Category Archives: Issues

Karzai’s brother killed by guard in Kandahar home

The half-brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai was assassinated by one of his security guards inside his house in Kandahar on Tuesday morning, a political killing that will reverberate widely through the country and could destabilize a key region in the U.S. military’s campaign against the Taliban, according to witnesses and Afghan officials.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of Kandahar’s provincial council who was widely considered the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan, had been meeting with tribal elders and politicians in his heavily fortified home in downtown Kandahar city when a security guard walked into his meeting room and requested a private discussion, according to two people at the house at the time. Karzai and the guard left for another room, and shortly afterwards three gunshots rang out.

Israel passes law banning free speech

Haaretz reports:

The Knesset passed Monday a law penalizing persons or organizations that boycott Israel or the settlements, by a vote of 47 to 38.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not present during the vote. MK Zeev Elkin (Likud), who proposed the law, said the law is not meant to silence people, but “to protect the citizens of Israel.”

According to the law, a person or an organization calling for the boycott of Israel, including the settlements, can be sued by the boycott’s targets without having to prove that they sustained damage. The court will then decide how much compensation is to be paid. The second part of the law says a person or a company that declare a boycott of Israel or the settlements will not be able to bid in government tenders.

MK Nitzan Horowitz from Meretz blasted the law, calling it outrageous and shameful. “We are dealing with a legislation that is an embarrassment to Israeli democracy and makes people around the world wonder if there is actually a democracy here,” he said. Ilan Gilon, another Meretz MK, said the law would further delegitimize Israel.

Kadima opposition party spokesman said the Netanyahu government is damaging Israel. “Netanyahu has crossed a red line of political foolishness today and national irresponsibility, knowing the meaning of the law and it’s severity, while giving in to the extreme right that is taking over the Likkud.”

Israel expels 39 pro-Palestinian activists over weekend, holds 81 more in jail

DPA reports:

A standoff between Israel and dozens of detained European pro-Palestinian activists continued Monday, with some of them refusing to be put on return flights.

More than 81 were still being held in an Israeli jail early Monday, three days after being refused entry on landing at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport.

“Some of them refuse to be returned while with others, it is only a matter of finding a vacant seat on a flight,” said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. “The only delay is a vacancy on a free flight,” he added.

Some 39 had been expelled by Monday, including 10 Germans who landed in Frankfurt late Sunday. Among the expelled was an 82-year-old German, who complained that despite his advanced age, he was kept on a transportation vehicle for hours, then brought to Beer Sheva prison with the other activists. He said he had only told Israeli security at Ben-Gurion that he wished to “visit friends in Israel and Palestine.” Palmor said he had no information of the specific case, which outraged many.

The spokesman said Israel had denied entry to anyone who was on a list published by the Welcome to Palestine campaign, as soon as the coalition of Palestinian groups announced the activists would participate in unauthorized protests against the Israeli occupation.

While Murdoch’s papers targeted former PM Gordon Brown, Tony Blair tried to protect Murdoch

The Guardian reports:

Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account, his legal file as well as his family’s medical records.

There is also evidence that a private investigator used a serving police officer to trawl the police national computer for information about him.

That investigator also targeted another Labour MP who was the subject of hostile inquiries by the News of the World, but it has not confirmed whether News International was specifically involved in trawling police computers for information on Brown.

Separately, Brown’s tax paperwork was taken from his accountant’s office apparently by hacking into the firm’s computer. This was passed to another newspaper.

Brown was targeted during a period of more than 10 years, both as chancellor of the exchequer and as prime minister. Some of the activity clearly was illegal.

The Mail on Sunday reported:

Tony Blair urged Gordon Brown to persuade the Labour MP who led the campaign to expose News of the World phone-hacking to back off, friends of Mr Brown said last night.

Well-placed sources said Mr Blair, who has close links with the paper’s owner Rupert Murdoch, wanted Mr Brown to get his ally Tom Watson to lay off the News International (NI) title, but Mr Brown refused.

Mr Watson’s two-year crusade played a major part in Mr Murdoch’s shock decision to close the paper after today’s edition.

UK govt. official: Murdoch made Cameron eat a ‘shit sandwich’ which turned into a three-course dinner

The Independent reports:

For more than 30 years now there have been two truths about Rupert Murdoch’s increasingly infrequent visitations to the British outpost of his media empire.

The first: anyone who is anyone in the world of politics and business angles for (and is delighted by) any kind of audience with the great man.

The second is the chill his visit engenders amongst his senior editors and executives in Wapping [News International’s London headquarters].

Yesterday as Mr Murdoch’s corporate Boeing 737 jet, complete with a boardroom and double bed, touched down at Luton Airport, it was clear how much has changed in the last week. The chill in Wapping is still there – worse than ever – but the audiences for Mr Murdoch have dried up.

He and his company – feted by David Cameron and Ed Miliband just two weeks ago at the News International Summer Party – have become a political liability. To paraphrase the famous quote: “It was News of the World wot lost it”. Yesterday Downing Street made it very clear that Mr Cameron would be neither meeting nor speaking to Mr Murdoch on this visit.

Privately Government sources are blunter. They are incandescent at the political damage done by the phone-hacking scandal and angry that News Corp has not voluntarily suspended its attempted takeover of BSkyB in the wake of the allegations.

They feel they are getting unfairly blamed for not stopping the takeover and the impression is growing that they are still in the pocket of the company. “We always knew we were going to have to eat a shit sandwich over the BSkyB deal,” said one. “We didn’t know it would turn into a three course dinner.”

David Carr writes:

[H]ow did we find out that a British tabloid was hacking thousands of voice mails of private citizens? Not from the British government, with its wan, inconclusive investigations, but from other newspapers.

Think of it. There was Mr. Murdoch, tying on a napkin and ready to dine on the other 60 percent of BSkyB that he did not already have. But just as he was about to swallow yet another tasty morsel, the hands at his throat belonged to, yes, newspaper journalists.

Newspapers, it turns out, are still powerful things, and not just in the way that Mr. Murdoch has historically deployed them.

The Guardian stayed on the phone-hacking story like a dog on a meat bone, acting very much in the British tradition of a crusading press, and goosing the story back to life after years of dormancy. Other papers, including The New York Times, reported executive and police complicity that gave the lie to the company’s “few bad apples” explanation. As recently as last week, Vanity Fair broke stories about police complicity.

Mr. Murdoch, ever the populist, prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect.

His corporation may be able to pick governments, but holding them accountable is also in the realm of newspaper journalism, an earnest concept of public service that has rarely been of much interest to him.

The coverage last week, on a suddenly fast-moving story that had been moving only in increments, destabilized the ledge that the News Corporation had been standing on. James Murdoch regretted everything and took responsibility for almost nothing. What looked like an opportunity for him to prove his mettle as a manager of crisis might yet engulf him.

Andy Coulson, the former editor of News of the World who became the chief spokesman for Mr. Cameron, has been arrested. And Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International and previous editor of The News of the World, responded by saying that it was “inconceivable” that she knew of the hacking.

I’d suggest it was inconceivable she did not know, given the number of hacking targets. What editor doesn’t know where her stories come from, especially stories chock full of highly private, delicious conversations. Did Ms. Brooks think they were borne in through the window by magic fairies?

‘If there wasn’t a Glenn Beck, Israel would have had to invent one’

Ami Kaufman reports on Glenn Beck’s visit to Israel’s Knesset today:

Outside the Negev hall, the atmosphere was like before a rock concert, complete with the pushing and shoving. Most attendees were religious, all the way from knitted kippas to haredim. After we sat down, it was only a few minutes wait till the star came in. Almost immediately the whole room stood up, including the Members of Knesset, and gave the man a standing ovation.

This was only the beginning of the biggest love-fest I’ve ever seen. At times, I was squirming in my chair. Considering how Beck has been accused of anti-semitism, the amount of love was particularly odd. Just recently, pundit Dana Milbank of the Washington Post listed a few of Beck’s feats in this field:

…hosting a guest on his show who describes as “accurate” the anti-Semitic tract “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; likening Reform rabbis to “radicalized Islam”; calling Holocaust survivor George Soros a “puppet master,” a bloodsucker and a Nazi collaborator; touting the work of a Nazi sympathizer who referred to Eisenhower as “Ike the Kike”; and claiming the Jews killed Jesus.

But I guess it takes one to know one, which is why I wasn’t surprised to see Baruch Marzel (the notorious Kahanist and in my humble opinion of of the most dangerous people this country has seen) taking a seat to hear Beck’s sermon.

MK Danny Danon (Likud), the committe chairman, warned the audience not to clap in the Knesset. Yet to no avail. Dannon went on to introduce Beck as “a friend of Israel. If there wasn’t a Glenn Beck, Israel would have had to invent one.”

The first thing Beck did was apologize for not wearing a tie. He proceeded to tell some kind of story about clothes and meeting a vice premier here, where Danon cut in and said: “Which vice? We have many vices,” which is where I said under my breath: ‘You got that right, Danny boy! Many vices indeed!”

The great generational threat

Glenn Greenwald writes:

In just the past two months alone (all subsequent to the killing of Osama bin Laden), the U.S. Government has taken the following steps in the name of battling the Terrorist menace: extended the Patriot Act by four years without a single reform; begun a new CIA drone attack campaign in Yemen; launched drone attacks in Somalia; slaughtered more civilians in Pakistan; attempted to assassinate U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki far from any battlefield and without a whiff of due process; invoked secrecy doctrines to conceal legal memos setting forth its views of its own domestic warrantless surveillance powers; announced a “withdrawal”plan for Afghanistan that entails double the number of troops in that country as were there when Obama was inaugurated; and invoked a very expansive view of its detention powers under the 2001 AUMF by detaining an alleged member of al-Shabab on a floating prison, without charges, Miranda warnings, or access to a lawyer. That’s all independent of a whole slew of drastically expanded surveillance powers seized over the past two years in the name of the same threat.

Behold the mammoth, life-altering, nation-threatening danger justifying this endless — and ongoing — erosion of safeguards, checks and liberties, from The Los Angeles Times (h/t Antony Loewenstein):

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that the United States is “within reach” of “strategically defeating” Al Qaeda as a terrorist threat, but that doing so would require killing or capturing the group’s 10 to 20 remaining leaders.

Heading to Afghanistan for the first time since taking office earlier this month, Panetta said that intelligence uncovered in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May showed that 10 years of U.S. operations against Al Qaeda had left it with fewer than two dozen key operatives, most of whom are in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa.

In one sense, it’s commendable that Panetta is acknowledging this, though he’s doing so to protect the President from political attacks in the wake of his announced withdrawal of 30,000 troops from Afghanistan. But in another, more important sense, Panetta knows that this disclosure won’t even slightly impede the always-expanding National Security State and the War on Terror which justifies it — just like the acknowledgment long ago that there were fewer than 100 Al Qaeda operatives in all of Afghanistan had no effect on our decade-long war there. That’s because — as the above-described events of the last eight weeks demonstrate — civil liberties assaults and expansions of executive power are not what the U.S. Government does in response to some actual problem; it’s what the public-private consortium composing the U.S. Government is. Terrorist villains are the pretext for, not the cause of, those policies, and they will continue irrespective of the scope or magnitude of Terrorism.

Roger Waters on Israel’s pending anti-boycott law

(H/t Noam Sheizaf. More on the Knesset’s boycott bill here.)

John Robertson: Elliot Abrams bangs the drum for war against Iran

By John Robertson, War in Context, July 11, 2011

Once again, from one of those worthies privileged to call themselves “fellows” of the Council on Foreign Relations, a call for America to suck it up, be strong, hammer those bad guys into submission (and not a word about how much it costs, or how little the US can afford it).

Days ago, it was Max Boot, pounding on the guilt button of America’s supposed humiliation in Somalia, and imploring Obama to steer our military and economy more deeply into the black hole that is nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. (For my take on that, I invite you to read this.) Now we have Elliot Abrams, another “expert” hailing from the so-called mainstream of the public diplomacy establishment, who is shocked – SHOCKED – by the deaths of US soldiers at the hands of Shii militias in Iraq, and intent on shaming Obama into doing something about it – by killing Iranians, those nefarious evil-doing people who surely are behind it all.

Here’s his historical context:

There must be very few times in American history when a foreign government is accused of killing American troops, and absolutely nothing is done about it.

Every school kid used to learn lines like “Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead,” or “Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.” The War of 1812 was fought in large part due to the “impressment” of American sailors by the British, a similar example of denial of freedom that fell far short of actually killing American sailors.

Are you serious, Mr. Abrams? For those who don’t know, Mrs. Perdicaris and children were, in perspective, a minor incident; they were held captive by a local sheikh in northern Africa and were rescued, unharmed, when Teddy Roosevelt sent in a small force. There was no danger of instigating a horrific war. British impressment of American sailors did contribute to starting the War of 1812, which soon entailed a British invasion of US territory and a real threat to the American republic.

The deaths of a few US soldiers in Iraq at the hands of Shii militias with ties to – and supplied by – Iran is deplorable, but it bears absolutely no real comparison to either of these two incidents. Abrams would have us believe that any Iranian involvement in the killing of US soldiers in Iraq is unprovoked. You want to cite history, Mr. Abrams? Try this out:

Even as US forces were rolling into Baghdad in 2003, the word among the neocon set was that “real men go to Tehran.” This, after the Khatami government had cooperated with the US post-9/11 and had been reaching out to the US during the Clinton administration – only to be rewarded with the idiocy of Bush’s “axis of evil” SoU address in 2002.
Between 1980 and 1988, the US provided huge support to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq after his unprovoked invasion of Iran. The war cost as many as 1 million Iranian lives, and featured attacks by the US navy on Iranian oil installations and naval forces in the Persian Gulf. It also featured Iraqi use of poison gas against Iranian troops – a horrific violation of international law, at which the Reagan administration essentially winked and looked the other way. And, it also featured the incident of a US warship (the USS Vincennes) launching anti-aircraft rockets that destroyed an Iranian passenger plane, killing 200 passengers – an incident the Iranian government commemorated only a few days ago.
Speaking of the Reagan administration, and history – under Reagan, the US secretly facilitated the illegal sale of weapons to Iran and then (again, illegally) funneled the profits to anti-communist CONTRA movement in Nicaragua. When it was discovered, this bit of chicanery brought us the Iran-CONTRA scandal, which came close to trashing the Reagan administration and led to the censure and convicting of some Reagan officials, including . . .
Elliot Abrams! Gee, you don’t remember that, Elliot? You don’t remember that there was once a time when you were up to your neck in unseemly dealings with Iran?

Outraged by Iran now, Abrams is calling for retaliation. Want some more historical context for that?

An article at the time of Iran-CONTRA also noted that on his office wall, Abrams proudly featured a Likud Party poster.
Anyone who reads Abrams’ stuff over the last several years knows that he is one of Israeli hard-right’s most ardent defenders in the press as well as the foreign-policy mainstream. He completely backs Netanyahu/Lieberman on the issue of West Bank settlements (i.e., Israel should keep them all, and anyone who raises the issue of settlements is simply trying to distract us from the issues of Palestinian/Islamist/Iranian perfidy).
He would love nothing better than to see the US either back Israel’s play in a proposed military strike against Iran or launch its own such strike.

So now, Abrams conjures up the ghosts of 1812 and Teddy Roosevelt to bang the war-drum for retaliation against Iran. He says, it’s to salvage American honor.

I betcha that Bibi – that great promoter of American honor – is smiling.

John Robertson is a professor of Middle East history at Central Michigan University and has his own blog, Chippshots.

Panetta blames Iran for rise in Iraq violence

Al Jazeera reports:

US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has said that his country will act “uniterally” to confront what he said were Iranian threats to US interests in Iraq.

Speaking during his first visit to Baghdad since taking office on July 1, Panetta said on Monday that the US was “very concerned about Iran and the weapons they are providing to extremists here in Iraq”.

He blamed weapon supplies from Iran for the increase in violence in June, the deadliest month for US troops in Iraq in two years.

“In June we lost a hell of a lot of Americans as a result of those attacks. And we cannot just simply stand back and allow this to continue to happen,” he said.

Panetta said Washington’s first effort would be to press the Iraqi government and military to go after the Shia groups he said were responsible for the attacks.

“Secondly, to do what we have to do unilaterally, to be able to go after those threats as well, and we’re doing that,” he said, referring to the right of US forces to defend themselves on Iraqi soil.

“And thirdly, to bring pressure on Iran to not engage in this kind of behaviour.

“Because, very frankly, they need to know that our first responsibility is to protect those that are defending our country. And that is something we are going to do.”

Indigenous resistance is the new ‘terrorism’

Manuela Picq writes:

If you thought there was anything romantic about environmental activism or indigenous rights, think twice. Socialist ideas about nature – such as keeping water a pubic good – can get you facing charges of sabotage by a leftist government. In the land of the Incas, if you protect the pachamama [“Mother World”], you might just be a “terrorist”.

It’s becoming tricky to identify “terrorists”, at least in Ecuador. They are not members of criminal organisations, they don’t spread fear or target civilians, nor have a politically motivated agenda. According to President Correa, “terrorists” are those opposing Ecuador’s development. So today’s “terrorism” might just look like indigenous peoples peacefully taking over the streets, with their ancestral knowledge and values, to demand environmental and social rights.

In Ecuador, “terrorists” are indigenous peoples from the Amazon and the Andean highlands fighting to preserve access to water in their communities. Old penal codes written in times of dictatorship are being revived by leftist presidents to repress indigenous activists. As “terrorists”, they are labelled as enemies of the state, and arrested – by the very president that claimed leftist credentials and staged his inauguration in overtly ethnic style.

When the Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala gathered delegations from the entire hemisphere in Ecuador last month, the focus was on the criminalisation of environmental protest.

Was New York Times’ Ethan Bronner duped by an Israeli Facebook fraud?

Al Abunimah writes:

RAMALLAH, West Bank – Moad Arqoub, a Palestinian graduate student, was bouncing around the Internet the other day and came across a site that surprised and attracted him. It was a Facebook page where Israelis and Palestinians and other Arabs were talking about everything at once: the prospects of peace, of course, but also soccer, photography and music.

“I joined immediately because right now, without a peace process and with Israelis and Palestinians physically separated, it is really important for us to be interacting without barriers,” Mr. Arqoub said as he sat at an outdoor cafe in this Palestinian city.

That is how an article in today’s New York Times by Ethan Bronner begins. But much of Bronner’s article is misleading and possibly false, as The Electronic Intifada discovered.

The Facebook page Bronner profiles is called YaLa-Young Leaders and is founded by Uri Savir, a former Israeli diplomat and head of the Peres Center for Peace. It is supposed to be a forum for interaction and normalization between Israeli and Palestinian youth in particular, and Israeli and Arab youth in general.

It is endorsed by Israeli President Shimon Peres, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, and Tony Blair – figures more likely to repel than attract Palestinian youth.

But Bronner’s story reads more like a promotional piece than a report. He appears to have relied only on the page’s creators for information, and presented people involved in managing the project as if they were unaffiliated users. Whether he was duped, careless or engaging in advocacy, Bronner’s report raises many questions about his standards of reporting from Palestine.

Street by street, Egypt activists face Old Guard

The Associated Press reports:

After the fall of President Hosni Mubarak, a group of young activists quickly moved to bring the can-do spirit of Egypt’s revolution down to the level of their neighborhood.

They began installing electricity poles in Mit Oqba’s dim streets. They got gas pipes extended to the area. They did what local officials had long promised but never done, with the aim of showing 300,000 low-income residents the benefits of an uprising meant to end the corruption and stagnation under Mubarak.

Then the activists’ parents started getting intimidating warnings: Your children are going to get beaten up by thugs. An official who helped them get papers signed for extending the gas pipes was suddenly transferred to another post.

The activists had run into a collision course with powerful local members of the former ruling party. It was a lesson about the new Egypt: The old regime is still in place and fighting change.

“The regime is not just Mubarak and his ministers. There are thousands still benefiting,” said Mohammed Magdy, one of the activists in Mit Oqba.

Mubarak was ousted five months ago, along with top figures from his nearly 30-year regime. But the military generals who now rule have been slow in — or have outright resisted — dismantling the grip that members of his former ruling party hold on every level of the state, from senior government positions down to local administrations. In the meantime, public anger that real change has not come is growing explosive.

Ex-newspaper editor appointed as Egypt’s Information Minister

The Los Angeles Times reports:

The former editor in chief of the Wafd party’s newspaper was sworn in as the new Minister of Information by the head of the ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi on Saturday.

The appointment of Osama Heikal surprised many politicians and activists, who believed that the ministry, which had not filled the job for five months, might keep the position vacant. Many online activists and bloggers quickly highlighted what they called Heikal’s “support” to Mubarak’s regime through an article he wrote one day before the Jan. 25 revolt that ended with ousting Mubarak.

“I don’t think that any devout Egyptian would want his country to witness a similar fate to Tunisia’s [referring to the Tunisian revolution]. No one wants a clash between people and the regime. What we should understand is that people want change and the quieter those changes come the better this will be for Egypt,” Heikal wrote in an editorial dated Jan. 24.

The editorial added that angry demonstrations represent a coup against “our values.”

After working as the newspaper’s reporter for military and presidential affairs for 18 years, Heikal was elected as head of Wafd’s newspaper last January. After his appointment as minister, Heikal stressed that the Egyptian state media will focus on “reporting the full truth without any exaggerations or exclusions and that all sects of the country’s society will have an equal place to appear in state media.”

Despite its status as an opposition party, Wafd and its newspaper have in recent years been criticized for taking the side of the former Mubarak regime against other independent newspapers and writers more critical of the former president. Egyptian information ministers during Mubarak’s rule have always been regarded as watchdogs who controlled and manipulated state media according to the ruling party’s interests.

America’s ‘detainee 001’ – the persecution of John Walker Lindh

Frank Lindh writes:

John Phillip Walker Lindh, my son, was raised a Roman Catholic, but converted to Islam when he was 16 years old. He has an older brother and a younger sister. John is scholarly and devout, devoted to his family, and blessed with a powerful intellect, a curious mind, and a wry sense of humour.

Labelled by the American government as “Detainee 001” in the “war on terror”, John occupies a prison cell in Terre Haute, Indiana. He has been a prisoner of the American government since 1 December 2001, less than three months after the terror attacks of 9/11.

John is entirely innocent of any involvement in the terror attacks, or any allegiance to terrorism. That is not disputed by the American government. Indeed, all accusations of terrorism against John were dropped by the government in a plea bargain, which in turn was approved by the US district court in which the case was brought.

Despite its proud history as a stable constitutional democracy, the US has, for 10 years, been affected by post-traumatic shock, following the horrific events of 11 September 2001. I can find no other explanation for the barbaric mistreatment and continued detention of a gentle young man like John Lindh.

Panetta says defeat of Al Qaeda is ‘within reach’

The New York Times reports:

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who arrived in Kabul on Saturday, said the United States was “within reach of strategically defeating Al Qaeda” and that the American focus had narrowed to capturing or killing 10 to 20 crucial leaders of the terrorist group in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

Mr. Panetta, who took over as defense secretary from Robert M. Gates on July 1, made his comments aboard his plane before arriving on an unannounced trip to Afghanistan.

They were Mr. Panetta’s first public remarks in his new post and among the most positive from a senior American national security official about the decade-old war against the terrorist organization, founded by Osama bin Laden, that was responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Panetta, who as director of the Central Intelligence Agency ran the American commando raid that killed Bin Laden in Pakistan on May 2, said that vanquishing Al Qaeda was one of his most important goals as defense secretary.

“Obviously we made an important start with that in getting rid of Bin Laden,” Mr. Panetta said. “We’re within reach of strategically defeating Al Qaeda. And I’m hoping to be able to focus on that, working obviously with my prior agency as well.”

Mr. Panetta, who rarely spoke on the record as C.I.A. director but has a more public role now, offered few details to bolster his assessment. But intelligence officials have said that computer files retrieved from Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, showed that the organization was in dire need of money and struggling under persistent American drone strikes on its leadership.

Israel’s campaign of violence against non-violent political opposition

Israel is now a nation governed by its reptilian brain. In response to the slightest challenge, it lashes out as though in each and every moment, its life were under threat.

Israel now only has one way of responding to criticism: to accuse its critics of being violent. By claiming critics are by their nature violent, violence then becomes the state’s necessary and unavoidable form of defense.

Israel has no political answers to its political critics — only the use of force, tear gas, detention, deportation and the occasional bullet in the head.

Having presented the arrival of a few hundred European tourists as a violent threat, Israeli paranoia thereafter needed some form of ‘proof’ for justifying its fears, thus today the Israeli press if filled with headlines like this:

Foreign pro-Palestinian activists clash with IDF in West Bank

Joseph Dana questions whether their is any basis for the reports. And in the video below showing “clashes” yesterday between non-violent protesters and the IDF, it’s clear that objective and accurate reporting would describe such events with very different language and headlines like this:

IDF attacks unarmed protesters in the West Bank

Dana writes:

According to media reports carried by all major news outlets in Israel, four ‘air flotilla’ passengers were arrested/detained Saturday in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh during an unarmed demonstration this morning. Haaretz, in its headline story, is citing reports by Channel 10 (Heb), that four ‘air flotilla’ activists have been taken for questioning after they had been arrested in the demonstration. The Jerusalem Post, citing unnamed ‘organizers’, claims that air flotilla passengers are clashing with security forces in Nabi Saleh. The paper does not cite the name of the organizations that the ‘organizers’ are representatives of. Ynet is reporting that activists might be involved in demonstrations in Nabi Saleh and Qalandiya but they provide nothing to substantiate their claims. None of these reports seem to based on facts on the ground in Nabi Saleh.

Kobi Snitz, an Israeli activist with the Anarchists Against the Wall, told me by telephone from Nabi Saleh that he has not seen any ‘air flotilla’ passenger in the course of the day. He told me that four people were indeed arrested, but they were all Israeli Jews from Tel Aviv. In fact, the Israeli activists are being charged with assaulting soldiers despite clear video footage to the contrary according to Snitz. Snitz did comment that there were international activists present in the demonstration but ‘they were definitively not arrested or taken in by Israeli forces.” Other villagers in Nabi Saleh told to me that they were unaware that ‘air flotilla’ passengers were present in their demonstration today. I have not been able to reach anyone present at the Qalandiya demonstration at the time of this writing.

News outlets often make mistakes and +972 is no exception. However, it is strange for a story that is based almost entirely on unsubstantiated reports to become the headline of every major newspaper website in Israel. When rumors of arrests of air flotilla passengers began this morning, Yossi Gurvitz contacted the IDF spokesman for a confirmation of the story. He was given a categorical rejection of claims that air flotilla passengers were targeted for arrest in the West Bank. No comment was given about air flotilla activists involved in demonstrations in Nabi Saleh.

Shir Hever notes:

The hundreds of activists being deported from Israel’s airport, or denied the right to board the planes to begin with, are mostly European citizens, who have the same right which every Israeli enjoys when visiting Europe. As an Israeli citizen, I can take a plane to any European country without worrying about being denied entry. I don’t need to lie at the airport. Tens of thousands of demonstrators who fly to G8 meetings to protest them are also not denied entry. Still, European citizens visiting Israel and even more so if they are visiting the OPT, are interrogated, placed under surveillance and political controls.

The European Union has a reciprocity policy regarding countries whose citizens enjoy a free visa, and expects these countries to offer the same treatment to European citizens that Europe awards their citizens. So far, European governments (as well as the Canadian and US governments) do not concern themselves too much with the rights of their own citizens in Israel.

A proper response by France, Germany and the UK to the current mass deportations would be to suspend the visa agreement with Israel and demand that every Israeli citizen apply for a visa (like citizens of most countries in Africa and Asia), until Israel gives its reasons for expelling each and every activist who wishes to visit the OPT. Such a response is sure to remind the Israeli public that control over the Palestinian population in the OPT also carries responsibilities, and abusing those responsibilities carries consequences.

Palestinians are preparing for September, but is Israel?

Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel write:

In a little more than two months, the United Nations General Assembly is scheduled to discuss the Palestinian Authority’s request for recognition of a Palestinian state within the June 4, 1967 boundaries. But for now, the Palestinian public is preoccupied with a range of other issues that have nothing to do with the occupation, the settlements or a popular uprising.

On Sunday, a World Cup preliminary qualifying match between Palestine and Afghanistan, played at Al-Ram stadium north of Jerusalem, ended in a 1-1 draw. In a previous round the Palestinians won 2-0, thus keeping their hopes alive, and now need a win against Thailand to move into the next round.

That same day, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad announced that civil servants would receive only half their salaries because funds promised by Arab donor states have not arrived. And on Tuesday, Hebron held elections for its chamber of commerce. Nearly 2,000 residents voted in what was perceived as a cross-clan battle of generations over the city’s economic future. Not a word was said about an intifada or the occupation.

Also on Sunday, however, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, headed by Dr. Khalil Shikaki, conducted a simulation exercise relating to the September vote. The participants, past and present senior figures from the PA and Fatah, assumed the roles of representatives of the PA and the U.S. administration, and other key international figures. Three Israelis were also invited (including one of this column’s co-authors ), who, alongside a Palestinian academic, played the Israeli government. Senior Hamas figures in the West Bank were invited to participate but refused because of the Israeli presence. The proceedings were held in Arabic.

In the first scenario, on the day of the UN vote, the United States and the European Union present separate initiatives to have the matter struck from the General Assembly agenda. Washington suggests recognizing a Palestinian state without setting its borders or capital; the EU suggests postponing the vote by a year, recognizing that negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians will be based on the 1949 armistice lines, and stipulating that if the parties do not reach an agreement within a year, the EU will recognize a Palestinian state within the 1967 boundaries, with Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinian team rejects both initiatives. The Israeli team accepts the U.S. proposal and rejects the EU proposal.

The second scenario predicts an outburst of violence the day after the UN vote: The Israeli army kills seven Palestinians at a demonstration at Qalandiyah, north of Jerusalem. In response young, albeit unarmed Palestinians hold another demonstration there, and block the road to the Beit El settlement. Simultaneously, Islamic Jihad launches Grad rockets from Gaza into Be’er Sheva.

The second scenario seemed a bit far-fetched at first. However, a poll Shikaki released 10 days ago casts things in a different light: It showed that 65 percent of respondents support the UN initiative. Moreover, 52 percent say they will take part in “peaceful” demonstrations and processions to Israeli checkpoints after the vote; 76 percent want the PA to be active in Area C (which is under full Israeli control ) after the state is recognized – for example, by building airports, roads and housing, and deploying security forces – even if this means a confrontation with Israel. Fully 75 percent support the deployment of Palestinian security forces at the Allenby Bridge across the Jordan River, even if this means the West Bank’s only access to the outside world will be closed for a few months. In other words, it is hard to say who will set the tone: the public or the leadership.

The third scenario has dozens of Palestinians killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli fire in West Bank demonstrations a few weeks after the UN vote. Meanwhile, rockets are being fired at Sderot and Ashkelon, the Palestinian security services are preparing to deploy in Area C and the Allenby Bridge, and the Israel Defense Forces has begun to take action against PA forces.

In this simulation the Israeli side proposes a cease-fire followed by direct negotiations on the basis of the 1967 boundaries, in return for Palestinian recognition of Israel as the Jewish state. The PA rejects this outright as unacceptable.

The Palestinian team’s curiosity was piqued when the “Israeli” side established a national unity government with opposition leader Tzipi Livni. Seeming somewhat enthusiastic, the Palestinians noted that this might change the picture, since Livni is trusted by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his aides. However, the enthusiasm faded when it became clear that Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman would remain in the government (Lieberman was played outstandingly by a Palestinian ).

The simulation was broken off prematurely due to lack of time. Still, a number of interesting conclusions can be drawn from it. First, a new intifada is not inevitable. A flare-up may occur in September or shortly afterward, but much depends on the behavior of the IDF and the police; minimizing the casualties will help contain a confrontation. While there were relatively few participants earlier this year in the Nakba Day (commemorating 1948 ) and Naksa Day (commemorating 1967 ) protests, the September events will be on a larger scale.

The second conclusion is that the Palestinian leadership, like the Israeli government, does not want a violent, all-out confrontation.

Third, public opinion on both sides, along with the Arab and Israeli media, will play a crucial role (even more than in the past ) vis-a-vis the leaders’ policy at this critical time – which may also reflect something about the character of the leaders on both sides.

The fourth conclusion is that bringing Livni into the government, even one led by Benjamin Netanyahu, could substantially change the relationship with the Palestinians.

And the final conclusion: It’s very possible that Netanyahu will decide to undertake the same measures he is avoiding at present (i.e., a renewed construction freeze in the settlements, or negotiations on the basis of the 1967 boundaries ) after blood is shed.