Not much is known about the new federal prisons that house primarily Muslims and political activists, that are called Communications Management Units (CMUs), except that they are located in Terre Haute, Indiana and Marion, Illinois.
Although the US government refuses to disclose the list of prisoners to the public, inmates include Enaam Arnaout, founder of Islamic charity Benevolence International Foundation, Dr. Rafil Dhafir, physician and founder of Iraqi charity Help the Needy, Ghassan Elashi, founder of Holy Land Foundation and Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Randall Royer, Muslim civil rights activist, Yassin Aref, Imam and Kurdish refugee, Sabri Benkahla, an American who was abducted the day before his wedding while studying in Saudi Arabia, and John Walker Lindh, an American convert to Islam who was captured in Afghanistan, plus some non-Muslim political activists. Most of these prisoners were falsely accused of terrorist offenses and then imprisoned for lesser charges but given sentences meant for serious terrorism-related crimes.
Carmen Hernandez, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said, “The primary problem with the opening of (the CMU) is that no one knows the criteria used to send the person imprisoned to that unit.”
What the prisoners have in common is that they were well disciplined, studious, and often religious compared to those in the general prison population, they maintain strong commitments to various causes, and for some reason the government wants to keep them separate, to restrict their communication with the outside world.
Prison officials claim, “By concentrating resources in this fashion, it will greatly enhance the agency’s capabilities for language translation, content analysis and intelligence sharing.”
Attorney Paul Hetznecker stated, “These Communication Management Units are an expansion of a continued war on dissent in this country... of using that word “terrorism” to push a political agenda and to really dominate and to control—attempt to control these social movements.”
Andy Stepanian, an animal rights activist who is the first to be released from a CMU, called it “a prison within the actual prison.” He said that the prisoners “are not there because they harmed anyone. They’re not there because they approach anything that most reasonable people would consider even close to being terrorism.”
He further stated, “From what I observed, about 70 per cent of the men that were there were Muslim and had questionable cases that were labeled as either extremist or terrorist cases. But when I grew to meet them, I realised that the cases were, in fact, very different. What it appears to be is that they don’t want people that are either considered to be fundamentalist in Islam or more devout than your average American in Islam to be circulating amidst the regular prison populace in the Bureau of Prisons. Whatever their objective in doing so, I mean, that would have to come from the Bureau of Prisons. But one can surmise it’s because they don’t want the spread of Islam in the prisons or that they’re trying to silence communications from these individuals, because perhaps their cases are in question themselves, and they don’t want to allow them access to the media.”
He concluded, “At the end of this prison sentence, I’ll look back on the fact that I had a tremendous opportunity to meet people from different cultures, to be exposed to the Islamic world and understand that it’s not something
to be feared, it’s not something to
be vilified.”
Daniel McGowan, a non-Muslim political activist in “Little Guantamo” wrote: “The most painful aspect of this unit, to me, is how the CMU restricts my contact with the world beyond these walls. It is difficult for those who have not known prison to understand what a lifeline contact with our family and friends is to us. It is our link to the world - and our future (for those of us who are fortunate enough to have release dates).”
The US houses 2.3 million domestic prisoners. Conditions are far worse in some of the other prisons. Within the CMU, Muslim prisoners are at least safe from violence.
However, the discrimination against prisoners at CMUs, in addition to the severe limitations on visits, phone calls and letters, includes a lack of access to vocational training and paying jobs that are available to other prisoners. More than half of the men face deportation after their release, and the difficulty in obtaining law books makes it difficult to prepare for an immigration hearing.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently filed lawsuits on behalf of several prisoners challenging the CMUs’ “violation of federal laws requiring public scrutiny” as well as the prison’s restrictions on Islamic group prayer. This legal struggle must be supported by increased activism on the outside to demand the release of the innocent either falsely convicted or
intimidated into pleading guilty to bogus charges.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Of Conspiracies and Plots
Many blame Ashcroft, Cheney, and Bush for ongoing campaigns against activists, politicians and organizations that try to help Arabs and Muslims.
Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner, a long time Palestinian rights advocate, told supporters that he believes former US Attorney General John Ashcroft personally orchestrated a sting operation to remove him from office. As in previous cases, strategic “media update sessions” put the media into a predatory frenzy before the accused even went to trial. Media accusations often do not even coincide with the actual charges.
Riad Hamad, founder of Palestinian Children’s Welfare Fund in Texas, believed George Bush was after him. When Hamad died mysteriously and violently after a vicious media campaign libeling him as a terrorism supporter, police and FBI refused to investigate. Clearly, there was a conspiracy involving media and law enforcement. Yet for Bush personally to take such an interest in local politics is probably beyond plausibility.
This pattern of political persecutions from Turner to Chas Freeman can be best understood with a bottom-up approach.
As Jewish wealth, power, and influence have increased so has its ability to punish those offending the organized Jewish community in some way. While the Jewish power elite seems to enjoy legal immunity, Americans and US residents targeted by these powerful political economic oligarchs suffer media and governmental abuse. This is particularly true in the Boston area, which is now a major command and control center for transnational Jewish politics and Zionist lobbying.
Not only do many such organizations that long ago should have lost 501(c)(3) tax deductible status continue to incite racism effectively with US government subsidization, but financial predation has to be truly awesome before discussion of their financial wrongdoing becomes even slightly possible, and to this day a Boston-area fraudster like longtime Madoff-associate Robert Jaffe has yet to face criminal charges.
Americans should wonder whether the studious obliviousness of US Attorney to federal criminal violations, including all the ongoing bribery of US public officials with trips to Israel, indicates that Zionist power has trumped Constitutional loyalty.
Although the pattern of abuse of power extends well beyond the Boston area, much if not most of Zionist social, political, economic, and academic misbehavior links back to the Boston-area Jewish community or educational institutions where young Jews often first hook up with vast corrupt Jewish social networks. As a major American and world education center, Boston provides the most efficient and excellent means for the Jewish power elite to influence the USA and the world. No one should be surprised US Senator from Israel Joseph Lieberman and Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse are co-in-laws.
Although the presence of extremist Zionists like Rahm Emanuel or Dennis Ross near the president is disturbing, lower rank staffers like Treasury Department official Stuart Levey or pro-Israel propagandist Matthew Levitt are far more threatening to US democracy. While serving the government, Boston-bred Levitt constructed a vast terrorist conspiracy out of paranoid Zionist fantasies trying to explain the refusal of Muslims to acknowledge that it was just to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.
In Levitt's delusions, to which other lesser ranking government officials like Daniel Pipes and Rachel Ehrenfeld contributed, Islamic finance and Islamic charity serve as a many-headed hydra of evil. Through vast numbers of meetings and internal dissemination of documents Levitt and Levey spread Zionist doctrine throughout government bureaucracy until practically every official from Ashcroft down could on cue reflexively repeat the whole litany of the sins that Levitt had fabricated about each charity or financial entity that was targeted for demonization.
Roots of the conspiracy involving Pipes, Levitt, and Levey lead back to the Boston area, where the Israel Lobby is deeply embedded in the region's educational institutions.
Aafia Siddique, who was a graduate student in cognitive neuroscience at Boston area Brandeis University, was demonized as a terrorist to punish her Muslim activism at the Jewish institution. The case constructed against Siddiqui has the flavor of psychotic paranoia so common in Matthew Levitt’s anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic fantasies.
During the Bush administration Levitt, who manipulated the US government into putting a lot of good people in jail, was a close associate of both Ashcroft and Levey, who continues in the Obama administration as an American Jewish Committee covert operative.
Understanding the centrality of Boston Jewish power in the USA requires a critical look at The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Professors Mearsheimer and Walt incorrectly claim the Israel Lobby is just another lobby even though the Israel Lobby is really the public face of an international criminal web, which has rendered the USA a dependent intimidated client state within the Zionist imperial system.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women. Joachim Martillo contributed to this article.
Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner, a long time Palestinian rights advocate, told supporters that he believes former US Attorney General John Ashcroft personally orchestrated a sting operation to remove him from office. As in previous cases, strategic “media update sessions” put the media into a predatory frenzy before the accused even went to trial. Media accusations often do not even coincide with the actual charges.
Riad Hamad, founder of Palestinian Children’s Welfare Fund in Texas, believed George Bush was after him. When Hamad died mysteriously and violently after a vicious media campaign libeling him as a terrorism supporter, police and FBI refused to investigate. Clearly, there was a conspiracy involving media and law enforcement. Yet for Bush personally to take such an interest in local politics is probably beyond plausibility.
This pattern of political persecutions from Turner to Chas Freeman can be best understood with a bottom-up approach.
As Jewish wealth, power, and influence have increased so has its ability to punish those offending the organized Jewish community in some way. While the Jewish power elite seems to enjoy legal immunity, Americans and US residents targeted by these powerful political economic oligarchs suffer media and governmental abuse. This is particularly true in the Boston area, which is now a major command and control center for transnational Jewish politics and Zionist lobbying.
Not only do many such organizations that long ago should have lost 501(c)(3) tax deductible status continue to incite racism effectively with US government subsidization, but financial predation has to be truly awesome before discussion of their financial wrongdoing becomes even slightly possible, and to this day a Boston-area fraudster like longtime Madoff-associate Robert Jaffe has yet to face criminal charges.
Americans should wonder whether the studious obliviousness of US Attorney to federal criminal violations, including all the ongoing bribery of US public officials with trips to Israel, indicates that Zionist power has trumped Constitutional loyalty.
Although the pattern of abuse of power extends well beyond the Boston area, much if not most of Zionist social, political, economic, and academic misbehavior links back to the Boston-area Jewish community or educational institutions where young Jews often first hook up with vast corrupt Jewish social networks. As a major American and world education center, Boston provides the most efficient and excellent means for the Jewish power elite to influence the USA and the world. No one should be surprised US Senator from Israel Joseph Lieberman and Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse are co-in-laws.
Although the presence of extremist Zionists like Rahm Emanuel or Dennis Ross near the president is disturbing, lower rank staffers like Treasury Department official Stuart Levey or pro-Israel propagandist Matthew Levitt are far more threatening to US democracy. While serving the government, Boston-bred Levitt constructed a vast terrorist conspiracy out of paranoid Zionist fantasies trying to explain the refusal of Muslims to acknowledge that it was just to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.
In Levitt's delusions, to which other lesser ranking government officials like Daniel Pipes and Rachel Ehrenfeld contributed, Islamic finance and Islamic charity serve as a many-headed hydra of evil. Through vast numbers of meetings and internal dissemination of documents Levitt and Levey spread Zionist doctrine throughout government bureaucracy until practically every official from Ashcroft down could on cue reflexively repeat the whole litany of the sins that Levitt had fabricated about each charity or financial entity that was targeted for demonization.
Roots of the conspiracy involving Pipes, Levitt, and Levey lead back to the Boston area, where the Israel Lobby is deeply embedded in the region's educational institutions.
Aafia Siddique, who was a graduate student in cognitive neuroscience at Boston area Brandeis University, was demonized as a terrorist to punish her Muslim activism at the Jewish institution. The case constructed against Siddiqui has the flavor of psychotic paranoia so common in Matthew Levitt’s anti-Palestinian, Islamophobic fantasies.
During the Bush administration Levitt, who manipulated the US government into putting a lot of good people in jail, was a close associate of both Ashcroft and Levey, who continues in the Obama administration as an American Jewish Committee covert operative.
Understanding the centrality of Boston Jewish power in the USA requires a critical look at The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Professors Mearsheimer and Walt incorrectly claim the Israel Lobby is just another lobby even though the Israel Lobby is really the public face of an international criminal web, which has rendered the USA a dependent intimidated client state within the Zionist imperial system.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women. Joachim Martillo contributed to this article.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Breastfeeding rates still low despite global education
Despite widespread awareness of the importance of breastfeeding to the human child, mothers in developed countries demonstrate low rates of compliance with global recommendations. Nursing past six months is the exception rather than the rule. Bottle-feeding infants has become normal. Exclusive and extensive breastfeeding has become a pastime primarily for the rich with some interesting exceptions. Nordic countries exhibit the overall highest European breastfeeding rate with England ranking lowest. UAE ruling class mothers exclusively breastfeed the longest among Arabs while Iraq suffers the lowest breastfeeding rates. US Whites and Native Americans are most likely to breastfeed while Blacks and Hispanics are the least likely.
Class plays a large role in decision to breastfeed, for far fewer women belonging to the routine and manual labor socio-economic group nurse beyond six weeks than is typical of professional women and full time mothers. Yet, religion and philosophy also affect women’s decision to breastfeed. In Singapore non-Malay Muslim women are 6.7 times more likely to breastfeed than Buddhist women although Malays have the lowest rate. Urban babies receive half the breast milk of rural babies. The youngest mothers tend to supplement with bottles from birth.
The World Health Organization and UNICEF work hard to promote breastfeeding worldwide, but their success is undermined by factors such as free infant formula distribution, hospital practices and lack of personal support. Breastfeeding is a learned skill requiring effort and focus. Good intentions are not always enough to establish lactation. “Baby-friendly hospital” initiatives in many countries have significantly increased breastfeeding but rates are still well below optimum health guidelines.
Almost all new mothers attempt breastfeeding but few continue for the recommended period. According to UNICEF the early introduction of bottle-feeding and complementary food leads to premature weaning, which is the primary cause of malnutrition in children under age two worldwide.
Many women give up nursing in favor of bottle-feeding out of a sense of powerless over the situation. These mothers often wanted very much to nurse their child, but they lost their chance. Hospitals fail to promote exclusive breastfeeding of newborns. Most new mothers receive free samples of formula because of multi-million dollar deals between hospitals and pharmaceutical companies and come home with their babies already addicted to the bottle. Coaxing a newborn child to breastfeed after he has been bottle-fed even just once or twice can be a big struggle. Success may be impossible without the aid of a midwife or lactation counselor because unfortunately even the older generation of mothers lack sufficient knowledge.
When newborns reject the breast, mothers typically try for a while, then give up and supply a bottle. This teaches the baby that refusing to nurse will be rewarded. Parents must exercise “tough love” by declining to give the baby a bottle even if it takes several hours or even days for the baby to nurse willingly. (If the baby gets dehydrated, do give him water with a cup or medicine dropper, but introducing a bottle creates “nipple confusion” which is disastrous for the mother-child relationship).
Some women give up on breastfeeding because the husband insists. This tragedy reveals a stripping away at women’s postnatal rights and sets a dangerous precedent. Nursing a baby is an exhausting and time-consuming job requiring family help, encouragement, and support especially from the father to enable mother and child to be together undisturbed as much as possible particularly during the first 40 days of the baby’s life.
Many women manage to make it through those hardest days in the beginning and then stop breastfeeding after a few weeks out of fear of insufficient milk supply. These mothers need to increase their consumption of calories and to get adequate rest. Under no circumstances should they give their baby a bottle because this will only decrease the supply of breastmilk. Sometimes it is actually the doctor’s advice to start feeding their babies solids before 6 months that leads to premature weaning. A mother needs to weigh the fun of spoon-feeding her infant against the risk of premature rejection of the breast.
Thus bottle-feeding rates remain high despite awareness that breastmilk alone contains all the nutrients, antibodies, hormones and immune factors that a baby needs.
“Encouraging exclusive breastfeeding has to become a high priority in all sectors of society,” said Dr. Mahendra Sheth, UNICEF Regional Health and Nutrition Adviser for the Middle East and North Africa. Exclusive breastfeeding for six months followed by complementary feeding between 6-9 months with continued breastfeeding through the first year could save an estimated 1.5 million lives annually.
Women receiving adequate advice can often prolong nursing even after returning to work outside the home. Premature infants particularly need breast milk for the best odds in life.
Pregnant women should read books on how to breastfeed and understand fully the necessary commitment to avoid making a tragic mistake to be remembered with regret.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women.
Class plays a large role in decision to breastfeed, for far fewer women belonging to the routine and manual labor socio-economic group nurse beyond six weeks than is typical of professional women and full time mothers. Yet, religion and philosophy also affect women’s decision to breastfeed. In Singapore non-Malay Muslim women are 6.7 times more likely to breastfeed than Buddhist women although Malays have the lowest rate. Urban babies receive half the breast milk of rural babies. The youngest mothers tend to supplement with bottles from birth.
The World Health Organization and UNICEF work hard to promote breastfeeding worldwide, but their success is undermined by factors such as free infant formula distribution, hospital practices and lack of personal support. Breastfeeding is a learned skill requiring effort and focus. Good intentions are not always enough to establish lactation. “Baby-friendly hospital” initiatives in many countries have significantly increased breastfeeding but rates are still well below optimum health guidelines.
Almost all new mothers attempt breastfeeding but few continue for the recommended period. According to UNICEF the early introduction of bottle-feeding and complementary food leads to premature weaning, which is the primary cause of malnutrition in children under age two worldwide.
Many women give up nursing in favor of bottle-feeding out of a sense of powerless over the situation. These mothers often wanted very much to nurse their child, but they lost their chance. Hospitals fail to promote exclusive breastfeeding of newborns. Most new mothers receive free samples of formula because of multi-million dollar deals between hospitals and pharmaceutical companies and come home with their babies already addicted to the bottle. Coaxing a newborn child to breastfeed after he has been bottle-fed even just once or twice can be a big struggle. Success may be impossible without the aid of a midwife or lactation counselor because unfortunately even the older generation of mothers lack sufficient knowledge.
When newborns reject the breast, mothers typically try for a while, then give up and supply a bottle. This teaches the baby that refusing to nurse will be rewarded. Parents must exercise “tough love” by declining to give the baby a bottle even if it takes several hours or even days for the baby to nurse willingly. (If the baby gets dehydrated, do give him water with a cup or medicine dropper, but introducing a bottle creates “nipple confusion” which is disastrous for the mother-child relationship).
Some women give up on breastfeeding because the husband insists. This tragedy reveals a stripping away at women’s postnatal rights and sets a dangerous precedent. Nursing a baby is an exhausting and time-consuming job requiring family help, encouragement, and support especially from the father to enable mother and child to be together undisturbed as much as possible particularly during the first 40 days of the baby’s life.
Many women manage to make it through those hardest days in the beginning and then stop breastfeeding after a few weeks out of fear of insufficient milk supply. These mothers need to increase their consumption of calories and to get adequate rest. Under no circumstances should they give their baby a bottle because this will only decrease the supply of breastmilk. Sometimes it is actually the doctor’s advice to start feeding their babies solids before 6 months that leads to premature weaning. A mother needs to weigh the fun of spoon-feeding her infant against the risk of premature rejection of the breast.
Thus bottle-feeding rates remain high despite awareness that breastmilk alone contains all the nutrients, antibodies, hormones and immune factors that a baby needs.
“Encouraging exclusive breastfeeding has to become a high priority in all sectors of society,” said Dr. Mahendra Sheth, UNICEF Regional Health and Nutrition Adviser for the Middle East and North Africa. Exclusive breastfeeding for six months followed by complementary feeding between 6-9 months with continued breastfeeding through the first year could save an estimated 1.5 million lives annually.
Women receiving adequate advice can often prolong nursing even after returning to work outside the home. Premature infants particularly need breast milk for the best odds in life.
Pregnant women should read books on how to breastfeed and understand fully the necessary commitment to avoid making a tragic mistake to be remembered with regret.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
US Charities Paying for Sending Aid to Palestinians
Khaleej Times
While US officials were dropping charges against former Senator Ted Stevens because of prosecutorial misconduct and against AIPAC operatives Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, Dallas US District Judge Jorge Solis handed Holy Land Foundation executive chairman Shukri Abu Baker a 65-year sentence, founding chairman Mohammad El-Mezain 15 years, former chairman Ghassan Elashi 65 years, former volunteer fundraiser Mufid Abdulqader 20 years, and former New Jersey representative Abdulrahman Odeh 15 years.
In an interview with Amy Goodman shortly after sentencing, Nancy Holder, attorney for HLF CEO Abu Baker, has pointed out: “There was never any allegation that any money went anywhere other than to charity. The government’s position was that these particular charities were associated with or controlled by Hamas. And it’s important to understand that the United States government, through USAID, continued to give money to the same charities for years after Holy Land was closed. But that’s what the allegation was all the way along. Although the government spent a great deal of time in the trial talking about and showing the jury horrific pictures of violent acts that Hamas did, our clients were not accused of nor convicted of one single act of violence.”
The first HLF prosecution ended in mistrial. The retrial conviction depended upon questionable translations and an anonymous Israeli Shin Bet agent, who provided evidence almost certainly obtained by torture. The case was noteworthy for vacuousness of charges, relentlessness of prosecution, and various levels of involvement of Bush administration officials, including Islamophobic propagandist Daniel Pipes, Defence Department adviser Rachel Ehrenfeld, Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Matthew Levitt, and Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey, whose continued service under Obama betrays the absence of any genuine difference between Bush and Obama administrations in attitude toward Muslims.
These four form the inner circle of a complex but deadly serious conspiracy to destroy Islamic finance and charities as well as to dominate the flow of information about the Middle East.
Ehrenfeld, who has a noticeable Israeli accent, had the bad luck to start her book writing career by publishing a text focused on Soviet narco-terrorism involvement just before the Soviet Union collapsed, but she quickly found her literary niche in 1992 by attacking Islamic banking and Islam. Her unsophisticated book, Evil Money, crassly defames Islam while she publicly equates Islamic finance with “stoning a women or cutting off a head.”
Levitt generates more sophisticated propaganda than Ehrenfeld. Educated at the Brookline Maimonides Academy, an exceptionally fanatic high school yeshiva, he was a key witness during the HLF retrial. His book, Hamas, Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, whose foreword was written by Dennis Ross, Obama’s US State Department Special Adviser for the Middle East and Southwest Asia, describes the prosecutorial logic: essentially, the HLF aided Hamas by providing rice and cooking oil to Palestinian civilians because Hamas might then shift money from social welfare into resistance. “In the absence of any serious examination of Israel’s occupation, Levitt’s portrayal of the rise of Hamas is completely detached from the context within which it was produced and shaped,” notes Harvard professor Sara Roy.
Levey slavishly follows Levitt’s analysis in designating groups and individuals as terrorism supporters. While receiving many accolades from the American Jewish Committee, Levey has predictably neither designated the IDF a terrorist organisation nor forced either closure of charities like Friends of the IDF or arrest of individuals like Irwin Moskowitz, who gives directly to IDF soldiers.
Since the late 1980s, Pipes has propagated the myth of a “worldwide Muslim conspiracy” in which Iran provides the fist of direct Islamic confrontation in coordination with “Saudi stealth subversion of the USA” via charitable and scholarly giving.
He claims that the major internal threat to America comes from “stealth or legal Islamists”: ordinary American Muslim citizens who respect and practise Shariah.
The infection of the US government with this pseudo analytical framework created and elaborated by this closely-knit conspiratorial team represents “the triumph of the Israeli mentality in American culture and politics”, according to Sephardic Heritage Center director David Shasha.
Because such thinking still permeates the highest US government levels, the FBI and Justice Department continue railroading Muslims into prison through paranoid prosecutions based on entrapment or ex-post facto applied laws.
While American Muslim, Asian or Arab defence organisations and individuals like Saudi businessman Khaled bin Mahfouz, who was libeled by Ehrenfeld, have occasionally resisted individual projects of Pipes or Ehrenfeld, they have yet to develop strategies to force Levey out of the US government or to counteract the hegemonic discourse that he is solidifying from his US Treasury office.
Unless Muslims and Asian and Arab Americans get their act together, their status in the United States will only decline while more Muslim populations suffer military assaults around the world.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women. Joachim Martillo contributed to this article
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Industrialized Farming Endangers World Food Supply
Multi-national food corporations are increasingly using global food insecurity as a tool for political control. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reports that “land grabbing” by foreign investors in developing countries has resulted in a new form of colonialism. Spanish NGO, GRAIN reports that rich countries are buying poor countries’ fertile soil, water and sun to ship food and fuel back home. IFPRI researcher Joachim von Braun states, “About one-quarter of these investments are for biofuel plantations.”
Agribusiness imposes a devastating toll on small farmers worldwide. Landowners in African countries, where there are no official land deeds, have no legal recourse against foreign companies that steal their farmland. In the United States ranchers and farmers lose their land to agribusinesses and end up working as employees. American cattle ranchers have the highest suicide rate among American professions. Similar humiliations have also led thousands of farmers in India to take their own lives.
The ‘Global Food Security Act’ [S384] recently introduced in the US Senate will give USAID $7.5 billion over five years. Arun Shrivastava of the Centre for Research on Globalization reports: “USAID is actually an arm of the US-Department of Defense; it serves US foreign policy interest and has little to do with humanism.” There are two other similar pending bills, HR875 and S425.
Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, points out that while purporting to address issues of global nutrition and health, “the US Congress is hell bent on introducing laws with global reach that would destroy the very basis of people’s food security and food sovereignty.”
HR 875, the Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2009, writes Barbara Minton in Natural News, “would effectively hand over control of America's food supply to such a nefarious giant as Monsanto and its lesser counterparts such as Tyson and Cargill.”
Monsanto GMO corn plants, which were designed with a built-in resistance to Monsanto's weed killers, have already devastated thousands of South African farmers. The corn plants look healthy, but inside the husks there are no kernels! This GMO crop failure highlights the dangers of agribusiness domination of the global food supply.
“To ensure the perpetuation of its near monopoly, Monsanto is helping to install the right people in the right places,” Minton continues. “To that end, Michael Taylor, the ex FDA head who approved the use of bovine growth hormone (rBGH), has just become ensconced in the Obama transition team where he may soon be overseeing food safety. He will join already well placed Tom Vilsack, the pro-GMO Secretary of Agriculture.”
South Africa repeats the pattern of Iraq and of Afghanistan, where new laws prohibit farmers to save or trade their own seeds. These laws being promoted within the US would also block access to non-GMO seeds.
“Iraq, it must be remembered, has the oldest history of farming and one of the longest traditions of cultivation in the civilized world,” writes Latha Jishnu in the Business Standard of India. According to the Institute of Near Eastern & African Studies (INEAS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “Farm-saved seeds and the free exchange of planting materials among farmers have long been the basis of agricultural practice in Iraq.”
The Oil-for-Food program in Iraq forced the large-scale importation of food after the first Gulf War. Devastated Iraqi farmers then became the victims of USAID.
Under US occupation, Iraqi farmers must pay a “technology fee” plus an annual license fee to agribusinesses supplying the seeds and equipment. Similar policies exist in Afghanistan, which compel dependency on supplies from multi-national agribusinesses while industrial agricultural training courses provide the US military with opportunities to gather intelligence from the local population. A US Special Forces civil affairs manager in Afghanistan explains, “The presence of this agricultural center is a security measure in and of itself.”
GRAIN reports, “The war provides these corporations with both a lucrative short-term market in the blossoming “reconstruction” industry and an opportunity to integrate Afghanistan into their global production networks and markets in the long term.”
Industrial agriculture is based on mono-cropping, use of GMO seeds, fertilizers, lethal pesticides, and expensive farm machinery. Environmentalists say these methods cause topsoil erosion, depleted soil fertility, air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, decreased nutritional value of food, and serious health risks. Iowa State University biotech researchers are putting flu vaccines into the DNA of corn, reports Bryan Salvage in the Meat and Poultry Journal. This genetic manipulation is likely to increase the rate of viral mutation, rather than to reduce disease as claimed.
French Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini, molecular endocrinologist at the University of Caen found that Monsanto’s GMO corn damages the liver and kidneys like pesticides. Hungarian biology professor Bela Darvas of Debrecen University discovered that Monsanto's corn endangers protected insect species. Spiegel reports that because corn is a wind-pollinated plant, GMO crops inevitably contaminate nearby farms. Because of these dangers, Germany has banned GMO corn.
Those wishing to avoid GMO should buy foods certified “organic.”
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women.
Agribusiness imposes a devastating toll on small farmers worldwide. Landowners in African countries, where there are no official land deeds, have no legal recourse against foreign companies that steal their farmland. In the United States ranchers and farmers lose their land to agribusinesses and end up working as employees. American cattle ranchers have the highest suicide rate among American professions. Similar humiliations have also led thousands of farmers in India to take their own lives.
The ‘Global Food Security Act’ [S384] recently introduced in the US Senate will give USAID $7.5 billion over five years. Arun Shrivastava of the Centre for Research on Globalization reports: “USAID is actually an arm of the US-Department of Defense; it serves US foreign policy interest and has little to do with humanism.” There are two other similar pending bills, HR875 and S425.
Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, points out that while purporting to address issues of global nutrition and health, “the US Congress is hell bent on introducing laws with global reach that would destroy the very basis of people’s food security and food sovereignty.”
HR 875, the Food Safety and Modernization Act of 2009, writes Barbara Minton in Natural News, “would effectively hand over control of America's food supply to such a nefarious giant as Monsanto and its lesser counterparts such as Tyson and Cargill.”
Monsanto GMO corn plants, which were designed with a built-in resistance to Monsanto's weed killers, have already devastated thousands of South African farmers. The corn plants look healthy, but inside the husks there are no kernels! This GMO crop failure highlights the dangers of agribusiness domination of the global food supply.
“To ensure the perpetuation of its near monopoly, Monsanto is helping to install the right people in the right places,” Minton continues. “To that end, Michael Taylor, the ex FDA head who approved the use of bovine growth hormone (rBGH), has just become ensconced in the Obama transition team where he may soon be overseeing food safety. He will join already well placed Tom Vilsack, the pro-GMO Secretary of Agriculture.”
South Africa repeats the pattern of Iraq and of Afghanistan, where new laws prohibit farmers to save or trade their own seeds. These laws being promoted within the US would also block access to non-GMO seeds.
“Iraq, it must be remembered, has the oldest history of farming and one of the longest traditions of cultivation in the civilized world,” writes Latha Jishnu in the Business Standard of India. According to the Institute of Near Eastern & African Studies (INEAS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “Farm-saved seeds and the free exchange of planting materials among farmers have long been the basis of agricultural practice in Iraq.”
The Oil-for-Food program in Iraq forced the large-scale importation of food after the first Gulf War. Devastated Iraqi farmers then became the victims of USAID.
Under US occupation, Iraqi farmers must pay a “technology fee” plus an annual license fee to agribusinesses supplying the seeds and equipment. Similar policies exist in Afghanistan, which compel dependency on supplies from multi-national agribusinesses while industrial agricultural training courses provide the US military with opportunities to gather intelligence from the local population. A US Special Forces civil affairs manager in Afghanistan explains, “The presence of this agricultural center is a security measure in and of itself.”
GRAIN reports, “The war provides these corporations with both a lucrative short-term market in the blossoming “reconstruction” industry and an opportunity to integrate Afghanistan into their global production networks and markets in the long term.”
Industrial agriculture is based on mono-cropping, use of GMO seeds, fertilizers, lethal pesticides, and expensive farm machinery. Environmentalists say these methods cause topsoil erosion, depleted soil fertility, air and water pollution, loss of biodiversity, decreased nutritional value of food, and serious health risks. Iowa State University biotech researchers are putting flu vaccines into the DNA of corn, reports Bryan Salvage in the Meat and Poultry Journal. This genetic manipulation is likely to increase the rate of viral mutation, rather than to reduce disease as claimed.
French Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini, molecular endocrinologist at the University of Caen found that Monsanto’s GMO corn damages the liver and kidneys like pesticides. Hungarian biology professor Bela Darvas of Debrecen University discovered that Monsanto's corn endangers protected insect species. Spiegel reports that because corn is a wind-pollinated plant, GMO crops inevitably contaminate nearby farms. Because of these dangers, Germany has banned GMO corn.
Those wishing to avoid GMO should buy foods certified “organic.”
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Israel Steals Palestinian Heritage, History
Khaleej Times
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayad has made a formal complaint to the Canadian government regarding the intention of Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum to collaborate with the Israel Antiquities Authority to host "Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World" from June 27 to January 3, 2010.
Palestinian Archaeological Department Director-General Hamdan Taha explains,"The exhibition would entail exhibiting or displaying artifacts removed from thePalestinian territories... I think it is important that Canadian institutionswould be responsible and act in accordance with Canada's obligations."
The Israeli exhibition violates international conventions or protocols that Canada has ratified and that protect cultural property during armed conflict.
The State of Israel seized the Jordanian-owned Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem in 1967 to take possession of the scrolls and has continued to loot similar Palestinian cultural property from the Occupied Territories ever since. Under the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1954 Hague Convention along with its two associated protocols, Canada is legally obliged "to take appropriate steps to recover and return any such cultural property" at the request of the wronged party.
The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition is part of Israel's effort to re-brand itself.
According to The Economist, American Jewish groups and Israeli diplomats are trying to create the perception of Israel as "hip, cool, cultured, fun and creative." The campaign has included placing sexually suggestive advertisements in Maxim and other men's magazines.
Harvard Professor Stephen Walt suggests in his Foreign Policy blog that the re-branding effort is foredoomed to failure: "Restoring Israel's image in the West isn't a matter of spin or PR or `re-branding;' it's a matter of abandoning the policies that have cost it the sympathy it once enjoyed. It's really just about that simple."
The archaeological component of the propaganda campaign, however, uses subliminal suggestion to bypass such political arguments. A top Israeli re-branding advocate argues, "[Let's] get to that first stage when people associate Israel with science and music and archaeology...Then we'll take it from there."
In Facts on the Ground Columbia Professor Nadia Abu Al Haj writes, "In the context of Israel and Palestine, archaeology emerged as a central scientific discipline because of the manner in which colonial settlement was configured in a language of, and a belief in, Jewish national return." Even though asserting ownership to a country after absence of 2000 years is preposterous, Israel's theft of Palestine from the native population is popularly legitimised through the claim that today's Jews descend from inhabitants of Greco-Roman Judea.
According to New York Times Reporters Ethan Bonner and Isabel Kershner in "Parks Fortify Israel's Claim to Jerusalem," "[There] is a battle for historical legitimacy. As part of the effort, archaeologists are finding indisputable evidence of ancient Jewish life here."
This claim is nonsense.
Intellectuals of Jewish origin in 19th century Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, invented their folk narratives 'retrospectively,' out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people, argues Tel Aviv University Professor Shlomo Sand, author of How and When the Jewish People Was Invented.
There is no single founder population for modern Jewry any more than there is a single founder population for modern Christians or modern Muslims. Late ancient and early medieval texts describe an ethnically diverse collection of communities associated with proselytizing pre-Rabbinic Judaism.
In English to use the word Jew is anachronistic before the 10th century when medieval Rabbinic Judaism crystallised thanks to the efforts of Saadyah Gaon (Sa`îd bin Yûsuf al-Fayyûmi) and his colleagues.
With the revolutionary codification of Rabbinic law these communities became part of a vast trade network that spanned the Christian and Muslim world and that extended into China and began to exchange members on a large scale. The main population-exporting region seems to have been located in territories near the Black Sea.
Current genetic anthropological findings based on DNA analysis indicate that the male ancestors of Yiddish Jewry were of Eastern European and non-Levantine Southwest Asian origin while the female ancestors were Eastern Europeans.
Sand admits, "[The] chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I [meaning Israeli Jews] are its descendents."
The Palestinians' ancestors created the Hasmonean Kingdom, composed the Hebrew Bible, followed Jesus, wrote the New Testament, compiled the Mishnah, and redacted the Jerusalem Talmud. The Palestinian people constitute the living link to the earliest beginnings of the heritage from the Torah and Gospel.
Zionists are almost pitiable, for they are so ashamed of their own history that they have usurped one belonging to another people. When the Israeli government sends the Dead Sea Scrolls to Canada, by its own law Canada must turn them over to their rightful owners — the Palestinian people.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women. Joachim Martillo contributed to this article
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayad has made a formal complaint to the Canadian government regarding the intention of Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum to collaborate with the Israel Antiquities Authority to host "Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World" from June 27 to January 3, 2010.
Palestinian Archaeological Department Director-General Hamdan Taha explains,"The exhibition would entail exhibiting or displaying artifacts removed from thePalestinian territories... I think it is important that Canadian institutionswould be responsible and act in accordance with Canada's obligations."
The Israeli exhibition violates international conventions or protocols that Canada has ratified and that protect cultural property during armed conflict.
The State of Israel seized the Jordanian-owned Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem in 1967 to take possession of the scrolls and has continued to loot similar Palestinian cultural property from the Occupied Territories ever since. Under the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property and the 1954 Hague Convention along with its two associated protocols, Canada is legally obliged "to take appropriate steps to recover and return any such cultural property" at the request of the wronged party.
The Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition is part of Israel's effort to re-brand itself.
According to The Economist, American Jewish groups and Israeli diplomats are trying to create the perception of Israel as "hip, cool, cultured, fun and creative." The campaign has included placing sexually suggestive advertisements in Maxim and other men's magazines.
Harvard Professor Stephen Walt suggests in his Foreign Policy blog that the re-branding effort is foredoomed to failure: "Restoring Israel's image in the West isn't a matter of spin or PR or `re-branding;' it's a matter of abandoning the policies that have cost it the sympathy it once enjoyed. It's really just about that simple."
The archaeological component of the propaganda campaign, however, uses subliminal suggestion to bypass such political arguments. A top Israeli re-branding advocate argues, "[Let's] get to that first stage when people associate Israel with science and music and archaeology...Then we'll take it from there."
In Facts on the Ground Columbia Professor Nadia Abu Al Haj writes, "In the context of Israel and Palestine, archaeology emerged as a central scientific discipline because of the manner in which colonial settlement was configured in a language of, and a belief in, Jewish national return." Even though asserting ownership to a country after absence of 2000 years is preposterous, Israel's theft of Palestine from the native population is popularly legitimised through the claim that today's Jews descend from inhabitants of Greco-Roman Judea.
According to New York Times Reporters Ethan Bonner and Isabel Kershner in "Parks Fortify Israel's Claim to Jerusalem," "[There] is a battle for historical legitimacy. As part of the effort, archaeologists are finding indisputable evidence of ancient Jewish life here."
This claim is nonsense.
Intellectuals of Jewish origin in 19th century Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, invented their folk narratives 'retrospectively,' out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people, argues Tel Aviv University Professor Shlomo Sand, author of How and When the Jewish People Was Invented.
There is no single founder population for modern Jewry any more than there is a single founder population for modern Christians or modern Muslims. Late ancient and early medieval texts describe an ethnically diverse collection of communities associated with proselytizing pre-Rabbinic Judaism.
In English to use the word Jew is anachronistic before the 10th century when medieval Rabbinic Judaism crystallised thanks to the efforts of Saadyah Gaon (Sa`îd bin Yûsuf al-Fayyûmi) and his colleagues.
With the revolutionary codification of Rabbinic law these communities became part of a vast trade network that spanned the Christian and Muslim world and that extended into China and began to exchange members on a large scale. The main population-exporting region seems to have been located in territories near the Black Sea.
Current genetic anthropological findings based on DNA analysis indicate that the male ancestors of Yiddish Jewry were of Eastern European and non-Levantine Southwest Asian origin while the female ancestors were Eastern Europeans.
Sand admits, "[The] chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I [meaning Israeli Jews] are its descendents."
The Palestinians' ancestors created the Hasmonean Kingdom, composed the Hebrew Bible, followed Jesus, wrote the New Testament, compiled the Mishnah, and redacted the Jerusalem Talmud. The Palestinian people constitute the living link to the earliest beginnings of the heritage from the Torah and Gospel.
Zionists are almost pitiable, for they are so ashamed of their own history that they have usurped one belonging to another people. When the Israeli government sends the Dead Sea Scrolls to Canada, by its own law Canada must turn them over to their rightful owners — the Palestinian people.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women. Joachim Martillo contributed to this article
Sunday, May 24, 2009
SPLC vs. Karin Friedemann
My response follows. -Karin
Demand for immediate retraction and publication of correction
Saturday, May 16, 2009 1:13 PM
From: "Mark Potok" mark.potok@splcenter.org
This is for Karen Friedemann and regards your May 16 "Letter From America"article in the Khaleej Times Online entitled "Americans Divided by HateCrimes Bill." http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2009/May/opinion_May80.xml§ion=opinion&col=
You make the following claim in your article:
"The ADL, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is alreadyheavily involved in Homeland Security's locally based 'fusion centres,'which collect personal data for intelligence databases that synchronise national intelligence collection with local police. ADL and SPLC have arecord of illegally spying on American citizens and providing falseinformation to law enforcement officials."
The statements about the SPLC -- that we have a record of "illegally spying"on Americans and "providing false information" to authorities -- are both materially false and also libelous and defamatory. Both statements containno shred of truth -- apparently, you've attributed the ADL's problems in the Roy Bullock case to the SPLC. We have never been charged or convicted oreven accused of these things.
As I noted above, these statements arelibelous and false. As a result, I write to demand that you immediatelywithdraw these statements from wherever they have been published, including the Khaleej Times, and publish a correction making clear that SPLC has not done the things you falsely accuse us of. I have written a similar note to the editor of the Khaleej Times and expect action to be taken by this Monday afternoon at the latest.
Mark Potok
Director, Intelligence Project
Editor, Intelligence Report/Hatewatch
Southern Poverty Law Center
400 Washington Ave.
Montgomery, AL 36104
===
Response to Mark Potok
Karin Friedemann
The US Department of Justice released FBI documents indicating that the Southern Poverty Law Center engaged in undercover surveillance of Oklahoma militia groups in 1995 before and after the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The local FBI team, which should have obtained a warrant to dispatch real FBI agents, criminally conspired with SPLC agents to get around Attorney General Janet Reno’s legal limitations on domestic spying. Because the conspiracy was criminal, the espionage was illegal.
In “The Watchdogs: A close look at Anti-Racist ‘Watchdog’ Groups,” Laird Wilcox documents the SPLC’s extensive intelligence networks monitoring editorials, observing meetings, and compiling files on people they consider offensive. Wilcox told WorldNetDaily: “By alleging ‘dangerousness’ on the basis of mere assumed values, opinions and beliefs, they put entirely innocent citizens at risk from law enforcement error and misconduct.”
Mark Potok himself admits the SPLC criminally spied on the Animal Rights 2001 Conference by secretly recording attendees. “We were at that conference, we collected the quote ourselves, in person and on a videotape to boot,” he wrote in response to complaints from Friends of Animals President Priscilla Feral about misleading SPLC characterizations of her organization.
In an article libeling Muslim clerics, the online SPLC Intelligence Report links videos apparently made in violation of federal wiretapping and eavesdropping statutes.
Many organizations and individuals accuse SPLC of publishing false and misleading information and manipulating crime data and terminology. Federal law enforcement agencies and Homeland Security Fusion Centers were issued a warning against relying upon faulty and politicized SPLC research reports.
The Turkish American Legal Defense Fund is currently suing the SPLC for defaming an 85-year-old emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts.
Harper's Magazine accused the SPLC of scare mongering to fund relatively lavish lifestyles for the organization's directors.
Demand for immediate retraction and publication of correction
Saturday, May 16, 2009 1:13 PM
From: "Mark Potok" mark.potok@splcenter.org
This is for Karen Friedemann and regards your May 16 "Letter From America"article in the Khaleej Times Online entitled "Americans Divided by HateCrimes Bill." http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2009/May/opinion_May80.xml§ion=opinion&col=
You make the following claim in your article:
"The ADL, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is alreadyheavily involved in Homeland Security's locally based 'fusion centres,'which collect personal data for intelligence databases that synchronise national intelligence collection with local police. ADL and SPLC have arecord of illegally spying on American citizens and providing falseinformation to law enforcement officials."
The statements about the SPLC -- that we have a record of "illegally spying"on Americans and "providing false information" to authorities -- are both materially false and also libelous and defamatory. Both statements containno shred of truth -- apparently, you've attributed the ADL's problems in the Roy Bullock case to the SPLC. We have never been charged or convicted oreven accused of these things.
As I noted above, these statements arelibelous and false. As a result, I write to demand that you immediatelywithdraw these statements from wherever they have been published, including the Khaleej Times, and publish a correction making clear that SPLC has not done the things you falsely accuse us of. I have written a similar note to the editor of the Khaleej Times and expect action to be taken by this Monday afternoon at the latest.
Mark Potok
Director, Intelligence Project
Editor, Intelligence Report/Hatewatch
Southern Poverty Law Center
400 Washington Ave.
Montgomery, AL 36104
===
Response to Mark Potok
Karin Friedemann
The US Department of Justice released FBI documents indicating that the Southern Poverty Law Center engaged in undercover surveillance of Oklahoma militia groups in 1995 before and after the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The local FBI team, which should have obtained a warrant to dispatch real FBI agents, criminally conspired with SPLC agents to get around Attorney General Janet Reno’s legal limitations on domestic spying. Because the conspiracy was criminal, the espionage was illegal.
In “The Watchdogs: A close look at Anti-Racist ‘Watchdog’ Groups,” Laird Wilcox documents the SPLC’s extensive intelligence networks monitoring editorials, observing meetings, and compiling files on people they consider offensive. Wilcox told WorldNetDaily: “By alleging ‘dangerousness’ on the basis of mere assumed values, opinions and beliefs, they put entirely innocent citizens at risk from law enforcement error and misconduct.”
Mark Potok himself admits the SPLC criminally spied on the Animal Rights 2001 Conference by secretly recording attendees. “We were at that conference, we collected the quote ourselves, in person and on a videotape to boot,” he wrote in response to complaints from Friends of Animals President Priscilla Feral about misleading SPLC characterizations of her organization.
In an article libeling Muslim clerics, the online SPLC Intelligence Report links videos apparently made in violation of federal wiretapping and eavesdropping statutes.
Many organizations and individuals accuse SPLC of publishing false and misleading information and manipulating crime data and terminology. Federal law enforcement agencies and Homeland Security Fusion Centers were issued a warning against relying upon faulty and politicized SPLC research reports.
The Turkish American Legal Defense Fund is currently suing the SPLC for defaming an 85-year-old emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts.
Harper's Magazine accused the SPLC of scare mongering to fund relatively lavish lifestyles for the organization's directors.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Americans Divided by Hate Crimes Bill
Khaleej Times
Despite lingering concerns about threats to Constitutional protections such as freedom of religion and freedom of speech, the Federal Hate Crimes bill, HR 1913, passed recently in the House of Representatives.
If passed by the Senate, the legislation will expand the federal definition of such crimes to include those motivated by gender identity and permit increased federal power to investigate and prosecute crimes as “hate crimes.” The meat of the hate crimes bill is a $10 million grant for the establishment of a federally funded surveillance centre.
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R, NC) argued HR 1913 would move America “down a slippery slope” to loss of freedom as has happened in Canada and Europe, where imprisonment for “thought crimes” has become a regular occurrence.
Susan Fani of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights warns: “The problem in general with hate crimes legislation is that it invites the government to probe way beyond motive. And in instances like this, it trespasses on free speech and religious liberty.”
Although the bill “declares that nothing in this Act shall be construed to prohibit the exercise of Constitutionally-protected free speech,” it sets a dangerous precedent of punishing motivations rather than actions because the actions — stalking, assault, etc. — are already illegal.
Anisa Abd el Fattah, President of National Association of Muslim American Women (NAMAW) points out: “Before our Congress passes such a law there are many questions to be answered, the most important of which is ‘who’ will decide that a given act is a ‘hate crime’?” The Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) originally wrote this bill. Arab, Latino and African-American organisations support it because they hope that prosecuting “hate” will decrease racist attacks on their communities. Serious fears exist, however, about the government surveillance centre, given the highly politicised nature of hate crimes labeling.
The ADL, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is already heavily involved in Homeland Security’s locally based “fusion centres,” which collect personal data for intelligence databases that synchronise national intelligence collection with local police.
ADL and SPLC have a record of illegally spying on American citizens and providing false information to law enforcement officials.
A fusion centre in Missouri recently distributed an “intelligence” document on “hate groups” to local police, which was written by the ADL and the SPLC. It instructed the police to look for Americans who were concerned about unemployment, taxes, illegal immigration, gangs, border security, abortion, high costs of living, gun restrictions, FEMA, the IRS, and the Federal Reserve, as well as supporters of third party presidential candidates! Mainstream Christian organisations that espouse a traditional orthodox view of homosexuality were lumped into a list filled with violent neo-Nazis and skinheads while Roman Catholic institutions were singled out as “encouraging anti-Semitism and ethnic and religious chauvinism.” The report also predictably vilified religiously observant Muslims and anti-war activists.
“There is no level of hate crime that is acceptable—period,” says Dan Stein, President of Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). “However, the SPLC’s calculated abuse of the term ‘hate group’ and manipulation of hate crime data for self-serving political interests is an affront to hate crime victims and those who advocate on their behalf.”
The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission declared, “If we were to apply the same twisted logic of the SPLC to the SPLC, it would have to label itself as a hate group because they are intolerant of conservative Christians.” Similarly, Hussein Ibish, a secular Arab-American lobbyist, could be charged with inciting hate crimes targeting Muslims and political activists, his compilation of anti-Arab hate crimes statistics for the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) aside.
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) expressed concern about how the fusion system has been “monitoring the legal activities of American Muslims exercising their constitutional privileges” and the “use of McCarthy-era tactics, most notably dissemination of Islamophobic analysis by federally-funded ‘fusion centres’ to local law enforcement agencies.”
Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), a citizens group in Missouri, issued a national advisory to all local, state and Federal law enforcement agencies and officers, including all DHS fusion centres, “warning against any reliance upon faulty and politicised research issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti Defamation League (ADL)” that “cast suspicion on millions of Americans.”
Governor Peter Kinder took the advisory seriously and is now engaging in damage control.
He issued a public apology to Presidential candidates Ron Paul, Bob Barr, and Chuck Baldwin, and placed Missouri Public Safety Director John Britt on administrative leave pending an investigation of the absurd report.
America’s problems with intolerance do not result from the absence of hate crime laws but originate in structural problems associated with bigotries of government officials, and often involve conspiracies against rights.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women
Despite lingering concerns about threats to Constitutional protections such as freedom of religion and freedom of speech, the Federal Hate Crimes bill, HR 1913, passed recently in the House of Representatives.
If passed by the Senate, the legislation will expand the federal definition of such crimes to include those motivated by gender identity and permit increased federal power to investigate and prosecute crimes as “hate crimes.” The meat of the hate crimes bill is a $10 million grant for the establishment of a federally funded surveillance centre.
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R, NC) argued HR 1913 would move America “down a slippery slope” to loss of freedom as has happened in Canada and Europe, where imprisonment for “thought crimes” has become a regular occurrence.
Susan Fani of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights warns: “The problem in general with hate crimes legislation is that it invites the government to probe way beyond motive. And in instances like this, it trespasses on free speech and religious liberty.”
Although the bill “declares that nothing in this Act shall be construed to prohibit the exercise of Constitutionally-protected free speech,” it sets a dangerous precedent of punishing motivations rather than actions because the actions — stalking, assault, etc. — are already illegal.
Anisa Abd el Fattah, President of National Association of Muslim American Women (NAMAW) points out: “Before our Congress passes such a law there are many questions to be answered, the most important of which is ‘who’ will decide that a given act is a ‘hate crime’?” The Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) originally wrote this bill. Arab, Latino and African-American organisations support it because they hope that prosecuting “hate” will decrease racist attacks on their communities. Serious fears exist, however, about the government surveillance centre, given the highly politicised nature of hate crimes labeling.
The ADL, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), is already heavily involved in Homeland Security’s locally based “fusion centres,” which collect personal data for intelligence databases that synchronise national intelligence collection with local police.
ADL and SPLC have a record of illegally spying on American citizens and providing false information to law enforcement officials.
A fusion centre in Missouri recently distributed an “intelligence” document on “hate groups” to local police, which was written by the ADL and the SPLC. It instructed the police to look for Americans who were concerned about unemployment, taxes, illegal immigration, gangs, border security, abortion, high costs of living, gun restrictions, FEMA, the IRS, and the Federal Reserve, as well as supporters of third party presidential candidates! Mainstream Christian organisations that espouse a traditional orthodox view of homosexuality were lumped into a list filled with violent neo-Nazis and skinheads while Roman Catholic institutions were singled out as “encouraging anti-Semitism and ethnic and religious chauvinism.” The report also predictably vilified religiously observant Muslims and anti-war activists.
“There is no level of hate crime that is acceptable—period,” says Dan Stein, President of Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). “However, the SPLC’s calculated abuse of the term ‘hate group’ and manipulation of hate crime data for self-serving political interests is an affront to hate crime victims and those who advocate on their behalf.”
The Christian Anti-Defamation Commission declared, “If we were to apply the same twisted logic of the SPLC to the SPLC, it would have to label itself as a hate group because they are intolerant of conservative Christians.” Similarly, Hussein Ibish, a secular Arab-American lobbyist, could be charged with inciting hate crimes targeting Muslims and political activists, his compilation of anti-Arab hate crimes statistics for the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) aside.
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) expressed concern about how the fusion system has been “monitoring the legal activities of American Muslims exercising their constitutional privileges” and the “use of McCarthy-era tactics, most notably dissemination of Islamophobic analysis by federally-funded ‘fusion centres’ to local law enforcement agencies.”
Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC), a citizens group in Missouri, issued a national advisory to all local, state and Federal law enforcement agencies and officers, including all DHS fusion centres, “warning against any reliance upon faulty and politicised research issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti Defamation League (ADL)” that “cast suspicion on millions of Americans.”
Governor Peter Kinder took the advisory seriously and is now engaging in damage control.
He issued a public apology to Presidential candidates Ron Paul, Bob Barr, and Chuck Baldwin, and placed Missouri Public Safety Director John Britt on administrative leave pending an investigation of the absurd report.
America’s problems with intolerance do not result from the absence of hate crime laws but originate in structural problems associated with bigotries of government officials, and often involve conspiracies against rights.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on Middle East affairs and US politics. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
White, European and Endangered: Is the Caucasian Race Dying?
Khaleej Times
Demographic predictions of increasing de-Europeanisation are becoming realised in playgrounds throughout America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Some call this creeping multiculturalism “a Genocide against the White race.” While globalist strategy does appear to undermine local social cohesion first by encouraging immigration and then by whipping up anti-immigrant hysteria, such analysis ignores personal choice. White people have not been reproducing at replacement levels.
“Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech, Europe represented 12.5 per cent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 per cent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 per cent of the world will be European,” states Russell Shorto in the New York Times.
“We start to wonder about our identity at the moment when we are about to lose it,” notes Tom Sunic in the Occidental Observer, but the Pan-European identity is something quite new in history.
“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanise us instead of our Anglifying them?” Benjamin Franklin complained in 1751.
“In the early 20th century, federal immigration officials classified the Irish, Italians, and Jews as separate races. Yet today all these groups are viewed collectively, and benignly, as ‘white,’” writes Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe.
Yet White identity has largely been defined collectively as the opposite of benign because it comes with the historical baggage of Southern Slavery, Segregation, Apartheid, and Colonialism. Throughout the Western world and its former colonies legal systems had separate laws for Whites and non-Whites. Even when such discrimination has been eliminated from codes, complaints persist of unfair enforcement and unequal protection alongside continuing structural inequalities.
“Whiteness” has been used as a weapon against non-Whites by the bankers and proprietors of capital to prevent working class solidarity, while simultaneously White Christian middle and upper classes have been subjected to decades of what Prof. Kevin MacDonald calls the “culture of critique emanating from the most prestigious academic and media institutions.”
Blogger Christian Lander summarises: “As a straight white male, I’m the worst thing on earth.”
In college I actually told my American history professor, “I wish I could rip my skin off.”
Jews are always exempt from collective White Guilt as their involvement in Bolshevik massacres, the American slave trade, and the conquest of Palestine is never mentioned at any level of the US public educational system while the Holocaust is taught starting in Kindergarten.
Although White Christians have been demonised as the Oppressor class, poverty is not specific to race in the United States. Representative Cynthia McKinney in a Congressional report concerning Hurricane Katrina points out: “In the greater New Orleans area, 65,000 minority residents lived in poverty before Katrina, compared with 85,000 whites.”
Sinister plots to reduce non-white populations and sometimes white Muslim populations through promotion of birth control, instigating warfare, starvation and disease have however constituted a recurring feature of international politics.
In 1974, the US National Security Council under Henry Kissinger released a memorandum on the “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth” claiming that population growth in Lesser Developed Countries was a dangerous threat to US national security.
It has even become popular to view mass death as something positive. Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund said, “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels,” according to a 1995 American Policy Center report.
Neoconservative commentator Mark Steyn writes in America Alone, “If you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ‘em.”
Likewise, abortion has been promoted as a way of reducing the population of the poor. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and member of the Eugenics Society wrote in 1922: “Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly… Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilisation are diverted to maintenance of those who should never have been born.”
Despite disproportionate use by African Americans of abortion services, their birth rate remains higher than replacement level while European Americans' population continues to decline.
Similar disparities exist in Europe. In 2005, 64,000 children were born in Norway of two foreign-born parents in comparison with only 13,800 children born to native Norwegian parents. Immigration in combination with higher non-European birth rates has resulted in projected transformation of majorities into minorities.
Journalist Eric Walberg blames the downfall of Europe on neoliberalism while author Michael Hoffman blames moral degeneracy. “The non-reproducing (i.e. self-exterminating) Whites of Europe and America live for luxury.”
Yet, Europeans have always been a global minority. Even pre-Christian Romans often recommended later marriage as a display of patience and chastity while in other cultures women typically produced their first baby at 14 or 15. In the 17th century, advances in medicine and hygiene resulted in increasing European populations. Other nations are now catching up.
Those who are panicked about disappearing European Christian culture should strive to address the socio-economic and emotional factors that discourage those of European ancestry from having children.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based political analyst. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women
Demographic predictions of increasing de-Europeanisation are becoming realised in playgrounds throughout America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Some call this creeping multiculturalism “a Genocide against the White race.” While globalist strategy does appear to undermine local social cohesion first by encouraging immigration and then by whipping up anti-immigrant hysteria, such analysis ignores personal choice. White people have not been reproducing at replacement levels.
“Around the time that President Kennedy went to Germany and gave his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech, Europe represented 12.5 per cent of the world’s population. Today it is 7.2 per cent, and if current trends continue, by 2050 only 5 per cent of the world will be European,” states Russell Shorto in the New York Times.
“We start to wonder about our identity at the moment when we are about to lose it,” notes Tom Sunic in the Occidental Observer, but the Pan-European identity is something quite new in history.
“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanise us instead of our Anglifying them?” Benjamin Franklin complained in 1751.
“In the early 20th century, federal immigration officials classified the Irish, Italians, and Jews as separate races. Yet today all these groups are viewed collectively, and benignly, as ‘white,’” writes Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe.
Yet White identity has largely been defined collectively as the opposite of benign because it comes with the historical baggage of Southern Slavery, Segregation, Apartheid, and Colonialism. Throughout the Western world and its former colonies legal systems had separate laws for Whites and non-Whites. Even when such discrimination has been eliminated from codes, complaints persist of unfair enforcement and unequal protection alongside continuing structural inequalities.
“Whiteness” has been used as a weapon against non-Whites by the bankers and proprietors of capital to prevent working class solidarity, while simultaneously White Christian middle and upper classes have been subjected to decades of what Prof. Kevin MacDonald calls the “culture of critique emanating from the most prestigious academic and media institutions.”
Blogger Christian Lander summarises: “As a straight white male, I’m the worst thing on earth.”
In college I actually told my American history professor, “I wish I could rip my skin off.”
Jews are always exempt from collective White Guilt as their involvement in Bolshevik massacres, the American slave trade, and the conquest of Palestine is never mentioned at any level of the US public educational system while the Holocaust is taught starting in Kindergarten.
Although White Christians have been demonised as the Oppressor class, poverty is not specific to race in the United States. Representative Cynthia McKinney in a Congressional report concerning Hurricane Katrina points out: “In the greater New Orleans area, 65,000 minority residents lived in poverty before Katrina, compared with 85,000 whites.”
Sinister plots to reduce non-white populations and sometimes white Muslim populations through promotion of birth control, instigating warfare, starvation and disease have however constituted a recurring feature of international politics.
In 1974, the US National Security Council under Henry Kissinger released a memorandum on the “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth” claiming that population growth in Lesser Developed Countries was a dangerous threat to US national security.
It has even become popular to view mass death as something positive. Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund said, “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels,” according to a 1995 American Policy Center report.
Neoconservative commentator Mark Steyn writes in America Alone, “If you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ‘em.”
Likewise, abortion has been promoted as a way of reducing the population of the poor. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and member of the Eugenics Society wrote in 1922: “Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly… Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilisation are diverted to maintenance of those who should never have been born.”
Despite disproportionate use by African Americans of abortion services, their birth rate remains higher than replacement level while European Americans' population continues to decline.
Similar disparities exist in Europe. In 2005, 64,000 children were born in Norway of two foreign-born parents in comparison with only 13,800 children born to native Norwegian parents. Immigration in combination with higher non-European birth rates has resulted in projected transformation of majorities into minorities.
Journalist Eric Walberg blames the downfall of Europe on neoliberalism while author Michael Hoffman blames moral degeneracy. “The non-reproducing (i.e. self-exterminating) Whites of Europe and America live for luxury.”
Yet, Europeans have always been a global minority. Even pre-Christian Romans often recommended later marriage as a display of patience and chastity while in other cultures women typically produced their first baby at 14 or 15. In the 17th century, advances in medicine and hygiene resulted in increasing European populations. Other nations are now catching up.
Those who are panicked about disappearing European Christian culture should strive to address the socio-economic and emotional factors that discourage those of European ancestry from having children.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based political analyst. She is Director of the Division on Muslim Civil Rights and Liberties for the National Association of Muslim American Women
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Bin Laden Hype Misled Public
Khaleej Times
A National Public Radio rehashing of the 1999 Egypt Air crash made me uneasy. It seemed like an effort to indoctrinate listeners to believe that Muslims would commit suicide by deliberately crashing passenger jets. I wondered what was coming.
The sky was blue and deceptively cheerful in New Jersey a few weeks later on September 11, 2001, when I heard about the attack on the World Trade Center. My husband called and told me to turn on the television. As soon as I saw the flames and explosions, I recognised a professional made-for-TV event.
As I watched the endless repetition of dramatic camera shots, I perceived an attempt to hypnotise the public with a list of suspects that had emerged before any serious investigation could possibly have begun. One ridiculous news story claimed that Mohammed Atta had left behind a handwritten note at the airport that began, “In the Name of Allah, my family, and myself!” No Muslim would ever use such a construction. Grandiose spectacles like 9/11 have not typically characterised Islamic militants. The Taleban used to kill a handful of Russian occupation soldiers a day. In the years since the WTC fell, there has never been any repeat attack on American soil.
Reuters reported on September 13, 2001, that Osama bin Laden told Taleban officials he had no role in the terror attacks in the United States. Bin Laden may be a lot of things, but he is not known to be a liar. “We asked from him, (and) he told (us) we don’t have any hand in this action,” stated Taleban ambassador Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef. Rather than provide evidence against bin Laden, the US imprisoned Zaeef in Guantanamo. He now lives under house arrest in Kabul.
On September 18, 2001, the Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli officials had warned Washington beforehand that “large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent,” and specifically linked the plot to bin Laden.
Problems in the official version soon developed. Some of the TV photographs were faked, at least 7 of the alleged hijackers were alive, and one had died before 2001. Bin Laden videotapes aired on TV were proven fraudulent and mistranslated.
On June 5, 2006 Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI told Muckraker Report that bin Laden “has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Robert Dreyfuss reported that former CIA officials claimed Department of Defense officials were “producing their own unverified intelligence reports to justify war.” Political analyst Eric Margolis notes, “Such ‘experts’ echoed the White House party line and all were dead wrong. Yet amazingly, many are still on air, continuing to misinform the public.”
A man whose nine children were killed when the US bombed his home told Yvonne Ridley, “There has been a lot of fighting around here between the Taleban and the Americans. They are searching for Osama bin Laden but everyone knows he is not here.”
The Pentagon has used the bin Laden hype for years to justify stationing warships and submarines off the Pakistani coast; kidnapping and torturing prisoners such as Abu Zubaydah and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammad based on hearsay by anonymous sources; and testing new hi-tech weapons like Predator unmanned drones and air-sucking thermo-baric bombs on a defenseless population. The US government arrested thousands of Muslims and deported hundreds. Not a single one of them has ever been convicted on terrorism charges.
In February 2009, 9/11 widow Beverly Eckert died in a plane crash days after she voiced her concerns to President Obama about the 9/11 investigation. Eckert was suing the Federal government to force testimony about what went wrong that day. She formed a Family Steering Committee to address the 9/11 Commission with questions like why on September 9th the president already had a war plan on his desk to go into Afghanistan; how the passports of two alleged hijackers survived the inferno; why Mayor Rudy Giuliani had the metal from the collapsed towers sold as scrap for recycling overseas.
“That metal was evidence which could have helped explain the collapse,” Eckert believed. She asked why high-ranking Pentagon officials cancelled travel plans for the morning of September 11 “apparently because of security concerns?” What are the names of the individuals and the financial institutions that bought “puts” on American Airlines and United Airlines during the three weeks prior to 9/11? Who profited? Why didn’t F-16s intercept the hijacked airliners? Why was protocol not followed on 9/11? Why did Dick Cheney hinder CIA and FBI investigations?
“If what the government has told us about 9/11 is a lie,” said William Rodriguez, a WTC janitor who survived the attack, “somebody has to take action to reveal the truth.”
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on the Middle East affairs and US politics
A National Public Radio rehashing of the 1999 Egypt Air crash made me uneasy. It seemed like an effort to indoctrinate listeners to believe that Muslims would commit suicide by deliberately crashing passenger jets. I wondered what was coming.
The sky was blue and deceptively cheerful in New Jersey a few weeks later on September 11, 2001, when I heard about the attack on the World Trade Center. My husband called and told me to turn on the television. As soon as I saw the flames and explosions, I recognised a professional made-for-TV event.
As I watched the endless repetition of dramatic camera shots, I perceived an attempt to hypnotise the public with a list of suspects that had emerged before any serious investigation could possibly have begun. One ridiculous news story claimed that Mohammed Atta had left behind a handwritten note at the airport that began, “In the Name of Allah, my family, and myself!” No Muslim would ever use such a construction. Grandiose spectacles like 9/11 have not typically characterised Islamic militants. The Taleban used to kill a handful of Russian occupation soldiers a day. In the years since the WTC fell, there has never been any repeat attack on American soil.
Reuters reported on September 13, 2001, that Osama bin Laden told Taleban officials he had no role in the terror attacks in the United States. Bin Laden may be a lot of things, but he is not known to be a liar. “We asked from him, (and) he told (us) we don’t have any hand in this action,” stated Taleban ambassador Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef. Rather than provide evidence against bin Laden, the US imprisoned Zaeef in Guantanamo. He now lives under house arrest in Kabul.
On September 18, 2001, the Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli officials had warned Washington beforehand that “large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent,” and specifically linked the plot to bin Laden.
Problems in the official version soon developed. Some of the TV photographs were faked, at least 7 of the alleged hijackers were alive, and one had died before 2001. Bin Laden videotapes aired on TV were proven fraudulent and mistranslated.
On June 5, 2006 Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI told Muckraker Report that bin Laden “has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting bin Laden to 9/11.” Robert Dreyfuss reported that former CIA officials claimed Department of Defense officials were “producing their own unverified intelligence reports to justify war.” Political analyst Eric Margolis notes, “Such ‘experts’ echoed the White House party line and all were dead wrong. Yet amazingly, many are still on air, continuing to misinform the public.”
A man whose nine children were killed when the US bombed his home told Yvonne Ridley, “There has been a lot of fighting around here between the Taleban and the Americans. They are searching for Osama bin Laden but everyone knows he is not here.”
The Pentagon has used the bin Laden hype for years to justify stationing warships and submarines off the Pakistani coast; kidnapping and torturing prisoners such as Abu Zubaydah and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammad based on hearsay by anonymous sources; and testing new hi-tech weapons like Predator unmanned drones and air-sucking thermo-baric bombs on a defenseless population. The US government arrested thousands of Muslims and deported hundreds. Not a single one of them has ever been convicted on terrorism charges.
In February 2009, 9/11 widow Beverly Eckert died in a plane crash days after she voiced her concerns to President Obama about the 9/11 investigation. Eckert was suing the Federal government to force testimony about what went wrong that day. She formed a Family Steering Committee to address the 9/11 Commission with questions like why on September 9th the president already had a war plan on his desk to go into Afghanistan; how the passports of two alleged hijackers survived the inferno; why Mayor Rudy Giuliani had the metal from the collapsed towers sold as scrap for recycling overseas.
“That metal was evidence which could have helped explain the collapse,” Eckert believed. She asked why high-ranking Pentagon officials cancelled travel plans for the morning of September 11 “apparently because of security concerns?” What are the names of the individuals and the financial institutions that bought “puts” on American Airlines and United Airlines during the three weeks prior to 9/11? Who profited? Why didn’t F-16s intercept the hijacked airliners? Why was protocol not followed on 9/11? Why did Dick Cheney hinder CIA and FBI investigations?
“If what the government has told us about 9/11 is a lie,” said William Rodriguez, a WTC janitor who survived the attack, “somebody has to take action to reveal the truth.”
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on the Middle East affairs and US politics
Monday, April 27, 2009
Islamophobia on American Campuses
Muslim parents from around the world once sent their children off to school in America with simple warnings against wine and song, but now Muslim students must be prepared to face Islamophobic incitement.
While political activism makes college exciting, Muslims need to be aware that autonomously managed local Muslim Student Association university chapters are outclassed by well-funded, hierarchically coordinated Jewish and Neoconservative organisations, which actively work to undermine Muslim student groups.
The Jewish Anti-Defamation League, which blacklists professors for failure to teach the Zionist version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, labels MSA an “Anti-Israel” organisation and keeps detailed files on its activities.
Steve Emerson’s Terrorism Awareness Project published a “Student’s Guide to Stop the Jihad on Campus” manual for organising “Islam-Fascism Awareness Week,” whose stated goal is “to show the connections between the MSA and the international jihad.”
IFAW sponsored a panel discussion on “Islamic Totalitarianism’s Threat to Civilisation” with the Ayn Rand Institute and screened propaganda films.
MSA chapters deal separately with such assaults on Muslim religious dignity. Usually they hold a protest or a counter-event. No coordinated national plan exists to oppose malicious professional anti-Islamic incitement. Muslim students clearly need protection and guidance from their elders.
An MSA student from University of Texas complains: “David Horowitz and his Islamophobic gang, which include the likes of Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Wafa Sultan, Ann Coulter and many others, have called on student organisations sponsoring IFAW to distribute petitions to MSA members denouncing terrorism and the Hadiths of Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him)… these petitions have been written in such a way that no Muslim could possibly sign it without denouncing their religion.” The Jewish Organisation of America in consultation with Hillel sued Michigan State University for permitting Muslim students to wear graduation stoles inscribed with the Shahada. They equated the Muslim declaration of faith with support for Hamas and claimed this threatened Jewish students’ civil rights.
The Harvard Crimson recently reported Harvard Islamic chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser came under attack because he addressed a student’s questions about apostates “in the context of the evolution of an Islamic legal doctrine.” This aggressive, prejudiced dissection of Islam stigmatises the religion as fundamentally different from Judeo-Christianity, intrinsically incompatible with American values, and results in the marginalisation of Muslim scholars.
As a college student, Aafia Siddique was active in MSA and managed a religious information (daw’ah) table in the MIT student center. Today Aafia is a US political prisoner because Islamophobes like Nonie Darwish denigrate Aafia’s faith as something unacceptable: “They are not trying to be part of the American way of life, they are not trying to be a part of our culture, they are here with an agenda to make Islam the law of the land.” Peer pressure has the dangerous effect of rendering Muslim youths vulnerable to Zionisation on American campuses. Muslim students trying to be “progressive” in the eyes of fellow students begin defending Jewish sensitivities against anti-Zionists and acting as spokespersons for the Holocaust or gay rights.
Parents and leaders within communities sending their children to America for school should protect and organise the Muslim students. Wealthy Jews provide Jewish students with campus organisational headquarters, where members create databases of Jewish students’ personal information gleaned through friendly phone calls and Sabbath dinner party invitations. The Jewish community arranges free trips to Israel and special access to internships throughout industry and government.
The Muslim Students Association needs both to create similar databases of supporters or of potential supporters and also to make connections with friendly student, religious and professional organisations in order to compete with Jewish social networking. Muslim think tanks need to observe the competition. Harvard University’s Catholic Student Center is integrated with the monumental St. Paul’s Church, and the Hillel building is modern and glassy, designed by Moshe Safdie, architect of the new Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher Jews have their own Chabad House operating under auspices of Alan Dershowitz and Ruth Wisse.
Harvard, which is the foremost intellectual institution of the US establishment, has no pan-Islamic cultural student building for meetings, prayers, social events, or creating political infrastructure. The Harvard Islamic Society meets in a room near the Buddhist Dharma Society in the basement of an undergraduate dormitory, just past the laundry room, recycling bins, and student lounge.
The wars over global domination and the debates about which races or nations have the right of self-defense and which do not are first fought in academia. As intellectuals poke the surface of pro-Israel bluster, they find there is nothing behind it. Islamophobic ideologies exist in a vacuum of reason. Despite vulgar and hostile pro-Israel campus organisations, many friendly Jews attend pro-Palestine events. For all its drawbacks the USA still offers more freedom of speech and freedom of religion than Europe for those students who want to sharpen their pencils for a battle of ideas.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on the Middle East affairs and US politics
While political activism makes college exciting, Muslims need to be aware that autonomously managed local Muslim Student Association university chapters are outclassed by well-funded, hierarchically coordinated Jewish and Neoconservative organisations, which actively work to undermine Muslim student groups.
The Jewish Anti-Defamation League, which blacklists professors for failure to teach the Zionist version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, labels MSA an “Anti-Israel” organisation and keeps detailed files on its activities.
Steve Emerson’s Terrorism Awareness Project published a “Student’s Guide to Stop the Jihad on Campus” manual for organising “Islam-Fascism Awareness Week,” whose stated goal is “to show the connections between the MSA and the international jihad.”
IFAW sponsored a panel discussion on “Islamic Totalitarianism’s Threat to Civilisation” with the Ayn Rand Institute and screened propaganda films.
MSA chapters deal separately with such assaults on Muslim religious dignity. Usually they hold a protest or a counter-event. No coordinated national plan exists to oppose malicious professional anti-Islamic incitement. Muslim students clearly need protection and guidance from their elders.
An MSA student from University of Texas complains: “David Horowitz and his Islamophobic gang, which include the likes of Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Wafa Sultan, Ann Coulter and many others, have called on student organisations sponsoring IFAW to distribute petitions to MSA members denouncing terrorism and the Hadiths of Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him)… these petitions have been written in such a way that no Muslim could possibly sign it without denouncing their religion.” The Jewish Organisation of America in consultation with Hillel sued Michigan State University for permitting Muslim students to wear graduation stoles inscribed with the Shahada. They equated the Muslim declaration of faith with support for Hamas and claimed this threatened Jewish students’ civil rights.
The Harvard Crimson recently reported Harvard Islamic chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser came under attack because he addressed a student’s questions about apostates “in the context of the evolution of an Islamic legal doctrine.” This aggressive, prejudiced dissection of Islam stigmatises the religion as fundamentally different from Judeo-Christianity, intrinsically incompatible with American values, and results in the marginalisation of Muslim scholars.
As a college student, Aafia Siddique was active in MSA and managed a religious information (daw’ah) table in the MIT student center. Today Aafia is a US political prisoner because Islamophobes like Nonie Darwish denigrate Aafia’s faith as something unacceptable: “They are not trying to be part of the American way of life, they are not trying to be a part of our culture, they are here with an agenda to make Islam the law of the land.” Peer pressure has the dangerous effect of rendering Muslim youths vulnerable to Zionisation on American campuses. Muslim students trying to be “progressive” in the eyes of fellow students begin defending Jewish sensitivities against anti-Zionists and acting as spokespersons for the Holocaust or gay rights.
Parents and leaders within communities sending their children to America for school should protect and organise the Muslim students. Wealthy Jews provide Jewish students with campus organisational headquarters, where members create databases of Jewish students’ personal information gleaned through friendly phone calls and Sabbath dinner party invitations. The Jewish community arranges free trips to Israel and special access to internships throughout industry and government.
The Muslim Students Association needs both to create similar databases of supporters or of potential supporters and also to make connections with friendly student, religious and professional organisations in order to compete with Jewish social networking. Muslim think tanks need to observe the competition. Harvard University’s Catholic Student Center is integrated with the monumental St. Paul’s Church, and the Hillel building is modern and glassy, designed by Moshe Safdie, architect of the new Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher Jews have their own Chabad House operating under auspices of Alan Dershowitz and Ruth Wisse.
Harvard, which is the foremost intellectual institution of the US establishment, has no pan-Islamic cultural student building for meetings, prayers, social events, or creating political infrastructure. The Harvard Islamic Society meets in a room near the Buddhist Dharma Society in the basement of an undergraduate dormitory, just past the laundry room, recycling bins, and student lounge.
The wars over global domination and the debates about which races or nations have the right of self-defense and which do not are first fought in academia. As intellectuals poke the surface of pro-Israel bluster, they find there is nothing behind it. Islamophobic ideologies exist in a vacuum of reason. Despite vulgar and hostile pro-Israel campus organisations, many friendly Jews attend pro-Palestine events. For all its drawbacks the USA still offers more freedom of speech and freedom of religion than Europe for those students who want to sharpen their pencils for a battle of ideas.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on the Middle East affairs and US politics
Monday, April 13, 2009
Chop Shop Economics & Stealth Zionism
Khaleej Times
Causing $64 trillion of liquidity to vanish from the world financial system and then manipulating the US government to reward the perpetrators with bailout money requires the presence of the “right people” in government, academia, and finance industries.
In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein argues that Milton Friedman or Chicago School influenced policy makers routinely used catastrophes to facilitate rewriting of national economic rules to benefit a select subset of the world’s hyperwealthy.
President Obama, whose economic background is all Chicago School, brought the Friedmanites including National Economic Council Director Larry Summers back into government.
Summers came under recent public scrutiny because 2008 White House financial disclosure reports reveal he collected favours from the very financial institutions that received huge taxpayer bailouts. “The document provided for Summers, who serves as one of the president’s closest confidants, underscores just how close some of these officials are to the industry over which they now have oversight,” writes Sam Stein in the Huffington Post.
J.P. Morgan Chase, which received $25 billion in government bailout funds, had paid Summers $67,500 for a single speaking engagement. Citigroup, which received $50 billion in “emergency” taxpayer aid, had paid Summers $99,000. Goldman Sachs, which received a $12 billion bailout, had paid Summers $202,500.
Glenn Greenwald of Salon explains that people like Summers and friends “shuffle back and forth from the public to the private sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with their GOP counterparts in this endless public/private sector looting.”
During the Clinton administration, as Secretaries of the Treasury, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers deregulated derivative trading. After leaving government service, Rubin became a Citigroup director and used deregulation to ruin that Bank by recommending investments in derivatives like CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations). For eight years of service Rubin received approximately $126 million in cash and stock.
Investors from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE were effectively swindled out of billions as Citigroup value crashed because of the CDO meltdown during the Bush administration. Larry Summers became president of Harvard University in 2001. Rubin was Summers’ main booster at the Harvard Corporation, which chooses the president.
Summer’s Harvard presidency erupted into scandal when the US government accused Summers’ associate, economics professor Andrei Shleifer of financial improprieties during work on a Harvard USAID grant to create a Russian stock market. The government suspected Shleifer’s wife Nancy Zimmerman of insider stock trading.
Because Shleifer put Harvard in breach of Federal regulations regarding grant money, Harvard had to pay $27 million to the US government while Summers protected Shleifer and his job. Additional questions arose over the management of the Harvard endowment, employee compensation, and suspected middle market restraint of trade involving university real estate acquisitions.
During this turbulent period in his career, Summers worked hard to improve his Jewish credentials. He badmouthed anti-Israel divestment activists on campus but supported Darfur-related divestment.. He dumped his Christian wife Victoria Perry for Holocaust Literature professor Elisa New, a close friend of Jewish Studies professor Ruth Wisse, whose husband is chairman of board of directors of CAMERA, a professional Israel advocacy organisation.
In a disastrous blow to Harvard’s academic stature, Summers rejected former UAE president Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s $2 million donation for an Islamic Studies chair at the Harvard Divinity School under pressure from Rachel Fish of the David Project, which is another Israel advocacy group with connections to CAMERA.
The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences twice voted “no confidence” in Summers, who resigned as Harvard president in 2006 amidst rumours of refusal to testify in an internal investigation of financial fraud. Shortly thereafter the D.E. Shaw hedge fund hired Summers with Rubin’s recommendation and paid Summers $5.2 million for approximately 50 working days.
Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel trod a similar career path perhaps more quickly because of superior Jewish Zionist credentials resulting from an Irgunist father and civilian IDF service during Iraq War I.
Boutique investment bank Wasserstein Perella, whose founder Bruce Wasserstein is heavily involved in Zionist politics, hired Emanuel in 1999 and paid him $16 million for two years of work, despite his having zero background in economics or finance.
Now this corrupt network is pushing through Congress another huge gift for their friends: the Summers-Geithner Plan, which enables banks to make their own valuation of toxic assets and then buy them with taxpayer money without restoring the lost liquidity.
Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times, “In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities.”
Dean Baker of Truthout points out: “Some hedge and equity fund managers could make hundreds of millions or even billions off the Geithner plan.” This Plan looks like a premeditated attempt to loot and destroy the US financial system.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on the Middle East affairs and US politics
Causing $64 trillion of liquidity to vanish from the world financial system and then manipulating the US government to reward the perpetrators with bailout money requires the presence of the “right people” in government, academia, and finance industries.
In The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein argues that Milton Friedman or Chicago School influenced policy makers routinely used catastrophes to facilitate rewriting of national economic rules to benefit a select subset of the world’s hyperwealthy.
President Obama, whose economic background is all Chicago School, brought the Friedmanites including National Economic Council Director Larry Summers back into government.
Summers came under recent public scrutiny because 2008 White House financial disclosure reports reveal he collected favours from the very financial institutions that received huge taxpayer bailouts. “The document provided for Summers, who serves as one of the president’s closest confidants, underscores just how close some of these officials are to the industry over which they now have oversight,” writes Sam Stein in the Huffington Post.
J.P. Morgan Chase, which received $25 billion in government bailout funds, had paid Summers $67,500 for a single speaking engagement. Citigroup, which received $50 billion in “emergency” taxpayer aid, had paid Summers $99,000. Goldman Sachs, which received a $12 billion bailout, had paid Summers $202,500.
Glenn Greenwald of Salon explains that people like Summers and friends “shuffle back and forth from the public to the private sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with their GOP counterparts in this endless public/private sector looting.”
During the Clinton administration, as Secretaries of the Treasury, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers deregulated derivative trading. After leaving government service, Rubin became a Citigroup director and used deregulation to ruin that Bank by recommending investments in derivatives like CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations). For eight years of service Rubin received approximately $126 million in cash and stock.
Investors from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and UAE were effectively swindled out of billions as Citigroup value crashed because of the CDO meltdown during the Bush administration. Larry Summers became president of Harvard University in 2001. Rubin was Summers’ main booster at the Harvard Corporation, which chooses the president.
Summer’s Harvard presidency erupted into scandal when the US government accused Summers’ associate, economics professor Andrei Shleifer of financial improprieties during work on a Harvard USAID grant to create a Russian stock market. The government suspected Shleifer’s wife Nancy Zimmerman of insider stock trading.
Because Shleifer put Harvard in breach of Federal regulations regarding grant money, Harvard had to pay $27 million to the US government while Summers protected Shleifer and his job. Additional questions arose over the management of the Harvard endowment, employee compensation, and suspected middle market restraint of trade involving university real estate acquisitions.
During this turbulent period in his career, Summers worked hard to improve his Jewish credentials. He badmouthed anti-Israel divestment activists on campus but supported Darfur-related divestment.. He dumped his Christian wife Victoria Perry for Holocaust Literature professor Elisa New, a close friend of Jewish Studies professor Ruth Wisse, whose husband is chairman of board of directors of CAMERA, a professional Israel advocacy organisation.
In a disastrous blow to Harvard’s academic stature, Summers rejected former UAE president Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan’s $2 million donation for an Islamic Studies chair at the Harvard Divinity School under pressure from Rachel Fish of the David Project, which is another Israel advocacy group with connections to CAMERA.
The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences twice voted “no confidence” in Summers, who resigned as Harvard president in 2006 amidst rumours of refusal to testify in an internal investigation of financial fraud. Shortly thereafter the D.E. Shaw hedge fund hired Summers with Rubin’s recommendation and paid Summers $5.2 million for approximately 50 working days.
Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel trod a similar career path perhaps more quickly because of superior Jewish Zionist credentials resulting from an Irgunist father and civilian IDF service during Iraq War I.
Boutique investment bank Wasserstein Perella, whose founder Bruce Wasserstein is heavily involved in Zionist politics, hired Emanuel in 1999 and paid him $16 million for two years of work, despite his having zero background in economics or finance.
Now this corrupt network is pushing through Congress another huge gift for their friends: the Summers-Geithner Plan, which enables banks to make their own valuation of toxic assets and then buy them with taxpayer money without restoring the lost liquidity.
Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times, “In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities.”
Dean Baker of Truthout points out: “Some hedge and equity fund managers could make hundreds of millions or even billions off the Geithner plan.” This Plan looks like a premeditated attempt to loot and destroy the US financial system.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on the Middle East affairs and US politics
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Why Arabs are Backing Sudan's Bashir
10 April 2009
Khaleej Times
Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir, despite being indicted on March 4, 2009 on seven counts of war crimes by the International Criminal Court, was given a “hero’s welcome” by the Arab League Summit hosted by Qatar last week. The 22 nations warmly supported Al Bashir with a resolution opposing the dubious ICC arrest warrant.
Bashir called the ICC an “undemocratic institution that ... applied double standards, targeted the weak and gave a blind eye to the criminals.”
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, also present at the summit, likewise objected to the ICC. “Why do they not order the capture of Bush? Why not order the arrest of the president of Israel?”
“If anything happened to Omar Al Bashir and Sudan ended up in chaos, the whole of Africa will sink into chaos,” warned Shaikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Amir of Qatar.
Amr Moussa, the Arab League Secretary-General, said that the arrest warrant was aimed “at undermining the unity and stability of Sudan.”
In response to the arrest warrant, which was issued at behest of “Save Darfur,” an activist coalition mobilised by pro-Israel organisations committed to pressuring the US administration to treat Sudan like Iraq, Al Bashir evicted 13 western NGOs from his country.
Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report comments, “Any government in the world that believes it has been targeted for regime change by the United States and its allies would be foolish to allow western-based nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to operate freely in its territory.”
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “Almost the entire Arab and African world supports Sudan against the ICC, arguing it is a biased and political tool that only targets Africans and infringes sovereignty.”
“The allegations at the ICC have nothing to do with reality, and we will use our friends in the United Nations to stop them,” says Abdel Malik Al Naiem, spokesman for the Sudanese Embassy in Cairo.
“In one year we will Sudanise all the aid on the ground and we can fill the gap in food distribution within one year because the Sudanese Red Crescent already distributes 45 per cent of the food in Darfur,” Al Bashir promised during a recent visit to Saudi Arabia.
China and Russia back the central government in Khartoum and support local peace agreements between Sudan’s warring tribes while the US, Britain, Israel and France materially support insurgent militias and promote increased foreign intervention with massive, internationally coordinated propaganda. Michel Massih, Al Bashir’s leading attorney points out, “I have never heard in my legal career of a chief prosecutor that launches media campaigns against a defendant, regardless of the nature of the charges.”
Columbia Professor Mahmood Mamdani, whose new book ‘Saviours and Survivors’ just came out, says he began to look at the issue of Darfur in 2003. He was struck by the rapid globalisation and the fact-indifference of the Save Darfur movement, which consistently misrepresented the facts in a media blitz.
Mamdani points out in a recent IslamOnline interview with Ismail Ikashkash: “The Save Darfur movement does not educate the people… about what issues drive the conflict. So they know nothing about the politics of Darfur, the history of Darfur, the history of the conflict. All they know is that … Darfur is a place where ‘evil lives.’”
In his book, Professor Mamdani describes in detail how the Save Darfur Coalition presented itself primarily as an inter-religious coalition promoting Islamophobia by implicitly creating a division of responsibility among faiths:
“The Christian faith packets were the most explicit: They spoke of ‘divine empowerment’ and ‘the burden to save’…The Jewish faith packets emphasized the special moral responsibility of Jews as ‘quintessential victims’ to identify genocide whenever it occurs…Muslims were asked to fight oppressors in their midst.”
Save Darfur board chairwoman Gloria White-Hammond, an African-American Christian minister in Boston who has been groomed to promote Zionist politics by Israel advocacy group “The David Project,” met with President Obama and his Sudan envoy General Scott Gration, before their recent trip to Sudan. She and Save Darfur president Jerry Fowler pressured Obama to revive Sudan’s internal conflicts and to threaten Khartoum with further international isolation.
America imposed economic sanctions on Sudan in 1997, but peace in Sudan requires foreign investment and political reform. Sudan has the largest underground freshwater lake in all of Africa. With some technology, Sudan could become the Breadbasket of Africa. Bush made it illegal for American-allied businesses to invest in life-saving infrastructure, and even threatened a delegation of African-American businesspeople with criminal prosecution for discussing investment ideas with President Al Bashir.
President Obama will have to choose between continuing Bush’s policies, which leave millions of Sudanese civilians in mortal jeopardy, and which have earned America international scorn, and reconciling with an international community whose support for the people of Africa is destined to grow.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on the Middle Eastern affairs
Khaleej Times
Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir, despite being indicted on March 4, 2009 on seven counts of war crimes by the International Criminal Court, was given a “hero’s welcome” by the Arab League Summit hosted by Qatar last week. The 22 nations warmly supported Al Bashir with a resolution opposing the dubious ICC arrest warrant.
Bashir called the ICC an “undemocratic institution that ... applied double standards, targeted the weak and gave a blind eye to the criminals.”
Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, also present at the summit, likewise objected to the ICC. “Why do they not order the capture of Bush? Why not order the arrest of the president of Israel?”
“If anything happened to Omar Al Bashir and Sudan ended up in chaos, the whole of Africa will sink into chaos,” warned Shaikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the Amir of Qatar.
Amr Moussa, the Arab League Secretary-General, said that the arrest warrant was aimed “at undermining the unity and stability of Sudan.”
In response to the arrest warrant, which was issued at behest of “Save Darfur,” an activist coalition mobilised by pro-Israel organisations committed to pressuring the US administration to treat Sudan like Iraq, Al Bashir evicted 13 western NGOs from his country.
Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report comments, “Any government in the world that believes it has been targeted for regime change by the United States and its allies would be foolish to allow western-based nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to operate freely in its territory.”
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “Almost the entire Arab and African world supports Sudan against the ICC, arguing it is a biased and political tool that only targets Africans and infringes sovereignty.”
“The allegations at the ICC have nothing to do with reality, and we will use our friends in the United Nations to stop them,” says Abdel Malik Al Naiem, spokesman for the Sudanese Embassy in Cairo.
“In one year we will Sudanise all the aid on the ground and we can fill the gap in food distribution within one year because the Sudanese Red Crescent already distributes 45 per cent of the food in Darfur,” Al Bashir promised during a recent visit to Saudi Arabia.
China and Russia back the central government in Khartoum and support local peace agreements between Sudan’s warring tribes while the US, Britain, Israel and France materially support insurgent militias and promote increased foreign intervention with massive, internationally coordinated propaganda. Michel Massih, Al Bashir’s leading attorney points out, “I have never heard in my legal career of a chief prosecutor that launches media campaigns against a defendant, regardless of the nature of the charges.”
Columbia Professor Mahmood Mamdani, whose new book ‘Saviours and Survivors’ just came out, says he began to look at the issue of Darfur in 2003. He was struck by the rapid globalisation and the fact-indifference of the Save Darfur movement, which consistently misrepresented the facts in a media blitz.
Mamdani points out in a recent IslamOnline interview with Ismail Ikashkash: “The Save Darfur movement does not educate the people… about what issues drive the conflict. So they know nothing about the politics of Darfur, the history of Darfur, the history of the conflict. All they know is that … Darfur is a place where ‘evil lives.’”
In his book, Professor Mamdani describes in detail how the Save Darfur Coalition presented itself primarily as an inter-religious coalition promoting Islamophobia by implicitly creating a division of responsibility among faiths:
“The Christian faith packets were the most explicit: They spoke of ‘divine empowerment’ and ‘the burden to save’…The Jewish faith packets emphasized the special moral responsibility of Jews as ‘quintessential victims’ to identify genocide whenever it occurs…Muslims were asked to fight oppressors in their midst.”
Save Darfur board chairwoman Gloria White-Hammond, an African-American Christian minister in Boston who has been groomed to promote Zionist politics by Israel advocacy group “The David Project,” met with President Obama and his Sudan envoy General Scott Gration, before their recent trip to Sudan. She and Save Darfur president Jerry Fowler pressured Obama to revive Sudan’s internal conflicts and to threaten Khartoum with further international isolation.
America imposed economic sanctions on Sudan in 1997, but peace in Sudan requires foreign investment and political reform. Sudan has the largest underground freshwater lake in all of Africa. With some technology, Sudan could become the Breadbasket of Africa. Bush made it illegal for American-allied businesses to invest in life-saving infrastructure, and even threatened a delegation of African-American businesspeople with criminal prosecution for discussing investment ideas with President Al Bashir.
President Obama will have to choose between continuing Bush’s policies, which leave millions of Sudanese civilians in mortal jeopardy, and which have earned America international scorn, and reconciling with an international community whose support for the people of Africa is destined to grow.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based writer on the Middle Eastern affairs
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
The Lobby's Role in America
It finally seems acceptable, even within polite circles, to discuss the role of the Israeli Lobby on US foreign policy. AIPAC’s recent success in deposing the almost National Security Chief Chas Freeman stimulated much free thought worldwide.
Freeman made it clear that he blamed certain “unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country whose aim is to prevent any other view other than its own from being aired.”
Freeman further stated, “The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonour and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth.”
John Mearsheimer, in a recent article published in the London Review of Books, speculates that the reason for the slander campaign against Freeman lies in a past statement from 2005:
“As long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected.”
Most Americans would prefer to keep their lights on than to personally finance Israel’s existence. We know about American Jews’ 79 per cent support for Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Yet why do Christian Americans not simply say, “We don’t want to pay for this”?
Joachim Martillo of Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel observes, “No comparable transnational political network has ever existed that has so successfully created a web of control to silence, to frame, to manage, and to dominate political discussion and
discourse at the local, national and
international level.”
The survival of Israel depends on squeezing Americans to cover the operations loss of the State of Israel even when the US economy is suffering from a major financial catastrophe. Israel advocates not only dog national and international organisations but in fact, their true power is revealed in their total control of local political discussions.
Ernesto Cienfuegos of La Voz de Aztlan reported that “the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles published a hateful and extremely biased article against one of the few radio programmes that speak on behalf of Chicanos in Southern California. The aim of these attacks is to silence any criticism of Israel and of the American Jewish Lobby, which now dictates many of the US government’s domestic and international policies.”
The actions of local Jewish organisations from one city to another are strikingly similar. For example, in Seattle, Washington and Somerville, Massachusetts, Jews aggressively harassed citizens who were collecting signatures for ballot questions, which asked the voters whether or not they would like to use City funds to pay for Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
In 1776, Americans fought the Revolutionary War against taxation without representation but the crimes of the British Empire against the American colonies do not even come close to
the crimes of Israel. So why does nobody speak up?In truth, many brave and thoughtful individuals across the country do speak up but they are frustrated in their attempts to get people to care about this important moral issue by a coordinated attempt to derail honest discussion by organisations such as the World Union of Jewish Students, which issued a Hasbarah Handbook for students.The handbook has a section called “How to score points while avoiding debate” which stresses that “point scoring is a method of communication that prioritises making certain points favourable to the speaker, and attacking opponents of the speaker by trying to undermine their positions.”
This method was successfully employed in Atlanta, Georgia at Emory University by a group called Emory Students for Israel, who verbally harassed the school’s pro-Palestine group, and defaced their announcement.
Emory University received dozens of letters denouncing the hate speech. Mosques, business owners, human rights advocates, and concerned residents of the area called upon the Emory Administration to take a firm stance against racism and discrimination. Although the police report implicated the president of Emory Students for Israel as well as two other members, the perpetrators have neither received a visit from the police nor been reprimanded by the university. This treatment contrasts sharply with the situation faced by pro-Palestine activists. At Harvard University, an activist who interrupted an Israeli Defense Force Commander during a lecture was reported to the police and threatened with imprisonment. The “free speech” double standard is more than obvious. Why won’t Emory do the right thing?
It might be useful to press the point that the Institute for the Study of Modern Israel at Emory may violate the university’s tax exempt status as it discriminates against non-Zionist students and produces propaganda instead of academic scholarship.
Karin Friedemann is a Boston-based
writer on Jewish Affairs in US politics
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Talking to Jews (or Not)
The very sweet Prof. Kevin MacDonald thoroughly analyzes my last blog entry:
Talking with Jews (or not)
Kevin MacDonald
A topic that is not discussed enough is the screaming, in-your-face, hostile aggression that people must withstand when they dare to trample on Jewish sensibilities. We are not talking about the sophisticated rationalization one sees in the op-ed pages of the mainstream media, or even the smear techniques of organizations like the ADL or the SPLC. We are talking about interpersonal aggression. There is something absolutely primal about it.
Now comes a refreshingly frank blog post by Karin Friedemann, an ethnically Jewish anti-Zionist. She notes the “violent intolerance” that defenders of Israel show towards people with different opinions.
American Jews are actually being trained since childhood to interact with non-Jews in a deceitful and arrogant manner, in coordination with each other, to emotionally destroy Gentiles and Israel critics in addition to wrecking their careers and interfering with their social relationships. This is actually deliberate, wicked, planned behavior motivated by a narcissistic self-righteous fury….
The problem is that Gentiles are taught through emotional pressure and violence via the media and the school system to be very sensitive to Jewish suffering so when a Zionist becomes outraged at them for challenging their world view, the Gentile really has to fight against his own inner self in a huge battle against his "inner Jew" making him feel inadequate and intimidated. But the Jew doesn’t care how much he or she hurts others. Jews only care about what's good for the Jews. …
I once reduced a 50 year old man to hysterical sobbing tears because I told him gently and lovingly that Jews were not that unique. I just told him the Jews, like everyone else, have had good times and bad times. Times when they were slaughtered and other times when they slaughtered others. Just like everyone else. Guess what he did next. He emotionally abused me in an insulting way and then cut off all further communication. Jewish behavior is so predictable that it's truly scary. …
If you mention cutting off the money or if you mention the possible compromise of living with Palestinians as equals in one state they become very angry and start using bullying tactics, unless they have some reason to fear you, in which case they shun you and complain about you to the authorities, try to get you arrested or try and destroy your career or social status through character assassination. …
Zionists all believe in the myth of "1000 years of Jewish suffering" and feel that the world owes them compensation for their ancestors' "unique" suffering. It's a criminally insane viewpoint. They cope with the contradictions between their belief that they are the good guys and what Jews are actually doing to their neighbors, both in the Middle East and in the US, by developing mental health issues. Most Zionists are functional schizophrenics.
My take:
· These tactics are not restricted to critics of Zionism. As one who has experienced a barrage of hostile email from my faculty colleagues, I can certainly attest to this. One quickly notices that assertions of the legitimacy of white identity and interests will also result in a barrage of hostility. This despite the fact that support for racial Zionism is strong throughout the entire Jewish political spectrum (see below). A correspondent sent me the following recently:
I have encountered many liberal, politically correct Jews who react vociferously (almost violently) to the most innocuous comments about any topic related to Israel or Jews. One Jew upon my mentioning that my wife and I had been to Russia spent several minutes virtually frothing at the mouth about Russians. Another upon hearing me say I was sympathetic to the problems of the Palestinians demanded to know who I was and how dare I say such a thing. Often zero tolerance for any difference in opinion.
· The media constantly present images of Jewish suffering—most recently the endless glut of Holocaust movies. But the media ignore instances, such as the early decades of the USSR and now in Greater Israel, where Jews have inflicted horrible suffering. Right now I am reading E. Michael Jones’ The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Effect on History. It is striking to read his account of Jewish violence against non-Jews in the ancient world, particularly the persecution of Christians whenever Jews had the power to do so. Long before Christians had any influence on Roman policy, Christians’ complaints about Jews were not stereotypes based on historical memory but resulted from direct experience with Jews: “Origen understood that Jewish calumny helped to cause Christian persecution, and that Jewish hatred was a fact of life for the Christians, continuing unabated after the repeated defeats of Messianic politics” (i.e., the defeats of Jewish rebels at the hands of the Romans in 70 and 135 ad) (p. 69). This is the basis of my concern on what will happen to whites when Jews become part of a hostile elite in white-minority America.
· Non-Jews absorb these media images and as a result feel inadequate, emotionally intimidated. Eventually they identify with the aggressor, much like a browbeaten hostage or, as Friedemann suggests, an abused spouse. Or they maintain their friendships but studiously avoid talking about anything related to Israel. Non-Jews do the bidding of their “inner Jew” because they have internalized images of Jewish suffering. They therefore aid and abet Jewish brutality and aggression.
· Non-Jews who persist in criticizing the organized Jewish community are threatened with loss of livelihood and social ostracism. As I noted in a previous article the organized Jewish community does not believe in free speech. It is important to keep in mind that when Jews were dominant in the first decades of the Soviet Union, the government controlled the media, anti-Semitism was outlawed, and there was mass murder of Christians and the destruction of Christian churches and religious institutions.
As Friedemann notes, the situation is nothing less than a sign of serious mental health issues for the mainstream Jewish community: “Most Zionists are functional schizophrenics.”
I think this is what happens when people who deal with Jewish issues finally realize that there is no hope for dialogue and begin to think of what to do next. Honest people finally realize that when it comes to critical issues like Israel and multicultural America, the divisions among Jews are an illusion. (Friedemann herself has renounced her Jewish identity.) As Friedemann’s husband, Joachim Martillo, notes, “Jews, who want to be decent human beings, have no choice but to renounce being Jewish and serve the anti-Zionist struggle (right now).”
Exhibit A for this right now is the murderous Israeli invasion of Gaza. We know (see, for example, John Mearsheimer’s article in The American Conservative) that this invasion occurred after a prolonged period when Israel restricted supplies into Gaza and then attacked tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. We know that the invasion was designed to “to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future.”
The tone of Mearsheimer’s article suggests a dramatic shift in attitude where the usual inhibitions on public discourse are finally beginning to fall, even for a respected academic:
There is … little chance that people around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in Gaza. … [D]iscourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims.
The gloves are coming off. This is what happens when smart and honest people who work hard to get the scholarship right are nevertheless smeared as anti-Semites guilty of the vilest misdeeds. Not surprisingly, Abe Foxman — a premier defender of the racial Zionist status quo in Israel — devoted an entire book to smearing Mearsheimer and Walt. Quite simply, there is no point to talking to such people or taking seriously what they say about us.
We know that the government of Israel is firmly in the hands of the racial Zionists — followers of Vladimir Jabotinsky and his view of the racial distinctiveness and superiority of the Jewish people. Indeed, the only question in the Israeli election is which brand of racial Zionism will form the next government. One knows that racial Zionism has completely won the day in Israel when Kadima — the party of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and the Gaza invasion — is now described by Benjamin Netanyahu as the party of the left. (The LA Times dutifully calls it “centrist” but, as Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery writes, Livni “cries to high heaven against any dialogue with Hamas. She objects to a mutually agreed cease-fire. She tries to compete with Netanyahu and [Avignor] Liberman with unbridled nationalist messages.”) Indeed, Netanyahu’s only worry is that the openly racist Liberman — a disciple of the notorious Meir Kehane — will take away too many votes from Likud.
The situation is analogous to a US election where Pat Buchanan is the candidate of the far left. (I can dream.)
Avnery analogizes the election to a joke where a sergeant tells his men: “I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you are going to change your dirty socks. The bad news is that you are going to exchange them among yourselves.”
Once again we see at work the general principle that within the Jewish community, the most extreme elements carry the day and pull the rest of the Jewish community with them. As I noted in "Zionism and the Internal Dynamics of Judaism," "over time, the more militant, expansionist Zionists (the Jabotinskyists, the Likud Party, fundamentalists, and West Bank settlers) have won the day and have continued to push for territorial expansion within Israel. This has led to conflicts with Palestinians and a widespread belief among Jews that Israel itself is threatened. The result has been a heightened group consciousness among Jews and ultimately support for Zionist extremism among the entire organized American Jewish community."
The fanatics keep pushing the envelop, forcing other Jews to either go along with their agenda or cease being part of the Jewish community. Ominously, if elected, Netanyahu promises that a top priority will be "harnessing the U.S. administration to stop the threat" of Iran's nuclear program.
Incidentally, E. Michael Jones (The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Effect on History, p. 42ff) has expanded this argument to the ancient world. He shows how the Jewish community was pulled in the direction of fanaticism by the Zealots who expelled the followers of Jesus from the synagogue and adopted a disastrous path of revolution against Rome, leading ultimately to the defeats of 70 and 135 a.d.
A good example of the schizophrenia described by Friedemann comes from the fact that around 80% of American Jews voted for Obama but around the same percentage blames Hamas for the escalation of violence and believes that the Israeli response was “appropriate.” These results of the poll on the Gaza invasion were proudly announced by Abraham Foxman of the ADL, an organization that is one of the principal forces in promoting a post-European America. The Jewish left is a pillar of multi-cultural America but strongly supports racial Zionism in Israel.
This same schizophrenia was on display at a recent presentation at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles by Chris Hedges and Mark Potok — he of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The program dealt with the usual bogey-men of the organized Jewish community: Christian fundamentalists, skinheads, David Duke, and (I am gratified to report) The Occidental Quarterly. In a comment on the alliance between Christian conservatives and Zionists, an audience member mentioned (to stifled applause) that “There are Jewish fascists.” But the moderator, Ian Masters, saved the day when he stated that “the vast majority of American Jews are secular and liberal” — a comment that brought much applause, presumably because it reassured the many Jews in the audience that they weren’t like THOSE Jews. For his part, Potok, that stalwart warrior against white America, expressed his support for what he sees as a beleaguered Israel on the verge of apocalypse at the hands of the Arabs. Schizophrenia indeed.
The politicians who are running Israel are, if anything, more racialist and nationalist than anything even remotely on the horizon in American or European politics. As Avnery notes:
In every other country, Liberman’s program would be called fascist, without quotation marks. Nowhere in the Western world is there a large party that would dare to advance such a demand [to annul the citizenship of Arabs]. The neo-fascists in Switzerland and Holland want to expel foreigners, not to annul the citizenship of the native-born. …
When Joerg Haider was taken into the Austrian cabinet, Israel recalled its ambassador from Vienna in protest. But compared to Liberman, Haider was a raving liberal, and so is Jean-Marie le Pen. Now Netanyahu has announced that Liberman will be “an important minister” in his government, Livni has hinted that he will be in her government, too, and Barak has not excluded that possibility.
The optimistic version says that Liberman will prove to be a passing curiosity. … There is also a pessimistic version: Fascism has become a serious player in the Israeli public domain. The three main parties have now legitimized it. This phenomenon must be stopped before it is too late.
So I have a suggestion for the Foxmans, the Potoks, the neoconservatives, and the secular Jewish liberals of the world: If you want to fight racism and ethnic nationalism, start in your own backyard. And my suggestion for the rest of us is to get rid of what Friedemann calls the “inner Jew.” I know it’s hard to do. But once you tune out the screaming hostility (and assuming you don’t fear losing your job), it’s easy. Just don’t expect a pleasant or rational conversation.
Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.
Permanent URL:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-talk.html
Talking with Jews (or not)
Kevin MacDonald
A topic that is not discussed enough is the screaming, in-your-face, hostile aggression that people must withstand when they dare to trample on Jewish sensibilities. We are not talking about the sophisticated rationalization one sees in the op-ed pages of the mainstream media, or even the smear techniques of organizations like the ADL or the SPLC. We are talking about interpersonal aggression. There is something absolutely primal about it.
Now comes a refreshingly frank blog post by Karin Friedemann, an ethnically Jewish anti-Zionist. She notes the “violent intolerance” that defenders of Israel show towards people with different opinions.
American Jews are actually being trained since childhood to interact with non-Jews in a deceitful and arrogant manner, in coordination with each other, to emotionally destroy Gentiles and Israel critics in addition to wrecking their careers and interfering with their social relationships. This is actually deliberate, wicked, planned behavior motivated by a narcissistic self-righteous fury….
The problem is that Gentiles are taught through emotional pressure and violence via the media and the school system to be very sensitive to Jewish suffering so when a Zionist becomes outraged at them for challenging their world view, the Gentile really has to fight against his own inner self in a huge battle against his "inner Jew" making him feel inadequate and intimidated. But the Jew doesn’t care how much he or she hurts others. Jews only care about what's good for the Jews. …
I once reduced a 50 year old man to hysterical sobbing tears because I told him gently and lovingly that Jews were not that unique. I just told him the Jews, like everyone else, have had good times and bad times. Times when they were slaughtered and other times when they slaughtered others. Just like everyone else. Guess what he did next. He emotionally abused me in an insulting way and then cut off all further communication. Jewish behavior is so predictable that it's truly scary. …
If you mention cutting off the money or if you mention the possible compromise of living with Palestinians as equals in one state they become very angry and start using bullying tactics, unless they have some reason to fear you, in which case they shun you and complain about you to the authorities, try to get you arrested or try and destroy your career or social status through character assassination. …
Zionists all believe in the myth of "1000 years of Jewish suffering" and feel that the world owes them compensation for their ancestors' "unique" suffering. It's a criminally insane viewpoint. They cope with the contradictions between their belief that they are the good guys and what Jews are actually doing to their neighbors, both in the Middle East and in the US, by developing mental health issues. Most Zionists are functional schizophrenics.
My take:
· These tactics are not restricted to critics of Zionism. As one who has experienced a barrage of hostile email from my faculty colleagues, I can certainly attest to this. One quickly notices that assertions of the legitimacy of white identity and interests will also result in a barrage of hostility. This despite the fact that support for racial Zionism is strong throughout the entire Jewish political spectrum (see below). A correspondent sent me the following recently:
I have encountered many liberal, politically correct Jews who react vociferously (almost violently) to the most innocuous comments about any topic related to Israel or Jews. One Jew upon my mentioning that my wife and I had been to Russia spent several minutes virtually frothing at the mouth about Russians. Another upon hearing me say I was sympathetic to the problems of the Palestinians demanded to know who I was and how dare I say such a thing. Often zero tolerance for any difference in opinion.
· The media constantly present images of Jewish suffering—most recently the endless glut of Holocaust movies. But the media ignore instances, such as the early decades of the USSR and now in Greater Israel, where Jews have inflicted horrible suffering. Right now I am reading E. Michael Jones’ The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Effect on History. It is striking to read his account of Jewish violence against non-Jews in the ancient world, particularly the persecution of Christians whenever Jews had the power to do so. Long before Christians had any influence on Roman policy, Christians’ complaints about Jews were not stereotypes based on historical memory but resulted from direct experience with Jews: “Origen understood that Jewish calumny helped to cause Christian persecution, and that Jewish hatred was a fact of life for the Christians, continuing unabated after the repeated defeats of Messianic politics” (i.e., the defeats of Jewish rebels at the hands of the Romans in 70 and 135 ad) (p. 69). This is the basis of my concern on what will happen to whites when Jews become part of a hostile elite in white-minority America.
· Non-Jews absorb these media images and as a result feel inadequate, emotionally intimidated. Eventually they identify with the aggressor, much like a browbeaten hostage or, as Friedemann suggests, an abused spouse. Or they maintain their friendships but studiously avoid talking about anything related to Israel. Non-Jews do the bidding of their “inner Jew” because they have internalized images of Jewish suffering. They therefore aid and abet Jewish brutality and aggression.
· Non-Jews who persist in criticizing the organized Jewish community are threatened with loss of livelihood and social ostracism. As I noted in a previous article the organized Jewish community does not believe in free speech. It is important to keep in mind that when Jews were dominant in the first decades of the Soviet Union, the government controlled the media, anti-Semitism was outlawed, and there was mass murder of Christians and the destruction of Christian churches and religious institutions.
As Friedemann notes, the situation is nothing less than a sign of serious mental health issues for the mainstream Jewish community: “Most Zionists are functional schizophrenics.”
I think this is what happens when people who deal with Jewish issues finally realize that there is no hope for dialogue and begin to think of what to do next. Honest people finally realize that when it comes to critical issues like Israel and multicultural America, the divisions among Jews are an illusion. (Friedemann herself has renounced her Jewish identity.) As Friedemann’s husband, Joachim Martillo, notes, “Jews, who want to be decent human beings, have no choice but to renounce being Jewish and serve the anti-Zionist struggle (right now).”
Exhibit A for this right now is the murderous Israeli invasion of Gaza. We know (see, for example, John Mearsheimer’s article in The American Conservative) that this invasion occurred after a prolonged period when Israel restricted supplies into Gaza and then attacked tunnels between Gaza and Egypt. We know that the invasion was designed to “to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future.”
The tone of Mearsheimer’s article suggests a dramatic shift in attitude where the usual inhibitions on public discourse are finally beginning to fall, even for a respected academic:
There is … little chance that people around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in Gaza. … [D]iscourse about this longstanding conflict has undergone a sea change in the West in recent years, and many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims.
The gloves are coming off. This is what happens when smart and honest people who work hard to get the scholarship right are nevertheless smeared as anti-Semites guilty of the vilest misdeeds. Not surprisingly, Abe Foxman — a premier defender of the racial Zionist status quo in Israel — devoted an entire book to smearing Mearsheimer and Walt. Quite simply, there is no point to talking to such people or taking seriously what they say about us.
We know that the government of Israel is firmly in the hands of the racial Zionists — followers of Vladimir Jabotinsky and his view of the racial distinctiveness and superiority of the Jewish people. Indeed, the only question in the Israeli election is which brand of racial Zionism will form the next government. One knows that racial Zionism has completely won the day in Israel when Kadima — the party of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and the Gaza invasion — is now described by Benjamin Netanyahu as the party of the left. (The LA Times dutifully calls it “centrist” but, as Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery writes, Livni “cries to high heaven against any dialogue with Hamas. She objects to a mutually agreed cease-fire. She tries to compete with Netanyahu and [Avignor] Liberman with unbridled nationalist messages.”) Indeed, Netanyahu’s only worry is that the openly racist Liberman — a disciple of the notorious Meir Kehane — will take away too many votes from Likud.
The situation is analogous to a US election where Pat Buchanan is the candidate of the far left. (I can dream.)
Avnery analogizes the election to a joke where a sergeant tells his men: “I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you are going to change your dirty socks. The bad news is that you are going to exchange them among yourselves.”
Once again we see at work the general principle that within the Jewish community, the most extreme elements carry the day and pull the rest of the Jewish community with them. As I noted in "Zionism and the Internal Dynamics of Judaism," "over time, the more militant, expansionist Zionists (the Jabotinskyists, the Likud Party, fundamentalists, and West Bank settlers) have won the day and have continued to push for territorial expansion within Israel. This has led to conflicts with Palestinians and a widespread belief among Jews that Israel itself is threatened. The result has been a heightened group consciousness among Jews and ultimately support for Zionist extremism among the entire organized American Jewish community."
The fanatics keep pushing the envelop, forcing other Jews to either go along with their agenda or cease being part of the Jewish community. Ominously, if elected, Netanyahu promises that a top priority will be "harnessing the U.S. administration to stop the threat" of Iran's nuclear program.
Incidentally, E. Michael Jones (The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Effect on History, p. 42ff) has expanded this argument to the ancient world. He shows how the Jewish community was pulled in the direction of fanaticism by the Zealots who expelled the followers of Jesus from the synagogue and adopted a disastrous path of revolution against Rome, leading ultimately to the defeats of 70 and 135 a.d.
A good example of the schizophrenia described by Friedemann comes from the fact that around 80% of American Jews voted for Obama but around the same percentage blames Hamas for the escalation of violence and believes that the Israeli response was “appropriate.” These results of the poll on the Gaza invasion were proudly announced by Abraham Foxman of the ADL, an organization that is one of the principal forces in promoting a post-European America. The Jewish left is a pillar of multi-cultural America but strongly supports racial Zionism in Israel.
This same schizophrenia was on display at a recent presentation at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles by Chris Hedges and Mark Potok — he of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The program dealt with the usual bogey-men of the organized Jewish community: Christian fundamentalists, skinheads, David Duke, and (I am gratified to report) The Occidental Quarterly. In a comment on the alliance between Christian conservatives and Zionists, an audience member mentioned (to stifled applause) that “There are Jewish fascists.” But the moderator, Ian Masters, saved the day when he stated that “the vast majority of American Jews are secular and liberal” — a comment that brought much applause, presumably because it reassured the many Jews in the audience that they weren’t like THOSE Jews. For his part, Potok, that stalwart warrior against white America, expressed his support for what he sees as a beleaguered Israel on the verge of apocalypse at the hands of the Arabs. Schizophrenia indeed.
The politicians who are running Israel are, if anything, more racialist and nationalist than anything even remotely on the horizon in American or European politics. As Avnery notes:
In every other country, Liberman’s program would be called fascist, without quotation marks. Nowhere in the Western world is there a large party that would dare to advance such a demand [to annul the citizenship of Arabs]. The neo-fascists in Switzerland and Holland want to expel foreigners, not to annul the citizenship of the native-born. …
When Joerg Haider was taken into the Austrian cabinet, Israel recalled its ambassador from Vienna in protest. But compared to Liberman, Haider was a raving liberal, and so is Jean-Marie le Pen. Now Netanyahu has announced that Liberman will be “an important minister” in his government, Livni has hinted that he will be in her government, too, and Barak has not excluded that possibility.
The optimistic version says that Liberman will prove to be a passing curiosity. … There is also a pessimistic version: Fascism has become a serious player in the Israeli public domain. The three main parties have now legitimized it. This phenomenon must be stopped before it is too late.
So I have a suggestion for the Foxmans, the Potoks, the neoconservatives, and the secular Jewish liberals of the world: If you want to fight racism and ethnic nationalism, start in your own backyard. And my suggestion for the rest of us is to get rid of what Friedemann calls the “inner Jew.” I know it’s hard to do. But once you tune out the screaming hostility (and assuming you don’t fear losing your job), it’s easy. Just don’t expect a pleasant or rational conversation.
Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.
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