat », 17 September 2009, www.cadtm.org/Honduras-Pourquoi-le-coup-d-Etat

3. Jean-Michel Caroit, « Au Honduras, la campagne électorale s’ouvre dans un climat de haine », Le Monde, p. 8, Saturday 12 September 2009.

4. http://www.liberation.fr/monde/0101593847-le-honduras-s-enfonce-dans-la-crise

5. It is interesting at this point to note the initiative of Hugo Chavez’ government on 11 April 2008, six years after the putsch. The government used its right to broadcast on the private and public TV stations to show a re-run of the entire reportage produced by the anti-Chavist private channels (Globovisión, RCTV...) on the official inauguration session of the president and the putschist government in a reception room in the Miraflores presidential palace. The complete programme, which the whole of Venezuela could watch on 11 April 2002, was re-broadcast without any cuts or critical commentary by the Chavez government. Hugo Chavez relied on the critical acumen of Venezuelan viewers to form their own opinion on the active complicity of the private media with those behind the putsch, amongst whom the viewer could identify the leading Catholic church authorities, the putschist military brass, the head of the anti-Chavist labour union CTV (Confederation of Workers of Venezuela), the chief executives of private corporations and the president of the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce (Fedecámaras), Pedro Carmona. It should be said that this president, who held power for scarcely 36 hours, earned the enduring nickname of “Pepe el breve” (Pepe the brief).

6. On 23 February 1981, an attempted coup d’état organized by Franquist sectors took place in the Spanish Congress, The leader, Colonel Tejero, held up the members of parliament present at gunpoint and took them hostage as the new president of the government was being sworn in.

7. See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html, consulted in March 2009

Original article, Venezuela, Honduras, Pérou, Equateur : « petits » oublis et « grands » mensonges des medias, published on October 5, 2009

Source

Robert Bernstein: Human Shield for Criticism of Israel

October 24, 2009

Palestinians are routinely subjected to violence--often lethal--at the hands of the Israeli Occupation Forces

By Max Kantar

Earlier this week the New York Times published an op-ed article, Rights Watchdog, ‘Lost in the Mideast’ written by Robert L. Bernstein, the founding chairman emeritus of Human Rights Watch.

The editorial amounts to one regurgitation of Israeli propaganda after another in an effort to delegitimize mainstream criticism of Israeli policies in the international human rights community. The timing of Bernstein's article is instructive; its publication in the New York Times comes on the heels of the release of the Goldstone Report as the intellectual apologists for Israeli crimes in the U.S. go into ultra-hysteria mode to save the already eroding image of their favorite client state. Bernstein decries HRW for its supposed anti-Israel bias and unleashes a tirade of familiar accusations routinely invoked by ‘supporters of Israel’ to deflect criticism of the Jewish state. To make the case that HRW--and presumably the international human rights community in general—has ‘lost critical perspective’ on Israel-Palestine, Bernstein cites six major points:

1) There is no "moral equivalency" between the "democratic and non-democratic worlds"

2) HRW spends more time criticizing Israel than it spends criticizing individual neighboring states

3) Hamas and Hezbollah use civilians as human shields and do not fight fairly

4) The government of Iran supports Hamas and Hezbollah and seeks to destroy the state of Israel and exterminate all Jews

5) Weapons are making their way into Gaza and Lebanon and might be used to strike Israel

6) Israel only commits wrongs in self-defense while Hamas and Hezbollah do so intentionally

These claims are all demonstrably false. What is interesting is that someone in Bernstein's position surely must be aware of this. In his analysis Bernstein wisely chooses not to inform his readers of the general political context surrounding Israel-Palestine--a point to which I will return. For the moment, let's have a look at Bernstein's primary talking points.

Moral Equivalency and the Democratic and Non-democratic Worlds

Bernstein begins by explaining that HRW in its birth originally "sought to draw a line between the democratic and non-democratic worlds in an effort to create clarity in human rights" in order "to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters." More to the point, "we wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers," Bernstein declared, "from playing a moral equivalence game with the West."

Bernstein's suggestion that there is no comparison between alleged human rights violations inside democratic states as opposed to abuses in authoritarian and undemocratic states seems to be, at face value, reasonable. However, the HRW reports of Israeli human rights violations are almost always (the exceptions being the wars in southern Lebanon) documentations of Israeli practices and policies in the occupied Palestinian territories where Palestinians most certainly do not live under the rule of a democratic state, but rather under the rule of a ruthless, foreign military occupation. Palestinians in the occupied territories (henceforth OPT) are systematically denied freedom of movement, assembly, and speech; they are routinely subjected to violence--often times lethal--at the hands of the IDF and paramilitary Jewish settlers, both of which act with virtual impunity and are totally unaccountable to the Palestinians. Jewish settlers living illegally in the occupied Palestinian territories enjoy all the rights and privileges that one would attribute to "the democratic world" while Palestinians in the same territorial entity essentially live under martial law, in what amounts plainly to an extremely violent military/police state. Palestinians have absolutely no rights and no say in the (Israeli) government and military that effectively rules over them. Bernstein's inference that documented Israeli human rights abuses take place in "the democratic world" is perhaps his most absurd and irresponsible assertion. By any standard of law and government the OPT is a part of--to use Bernstein's terminology--"the undemocratic world." Of course, the existence of systematic violations of human rights (like those attributed to Israel) proves that those being subjected to the abuses are not part of anything that could be even remotely called a "democracy."

Furthermore, it should be understood that empty and elite rhetorical concoctions like "moral equivalency" are simply terms of propaganda used to justify applying to official enemies standards one refuses to apply to favored states. Suggesting that favored states (Israel or the West in general) have an inherent moral superiority compared to disfavored states/parties is totally meaningless. It has been illustrated time and time again that the internal democratic character of a state does not necessarily inhibit it from committing gruesome atrocities outside of its official national boundaries. What difference does it make to the victims of state violence if the perpetrator has democratic institutions and provisions in its own national territory? The real issue at hand is Israel's human rights record, which leads us to the next point.

Why Does HRW Write More about Israel Than Other States in the Region?

To illustrate HRW's failures, Bernstein points to the fact that although "the region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records," (which it surely is) it is Israel who receives the most condemnations from HRW. The basis for Bernstein's objection to this fact (assuming that Israel does receive the most condemnations) is that Israel is a democracy--rationale that falls flat on its head when juxtaposed with the reality in the occupied Palestinian territories, as illustrated above.

That being said, perhaps Israel receives more attention from HRW than its neighbors because it does indeed have the worst human rights record in the region. For over forty years it has been a belligerent occupier, constantly threatening its neighbors and attacking them at will. Israel's savage repression of the primarily nonviolent first intifada in the OPT almost makes the recent crushing of the Iranian popular uprising look like a tea party. When one thinks of the thousands of home demolitions, the draconian siege, the multiple invasions of Lebanon, the constant atrocities and arbitrary killings, the "separation" wall, and the 300 children murdered in cold blood last winter, it is not difficult to conclude that Israel likely holds the regional title for "worst human rights record."

Moreover, why should Western human rights activists not focus on exposing Israeli practices in the OPT? I imagine that supporters of white supremacy in Apartheid South Africa decried what they saw as the overemphasis on South African human rights abuses as well. Like South Africa was, Israel is largely dependent on Western military, economic and diplomatic support which therefore warrants a corresponding degree of critical attention in light of the massive abuses. It is also widely recognized that Israel is imposing an apartheid regime on the Palestinians in the OPT, as alluded to above. Both Israel's leading human rights group and its leading newspaper (Ha’aretz) have acknowledged this much, as have Former President Jimmy Carter and countless South African anti-apartheid activists, including John Dugard and Desmond Tutu. Apartheid is considered to be a "crime against humanity" and warrants an international solidarity effort to overthrow it. Instead of complaining about the fact that rights groups are exposing Israeli crimes, Bernstein and his ideological cohorts should use their influence to help put an end to the abuses.

Human Shielding

In the most familiar accusation leveled against anyone Israel attacks, Bernstein desperately parrots the claims of Israel's state department, noting that Hamas and Hezbollah "use their own people as human shields." Unfortunately for Bernstein, the documentary record reveals that by and large, the accusations of the use of human shields on the part of Hamas and Hezbollah are false, or at best, unsubstantiated.

Taking the most recent conflict with Hezbollah in 2006, the US Army War College carried out a study on counterterrorism and guerilla warfare. Despite their heavy reliance on Israeli military contacts and interviews, the study discovered that there was no "systematic reporting of Hezbollah using civilians in the combat zone as shields" and "little or no meaningful intermingling of Hezbollah fighters and noncombatants."

An Amnesty International report on the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war also concluded that no evidence existed that would suggest the use of civilian shielding on the part of Hezbollah. However, the study did find that Hezbollah officials "encouraged or assisted people who had been unable to leave their villages in south Lebanon to do so." As for Israel, Amnesty noted that convoys of fleeing civilians were deliberately attacked by Israeli forces as they attempted to evacuate the area.

Human Rights Watch also reached similar conclusions in its own analysis and report on the 2006 war noting that "available evidence indicates that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started and fired the majority of their rockets from pre-prepared positions in largely unpopulated valleys and fields outside villages." They went on to report that "Hezbollah fighters had not mixed with the civilian population" and that "Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys."

During "Operation Cast Lead" Israel constantly accused Hamas of using civilians as human shields in an attempt to explain the massive civilian causalities it was inflicting on the people of Gaza. None of the independent reports to emerge since the assault on Gaza have found any evidence to substantiate Israel's claims. The Goldstone Report did however discover multiple cases of Israeli military forces and units using Palestinian civilians as human shields during "Operation Cast Lead" and dedicated twenty full pages to the chronicling of these abuses (pgs. 280-300). Israeli soldiers have also since came out and testified as to the IDF's use of Palestinian civilians as human shields in Breaking the Silence.

The Devil in Tehran

Bernstein cites Hamas and Hezbollah's relationship with the Iranian regime as yet another reason why HRW should sympathize with Israel. The Iranian regime seeks to destroy Israel and all of the world's Jews, Bernstein says.

Bernstein should know that Iran does not seek to destroy Israel anymore than it seeks to destroy itself. If Iran were to even contemplate an attack on Israel, the entire country would be flattened within moments by the United States, as everybody knows. I'm afraid that such statements on the part of Bernstein simply play into the hysteria conjured up by the US and Israel...

In fact, Iran has accepted the international consensus on resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. Like every other Muslim state, it has endorsed the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative which calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the OPT alongside Israel in its pre June 1967 borders--precisely the international consensus on the conflict's resolution. If Iran seeks to "destroy" Israel, why would it endorse this mainstream peace plan which recognizes the right of Israel to live in peace and security in its internationally recognized borders? Let us not forget that it is Israel and the United States who have continued to threaten Iran with annihilation and obliteration. These threats are also violations of the UN Charter.

Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

Bernstein also warns that HRW "know[s] that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again."

Israel has the fourth most powerful military in the world and a stockpile of nuclear weapons big enough to wipe Lebanon, Gaza, and Iran off of the face of the planet. Last winter Israel slaughtered 1,400 people while sustaining only 13 casualties of its own. The number of Palestinians killed by Israel in the first three minutes of "Operation Cast Lead" greatly exceeds the number of Israelis killed by Hamas in the previous six years.

Nevertheless it is Hamas and Hezbollah that we should be worried about, Bernstein tell us. While Israel starves the Gaza Strip into the Stone Age we are supposed to believe that Hamas fighters are developing serious deterrence capabilities. Putting aside the complete lunacy of Bernstein's false alarms, readers should keep in mind that the Hezbollah organization was established to resist the brutal Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Likewise Hamas was created for the same reason--to resist Israeli military occupation of their land.

In any event, it truly surpasses belief that these absurdities could even be contemplated in a free society, let alone appear on the pages of the country's most prominent newspaper.

Self-Defense and Occupation

Implying that Israel acts with proportion and in self-defense and that the Palestinians are the aggressors, Bernstein declares that "there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally." It takes true intellectual discipline to read these words without breaking into laughter--or tears. Israel is the military occupier and has been for over forty years. By definition, Israel is the aggressor. How can Israel claim to be defending itself while it is militarily occupying other people's lands? By any reasonable standard, one could not call what Israel does "self-defense."

And while Gaza is still considered "occupied territory" by all relevant observers, the illegal economic blockade is considered to be "an act of war" under international law. What are the Palestinians supposed to do? Does Israel have a moral ‘right’ to impose illegal collective punishment on the Palestinians in Gaza?

While no party is entitled to attack and target civilian populations, readers should not forget the root cause of Israel's conflict with the Palestinians, which is unending military occupation and colonization. Virtually the entire world--including both major Palestinian political groupings and every Arab and Muslim state--has accepted the principle of resolving the conflict peacefully via a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. It is Israel—backed by the United States--who refuses to accept these terms.

Until Robert Bernstein can come to terms with these basic facts, it is he--not Human Rights Watch--who is lost in the Mideast.

- Max Kantar is a Michigan based human rights activist and freelance writer. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: maxkantar@gmail.com

AP and NYT Coddle Terrorists

Left I on the News
October 23, 2009

An astonishing (if you were a visitor from outer space unaccustomed to reading the U.S. corporate media) headline from AP via The New York Times: "Florida: Militant's Benefactor Released." And who is this "militant" of which they speak? Only one of the world's most notorious terrorists, Luis Posada Carriles, organizer of a mid-air airplane bombing which killed 73 people, a string of hotel and tourist site bombings in Cuba which killed one person, and a convicted participant in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro in Panama in a bombing which would have killed hundreds of students had it been successful, along with a host of other nefarious activities. And, as readers know, a man who is being successfully protected by the United States from being extradited to Venezuela to stand trial for those 73 murders.

And the "benefactor"? Why it's yet another terrorist, Santiago Alvarez, who acted as "benefactor" to mercenaries that he sent to Cuba to participate in bombing tourist facilities like the famous Tropicana nightclub, a man who served time (minimal, naturally) for being caught with one of the largest illegal stashes of weapons ever seized in the U.S. (dozens of machine guns, rifles, C-4 explosive, dynamite, detonators, a grenade launcher and ammunition), and a man who helped smuggle Posada into the U.S., which, as noted in that earlier post, would be a crime even if Posada were a normal illegal immigrant, and a major crime considering Posada is a convicted felon (not to mention a known terrorist).

Is it any wonder Americans are confused about the "war on terror"? A war the U.S. is supposedly fighting, at the same time both the government and the media do their best to protect and whitewash the existence of terrorists walking free right here in the streets of Miami?

Meanwhile, the Cuban Five, five heroic men who risked their lives to prevent such acts of terrorism, languish in U.S. prisons.

Palestine in Pieces

An Interview with Bill and Kathleen Christison

By JEFF GORE - October 23, 2009

In 1979, Kathleen and Bill Christison retired from the CIA, where they worked as analysts. Ever since then, they've had an unorthodox retirement, to say the least. With only a couple relatively brief interludes, they've dedicated what could have been years of relaxation to fighting perhaps the most uphill battle imaginable: trying to bring the plight of the Palestinians to the public eye. The newest addition to the Christison canon is Palestine in Pieces: Graphic Perspectives on the Israeli Occupation, published in August by Pluto Press. During this decade the Christisons have made a habit of visiting Palestine at least once per year; they returned from their most recent trip earlier this month. Since the couple warned against the potentially endless nature of a conversation over the phone, I elected to send them a few questions via email, which they were gracious enough to answer.

Jeff Gore: Kathleen: In a recent interview with Laura Flanders on GRITtv, you said that based on your travels to Palestine over the past half-decade or so, you believe the situation of the Palestinians “has gotten worse, every year.” Given that the interview was conducted before your latest trip, would you still say this today, considering the downgrade or closure of several checkpoints this year, and, according to the New York Times, “a sense of personal security and economic potential...spreading across the West Bank?”

Kathleen Christison: This is an extremely important question. The supposed closure of checkpoints throughout the West Bank and what is being widely touted as an opening of economic potential are a fiction—a huge scam perpetrated by Israel and the U.S., intended to make it look to the world as though Palestinians are now prospering, that the Palestinian economy is thriving and Palestinian society is now content, all thanks to the beneficence and good will of the Israelis. The media—not just the New York Times, but other print and electronic media and various opinion-molders like Thomas Friedman—have fallen for this scam and indeed have been knowingly participating in it.

The objective is to delude us all, including the Palestinians, into thinking that a new era of peace and prosperity is dawning in the West Bank because Palestinians have stopped terrorism and Israel has responded in good faith by easing restrictions, all in contrast to the situation in Gaza, where all the misery is supposedly the fault of Hamas because it refuses to recognize Israel and refuses to end violence. We are meant to forget that the occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem continues and is continually being reinforced, that Israel launched an unprovoked murderous assault on Gaza early this year, that Israel continues to dominate every aspect of Palestinian daily lives.

In actual fact, things are no better for Palestinians in the West Bank, and in many cases they are worse. We’ve made two trips to Jerusalem and the West Bank this year, in April-May and October, and we’ve seen no substantial improvement in the situation Palestinians face on a daily basis. Despite the supposed removal of many checkpoints, most remain, and all can be reimposed at a moment’s notice. OCHA, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which has kept careful track for the last several years of Israeli movement obstacles, just issued a report indicating that the numbers of obstacles, which include checkpoints, roadblocks, earth mounds across roads, and gates blocking roads, had been reduced in recent months hardly at all—from 618 earlier in the year to 592 now. OCHA also suggests that there’s a good deal of subterfuge in Israeli reporting: although the Israelis promised the removal of 100 roadblocks by the end of Ramadan and issued GPS coordinates for these supposedly vanishing obstacles, OCHA did an on-the-ground survey and could confirm the removal of only 35. In numerous instances, the Israeli GPS locations weren’t even in the West Bank.

It’s true that there has been some improvement in a few showcase locations. The cities of Jenin and Nablus are rebuilding after the terrible destruction there during the Israeli siege of 2002 and 2003, and there’s a bit more economic prosperity. Even in Hebron, which lives under siege from the most vicious of Israeli settlers, some market areas are reopening. The most notorious checkpoint, Huwara just south of Nablus, has been opened up somewhat so that Palestinian cars may now drive through and people no longer have to walk through. But this is classic colonialism, designed to make things just enough better to take the edge off the anger of the colonized: you fill the natives’ stomachs and hope they become tame, that they won’t want to resist your oppression, that they’ll forget that they have no freedom, that they still live under oppression, always at the mercy of a colonialist oppressor who has no intention of relinquishing his domination or ending his exploitation of the oppressed and their resources.

The “model cities” in Jenin and Nablus and the “model checkpoints” such as Huwara are the exceptions in the Palestinians’ grinding life under occupation. Movement from one area to another is still severely restricted. Most West Bank Palestinians still cannot visit Jerusalem. Those who have work permits to enter Jerusalem must still wait for hours in endless lines to enter the city and pass through multiple security checks, including biometric checks that leave a record of when they entered the city and whether they have exited by the end of the day. Israeli settlements continue to be built and expanded on confiscated Palestinian land. The road network connecting the settlements to each other and to Israel, on which Palestinians may not drive, continues to be expanded, cutting off increasing numbers of Palestinians from each other. Palestinians are still harassed and physically attacked by aggressive Israeli settlers. Olive groves and other agricultural land continue to be confiscated, destroyed, burned, either by settlers or by bulldozers clearing land for more settlements or for the Separation Wall. Construction of the Wall is proceeding, cutting off more Palestinian land from its owners.

Non-violent protesters who demonstrate regularly against the Wall continue to be shot and killed or imprisoned. While newly trained, spiffily uniformed Palestinian security forces patrol city streets during the day, Israeli forces control the night and therefore control the entire territory. They conduct middle-of-the-night raids in villages throughout the West Bank, arresting young Palestinian men on suspicion merely of being Palestinian, beating or even shooting anyone who resists. In Jerusalem, where the Netanyahu government is currently concentrating its harshest oppression, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians continues quite openly. Palestinian homes continue to be demolished for no other reason than that they are in Israel’s way—in the way of the Wall’s advance, or of the next new or expanding Israeli settlement, or of Israel’s efforts to depopulate the land of Palestinians and create a Jewish majority. Palestinian families continue to be evicted from their homes so that Israeli settlers can live in them.

The catalog of horrors is long, and it is not ending, despite the hypocritical claims by the New York Times and others of an increased “sense of personal security,” despite all efforts by Netanyahu and the Obama administration to make us think peace has come. The occupation continues, and more harshly than ever. As Israeli journalist Amira Hass recently put it, the occupation “completely shrinks people’s lives,” and this has not changed.


JG: What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a white Westerner traveling in the Occupied Territories?

Kathleen & Bill Christison: Although we feel very comfortable among Palestinians, and have always felt very welcome, at the same time we always feel some embarrassment because we’re there basically as voyeurs watching other people’s misery. In fact, we feel we’re helping by bringing the Palestinians’ story, the facts of the occupation and what it means for Palestinian daily lives, to public attention in the West, but it’s still hard to get away from the feeling that we’re invading other people’s privacy by watching them line up at checkpoints and taking pictures of them, or watching them sob as their homes are demolished. Or, as happened to us once, talking to a man scheduled for surgery in Jerusalem who had been waiting for days for an Israeli permit to get into the city and who cried as he told us his story and asked us to take a picture of the medical certificate that attested to his need for surgery and should have provided his entrée to the city. We’ve told his story, but we knew, and he knew, that we couldn’t do anything to help him and that we would ultimately be able to go home to our comfortable lives in the U.S. while he waits—waits for his permit, waits for his freedom, waits for a decent life.

This is the principal reason, incidentally, that we’ve decided we won’t take any royalties or other profits from our new book, but will donate them to organizations that we feel most benefit the Palestinians. No book on the Palestinians will ever make much money in the first place, sad to say, but the idea that we personally should make any money because we’ve been witness to other people’s misery is unacceptable to us.

JG: I've always thought that the strongest argument for the two-state solution -- and against the one-state solution -- was Michael Neumann's assessment of Israel as unwilling to “abolish itself.” On the other hand, Kathleen, you've written critically about Neumann's remarks and advocated a single democratic state in Palestine. Ruling out any precipitous fall in American power, any miraculous surge in power of the Palestinian governing body, or God forbid, any catastrophic regional war, in what scenario can you envision Israeli Jews consenting to a bi-national secular state; to changing their flag, national anthem, even the name of their country?

KC: I have to say I object to the premise of Michael Neumann’s argument—that we should or should not pursue one or another solution simply on the basis of whether it meets Israel’s desires. I think, on the contrary, that we should pursue a solution for no other reason than that it is just, for both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. A two-state solution—which at its very best would give Palestinians a state in less than one-quarter of their original homeland and at it most likely would give them a non-viable, non-contiguous state in little pieces constituting quite a bit less than one-quarter—is simply not just. I recognize that realists like Michael disdain “dreamers,” as he’s called one-state advocates, as naïve and maybe other-worldly to be talking about unrealistic, impractical concepts like justice. But I don’t think, first of all, that it’s really so naïve or even futile to advocate and work for justice—justice does prevail on occasion. And, secondly, I think perpetrating gross injustice is ultimately totally impractical and cannot endure: a two-state solution, to my mind, is so grossly unjust—not to say also unlikely because Israel doesn’t want that either—that it is also impractical.

So my preference, if we’re faced with a situation in which Israel is not willing at the moment to “abolish itself” but is also not willing to give the Palestinians anything, not even a non-viable, cantonized state, is to work for the most just solution, which is a single democratic state in which Palestinians and Jews would live as equal citizens with equal access to the instruments of government and a constitution that would guarantee the equality of everyone. (I would not, by the way, call this a “bi-national” state, which I see as a state that maintains some de jure separation between the two peoples. This is something I fear would perpetuate the power imbalance and perpetuate Jewish domination of Palestinians. Although nothing would be easy for the Palestinians no matter what solution is pursued, a single integrated state with constitutional guarantees of equality would more readily assure them of some kind of political and economic parity.)

Those like Michael who argue on the basis of what Israel would not want to do are arguing from the premise that might makes right, that might makes a reality that we cannot counter, and that simply because the powerful party in this conflict doesn’t want something, it won’t come to be and none of us should even speak about it. This is absurd. Who would have expected in the mid-1980s when liberals throughout the world were fighting a seemingly futile battle of sanctions against apartheid South Africa, that the very powerful white leadership of that country would decide in the next few years to “abolish itself”? Who would have expected at that same time that the very powerful Soviet Union would “abolish itself”?

My crystal ball isn’t clear enough to be able to lay out a precise scenario, but I believe that Zionism and the racism and injustice inherent in it simply cannot endure and that Israel will collapse of its own weight at some time in the future, hopefully in our lifetime. No empire has lasted in history, and gross, systematic injustice does not last either. I also give Jews greater credit for having a conscience, for caring about justice and caring about the injustices perpetrated against the Palestinians in the name of world Jewry, than Michael or others like Uri Avnery do, who criticize us one-staters because we don’t seem to realize, as they say, that Israeli Jews will always want to screw the Palestinians if they all live in the same state. I just don’t buy that. If white South Africans and Soviet appartchiks could relinquish power voluntarily and non-violently, then I believe Jews will ultimately be led by their consciences to do the same.

My bottom line is, I don’t think we can or should shut our mouths about a just peace settlement—or, even more importantly, deliberately limit Palestinian options by refusing to speak about the possibilities—simply because Israel might not happen to like it, which is what I see as the principal argument of the anti-one-staters.

JG: Similarly, in your travels, what impression have you gotten from Palestinians as to which solution they advocate?

KBC: It’s hard to make a definitive judgment on this, but it is fair to say that support for a one-state solution is growing among Palestinians. Polls of Palestinian opinion still show this support in the minority, but growing. Many Palestinians whom we’ve talked to still favor two states and specifically reject one state, either because they fear Jewish political and economic domination in a single state or because they are closely enough connected to the Palestinian Authority that they are unwilling even to think of any alternative to the PA’s official support for two states, which is the position that gives them entrée into negotiations and whatever favors are bestowed by the U.S. But an increasing number of our acquaintances now more explicitly favor one state. They are increasingly dissatisfied with the PA’s position and its acceptance of the two-state solution, all of which they see as collaboration with the Israeli oppressor and a betrayal of fundamental rights in return for no benefit whatsoever for the Palestinians.

Much of Palestinian thinking is formed more around the possibilities than strictly on the basis of preferences, which is to say that as long as the two-state solution was the only alternative held out to the Palestinians, support for this option was quite high, but the more the possibility of a one-state solution is talked about—and, of course, the more the likelihood of a real, independent Palestinian state ever being formed in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem has receded—the more Palestinians are willing to think about and advocate a single state. As it has become clearer and clearer to the Palestinians that Israel under its current leadership has no intention of ever withdrawing from the occupied territories and no intention of allowing Palestinians any sovereignty in Jerusalem, support for a single state in all of Palestine has grown. More importantly, Palestinians increasingly recognize that their demand for the right of return is ultimately incompatible with a two-state solution, in which only limited numbers of refugees, if any, would be allowed to return to their homes and land inside Israel and the vast majority would have to be accommodated inside the tiny Palestinian state. It’s unlikely that an enduring peace settlement will ever be forged that does not address and provide a fair solution of the refugee issue and the right of return.

JG: In my recent interview with Jonathan Cook, he spoke highly of the Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS) movement, saying that in his view, “there is no way to end the occupation unless Israelis are made to see that they will pay a heavy price for its continuance.” Would you agree with this? If so, how would you respond to criticism about harming “innocent” Israelis with a blanket boycott or sanctions? Or is there even such a thing as an “innocent” Israeli when it comes to the issue of Palestinian suffering?

KBC: We do indeed agree with Jonathan on the wisdom of BDS and the notion that Israelis must be made to pay a heavy price for continuing the occupation if there’s to be any hope of ever ending it. As to whether “innocent” Israelis might be harmed by a blanket application of BDS, we would ask where one should draw the line on what harms Israelis. Does it harm innocent Israelis to cut off or cut back U.S. aid to Israel—which would be the ultimate sanction? Under a long-term ten-year agreement, the U.S. gives, not lends, Israel $3 billion of military aid every year—in cash, at the beginning of each fiscal year—plus additional increments of economic aid and loan guarantees on a year-by-year basis. Aid of this magnitude and given under these terms obviously greatly helps the Israeli economy. It also gives Israel virtually total impunity to commit whatever atrocities it wants against the Palestinians without fear that the U.S. will cut it off. So if we’re worried about harming individual Israelis, we have to worry about the guy in an electronics shop who is harmed economically because he no longer gets the subcontract for some airplane or tank part, but we also have to worry about the innocent Palestinians—the literally millions of innocent Palestinians—in Gaza particularly, but elsewhere as well, who are being killed by those airplanes and tanks and other military equipment that Israel uses with the impunity granted it by the U.S. If blind justice weighs these two groups of innocents and the harm done to them on her scales, we believe she would conclude that the “innocent” Israeli is after all not so innocent.

Although it may be clearer how the scales should balance when we’re talking about military aid, the same factors must be weighed when we deal with boycotts of non-military products and academic and cultural boycotts, and we think the same conclusions must be reached: ending Palestinian suffering at Israel’s hands is a more worthy, more just objective than saving the economic hide or the jobs of any Israelis. Maybe you’re right that there is no such thing as an “innocent” Israeli when it comes to Palestinian suffering. In a democratic state—democratic at least for Israeli Jews—all Jewish Israelis are responsible for the injustices and the killing and the atrocities visited upon the Palestinians. They elected the governments that have carried out these policies and actions; they have failed to put an end to them; they live in a state established on the suffering and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians over 60 years ago. We Americans are just as responsible for the killing and atrocities visited by U.S. forces on Iraqi and Afghan civilians and in past eras on civilians in places like Vietnam, and we would not claim that sanctions against the U.S. were unfair, even if these caused us to suffer personally. Perhaps this should be the criterion: that innocence lies in greater measure with the people being oppressed and bombed and occupied, and we must be more concerned with ending harm to them than with causing incidental harm to individuals in the oppressor-occupier nation.

JG: In your new book you briefly compare Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the U.S's treatment of Native Americans. That said, I was wondering if you had an opinion on how to respond to one of the peskier questions addressed specifically to Americans that nobody seems to be able to answer. The question is: what right do I have to criticize Israel as a “colonial” or “settler” state when I am a descendant of colonists and settlers myself, enjoying the spoils of theft from an indigenous people?

KBC: This is indeed a difficult question to answer, and there is for sure a measure of hypocrisy in criticizing Israel without also rectifying our own nation’s sins. But we don’t believe that one injustice, even when perpetrated by our own country, imposes an obligation to remain silent about another injustice or requires that we stop working on Israel’s injustice until we’ve resolved the United States’ unjust policies. In fact, having acquired a conscience about what our country did, and continues to do, to our own native population has given us, we feel, a bit more moral authority from which to demand that the United States stop giving Israel the means—the political, military, and economic support—with which to commit a similar atrocity against the Palestinians.

We all pick our battles in this life, and we happen to have picked support for Palestinian rights as our battle. We did this initially from a position of considerable—and, we would acknowledge, shameful—ignorance about the history of U.S. treatment of Native Americans, but our focus on the Palestinians has helped open our eyes to the Native Americans’ situation, and we’re now more conscious of the need to work for justice for both peoples. If we personally continue to devote more of our attention to the Palestinians, this is because it’s a more easily resolvable situation and because we’ve already invested 30-plus years of our education and work in it. But to repeat, whatever inequity exists in our own allocation of attention, whatever hypocrisy exists in demanding of Israel what the U.S. has not done for its own native population, does not put any obligation on us to give Israel carte blanche to continue its oppression unopposed.

JG: Kathleen, in the GRITtv interview you described losing interest in the conflict for a few years before returning to it due to its "haunting" nature. Could you describe that in more detail, or in other words, what has compelled you to keep writing on behalf of the Palestinians for three decades, despite their situation growing increasingly worse over that time period?

KC: Maybe it’s precisely because the Palestinians’ situation has grown worse that I’ve been so “haunted” and so compelled to continue working on this issue. Although I had worked on the Palestinian question for several years before Bill and I left the CIA in 1979, I never actually met a Palestinian until the late 1980s, when I began interviewing Palestinian Americans about their attitudes toward Israel—which ultimately led to my book The Wound of Dispossession. It was only by doing these interviews, and doing a lot of reading on the history of Palestine-Israel, that I really learned the Palestinian story. And I was and continue to be shocked at how horribly that story has been distorted in the United States and the rest of the West. For me—and for Bill too—it’s been a kind of crusade to bring this story to greater public attention. The Palestinians are such a graceful people and the injustices perpetrated against them for six decades and more have been so horrific—and so deliberate—that we both feel we can’t give up.

JG: For those who don't have time or means to visit Palestine, but want to help the Palestinians, what would you suggest is the best thing that they can do?

KBC: This may be the most difficult of your questions to answer. The usual route, talking to one’s congressmen, is an almost totally futile pursuit on this issue. The Israel lobby, in all its aspects, has Congress so sewed up that it’s almost impossible to get any attention if one is talking about Palestinian rights or demanding concessions from Israel or advocating anything other than the current so-called international consensus on two states. We both think that at the popular level in the U.S. there’s been an upsurge in support for the Palestinians and a greater willingness to criticize Israel. This has been particularly true since Israel’s assault on Gaza early this year. But so far this change in viewpoint hasn’t reached up to the political level, meaning in the administration and Congress, because there simply aren’t enough people willing to mobilize, visit congressmen, write letters to the editor, etc. But this is what’s needed. We need to educate ourselves on the issue so that we can educate others, join whatever solidarity organizations exist in our areas, gain some political muscle by increasing our numbers, work together, lobby congressmen in numbers, write letters to the editor, force the media to pay attention to what’s happening on the ground, call out Israel’s supporters everywhere for their moral blindness, sign on to the many petitions and letters to politicians that circulate on the internet. In general, make ourselves known, make our position known, and make noise!

Jeff Gore is a freelance journalist based in Athens, GA. He is a frequent contributor to the Athens weekly Flagpole Magazine and has also written articles for Dissident Voice and The Comment Factory. His journal of his summer spent in Palestine can be read at holylanddispatches.blogspot.com . He can be reached at jgore00@gmail.com.
Source

Whatever happened to the war for oil?

By Jeffrey Blankfort on October 22, 2009

Critics of the Iraq war who claimed that it was a war for Israel, engineered by the neocons in the Bush administration and promoted by their allies in the media, were routinely disparaged by the well known pundits of the US Left and the leading organizations of the anti-war movement that insisted that it was a war for access and control over Iraq’s oil. This was, they declared, in so many words, a "no-brainer."

Without casting aspersions on the wisdom of the latter, this story, in which T Boone Pickens complains that US firms have been shut out of Iraq’s oil market, is but the latest to undermine the "war for oil" theory. But don’t expect what remains of the Left to admit their error anytime soon. Reuters:

the Iraqi government has awarded contracts to foreign companies, particularly Chinese firms, to develop Iraq’s vast reserves while American companies have mostly been shut out.

"They’re opening them (oil fields) up to other companies all over the world … We’re entitled to it," Pickens said of Iraq’s oil. "Heck, we even lost 5,000 of our people, 65,000 injured and a trillion, five hundred billion dollars."

Busting the Darfur Myth

The Real Genocide is Playing Out in Ethiopia--And the West is Funding It

By TOM MOUNTAIN
October 22, 2009
Asmara, Eritrea.

As one of the first to write about the problems in West Sudan/Darfur, in mid 2003, and living side by side here in Asmara for three years with representatives of the Darfur, and other Sudanese resistance, my investigation has found no evidence of genocide. Of course, genocide has and is being committed by Ethiopia against the Somalis in Ethiopia, but there has been no genocide in Darfur.

Let us start by comparing the two situations, the first being Darfur and the second the Ethiopian Ogaden.

The refugees of the Darfur conflict were and are the beneficiaries of one of the largest, and most effective relief works in history.

In contrast, relief aid to the Somalis living in the Ethiopian Ogaden, what little there was to begin with, has been effectively shut down now in almost all of the Ogaden for several years, despite one of the worst droughts in history.

Darfur has had an international police force in place for years, who work along side Sudanese security forces and most of the violence has ended.

In the Ogaden, Ethiopian death squads, funded by western “aid” have spent the better part of the past decade spreading murder and mayhem across the countryside. With almost everyone from the International Committee of the Red Cross to Doctors Without Borders being expelled, there has been miniscule coverage of this genocide in the western media let alone any exposure of the western role in funding the Ethiopian regime. Compare this to the saturation of the western media with the “Save Darfur” propaganda campaign and the tried and true golden rule of “show me the money” needs to be applied to explain what is really going on.

The Darfur genocide myth has been promoted by western “human rights” NGOs who have collected tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars under the rubric of “Enough” and “Preventing Genocide”. The claims of genocide are based on estimates of the number of deaths that were rapidly inflated as the dollars started rolling in. First it was 100,000, then 200,000, then 300,000 and finally, in a claim so ludicrous that even the British government media watchdog yanked it off the air, 400,000 people were supposed to have been victims of genocide in Darfur. None of the Darfur reps I have heard here in Asmara ever gave any credibility to the western figures. In fact, most everyone here in the Horn, at least those not on the western payroll, all agree the real number of those lost in the violence in west Sudan is in the tens of thousands, a tragic number but far surpassed by what has befallen those suffering in Somalia and the Ogaden where a real genocide has been taking place.

Today, the humanitarian situation in Somalia, where aid workers still operate, has been declared the worst in the world (and with what is happening to the Tamils in the concentration camps in Sri Lanka that is saying a lot). Next door in the Ethiopian Ogaden, conveniently there are almost no aid agencies, other than in a few towns, to witness what is as bad or more likely worse than in Somalia. Yet what do we hear from those who are collecting so much loot on behalf of suffering Africans about the real genocide going on in the Ogaden?

As I mentioned earlier, I first wrote about what I believed was happening in Sudan and Ethiopia back in mid 2003. Sudan is estimated to have suffered some two million deaths during its decades long civil war between the north and the south. After many years of hard work, peace has slowly, almost tortuously, been nurtured in Sudan, with the major ground work laid during negotiations held here in Asmara. In contrast to this what is the program of action demanded by the “Save Darfur” lot? A western-led military invasion and occupation a la Iraq and Afghanistan! With half a million or more dead in Iraq and Afghanistan thanks to western military “intervention” who in their right mind could think that sending western soldiers to Sudan will do anything other than destroy the peace so painfully built these past few years and cause even more suffering?

While peace has been slowing taking hold in Darfur, in the Ogaden peace is a long lost memory. War, famine and disease are spreading across the Ogaden and is becoming a situation that is increasingly the norm in growing areas of Ethiopia. While the western hucksters rake in beaucoup millions of dollars while peddling their “Save Darfur” bunkum , Sudanese have seen peace break out. In contrast, Ethiopians, suffering under a regime that is the largest recipient of western aid in Africa see only a future of growing ethnic and religious conflict and worse, active programs of genocide.

The problems developing in Ethiopia can invariably be traced back to the west, mainly the USA. The west, in particular the USA are hell bent on keeping Africa in a state of crisis, the better to exploit. And the “Save Darfur” lobby is all for bringing more violence to Africa under the guise of “humanitarian intervention”, while little of the tens of millions they collect ever reaches the Sudanese who it was intended for.

Busting the Darfur genocide myth is long overdue. If people in the west really want to help Africa they should stop donating to the Save Darfur fraudsters and start demanding accountability for the tens of billions of western aid that is paying for a real genocide in the Ethiopian Ogaden.

Tom Mountain lives in Somalia and can be reached at thomascmountain@yahoo.com