Weighing in on the controversies of the moment…
Israeli soldiers’ ‘trophy’ pictures

Former Israeli soldier Eden Abergil has posted photos of her posing with Palestinian prisoners on her Facebook.  This has sparked debated between those who claim that this is a one time incident versus those who claim ‘souvenir pictures’ are wide spread through out the army.

http://english.aljazeera.net//news/middleeast/2010/08/20108171445535995.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2010/aug/17/israel-palestinian-territories#/?picture=365845341&index=8

This is unfortunately a trend with most militarized nations. I recall the pictures that came out a few years ago of US troops posing with tortured victims in their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We have to look at the system in place that trains these soldiers, that communicates to them on the deepest level, how to devalue human life.

Park 51

Keith Olbermann pretty much hits it right on the head for me.

There are so many articles that have been written on the topic, I’ll just post a few…

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/08/ground-zero-mosque-obama-muslim

If I could do it all over again and go back to that day in Ohio, I would ignore the pleas of the Obama campaign. I would stand up straight and declare to the misinformed woman that I am a Muslim. Not a “moderate Muslim,” not a Westernized “good Muslim,” but a Muslim like Mahmoud Darwish, like Shirin Ebadi, like Muhammad Ali, like some New York cabbies, and the bankers on Wall Street. But I am also an American, born in California with no other home in the world. I, like my fellow Muslims, love this country and have firm roots here. Spit on me and my faith if it makes you feel better, but our Constitution has given me my seat. I refuse to move to the back of the bus.

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/08/ground-zero-was-built-graves-slaves

Before the World Trade Center was even designed (with Islamic architectural elements, incidentally), the ground was indeed sacrosanct: The bones of some 20,000 African slaves are buried 25 feet below Lower Manhattan. As at least 10 percent of West African slaves in America were Muslims, it’s not out of bounds to extrapolate that ground zero itself was built on the bones of at least a few Muslim slaves. That is to say, hallowed Muslim ground.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/23/charlie-brooker-ground-zero-mosque

Perhaps spatial reality functions differently on the other side of the Atlantic, but here in London, something that is “two minutes’ walk and round a corner” from something else isn’t actually “in” the same place at all. I once had a poo in a pub about two minutes’ walk from Buckingham Palace. I was not subsequently arrested and charged with crapping directly onto the Queen’s pillow. That’s how “distance” works in Britain. It’s also how distance works in America, of course, but some people are currently pretending it doesn’t, for daft political ends.

http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2010/08/14/its-not-about-them-its-about-us/

“No matter how you personally feel about Muslims and mosques, you have to recognize that this is a one-way trip, a simple, irreversible binary choice. As there can be no real doubt that the Imam and his congregation have every right to build their mosque where they wish, it comes down to something more nuanced, and much more pernicious. Do you want people, either by dint of their popular majority or their frantic shrieking and hand-waving to have the power to over-rule the basic rights and freedoms granted to all Americans? Do you understand that if it’s just Muslims today, it will be Jews tomorrow and atheists after that and in the end, the battle for the smouldering rubble of the American experiment will be fought between Catholics and Protestants, with the victors laying claim to just another totalitarian theocracy?”

I think what sums up my thoughts best is this statement attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group.

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

I have a Scheme

Glenn Becks  Rally of Hate happened last Saturday on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech.

http://stbsmartpeople.blogspot.com/2010/08/i-have-dream.html

http://newleftmedia.com/2010/08/glenn-becks-restoring-honor-rally-interviews-with-participants/

On 8.28.2010, Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally was held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  The purpose of the rally, which Beck claimed to be “non-political” despite featuring Tea Party-favorite Sarah Palin as a speaker and its being attended entirely by conservatives, was unclear.  The participants spoke abstractly about the need to restore “honor” and “pride” to a country that had lost it.  When pressed for when our country had lost its honor, most cited the election of Barack Obama.

On 8.28.2010, Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally was held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  The purpose of the rally, which Beck claimed to be “non-political” despite featuring Tea Party-favorite Sarah Palin as a speaker and its being attended entirely by conservatives, was unclear.  The participants spoke abstractly about the need to restore “honor” and “pride” to a country that had lost it.  When pressed for when our country had lost its honor, most cited the election of Barack Obama.

8.28.2010 also represented the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and Glenn Beck has been criticized for by civil rights groups for trying to misappropriate the occasion.Last year, Beck referred to Barack Obama—our country’s first African-American President–as a “racist… who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”  When offered the chance to respond to Beck’s statements, his fans either agreed with him or simply refused to believe that he had ever made them.While the speaker list was diverse, the overwhelmingly white crowd expressed paranoid and conspiratorial fears of multiculturalism—that atheists or black liberation theologists or radical Muslims or “free-loading” Latinos were going to ruin our country.  There was the constant suggestion that white Christians and their way of life are somehow under assault, and that the attendees of this rally were here to put an end to it and return the country to what it used to be.

I’ve been re-listening to Martin Luther King Jr. to remind myself what we’re fighting for… and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I had tears streaming by the end of it. That’s the difference between Beck and King. One stirs up hate, one brings you hope. I’m willing to bet a shiny penny that the majority of people who went to the rally have never even listened to King speak….

Anyways, got to run to work now!

I`m a member of Canadians Against Israel Apartheid and on the mailing list.  I just read this article by Jeff Halper, from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and I wanted to share it with you.

Yesterday, the day before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, at 2:30 in the morning, workers sent by the Israeli authorities, protected by dozens of police, destroyed the tombstones in the last portion of the Mamilla cemetery, an historic Muslim burial ground with graves going back to the 7th Century, hitherto left untouched. The government of Israel has always been fully cognizant of the sanctity and historic significance of the site. Already in 1948, when control of the cemetery reverted to Israel, the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry recognized Mamilla “to be one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin's] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars. Israel will always know to protect and respect this site.” For all that, and despite (proper) Israeli outrage when Jewish cemeteries are desecrated anywhere in the world, the dismantlement of the Mamilla cemetery has been systematic. In the 1960s “Independence Park” was built over a portion of it; subsequently an urban road was built through it, major electrical cables were laid over graves and a parking lot constructed over yet another piece. Now some 1,500 Muslim graves have been cleared in several nighttime operations to make way for…..a $100 million Museum of Tolerance and Human Dignity, a project of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. (Ironically, Rabbi Marvin Hier, the Wiesenthal Center’s Director, appeared on Fox News to express his opposition to the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in Manhattan, because the site of the 9/11 attack “is a cemetery.”)

The month-long period between Netanyahu’s July 6th visit to Washington and the start of Ramadan has provided Israel with a window to “clear the table” after a frustrating hiatus on home demolitions imposed by the “old,” mildly critical Obama Administration – although there is no guarantee that Israel will not demolish during Ramadan, especially if it wants to exploit the period until the November elections, knowing that until then Obama will not overtly oppose anything it does in the Occupied Territories. In fact, the process of demolishing Palestinian homes never ceased. On June 6th, for example, a year after the demolition of more than 65 structures and the forced displacement of more than 120 people, including 66 children, nine families of Khirbet Ar Ras Ahmar in the Jordan Valley, totaling 70 people, received a new round of “evacuation orders.” A week later the Israeli High Court ordered the Civil Administration to “step up enforcement against illegal Palestinian structures” in Area C, the 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control.

And so, on July 13th, upon Netanyahu’s return (Palestinian homes are not demolished without an OK from the Prime Minister’s Office), three homes were demolished in the Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya, followed by three more homes in Beit Hanina. The Jerusalem Municipality also announced the planned demolition of 19 more homes in Issawiya this month. In the West Bank, the Israeli “Civil” Administration demolished 55 structures belonging to 22 Palestinian families in the Hmayer area of Al Farisiye in the northern Jordan Valley, including 22 residential tents and 30 other structures used to shelter animals and store agricultural equipment. According to the UN’s Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA): “This week [July 14-20, the week of Netanyahu's return from Washington] there was a significant increase in the number of demolitions in Area C, with at least 86 structures demolished in the Jordan Valley and the southern West Bank, including Bethlehem and Hebron districts. In 2010, at least 230 Palestinian structures have been demolished in Area C, forcibly displacing 1100 people, including 400 children. Approximately 600 others have been otherwise affected.” Two-thirds of the demolitions for 2010 have occurred since Netanyahu’s meeting with Obama. More than 3,000 demolition orders are outstanding in the West Bank, and up to 15,000 in Palestinian East Jerusalem.

The demolition of homes is, of course, only a small, if painful, part of the destruction Israel wreaks daily on the Palestinian population. Over the past few weeks a violent campaign has been waged against Palestinian farmers in one of the most fertile agricultural areas of the West Bank, the Baka Valley, steadily being encroached upon by large suburbs of the settlement of Kiryat Arba, in Hebron. Israel already takes 85% of the West Bank’s water for its own use, either for settlements (settlers use five times more water per capita as do Palestinians, and Ma’aleh Adumim is currently building a water park in addition to its four municipal swimming pools and the huge fountains constantly flowing in the city center) or to be pumped into Israel proper – all in flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an Occupying Power from using the resources of an occupied territory.

Accusing the farmers of “stealing water” – their own water – the Israel water company Mekorot, supported by the Civil Administration and the IDF, has in recent weeks destroyed dozens of wells, some of them ancient, and reservoirs used to collect rain water, which is also “illegal.” Hundreds of hectares of agricultural land have dried up as irrigation pipes have been pulled out and confiscated by the Civil Administration. Fields of tomatoes, beans, eggplants and cucumbers are dying just before they can be harvested, and the grape industry in this rich valley is threatened with destruction. “I’m watching my life dry up before my eyes,” says Ata Jaber, a Palestinian farmer who has had his home demolished twice, most of whose land lies buried under the Givat Harsina neighborhood of Kiryat Arba and whose plastic drip irrigation pipes are destroyed annually by the Civil Administration just before he can harvest. “I had hoped to sell my crop for at least $2000 before Ramadan, but all is gone.”

Read the entire article at icahdusa.org.

Jeff Halper is the Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached atjeff@icahd.org.

I think this is one of the best documentaries I’ve ever watched.

It is a must see for anyone who questions media and war.

War Made Easy reaches into the Orwellian memory hole to expose a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. Narrated by actor and activist Sean Penn, the film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations.

The movie ends with an audio track of a speech given by Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. I want to share with you the beginning of it.

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join with you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statement of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

The speech can be read in its entirety here.