Austerity road to 19th Century
Monthly Archives: November 2010
Did Bibi win the midterms?
James Traub writes:
It is widely believed in Israel that Netanyahu’s close aides have been demeaning Obama to the Israeli public through an orchestrated whispering campaign and that this accounts in part for Obama’s dismal poll ratings there. And he and his Likud party have longstanding ties to the Republican Party, which shares Likud’s faith in free markets, its deep suspicion toward most Arab regimes, and its low regard for the Palestinian sense of grievance. Conservative evangelicals, an important GOP constituency, also tend to be passionately pro-Israel. Thus after the new settlement flare-up, Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, told the New York Times that with the Republicans now in the ascendant, Netanyahu “feels that he’s got a freer hand here.”
I called the office of Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican whip and the leading GOP voice on Israel, to ask whether he felt this was so. Cantor has, among other things, suggested that aid to Israel be removed from the foreign-assistance budget so that his party could zero out funding to unfriendly countries while sparing Israel. Cantor was unavailable to talk, but I was sent remarks he had just made on talk radio-host Don Imus’s Imus in the Morning: “I don’t understand how the president wants to push our best ally in the Middle East into a posture of thinking that we’re not going to back their security.” Cantor said that “it is very controversial” to “slam our ally, Israel,” adding that “most Americans understand that Israel’s security is synonymous with America’s security.”
Actually, it’s extraordinary to think that any country’s security can be “synonymous” with that of the United States, though of course even this assumes that Netanyahu’s definition of Israel’s security is right, while that of, say, former prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ariel Sharon, or aspiring prime minister Tzipi Livni, is wrong. Or is Cantor saying that Americans should automatically accept Israel’s own definition of its security? The United States doesn’t automatically accept even Britain’s definition of its own security. Whichever it is, the Israel-is-always-right wing of the Republican Party is in a much more powerful position today than it was two weeks ago, and Netanyahu would have every reason to believe that the GOP has his back. So much for those who say that the election had no effect on the conduct of foreign affairs.
Baghdad attacks on Christians prompt archbishop’s call for mass exodus
The Guardian reports:
The martyr in their midst was known all around the area. But in case anyone had missed it, a mourning sign had been posted outside Saad Adwar’s house in the Baghdad suburb of Kampsar, revealing exactly where he lived.
It said simply that Adwar had been killed “by the hand of a spiteful and hateful enemy while he prayed to his holy God in Our Lady of Salvation church” nine days ago.
This morning, the terrorists who had killed 44 of Baghdad’s Christians at their place of worship, came hunting them once more – this time in their homes.
They struck 10 times just after 7am in six different places in Baghdad, almost all of them Christian houses.
Mortars damaged two homes in the south. Improvised bombs damaged four in the north of the city and four in the east. A total of four people were killed and 25 injured. Worse was the effect on the city’s already traumatised Christian minority, which now seems more fearful than ever – and potentially poised for another mass exodus.
Major Dutch pension fund divests from occupation
Electronic Intifada reports:
The major Dutch pension fund Pensioenfonds Zorg en Welzijn (PFZW), which has investments totaling 97 billion euros, has informed The Electronic Intifada that it has divested from almost all the Israeli companies in its portfolio.
PGGM, the manager of the major Dutch pension fund PFZW, has adopted a new guideline for socially responsible investment in companies which operate in conflict zones.
In addition, PFZM has also entered into discussions with Motorola, Veolia and Alstom to raise its concerns about human rights issues. All three companies have actively supported and profited from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip.
Glenn Beck: inspired by Iran or Lyndon LaRouche?
George Soros is a Jewish tycoon and mastermind of ultra-modern colonialism. He is also a thug who is deployed as an economic hitman for the British empire.
The first claim comes from a video produced by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence which has depicted Soros operating out of the Situation Room in the White House, while the second comes from Hector A Rivas Jr at LaRouchePAC, serving longtime presidential aspirant Lyndon LaRouche.
Now comes Glenn Beck, asking ominously about President Obama’s channels of communication: “Have you ever wondered who is at the other end of a BlackBerry?”
Who else but Obama’s puppet master, the omnipotent George Soros.
Soros the macro-managing controller of global events is also the micro-manager of Obama’s daily agenda. He really has taken multi-tasking to a supernatural level as he steers the global financial markets, runs his empire of 501(c)3s, and tells Obama what to do!
Even with his show’s title and images of Soros pulling puppet strings and with puppets dangling from the studio ceiling, Beck still didn’t seem completely confident with his puppet-master metaphor and so needed to make it more literal, the Blackberry supposedly providing the tangible evidence that on a minute-by-minute basis, George Soros has the power and ability to control all of Obama’s actions. But as Beck himself says in his comprehensive disclaimer: “if you take what I say as gospel, you’re an idiot.”
Thus we are presented with the distinctive blend of fear and farce from a man who clearly doesn’t take himself seriously yet who surely lives in a state of constant amazement that his own antics have made him so rich and influential.
In the last year, Glenn Beck’s estimated earnings were $33 million, putting him in second place after Rush Limbaugh ($58.7 million) in Newsweek‘s “Power 50” list which ranks the highest earning political figures in 2010. Bundle the Fox News triumvirate of Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly together and they rank #1 with combined earnings of $75 million. Following the same career trajectory as Beck, Lou Dobbs has just joined Fox, a year after his departure from CNN.
Are Beck and his cohorts now themselves the puppet masters of American politics? Emma Mustich shows how the five-point formula Beck ascribes to Soros just as accurately represents Beck and Fox News‘ methods for gathering and exerting enormous political power.
Meanwhile, Michelle Goldberg writes:
Soros, a billionaire financier and patron of liberal causes, has long been an object of hatred on the right. But Beck went beyond demonizing him; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He described Soros as the most powerful man on earth, the creator of a “shadow government” that manipulates regimes and currencies for its own enrichment. Obama is his “puppet,” Beck says. Soros has even “infiltrated the churches.” He foments social unrest and economic distress so he can bring down governments, all for his own financial gain. “Four times before,” Beck warned. “We’ll be number five.”
It’s true, of course, that Soros has had a hand in bringing down governments—communist, authoritarian governments. Beck seems to be assuming a colossal level of ignorance on the part of his viewers when he informs them, “Along with currencies, Soros also collapses regimes. With his Open Society Fund… Soros has helped fund the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia. He also helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia. So what is his target now? Us. America.”
Beck’s implication is that there was something sinister in Soros’ support for anti-communist civil society organizations in the former Soviet Union. Further, he sees such support as evidence that Soros will engineer a communist coup here in the United States. This kind of thinking only makes sense within the conspiratorial mind-set of classic anti-Semitism, in which Jews threaten all governments equally. And as a wealthy Jew with a distinct Eastern European accent, Soros is a perfect target for such theories.
And in an indication that for the American Jewish community, Beck has indeed crossed a line with his slanderous attack, suggesting that the 14-year-old Soros was a Nazi collaborator, Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, called Beck’s comments “horrific” and “totally off limits and over the top.” Whether Beck’s antipathy for Soros makes him an anti-Semite, is nevertheless questionable.
For Beck, fear is a commodity in which he has deeply invested in futures — an investment whose value he works on inflating every day. But the fear he trades in is not something he invented. It has long resided in the heart of that predominantly white America which is a nation of islanders, challenged by the inconvenient truth that America is not an island.
US military destroys hundreds of Afghan homes
You first have to destroy the nation so that you can then rebuild it — this seems to be innovative thinking that Gen David Petreaus has brought to Afghanistan.
Flatten a farmer’s home, destroy his source of livelihood, and then hand him a compensation card that can only be redeemed by an Afghan government official. This, we are supposed to believe, is a way of strengthening the connection between Afghans and their government.
No need to ask why this is a war with no end in clear sight.
Ben Gilbert reports:
The U.S. military has destroyed hundreds of Afghan civilian homes, farm houses, walls, trees and plowed through fields and buildings using explosives and bulldozers in war-torn Zhari district, a practice that has begun to anger Afghan villagers.
The much anticipated third phase of the Kandahar campaign, called Operation Dragon Strike, has U.S. troops from the 2nd brigade, 101st Airborne Division pushing into a dangerous swath of once-Taliban dominated territory from Highway 1 to the Arghandab River.
But it has come at much material cost to the Afghans, who complain that the troops are destroying their property, leaving some homeless and blocking their irrigation canals —potentially derailing the all-important counterinsurgency strategy that aims to win the hearts and minds of regular Afghans.
“You bulldozed some of my trees, they’re blocking the canal, now we can’t get water to the orchard,” Haji Jilal, a frail, weathered Afghan farmer with a white beard said to one of the U.S. military’s Afghan interpreters on a recent patrol here.
Military officials said the majority of the buildings blown up, and fields and walls plowed through, have been either booby-trapped or used by the Taliban as hideouts and shooting positions.
They also argue the destruction is actually a positive development — it forces Zhari residents to go to their local government center for compensation. U.S. Army commanders see this as a way to kick-start progress toward the final goal of the Kandahar campaign: connect the people of Zhari district to the Afghan government.
Deadlock in Afghanistan: ‘It’s taken a year to move 20km’
In June and July, The Guardian‘s Sean Smith accompanied US Marines and a helicopter ambulance crew in Helmand province. He described how embedded reporters quickly adopt the language and mindset of the soldiers they are with:
All the journalists here are starting to act like they want to be soldiers. They’re talking about “L-shaped attacks” and speaking military speak. I hear one saying, “Right, now we’re being drawn into L-shaped attacks, so they’re planting IEDs in front of them.” They’re all getting very enthusiastic, going into the military shops and buying contractor-type trousers and getting military haircuts.
The Palestinians of Israel are poised to take center stage
Seumas Milne writes:
In a quiet street in the Sheikh Jarrah district of occupied East Jerusalem 88-year-old Rifka al-Kurd is explaining how she came to live in the house she and her husband built as Palestinian refugees in the 1950s. As she speaks, three young ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers swagger in to stake their claim to the front part of the building, shouting abuse in Hebrew and broken Arabic: “Arab animals”, “shut up, whore”.
There is a brief physical confrontation with Rifka’s daughter as the settlers barricade themselves in to the rooms they have occupied since last winter. That was when they finally won a court order to take over the Kurd family’s extension on the grounds that it was built without permission – which Palestinians in Jerusalem are almost never granted. It is an ugly scene, the settlers’ chilling arrogance underpinned by the certain knowledge that they can call in the police and army at will.
But such takeovers of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah have become commonplace, and the focus of continual protest. The same is true in nearby Silwan, home to upwards of 30,000 Palestinians next to the Old City, where 88 homes to 1,500 Palestinians have been lined up for demolition to make way for a King David theme park and hundreds of settlers are protected round the clock by trigger-happy security guards.
Throughout the Arab areas of Jerusalem, as in the West Bank, the government is pressing ahead with land expropriations, demolitions and settlement building, making the prospects of a Palestinian state ever more improbable. More than a third of the land in East Jerusalem has been expropriated since it was occupied in 1967 to make way for Israeli colonists, in flagrant violation of international law.
Israel’s latest settlement plans were not “helpful”, Barack Obama ventured on Tuesday. But while US-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian negotiations go nowhere and attention has been focused on the brutal siege of Gaza, the colonisation goes on. It is also proceeding apace in Israel proper, where the demolition of Palestinian Bedouin villages around the Negev desert has accelerated under Binyamin Netanyahu.
About 87,000 Bedouin live in 45 “unrecognised” villages, without rights or basic public services, because the Israeli authorities refuse to recognise their claim to the land. All have demolition orders hanging over them, while hundreds of Jewish settlements have been established throughout the area.
The Israeli writer Amos Oz calls the Negev a “ticking time bomb”. The village of Araqeeb has been destroyed six times in recent months and each time it has been reconstructed by its inhabitants. The government wants to clear the land and move the Bedouin into designated townships. But even there, demolitions are carried out on a routine basis.
Cultures of Resistance: A look at global militarization
From the front lines of the Palestinian popular struggle
Palestinian popular resistance to the Israeli occupation, settlements and the wall are a regular occurrence in the West Bank. Despite this, the overwhelmingly non-violent protests, often put down harshly by occupation forces, rarely make the mainstream news. This is a video of a lecture by journalist, blogger and filmmaker, Joseph Dana, at the Palestine Center in Washington yesterday.
Afghan air war peaks with 1,000 strikes in October
Noah Shachtman reports:
The U.S. and its allies have unleashed a massive air campaign in Afghanistan, launching missiles and bombs from the sky at a rate rarely seen since the war’s earliest days. In October alone, NATO planes fired their weapons on 1,000 separate missions, U.S. Air Force statistics provided to Danger Room show. Since Gen. David Petraeus took command of the war effort in late June, coalition aircraft have flown 2,600 attack sorties. That’s 50% more than they did during the same period in 2009. Not surprisingly, civilian casualties are on the rise, as well.
NATO officials say the increase in air attacks is simply a natural outgrowth of a more aggressive campaign to push militants out of their strongholds in southern Afghanistan. “Simply put, our air strikes have increased because our operations have increased. We’ve made a concentrated effort in the south to clear out the insurgency and therefore have increased our number of troops on the ground and aircraft to support them in this effort,” Lt. Nicole Schwegman, a NATO spokesperson, tells Danger Room.
On the other hand, some outside observers believe the strikes are part of an attempt to soften up the insurgency before negotiations with them begin in earnest. But one thing is clear: it’s a strategy Petraeus has used before. Once he took over the Iraq war effort, air strikes jumped nearly sevenfold.
U.S. to store another $400m worth of emergency military equipment in Israel
Haaretz reports:
The U.S. government is to move an additional $400 million worth of military equipment to emergency storage in Israel over the next two years.
The equipment, which includes so-called smart bombs, will stand at Israel’s disposal in an emergency.
The U.S. Congress approved the hike last month, which will bring the value of American military equipment stockpiled in Israel to $1.2 billion by 2012. The story was first reported this week by Defense News magazine’s reporter in Israel, Barbara Opall-Rome.
The U.S. stores equipment in Israel by virtue of a special clause in U.S. foreign aid law governing war reserves stockpiles for allies. According to the clause, the equipment can be utilized by American forces throughout the world, and also, in an emergency, by the military in the country where the equipment is stored.
The clause was originally intended to allow South Korea use of American equipment in case of a surprise attack by North Korea.
The type of equipment stockpiled in Israel is determined through dialogue between the Israel Defense Forces and the U.S. Army’s European Command. The issue was raised in discussions last week during the visit by the IDF’s logistics and technology chief, Maj. Gen. Dan Biton, at the Pentagon in Washington.
The agreement between the two armed forces also includes conditions under which the IDF may use the equipment. It is believed that a great deal of the equipment will include precision weapons launched from the air.
IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi said this week that in Israel’s future wars, much more precise weaponry will be needed to strike urban targets from the air without injuring civilians.
During Operation Cast Lead, 81 percent of the missiles and bombs launched from the air on and by IDF artillery were of the precision type.
Use of the the American equipment is allowed with permission of the American administration; Israel used such U.S. weaponry during the Second Lebanon War.
America’s power has already been eclipsed in Asia
As many a conservative American commentator remains obsessed with the question as to how the United States can retain its position as the world’s preeminent power, Pankaj Mishra indicates why that question is already moot: it is a position America has already lost.
He points out:
India has many more likely and rewarding partners in booming Asia than in the recession-hit west. Politically damaged Thailand as well as Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan have recovered from the downturn. Last year India signed a major free-trade deal with Asean. Not surprisingly a columnist in the Star, Malaysia’s leading newspaper in English, deemed the Indian prime minister’s visit to Kuala Lumpur last week more important than the jaunt of Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, to the region at the same time.
A tangle of bilateral trade agreements underpins Asia’s new economic unity. China and Asean countries already constitute the biggest free-trade zone in the world. Asian fears of China’s rise, which the United States keenly monitors, look minor beside the fact that China is now the largest export market for Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, in addition to being India’s biggest trading partner.
All this sounds a planet away from those Tea-Partying Americans who think that the US can bomb its way out of any political and economic difficulties abroad. It now falls to Obama to advance their education; and he’ll most likely fail in this thankless task.
Separation without separating
Amjad Atallah and Mickey Bergman step outside the confines of a two-state solution whose parameters are supposedly already well understood, and present a new approach that could conceivably meet both Palestinian and Jewish nationalist aspirations. In their outline for a plan, the two states would be defined more in terms of the political rights based on resident status than through an attempt to physically separate the two populations. As with any novel approach to resolving the conflict, its value hinges on a precursor that has yet to happen: a collective acknowledgment that the peace process aimed at a two-state solution has failed.
Introducing a permanent residency status into the toolbox of an agreement can lead to two national states, with two national polities, and clearly defined borders, while not forcing relocation or denial of political rights from those who want to remain in or return to their homes. In essence, separation without separating. Here is how it might work:
1. Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, there will be two national states with clearly defined, internationally recognized borders along the internationally accepted 1967 border.
2. Each person living in this territory will be able to hold one of two citizenships: Israeli or Palestinian, regardless of which nation state is their place of residence.
3. It is possible for a citizen of one state to reside in the other, under a clear mutually agreed upon formula between the two states, with a permanent residency status, as exists with a number of states around the world.
4. Those permanent residents will be allowed to own property, pay taxes, abide by local laws and even vote in municipal elections. Their national political aspirations, however, will be exercised by voting in the elections of their national government.
This concept can allow Israeli-Palestinians to choose their nationality, while maintaining their property, residency and rights. It will allow Jewish settlers, who choose to remain in their homes to do so, while retaining their Israeli citizenship. It will allow Palestinian refugees the right of return, gaining Palestinian citizenship and residing in a location of their choice.
Obama officials moving away from 2011 Afghan date
McClatchy reports:
The Obama administration has decided to begin publicly walking away from what it once touted as key deadlines in the war in Afghanistan in an effort to de-emphasize President Barack Obama’s pledge that he’d begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July 2011, administration and military officials have told McClatchy.
The new policy will be on display next week during a conference of NATO countries in Lisbon, Portugal, where the administration hopes to introduce a timeline that calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the year when Afghan President Hamid Karzai once said Afghan troops could provide their own security, three senior officials told McClatchy, along with others speaking anonymously as a matter of policy.
The Pentagon also has decided not to announce specific dates for handing security responsibility for several Afghan provinces to local officials and instead intends to work out a more vague definition of transition when it meets with its NATO allies.
What a year ago had been touted as an extensive December review of the strategy now also will be less expansive and will offer no major changes in strategy, the officials told McClatchy. So far, the U.S. Central Command, the military division that oversees Afghanistan operations, hasn’t submitted any kind of withdrawal order for forces for the July deadline, two of those officials told McClatchy.
Desperate Afghan wives choose self-immolation
The New York Times reports:
“Why did you burn yourself?” asks the doctor. “If I threw myself from a building, I’d break an arm or a leg, but I wanted to die,” Halima answers. “That’s why I set myself on fire. I thought I would die instantly.”
As an answer it is more how than why, but it is enough for Dr. Arif Jalali, the senior surgeon at The Burn and Plastic Surgery Center of Herat Regional Hospital, in western Afghanistan. Afghan women who arrive here have either set fire to themselves, or their families did it to them. Halima did it to herself.
But why, at just 20 years of age? Halima’s circumstances, like those of many of burn victims here, have to be painstakingly pieced together by the doctors and nurses.
It is hard at any time to see another human being’s suffering, but the burns center is pain of a different order. There is every noise a human being can make to express pain — cries, whimpers, groans, pleadings — as bandages are removed, burns cleaned and then wrapped again to protect them from infection. The women inside grip the hands of anyone nearby, digging their fingernails into the nurses’ arms, into my hand if I offer it.
British deny George Bush’s claims that torture helped foil terror plots
The Guardian reports:
British officials said today there was no evidence to support claims by George Bush, the former US president, that information extracted by “waterboarding” saved British lives by foiling attacks on Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf. In his memoirs, Bush said the practice – condemned by Downing Street as torture – was used in CIA interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the US.
He said Mohammed, below, was one of three al-Qaida suspects subjected to waterboarding. “Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport, and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States,” he wrote.
It is not the first time information extracted from Mohammed has been claimed as helping to prevent al-Qaida attacks on British targets. Mohammed cited attacks on Heathrow, Big Ben and Canary Wharf in a list of 31 plots he described at Guantánamo Bay after he was subjected to waterboarding 183 times following his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. The Heathrow alert in fact happened a month before his arrest, with army tanks parked around the airport, in what was widely regarded as an overreaction.
British counter-terrorism officials distanced themselves from Bush’s claims. They said Mohammed provided “extremely valuable” information which was passed on to security and intelligence agencies, but that it mainly related to al-Qaida’s structure and was not known to have been extracted through torture. Eliza Manningham-Buller,head of MI5 at the time, said earlier this year that the government protested to the US over the torture of terror suspects, but that the Americans concealed Mohammed’s waterboarding from Britain. Officials said today the US still had not officially told the British government about the conditions in which Mohammed was held.
The fight has broken out inside the Jewish family
Philip Weiss writes:
The news from the Jewish Federations’ General Assembly in New Orleans is important. I announce landmarks every 100 yards, but this is a big one. The significance of the event is that several young Jews calling themselves proud Jews took Palestinian solidarity into the Jewish family and made trouble with an explosive disruption of rightwinger Netanyahu’s speech. These Jews were brave and surely inspired by the countless brave Palestinians who have taken far greater risks in the occupied territories. But they said, this is our place to voice our anger, an official Jewish space. We are part of the Jewish community. Deal. And the official community responded with rage and violence.
These young people are liberators. The Jewish family will never be the same; the fight has begun inside the family and begun openly at last. Now Netanyahu, whose coalition included fascistic elements, has finally been called out to his face inside the Israel lobby, by angry young Jews, as their parents’ generation swallowed his ethnic cleansing and landgrabbing.
Last year at J Street, the Palestinian solidarity types were quiet. Rabbi Eric Yoffie attacked noble Richard Goldstone in a keynote speech and some people booed but they swallowed it. The panels were all Zionist. Jonathan Chait attacked this website twice during a panel with Matt Yglesias, and I said nothing about it. Passive. I thought, what is my place here, am I a real Jew?