Sunday, 29 August 2010

Why Americans should oppose Zionism


This article, which I reprint in total, contains a succinct but wide-ranging condemnation of Zionism; and sets out why all who care about democracy but especially Americans, should stand against it.

Eden Abergil's Facebook shots did not represent anomalous or excessive behaviour



Steven Salaita, The Electronic Intifada, 26 August 2010


Israel has been subject to some bad publicity recently. In 2008-09, it launched a brutal military campaign in the Gaza Strip that killed more than 400 Palestinian children. In May 2010, bumbling Israeli commandos murdered nine nonviolence activists on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla's Mavi Marmara. It only got worse for Israel when it was revealed that soldiers stole and sold personal items such as laptops from the ship. Last week, former Israeli soldier Eden Abergil posted photos onto Facebook showing her preening in front of blindfolded and despondent Palestinian prisoners, in some instances mocking those prisoners with sexual undertones. The photos were part of an album entitled "IDF [Israeli army] -- the best time of my life."


While Abergil's pictures may not seem as abhorrent as the Gaza and Mavi Marmara brutality -- Abergil, for her part, described her behavior as nonviolent and free of contempt -- all three actions are intimately connected. First of all, we must dispel the notion that Abergil's photos are nonviolent. As with the Abu Ghraib debacle, a sexualized and coercive humiliation is being visited on the bodies of powerless, colonized and incarcerated subjects, which by any reasonable principle is a basal form of violence. There is also the obvious physical violence of Palestinians being bound and blindfolded, presumably in or on their way to prisons nobody will confuse with the Ritz Carlton.


More important, these recent episodes merely extend an age-old list of Israeli crimes and indignities that illuminate a depravity in the Zionist enterprise itself. What is noteworthy about Israel's three recent escapades is that more and more people are starting to pay attention to its crimes and indignities. In so doing, more and more people are questioning the origin and meaning of Zionism -- that is, the very idea of a legally ethnocentric Israel.


I would like to address this piece to those who have undertaken such questioning or to those who are prepared to initiate it. I would urge you not to limit your critique of Israel only to its errors of judgment or its perceived excesses; it is more productive to challenge the ideology and practice of Zionism itself. There is no noble origin or beautiful ideal to which the wayward Jewish state must return; such yearnings are often duplicitous mythmaking or romanticized nostalgia. Zionists always intended to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, a strategy they carried out and continue to pursue with horrifying efficiency.


Likewise, Zionism was always a colonialist movement, one that relied on the notions of divine entitlement and civilizational superiority that justified previous settlement projects in South Africa, Algeria and North America. Zionism, by virtue of its exclusionary outlook and ethnocentric model of citizenship, is on its own a purveyor of fundamental violence. The bad PR to which Israel sometimes is subject today is a reflection of changed media dynamics, not a worsening of Israel's behavior.


The 2008-09 Gaza invasion, the attack on the Mavi Marmara and Abergil's Facebook photos aren't anomalous or extraordinary. They are the invariable result of a Zionist ideology that cannot help but view Palestinian Muslims and Christians as subhuman, no matter how ardently its liberal champions assert that Zionism is a liberation movement. Zionism has the unfortunate effect of proclaiming that one group of people should have access to certain rights from which another group of people is excluded. There is nothing defensible in this proposition.


Here, then, are four reasons why Americans (and all other humans regardless of race or religion) should oppose Zionism:


1. Zionism is unethical and immoral: Because Zionists claim access to land and legal rights that directly obviate the same access to an indigenous community, it operates from within an idea of belonging that is cruel and archaic. Israel bases its primary criterion for citizenship on religious identity. Imagine having your religion on your driver's license. And imagine having limited access to freeways, farmland, family, education, employment and foreign travel because the religion by which the state has chosen to identify you is legally marginalized. Such is the daily reality of the Palestinian people.


2. Zionism is racist: This claim isn't the same as saying that all Zionists are racist. I would make a distinction between the categories of "Zionist" and "Zionism." However, inherent in the practice of Zionism is a reliance on racialist judgments about who can fully participate in the benefits and practices of a national community. Many Zionists view themselves merely as supporting freedom and safety for Jewish people. I would suggest that people who identify themselves as Zionist look more closely at the ideology they support. Such freedom and safety, both of which are in fact mythologies, come at the direct expense of people confined to Bantustans and refugee camps.


3. Zionism contravenes the geopolitical interests of the United States: Many Americans have heard former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert boast that he once pulled George W. Bush off the dais while Bush was giving a speech, or more recently current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that "America is something that can be easily moved." Israel costs the United States billions of dollars in direct aid and in bribe money to Jordan and Egypt for their docility. Israel also is the main reason for disgruntlement about American foreign policy in the Arab and Muslim Worlds. I raise this point with some hesitation because I believe all citizens of the United States should challenge and not celebrate American geopolitical interests. I would also point out that Zionism's narrative of salvation and redemption resonates deeply among Americans because of the US' origin and continued presence as a nation of settler colonists. In the end, America itself needs to be decolonized and the vast sums of money that support the imperial projects Israel so brazenly exemplifies need to be directed toward the well-being of those who pay the government its taxes.


4. Zionism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy: Israel, as a result, is undemocratic and will be as long as it uses religious identity as the operating criterion of citizenship. We hear much in the US about Islam being incompatible with democracy, a belief that is historically untrue and that elides the massive military and monetary support the US provides to the assortment of dictators and plutocrats that rule much of the Arab World. Neoconservative and mainstream commentators both evoke Israel in opposition to Islam as a symbol of democratic achievement. In reality Israel performs one of the most barbaric forms of oppression today in the West Bank and Gaza Strip while simultaneously discriminating against the Palestinian citizens of Israel who constitute approximately twenty percent of the citizenry.


The alternative media engendered by new technology have allowed more people to witness the unremitting violence that has been Israel's stock in trade for decades. Many consumers of this information and these images believe that Israel is guilty of excess when a simpler explanation exists: Israel is acting out the requisites of an exclusionary and inherently violent ideology.


These days all it takes is a little braggadocio from an ex-soldier such as Eden Abergil to so perfectly symbolize the callousness of Zionist colonization. Ten years ago, the Israeli government's lies about the killings aboard the Mavi Marmara would have been unchallenged by gruesome footage distributed through alternative news networks and social media. Nobody these days could have stopped the images of white phosphorous exploding and spreading over the Gaza Strip from being aired; Israelis themselves were foolish enough to capture Jewish children writing messages on soon-to-be-launched missiles.


Americans now have all the evidence they need for a reasonable and morally-sound conclusion, that Zionism produces a cruelty and truculence that they bankroll with their taxes and legitimize with either silence or consent. As a result, I am not arguing that Americans should reassess their level of support for Israel. I am arguing that Americans should oppose Zionism altogether. Perhaps in this way we might begin the long and difficult process of redeeming our own nation of its imperial sins.


Steven Salaita is author, most recently, of The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought. A version of this essay was originally published by Foreign Policy Journal and is republished with the author's permission


Also: watch this darkly humorous and disturbing video; an expose of the Jewish/American lobby by the wildly eccentric and self-aggrandising Nathanael Kapner, Baptist preacher - for hard-fact content, it may well hit the spot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzfbSsqES34&feature=player_embedded


Saturday, 21 August 2010

The People rise up against the BBC




By the time the previous entry was posted, plans were under way for crowds to take to the streets of London and Bristol, attacking the craven BBC, on Sunday 22nd and Saturday 21st August respectively. Any googling of the BBC website on this very subject will only produce a link to archive footage of the Vietnam War demo, London 1968 - worth seeing, for what has changed (the police being replaced with armed riot troops) and what has not - the attacks on US imperialism. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7424415.stm

BBC covers for the Israeli Flotilla attack

A beautiful gift from the BBC by Ken O'Keefe




If you haven't seen it, look for BBC Panorama’s"Death in the Med" program online, you will be treated to first class propaganda as only the BBC can deliver.

I am one of the passengers/witnesses interviewed for this program and I am very much aware of BBC's role in justifying war and covering up Israeli crimes.

I am in no way naive about this; to the contrary my motivation for the interview lay largely in the all too likely opportunity to expose the BBC. A relevant job considering the
BBC's role in the slaughter of over one million Iraqi's, a direct role by virtue of the war they justified. BBC from start to present, justifying Iraq, a massive war crime and crime against humanity based entirely on lies (propagated intensely by the BBC).

The British Broadcasting Corporation, synonymous with millions of orphans and refugees and countless lives destroyed in Iraq, beating the drums of war without pause, the ultimate prostitutes of propaganda.
With this understanding I solicited an agreement with the BBC producers, in return for my interview the program would include the fact that we disarmed, captured and ultimately released three Israeli commandos (after giving them medical attention no less).

That was the deal, a deal I made with an audio recorder in service.ttp://www.facebook.com/1worldcitizen#!/video/video.php?v=1440199638883

And yes the poor Israeli commandos were beaten, just as any invader in any capable persons home would be beaten. I take no issue with that fact.

But truth be told, the commandos we captured should thank us for their lives. I ask the Israeli's, British and American people specifically, if your home was invaded, your family being murdered, would you be willing to disarm, completely control, and then set a murderer of your family free???

You can lie to yourself if you like, bury that head right down deep in the sand, but that ship was our home, and we were all brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles, united, a family, engaged in a most righteous cause, with the vast majority of the planet behind us. The primary beneficiary of our mission, over 800,000 innocent children.

For those lost in a pit of ignorance and indoctrination, those currently stripped of all reason, absent of conscience, duped and hoodwinked, I know you very well because I was once you, a US Marine robot volunteering to kill or be killed. I see my past self in the Zionist who has no capacity at this moment to think, for in that state it is all about regurgitation, independent thought is but a possibility. For you I maintain no hate, for nobody actually, rather it is pity, pity for you that you sacrifice the greatest gift of all, the gift of humanity.

And so it is that the BBC, absent of integrity, contemptuous of humanity, attempts in this program to turn disarmed, helpless Israeli commandos into heroic self-rescuing commandos who managed to Superman their way out of a circle of well over 100 very motivated men whose brothers lay murdered with multiple gunshot wounds. That is what we call a bald-faced lie. Big time lie, in your face lie, you in the audience are a bunch of drooling idiots lie.

Returning from the Zionist alternate universe, we held in our power the fate of three boy commandos who may well have been murderers on that night. Think about that, under these circumstances, we let them go. That is what we call preserving life.

It is not that BBC does not know the truth, there are literally hundreds of witnesses and overflowing facts to reveal it; it is simply BBC's slavish duty to produce a Zionist storyline of illusions and deceptions. And the story goes that we are the aggressors, “terrorists”, “extremists” and killers. Only in this context can the poor Israeli commandos be victims. How is it possible to dominate and control commandos simply to let them go if we are killers? Answer, it isn't. And that is precisely why Panorama blatantly lied.

Ah but the irony, the kind of irony that always provides me a smile from the inside out, the irony of these lies being big, beautiful gifts. In all sincerity, thank you BBC.

The BBC says there is doubt as to who fired first. There is no doubt at all who shot who and when to the hundreds of us on the Mavi Marmara and other ships. The Israelis have said we shot at them, well where are their gunshot wounds? And even if you have gunshot wounds, how do we know you did not shoot yourselves? Exactly like you did in "Operation Cast Lead"?

Returning once again from the Zionist alternate universe, the Israeli military attacked in international waters and murdered within the first five minutes of the attack. The attack resulting in scores of gunshot wounds and death in rapid succession. Blood spilling all over the ship. In that environment I took possession of a 9mm pistol that I removed from one of the commandos... and I emptied it of the (real) bullets. Other weapons were seized by other brothers and thrown into the sea, one of which was an assault rifle.

Yet when others and myself had the power to end life, and believe me it was as simple as release the safety, point, shoot, over. Instead we preserved life,
by taking those weapons away from established killers, we prevented them from killing more. We literally saved our lives and their lives. That is what we call cold, hard facts.

We could have taken out at least three of them, but we did not. Nope, we let them go.

The BBC mentions that we were in international waters at the very end of the story, as if this were an insignificant fact. The fact that Israel stole all the footage that it could, footage that undoubtedly shows them firing 4 bullets to the head of the 19-year-old American passenger, Furkan Dogan. No problem. Executing people at close range, no worries. The fact that the blockade itself is illegal, nah, don't mention that. 800,000 plus children in Gaza, malnourished, anemic, traumatised... not important.


I would need to review this program many times over to identify every poisoned tactic that the BBC employed in order to do what they do so well, justify murder and war.

Nevertheless BBC's perversion of the truth will elevate the cause of justice immensely, delegitimizing itself in such grand fashion was indeed a great big gift.

Hats off to ya BBC!

Ken O'Keefe



Monday, 16 August 2010

Innocents lost

One soldier, who just couldn't take being ordered to murder for Uncle Sam any more, speaks up. Ethan McCord on Being There, after airborne soldiers raised on computer games ripped into a gathering of Iraqi citizens and the ambulance that attempted to rescue the survivors, on the 24th July, 2010:



Thursday, 12 August 2010

Village flattened for third time

This is the reality of living in Palestine under the Israeli occupation. There are no rights, other than the 'right' to leave or the 'right' to die. Israel's Destruction of the Bedouin Village Al-Araqib for the third time in two weeks, witnessed by international and Israeli activists:


UPDATE:
Bedouin village razed for fourth time
Published 17/08/2010 19:15

BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Israeli authorities on Tuesday demolished an unrecognized Bedouin village for the fourth time, Israeli media reported.

The Al-Araqib village was razed two weeks ago for the third time, after residents rebuilt dwellings demolished to make way for a Jewish National Fund park.

The efforts to rebuild were prompted by decision by the Higher Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel after the village was first torn down. Locals said following the last demolitions that they intended to rebuild their homes.

A spokesman for Israel's national police said he would look into the report.

Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member Taleb As-Sana denounced the demolitions during Ramadan, describing them as inhumane. He added that razing of Bedouin homes was "a declaration of war" against the Negev inhabitants and would only create violence.

As-Sana said the residents of Al-Araqib will rebuild their homes in spite of Israel's demolition, and cited the village as an example of Palestinian steadfastness.

Monday, 2 August 2010

Petra Hayden - voice of the sublime


If you ever wonder why humanity counts for anything, give Petra a listen. Daughter of bassist/composer Charlie Hayden, she is rightly celebrated for recording an a capella "The Who Sell Out" right down to the clicks in the middle of the record.

Destroying Jerusalem

The Zionists are determined to make Jerusalem an exclusively racist enclave, despite the best efforts of Palestinian home owners, Israeli and international activists. The heartless march of demolition goes on, but so does the resistance. Caterpillar / Cat is doing well out of this.