Human rights and disarmament activists reacted bitterly Wednesday to the decision by the administration of President Barack Obama, who will receive the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize next month, not to sign the 10-year-old treaty banning anti-personnel landmines.
The U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines (USCBL), a coalition of scores of activist groups, called the administration’s decision "shocking," while Human Rights Watch (HRW), one of the Campaign’s most influential members, described it as "reprehensible."
"President Obama’s decision to cling to anti-personnel mines keeps the U.S. on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of humanity," said Steve Goose, the director of HRW’s Arms Division, who also noted that Washington stood alone among its NATO allies in refusing to sign the treaty.
"This decision lacks vision, compassion, and basic common sense, and contradicts the Obama administration’s professed emphasis on multilateralism, disarmament, and humanitarian affairs," he added.
A leading Democratic lawmaker, who spearheaded the drive in the early 1990s to ban Washington’s export of the weapon to other countries, also decried the decision, which was announced by State Department spokesman Ian Kelly Tuesday.
Sen. Patrick Leahy said the decision constituted a "default of U.S. leadership" and charged that it appeared to be based on a review that "can only be described as cursory and half-hearted."
[...]
Like Leahy, the USCBL, which is part of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), said it was especially disappointed by the way the administration’s review of the treaty was carried out.
"While we were told to expect a landmine policy review… we were taken by surprise that it had already been concluded behind closed doors without the consultation of non-governmental aid workers, legislators, and important U.S. NATO allies who are all States Parties to the treaty," said Zach Hudson, the group’s coordinator.
"We also have been offered no official reasons as to why the U.S. would continue on this present course – other than that nothing has changed since Bush reviewed the policy in 2004," he added. "President Obama should explain these actions to the international community, which held such high hopes for a different kind of U.S. engagement."
"It’s painful that President Obama has chosen to reject the Mine Ban Treaty just weeks before he joins the ranks of Nobel peace laureates, including the ICBL," Goose added.
A prisoner leans against an entrance to the wing where political prisoners are kept at Sarposa prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan. (Dene Moore/Canadian Press)
The International Committee of the Red Cross had serious concerns about Canada's handling of Afghan detainees, according to reports Richard Colvin sent to the office of former foreign affairs minister Peter MacKay in 2006, CBC News has learned.
"According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured, for the interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure," Colvin, a former senior diplomat with Canada's mission in Afghanistan, told a parliamentary committee on Nov. 18.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay denies seeing any of Richard Colvin's reports when he was foreign affairs minister.(Reuters)
CBC News has details of the contents of Colvin's first two reports, which describe a series of meetings he had in 2006 with officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the organization that monitors the condition of prisoners of war and detainees.
Colvin reported the Red Cross had concerns about Canada's detainee handling. "Kandahar ICRC losing track of some detainees," Colvin's report said.
The Red Cross blamed this on shoddy record-keeping in the Canadian Forces. Colvin's report said the Red Cross was "angry" and "frustrated," that the Canadian Forces wouldn't notify its monitors of detainee transfers for between two and eight days.
"In other words, in the critical days after a detainee was first transferred to the Afghan intelligence service, nobody was able to monitor them," Colvin told the parliamentary committee last week.
The second of Colvin's memos said that Canada's Dutch allies were so concerned about the conditions in Afghan jails, they wanted to build their own prison, with help from Canada and the United Kingdom. The note also described new meetings with the Red Cross.
Some of Canada's Afghan detainees were being held in "unsatisfactory conditions," the Red Cross warned. There was a lack of safeguards, and it was frequently unclear which Afghan security agency was actually holding a detainee.
"He says all kinds of things are going on," Colvin reported. "He says Canada's responsibility for detainees does not cease because they have been transferred over to Afghan authorities."
Colvin deemed his warnings of "serious and alarming" problems in the treatment of Afghan detainees to be so important that he sent two reports directly to MacKay's office — the first on May 26, 2006, and the second just a few days later.
MacKay, now defence minister, denies seeing any of Colvin's reports when he was foreign affairs minister. He said the first report he saw from Colvin was in June 2007, and it was nothing serious.
MacKay said Colvin's reports were based on groundless allegations made by Taliban prisoners. "Mr. Speaker no courts in the law would take the evidence of one individual based on reports, second and third-hand information and information from the Taliban," MacKay told the House of Commons Wednesday.
Colvin wrote several more reports, which were sent to at least 80 addresses in Afghanistan and Ottawa through a secure email system used to send diplomatic reports.
Among those recipients was an address used by the office of the minister of foreign affairs. In its response to Colvin, the government expressed surprise at the tone of his report, and his allegations that the Canadian Forces were not co-operating, CBC News has learned.
War may be hell, but it also doesn’t come cheap and it is time that the US taxpayer begin to question what he is getting for his money. Napoleon once famously said that an army travels on its stomach. He meant that feeding and supplying an army so that it would arrive to do battle in good condition were keys to victory. He frequently cut costs, however, provisioning his troops by looting the food supplies of the local population. That ad hoc policy led to disaster when confronted by the Russian scorched earth response on his retreat from Moscow in 1812 when he lost most of his army.
Rudyard Kipling, a witness to British Colonial fighting against Afghan and Pakistani tribesmen, also understood the economic reality of warfare. In his poem "Arithmetic on the Frontier," describing fighting in Afghanistan, he wrote about how a British officer possessed of a superb classical education might well be shot dead by an illiterate tribesman wielding an old musket firing a homemade bullet worth two cents:
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem, The troop-ships bring us one by one, At vast expense of time and steam, To slay Afridis where they run. The "captives of our bow and spear" Are cheap — alas! as we are dear.
What would Napoleon and Kipling have thought about America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Napoleon would have been astute enough to understand immediately that the American efforts lack any clear political objective beyond supporting the status quo, but he would undoubtedly also note the vast and wasteful expense of the enterprise. If Kipling were to tally up the new American rendition of arithmetic on the frontier he would undoubtedly be astonished and would want to double check his numbers. Both Napoleon and Kipling would have appreciated how the insurgents have the upper hand, free to engage in asymmetrical warfare against the clumsy invader who is totally reliant on extended and vulnerable supply lines.
The fiscal year 2010 Federal government budget included $130 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or somewhat more than $10 billion per month. The White House estimates that it will cost one billion dollars per year to deploy an additional 1,000 troops to Afghanistan. If President Obama makes the unfortunate decision to add 34,000 soldiers, as is being rumored, that cost would be $34 billion higher, raising the total to something approaching $14 billion per month. Exactly how the $1 billion number for each 1,000 addition is derived is not completely clear, but it appears to assume that there is complete elasticity in the supply arrangements, meaning that costs will not escalate because of increased demand or because of enemy action. It also does not address the six hundred pound gorilla in the room, which is the legacy issue that comes from fighting a war with borrowed money. As the Obama White House is so deep in the red that even George W. Bush appears in hindsight to have been a model of frugality, it should be assumed that Obama’s "war of necessity" will not be fully funded by Congress. That means either borrowing from the Asians or just printing the money while watching the dollar slide down the toilet. It has to be assumed that the US Treasury will do a bit of both.
Why are these wars so expensive? It goes back to Napoleon: logistics. US bases in Iraq are supplied by a 344-mile road running north from huge depots in Kuwait and by another artery running south from Turkey, both of which require convoys of trucks with armed guards dramatically raising the costs of everything being brought in. It is similar in Afghanistan but worse. The main supply route starts in Karachi, Pakistan, and works its way up through the Khyber Pass, at which point the truck convoys are frequently attacked by insurgents. When a convoy is destroyed the US Army assumes the loss as no one will insure such a perilous enterprise. Sometimes the trucking companies pay off the attackers to be left alone, ironically putting US taxpayer-provided money into the hands of those seeking to kill American soldiers.
The US Army, which used to manage its own logistics, now contracts out the work of running in the military supplies as well as water, food, and fuel. Contracting provides flexibility but it also means everything will be done for profit and therefore be more expensive. It also guarantees a high level of corruption. Even drinking water became a valued commodity in Iraq where summer temperatures sometimes reach 130 degrees and the country’s water purification system was destroyed by coalition bombs. A senior CIA officer Kyle Dusty Foggo has gone to jail based on his reported manipulation of multimillion dollar contracts to supply water to Agency bases in Iraq. Contractors in Kuwait paid $15 million in bribes to three US Army procurement officers between 2004 and 2007 to obtain the enormous contracts to supply bottled water to American forces. There is even a Burger King at the US Embassy in Baghdad which trucks in all its raw materials subsidized by the government through the military’s Army and Air Force Exchange System as well as other Burger Kings and several Pizza Huts at the other large Iraqi bases and at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. That $2 burger or slice of pizza might be a taste of home but it actually costs more like $20 when all the real expenses are factored in.
Think for a moment the role played by gasoline and other fuels in the current conflicts, three times greater than was the norm per soldier in Vietnam. A modern US soldier requires 22 gallons of fuel per day. American forces in Iraq alone are supplied by a fleet of 5,500 fuel trucks. The Pentagon estimates that the cost of fuel delivered to the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq averages $45 per gallon, including all expenses but excluding legacy costs like interest on borrowing money to buy the fuel in the first place. The fuel goes into Blackhawk helicopters which use about five gallons of aviation fuel every minute they are in the air, armored Humvees which get 8 miles per gallon, Stryker combat vehicles at 3 miles per gallon, and the new generation of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles which are being introduced into Afghanistan in large numbers to defend against roadside bombs. The MRAPs undeniably save lives, but they are heavily armored, weighing from fourteen and up to 52 tons depending on how they are configured. The lightest ones get only 4 miles per gallon of fuel and the heaviest less than a mile per gallon. Because the money is borrowed to pay for the fuel, the final true cost to the US taxpayer will likely exceed $100 per gallon when the current level of war debt is finally amortized around the year 2017.
Fuel is only one aspect of the escalating costs of the wars that America has become involved in. A total of one trillion dollars has been spent already in Iraq and in Afghanistan but legacy costs to include paying off the money that was borrowed and medical care for the many thousands of wounded soldiers and marines will drive the total cost of the war past the $5 trillion dollar mark even if the two wars were to end tomorrow. Harvard economist Joseph Stiglitz is now suggesting that a final figure approaching $7 trillion is not inconceivable inclusive of Obama’s early 2009 surge in Afghanistan coupled with the escalating costs of supplying US forces. If Obama adds thousands more soldiers at the request of Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, the final tab will go higher.
The numbers don’t lie. It is a fantasy to believe that Washington will somehow obtain a simulacrum of victory in Afghanistan and Iraq that will benefit America and its people. Apart from any other moral or practical considerations, the United States simply cannot afford to continue feeding an insatiable war machine. Extending the conflict to Iran will likely break the bank. Someone should speak the truth to President Obama, who is pledging to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, explaining that the best way to finish is to end the sorry debacle. The President should make the politically difficult but necessary decision to stop the bleeding and bring our soldiers home.
The Venezuelan National Assembly passed a new law on Thursday to preserve, promote, and strengthen indigenous artisanship through legal recognition, the creation of indigenous artisan councils, and a special development fund.
The Indigenous Artisans Law declares that indigenous artisanship is an integral part of the nation’s cultural heritage and that it is in the public and social interest to protect it and include it as an educational activity in public schools.
Once President Hugo Chavez signs the law, the productive activity carried out by indigenous peoples using “traditional” materials, techniques, skills, and knowledge will be exempt from national taxes.
To identify and define traditional practices as well as administer this productive activity, the Culture Ministry will create municipal, state, and national indigenous artisan councils made up of indigenous spokespersons designated by their respective communities.
In addition, the law creates a special “Fund for the Integral Social Development of Indigenous Artisans” that will finance the development of the infrastructure, health care, and educational facilities that the artisans need.
The law also requires states and municipalities to establish their own “benefits and fiscal incentives,” including the construction of marketplaces, to foment the artisanship of the indigenous peoples who reside in their districts. And, the national Institute of Cultural Heritage must create a social security program for the artisans and carry out a nation-wide registry of indigenous artisans, together with indigenous communities, in accordance with the law.
Most parts of the new law are mandated by the eight articles that make up Chapter 7 of the National Constitution, titled “Rights of Native Peoples.” Venezuela’s Constitution was written by an elected constituent assembly and passed by popular referendum in 1999, the year President Hugo Chavez first took office.
Article 121 of the Constitution says, “The state shall promote the appreciation and dissemination of the cultural manifestations of the native peoples,” and Article 123 says indigenous peoples “have the right to maintain and promote their own economic practices based on reciprocity, solidarity and exchange; their traditional productive activities and their participation in the national economy.”
Moreover, Article 124 prohibits the patenting of indigenous ancestral knowledge.
As a result of constitutional mandates, Venezuelan indigenous communities have gained representation in the government and received more social services than ever before, but conflicts persist over the ownership and mining of their ancestral lands.
In an effort to reassure Americans ahead of next week’s speech in which President Obama will announce the escalation of the Afghan War, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs wants Americans to rest safe in the knowledge that the war is not going to last forever.
When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the military presence was comparatively limited, and even in summer of 2008 only about 28,000 American soldiers were on the ground. When the latest escalation is approved the US will have over 100,000 troops in Afghanistan.
Adri Nieuwhof, The Electronic Intifada, 24 November 2009
Despite mounting pressure to withdraw from the light rail project in Jerusalem designed to serve the needs of Israel's illegal settlements, the French transportation giant Veolia is set to be highly involved in the project for the next five years. The company needs to support its new Israeli partner, the Dan Bus Company, which lacks the experience to operate the light rail.
As the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on 23 October, Dan has bought a 49 percent share in Veolia's contract with the City Pass Consortium to operate the light rail in Jerusalem, which connects the city to illegal Israeli settlements built on seized Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank. After it runs the light rail for five years, Dan will buy out Veolia's 51 percent share in the 30-year contract, as well as Veolia's five percent share in the City Pass Consortium.
The City Pass Consortium consists of four Israeli companies and the French companies Connex, a subsidiary of Veolia Transport, and Alstom. Dan will need the full support of Veolia to successfully run the light rail for the next five years because of Dan's lack of experience in this area. As a major shareholder, Veolia will provide the crucial expertise to Dan and continue to be a key player in the light rail project.
Veolia has been pressured to end its involvement in the Jerusalem light rail project by several financial institutions concerned with socially responsible investing, because the rail will normalize the illegal annexation of Palestinian East Jerusalem, considered part of the West Bank under international law. Some European politicians have also criticized the company because the project infringes on Palestinian human rights. After four years of silence, Veolia recently attempted to pacify concerns and protests by expressing the company's commitment to operate the Jerusalem light rail on "a clear, non-discriminatory policy based on free access for all parts of the population." The company promised to reconsider its involvement in the light rail if application of the non-discrimination policy turns out to be impossible.
However, statements made by a City Pass spokesperson reveal that Veolia is aware that the light rail service will be discriminatory. In a 23 April 2009 interview with Belgian masters student Karolien van Dyck, City Pass spokesperson Ammon Elian explained how Palestinians and Jews are segregated in Jerusalem, and that the first planned rail line is designed to serve the needs of the secular Jewish population (with one stop in the Palestinian neighborhood of Shufat), and a second line is planned to serve the Orthodox Jewish population. "If Palestinians would want to make use of the light rail, both groups will not meet on the train, because of their different life patterns," Elian explained. The interview appeared in a Dutch-language report entitled "Public Transport and Political Control: an empirical study into the City Pass project on the West Bank" ("Openbaar vervoer en politieke controle: een empirische studie van het City Pass project op de Westelijke Jordaanoever"). Elian further justified the discriminatory service by claiming that since Palestinians are served by a network of buses, integration in the light rail would be redundant.
Considering its own past, it is hard to imagine that the Dan Bus Company management will take Veolia's non-discrimination policy seriously. On its English-language website, Dan states that "the Jewish battle of Jewish settlements for survival, from the pre-statehood 'Incidents' to the present day, has been an inseparable part of the Israeli experience. It is only natural that the Dan Cooperative has always been a central element in the struggle for the security of Israel, at all periods and in all circumstances." Not only serving Israel's civilian population, Israeli military forces use Dan's bus fleet "in times of peace as well as of war."
Meanwhile, legal action in France by the Association France Palestine Solidarity (AFPS) and the Palestine Liberation Organization against Alstom and Alstom Transport continues. The French companies have appealed a court decision to go ahead with the legal case. On 15 April 2009, the Nanterre tribunal ruled that the AFPS complaint aimed at ending Veolia, Alstom and Alstom Transport's participation in the light rail fell within its jurisdiction. Alstom and Alstom Transport appealed the judgment in a hearing at the Versailles Court of Appeals on 9 November. While Veolia did not appeal the ruling, a lawyer representing the company attended the hearing as an observer. The judgment is expected on 17 December 2009.
The New Zealand Government's chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn't there.
The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain's CRU climate research centre.
In New Zealand's case, the figures published on NIWA's [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century:
The caption to the photo on the NiWA site reads:
From NIWA's web site — Figure 7: Mean annual temperature over New Zealand, from 1853 to 2008 inclusive, based on
between 2 (from 1853) and 7 (from 1908) long-term station records. The blue and red bars show annual differences from the
1971 – 2000 average, the solid black line is a smoothed time series, and the dotted [straight] line is the linear trend over 1909
to 2008 (0.92°C/100 years).
But analysis of the raw climate data from the same temperature stations has just turned up a very different result:
Gone is the relentless rising temperature trend, and instead there appears to have been a much smaller growth in warming, consistent with the warming up of the planet after the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850.
Straight away you can see there's no slope—either up or down. The temperatures are remarkably constant way back to the 1850s. Of course, the temperature still varies from year to year, but the trend stays level—statistically insignificant at 0.06°C per century since 1850.
Putting these two graphs side by side, you can see huge differences. What is going on?
Why does NIWA's graph show strong warming, but graphing their own raw data looks completely different? Their graph shows warming, but the actual temperature readings show none whatsoever!
Have the readings in the official NIWA graph been adjusted?
It is relatively easy to find out. We compared raw data for each station (from NIWA's web site) with the adjusted official data, which we obtained from one of Dr Salinger's colleagues.
Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the years, by different scientists, have long gone unanswered, but now we might discover the truth.
Proof of man-made warming
What did we find? First, the station histories are unremarkable. There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.
About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.
The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.
One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a huge 1.3°C, creating strong warming from a mild cooling, yet there's no apparent reason for it.
We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It's a disgrace.
NIWA claim their official graph reveals a rising trend of 0.92ºC per century, which means (they claim) we warmed more than the rest of the globe, for according to the IPCC, global warming over the 20th century was only about 0.6°C.
NIWA's David Wratt has told Investigate magazine this afternoon his organization denies faking temperature data and he claims NIWA has a good explanation for adjusting the temperature data upward. Wratt says NIWA is drafting a media response for release later this afternoon which will explain why they altered the raw data.
"Do you agree it might look bad in the wake of the CRU scandal?"
"No, no," replied Wratt before hitting out at the Climate Science Coalition and accusing them of "misleading" people about the temperature adjustments.
Manipulation of raw data is at the heart of recent claims of corrupt scientific practice in climate science, with CRU's Phil Jones recently claiming old temperature records collected by his organization were "destroyed" or "lost", meaning researchers can now only access manipulated data.
The Corbett Report has released a new video message to the environmental movement. Watch the video by clicking here or in the embedded player.
Transcript: This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com and I come here today with a message for you.
You the environmentalists, you the activists, you the campaigners.
You who have watched with growing concern the ways in which the world around us has been ravaged in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.
You who are concerned with the state of the planet that we are leaving for our children and our grandchildren and those generations yet unborn.
This is not a message of divisiveness, but cooperation.
This is a message of hope and empowerment, but it requires us to look at a hard and uncomfortable truth:
Your movement has been usurped by the very same financial interests you thought you were fighting against.
You have suspected as much for years.
You watched at first with hope and excitement as your movement, your cause, your message began to spread, as it was taken up by the media and given attention, as conferences were organized and as the ideas you had struggled so long and hard to be heard were talked about nationally. Then internationally.
You watched with growing unease as the message was simplified. First it became a slogan. Then it became a brand. Soon it was nothing more than a label and it became attached to products. The ideas you had once fought for were now being sold back to you. For profit.
You watched with growing unease as the message became parroted, not argued, worn like a fashion rather than something that came from the conviction of understanding.
You disagreed when the slogans--and then the science--were dumbed down. When carbon dioxide became the focus and CO2 was taken up as a political cause. Soon it was the only cause.
You knew that Al Gore was not a scientist, that his evidence was factually incorrect, that the movement was being taken over by a cause that was not your own, one that relied on beliefs you did not share to propose a solution you did not want. It began to reach a breaking point when you saw that the solutions being proposed were not solutions at all, when they began to propose new taxes and new markets that would only serve to line their own pockets.
You knew something was wrong when you saw them argue for a cap-and-trade scheme proposed by Ken Lay, when you saw Goldman Sachs position itself to ride the carbon trading bubble, when the whole thrust of the movement became ways to make money or spend money or raise money from this panic.
Your movement had been hijacked.
The realization came the first time you read The Club of Rome's 1991 book, The First Global Revolution, which says:
"In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself."
Still, you wanted to believe that there was some basis of truth, something real and valuable in the single-minded obsession of this hijacked environmental movement with manmade global warming.
Now, in November 2009, the last traces of doubt have been removed.
Last week, an insider leaked internal documents and emails from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University and exposed the lies, manipulation and fraud behind the studies that supposedly show 0.6 degrees Celsius of warming over the last 130 years. And the hockey stick graph that supposedly shows unprecedented warming in our times. And the alarmist warning of impending climate disaster.
We now know that these scientists wrote programming notes in the source code of their own climate models admitting that results were being manually adjusted.
We now know that values were being adjusted to conform to scientists' wishes, not reality.
We now know that the peer review process itself was being perverted to exclude those scientists whose work criticized their findings.
We now know that these scientists privately expressed doubts about the science that they publicly claimed to be settled.
We now know, in short, that they were lying.
It is unknown as yet what the fallout will be from all of this, but it is evident that the fallout will be substantial.
With this crisis, however, comes an opportunity. An opportunity to recapture the movement that the financiers have stolen from the people.
Together, we can demand a full and independent investigation into all of the researchers whose work was implicated in the CRU affair.
We can demand a full re-evaluation of all those studies whose conclusions have been thrown into question by these revelations, and all of the public policy that has been based on those studies.
We can establish new standards of transparency for scientists whose work is taxpayer funded and/or whose work effects public policy, so that everyone has full and equal access to the data used to calculate results and all of the source code used in all of the programs used to model that data.
In other words, we can reaffirm that no cause is worth supporting that requires deception for its propagation.
Even more importantly, we can take back the environmental movement.
We can begin to concentrate on the serious questions that need to be asked about the genetic engineering technology whereby hybrid organisms and new, never-before-seen proteins that are being released into the biosphere in a giant, uncontrolled experiment that threatens the very genome of life on this planet.
We can look into the environmental causes of the explosion in cancer and the staggering drops in fertility over the last 50 years, including the BPA in our plastics and the anti-androgens in the water.
We can examine regulatory agencies that are controlled by the very corporations they are supposedly watching over.
Or we can, as some have, descend into petty partisan politics. We can decide that lies are OK if they support 'our' side. We can defend the reprehensible actions of the CRU researchers and rally around the green flag that has long since been captured by the enemy.
It is a simple decision to make, but one that we must make quickly, before the argument can be spun away and environmentalism can go back to business as usual.
We are at a crossroads of history. And make no mistake, history will be the final judge of our actions. So I leave you today with a simple question: Which side of history do you want to be on?
For The Corbett Report, this is James Corbett in western Japan.
[T]his post is on something you can read about in Haaretz. I do add some analysis and access to additional materials, but the primary reason for the divergence is emotional. Not only is this a story of extraordinary injustice, it is also about the family of a friend and colleague, Mary Koussa.
You can read the entire saga of the Shaya family in this Haaretz article, but the gist is fairly simple. In the 1920’s, Salim Khoury Shaya, head of Jaffa’s once prosperous Greek Orthodox Palestinian community, built a house for his family. He had seven children. In 1948, a census was taken of the remnants of Jaffa’s Palestinian community. Empty houses were taken over by the State of Israel, according to the Absentee Property Law (more about that at the bottom of this post). The Shaya house was a unique case. Three of the siblings were absent (in Lebanon), but four were present. So the State proclaimed itself “partner” and legally took over 40% of the house.
Decades passed and, except for a number of failed attempts in the 50’s and 60’s, to sue for full property rights, the Shaya family didn’t hear much from the government. Their area of Jaffa (near Ajami) was a slum no one was really interested in. That all changed about four years ago. The Jaffa coast went through accelerated gentrification and property prices skyrocketed. Amidar, the government owned housing company that administrates most Absentee Properties, saw an opportunity for a windfall. Contrary to popular perception, most of the Palestinians living in the area are not descendants of the pre-1948 residents,but descendants of refugees displaced during the war from other parts of the country, and are now tenants of Amidar.Therefore, their eviction, on a variety of pretexts, was relatively simple. In 2007-2008 alone, Amidar issued at least 400 eviction notices in the Ajami neighborhood.
The few Palestinian owners were more of a problem. But in 2007, some bureaucrat looking through old case files discovered the Shaya family’s vulnerability and hatched a plan — slap them with an exorbitant demand for years of back rent for the 40% of the house “owned” by the government and then demand that the “partnership” be dissolved through sale of the house to a third party. The Shayas don’t want to leave their ancestral home, but their attempts to buy out the State were rebuffed, and now Amidar and the Israel Lands Administration (ILA) have taken them to court. They want them out.
Even from the perspective of Lieberman’s Jewish-Nationalist school of thought there is much that is wrong with this story. As a devil’s advocate, I would ask his disciples in the government, why persecute “good Arabs?” The Shaya’s are fully integrated in Israeli society. One of the second generation siblings worked at the Tel-Aviv municipality for his entire life. An uncle was the first Palestinian policeman recruited in Jaffa by the Israeli government in 1949. A visitor at the Sunday family gatherings hears a mix of Arabic and Hebrew. Why is Israel taking them back to the Nakba that it wants to force them to forget through legislation?
For Israelis who still believe in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and for genuinely “pro-Israel” Jews abroad, this kind of reopening of 1948, which is also happening in Jerusalem and Haifa, is no less than suicidal. It severely undermines the premise of 1967 as the starting point for a diplomatic solution, with its implications regarding the 1948 refugees.
For all Jews, or at least those that see Judaism as a culture and a moral code, rather than an ethnic filter, the story of the persecution of the Shaya family presents a grave injustice for which we, as a collective, are responsible. It often seems to me that the apparatus of our government has lost any sense of justice and morality.
By Jim Lobe, November 26, 2009 
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