Anthony McIntyre's Blog, page 1149
April 25, 2018
April 24, 2018
Moronic President
Mick Hall poses the very simple question:
What type of moronic president would threaten a fellow UN member state with this 'Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!
If the Islamic dunderheads who are in the tight grip of their god had any thought for the living they would negotiate a path to end the war in Syria, they must know they cannot win. We witnessed what they do with power in Raqqa and it wasn’t pretty. Murder, intimidation, a slave market in the heart of the city, where women and young girls were sold to the highest bidder as if they were cattle.
It’s becoming increasingly clear after almost nine years of a bloody civil war the only way peace will come to Syria is if the current government led by Assad wins. The only other alternatives are permanent war, or a government in Damascus run religious fanatics. I might not like this but it is a fact.
After the alleged chemical weapons attack in the town of Douma which has not yet been independently verified, although the UN have now agreed to send weapons inspectors there. Instead of waiting for them to report Trump has posted on twitter an incendiary tweet about US missiles coming in:
"Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!” (It is worth noting Jaysh al-Islam, (in English 'The Army of Islam') the militia which controlled Douma at the time of the alleged chemical weapons attack, is said to have mounted a chemical attack on Kurdish civilians in Aleppo in April 2016. Yet according to the mainstream media, Trump, Macron and the British government believe they're incapable of either staging or faking such an attack)
Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May have proudly proclaimed they have held phone consultation with Trump about which Syrian government facilities to target.
May and Macron remind me of the kid who tags around with the school playground bully because they lack the physical attributes to be a bully themselves.
The USA and it's two European allies attempt to take the high moral ground by supporting ever more military intervention in Syria will not only prolong the war, it's gross hypocrisy of the worst kind. Pray tell me what is the difference between being vaporised by a cruise missile while seeking shelter in a Baghdad bunker from shock and awe, and choking to death after Chlorine attack in a cellar in Douma, if that is what happened.
What is the difference between the numbers killed in Yemen by Saudi Arabia with weapons supplied by the UK and USA, and those killed by the Assad regime in Syria with weapons supplied by Putin's Russia?
The Syrian government doesn't pose any threat to the USA or it’s citizens, nor its two main allies and never has, indeed that shoe is on the other foot.
When will we wake up to the fact military intervention in other people’s wars only makes a bad situation worse. History teaches it only prolongs wars, whether it be in the north of Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Yemen.
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.
Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
What type of moronic president would threaten a fellow UN member state with this 'Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and smart!
If the Islamic dunderheads who are in the tight grip of their god had any thought for the living they would negotiate a path to end the war in Syria, they must know they cannot win. We witnessed what they do with power in Raqqa and it wasn’t pretty. Murder, intimidation, a slave market in the heart of the city, where women and young girls were sold to the highest bidder as if they were cattle.
It’s becoming increasingly clear after almost nine years of a bloody civil war the only way peace will come to Syria is if the current government led by Assad wins. The only other alternatives are permanent war, or a government in Damascus run religious fanatics. I might not like this but it is a fact.
After the alleged chemical weapons attack in the town of Douma which has not yet been independently verified, although the UN have now agreed to send weapons inspectors there. Instead of waiting for them to report Trump has posted on twitter an incendiary tweet about US missiles coming in:
"Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and “smart!” You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!” (It is worth noting Jaysh al-Islam, (in English 'The Army of Islam') the militia which controlled Douma at the time of the alleged chemical weapons attack, is said to have mounted a chemical attack on Kurdish civilians in Aleppo in April 2016. Yet according to the mainstream media, Trump, Macron and the British government believe they're incapable of either staging or faking such an attack)
Emmanuel Macron and Theresa May have proudly proclaimed they have held phone consultation with Trump about which Syrian government facilities to target.
May and Macron remind me of the kid who tags around with the school playground bully because they lack the physical attributes to be a bully themselves.
The USA and it's two European allies attempt to take the high moral ground by supporting ever more military intervention in Syria will not only prolong the war, it's gross hypocrisy of the worst kind. Pray tell me what is the difference between being vaporised by a cruise missile while seeking shelter in a Baghdad bunker from shock and awe, and choking to death after Chlorine attack in a cellar in Douma, if that is what happened.
What is the difference between the numbers killed in Yemen by Saudi Arabia with weapons supplied by the UK and USA, and those killed by the Assad regime in Syria with weapons supplied by Putin's Russia?
The Syrian government doesn't pose any threat to the USA or it’s citizens, nor its two main allies and never has, indeed that shoe is on the other foot.
When will we wake up to the fact military intervention in other people’s wars only makes a bad situation worse. History teaches it only prolongs wars, whether it be in the north of Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or Yemen.
Mick Hall blogs @ Organized Rage.Follow Mick Hall on Twitter @organizedrage
“If I Can’t Loot, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution.”
Matt Treacy, writing in the wake of looting in Dublin, dismissed as an ideological veneer any left wing attempt to sanitise the looters.
With apologies to Emma Goldman….
The Beast from the East not only caused the country to come to a halt for several days; it inspired the revolutionary proletariat of Tallaght to strike a blow against corporate capitalism and globalisation.
A LIDL store was demolished after being expropriated, and an attempt was made to burn down a Centra shop over which a number of people were living in apartments. Mostly the insurgents concentrated on attacking their neighbours who showed signs of having succumbed to consumerism. Some of the rebels clearly knew their Marcuse, and thoughtfully stole cars and smashed windows and mugged in an effort to bring the labour aristocracy back into the ranks of the Risen People.
Only a few stout comrades spoke out in favour of the Tallaght Panthers. Some even pointed out that LIDL is a non union shop, which of course was one of the main motivations for the toiling masses exacting their vengeance. The ultra left local elected representatives were either curiously silent or attempted to excuse the mayhem. Paul Murphy TD slammed the “naked class hatred” of those who condemned the criminality, and ludicrously tried to deflect from it by referring to protests over water charges. Their heroic defence of the LIDL 9 will not be forgotten.
Such ultra leftist dissimulation or even open support for those who prey on working class communities is not new, especially on the part of “revolutionaries” whose own class origins are rather different. It is very retro 1968, when the student run Berkeley Barb declared: “We are all criminals in the blind eyes of pig America… All property is target. All lawmen are enemy! From now on, Total Disregard for the man’s homes, jobs, polls, streets, stores, churches, daughters sons pets media culture games goals laws and orders. WE ARE THE FORCES OF CHAOS AND ANARCHY.”
What would their poor mothers have thought of it all?
Marx, when he was not writing about the revolutionary demand for transgender toilets, took a rather dim view of what his followers once termed the “lumpen proletariat.” Marx referred to them as social “dross,’” and “scum” who were the “recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all sorts, living off the garbage of society.” Writing about the periodic working class revolts in Paris, Engels referred to the taking of vengeance by the insurrectionists against the criminals. Mort aux voleurs! Death to the thieves! was daubed on the houses of criminals, so that they could be dealt with by their victims. Engels claimed that anyone purporting to be in the workers movement who pandered to these “gutter proletarians” was a traitor.
Tallaght was the first instance of rioting here since 2006 when a protest against a loyalist march developed into an outdoor shopping expedition as the barefoot oppressed of Dublin, and beyond, helped themselves to the contents of Foot Locker and other shoe emporiums.
In so doing, the starving masses made a Situationist statement that they would rather feed their souls with bright new fuck off orange trainers than take breakfast rolls and cornflakes from Spar, although the off license section was visited in a blow against the attempt to distract them in their righteous work of liberation with the opium of cheap alcohol.
Other European cities have witnessed such behaviour on a far grander scale. In 2005 there was something akin to an uprising by the Parisian underclass. London in 2011 erupted after the shooting by police of an armed drug dealer. While some on the Pollyanna left celebrated the riots, others recognised it as a phantasmagoria of the anti-social lumpen proletariat who were merely preying on and victimising the communities they infest on a larger scale than usual.
There were of course those, as in Dublin, who defended the assault of the lumpens on those around them. Solicitor Lucy Finchett-Maddock attempted to provide an ideological veneer by invoking the revolt of the “invisible and forgotten” against the “commodity fetish”; through the “freeing of the commodity from the realms of individualism.” That would be robbing, for those of us not familiar with Lacan and Derrida. The SWP described the killing of Duggan as “racist,” implying that the criminal mayhem that ensued was justified, and the former leader of the Militant Tendency part of which became Paul Murphy’s Socialist Party described the London riots as a “symptom of a general crisis of capitalism,” and claimed that only a minority had been motivated by criminality.
That sort of nonsense is a reversion to the adulation of the criminal that was common among the American left in the 1960s and 70s; among whose heroes were George Jackson and the Panthers led by a serial rapist and a drug dealer. In contrast, Malcolm X, who in his earlier life had been a criminal, had no such tolerance for the veneration of those who preyed on poor black people. In the 1960s, the Amsterdam News based in Harlem called for a crackdown on drug dealing and was attacked for supporting the “pigs.” Organisers of anti-rape marches in New York were accused of racism by Angela Davis, one of Jackson’s groupies.
Such dysfunctional thinking leads to a situation in which the burglar and mugger may be regarded as rebels against “bourgeois property relations” The logical conclusion of that line of thought is that the victims of crime ought not to be regarded as victims at all, but rather as “those who have an excess or surplus of commodities.” Stuart Hall declared that if street crime was an “evil,” then it was only so because it was the product of an “evil system.”
Dostoyevsky was a political prisoner in Siberia where he was surrounded mostly by criminals. He was dismissive of any sociological explanation of crime. Anticipating the amorality of the post modern left, Dostoyevsky stated that if we attribute criminal acts to the environment then we must logically conclude that all crime is a “noble protest against the environment.”
Foucault went beyond that to almost celebrate violent deviancy. He was fascinated by the potential to use power unrestricted by any sort of constraint. That led Chomsky to describe Foucault as “completely amoral” and as someone who had turned their back on any conception of a society that might embody the values of the Enlightenment, values which were at the basis of the democratic working class movement.
Those who subject communities to the sort of terror that was visited on Tallaght a fortnight ago epitomise that amorality. The only thing that matters is the gratification of their deviancy, and at anyone’s expense. They are assisted in the justification of their parasitism by a range of lawyers who ensure that they can run up dozens of convictions before being imprisoned; “social scientists” who construct the myth that the criminal is the primary victim, and a bankrupt ideology that attributes crime against ordinary people, often trying to do their best in difficult circumstances, to a range of causes from bin charges to climate change to Leo Varadkar’s jacket.
Perhaps some of the people inclined to look fondly on events such as took place in Tallaght might reflect upon what their fantasy of the breakdown of social order might look like.
I suspect it would be less like a scene from an Eisenstein film, and more like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Matt Treacy’s book
A Tunnel to the Moon: The End of the Irish
Republican Army
is also available @ Amazon.
Matt Treacy blogs @ Brocaire Books.
Follow Matt Treacy on Twitter @MattTreacy2
With apologies to Emma Goldman…. The Beast from the East not only caused the country to come to a halt for several days; it inspired the revolutionary proletariat of Tallaght to strike a blow against corporate capitalism and globalisation.
A LIDL store was demolished after being expropriated, and an attempt was made to burn down a Centra shop over which a number of people were living in apartments. Mostly the insurgents concentrated on attacking their neighbours who showed signs of having succumbed to consumerism. Some of the rebels clearly knew their Marcuse, and thoughtfully stole cars and smashed windows and mugged in an effort to bring the labour aristocracy back into the ranks of the Risen People.
Only a few stout comrades spoke out in favour of the Tallaght Panthers. Some even pointed out that LIDL is a non union shop, which of course was one of the main motivations for the toiling masses exacting their vengeance. The ultra left local elected representatives were either curiously silent or attempted to excuse the mayhem. Paul Murphy TD slammed the “naked class hatred” of those who condemned the criminality, and ludicrously tried to deflect from it by referring to protests over water charges. Their heroic defence of the LIDL 9 will not be forgotten.
Such ultra leftist dissimulation or even open support for those who prey on working class communities is not new, especially on the part of “revolutionaries” whose own class origins are rather different. It is very retro 1968, when the student run Berkeley Barb declared: “We are all criminals in the blind eyes of pig America… All property is target. All lawmen are enemy! From now on, Total Disregard for the man’s homes, jobs, polls, streets, stores, churches, daughters sons pets media culture games goals laws and orders. WE ARE THE FORCES OF CHAOS AND ANARCHY.”
What would their poor mothers have thought of it all?
Marx, when he was not writing about the revolutionary demand for transgender toilets, took a rather dim view of what his followers once termed the “lumpen proletariat.” Marx referred to them as social “dross,’” and “scum” who were the “recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all sorts, living off the garbage of society.” Writing about the periodic working class revolts in Paris, Engels referred to the taking of vengeance by the insurrectionists against the criminals. Mort aux voleurs! Death to the thieves! was daubed on the houses of criminals, so that they could be dealt with by their victims. Engels claimed that anyone purporting to be in the workers movement who pandered to these “gutter proletarians” was a traitor.
Tallaght was the first instance of rioting here since 2006 when a protest against a loyalist march developed into an outdoor shopping expedition as the barefoot oppressed of Dublin, and beyond, helped themselves to the contents of Foot Locker and other shoe emporiums.
In so doing, the starving masses made a Situationist statement that they would rather feed their souls with bright new fuck off orange trainers than take breakfast rolls and cornflakes from Spar, although the off license section was visited in a blow against the attempt to distract them in their righteous work of liberation with the opium of cheap alcohol.
Other European cities have witnessed such behaviour on a far grander scale. In 2005 there was something akin to an uprising by the Parisian underclass. London in 2011 erupted after the shooting by police of an armed drug dealer. While some on the Pollyanna left celebrated the riots, others recognised it as a phantasmagoria of the anti-social lumpen proletariat who were merely preying on and victimising the communities they infest on a larger scale than usual.
There were of course those, as in Dublin, who defended the assault of the lumpens on those around them. Solicitor Lucy Finchett-Maddock attempted to provide an ideological veneer by invoking the revolt of the “invisible and forgotten” against the “commodity fetish”; through the “freeing of the commodity from the realms of individualism.” That would be robbing, for those of us not familiar with Lacan and Derrida. The SWP described the killing of Duggan as “racist,” implying that the criminal mayhem that ensued was justified, and the former leader of the Militant Tendency part of which became Paul Murphy’s Socialist Party described the London riots as a “symptom of a general crisis of capitalism,” and claimed that only a minority had been motivated by criminality.
That sort of nonsense is a reversion to the adulation of the criminal that was common among the American left in the 1960s and 70s; among whose heroes were George Jackson and the Panthers led by a serial rapist and a drug dealer. In contrast, Malcolm X, who in his earlier life had been a criminal, had no such tolerance for the veneration of those who preyed on poor black people. In the 1960s, the Amsterdam News based in Harlem called for a crackdown on drug dealing and was attacked for supporting the “pigs.” Organisers of anti-rape marches in New York were accused of racism by Angela Davis, one of Jackson’s groupies.
Such dysfunctional thinking leads to a situation in which the burglar and mugger may be regarded as rebels against “bourgeois property relations” The logical conclusion of that line of thought is that the victims of crime ought not to be regarded as victims at all, but rather as “those who have an excess or surplus of commodities.” Stuart Hall declared that if street crime was an “evil,” then it was only so because it was the product of an “evil system.”
Dostoyevsky was a political prisoner in Siberia where he was surrounded mostly by criminals. He was dismissive of any sociological explanation of crime. Anticipating the amorality of the post modern left, Dostoyevsky stated that if we attribute criminal acts to the environment then we must logically conclude that all crime is a “noble protest against the environment.”
Foucault went beyond that to almost celebrate violent deviancy. He was fascinated by the potential to use power unrestricted by any sort of constraint. That led Chomsky to describe Foucault as “completely amoral” and as someone who had turned their back on any conception of a society that might embody the values of the Enlightenment, values which were at the basis of the democratic working class movement.
Those who subject communities to the sort of terror that was visited on Tallaght a fortnight ago epitomise that amorality. The only thing that matters is the gratification of their deviancy, and at anyone’s expense. They are assisted in the justification of their parasitism by a range of lawyers who ensure that they can run up dozens of convictions before being imprisoned; “social scientists” who construct the myth that the criminal is the primary victim, and a bankrupt ideology that attributes crime against ordinary people, often trying to do their best in difficult circumstances, to a range of causes from bin charges to climate change to Leo Varadkar’s jacket.
Perhaps some of the people inclined to look fondly on events such as took place in Tallaght might reflect upon what their fantasy of the breakdown of social order might look like.
I suspect it would be less like a scene from an Eisenstein film, and more like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Matt Treacy’s book
A Tunnel to the Moon: The End of the Irish
Republican Army
is also available @ Amazon. Matt Treacy blogs @ Brocaire Books.
Follow Matt Treacy on Twitter @MattTreacy2
April 23, 2018
Son Of A Dog
Uri Avnery discusses no-violence as a strategy Palestinians should consider.
Recently he spoke about Donald Trump and uttered the words "May your house be destroyed". In Arabic this is a common curse, and sounds less extreme than in English. But even in Arabic this is not a usual phrase when speaking about a head of state.
This week Abbas spoke about the US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and called him a "Son of a Dog". This, too, sounds in Arabic slightly less offensive than in English, but is hardly diplomatic.
It is hard to say that Friedman does not deserve it, though I would have wished, as a dog-lover, that Abbas had chosen another animal.
Friedman is a kippah-wearing Jew, who identifies completely with the most extreme settlers in the occupied territories. He certainly would be more fitting as Israeli ambassador to the US than as US ambassador to Israel.
That would be problematic, too, because he has called liberal American Jews "worse than Capos" – "Capos" (short for "camp police") were the prisoners who assisted the Nazis in the concentration camps.
To appoint such a Jewish fascist ambassador to Israel is – well – chutzpah. This could not happen in a normal country, which does not send an ambassador to a country in which he or she has a personal involvement. But Trump does not care. Not for Israel and not for Palestine.
So What does Trump really care about? He cares about votes in US elections.
Sending a religious Jew to serve as his ambassador in Jerusalem may gain him some votes in the US Jewish community. American Jews generally vote for the Democrats. Why? Out of habit. Generations of new immigrants to the US have voted for the Democratic party - the Irish before the Jews, the Asians after the Jews.
But most American Jews will continue to vote for the Democrats, in spite of the kippah on the head of Friedman. There are voices in the Jewish community which accuse their leaders of neglecting their own concerns, such as rising anti-Semitism, and spending all their energies supporting Israel's extreme right-wing government.
But Trump has far more important supporters: the millions of evangelists. These peculiar Christian fanatics have a special vision: they believe that Jesus Christ will return once all the Jews congregate in the Holy Land. They do not like to mention what they expect to happen next: the Jews will convert to Christianity, and those who do not will perish.
Sounds strange? It sure is strange. But Trump needs these millions of votes, without which he would not have been elected in the first place. He acts according to the beliefs of this sect.
As a result, the President of the US totally ignores the rights of the Palestinian people and their aspirations. According to him, the Palestinians must accept what is offered to them, as a dog must accept what his master throws to him and wag his tail. What exactly? Trump's masterful Peace Plan is still wrapped in secrecy. But it is enough to know who is in charge of it: his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
So it is natural for Abbas to despair. He knows that during his remaining days in office, nothing good will happen to the Palestinians.
Never Since the emergence of the modern Palestinian nation has its situation been as dire as it is now.
The inhabitants of Palestine began to feel like a nation at the end of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire broke down. Photos of demonstrations held at the time in Jerusalem show the new Palestinian flag – black, white, green and red. Until then, the Palestinians were generally considered "South Syrians". But when Syria was turned over to the French and Palestine to the British, this tie was broken.
Since then, the Palestinians have experienced many events: the Zionist influx, the Great Arab Rebellion of 1936, the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, the end of British rule, the war of 1948, the Naqbah (catastrophe), the several wars, the rise and murder of Yasser Arafat, and more. But never was their situation as desperate as now.
True, the heart of all the Arab peoples, and indeed all the Muslim peoples, has remained true to the Palestinians. But there is no Arab – or Muslim – government which is not ready to sell the Palestinian cause for its own interests.
Throughout the world there is a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians, but no government would lift a finger for them. And the most powerful country in the world is now their open enemy.
As If all this was not enough, the Palestinians themselves are deeply divided between the PLO in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. This is so much in the interest of the Israeli government that it is difficult not to suspect that it is involved.
Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River there live now about 13 million people, about half of them Jews and the other half Arabs. The Arabs may have a slight majority, which will grow continuously because of their higher birth rate. That does frighten the Zionist demographers. But they "cut off" the Gaza Strip from the rest of the country, pretending that its 2 million inhabitants do not belong to Palestine. That makes the problem seem a little less frightening.
This is the situation now. There is a tacit agreement in Israel not to "count" the inhabitants of the Strip. They are not there. There is only the West Bank, which must be Judaized.
A Desperate situation has one advantage: it encourages the search for new solutions.
That is happening now on the Palestinian side. Without waiting for the stepping down of Abbas and the appointment of a new leader, new ideas are popping up.
Yasser Arafat once explained to me why he entered the path to Oslo. We tried everything, he said. We tried the armed struggle. We tried diplomacy. We tried full-scale wars. Everything failed. So we entered a new road: peace with Israel. (The first sign was Arafat's inviting me to a meeting in Beirut.)
It is clear now that Oslo has failed. Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. In Israel the extreme right is in power. It steals the land and puts settlers on it. Israel has a leader who hates the Palestinians, an annexationist from birth.
The path to peace is blocked. The generation of Mahmoud Abbas, the generation of Yasser Arafat, has reached the end of its road.
And here comes a new generation. In a few weeks, a new chapter in the Palestinian story may start.
There have always been voices in the Palestinian community who advocated non-violent struggle. They found no listeners, because in Arab tradition, struggles are generally violent. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela were not Muslims.
Now the idea of the non-violent struggle is raising its head. Not because of its moral aspect, but because it promises results.
In a few weeks, the Palestinians will start a non-violent campaign. Its declared aim is the return of the refugees. Thousands of Palestinians are about to march to the borders with Israel, first in the Gaza Strip and then in other places. They will not confront the Israeli army, and not break through the fences. Instead they will put up tent camps on the Palestinian side of the fences and stay there for a long time.
This is a well-tried method. The sleepy Palestinian cause will suddenly return to life. From all over the world, journalists will come and see. The camps will become centers of world attention. Throughout Europe and the world, solidarity camps will spring up. In the Arab countries, the princes and Emirs will find it hard to suppress demonstrations of sympathy.
And what then? Allah is great.
In My eyes, this plan has one great defect: the official aim.
If the protest movement concentrated on the aim of Palestinian independence, the world would give its blessing. There is now a world-wide consensus in favor of Palestinian statehood and the end of the Israeli occupation. In Israel, too, this aim has a lot of supporters. "Two States" or one colonial state, independence or occupation – the choice is clear.
The refugee problem is quite different. During the war of 1948, some 650 thousand Palestinians were displaced, either in the turmoil of the fighting or as a deliberate Israeli policy. By now, their families have grown to 6 million.
Some live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, some in the countries around Israel and throughout the world. Some have taken root and started a new life, some are still refugees, supported by the international community. All are longing for their ancestral homes.
Bringing them back would mean the end of Israel, the displacement of millions of Israelis. This would be possible only through war. The very idea frightens every Israeli.
Is there no solution? I believe there is. Once, after a very emotional meeting with Palestinian refugees in America, I told my wife: "You know what my impression is? That these people are less interested in an actual return than in moral compensation. They want Israel to confess and apologize."
When drawing up plans for peace, I proposed (a) to apologize officially, (b) to allow the return of a symbolic number of refugees, (c) to pay compensation to all others.
How many would be allowed to return? A number of 100 thousand has been mentioned. I believe that we can do much better. In a situation of peace and reconciliation, even the addition of half a million to Israel's present 1.5 million Palestinian citizens would be acceptable.
I discussed this solution with Yasser Arafat. My impression was that he agreed more or less, though he kept the refugee issue as a bargaining chip. Anyhow, this is no longer the main problem on the way of peace.
So why go back 70 years? In a major Palestinian campaign, as planned now, why not concentrate on the main point: an end to the occupation, a State of Palestine next to the State of Israel?
The Non-Violent struggle is an excellent idea.
It reminds me of a saying of the late Abba Even: "People and states always do the right thing – after all other possibilities have been exhausted."
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist. He writes @ Gush Shalom
Recently he spoke about Donald Trump and uttered the words "May your house be destroyed". In Arabic this is a common curse, and sounds less extreme than in English. But even in Arabic this is not a usual phrase when speaking about a head of state.
This week Abbas spoke about the US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and called him a "Son of a Dog". This, too, sounds in Arabic slightly less offensive than in English, but is hardly diplomatic.
It is hard to say that Friedman does not deserve it, though I would have wished, as a dog-lover, that Abbas had chosen another animal.
Friedman is a kippah-wearing Jew, who identifies completely with the most extreme settlers in the occupied territories. He certainly would be more fitting as Israeli ambassador to the US than as US ambassador to Israel.
That would be problematic, too, because he has called liberal American Jews "worse than Capos" – "Capos" (short for "camp police") were the prisoners who assisted the Nazis in the concentration camps.
To appoint such a Jewish fascist ambassador to Israel is – well – chutzpah. This could not happen in a normal country, which does not send an ambassador to a country in which he or she has a personal involvement. But Trump does not care. Not for Israel and not for Palestine.
So What does Trump really care about? He cares about votes in US elections.
Sending a religious Jew to serve as his ambassador in Jerusalem may gain him some votes in the US Jewish community. American Jews generally vote for the Democrats. Why? Out of habit. Generations of new immigrants to the US have voted for the Democratic party - the Irish before the Jews, the Asians after the Jews.
But most American Jews will continue to vote for the Democrats, in spite of the kippah on the head of Friedman. There are voices in the Jewish community which accuse their leaders of neglecting their own concerns, such as rising anti-Semitism, and spending all their energies supporting Israel's extreme right-wing government.
But Trump has far more important supporters: the millions of evangelists. These peculiar Christian fanatics have a special vision: they believe that Jesus Christ will return once all the Jews congregate in the Holy Land. They do not like to mention what they expect to happen next: the Jews will convert to Christianity, and those who do not will perish.
Sounds strange? It sure is strange. But Trump needs these millions of votes, without which he would not have been elected in the first place. He acts according to the beliefs of this sect.
As a result, the President of the US totally ignores the rights of the Palestinian people and their aspirations. According to him, the Palestinians must accept what is offered to them, as a dog must accept what his master throws to him and wag his tail. What exactly? Trump's masterful Peace Plan is still wrapped in secrecy. But it is enough to know who is in charge of it: his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
So it is natural for Abbas to despair. He knows that during his remaining days in office, nothing good will happen to the Palestinians.
Never Since the emergence of the modern Palestinian nation has its situation been as dire as it is now.
The inhabitants of Palestine began to feel like a nation at the end of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire broke down. Photos of demonstrations held at the time in Jerusalem show the new Palestinian flag – black, white, green and red. Until then, the Palestinians were generally considered "South Syrians". But when Syria was turned over to the French and Palestine to the British, this tie was broken.
Since then, the Palestinians have experienced many events: the Zionist influx, the Great Arab Rebellion of 1936, the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, the end of British rule, the war of 1948, the Naqbah (catastrophe), the several wars, the rise and murder of Yasser Arafat, and more. But never was their situation as desperate as now.
True, the heart of all the Arab peoples, and indeed all the Muslim peoples, has remained true to the Palestinians. But there is no Arab – or Muslim – government which is not ready to sell the Palestinian cause for its own interests.
Throughout the world there is a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians, but no government would lift a finger for them. And the most powerful country in the world is now their open enemy.
As If all this was not enough, the Palestinians themselves are deeply divided between the PLO in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. This is so much in the interest of the Israeli government that it is difficult not to suspect that it is involved.
Between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River there live now about 13 million people, about half of them Jews and the other half Arabs. The Arabs may have a slight majority, which will grow continuously because of their higher birth rate. That does frighten the Zionist demographers. But they "cut off" the Gaza Strip from the rest of the country, pretending that its 2 million inhabitants do not belong to Palestine. That makes the problem seem a little less frightening.
This is the situation now. There is a tacit agreement in Israel not to "count" the inhabitants of the Strip. They are not there. There is only the West Bank, which must be Judaized.
A Desperate situation has one advantage: it encourages the search for new solutions.
That is happening now on the Palestinian side. Without waiting for the stepping down of Abbas and the appointment of a new leader, new ideas are popping up.
Yasser Arafat once explained to me why he entered the path to Oslo. We tried everything, he said. We tried the armed struggle. We tried diplomacy. We tried full-scale wars. Everything failed. So we entered a new road: peace with Israel. (The first sign was Arafat's inviting me to a meeting in Beirut.)
It is clear now that Oslo has failed. Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. In Israel the extreme right is in power. It steals the land and puts settlers on it. Israel has a leader who hates the Palestinians, an annexationist from birth.
The path to peace is blocked. The generation of Mahmoud Abbas, the generation of Yasser Arafat, has reached the end of its road.
And here comes a new generation. In a few weeks, a new chapter in the Palestinian story may start.
There have always been voices in the Palestinian community who advocated non-violent struggle. They found no listeners, because in Arab tradition, struggles are generally violent. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela were not Muslims.
Now the idea of the non-violent struggle is raising its head. Not because of its moral aspect, but because it promises results.
In a few weeks, the Palestinians will start a non-violent campaign. Its declared aim is the return of the refugees. Thousands of Palestinians are about to march to the borders with Israel, first in the Gaza Strip and then in other places. They will not confront the Israeli army, and not break through the fences. Instead they will put up tent camps on the Palestinian side of the fences and stay there for a long time.
This is a well-tried method. The sleepy Palestinian cause will suddenly return to life. From all over the world, journalists will come and see. The camps will become centers of world attention. Throughout Europe and the world, solidarity camps will spring up. In the Arab countries, the princes and Emirs will find it hard to suppress demonstrations of sympathy.
And what then? Allah is great.
In My eyes, this plan has one great defect: the official aim.
If the protest movement concentrated on the aim of Palestinian independence, the world would give its blessing. There is now a world-wide consensus in favor of Palestinian statehood and the end of the Israeli occupation. In Israel, too, this aim has a lot of supporters. "Two States" or one colonial state, independence or occupation – the choice is clear.
The refugee problem is quite different. During the war of 1948, some 650 thousand Palestinians were displaced, either in the turmoil of the fighting or as a deliberate Israeli policy. By now, their families have grown to 6 million.
Some live in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, some in the countries around Israel and throughout the world. Some have taken root and started a new life, some are still refugees, supported by the international community. All are longing for their ancestral homes.
Bringing them back would mean the end of Israel, the displacement of millions of Israelis. This would be possible only through war. The very idea frightens every Israeli.
Is there no solution? I believe there is. Once, after a very emotional meeting with Palestinian refugees in America, I told my wife: "You know what my impression is? That these people are less interested in an actual return than in moral compensation. They want Israel to confess and apologize."
When drawing up plans for peace, I proposed (a) to apologize officially, (b) to allow the return of a symbolic number of refugees, (c) to pay compensation to all others.
How many would be allowed to return? A number of 100 thousand has been mentioned. I believe that we can do much better. In a situation of peace and reconciliation, even the addition of half a million to Israel's present 1.5 million Palestinian citizens would be acceptable.
I discussed this solution with Yasser Arafat. My impression was that he agreed more or less, though he kept the refugee issue as a bargaining chip. Anyhow, this is no longer the main problem on the way of peace.
So why go back 70 years? In a major Palestinian campaign, as planned now, why not concentrate on the main point: an end to the occupation, a State of Palestine next to the State of Israel?
The Non-Violent struggle is an excellent idea.
It reminds me of a saying of the late Abba Even: "People and states always do the right thing – after all other possibilities have been exhausted."
Uri Avnery is a veteran Israeli peace activist. He writes @ Gush Shalom
A Unique Customs Union
A unique Customs Union between Northern Ireland and the European Union - that’s the solution to the Irish border question and Brexit which controversial commentator Dr John Coulter is proposing in his latest Fearless Flying Column today.
Ireland, north and south, along with the European Union needs its own unique Customs Union to avoid the economic nightmare of a hard border as the Brexit clock ticks towards March 2019.
The EU is clearly adamant about the need for Northern Ireland to remain in its Customs Union after Brexit, and the DUP’s dogmatic stance over an Irish Language Act which saw the latest Ulster peace talks flop, British Prime Minister Theresa May could be forgiven for thinking she has no way through the Customs Union impasse.
However, there is a compromise which is both achievable and workable - a special new Customs Union between Northern Ireland and the European Union post Brexit could well be the solution which the staunchly euro skeptic DUP could compromise on.
As the situation currently exists, the DUP will not agree to Northern Ireland remaining in the present Customs Union after March 2019, but if past experiences of DUP compromises during the Irish peace process are taken as a benchmark, a completely new – and unique – Customs Union could be on the cards.
The political wild card which must be factored in at this stage is the collapse of the negotiations between Sinn Fein and the DUP which could have seen the devolved power-sharing Executive at Stormont fully restored. It has been collapsed since January 2017.
With no agreement on restoring devolution, Direct Rule from Westminster seems the likely option.
The DUP has already negotiated a cash boost for Northern Ireland – estimated to be around one billion pounds – in exchange for the votes of its 10 MPs to keep Theresa May’s Government in power, especially given the fallout of the recent air strikes in Syria.
In spite of the DUP’s public euro skeptism, given the party’s substantial support among the pro-Union farming community, the question could be posed - how many DUP farming voters actually voted ‘remain’ in the membership referendum because of the EU subsidies to the agricultural sector?
While the DUP is staunchly opposed to Northern Ireland remaining in the Customs Union as it presently exists, the party could compromise on a new deal which would see the creation of a special one-off Customs Union between Northern Ireland and the EU.
What is at stake here in dictating which format any proposed new Customs Union could take will be the type of Direct Rule over Northern Ireland.
Traditionally and historically, Direct Rule from Westminster has involved the Government of the day appointing MPs from British mainland constituencies to run the various political departments in the Northern Ireland Office.
However, given the unique arrangement which the DUP now has with the Tories, could the DUP be in a position to negotiate which MPs are appointed to the NIO? Even better for the DUP, could the party actually demand that the NIO ministerial team be staffed by MPs elected from Northern Ireland?
The current tally of 18 MPs from Northern Ireland comprise 10 DUP, one Independent Unionist (Lady Sylvia Hermon, the widow of a former police chief constable) and seven abstentionist Sinn Fein MPs, who still refuse to take their Commons seats.
Given that Sinn Fein and the Dublin government oppose Direct Rule, for Theresa May to appoint a team of DUP MPs to run the NIO could be a step too far and destabilise the entire peace process established by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
The compromise which the DUP could agree to is that it could negotiate with the Prime Minister which Conservative MPs are appointed to run the NIO. This would allow Mrs May to select Tories from the euro skeptic Right of the party who would be favourable towards the DUP – even through Northern Ireland overall voted ‘remain’ in the referendum.
The Dublin government, likewise, would naturally prefer the existing Customs Union to be in place after March 2019 to avoid the economic nightmare of the so-called ‘hard border’, which would make cross-border trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic very cumbersome.
While euro skeptics in the DUP point to the fact that Northern Ireland does more trade with mainland Britain than with the Republic, the DUP will have to adopt an economic all-island – as opposed to a political all-Ireland – compromise to secure the financial stability of both states on the geographical island of Ireland.
The key question – with some form of Direct Rule inevitable – is who would negotiate this unique Customs Union between the EU and Northern Ireland? Would this be done as part of the overall UK negotiating team, or could an NIO – staffed by either Tory or DUP MPs, or a combination of both – be given special negotiating rights to agree an EU/NI Customs Union compromise?
London and Dublin must also keep uppermost in their minds that the DUP2018 is not the same political beast as the DUP1988 led then by the late Rev Ian Paisley.
While Paisley senior – later Lord Bannside – is perhaps best known for his ‘Never, never, never’ speech against the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, he did compromise and negotiate the St Andrews Agreement of 2006 which heralded in the power-sharing Stormont Executive between the DUP and Sinn Fein. The bottom line is – in spite of the DUP’s perceived Hard Right image, it can be pragmatic enough to compromise when called upon.
On paper, a unique EU/NI Customs Union is the obvious solution to guarantee the required ‘soft border’ option between Northern Ireland and the Republic. It is the clear compromise which could politically palatable for EU negotiator Michel Barnier, the UK Brexit team – and especially the DUP.
But this all comes with a severe health warning. If Northern Ireland gets a unique Customs Union deal, the Scottish nationalists will equally demand one given that Scotland also voted ‘remain’. Could this see the formation of a Celtic Alliance between Ireland and Scotland?
Then what happens if Westminster compromises on Dublin and Sinn Fein’s demands that a peace deal be negotiated for Northern Ireland using the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference?
The Conference is currently only a recommendation-making body. What happens if it is upgraded to a decision-taking forum? That could leave a unique EU/NI Customs Union looking like an exact mirror image of the current structure.
Dr John Coulter has been a journalist working in Ireland for the past 40 years.
His ebook, An Sais Glas (The Green Sash) The Road to National Republicanism is published on Amazon Kindle.
Dr Coulter is on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
Ireland, north and south, along with the European Union needs its own unique Customs Union to avoid the economic nightmare of a hard border as the Brexit clock ticks towards March 2019.
The EU is clearly adamant about the need for Northern Ireland to remain in its Customs Union after Brexit, and the DUP’s dogmatic stance over an Irish Language Act which saw the latest Ulster peace talks flop, British Prime Minister Theresa May could be forgiven for thinking she has no way through the Customs Union impasse.
However, there is a compromise which is both achievable and workable - a special new Customs Union between Northern Ireland and the European Union post Brexit could well be the solution which the staunchly euro skeptic DUP could compromise on.
As the situation currently exists, the DUP will not agree to Northern Ireland remaining in the present Customs Union after March 2019, but if past experiences of DUP compromises during the Irish peace process are taken as a benchmark, a completely new – and unique – Customs Union could be on the cards.
The political wild card which must be factored in at this stage is the collapse of the negotiations between Sinn Fein and the DUP which could have seen the devolved power-sharing Executive at Stormont fully restored. It has been collapsed since January 2017.
With no agreement on restoring devolution, Direct Rule from Westminster seems the likely option.
The DUP has already negotiated a cash boost for Northern Ireland – estimated to be around one billion pounds – in exchange for the votes of its 10 MPs to keep Theresa May’s Government in power, especially given the fallout of the recent air strikes in Syria.
In spite of the DUP’s public euro skeptism, given the party’s substantial support among the pro-Union farming community, the question could be posed - how many DUP farming voters actually voted ‘remain’ in the membership referendum because of the EU subsidies to the agricultural sector?
While the DUP is staunchly opposed to Northern Ireland remaining in the Customs Union as it presently exists, the party could compromise on a new deal which would see the creation of a special one-off Customs Union between Northern Ireland and the EU.
What is at stake here in dictating which format any proposed new Customs Union could take will be the type of Direct Rule over Northern Ireland.
Traditionally and historically, Direct Rule from Westminster has involved the Government of the day appointing MPs from British mainland constituencies to run the various political departments in the Northern Ireland Office.
However, given the unique arrangement which the DUP now has with the Tories, could the DUP be in a position to negotiate which MPs are appointed to the NIO? Even better for the DUP, could the party actually demand that the NIO ministerial team be staffed by MPs elected from Northern Ireland?
The current tally of 18 MPs from Northern Ireland comprise 10 DUP, one Independent Unionist (Lady Sylvia Hermon, the widow of a former police chief constable) and seven abstentionist Sinn Fein MPs, who still refuse to take their Commons seats.
Given that Sinn Fein and the Dublin government oppose Direct Rule, for Theresa May to appoint a team of DUP MPs to run the NIO could be a step too far and destabilise the entire peace process established by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
The compromise which the DUP could agree to is that it could negotiate with the Prime Minister which Conservative MPs are appointed to run the NIO. This would allow Mrs May to select Tories from the euro skeptic Right of the party who would be favourable towards the DUP – even through Northern Ireland overall voted ‘remain’ in the referendum.
The Dublin government, likewise, would naturally prefer the existing Customs Union to be in place after March 2019 to avoid the economic nightmare of the so-called ‘hard border’, which would make cross-border trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic very cumbersome.
While euro skeptics in the DUP point to the fact that Northern Ireland does more trade with mainland Britain than with the Republic, the DUP will have to adopt an economic all-island – as opposed to a political all-Ireland – compromise to secure the financial stability of both states on the geographical island of Ireland.
The key question – with some form of Direct Rule inevitable – is who would negotiate this unique Customs Union between the EU and Northern Ireland? Would this be done as part of the overall UK negotiating team, or could an NIO – staffed by either Tory or DUP MPs, or a combination of both – be given special negotiating rights to agree an EU/NI Customs Union compromise?
London and Dublin must also keep uppermost in their minds that the DUP2018 is not the same political beast as the DUP1988 led then by the late Rev Ian Paisley.
While Paisley senior – later Lord Bannside – is perhaps best known for his ‘Never, never, never’ speech against the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, he did compromise and negotiate the St Andrews Agreement of 2006 which heralded in the power-sharing Stormont Executive between the DUP and Sinn Fein. The bottom line is – in spite of the DUP’s perceived Hard Right image, it can be pragmatic enough to compromise when called upon.
On paper, a unique EU/NI Customs Union is the obvious solution to guarantee the required ‘soft border’ option between Northern Ireland and the Republic. It is the clear compromise which could politically palatable for EU negotiator Michel Barnier, the UK Brexit team – and especially the DUP.
But this all comes with a severe health warning. If Northern Ireland gets a unique Customs Union deal, the Scottish nationalists will equally demand one given that Scotland also voted ‘remain’. Could this see the formation of a Celtic Alliance between Ireland and Scotland?
Then what happens if Westminster compromises on Dublin and Sinn Fein’s demands that a peace deal be negotiated for Northern Ireland using the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference?
The Conference is currently only a recommendation-making body. What happens if it is upgraded to a decision-taking forum? That could leave a unique EU/NI Customs Union looking like an exact mirror image of the current structure.
Dr John Coulter has been a journalist working in Ireland for the past 40 years. His ebook, An Sais Glas (The Green Sash) The Road to National Republicanism is published on Amazon Kindle.
Dr Coulter is on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
April 22, 2018
When Zionism Rubs Up Against Reality
Stanley Cohen writing in Counterpunch on Israeli war crimes.
Photo by Jordi Bernabeu Farrús | CC BY 2.0
With these commanding words, Robert H. Jackson, Chief Counsel for the United States, opened the War Crimes Tribunals at Nuremberg, Germany not long after the conclusion of World War II.
Empanelled to hold accountable military, political and judicial leaders for violations of international law… including war crimes, crimes against humanity and the law of war… the tribunals imposed personal accountability for genocide directed at Jews and others marked by the German state as a challenge to its declared racial, religious and political supremacy.
Although these offenses took many forms, at their core, each derived their evil from a common intersect that those targeted by the state for eradication were not just inferior, but unworthy of life itself… men, women and children, young and old, reduced to little more than objects of surreal derision whose mere existence contaminated the state’s supremacist lens.
There is no secret about the campaign of terror unleashed by the Third Reich as it swallowed states and triggered international violence unseen before or since. Nor are its tools of open warfare against military and civilians, alike, subject to any serious debate. While some choose to contest the number of victims or recast the precise instruments of persecution, no serious observer of history doubts the role that box cars, ghettos, siege, and ovens played in a conscious effort to silence the diversity of life while much of the world looked away.
The assault on humanity did not unfold overnight, or in a vacuum, with a sudden roundup. It followed a well calculated and implemented historical rewrite… a slow, but steady, recast of entire peoples… stripping them of their history, culture and collective purpose and decency.
What began with the burn of books and silence of press soon moved on to a successful reach of propaganda that cast a dark pall across millions whose wrong was to speak a different language, embrace another faith or to demand justice. Once there, it was a short walk to assault and worse.
The Repeat of History
With conscience, and vision as an outsider looking in, today, it is simply impossible not to feel an overwhelming sense of sheer revulsion when, if one is a caring being, an honest scan comes across Israel.
Forget about humanity and compassion or any broad notion of enlightened collective purpose. By now, Israel has reduced these cornerstones of fundamental decency to fabled fiction… a successful narrative of perverse existence that crushes truth and justice as little more than tedious impediments to its own, now decade’s old, ethnic and racial pogrom against others.
Israel is good at what it does. Damn good. No, not its slaughter, torture and endless detention and land theft; these are givens. A dark, very public, almost proud record of “achievement” that stands essentially unparalleled when it comes to recent contempt for international norm and law.
Like those before, what it really excels at is the grand lie… the convenient historical rewrite; the excuse; the ability to recast yesterday, today and surely tomorrow as so much a duty-bound journey in which no outrage is beyond the pale, no crime too extreme, no offense too offensive. Always, of course, cast in the talisman of survival. It’s a skill … a dodgy political art-form that converts inconvenient truth into self serving dogma with all too predictable deadly consequence.
Unlike that rare explosive autocrat or passing despotic regime, Israel has perfected its crafted control of selective reality in time-tested ways nothing short of masterful. Long before U.N. anthropologists discovered a European state in the midst of an Arab history, Zionists mastered the skill of expedient deception.
Thus, almost a hundred years ago, European terrorists became celebrated freedom fighters as they slaughtered Palestinians asleep in their beds and cribs. The Nakba, a forced stampede of almost a million Palestinians sparked by mass rape and murder, recast with historical ease to become a voluntary transition… a move by restive villagers to find a better time in a better place.
Kibbutzim, those enlightened socialist communes that, with magic-like remake, blossomed from long barren deserts. Could that be the rubble of age-old villages and decomposed remains just below the veneer of the sand?
Settlements, an employment opportunity for a troubled work force in need of purpose and discipline. The siege of Gaza… not at all a premeditated embargo of food, medicine, water, electricity and movement to break the will of its two million people, but rather a generous helping hand to liberate them from the limitations of their primitive vision and Hamas terror.
Advancing itself as a democracy under siege, Israel has long since abandoned any pretense of equality and justice in its limitless thirst to seize what little remains of Palestine as it exalts a racist de jure Jewish state in its quest.
This supremacist drive has been occasioned not merely with the passage of time or through a loss of interest by the world community alone. Along the way, to be sure, by design, Israel has successfully exploited the ignorance and fear of Arab and Muslim communities by the West. Of late, it has found willing companion among some Arab states anxious to move on from proxy to full on partner as they’ve tired of the “dilemma” that is Palestine.
In Israel and the occupied territories, the catalog of ersatz narrative is endless. With a slap… a stab, a book… a bomb; a prayer… a provocation, the Zionist tale has long since swallowed any semblance of relevance, let alone reality. Yet, from time immemorial, much of the world has blinked, frozen in place, fixated by a steady broadcast of propaganda, both home spun in Israel and in echo abroad.
Yet, over the last ten days, that faux moral perch has begun to collapse as the winds of truth have blown away the mask of hate that is very much Israel. During this time, tens of thousands of peaceful unarmed demonstrators marched on the barricades of their Gaza prison only to be met by carnage.
It is unnecessary to repeat, in full, the tales of slaughter that ensued as hundreds of snipers, drones and tanks announced with deadly precision that all were fair game for nothing more than voice. When the tear gas cleared , “fortunate” young men, women and children, elderly and journalists, alike, lay paralyzed by a strain of chemical assault, similar to sporadic reported uses since 2001, which soon gave way to uncontrolled vomiting and trembles.
For others, less fortunate, thousands lay bloodied by explosive high velocity munitions designed to rip apart flesh and destroy organs. Some thirty-one were murdered. Almost all casualties shot in the back of their head or torso.
What is there about a peaceful march, the national flag, and a Dakbe song and dance that so enrages an occupation force as to drive its snipers to unleash deadly targeted fire as if surrounded by well armed enemy combatants?
The Law
Under international law, crimes against humanity include “murder and other inhumane acts carried out against any civilian population… when such acts are done or such persecutions carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.”
A war crime is an act that constitutes a “serious violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility and include intentionally killing civilians… destroying civilian property… and serious violations of the principles of distinction and proportionality, such as strategic bombing of civilian populations.”
Under the law of war, military necessity is governed by several constraints: an attack or action must be intended to help in the defeat of the enemy; it must be an attack on a legitimate military objective, and the harm caused to civilians or civilian property must be proportional and not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
Under international humanitarian law, proportionality is a principle that governs the legal use of force in an armed conflict, whereby belligerents must make sure that the harm caused to civilians or civilian property is not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected by an attack on a legitimate military objective.
Finally, “the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him”.
That is to say it is not an acceptable defense to simply say “I was just following my superior’s orders.”
For years, as some have debated the reach of international law, much of the world has stood in silence and, accordingly, very much complicit as Israel has carried out unspeakable offenses against a largely civilian population in Palestine.
Although often nuanced, if not complex, the application of law to facts is not magic. At times a plain read of well settled legal covenants in the light of events at hand can lead even an unpracticed but principled eye to conclude that violations of law have in fact occurred.
Not before has Israel’s indifference to international law been so clear, so visible, so compelling as it has been through the lens of its repeated slaughter, over the last ten days in Gaza, as thousands of civilians have simply marched and marched in peace to say “enough”.
Today, more than 70 years after the judgments at Nuremberg, we are witness to an undeniable paradox as those victimized long ago by notions of racial, religious and political superiority have themselves become willing accomplished adherents of that same evil doctrine.
In words that shook the silence of the courtroom with the majesty of the moment war crimes prosecutor Robert H. Jackson passed, to generations to come, a reminder of the obligation companion to humanity:
Stanley L Cohen is a lawyer and human rights
activist in New York City.
He has done extensive work in the Middle Eastand Africa.
Photo by Jordi Bernabeu Farrús | CC BY 2.0 The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.
With these commanding words, Robert H. Jackson, Chief Counsel for the United States, opened the War Crimes Tribunals at Nuremberg, Germany not long after the conclusion of World War II.
Empanelled to hold accountable military, political and judicial leaders for violations of international law… including war crimes, crimes against humanity and the law of war… the tribunals imposed personal accountability for genocide directed at Jews and others marked by the German state as a challenge to its declared racial, religious and political supremacy.
Although these offenses took many forms, at their core, each derived their evil from a common intersect that those targeted by the state for eradication were not just inferior, but unworthy of life itself… men, women and children, young and old, reduced to little more than objects of surreal derision whose mere existence contaminated the state’s supremacist lens.
There is no secret about the campaign of terror unleashed by the Third Reich as it swallowed states and triggered international violence unseen before or since. Nor are its tools of open warfare against military and civilians, alike, subject to any serious debate. While some choose to contest the number of victims or recast the precise instruments of persecution, no serious observer of history doubts the role that box cars, ghettos, siege, and ovens played in a conscious effort to silence the diversity of life while much of the world looked away.
The assault on humanity did not unfold overnight, or in a vacuum, with a sudden roundup. It followed a well calculated and implemented historical rewrite… a slow, but steady, recast of entire peoples… stripping them of their history, culture and collective purpose and decency.
What began with the burn of books and silence of press soon moved on to a successful reach of propaganda that cast a dark pall across millions whose wrong was to speak a different language, embrace another faith or to demand justice. Once there, it was a short walk to assault and worse.
The Repeat of History
With conscience, and vision as an outsider looking in, today, it is simply impossible not to feel an overwhelming sense of sheer revulsion when, if one is a caring being, an honest scan comes across Israel.
Forget about humanity and compassion or any broad notion of enlightened collective purpose. By now, Israel has reduced these cornerstones of fundamental decency to fabled fiction… a successful narrative of perverse existence that crushes truth and justice as little more than tedious impediments to its own, now decade’s old, ethnic and racial pogrom against others.
Israel is good at what it does. Damn good. No, not its slaughter, torture and endless detention and land theft; these are givens. A dark, very public, almost proud record of “achievement” that stands essentially unparalleled when it comes to recent contempt for international norm and law.
Like those before, what it really excels at is the grand lie… the convenient historical rewrite; the excuse; the ability to recast yesterday, today and surely tomorrow as so much a duty-bound journey in which no outrage is beyond the pale, no crime too extreme, no offense too offensive. Always, of course, cast in the talisman of survival. It’s a skill … a dodgy political art-form that converts inconvenient truth into self serving dogma with all too predictable deadly consequence.
Unlike that rare explosive autocrat or passing despotic regime, Israel has perfected its crafted control of selective reality in time-tested ways nothing short of masterful. Long before U.N. anthropologists discovered a European state in the midst of an Arab history, Zionists mastered the skill of expedient deception.
Thus, almost a hundred years ago, European terrorists became celebrated freedom fighters as they slaughtered Palestinians asleep in their beds and cribs. The Nakba, a forced stampede of almost a million Palestinians sparked by mass rape and murder, recast with historical ease to become a voluntary transition… a move by restive villagers to find a better time in a better place.
Kibbutzim, those enlightened socialist communes that, with magic-like remake, blossomed from long barren deserts. Could that be the rubble of age-old villages and decomposed remains just below the veneer of the sand?
Settlements, an employment opportunity for a troubled work force in need of purpose and discipline. The siege of Gaza… not at all a premeditated embargo of food, medicine, water, electricity and movement to break the will of its two million people, but rather a generous helping hand to liberate them from the limitations of their primitive vision and Hamas terror.
Advancing itself as a democracy under siege, Israel has long since abandoned any pretense of equality and justice in its limitless thirst to seize what little remains of Palestine as it exalts a racist de jure Jewish state in its quest.
This supremacist drive has been occasioned not merely with the passage of time or through a loss of interest by the world community alone. Along the way, to be sure, by design, Israel has successfully exploited the ignorance and fear of Arab and Muslim communities by the West. Of late, it has found willing companion among some Arab states anxious to move on from proxy to full on partner as they’ve tired of the “dilemma” that is Palestine.
In Israel and the occupied territories, the catalog of ersatz narrative is endless. With a slap… a stab, a book… a bomb; a prayer… a provocation, the Zionist tale has long since swallowed any semblance of relevance, let alone reality. Yet, from time immemorial, much of the world has blinked, frozen in place, fixated by a steady broadcast of propaganda, both home spun in Israel and in echo abroad.
Yet, over the last ten days, that faux moral perch has begun to collapse as the winds of truth have blown away the mask of hate that is very much Israel. During this time, tens of thousands of peaceful unarmed demonstrators marched on the barricades of their Gaza prison only to be met by carnage.
It is unnecessary to repeat, in full, the tales of slaughter that ensued as hundreds of snipers, drones and tanks announced with deadly precision that all were fair game for nothing more than voice. When the tear gas cleared , “fortunate” young men, women and children, elderly and journalists, alike, lay paralyzed by a strain of chemical assault, similar to sporadic reported uses since 2001, which soon gave way to uncontrolled vomiting and trembles.
For others, less fortunate, thousands lay bloodied by explosive high velocity munitions designed to rip apart flesh and destroy organs. Some thirty-one were murdered. Almost all casualties shot in the back of their head or torso.
What is there about a peaceful march, the national flag, and a Dakbe song and dance that so enrages an occupation force as to drive its snipers to unleash deadly targeted fire as if surrounded by well armed enemy combatants?
The Law
Under international law, crimes against humanity include “murder and other inhumane acts carried out against any civilian population… when such acts are done or such persecutions carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.”
A war crime is an act that constitutes a “serious violation of the laws of war that gives rise to individual criminal responsibility and include intentionally killing civilians… destroying civilian property… and serious violations of the principles of distinction and proportionality, such as strategic bombing of civilian populations.”
Under the law of war, military necessity is governed by several constraints: an attack or action must be intended to help in the defeat of the enemy; it must be an attack on a legitimate military objective, and the harm caused to civilians or civilian property must be proportional and not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
Under international humanitarian law, proportionality is a principle that governs the legal use of force in an armed conflict, whereby belligerents must make sure that the harm caused to civilians or civilian property is not excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected by an attack on a legitimate military objective.
Finally, “the fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him”.
That is to say it is not an acceptable defense to simply say “I was just following my superior’s orders.”
For years, as some have debated the reach of international law, much of the world has stood in silence and, accordingly, very much complicit as Israel has carried out unspeakable offenses against a largely civilian population in Palestine.
Although often nuanced, if not complex, the application of law to facts is not magic. At times a plain read of well settled legal covenants in the light of events at hand can lead even an unpracticed but principled eye to conclude that violations of law have in fact occurred.
Not before has Israel’s indifference to international law been so clear, so visible, so compelling as it has been through the lens of its repeated slaughter, over the last ten days in Gaza, as thousands of civilians have simply marched and marched in peace to say “enough”.
Today, more than 70 years after the judgments at Nuremberg, we are witness to an undeniable paradox as those victimized long ago by notions of racial, religious and political superiority have themselves become willing accomplished adherents of that same evil doctrine.
In words that shook the silence of the courtroom with the majesty of the moment war crimes prosecutor Robert H. Jackson passed, to generations to come, a reminder of the obligation companion to humanity:
We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.
Stanley L Cohen is a lawyer and human rights
activist in New York City.
He has done extensive work in the Middle Eastand Africa.
A Catholic Monsignor Arrested By Vatican Police
Lena M writing in Atheist Republic flags up yet another clerical sex abuse scandal.
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Wikimedia
The Vatican police arrested Monsignor Carlo Alberto Capella — who was one of the church's diplomats accredited to Washington — on suspicion of possessing child pornography. Monsignor Capella was recalled from the Vatican Embassy in August and at that time the police in Windsor, Canada, said they had issued an arrest warrant for him on suspicion of possessing and distributing images of child abuse on the internet. After an investigation, which led to a warrant issued by the Holy See’s chief magistrate, Capella was arrested in the Vatican. The accusation is based on articles of the law signed by Pope Francis in 2013 which are related to images of child sexual abuse.
But this is not the first time Capella was accused of child porn abuse, and the Vatican tried to protect him at first. The Holy See was notified of a possible violation of laws by a member of their diplomatic corps accredited in Washington by the State Department, and the Vatican denied the United States’ request to waive diplomatic immunity. If the Vatican accepted this request, the offender could have been charged in the United States. At that time, the Vatican refused to identify the diplomat, but there were strong indications that it was Monsignor Capella.
According to The Guardian, Capella’s case is the worst involving a diplomat since 2013 when former Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski faced charges of paying boys for sexual acts, downloading and buying pedophile material while he was the Vatican’s ambassador in the Dominican Republic. He was recalled to Rome by the Vatican, arrested and stripped of his duties after an investigation by Dominican magistrates. He died at the hospital in 2015 at the age of 67 before his trial at a Vatican court could begin.
If convicted after his trial at the Vatican, Monsignor Capella could possibly face up to 12 years in prison. But this may not be likely since, in 2011, the Vatican held a trial for a priest who was a “notorious sex abuser” decades earlier, — he was found guilty of sexual abuse — but was only forced to retire and sentenced to a lifetime of "penance and prayer". Also, this inappropriate sentence came 27 years after the first complaints about him were made.
Although the Pontiff declared zero tolerance for the abuse that occurs in churches, it looks like the Vatican is not doing enough to prevent misconduct. This case may look like a step forward, but still the question remains why the Vatican refused to waive Capella's diplomatic immunity in the USA; then they arrest him and hold him for trial. If a man is guilty he should be adequately sentenced —and "penance and prayer" is not that type of sentence.
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Photo Credits:
Wikimedia
The Vatican police arrested Monsignor Carlo Alberto Capella — who was one of the church's diplomats accredited to Washington — on suspicion of possessing child pornography. Monsignor Capella was recalled from the Vatican Embassy in August and at that time the police in Windsor, Canada, said they had issued an arrest warrant for him on suspicion of possessing and distributing images of child abuse on the internet. After an investigation, which led to a warrant issued by the Holy See’s chief magistrate, Capella was arrested in the Vatican. The accusation is based on articles of the law signed by Pope Francis in 2013 which are related to images of child sexual abuse.
But this is not the first time Capella was accused of child porn abuse, and the Vatican tried to protect him at first. The Holy See was notified of a possible violation of laws by a member of their diplomatic corps accredited in Washington by the State Department, and the Vatican denied the United States’ request to waive diplomatic immunity. If the Vatican accepted this request, the offender could have been charged in the United States. At that time, the Vatican refused to identify the diplomat, but there were strong indications that it was Monsignor Capella.
According to The Guardian, Capella’s case is the worst involving a diplomat since 2013 when former Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski faced charges of paying boys for sexual acts, downloading and buying pedophile material while he was the Vatican’s ambassador in the Dominican Republic. He was recalled to Rome by the Vatican, arrested and stripped of his duties after an investigation by Dominican magistrates. He died at the hospital in 2015 at the age of 67 before his trial at a Vatican court could begin.
If convicted after his trial at the Vatican, Monsignor Capella could possibly face up to 12 years in prison. But this may not be likely since, in 2011, the Vatican held a trial for a priest who was a “notorious sex abuser” decades earlier, — he was found guilty of sexual abuse — but was only forced to retire and sentenced to a lifetime of "penance and prayer". Also, this inappropriate sentence came 27 years after the first complaints about him were made.
Although the Pontiff declared zero tolerance for the abuse that occurs in churches, it looks like the Vatican is not doing enough to prevent misconduct. This case may look like a step forward, but still the question remains why the Vatican refused to waive Capella's diplomatic immunity in the USA; then they arrest him and hold him for trial. If a man is guilty he should be adequately sentenced —and "penance and prayer" is not that type of sentence.
Follow Atheist Republic on Twitter @AtheistRepublic
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