Justin Podur

Israel/Palestine

Yitzhak Laor wrote this article during the recent re-destruction of Rafah for the London Review of Books (published May 20). Laor is a novelist and poet who lives in Tel Aviv. I really like the last paragraph:

Hebron is hidden. Rafah is entirely cut off. The Israeli army didn’t kill the children in Rafah intentionally, it will be said. Who will remind us that for three months now, the army has been killing unarmed Palestinians demonstrating peacefully along the Wall that’s going up in the West Bank?

Israeli families of dead soldiers or dead civilians get a follow-up, even on foreign TV, for they had a future ahead of them before they died. Did the Palestinian children who died in Rafah have any future? No. So they are dead, and it will be over in a few days. Palestinians don’t get a follow-up, not even on foreign TV. Maybe there’ll be a documentary movie, followed by some public discussion about whether to allow the movie to be publicly screened, or whether it’s another sign of ‘the new anti-semitism’. Nothing will be followed up. The Israeli army is secure. It calls itself the Israel Defence Force.

The LRB seems to have published some good stuff lately (It published Paul Farmer’s important article, “Who Removed Aristide“). Laor’s article touches on a very important point about media, I think.

If you look at a site like ‘News Insider’, you realize that a dedicated person (in this case group of people) can learn a tremendous amount from reading the mainstream media. You have to read carefully and critically, you have to have a good memory, be able to compare one set of lies to another, and above all I think you have to know what you’re looking for. That is, you have to understand how the media works, what they are trying to present and what they are trying to obscure. In a way, you already have to know the story before you can interpret what the media provides.

The question is then, if the media provides so much of this information, why are we so misinformed? I spoke at a media conference once, presenting figures and analyses from groups like FAIR on media bias. Someone got up at the end and said: “I read the papers and know everything you said. So maybe the papers aren’t so bad, and you’re trying to make them sound bad because you have an agenda.”

I do have an agenda, it’s true. I have no desire to hide it. But my agenda doesn’t include distorting the facts. In a sense, the gentleman was right: the papers aren’t that bad. One reporter at the conference, from USA Today, said the problem was simply that no one reads. Her paper, the biggest in the country, has a circulation of a few million (in a country of a few hundred milion). The NYT has a circulation of about a million. Those of us who spew out thousands of words on the internet are in some cases trying to reach a subset of those who read.

But whether you read or watch TV or listen to the radio for information, the problem is not usually that things never come up. It is, as Laor identifies in his article, a question of ‘follow-up’. And for follow-up, it has to be the alternative media…

(links should be opening in a new window, thanks to the suggestion of a certain person who maintains fromoccupiedpalestine.org, a very important site in case you haven’t seen it)

Colombia and Venezuela, again

In a state of preoccupation about the recall referendum trap that Venezuela has found itself in, I thought I would check Colombia’s national newspaper, El Tiempo, to see what they are saying about it. El Tiempo is actually a better paper, even on Venezuelan issues, than any of the Venezuelan papers. I saw something that is quite ironic. It seems that yesterday, the very day that the results of the signature drive for the recall referendum came out in Venezuela, the Colombian Congress narrowly passed legislation enabling Colombia’s current president Alvaro Uribe Velez to be re-elected.

So, while the oligarchy of one country conspires to cut the term of a decent president in half, the oligarchy of another conspires to double the term of a most indecent president (see ZNet Colombia Watch for a mountain of articles about Uribe, going back years, and for the most damning piece, see this interview with Javier Giraldo).

When Uribe tried to get his own re-election prepared in a referendum in October 2003, it failed. So he defied the will of the people, defied the constitutional court, defied the constitution itself, and has finally slipped his re-election through the cracks, with no one paying attention.

Imagine if Chavez had tried to pull the same thing? Imagine the appalled notes of concern about democracy and constitutional process and the will of the people, coming from not only the State Department but other equally hypocritical sources?

Imagine, in other words, if Venezuela was ruled by someone like Uribe instead of someone like Chavez?

The frightening thing is that you don’t need to imagine it. If the US and the Venezuelan elite have their way, that’s exactly what you are going to see. And when that happens, you’ll find parts of the ‘left’ supporting it, the kind of ‘left’ that supported the paramilitary killers to take over Haiti and are supporting the ongoing slaughter there by focusing — at a time when Aristide has been driven out, the will of the people torn to shreds — on supposed crimes committed by the very parties (Aristide, Lavalas) who are now being hunted down, hounded, and murdered. You can be sure these people will be back to claim that whatever the US is doing in Venezuela is for the best, and what the ‘left’ in Venezuela really wants.

On abuse

Thanks to the News Insider I saw this story about how Israel is ‘stunned’ by the abuse of Palestinians by its police. An example:

… three [police] confessed to ordering the 17-year-olds into their jeeps and driving them off to a nearby forest, where they were beaten with sticks, punched, had milk poured over them and were forced to kiss the policemen’s boots and chew sand and stones.

This is appalling. But to me, it is only a part of something much bigger and hence, more appalling. None of this ‘abuse’ (don’t say the word ‘torture’, it’s impolite) would take place if Israel wasn’t occupying Palestine. It wouldn’t take place if Israelis, Americans, and the rest of the world were not willing to accept the idea that entire peoples have to be subjugated, humiliated, starved, and killed so that other people can enjoy some notion of ‘security’ (when in fact even that ‘security’ is endangered by the occupation itself). It is similar to the way people were appalled by the photos at Abu Ghraib. Of course what happened there is appalling. But something the world seemed to have understood after WWII, that international aggression was the ultimate crime that made every other crime possible, seems to have been lost here. It is not just that American or Israeli soldiers shouldn’t have tortured Iraqis or Palestinians. It is that American or Israeli soldiers shouldn’t be there at all. It feels odd to even have to say this. This is always a problem in trying to relate things that should be obvious — sometimes obvious things are obvious to everyone. Other times they are not, so they have to be said, even at the risk of saying something that might be obvious.

Other West Asia news. Sharon has dumped some people from his cabinet so he can try to push through what I will continue to call the Gaza starvation plan.

Congo troubles

Rwanda invaded Congo again, it seems — with local backing. In Kinshasa, a protest against the UN and the government for failing to stop the invasion was suppressed, with UN troops firing on protesters and killing at least 2. I tried to write an introductory article on the Congo conflict a few months back to help readers begin to get a handle on one of the major mass murders of the past decade. That piece is damning of the role of Rwanda and Uganda in the Congo, following the credible sources I was able to find. The piece ended with a very precarious peace in place… that is what seems to be breaking down now.

The Venezuela Recall Trap

Looks like yet another country will be going to the polls before the United States, with Venezuela set on the course of a recall referendum for Chavez. The article linked is from venezuelanalysis.com, which is where I would recommend English-speakers go. ZNet Venezuela Watch is good too, there is much overlap.

The whole thing is troubling. Even though Chavez and many Chavistas believe that Chavez could handily win the referendum, the point is not and never has been to let Chavez win. This is a destabilization program, pure and simple. And the climate of a referendum offers innumerable opportunities for destabilization. A quote from the article is a good summary:

“We would win the recall referendum by a wide margin, and that would be an excellent opportunity to re-legitimize the [revolutionary] process,” said a pro-Chavez activist who wishes to remain anonymous after losing a debate during a meeting with other grassroots leaders who rejected the recall. “U.S. imperialism wants the CNE to declare that there were not enough signatures for the recall, so they can say that Chavez prevented the opposition from exercising their democratic rights. It’s a trap to label Chavez as a dictator, invoke the OAS Democratic Charter against Venezuela and isolate us,” he said.

Those who reject the recall, arguing that there was fraud, say that it will be hard to combat fraud during the recall vote. Another Chavez supporter said that “they have huge technological resources, the support of the U.S. government, and all the media at their disposal. We are the majority, but they can win with fraud. They did it now, and they can do it again.”

“They won’t get any more votes than the signatures they collected,” said another Chavez supporter.

Chavez loyalists coincide that winning the recall won’t cause Chavez enemies to stop their efforts to oust him. “We have won 7 electoral processes in five years, how many more do we need to win in order to be seen as legitimate?”, asked a pro Chavez activist during the meeting.

It is a horrible situation to be in: the Venezuelans have no choice but to walk into a trap set for them by the US and the local oligarchy — forces that have nothing but a demonstratedly murderous contempt for the people.

Palestine death toll

Paul de Rooij, writing in Counterpunch, has a good analysis of Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israel. He calculates an average of 2.25 Palestinians killed each day — day in, day out, since 2000. Based on Red Crescent figures. IMEMC did their own body count for May — 137 Palestinians killed.

Elections as punishment

Today I saw in the headlines that Stephen Harper, who might just replace gangster Paul Martin (the ‘gangster’ epithet is based on his behaviour as regards Haiti) as the Canadian Prime Minister, is planning to drop the gun registry and put more cops on the streets. In other words, harmonize Canadian crime policies with those of the United States, which is a model for social cohesion and just plain feelings of safety and well-being on the streets.

This is one aspect of the Canadian elite that I’ve never understood.

Continue reading “Elections as punishment”

USO: the punishment for winning begins

A few days ago I blogged about the end of the oil worker’s strike in Colombia, and how they won an agreement preventing the privatization at some cost to the workers. The pattern after a successful strike or demonstration in Colombia is very predictable: workers, especially union leaders, start getting picked off and assassinated by paramilitaries. That began yesterday with the murder of Fabio Burbano at his home, yesterday night, according to a communique from USO. He was a part-time worker and a union activist.

The State Department Doesn’t Know Where Castano Is

Gonzalo Gallegos, spokesman for the US State Dept. for the Western Hemisphere, said about Castano: “We have not been in contact with that individual. We don’t know where he is, and we don’t know where the information came from.”

The information he’s referring to is the information that Castano was smuggled — by Americans — out of Colombia and into Israel, via Panama. An official denial from the State Department and an official denial from the Israeli Ambassador in Colombia are enough to make a person really suspect that Castano is in Israel.

Continue reading “The State Department Doesn’t Know Where Castano Is”

Colombia’s ELN, Mexico, and the Government

Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group, the ELN (Ejercito de la Liberacion Nacional, or Army of National Liberation) is talking to the government and to the Mexican government about a possible peace negotiation with the Mexican government as guarantor.

If you are wondering how the Mexican governnment, which deploys pretty much the exact same techniques (a US-funded and trained military, paramilitary killers to commit massacres and assassinations to create a refugee problem and destroy the popular base of a guerrilla movement) if on a smaller scale, is supposed to guarantee a peace between Colombian guerrillas and the government, you are not alone.

A little bit about the ELN. The stereotypes about ELN, which have a grain of truth, are: that it at its founding it was more inspired by the Cuban revolution (whereas the FARC is much more a Colombian-based group that organized for self-defense against landowners, private armies, and state violence); that it is more interested in dialogue with the social movements (it tried to spur a major dialogue effort that included social movements years ago); and that it is militarily smaller and weaker than the FARC. Given Uribe’s hard-line stance against the guerrillas, it seems hard to imagine that he would accept a ‘peace’ that isn’t essentially a surrender. Given the history of Colombian guerrillas putting down their arms to get slaughtered, it is hard to imagine the ELN would go for such. So I’m not sure where these dialogues can go.