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September 2010

Activists heckle actors during performance

September 7, 2010

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Three activists, including an Israeli lawmaker, heckled actors during a performance at a theater in Tel Aviv.

Monday night’s disruption was a protest of the more than 50 Israeli theater professionals who signed a petition in late August saying that they will not perform in the new Ariel cultural center in the West Bank when it opens in November. The activists included Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari of the National Union Party.

Both the playwright and the director of Monday night’s show at the Cameri Theater signed the petition.

Lead actor Oded Teomi, one of the Cameri’s veteran performers, did not sign the letter and tried to tell this to the hecklers.

“Because of your behavior, maybe we should consider whether there is anything to perform to in Ariel,” he then told the protesters, Haaretz reported.

The Ariel cultural center, which cost more than $10 million, was built with public funds. Several major Israeli theaters are scheduled to stage productions there this year.

At least 150 Israeli academics and authors, and another 150 American and British television and film professionals, also threw their support behind the boycott.

Ariel is one of the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

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From a comment at Mondoweiss

Lysander September 6, 2010 at 5:24 pm
It seems the whole story about stoning to death is nonsense. Here is a comment by b (Bernhardt) formerly of moonofalabama.com posted at Pat Lang’s sic semper tyranis blog.

“There is a lot of propaganda around this story and hardly a fact reported in the western media.

From what I gathered:

1. The woman was sentenced by a low court for aiding and abetting to murder her husband and for adultery and the punishment of stoning to death.

But in July the highest Iranian court judged that this was invalid and that the lower courts opinion was false.

There simply is no case anymore against that woman for adultery and there is no legal sentence of stoning her to death. It simply doesn’t exist anymore.

2. There is a sentence against the woman for aiding and abetting to the murder of her husband. That sentence is to 10 years of prison.

So far the facts.

Since 2002 stoning is abolished in Iran. While it is still on the books, it is no longer used.

Stoning:

The Iranian judiciary officially placed a moratorium on stoning in 2002, although the punishment remained on the books, and there were a few cases of Judges handing down stoning sentences in 2006 and 2007 [21] In 2008, Iran’s judiciary decided to fully scrap the punishment from the books in a legislation submitted to parliament for approval.[22] As of June 2009, Iran’s parliament has been reviewing and revising the Islamic penal code to omit stoning as a form of punishment.[23]
…
In July 2010, the Iranian judiciary spokesman Jamal Karimirad was quoted as saying “Stoning has been dropped from the penal code for a long time, and in the Islamic republic, we do not see such punishments being carried out”, further adding that if stoning sentences were passed by lower courts, they were over-ruled by higher courts and “no such verdicts have been carried out.”[26]

A crazy judgment by a lower court is certainly not something unusual even in the U.S.

So what is all the fuzz about if not for simple Iran bashing to prepare the public for war against Iran?”

Posted by: b | 06 September 2010 at 08:16 AM

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Freedom Watch The Empire Of America, Judge Napolitano, September 4, 2010

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The silent treatment

William Parry


Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack tells William Parry why he is boycotting Israel.

The movement for a cultural boycott of Israel in response to its treatment of the Palestinians, modelled on the boycott of apartheid South Africa, could eclipse decades of disingenuous political charades in engaging western intellectuals, academics and artists. Internationally renowned figures such as Naomi Klein and Ken Loach have supported the call, and now one of Britain’s most successful bands, Massive Attack, is publicly backing the boycott.

“I’ve always felt that it’s the only way forward,” Robert Del Naja, the band’s lead singer, tells me when we meet at the Lazarides gallery in Fitzrovia, London. Del Naja is an artist as well as musician and his face and fingers are speckled with paint. Dozens of his pictures are strewn
all over the wooden floorboards, drying. “It’s a system that’s been applied to many countries. It’s a good thing to aim for because it applies the continual pressure that’s needed.”

Musicians have a history of rallying the public to supporting political causes. The global anti-apartheid movement got the fillip it desperately needed when musicians began supporting it. The single “Sun City” by Artists United Against Apartheid in 1985 and the 70th-birthday tribute concert for Nelson Mandela at Wembley in 1988 catapulted the cause into millions of ordinary homes.

“I think musicians have a major role to play,” Del Naja says. “I find the more I get involved, the more the movement becomes something tangible. I remember going to ‘Artists Against Apartheid’ gigs, and ‘Rock Against Racism’ gigs around the same sort of time. Bands like the Clash and the Specials had a lot to do with influencing the minds of the youth in those days.” Those formative experiences are still evident in Massive Attack’s outlook today. A typical gig by the band is a blistering fusion of music with political messages and statistics flashed up on video screens, while the band regularly lends support to humanitarian causes.

Calls for a boycott were first issued five years ago by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, but a series of developments beginning with the Gaza war in winter 2008-2009 have led to rising support for the campaign. After Israel’s deadly raid on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May this year, a number of leading artists, including the Pixies, Elvis Costello and Gorillaz, cancelled concerts in Israel. In August, 150 Irish visual artists also pledged not to exhibit in Israel, but it is musicians who have been the most prominent international supporters of the boycott.

Their views are not unanimous, however. Other musicians, from Elton John and Diana Krall (Costello’s wife) to Placebo and John Lydon, have refused to cancel concert dates in Israel. Some have insisted that engagement with Israel is more productive – a stance that Del Naja rejects. “We were asked to play Israel and we refused,” he says. “The question was asked: ‘If you don’t play there, how can you go there and change things?’ I said: ‘Listen, I can’t play in Israel when the Palestinians have no access to the same fundamental benefits that the Israelis do.’ I think the best approach is to boycott a government that seems hell-bent on very destructive policies. And it’s sad, because we’ve met some great people in Israel, and it’s a difficult decision to have to make.”

Beyond the arts world, an increasing number of trade unions, student unions and churches are signing up to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Even an Israel-based group, Boycott from Within, backs the campaign, stating that its government’s “political agenda will change only when the price of continuing the status quo becomes too high . . . because the current levels of apathy in our society render this move necessary”.

“We are not going to achieve a quick lib­eration,” Del Naja concedes, but says the point is to apply “pressure, the continual pressure that’s needed”. And the threat of international isolation and economic repercussions is clearly starting to bite: Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, recently passed the first reading of a bill that would impose heavy fines on Israeli citizens who initiate or support boycotts against Israel, and a bill to bar foreigners – like Del Naja – who do the same from entering Israel for ten years.

“The boycott is not an action of aggression towards the Israeli people,” he says. “It’s towards the government and its policies. Everyone needs to be reminded of this because it’s very easy to be accused of being anti-Semitic, and that’s not what this is about.”

William Parry’s “Against the Wall: the Art of Resistance in Palestine” is published by Pluto Press (£14.99)

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Why Palestinians are second-class citizens in Lebanon

by
Ahmed Moor

Arab leaders pay lip service to Palestinian rights – except when it comes to the rights of domiciled refugees in their countries

I moved to Beirut from New York nine months ago and began looking for an apartment. After 10 continuous years in America, I wanted to return to the Arab world – and returning to my family’s roots in Palestine wasn’t an option.

I knew that in Beirut, I likely wasn’t going to be renting from a faceless, impersonal property company; real people mostly own the real estate here – and often, they are interested in knowing their tenants personally. That’s how I learned, to my dismay, that being a Palestinian in Beirut is mostly a liability; anti-Palestinian racism is a fact of life here.

During my second month in Lebanon, I responded to an ad for an apartment in East Beirut, which is now predominantly a Christian district. The building owner called me and we arranged a viewing. The apartment seemed fine, and on my way out, the owner invited me into his apartment on the first floor of the building for a coffee.

The coffee turned out to be an interview – or rather, an interrogation. It began with a series of inquisitive but reasonable questions. Why did my family leave Palestine? What was my business in Lebanon? Why didn’t I go back to Palestine? Why didn’t I go back to America?

But from there, it became aggressively adversarial. The man suggested my father had behaved in a cowardly fashion by leaving Palestine – or that he left for love of money. I was shocked, and only said that it was clear that the man resented Palestinians. Needless to say, he didn’t want to rent the apartment to me and I didn’t want to rent it from him.

But my experience here in Lebanon has been a privileged one. I have the luxury of looking for an apartment in East Beirut – and I can afford the rent. Furthermore, I’m an American citizen, which makes life immeasurably easier. The vast majority of the 400,000 Palestinian refugees (10% of the population in Lebanon) who were born and raised in Lebanon do not have anything approaching the privilege I do. Today, Lebanon is the most hostile country to Palestinian refugees after Israel. They are second-class citizens here, but they are not the only ones.

Foreign guest workers also have a notoriously hard time in Lebanese society. Racism is so widespread (see Nesrine Malik’s recent Cif article) that African and Asian guest workers are openly barred from attending the beaches where Lebanese people frolic. And that’s saying nothing of the often inhumane working conditions they are subjected to on a daily basis.

There is an anti-Syrian current, as well. I remember encountering a barking dog while hiking somewhere in the northern part of the country. The owner rushed up and quieted the animal, remarking to me: “See how quickly he calmed down when I told him you’re not Syrian.”

The difference, of course, is that the Syrians, Ethiopians, Filipinos and others have consular support and countries to return to (although that is a serious problem for many guest workers, who are functionally indentured servants). The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have no such recourse.

Lebanese hostility to the Palestinian refugees is far from uniform. But it’s explosive and dangerous where it exists. For instance, the Lebanese Forces militia massacred up to 2,500 Palestinian refugees and others in the Sabra and Shatila camps in 1982 in coordination with the Israeli army. In the 1980s, the Amal militia besieged the camps, killing hundreds and starving thousands. More recently, the Lebanese army bombarded the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in the north of the country in an attempt to root out terrorists unaffiliated to the camp.

The Arab world is rife with hypocrisy when it comes to the Palestinian issue. Arab leaders frequently and rightly cite the chronic human rights violations in which Israel engages, but fail to address the marginalisation of Palestinians within their own societies. Historically, Lebanese citizens have declared that naturalising Palestinians will act as a disincentive to their eventual repatriation and the exercise of their inviolable right of return. But this is a specious and cynical misrepresentation of the issue.

First, many diaspora Palestinians who have been naturalised in foreign countries, including myself, still seek to return to Palestine. Second, an individual ought to have the right to lead a complete and fulfilling life in his/her country of birth, irrespective of national or racial identity; it is not up to the Arab leaders to safeguard the Palestinian right of return against the prospect of a meaningful life lived outside Palestine.

More plausibly, Lebanon’s miserable record regarding the human rights of Palestinian refugees (and others) is a result of the country’s sectarian structure. Lebanon has never been a cohesive political entity and remains divided by sectarian allegiances. Most Lebanese citizens are members of one of three communities: the Sunni community, the Shia community and the Christian community (each of which is further subdivided into competing forces). The country is less divided today than it was in 1991, in the aftermath of the 15-year-long civil war, but it remains fractured.

In this context, it matters that the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are mostly Sunni Muslims. There is a fear that if Palestinians are integrated, they will upset the delicate confessional balance that prevails here. It is therefore difficult to see how Lebanon will undertake to improve the lives of the refugees before the Lebanese solve their own sectarian problems.

There has been some official movement on the issue, however. The current prime minister, Saad Hariri, recently remarked that “we included the ministerial statement with an article related to the Palestinians that guarantees their human and public rights”.

Major parliamentary leaders, like Walid Jumblatt and Nabih Berri, favour extending civil rights to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, but their efforts are being stalled by others like National Liberal party leader, Dori Chamoun. At the end of parliamentary proceedings on the issue last week, Chamoun said: “We hold on to Lebanon first and foremost and not onto the Palestinian cause at the expense of the Lebanese cause, and the Christians speak one language in this regard.”

But the issue is far from deadlocked. Elias Muhanna, a prominent blogger, writes that “several analysts are very optimistic that the law will be passed when it comes up again, thereby rolling back several decades’ worth of institutionalised discrimination against Palestinians in Lebanon.”

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THE FATAH HAMAS SPLIT

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5 Jaw-Dropping Stories In Wikileaks’ Archives

Begging For National Attention
By Nick Turse

04 September, 2010
Alternet.org

Many files, beyond the Afghan War Diary and the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, continue to hide in plain sight on Wikileaks’ Web site

In December 2008, I received an email message from Julian Assange — the now world-famous public face of the whistleblower organization, Wikileaks. I don’t recall why or how it came about, but he invited me to join a counterinsurgency “analysis team” alongside a number of other academics, journalists and analysts.

The idea was to offer us embargoed material, much as Wikileaks recently did with the files of the Afghan War Diary — a 6-year archive of tens of thousands of classified military documents, dealing with the U.S. war in Afghanistan — giving the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel advance access to the documents. The reason for doing so was because Wikileaks had released a number of important U.S. military counterinsurgency manuals in the preceding months, but few reporters had shown much interest in them. Operating in a media environment where breaking the story is key and the fear of being scooped limits the amount of time and energy publications are willing to invest on documents sitting out in public, Assange carried out a trial run of a strategy that served Wikileaks exceptionally well this year.

I never wrote anything on the embargoed counterinsurgency manuals and the “analysis team” either petered out or gave up on me. But just as was the case then, today there are many files, beyond the much-publicized Afghan War Diary and the “Collateral Murder” video of a U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter mowing down people in Baghdad in 2007, that continue to hide in plain sight on Wikileaks’ Web site. Below are just five examples of the types of documents available at Wikileaks.org that deserve in-depth analysis and national media attention.

COIN of the Realm

Those counterinsurgency (COIN) manuals I read and then never wrote about, as well as other related materials, are still available at Wikileaks and have taken on ever-increasing importance as COIN has become the strategy du jour for the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Wikileaks currently offers no fewer than eight core U.S. counterinsurgency manuals and handbooks as well as numerous supporting materials with special bearing on COIN operations. One of the most important is the U.S. Special Forces Southern Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Handbook of 2006 which was designed to provide “guidance to the commanders and staffs of combined-arms forces that have a primary mission of eliminating insurgent forces and discusses the nature of organized guerrilla units and underground elements and their supporters.”

The handbook is notable for the fact that it is incredibly unsophisticated and rehashes lots of well-worn material on guerrillas and conventional efforts to defeat them. As a result, it explains a great deal about why and how the U.S. finds itself nearly a decade into a war against a rather rag-tag insurgency without exceptionally fervent popular support or the sponsorship of a major power.

Another COIN-related document of special interest on Wikileaks’ Web site is the September 2008 U.S. Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare manual. Defined as “[o]perations conducted by, with, or through irregular forces in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, or conventional military operations,” unconventional warfare (UW) is just one of the panoply of other non-traditional types of operations, like irregular warfare and counterinsurgency, that the U.S. military both studies and carries out. At nearly 250 pages, the acronym-filled manual offers everything from a stilted primer on U.S. “national power” to guidance on when to begin conducting psychological operations in a UW campaign (“as early as possible”) to obtuse and near-useless formulations that, in almost any other publication, would be red-lined by an editor. For example:

The information environment is the total of individuals, organizations, and systems that collect, process, disseminate, or act on information. The actors include leaders, decision makers, individuals, and organizations. Resources include the materials and systems employed to collect, analyze, apply, or disseminate information. The information environment is where humans and automated systems observe, orient, decide, and act upon information, and is therefore the principal environment of decision making. Even though the information environment is considered distinct, it resides within each of the four domains of air, land, sea, and space.

The manual is also filled with dubious assertions, like this one that people from the Indian tribes of the Great Plains, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to name a few locales, might dispute:

The United States avoids resorting to military force, preferring to wield all other instruments of power in the pursuit of national objectives and in the context of international competition and conflict. Therefore, diplomacy routinely blocks the need for the application of the military instrument of power.

Other U.S. Military Material

U.S. military documents found at Wikileaks’ Web site are not, however, limited to COIN-related material. There are, to take just two examples, the March 2004 Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for Camp Delta — the main prison facility at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — and the U.S. military’s Rules of Engagement (ROE) for Iraq circa 2005, both of which are of potential use to reporters and scholars evaluating U.S. military treatment of noncombatants during the Bush years.

One very different but no less interesting report is the “Marine Corps Midrange Threat Estimate: 2005-2015,” which was prepared by Marine Corps Intelligence’s Global Threats Branch. “Marine Corps forces will be challenged by emerging technical, military, and geopolitical threats; by thegrowing resourcefulness and the ingenuity of non-state actors and terrorist networks; and by natural disasters,” begins the report. “The U.S. military must develop more agile strategies and adaptive tactics if it is to succeed in this complex environment.” The Marines were changing, said the report, to do just that.

“The threat environment facing today’s Marines can be defined in three words: unconventional, unforeseen, and unpredictable,” reads the document. Despite admitting that future threats were largely unforeseeable, Marine Intelligence still endeavored to forecast the likelihood of various intervention scenarios “based on an independent, data-driven methodology that assessed the conditions for possible Marine intervention or assistance in the selected countries,” more specifically, “20 states of interest that represent a wide range of potential future security challenges for the Marine Corps.”

For those interested in keeping score over the next five years, the Marine Corps’ report forecasts that counterterrorism missions by U.S. Marines in Albania, Bangladesh, Colombia and Saudi Arabia are “possible” — the mid-range on the three-point scale of likelihood — as are COIN missions in Liberia, Syria and Uzbekistan. Countries that rated “high” on the scale, when it came to the chance of conducting counterterrorism operations, included Ethiopia, Georgia, Mauritania, and Nigeria, while Iran and North Korea were rated as “high” when it came “major regional contingencies” — that is full-scale wars.

Insider Information from the CIA

Wikileaks offers access to a number of documents prepared by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which, if not for the site, would likely be totally out of the reach of the very taxpayers who foot the bill for them. These files include everything from a report about the threat Al Qaeda poses to the United States, which was prepared by the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center’s Office of Terrorism Analysis in 2005 to a 10-page book listing the briefings about the U.S. use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (also known as torture) provided to members of Congress during 2009.

Another especially intriguing CIA document, with special bearing on the war in Afghanistan, was released by Wikileaks this spring and offers a window into the ways in which the United States thinks about allied countries, their people and the worth of their opinions.

Since taking office in January 2009, President Barack Obama has repeatedly escalated the war in Afghanistan, increasing troop numbers, boosting air strikes by unmanned drones, and sending more CIA agents and covert operators into the country. Over that same time period, opposition to the war in allied NATO countries has been on the rise, as Canada declared it would withdraw its 2,800 soldiers by the end of 2011 and the Dutch government collapsed under the weight of anti-war sentiment.

This spring, a month after the Dutch government fell, the CIA “Red Cell” — an analytic team “charged by the Director of Intelligence with taking a pronounced ‘out-of-the-box’ approach that will provoke thought and offer an alternative viewpoint” — issued a report on “Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission” in Afghanistan. The document, produced in collaboration with an Agency “strategic communications” expert and analysts from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), outlines strategies for manipulating public opinion in France, Germany, and other allied NATO nations in order to further U.S. war aims in Afghanistan.

The report, classified confidential, and not surprisingly, not to be shown to foreign nationals, noted that public apathy in France and Germany — where most citizens have paid scant attention to the war — has allowed their national governments “to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)… despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to increased ISAF deployments.” The document cautions that increased ISAF casualties or press coverage of civilian carnage might catch the attention of the European public and increase hostility toward the war effort. The worse case scenario being that, as elections approach, the Dutch troop withdrawal might cause “politicians elsewhere [to] cite a precedent for ‘listening to the voters.’”

To forestall the possibility that NATO nations will respond to public will, the CIA report suggests focused propaganda campaigns, dubbed an “iterative strategic communication program.” For France, it suggests tailored messages focused on civilians and refugees that will “leverage French (and other European) guilt” to the advantage of the U.S. For Germans, increasing positive press about the military situation combined with scare tactics highlighting the possibility that defeat in Afghanistan might “heighten Germany’s exposure to terrorism, opium, and refugees” were offered as viable strategies. The CIA team also indicated that Afghan women could be deployed, as part of a concerted strategy, to manipulate public opinion in support of the war effort.

Foreign Government Documents

While classified U.S. government records may be the highest profile materials that appear on Wikileaks.org, they are far from alone. Other governments have also seen their documents, whether leaked directly to Wikileaks or reposted from elsewhere, exposed via the Web site. One example is a secret, 186-page database of settlements, written in Hebrew, that was compiled by the Israeli government. Writing about it earlier this year, Steven Aftergood, the head of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists explained:

The database provides a concise description of each of the dozens of settlements, including their location, legal status, population, and even the origins of their names, which are often Biblically inspired. Crucially, the database makes clear that unauthorized and illegal construction activity has taken place in most of the settlements.

Another example of the type of foreign government information available through Wikileaks is the Indian Army’s doctrine from 2004, which demonstrates that stilted language and statements of the obvious are not limited to U.S. military manuals. Consider this gem:

Offensive operations are a decisive form of winning a war. Their purpose is to attain the desired end state and achieve decisive victory. Offensive operations seek to seize the initiative from the enemy, retain it and exploit the dividends accruing from such actions. These operations end when the force either achieves the desired end state or reaches its culmination point.

Corporate Documents

Earlier this year, Aftergood castigated Wikileaks for posting everything from documents detailing the secret rituals of sororities to those shedding light on the shadowy rites of Masons and Mormons. “This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism,” he wrote. “It is a kind of information vandalism.”

Wikileaks also offers a selection of internal corporate memos, manuals and emails, some of which intersect with matters of politics, law enforcement and/or national security issues. One prime example is an email reportedly sent by Anthony Jones, the vice president and senior site executive of mega-defense contractor Boeing’s Huntsville, Alabama operations to plant employees in an effort to combat Obama administration efforts to make cuts to the company’s ground-based midcourse missile defense system. Offering subordinates talking points and contact information for Congressional representatives, the email even suggests that workers’ families might also become involved in the campaign. Missing from the note is even a mention of Boeing’s financial interests. The email, instead, frames all concerns in terms of U.S. national security.

Another corporate document that is available at Wikileaks.org is the Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook. In February of this year, Cryptome.org — a Web site that, since the 1990s, has “welcome[d] documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance” — posted the manual and was shut down by its hosting provider, Network Solutions, at Microsoft’s behest.

Labeled “Confidential For Law Enforcement Use Only,” the 22-page manual contains no trade secrets, but did allow Microsoft customers to learn just what information the software giant is retaining from their Hotmail and Xbox Live accounts and under what circumstances it will be turned over to law enforcement when presented with a subpoena, court order or search warrant. (“Xbox Live records every IP address you ever use to login and stores them for perpetuity,” Wired.com’s Ryan Singel noted in an article published earlier this year.)

What Else Wikileaks Has to Offer

While most media outlets and bloggers alike, are seemingly content to wait for Wikileaks to unveil a second batch of documents — roughly 15,000 in all — about the Afghan war in the days ahead, other important materials are waiting for intrepid reporters and researchers to wade in and make something of the information.

While the chilling “Collateral Murder” video and the gargantuan Afghan War Diary have, quite rightly, garnered a tremendous amount of attention for Wikileaks.org this year, the site has long offered much more in the way of classified, shadowy or otherwise unavailable material from public and private sources. It remains a relatively untapped or at least undertapped treasure trove for journalists, bloggers and academic researchers willing to put in the time and effort.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso), which brings together leading analysts from across the political spectrum, will be published later this month. He is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on at http://nickturse.tumblr.com/Tumblr, and on Facebook. His website is NickTurse.com.

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Flying the flag, faking the news

John Pilger

Loud noises from Washington about a US pull-out from Iraq are a poor disguise for America’s determination to keep waging war. And the same sort of spin is at work here in Britain

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the First World War, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society”, and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country”. Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations”.

The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women that they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s
liberation, he made cigarettes “torches of freedom”. In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit Company’s monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a “liberation”.

Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that “engineering public consent” was for the greater good. This could be achieved by the creation of “false realities” which then became “news events”. Here are examples of how it is done these days.

False reality The last US combat troops have left Iraq “as promised, on schedule”, according to President Barack Obama. The TV news has been filled with cinematic images of the “last US soldiers”, silhouetted against the dawn light, crossing the border into Kuwait.

Fact They have not left. At least 50,000 troops will continue to operate from 94 bases. American air assaults are unchanged, as are special forces’ assassinations. The number of “military contractors” is 100,000 and rising. Most Iraqi oil is now under direct foreign control.

False reality BBC presenters have described the departing US troops as a “sort of victorious army” that has achieved “a remarkable change in [Iraq’s] fortunes”. Their commander, General David Petraeus, is a “celebrity”, “charming”, “savvy” and “remarkable”.

Fact There is no victory of any sort. There is a catastrophic disaster, and attempts to present it as otherwise are a model of Bernays’s campaign to “rebrand” the slaughter of the First World War as “necessary” and “noble”. In 1980, Ronald Reagan, running for president, rebranded the invasion of Vietnam, in which up to three million people died, as a “noble cause”, a theme taken up enthusiastically by Hollywood. Today’s Iraq war movies have a similar purging theme: the invader as both idealist and victim.

False reality It is not known how many Iraqis have died. They are “countless”, or maybe “in the tens of thousands”.

Fact As a direct consequence of the Anglo-American-led invasion, a million Iraqis have died. This figure, from Opinion Research Business, follows peer-reviewed research by Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, whose methods were secretly affirmed as “best practice” and “robust” by the Blair government’s chief scientific adviser. This is rarely reported or presented to “charming” American generals. Neither is the dispossession of four million Iraqis, the malnourishment of most Iraqi children, the epidemic of mental illness, or the poisoning of the environment.

False reality The British economy has a deficit of billions which must be reduced with cuts in public services and regressive taxation, in a spirit of “we’re all in this together”.

Fact We are not in this together. What is remarkable about this PR triumph is that only 18 months ago, the diametric opposite filled TV screens and front pages. Then, in a state of shock, truth became unavoidable, if briefly. The Wall Street and City of London trough was on full view for the first time, along with the venality of once-celebrated snouts. Billions in public money went to inept and crooked organisations known as banks, which were spared debt liability by their Labour government sponsors.

Within a year, record profits and personal bonuses were posted and the “black hole” was no longer the responsibility of the banks, whose debt is to be paid by those not in any way responsible: the public. The received media wisdom of this “necessity” is now a chorus, from the BBC to the Sun. A masterstroke, Bernays would surely say.

False reality Ed Miliband offers a “genuine alternative” as leader of the Labour Party.

Fact Miliband, like his brother and almost all those standing for the Labour leadership, is immersed in the effluent of New Labour. As a New Labour MP and minister, he did not refuse to serve under Blair or to speak out against Labour’s persistent warmongering. He now calls the invasion of Iraq a “profound mistake”. Calling it a mistake insults the memory and the dead. It was a crime, of which the evidence is voluminous. He has nothing new to say about the other colonial wars, none of them mistakes. Neither has he demanded basic social justice – that those who caused the recession clear up the mess and that Britain’s fabulously rich corporate minority be taxed seriously, starting with Rupert Murdoch.

The good news is that false realities often fail when the public trusts its own critical intelligence. Two classified documents recently released by WikiLeaks express the CIA’s concern that the populations of European countries, which oppose their governments’ war policies, are not succumbing to the usual propaganda spun through the media.

For the rulers of the world, this is a conundrum, because their unaccountable power rests on the false reality that no popular resistance works. And it does.

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How To Kill Goyim And Influence People — Torat Ha’melech

Max Blumenthal

When I went into the Jewish religious book emporium, Pomeranz, in central Jerusalem to inquire about the availability of a book called Torat Ha’Melech, or the King’s Torah, a commotion immediately ensued. “Are you sure you want it?” the owner, M. Pomeranz, asked me half-jokingly. “The Shabak [Israel’s internal security service] is going to want a word with you if you do.” As customers stopped browsing and began to stare in my direction, Pomeranz pointed to a security camera affixed to a wall. “See that?” he told me. “It goes straight to the Shabak!”

As soon as it was published late last year,Torat Ha’Melech sparked a national uproar. The controversy began when an Israeli tabloid panned the book’s contents as “230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew.” According to the book’s author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, “Non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and should be killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” “If we kill a gentile who has has violated one of the seven commandments… there is nothing wrong with the murder,” Shapira insisted. Citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it) he declared: “There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.”

In January, Shapira was briefly detained by the Israeli police, while two leading rabbis who endorsed the book, Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef, were summoned to interrogations by the Shabak. However, the rabbis refused to appear at the interrogations, essentially thumbing their noses at the state and its laws. And the government did nothing. The episode raised grave questions about the willingness of the Israeli government to confront the ferociously racist swathe of the country’s rabbinate. “Something like this has never happened before, even though it seems as if everything possible has already happened,” Israeli commentator Yossi Sarid remarked with astonishment. “Two rabbis [were] summoned to a police investigation, and announc[ed] that they will not go. Even settlers are kind enough to turn up.”

In response to the rabbis’ public rebuke of the state’s legal system, the Israeli Attorney General and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kept silent. Indeed, since the publication of Torat Ha’Melech, Netanyahu has strenuously avoided criticizing its contents or the author’s leading supporters. Like so many prime ministers before him, he has been cowed into submission by Israel’s religious nationalist community. But Netanyahu appears to be particularly impotent. His weakness stems from the fact that the religious nationalist right figures prominently in his governing coalition and comprises a substantial portion of his political base. For Netanyahu, a confrontation with the rabid rabbis could amount to political suicide, or could force him into an alliance with centrist forces who do not share his commitment to the settlement enterprise in the West Bank.

On August 18, a pantheon of Israel’s top fundamentalist rabbis flaunted their political power during an ad hoc congress they convened at Jerusalem’s Ramada Renaissance hotel. Before an audience of 250 supporters including the far-right Israeli Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari, the rabbis declared in the name of the Holy Torah that would not submit to any attempt by the government to regulate their political activities — even and especially if those activities included inciting terrorist attacks against non-Jews. As one wizened rabbi after another rose up to inveigh against the government’s investigation of Torat Ha’Melech until his voice grew hoarse, the gathering degenerated into calls for murdering not just non-Jews, but secular Jews as well.

“The obligation to sacrifice your life is above all others when fighting those who wish to destroy the authority of the Torah,” bellowed Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira, head of the yeshiva in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. “It is not only true against non-Jews who are trying to destroy it but against Jewish people from any side.”

The government-funded terror academy

The disturbing philosophy expressed in Torat Ha’Melech emerged from the fevered atmosphere of a settlement called Yitzhar located in the northern West Bank near the Palestinian city of Nablus. Shapira leads the settlement’s Od Yosef Chai yeshiva, holding sway over a small army of fanatics who are eager to lash out at the Palestinians tending to their crops and livestock in the valleys below them. One of Shapira’s followers, an American immigrant named Jack Teitel, has confessed to murdering two innocent Palestinians and attempting to the kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell with a mail bomb. Teitel is suspected of many more murders, including an attack on a Tel Aviv gay community center.

Despite its apparent role as a terror training institute, Od Yosef Chai has raked in nearly fifty thousand dollars from the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs since 2007, while the Ministry of Education has pumped over 250 thousand dollars into the yeshiva’s coffers between 2006 and 2007. The yeshiva has also benefited handsomely from donations from a tax-exempt American non-profit called the Central Fund of Israel. Located inside the Marcus Brothers Textiles store in midtown Manhattan, the Central Fund transferred at least thirty thousand to Od Yosef Chai between 2007 and 2008.

Though he does not name “the enemy” in the pages of his book, Shapira’s longstanding connection to terrorist attacks against Palestinian civilians exposes the true identity of his targets. In 2006, Shapira was briefly held by Israeli police for urging his supporters to murder all Palestinians over the age of 13. Two years later, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz, he signed a rabbinical letter in support of Israeli Jews who had brutally assaulted two Arab youths on the country’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same year, Shapira was arrested under suspicion that he helped orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus. Though he was released, Shapira’s name arose in connection with another act of terror, when in January, the Israeli police raided his settlement seeking the vandals who set fire to a nearby mosque. After arresting ten settlers, the Shabak held five of Shapira’s confederates under suspicion of arson.

Friends in high places

Despite his longstanding involvement in terrorism, or perhaps because of it, Shapira counts Israel’s leading fundamentalist rabbis among his supporters. His most well-known backer is Dov Lior the leader of the Shavei-Hevron yeshiva at Kiryat Arba, a radical Jewish settlement near the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron and a hotbed of Jewish terrorism. Lior has vigorously endorsed Torat Ha’Melech, calling it “very relevant, especially in this time.”

Lior’s enthusiasm for Shapira’s tract stems from his own eliminationist attitude toward non-Jews. For example, while Lior served as the IDF’s top rabbi, he instructed soldiers: “There is no such thing as civilians in wartime… A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail!” Indeed, there are only a few non-Jews whose lives Lior would demand to be spared. They are captured Palestinian militants who, as he once suggested, could be used as subjects for live human medical experiments.

Otherwise, Lior appears content to watch Palestinians perish as they did at the muzzle of Dr. Baruch Goldstein’s machine gun in 1994. Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians and wounded 150 in a shooting spree while they prayed in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs mosque, was a compatriot and neighbor of Lior in the settlement of Kiryat Arba. At Goldstein’s funeral, Lior celebrated the massacre as an act carried out “to sanctify the holy name of God.” He then extolled Goldstein as “a righteous man.” Thanks to Lior’s efforts, a shrine to Goldstein was constructed in center of Kiryat Arba so that locals could celebrate the killer’s deeds and pass his legacy down to future generations.

Though Lior’s inflammatory statements resulted in his being barred from running for election to the Supreme Rabbinical Council, according to journalist Daniel Estrin, the rabbi remains “a respected figure among many mainstream ZIonists.” By extension, he maintains considerable influence among religious elements in the IDF. In 2008, when the IDF’s chief rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Ronski, brought a group of military intelligence officers to Hebron for a special tour, he concluded the day with a private meeting with Lior, who was allowed to revel the officers with his views on modern warfare — “no such thing as civilians in wartime.”

Besides Lior, Torat Ha’Melech has earned support from another nationally prominent fundamentalist rabbi: Yaakov Yosef. Yosef is the leader of the Hazon Yaakov Yeshiva in Jerusalem and a former member of Knesset. Perhaps more significantly, he is the son of Ovadiah Yosef, the former chief rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas Party that forms a key segment of Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

Yaakov Yosef has brought his influence to bear in defense of Torat Ha’Melech, insisting at the August 18 convention in Jerusalem that the book was no different than the Hagadah that all Jews read from on the holiday of Passover. The Hagadah contains passages about killing non-Jews and so does the Bible, Yosef reminded his audience. “Does anyone want to change the Bible?” he asked.

Bibi buckles

Only days before direct negotiations in Washington between Israel and the Palestinian Authority planned for early September, Yaakov Yosef’s 89-year-old father, Ovadiah delivered his weekly sermon. With characteristic vitriol, he declared: “All these evil people should perish from this world… God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.”

The remarks have sparked an international furor and earned a stern rebuke from Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. “While the PLO is ready to resume negotiations in seriousness and good faith,” Erekat remarked, “a member of the Israeli government is calling for our destruction.”

Palestinian Israeli member of Knesset Jamal Zehalka subsequently demanded that the Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein put Yosef on trial for incitement. “If, heaven forbid, a Muslim spiritual leader were to make anti-Jewish comments of this sort,” Zehalka said, “he would be arrested immediately.”

Here was a perfect opportunity for Netanyahu to demonstrate sincerity about negotiations by shedding an extremist ally in the name of securing peace. All he had to do was forcefully reject Yosef’s genocidal comments — a feat made all the easier by the White House’s condemnation of the rabbi. But the Israeli Prime Minister ducked for political cover instead, issuing a canned statement through his office. “Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef’s remarks do not reflect Netanyahu’s views,” the statement read, “nor do they reflect the position of the Israeli government.”

Thus on the eve of peace negotiations, Bibi chose political expediency over condemning the murderous oath of a coalition partner.

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