Category: Palestine

The York University Drama continues

Toronto’s York University’s suspension of student Daniel Freeman-Maloy for his ‘crime of megaphone’ continues to provide comic relief for those who still believe in freedom of speech. The York University student paper provided some amusing graphics, since he was supposed to be their opinions editor, a position he will have difficulty accepting since he’s not allowed to set foot on campus. Graphics and letters of support can be found at the website established for this strange case. Naomi Klein wrote a very nice letter to York University’s Presidnt (most universities have a president, but york university has a presidnt — her email is presidnt@yorku.ca) about it, included below. The letters have actually been overwhelming — and coupled with the legal and political pressure being applied could result in York having to back off.

Below is the letter from Naomi.

Dear President Marsden (presidnt@yorku.ca),

I realize you are receiving many letters and calls about the outrageous summary suspension of respected student journalist and activist Daniel Freeman-Maloy. Let me add a slightly different perspective. As you may recall, my last dealings with your office were when you initiated legal proceedings against me and my publisher on the publication of my book, No Logo. You took exception to a passage that alleged that York University had banned students from protesting against the DuMaurier Tennis Open. You denied this and claimed that the idea that York would ban students from protesting on their own campus badly damaged the good reputation of York of University.

So it is with a particularly keen sense of outrage that I have followed the controversy surrounding Freeman-Maloy’s suspension: you are doing exactly what you then claimed York University would never do, banning students from peacefully expressing their political views on campus. Particularly alarming is the way this has been done: without giving the student the slightest opportunity to plead his case. You would never know that York University was once a hotbed of the campus democratization movement.

There is another reason why I am following this issue closely: the Israeli state is acting with greater and greater brutality and impunity with each passing day. The conflict in the Middle East poses a deep moral challenge to all of us: what are we willing to do when deep injustices are being committed and the world community fails to stop them? Will we watch silently, or will we act in our sphere- our workplace, our school? For many Jews, this moral challenge is particularly wrenching because the escalating attacks on Palestinians are being carried in our name. Many of us feel like we must act, we must speak out, or else we are silently complicit.

By suspending Daniel Freeman-Maloy and preventing him from taking his post at the Excalibur, you are punishing a student for peacefully acting on his conscience in the face of tremendous suffering. This is profoundly shameful and will damage not just York University, but the spirit of bold dissent that is so badly needed in this country and the world.

Activism is disruptive. We do it because we believe that there are times when disruption is necessary for needed change to occur. I hope that you will make a decision that is not based on fear of disruption, but on hope in the change that can happen when people are free to speak, and even yell, their minds.

Sincerely,

Naomi Klein

More Symmetries

I don’t have anything to say about Reagan. This is one of those things that is covered ad nauseam in the mainstream and as a result there will be ample coverage in the alternative media as well. Paul Street’s blog has a comparison of Reagan and Bush II, for example.

A couple days ago I blogged about the symmetry between Colombia and Venezuela — Venezuela’s elite attempting to halve Chavez’s term, Colombia’s elite attempting to double Uribe’s term.

Today’s symmetry is from Israel/Palestine.

Marwan Barghouti, one of the most respected Palestinian leaders and political prisoners, has been sentenced to life in prison (five life terms plus forty years) by an Israeli kangaroo court. The interesting part is that he was convicted not for any direct role in violence, but because — and this is a quote from the judges decision — “He did not have direct control over the militants, but did wield influence”.

Coupled with the fact that Israel doesn’t really have jurisdiction over Palestinians in a legal sense (a point raised by Barghouti himself and a Palestinian spokesperson — Barghouti said “The Israeli courts are a partner to the Israeli occupation … the judges are just like pilots who fly planes and drop bombs.”) this means that the Israelis should be rounding up, at the very least, the entire leadership of the United States, including Congress and much of the media — they don’t have direct control over US terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere, but they do wield influence.” They should also round up Sharon and his cabinet. There would be at least one difference between Barghouti and these arrests: they are much more demonstrably guilty than Barghouti was.

And now for the symmetry part. So, around the same time Barghouti’s sentence is coming down, Israelis were killing a 19-year old Palestinian, Omar Farah, in the West Bank, a 17-year old Palestinian, Mohammad Nabahan, in Gaza, and a man in a wheelchair at Qalandya, in the West Bank.

His name was Arafat Ibrahim Yakub, and he was in a wheelchair because he had been injured in the first intifada, in 1987.

An Israeli tank also ran over a man in a wheelchair in Jenin during the 2002 massacre there.

No one is serving a life sentence for any of these murders. Nor will the people who “influenced them” serve life sentences, any more than Reagan was punished for his crimes.

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)

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.

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”

Carlos Castano not in Israel?

Israel’s ambassador to Colombia, Yair Recanati, said that Castano that the embassy hadn’t heard a word from him about him going to Israel, according to an interview with RCN Television (Colombia’s big television network). This doesn’t exactly mean that he’s not in Israel, although the ‘diplomatic sources’ who told AFP that he was in Israel (from which the Ha’aretz and El Tiempo stories drew) were never named. It seems that those looking for a definitive location for this paramilitary warlord are destined for disappointment… for now…

Carlos Castano in Israel

Colombia’s El Tiempo and Israel’s Haaretz are reporting that Carlos Castano, the head of Colombia’s paramilitaries, the drug trafficker, the mass murderer, has been smuggled into Israel after ‘disappearing’ about a month ago.

This does wonders for Israel’s ‘anti-terror’ posture, since Castano is a mega-terrorist. But then, when you kill thousands (that’s not an exaggeration) of helpless people over a period of many years, that’s called ‘counter-terror’ isn’t it? Maybe Castano, Sharon, Bush, and Uribe can all get together for a televised terrorist group hug.

Actually that Castano ended up in Israel shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. His autobiography, ‘Mi Confesion’, has nothing but praise for Israel and the country is where he says he learned what he knows about how to fight ‘terrorism’: he apparently took courses there on ‘anti-terror techniques’.

It’s the new world water, and every drop counts

A reader sent me this article in the New Scientist. It is about a neglected aspect of the US/Israel war on the Palestinian population: the fact that it is a water war. I don’t have the statistics with me (Vandana Shiva cites a few of them in her book, Water Wars), but Israeli per capita water use is vast compared to Palestinians. Israeli agriculturalists are allowed to dig wells several times deeper than Palestinians. Gaza is always short of drinking water and every time it is besieged the Israelis essentially use the denial of water as a weapon. And, most tellingly, the Apartheid Wall‘s path follows the West Bank aquifer very closely.

The New Scientist article reports on a ‘plan’ for desalination plants to supply the Palestinian territories with water, while the Israelis freely use the Palestinian aquifer for their own water needs, as they are doing now.

This may come as a surprise to readers, but the US and Israeli officials agree that the plan is a good one, while experts, scientists, and Palestinians all agree that it is a bad one — all strictly from a technical point of view, of course. The immorality of a campaign of ethnic cleansing as part of a wholesale water theft (or is the water theft part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing?) doesn’t really come up in the article.

(thanks to the reader who sent me the article. points to any reader who can identify the song and the artist from which the title of this blog entry was taken and email it to me).

A beacon of democracy in the middle east

Israel and the United States, currently competing to see who can bring more democracy to the Middle East, have achieved notable triumphs in the area of press freedom. Israel, for example, shoots and kills journalists (like the UK’s James Miller and over a dozen Arab journalists who die even more invisibly than people like Miller) and international observers (like the UN’s Ian Hook) and activists (like the US’s Rachel Corrie). Israel bombs radio stations — it did so as part of its latest attack on Rafah, for example. You can get a good idea for what Israel thinks of freedom of the press for Palestinians from this quote by an Israeli official, that comes via al-Jazeera: “We are under no obligation to help Palestinian journalists enter Israel. We don’t differentiate between ordinary Palestinians and Palestinians who claim to be journalists.”

Not to be outdone, the United States has a proclivity for bombing al-Jazeera journalists — it bombed the Kabul station while bombing Afghanistan, it conducted a missile attack on Tariq Ayoub, and it shelled the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, killing numerous journalists.

Well, Israel is keeping up! Readers may remember the case of Mordechai Vanunu, the technician who leaked Israel’s nuclear weapons program and spent 18 years in prison for his act. His arrest itself was abhorrent, his imprisonment despicable, and conditions were placed on him after his release that he couldn’t leave Israel, couldn’t talk to journalists, etc. After Vanunu’s release, he was forced to hide in a church after Israeli newspapers leaked his address. A journalist from the Sunday Times, Peter Hounam of the UK, spent some time with Vanunu at the church. As a result, Hounam was arrested and is now being kept incommunicado by the Israelis.